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After my short introduction an essay by Peter Anderson follows where he explains how he learned to speak Lavinian.
All my life I have been mystified by:
All my life I have been mystified by:
1. How Noah
was able to board all those animals, insects etc into one smallish ark.
2. How
humans are able to learn to read music and play violins and bassoons.
3. How
actors and actresses (I am old fashioned) are able to act and to memorize their
lines.
Last night
number 3 was particularly in my mind when Rosemary and I experienced (the right
word here) the Nicolas Billon play Butcher directed by Kevin McKendrick. You
see many of these actors speak in mostly untranslated Lavinian. We will have to
wait for Mr. Billon to convert Butcher into an opera and then we will have the
benefit of subtitles.
So I decided to ask Don Peter Anderson, one of the protagonists in Butcher to explain how he is able to memorize a non-existent and really invented language (inventors are Christina E. Kramer and Dragana Obradović.
Here is
what Anderson wrote:
For the past year I’ve been learning a language that does not exist. When Nicolas Billon conceived of his play Butcher,
now on at the Cultch until March 31, he wanted his examination of
revenge and justice to not be tied to a specific political, ethnic
conflict. While the play takes place in Canada, the story is
backgrounded in the fictional country of Lavinia (named after Titus
Andronicus’ daughter Lavinia, the innocent victim of a brutal
revenge-fueled rape and disfigurement) which bears some resemblance to
the countries of the former Yugoslavia.
The character I portray speaks entirely in Lavinian, a unique language created for the play by professors Christina Kramer and Dragana Obrodovic. It’s been said the language would sound vaguely familiar to a slavic speaker, something like an English speaker hearing “Jabberwocky.” When people ask me how I learned Lavinian all I can answer is “practice.” Which the dictionary defines as: “repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it: it must have taken a lot of practice to become so fluent.”
In preparation for the role I spent close to a year istening to a recording of the Lavinian spoken in the play (line by line along with the English translation) made by Dragana. Every morning for months, I took a walk around Trout Lake, listening to Dragana’s voice on my iPod shuffle, muttering to myself in Lavinian. Passing joggers steered well clear of me. I said every line hundreds of times. Sometimes the words came easy, but other times my North American tongue had difficulty wrapping itself around some of the trickier vowel and consonant combinations. I’ve always had difficulty rolling my “R’s” — many YouTube tutorials later I made some very little progress (and drew heart from the fact that Vladimir Lenin could not roll his “r’s” either - a fact he was painfully ashamed of).
Slowly, the sounds and words became clearer. I began to recognize individual words (“ali” meaning “but”) and grammatical constructs, and to know what I was saying when I said it. Not unlike learning a part in English actually. Ironically, once in rehearsals, I found the real challenge was no longer speaking the Lavinian, but listening to the English my colleagues were speaking as if I didn’t understand it, taking my cues from things like body language, volume, intonation.
The play Butcher is like a set of nesting dolls, mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. The language of Lavinian is one of the tools Nicolas so effectively uses to create the atmosphere of suspense that permeates the play.
The character I portray speaks entirely in Lavinian, a unique language created for the play by professors Christina Kramer and Dragana Obrodovic. It’s been said the language would sound vaguely familiar to a slavic speaker, something like an English speaker hearing “Jabberwocky.” When people ask me how I learned Lavinian all I can answer is “practice.” Which the dictionary defines as: “repeated exercise in or performance of an activity or skill so as to acquire or maintain proficiency in it: it must have taken a lot of practice to become so fluent.”
In preparation for the role I spent close to a year istening to a recording of the Lavinian spoken in the play (line by line along with the English translation) made by Dragana. Every morning for months, I took a walk around Trout Lake, listening to Dragana’s voice on my iPod shuffle, muttering to myself in Lavinian. Passing joggers steered well clear of me. I said every line hundreds of times. Sometimes the words came easy, but other times my North American tongue had difficulty wrapping itself around some of the trickier vowel and consonant combinations. I’ve always had difficulty rolling my “R’s” — many YouTube tutorials later I made some very little progress (and drew heart from the fact that Vladimir Lenin could not roll his “r’s” either - a fact he was painfully ashamed of).
Slowly, the sounds and words became clearer. I began to recognize individual words (“ali” meaning “but”) and grammatical constructs, and to know what I was saying when I said it. Not unlike learning a part in English actually. Ironically, once in rehearsals, I found the real challenge was no longer speaking the Lavinian, but listening to the English my colleagues were speaking as if I didn’t understand it, taking my cues from things like body language, volume, intonation.
The play Butcher is like a set of nesting dolls, mysteries within mysteries within mysteries. The language of Lavinian is one of the tools Nicolas so effectively uses to create the atmosphere of suspense that permeates the play.