SPEAKER_00 1:17

Most actors hate the sound of their voice. How do you, as a dialect coach, help them get over that and start to have confidence of how they sound without feeling insecure or self-conscious about it?

SPEAKER_01 1:35

The first thing is I make them promise me that they will not listen to themselves for a good three to four weeks while we're working. So that they don't get caught up and trapped into the preconceived notions of their voices. Because basically, what they're hearing is a notion of themselves and not the real deal. And so what I do is I train the real deal, meaning the breath, relaxation, the melody in your voice, and the story. So if you take your attention and your fears and your angsts and anxieties away from your voice and put all of that energy into the story, then the story becomes the star. And so when they're telling the story and breathing and relaxing, a whole different vibration starts happening. They start rising to the demands of the story because the story is the star. And two to three weeks in, then I say, okay, go and listen to yourself. Listen to this one. Listen to this most current, most recent uh iteration of your voice. And then I have them listen to the first recording of the voice. Because we record, but I don't have them listen. And the difference is night and day. Because you got to get out of your head. You gotta let you gotta let the voice be. I say, just let it do what it does. Let it be what it's going to be. And what I'm going to give you is tools to create the best version of that.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

So when an actor first comes into your office or your studio, what do you find their misconceptions are about a dialect coach?

SPEAKER_01 3:27

Well, you know, it it all depends on the level of training that they're at. Let's talk about the novice, the person that's coming in. They really think that I am going to change the essence of who they are. Because a lot of times by the time an actor comes to me, someone has said, you need to go to a voice coach, you need to work on your voice, or you need to work on your diction, you need to work on your instrument. It's not like an acting class. Every actor knows that they have to be in class. My work is different. I liken what I do to you going to your primary care doctor and they recommending a specialist. I'm the specialist. I'm the one that your acting teacher recommends. And so by the time you get to me, someone has recommended that something is not right, or that's how they perceive it, that something is wrong. Something's uh, what am I? I'm not wait, what I don't sound right or good. So they come in a lot with I don't want to say a chip on the shoulder, but but a little bit apprehensive at best. A chip on their shoulder, and I've seen that at the very worst. But uh what I do is offer that I'm not trying to change you. That is not what this is. What this is is giving you tools, adding to what you already have, not taking away, even if you have a really uh thick dialect or an accent, I don't use the terminology accent reduction or accent modification because I don't want to modify that. I want you to keep that intact. What I want to do is add to that. I want to add to your vocabulary of if in fact your character is from this place, then they would say it this way. If in fact there's something about your voice that people have been commenting on over the course of your career and it's distracting and it takes away from the story. That's the important thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

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SPEAKER_01 6:53

Yes, Tim Monik is his name. And when we were at Juilliard, and particularly in the voice and speech department, which is where you kind of feel it, because when people talk about and the way you sound, and I'm just gonna echo this when people talk about the way you sound in a pejorative way, be it overtly or covertly, and you feel as a student you can't do anything about it because it's Juilliard, because they're right and I'm wrong, you know, and they are the creme de la creme, and I came to get what they have. There was a teacher that came to Juilliard who was just a little bit older than we were, and he was a white man from California. I say that because he had a Hang 10 shirt. And I'm from the projects in New York, he's from the beaches of Southern California. And I said, What's Hang 10? And he had to tell me what Hang 10 was. You know, I was like, oh, okay. But Tim Monik was the the the angel that we needed at the time to help all of us uh find our voices within this paradigm, gave us the permission because once the the the the grand dam of speech retired and she was in her 80s in 1975, she was in her 80s, she was our teacher, she was the grand damn of American speech, and of course it was mid-Atlantic, and she spoke like that, and so clearly everyone was talking like this, and it was the Juilliard way of talking, and it was so far-fetched, you know. I I mean, even when I was kind of doing, I can remember doing an exercise one time and trying to talk like this, and just would start laughing. I just went in front of the class and they would start laughing. I would just go, this is preposterous. Who talks like this? Who talks like this? And she asked me to leave her class. So, but then Tim comes in and he became that teacher that we all needed, that we all looked to to figure out how to navigate these waters um and find ourselves within these waters. And then Tim became after graduation, and when Juilliard invited me to come back to teach at Juilliard, it was because of Tim Monic. I didn't know that they were looking for a voice and speech teacher. When they reached out to me, they just said they were looking for a new faculty member. And I thought that they were looking for an acting teacher because okay, I was a good voice and speech student, but I can't imagine you want me to teach it. I can teach acting because I've been doing it. And when I got in town, because at the time when they approached me, I was doing the Canadian production of a Broadway show. I was acting. And um they came to me and said, We want you to join the voice and speech faculty. I said, What? And they said, Tim Monik thinks you are the absolute best person for this job. And what we're doing, Denise, we're gonna tell you straight off, we need more, we need more people of color on this faculty. It's a travesty that we've not done it sooner. And and when we started looking, Tim Monarch, you were the first person that Tim Monik recommended. And um, I know. I mean, uh, and by the 90s, look at all the black, the black students that had had come through the halls of Juilliard. I was the first one that came to mind. And I'm just I'm I'm I'm just indebted to him. My very first big movie, which was Will Smith's Ali, he um they called him to do the film. And he he said, Scorsese has called me to do Gangs of New York. Because he by this time he's a huge dialect coach. I mean, most of the clients that I have now are because of Tim Monik. Because Tim is the man, was the man in the ninth, in he he was the dialect coach, and black and white would come to him, and people would go to him and he'd go, I'm honored that you're coming to me, but you really need to see Denise Woods. I got common that way. I mean, commons people contacted him and he said, I'm not your person, Denise Woods is. I can tell you a list of people that he would that would come to him because he's the man. And he'd go, mm-mm, I'm not your person, she is.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

