This is Who We Are: Liz Hayes
This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia University School of the Arts' professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Theatre, Liz Hayes, about how a childhood fascination turned into a career, the techniques of teaching speech, and the importance of personal resonance.
The first time I heard Liz Hayes speak, which must have been during my Theatre Department Orientation, I could tell she was one of those magical art school professors whose pedagogy changes lives. It must’ve been how alert and observant she seemed. Or it was her subject matter—voice and speech—and how specialized and challenging it is. It was also her hands, elegant and poised, physicalizing an acquired wisdom.
“I have always been interested in how people use language,” Hayes tells me. “I grew up a parrot.” Growing up in Boston, her mother, a career first grade teacher, had studied Speech Pathology in school. While she never became a Speech Language Pathologist, or SLP as Hayes calls it, the attention and focus on how people speak colored much of Hayes’ upbringing. One time, Hayes’ mother had to have an intervention with her. She had been mimicking the way her friend with a tongue thrust spoke. “My mom had to be like, Hey, so fun fact, you don't actually speak that way.” While an amusing childhood anecdote, the experience also made Hayes realize something: kinesthetically she was quite capable of replicating speech patterns.
High school offered Hayes a unique exposure to accents and dialects: first her family moved to Maine where she learned, because of its proximity to Canada, Quebecoise French. Next, she was awarded a Rotary Scholarship and traveled to the United Kingdom— “I nerded out about accent differences. I was so curious how English could have so many forms,” she tells me. In high school, Hayes played music and studied dance, but as school progressed, she grew more and more interested in acting. While in college at Brown, Hayes majored in Psychology, but was heavily involved in the robust undergraduate theatre scene. This breadth of interest—“I split my time between the lab and the theater”—made her unsure what to pursue after college. She nearly applied to medical school, an instinct that makes sense. Teaching speech, not only for its anatomical components, has the exactitude of a science.
After college, Hayes moved to Boston. She started auditioning for work and got some traction, but realized she needed more training. She decided to go to graduate school, which she completed at George Washington University’s Shakespeare Academy for Classical Acting. While at school, probably because of the program’s classical focus, Hayes realized she had a special interest in speech work. Graduating and returning to Boston, Hayes performed in shows like Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man Cell Phone, Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. It was also during this return that Hayes started to teach speech—at schools like The Boston Conservatory, Emerson College, and Walnut Hill School for The Arts—both for professional stability and because of her enthusiasm for the subject matter. “I loved that I could be on stage all the time and teach… it’s so nice to share your work with your students.”
At the School of the Arts, Hayes teaches first and second years for four consecutive semesters. “If I had to narrow it down to two things [we focus on] in the first semester,” Hayes tells me, “It would be gaining a map of the vocal tract—what does everything do?—and relating that to IPA.” IPA refers to The International Phonetic Alphabet, which Hayes introduces early on as a technical backing of her coursework. “It's a series of shapes that represent one sound in all of the world's languages…[It’s a method of] mapping the vocal tract [in order to understand and] get to know the actor’s personal voice.” IPA is an old and highly complicated system not necessarily adored by all her students. Hayes understands that it’s merely a way to learn the material. “If you talk to any of the first year actors…some of them will be like, IPA unlocked all of this new stuff for me. And other actors will be like…hard pass.” While Hayes wants to endow her students with certain skills, she does this with a keen awareness of the person in front of her. Working in tandem with her colleagues allows for this kind of adaptability. “One of the many reasons I love teaching alongside [Lecturer in Theatre] Sita Mani, who's our Head of Movement, is because I think about speech like movement. The muscles are just smaller.” Hayes knows her subject matter can handle such flexibility and capaciousness.
What exactly does it mean to teach speech? In our conversation, Hayes mentions two quotes that seem to summarize her approach. The first, which is the very first idea she presents to her students, is a quote by documentary filmmaker Valarie Kaur. “Listening is an act of surrender.” Next, Hayes references Jeanette Nelson, the vocal coach at the National Theatre in London. “She [says] every time you open your mouth on stage, you're trying to change someone's mind.” Yes, all of her students come in with the ability to read and memorize lines, but Hayes, in her teaching, wants students to isolate the role of the voice, stretching their relationship to and dependency on its function. It’s as if she’s teaching actors to play an instrument and their task is to hone their approach. To do this, she grounds her teaching in the assumption that each particular student’s impulse must be honored: “I talk about writers as dance partners. When you deify the writer, you are completely taking yourself out of the equation.” Here, the relationship becomes less about the actor’s relationship to the author’s ideas and more about why a person would say those words at all: "It's your job to figure out, why am I talking?" Other units in the first year include accent work, a haiku unit—“they’re these perfect little bite-sized one-act plays”—and Shakespearian sonnets.
In many ways, the role that IPA plays in the students’ lives exemplifies the purpose of an arts school education: learn a technique in order to break it. That’s to say, Hayes pays no particular attention to the material labeled canonical within her subject matter. While it's clear Shakespeare holds a special place in Hayes’ heart—this past spring break, she was in Chicago completing a reading of an adaptation of Winter’s Tale she wrote with a collaborator—she does not foist this on her students. “We are in pursuit, over the course of four semesters, of the precise vitality of the language,” she says. How her students get there is up to them. Hayes offers them tools, and in class, she creates space for them to rely on their own approach. “The best day of the year,” Hayes says, is the last day of the text collection project, where students choose three texts and after being coached in two of them, direct themselves for the last one. “What is the most notable difference after a year of the course…is [their increased ability to] look to the language.”
Outside of Columbia, Hayes continues to work as a coach with individuals in and outside of theatre. “I’ve worked with a couple lawyers, which I've really enjoyed.” One lawyer was an older gentleman who sought out coaching before arguing before the Supreme Court. “We did a lot of what's called 'semi occluded vocal tract work' together, which is like straw phonation, where there's back pressure from the straw. [It's] a massage for your vocal folds. And so before he argued before the Supreme Court, he was doing his little straw work.” In addition, Hayes has served as the resident dialectic coach on Harry Potter and The Cursed Child for five and a half years.
A few days ago, I was scrolling through Instagram stories. I kept seeing images of The Met Museum posted by various Acting students. I remembered a project Hayes told me that takes place in the second semester in the second year: “I call it the Met project, and it's designed after an actual job I had with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. I assign each student a sculpture from The Met, and they have to read the curator's text, and then pick a piece of heightened text that resonates with the sculpture and perform in class.’ The assignment culminates in a trip to the museum. I replied to one of the stories inquiring if the photos they posted were from this trip.“Yes!” The student replied. “We went this morning. It was so beautiful…I had not seen that part of The Met in that way before.” Then, confirming what I’ve expected all along, the student added, “It's probably been my favorite class ever, she’s really the best.”