The past two days have given me a very interesting viewpoint on the difference between speaking and conversing.
My 7-year old daughter has took it upon herself to audition for a local theater’s summer production. After a couple of years of “summer theater camp” which she excels in , the opportunity presented itself for her to audition for a real production.
So, with little notice, we signed her up for an audition spot. We acquired a decent 1 minute monologue to fit the audition and the child. In less than 24 hours, she memorized it spot on – and began working on pacing, breathing, word choice and transitions.
She got the concept of progression right down when we stood her in the upstairs hallway and told her to talk to us downstairs without yelling.
The audition went swell. The director laughed at the right part in her joke.
In the long run, she got called back, and eventually got cast as one of the two young ladies playing “Fudge” – the 3 1/2 year old brother in Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing. A surprisingly large role for someone her age.
On Monday of this week, we started rehearsals.
Rehearsals for her consist of 2 hours a night, Monday thru Friday and 3 hours on Saturdays spent learning lines, blocking, stagecraft… and for Mom & Dad they consist mostly of spending time in the back of Fluffy the Minivan of Doom playing on our laptops thanks to a tethered Android phone and internet connectivity.
But we do catch part of the rehearsals on either end – and it made me think a lot about “speaking” versus “conversing”.
Young actors have a habit of “over emoting” when they are first getting the swing of it. I think maybe it has something to do with their internal sense that a ‘real’ conversation isn’t rehearsed. Despite the fact that playwrites try their best to write dialog as if it were natural, it’s still a rehearsed dialog.
There’s something unnatural about a rehearsed conversation to the ear.
Real conversation isn’t planned. It occurs spontaneously. Those taking part haven’t rehearsed their lines nor are they waiting for their cue to speak. They interrupt. They repeat themselves. Sometimes, they go off down rambling or tangential paths.
Part of where conversations fall apart between companies and customers is that altogether too often, the company has a message they are trying to get across and they have rehearsed their side. They have ‘talking points‘ and try to stay ‘on message’. They give their customer facing employees canned responses that they are supposed to reply with. These kinds of companies don’t respond to what the customer is saying so much as they wait for their turn and then blurt out exactly what they think is important – whether or not it’s relevant to what was just said.
Conversations aren’t predictable.
Sure, you can stand talking to yourself in a mirror, planning out what will happen before hand (yeah, I’ve done it too) and hope that you are a little more prepared for whatever will happen – but you can’t really predict what the other person will say. That’s the difference.
As I watch the young actors in this play try to learn the art of making lines sound as if they were spontaneous conversation – I wonder why it is that so few brands and companies have figured out that there is no such thing as a ‘scripted conversation’?
Have you come across one of those situations? Where no matter what you say as a customer you get back a response that seems scripted rather than actually having something to do with what you said?
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Photo by Baslow - http://www.flickr.com/photos/baslow/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