And you're the woman. Yeah, the man, and you're the woman, and I'm the woman.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

And so, and so I I felt it appropriate to dedicate the book to my mother, my aunt Sylvia, and Tim Monic.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

That's beautiful. Now, I I wanna um pivot here and talk about you have worked with uh a bunch of actors on biopics um with their speech and their voice. How difficult is that as opposed to just working with them on dialect for a fictitious character?

SPEAKER_01 14:07

You're absolutely right. There is something very, very distinct about doing a biopic, and it becomes even more distinct if the the subject is well known or not, if this if the if if the subject is of a different period and we have no recordings of how they sounded. Now, that can be liberating and constraining at the same time. The liberating part is that no one can definitively say how this person sounded because all the people that heard them are no longer with us and there are no recordings of their voices. So we have a little leeway to create based on how we can approximate the sound of that generation based on the enslaved narratives that we currently have in the Library of Congress, which is what I use as a hallmark of period pieces. And and then I get the specificity, the regional specificity. So so there is much more. I've done Harriet Tubman, I've done Bass Reeves, and and clearly there's a little more leeway, um, artistic freedom to to create, um, to curate a sound based on what we what we based on research.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

So now do you actually go to Washington to the uh to the Congress, uh, the Library of Congress to start to get that information, or are you able to get it online?

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Oh, it's all available online, but before the online presence of all of this wonderful material and and and and the wonderful invention of YouTube, you really had to go and and and do research. And I've I've mentioned um the Schaumburg Library. I've never had to go to DC to the Library of Con um Congress because there are there are archives, archival information that is is is is very useful and and can be at our disposal at the Schaumburg Library. Um but now that we that we have you know an online presence for everything, you just click, you just have to know what to put into the search engine to get what you're looking for. And everything is pretty much at your disposal. So so that now that it's easy, easier to access, and we have the leeway to approximate what it is, the most difficult is doing a dialect that everybody knows, that everybody does a version of. Everybody knows how this person sounds, everybody on the planet knows how Muhammad Ali sounds. So you have to be able to work with the actor, with the director, in lockstep with the director and the actor at every I work with the actor all the time, but for Ali, I was in lockstep with the director so that we wouldn't go too far left or too far right.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

And the director was was Michael Mann. Who did Miami Vice?

SPEAKER_01 17:44

That's right. That's right, that's right. And he wanted he wanted elements of Will's voice in it. He said, I don't want you to do an impersonation of Ollie. It's been done. I want to hear elements of Will. So you've got to you've got to um honor what the director is looking for, make sure that he's he's in lockstep the whole time listening to your working because we prepped for three months prior to filming. And that was it was wonderful. I got really, really close to Will and his family, and it it was it was it was a beautiful time. Um, because we really wanted to nail it. And um, and that he did.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

And as a dialect coach, you you do spend a lot of time with the actor. A lot, you know, especially with a film, you have more time to prep. And so um you you you talk a lot about Maherschela and and how you've worked with him, and he he was the one in pursuit of you because of hidden figures, seeing you working. And so uh from that, you guys have cultivated this incredible relationship because he seeks you out every time he's doing something. You had mentioned you had asked him how he starts with the character. What um what has he taught you as a teacher that you now give to other students?

SPEAKER_01 19:23

Wow. Well, first of all, we have to understand that he has two Oscars. Two. Um two. He's a genius, and when I say this, I say this you see how humble I become when I talk about him, because he's so humble. He's such a genius, he's such a purist, and usually pure geniuses have a tendency to be a little bit aerodyp and sometimes border on arrogance because they are so myopic when it comes to their art and their craft that they can sometimes lose a sense of their humanity and sometimes can become difficult. I mean, we've seen that historically with people like Maria Callis, you know, the genius of loved her.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Oh my gosh. I still do.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

