I’ve been spending a good part of my summer teaching in the Fitzmaurice Voicework Certification program, and something about the process of teaching this method to experienced teachers has led me to reflect a bit more deeply than usual on the core of our endeavor as voice teachers. We all learn great lessons from our students, of course, and this particular crop of adept and sophisticated students got me thinking about what we might call the quintessence of voice training. It seems to me that in our work, that is the work of all voice trainers, we find ourselves continually balanced between science and fantasy. This is not just an occupational hazard but a positive requirement. We need to know our bilabials and our Bernoulli effect, our tracheas and our trochees. But we also need a rich experience of imagery and an intuition about people. The territory where we do our work is in the delicate relationship between accurate scientific observation and the poetry of images. We all have our predilections, either towards the analytical or the magical, but the experience of the performer is always a balance of these two impulses and it is our job to help them negotiate between the two, to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.

This is a subtle proposition and it means that our teaching is always about the moment before us. It is essential for us to look with clear eyes and with curiosity at the human being in front of us. Plato quotes Heraclitus as saying, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” This is something I think the membership of VASTA can particularly appreciate. We understand change and flow and we embody it in our work and in our organization.

This will be my last communiqué as President as I am coming to the end of my term. I will continue, of course, in the role of Past-President for the next two years. Starting at the end of our conference this summer, Beth McGee will be our President. You may already have had interactions with Beth as a board member and as the chair of VASTA’s diversity committee. I have been tremendously impressed with her energy and insight and I’m looking forward to being led by her.

I also have to bid farewell to two of our board members: Rena Cook and Joanna Cazden as they finish their terms along with me this summer. Their absence from our board discussions will be profoundly felt, but they will continue to be active members of our organization. Rena has already been serving as Editor of the Voice and Speech Review and will continue in that capacity. My hope is that after leaving the board, Joanna will have plenty of free time to answer all our questions about the intersection of art and science on Vastavox. Please join me in thanking these two for their service.

I hope many of you will be joining us in Ashland for what’s shaping up to be a terrific conference. In addition to our presenters, the shows, member presentations and panel discussions, I’m excited by the prospect of seeing many of you face to face and hearing your voices.

There are two points I want to make about the conference before I wrap up this letter. First, I want to let you know about an aspect of the conference that I wouldn’t want you to miss. As you know, all attendees will have tickets to see The Clay Cart, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Coriolanus. These will be wonderful experiences and they fit conveniently into our schedule. It recently dawned on me, however, that in the selection of shows I have neglected a vital feature of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival: a commitment to the unamplified voice in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre. The festival started with this large outdoor theatre back in 1935 and they have built a tradition of vocal expertise that allows them to fill it with intelligible voices. I’m sure that you share an interest in the challenges and rewards of such work and I would like to strongly urge you, if you are attending the conference, to purchase tickets to Our Town on the evening of July 29th and if possible to see Othello on the 25th or 31st.

Finally, I’d like to assure you all that my personal tradition of drinking excellent beer with my colleagues at our conferences will be easy to uphold this year. Ashland is a shining star in the firmament of American zymurgy and I intend to lead a band of hardy sippers to taste all that Oregon has to offer us. Please join me, if only for the conversation.

Word,
Phil Thompson

FROM THE EDITOR

Jeff Morrison

Jeff, Morrison, Editor

VASTAns,
Greetings from the new Editor of the Newsletter.

I recently assisted Phil Thompson at a Voice Methods workshop coordinated and produced by Amy Fall. The participants were largely experienced voice teachers and actors, people with a significant amount of expertise who nevertheless agreed to enter an unspoken agreement, with teachers who were basically their peers, to explore changing the way they used their breath and their voices. Observing how these accomplished artists encountered material that was new to them was fascinating. It ran the gamut from joyous to surprised to bored to moved to resistant – everything we are used to seeing in students, clients and cast members. I think watching students (peers or otherwise) encounter change is one of the great joys of our work, because it requires the teacher (or coach) to be fully present and ready to react to whatever happens – because we can never predict precisely what that will be.

Perhaps because of this ingrained knowledge in its members, VASTA as an organization is very thoughtful about how it deals with change. This summer marks a changeover to a new President, Beth McGee, from the previous president, Phil Thompson. However, Beth has known she would be President for the two years of Phil’s term, and the Past President, Lisa Wilson, has been serving on the board as such since the end of her term in 2006. Once Phil steps down, he will remain actively involved as Past President for another two years. This overlapping of expertise and experience, common to many of VASTA’sareas of endeavor, allows VASTA to keep track of itself, as it were, and continue moving forward without a hitch.

I personally am facing some significant change in my life, not only as the new Editor of the Newsletter and Associate Editor for Pedagogy and Coaching for the VSR, but also as a new father. My year as Associate Editor of the Newsletter prepared me to some degree for this post, but nothing could have prepared me for the reality of having a first child. Perhaps giving her a tongue twister for a name (Virginia Genevieve Moss Morrison, say it fast ten times) was some subconscious attempt to link her to something I feel competent doing.

The newsletter itself has changed dramatically since its inception in 1987 (over twenty years ago!). Before the advent of electronic mailing and the VSR, it was a primary outlet for not only member news, conference updates, and VASTA business as it is now, but also scholarly essays, some that are even now used in our classrooms at Marymount Manhattan College where I teach, and some that developed into pieces in the VSR that have defined the most important debates in our discipline.We have had a number of excellent essays on diversity in the last year, but I would like to see the newsletter regain a wider scholarly relevance. So, over the next year, I will be actively soliciting that kind of material from you, because it is your voices that make this organization what it is. We want to hear more! Whether or not this change will succeed remains to be seen – just like in the studio, I can’t predict what will happen, I simply have to be open to whatever presents itself.

Jeff Morrison

VASTA Conference 2008

Michele Cuomo
Conference Director

Michele Cuomo The 2008 VASTA conference, YOUR MOST SWEET VOICES: COACHING SHAKESPEARE takes place July 26-30 in Ashland, Oregon. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is our generous host for this conference. The play offerings during our stay at the festival include The Clay Cart, Coriolanus, Our Town,and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Andrew Wade will present OPENING UP POSSIBILITIES, David Carey will present APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEARE’S IMAGERY, and Ayanna Thompson will present RACE IN THE RENAISSANCE.

Our featured presenter list has been augmented considerably with festival personnel, and we will have a talkback following each production with both voice and text directors as well as cast members from each performance. Bill Rauch, artistic director of OSF and Scott Kaiser, director of company development and voice and text director, will both present, and Scott will also lead an Elizabethan Stage Workshop and Demonstration., as well as a panel of OSF voice/text directors which include David Carey, Ursula Meyer, Jan Gist, and Sarah Phillips. A panel discussion on diversity includes Ayanna Thompson, Micha Espinosa, Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, and Kimoko Shimoda. Our member workshop and paper presentations will provide an additional array of perspectives and techniques.

I look forward to seeing all who will join us in beautiful Ashland, Oregon for this unique VASTA event.

Michele Cuomo

Some Things I Learned from Six Years of Diversity Work

Beth McGee

Beth McGee Recently I chose to resign from the faculty diversity officer position at my university and go back to being a full-time faculty member. In looking back over the six years I performed the position, which included taking informal complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination, faculty mediation, Americans with Disability Act accommodations, serving on multitudes of committees to promote best practices for recruiting and retaining minority and women faculty, and promoting positive cultural climate change for everyone in the university community, I learned a great deal about diversity issues, academia, and inter-personal relations. In August I will be taking on the position of VASTA president, and will be handing the “VAVSTA diversity committee chair” to a new person. I thought I’d share some of what I learned as a diversity officer with VASTA VOICE readers. It’s sort of a “what I learned on summer vacation list.”

If you’re feeling besieged or mistreated by others:

Most everyone feels that they are fair, relatively honest, and are trying their best. The times when they behave differently are usually caused by blind spots or particular circumstances, and not by malice. It can be helpful to remember this if you have a conflict with someone.
Malice does build when people have expectations of one another that they don’t communicate to each other, but still hold each other accountable to those expectations. If these expectations are not communicated, a series of unfortunate occurrences can build to create a “victim story” for one or several people. Once a victim story is created, it becomes very hard to re-negotiate the original problem. It is most helpful to communicate expectations of others early and often.
Very few majority white people feel that they are personally racist or sexist and it is sometimes difficult for them to acknowledge racism or sexism; since they don’t experience racism/sexism, it’s hard for them to believe the stories of people who do. For people who experience racism and or sexism daily, this lack of acknowledgement can be very frustrating.
All candidates are deemed qualified before Affirmative Action is applied to an open position. It is false (and can be racist) that “lesser qualified” people are hired because of affirmative action. The goal is to have a qualified applicant pool that reflects the diversity of qualified applicants in the field. Problems in hiring a diverse workplace occur when the applicant pool doesn’t reflect the diversity of the field, or subtle bias disqualifies minority applicants. It is disrespectful and demeaning to assume that a minority or woman hire was “an affirmative action hire.”
Majority white folks often don’t acknowledge their own privilege, as they are not often confronted by privilege’s negative elements (and the positive aspects of privilege are experienced by them as “normal life”). They have worked hard to get where they are, and they don’t necessarily feel privileged. If they want to learn about white privilege or the experiences of minorities, they have to make an effort to do so, as their “normal life” may not often give them opportunities to learn.
People like to feel acknowledged for their hard work and personal attention. A little kindness and a lot of sincere “thank yous” will instantly make any interaction more positive.
When people are upset/unhappy, they want someone to listen to them and understand their point of view. Often they want to be heard more than they want an action taken. An attitude of “how can I help you?” and a listening ear immediately brings calm to a charged situation.
For academics:
1. There are very few conspiracies in academia. Most people are working too hard with too few resources and don’t have time or energy to band together and conspire against someone. “The administration” is a group of individual people, not an entity, and this group can be communicative and functional, or they can be dysfunctional. If you feel that a group is conspiring against you, it is more likely the problem is caused by a lack of attention or a particular administrator’s incompetence/indifference, rather than a premeditated plan.
2. Don’t count on your chair/dean to acknowledge your hard work and reward you. Some chairs/deans are better supervisors than others, and some are incompetent. Make sure you know exactly what is expected of you and how those expectations will be evaluated. Check in often to make sure the expectations haven’t changed.