About Phonetics for Actors
Who Is Phonetics For Actors For?
Phonetics for Actors is for all actors who want to raise their dialect skills to the next level. It is useful for stage, screen, scripted, and improvisational performance, as well as for voiceover and narration work. It requires no previous training.
Why Study With Phonetics For Actors?
The need for actors to master accents increases every year, as the world becomes more and more connected and both story settings and real audiences grow more diverse. Today, a good actor needs to be able to not only learn accents to fit the parts they want but to pass those accents off as authentic to audiences who actually speak those accents. Whether an actor appears in a globally distributed television show or film or performs in even the smallest New York or London theater, they will have an international audience in our global world. An international audience might include members from anywhere and any of them might be native speakers of the accents the actors are performing. Native speakers are the toughest critics to convince, so accent-learning skills are very valuable.
Phonetics for Actors is taught by Benjamin Cannicott Shavitz, a trained expert in language. Ben has a PhD in linguistics and studied under one of the world’s leading scholars of language sound systems. Ben also taught The Structure of Modern English and The History of the English Language at the university level. His expertise allows him to offer the highest level of dialect coaching, so that his students can impress even native speakers. His abilities go far beyond the ability to teach accents: he has done an original analysis of the accents of English that makes his teaching more precise and easier to understand. For that reason, Phonetics for Actors is elite in the world of dialect coaching.
How Does Phonetics For Actors Work?
Phonetics for Actors offers two ways for actors to improve their dialect skills:
1) Individual Accent Training: Actors can get dialect coaching for individual accents. This is useful for any actor who is preparing for a specific role or any actor who wants to have a specific accent ready for when they need it.
2) The Signature Course: Actors can take the signature 12-session Phonetics for Actors course, which teaches actors how accents work and how to learn accents systematically, quickly, and accurately forever. This special course presents all the information known to phonetics (the study of speech sounds) that actors need to be able to learn accents well both with and without assistance. It is useful for actors who want to comprehensively elevate their dialect knowledge so they can learn accents efficiently for the rest of their careers.
(All instruction is currently done through Zoom. Instruction can be taken either 1-on-1 or in a small-group format.)
What Does Phonetics For Actors Teach?
1) Through individual accent training, Phonetics for Actors can teach actors almost any accent with a little notice and can teach the following accents immediately: British Received Pronunciation (RP), General American, Cockney, American South (Mid-South), American Deep South, General Scottish, Irish (Southern Ireland), Northern Irish, Modern London (Estuary), Australian, Traditional New York City, French-influenced, German-influenced, Spanish-influenced, Italian-influenced, and Mandarin Chinese-influenced.
After taking a full set of individual accent training sessions, a student should be able to:
Perform any script in the accent they studied,
Speak in the accent they studied without a script,
Continue to improve the accent they studied on their own forever, and
Practice using the accent they studied on their own in order to keep up the skill.
2) Through the signature course, Phonetics for Actors teaches actors a deep understanding of how speech works, how using the vocal anatomy in different ways creates different accents, and how to use that knowledge to learn accents faster and better forever.
After taking the signature Phonetics for Actors course, a student should be able to:
Understand how speech sounds work in terms of the positioning of vocal anatomy,
Understand how to read the International Phonetic Alphabet,
Understand important parts of accents other than individual sounds,
Understand how to use a dialect guide to teach themselves an accent, and
Speak in a practice accent at a basic level.