I Blame Uta — You got style, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise

Before college I read, “A Challenge for the Actor” by Uta Hagen.

I didn’t know how to pronounce her name, but I took notes on all the strange exercises she taught:

☕️ spending inordinate amounts of time with cups of coffee experiencing smells and feels,

? pretending you were the character before and after you were on stage,

? and writing down all kinds of biographical information that you never even talk about in the show.

Sounded like a lot of work. And I was THERE for it.

She said I should swim and play tennis for exercise. Great! I already did both.

Then she came for my regional dialect.

She didn’t single me out by twang, but I knew my Surry County drawl wouldn’t fly at HB Studios.

I broke the news to my dad (whom I’d continue to call “Deddy.” They couldn’t take THAT away from me.)

“Deddy,” I said, hoisting a spool of rope onto a high shelf in his warehouse. “I don’t want you to think I’m putting on airs, but I’m going to have to work on my accent.”

He understood, and so I set out to create a composite dialect profile that was part Tom Hanks part Leo DiCaprio (it was the Titanic and Romeo and Juliet year.)

No matter how many flourish syllables I eliminated from words like “there” and my first name, my rolling hills DNA still vibrated.

The vicar at the church I attended in London always greeted me with a hearty, “Well howdy Danny Callaway!”

While it no longer feels natural to say “win” and “when” as multisyllabic homonyms, the southern spice still seasons my vowels and vocal melody.

Since I’ve lived in lots of different spots, I’ve studied humans with different ways of talking.

And it made me realize there’s a direct connection there with musical style.

A human usually speaks and moves the way they do because of the sounds and movements they were surrounded by growing up. These become ways to connect and communicate.

When I lived in London, my American dialect stayed in tact. But I changed inflections without noticing it. (So that folks knew I was actually asking a question.)

(It took me three months to understand that a question was being asked in the first place with the Brit pitch down-swoop before a slight rise. In North Carolina, a question was communicated through an upward slide of at least a perfect 5th through diphthong extravaganzas.)

The more folks I encountered, the more I learned that musical style is dialect.

Musical style grows from the soil and soul of a place.

Reggae, hip hop, British music hall, bluegrass, metal, 80s pop, 1920s crooning, bel canto, bossa nova, Vaudeville.

Each of these style names evokes place and culture.

The big mistake theatre singers make when they seek to embody different styles is that they focus first on how a style sounds.

What needs to happen is to back up and ask: Who am I?

My ego identity is going to be very different if I grew up in Black Mountain, North Carolina, as opposed to Caracas, Venezuela.

Where did this style grow up, and who am I as a communicator of this style?

That’s where to begin.

This question will change everything because you’ll start to embody the style rather than parrot sounds.

On a road trip from North Carolina back up to Massachusetts, I studied of a group of men talking around a Sheetz gas pump. Their bodies spoke in Surry County; the way they laughed and moved was like they had time to eat a slice of pecan pie while they guffawed at rude jokes.

I imagined a similar scenario in Massachusetts, and the bodies and voices were very different. Tighter torsos, tenser shoulders, quicker arms and hands. MAYBE time for half a Dunkies chocloate sprinkle donut.

Reminds me of a dance callback I had for Jersey Boys. I couldn’t get the style down because it was sharp and compact. Not only did it feel alien, it felt wrong in my body. You can take the boy out of Surry County….

So, when you approach musical style AND dialect in any material you work on, ask those questions: Who am I? Where did I grow up, and what are my assumptions about how I relate? Let that affect your body and then see how the voice follows.

You yourself show up with your voice and body based on a whole life’s collection of influences and choices about how you want to connect to the world.

The characters you play and the songs you sing are no different.

And inside of there, there’s the one and only you singing whatever style you’re singing, and folks need to hear the story only you can sing (in whatever dialect that may be).

Love much,