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By Ian
Bauer
STAFF
WRITER
Oaklander Lissa Renaud’s specialty is voice training—she gives lessons to
anyone wanting to speak better, from politicians to talk show hosts. And
she’s well-spoken herself: "Um" and "uh" are not in her
vocabulary.
Born and raised in Berkeley, where she obtained her Ph.D. in theater, Renaud
moved to Oakland in 1975; she lives in the Piedmont Avenue neighborhood.
Since 1975, the 44-year old has run the Voice Training Project.
In 1985, the business branched out and Renaud collaborated with fellow
performing arts trainers to include in-depth instruction on acting and body
movement. This collaboration became known as the Actor’s Training Project, a
local program for training professional actors.
"It’s my life’s work," Renaud says of the two projects.
Although she still teaches voice lessons out of her home, she uses a studio
at the campus of a north Oakland private high school for larger group classes
devoted to body movement and acting.
She remains tight-lipped about who her clients might be; she won’t name-drop,
but says, "I’ve worked with television and radio anchors, politicians
running for office, religious and educational speakers, professors,
therapists and others."
As a young child, Renaud says she was surrounded by theater and acting.
"My mother sent me to a nursery school in Berkeley called Gay’s Nursery
School. The school emphasized the performing arts. I started when I was 3. I
was performing everything, including dance."
When Renaud was a sixth-grade actress, she says her mother went to the limits
to encourage her: "My mother hired a well-known professional American
actress named Elizabeth Sackett to instruct me. (Sackett) would correct my
speech, my readings, correct pronunciations, where the stress was in the line
and where I should take a breath. All of this for the occasion of my debut as
Lady Macbeth."
So what’s a class like with Renaud? "A typical first lesson in acting
studios is some kind of improvisation, or an emotional memory (but) my first
lesson is posture and enunciation," she says. One hundred percent of
acting relates to posture, Renaud believes.
"Posture is very important. Poor posture means constriction in the body.
A free voice cannot come out of a constricted body. An expressive speaking
voice shows emotion," she explains. "I don’t know how to train an
actor without having a voice, or to train an actor without knowing how to
move their body.
"The human voice and breath is something amazing; it’s the thing that
goes inside our bodies and comes out and connects us to each other through
speech," she says. "People go to the theater for a very wide range
[of reasons]. Some go to be seen. Others go to keep current with trends in
playwriting. Some people go to see the work of a specific actor or director.
I go for the human speaking voice."
Renaud says she mentors as much as she teaches. "The longer I’ve been
teaching, the smaller my class size has gotten. It’s a mentoring
process," she says. Her class size may be one person, or it may be 25.
When a group is larger, she mixes all levels—this way, advanced students have
a heightened sense of their accomplishment and new people have, right in
front of them, an example of what they are trying to do.
Renaud has an interesting requirement for taking on a student. There’s no
application, no prerequisites—but before she even meets them, she has to hear
them.
"I have to talk to them over the phone. I have to hear their
voice," she says.
She’s picky about her acting students. She says she is looking for "the
kinds of people who can make a contribution in this field. I’m interested in
people who have a larger sense about the welfare of the acting
profession."
For more information, call the Actors’ Training Project at 510-653-8395 or
visit either acttrainproj@earthlink.net
or http://www.interarts-training.org/.
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