The Body Speaks: Physicality and the Voice
The voice doesn’t live in your throat — it lives in your whole body.
Every sound you make is a physical event. The way you stand, move, and carry your energy determines how your voice resonates, and how others hear it.
For actors, this connection between body and voice is essential. And when working on accents — especially something as specific as the American accent — physicality can be the key that unlocks the sound.
Voice Is Movement
Arthur Lessac believed that the voice is not something you do; it’s something you allow. His method treats the voice as a living part of the body — responsive, dynamic, and deeply physical.
If you’re tense, your sound is tense. If your posture is rigid, your vowels will be tight. When you move, release, and inhabit rhythm, the voice opens and takes on a new resonance.
Try this:
Read a simple line standing perfectly still.
Then, read it again while walking slowly, swaying slightly, letting your arms move freely.
Notice how the sound changes — it becomes fuller, easier, and more alive.
This is why every voice session at The Voice Atelier includes movement. You can’t separate the voice from the body that carries it.
Every Accent Has a Body
Accents are not only about sound — they’re about rhythm, breath, and body habits.
A New Yorker moves differently from someone in the South, and their voices reflect that.
A Southern accent often carries buoyancy — a relaxed, flowing rhythm that seems to roll forward like a slow river. The body follows: grounded hips, a looser jaw, gestures that expand outward. There’s time, space, and warmth.
A New York accent, by contrast, has radiancy: quick, bright, and forward. The breath is higher, the pace faster, the physicality sharper. Even the gestures seem to cut through space.
California (or a General West Coast sound) tends to rest in openness — the vowels are longer, airier, a kind of sunlit casualness that comes from easy breathing and a lifted posture.
When we train accents, we often start with sound. But when we add movement — how the character lives in their body — the accent begins to feel real, embodied, truthful.
Finding the Voice Through the Body
Sometimes the fastest way to discover an accent is to move first.
If you can find how a person from that region walks, gestures, or breathes, the sound tends to follow naturally.
Try exploring:
Weight — Is the movement light or heavy?
Tempo — Is it quick and reactive, or slow and measured?
Direction — Does the energy move upward, forward, or stay centered?
For instance, when working on a Southern accent, try loosening your body, softening the knees, letting your gestures open. Feel the sound stretch with you.
For a New York accent, tighten the focus — lean forward slightly, move faster, speak on shorter breaths. The rhythm becomes electric.
The body teaches the sound.
Why This Matters for Dutch and European Actors
Many European actors are trained to separate movement from voice — to think first, move second, and speak last. But in the American approach to acting and speech, physical and vocal life happen together.
To sound authentically American, you have to embody the freedom and rhythmic looseness of the accent.
That doesn’t mean exaggeration — it means allowing the body to participate.
When your physicality shifts, your rhythm changes. When your rhythm changes, your sound changes.
Practice: Move, Then Speak
Take a line from your audition text.
Walk around the room while humming it softly — no words, just vibration.
Add gesture, let your arms and spine move freely.
Then speak the line, keeping that movement alive.
Notice how the accent feels more natural, as if the sound is coming through you rather than from you.
The body is the foundation of voice work.
When you engage it — fully and honestly — every accent you learn, every sound you shape, becomes grounded, expressive, and real.
“The body doesn’t lie. When you move truthfully, the voice follows.”