Oh my gosh. You know, um, and he is so not like that. Mahershla leads from a place of love. Mahershla leads from a place of spirituality that transcends religious dogma because we all know he's Muslim, and we have wonderful conversations about Islam because I know very little about Islam. I really do. I I mean, I have since gotten more informed thanks to him, but I didn't know a lot about Islam, and and in between takes on the television series that we did, which was True Detective, we were we were in Arkansas for months, and this is where we forged an incredible bond. Not just he and I, but his wife and I. Because I was hungry to know more about Islam, I was hungry for his sense of a practice that he is committed to, a rigor that he is committed to that shows up in every aspect of his life. And on set, it he prays five times a day, and you know he doesn't make an announcement of it. We just knew Mahersh was praying, and we waited. He knew everybody's name from every PA, everybody in craft service, everybody in you know, on on the sound stage, the painters on the sound stage, everybody, and was genuinely concerned to know how their day is. How are you doing? How's your mother? Um just this wonderful sense of humanity that I have seen, how it it morphs into creativity at a higher level, a vibration at a higher level. I have also seen how genius create creative geniuses, and I won't mention the artist's name, but the self-destruction element of this, of that, not not Mahershla, another artist that I'm talking about in juxtaposition to what I'm talking about with Mahershla. How the self-destruction in this person added to his genius. And and I've never mentioned this person, so it's it's it this person's name is never mentioned in any of the material that I I write about. But I I want, I it was just so interesting to me because I've worked with this person a couple of times. And we know because we've been around the block, we're New Yorkers, we know self-destruction when we see it, even if if they're trying to mask it, we know it. But at the end of the day, I'm looking at it and going, wow, gosh, it just the hodgepodge of internal angst and stuff that hasn't been dealt with. The trauma, how it plays out over and over, over and over, and then it is exacerbated by behavior, yes, and how it shows up artistically is just mind-boggling. Mind-boggling, you know, and so there's no judgment here. There's no j I I just I just see in juxtaposition. Observing, just observing, you're observing, but with Mahershla, it is um, it is a deep way of looking. Life. It is a calling. It is a ministry.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

You made a reference to having to learn. So as a teacher, you are uh perpetually learning different things because in order to teach somebody a dialect, you have to learn it, you have to absorb it, you have to take it on. And I don't think many of us really um focus on the fact that good teachers, great teachers, genius teachers are always filling their well creatively, are always learning things. And and so um tell me when you are looking to get um when you're looking for your student or your client to get them what they need, what is your process of uncovering those things?

SPEAKER_01 25:46

I don't Google people before I work with them. Um, and even even if they are known people, I don't I don't do the research of them. I come in because I want to get everything I need from them, and then I Google. I don't want their accolades, what they've done, to inform that first meeting because I need to have a sense of who they are, not what they've done. And then I defer to how they work. I don't put my style of work on them because everybody works differently, and and that's how I learn because I learn new styles and new ways of working that add to my pedagogical style. Pedagogy for me is everything. My style, being malleable, being able to fit and make my client, my student comfortable to meet them where they are, to buy into their learning style.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Does that take the first time you meet them? Is it uh does it take a few times of getting to uh sit with them? Do you then start to say, how do you like to work?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

No, first time. First time, the first time. I like you, it's it's about asking the right questions, you know. Uh some people like to work um theoretically, they like theory, they want the the the phonetic sounds, the phonetic symbols, they want, they want to read the dialect phonetically. And some people want to work by ear. And it's not it's not that one way is better than the other. I know all of the ways of working. And so, and I'm comfortable in in meeting you where you are and not making you feel that you need to know this in order to make it stick. No, I I then what I do is I categorize the steps that that we and the process, the steps to the process. So if in fact it's it's it's a dialect, okay. I'm gonna do Trini, I'm gonna do a girl from Trinidad, you know, and you know, and the rhythm is so important. It is so important, you know, and so then we start with the rhythm. We start with the rhythm first, and then what I do is I give them, you know, music from Trinidad. I tell them a little bit about the culture and why Trinity sounds a little bit different than Jamaica because of the Indian influence in Trini. So you got the Indians and you got the African, you got the brown people, and you got the the African, the black people, and you give them a little bit of the background and a little bit of story, and then I start with rhythm because that once you sort of get into the rhythm and you start playing with the rhythm, then I bring on the notes, you know. And I and I speak in musical terms quite often, you know, then we start playing with the notes and and and and and being very specific, and not just only being specific, but being consistent. That's the key. You can't come back, you can't. If you say can't one time, you can't say can't the next time. You gotta say consistently. If you're gonna say can't, can't, or, or, or if you do the British, I can't, can't, can't, can't. We keep it consistent. We make some decisions and we and we keep them consistently.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

I love that. And and you you said the rhythm, and when you were saying the rhythm, I was thinking the music, but I was thinking the music of the people, the music of the culture, how important as an actor it is to know that music, that because you are playing in that in that uh arena, you need to know that as well. Just as Stella Adler, I studied with Stella uh many years ago, the she was the grand damn. And Stella uh her way of teaching was you had to know the history before you could even read the lines. If you didn't know where the character came from, if you did not know the time period, you could not uh start to memorize the material.

SPEAKER_01 30:30

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

So I love what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Something as as seemingly ludicrous, and I say seemingly because it's not, the region, where what part of the world are they from? Is it is it is it what's the what's the weather like? You know, because you know what if it's if it's if it's the south, it's slow, it slows, it slows the tempo down because it's so hot. If it's in a cold place, what does it do when people are doing like this bundled up for the most you know, the jaws are tighter? Why, why does Chicago have that ad, that, that a, ah, ass? Why do New Yorkers talk like this? Why do we talk? Why what is it? So I get into the the the anthropological cultural aspects of why people sound the way they sound. Before we even start, we we we talk, we we go in, we take a deep dive into culture.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

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