Need for Words - Tapa dura

Words are powerful. They are alive and liberating. Yet so many of us have lost our connection to spoken language. We fear metaphor, we distrust eloquence, we undervalue our ability to speak or to read aloud. We are fettered, Patsy Rodenburg argues, by 'word blocks'. But any barrier, she tells us, can be breached.
The Need for Words is about reclaiming language, relearning its art and rediscovering pleasure in words. How we speak, what we speak and the impact of spoken words is the story that Patsy Rodenburg takes up in this companion volume to her first book, The Right to Speak, her 'Owner's Manual of the Voice'.
Part One of The Need for Words sifts through all the blocks that deny us access to language and show us how to release them. It destroys the myth that there is only one, correct way to speak. Part Two, a series of language and text exercises, connects the voice to the shape and quality of individual words and phrases. The language of Shakespeare, poetry, drama, contemporary prose and numerous other text examples are used to prompt the reader to find his or her own unique need for words.
In this penetrating and timely book, Patsy Rodenburg reaches out to performers, writers, students, teachers, business people, politicians and to everyone who must speak but cannot make the connection between voice and the text. She tells us that our voices and our language are our own. But until a need to use them is provoked within us, a fear of words will keep us silent.

Patsy Rodenburg teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and is currently Head of the Voice Department at London's Royal National Theatre, where she has worked with such actors as Ian McKellen, Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis.