blog

kasina Talks Smack

by Jessica

Things I never thought I would hear kasina team members say to each other:

"I desire that we be better strangers."

"Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

And of course, the succinct but effective, "Peace, ye fat guts!"

We were hurling insults in my latest book report, an investigation of how to best say what you mean and mean what you say. How is a performance persuasive and what makes a dialogue productive? How does Much Ado About Nothing apply to, say, consulting? With a little help from John Barton's, Playing Shakespeare and Cicely Berry's The Actor and The Text, we spent an hour exploring some of the great Shakespearean snippets, as well as his seemingly endless supply of jabs and barbs.

It seems an odd way for a consulting firm to spend a Friday afternoon, but there's a lot to be learned from being nitpicky about the Bard's text. Shakespeare's vocabulary numbered over 17,000 words and he invented just under 1700 of those himself -- all of which we now use in modern conversation ("advertising", "radiant", "fashionable" and "compromise" are all of his invention). In the entirety of his work, he managed to use over 7,000 words - more than occur in the whole of the King James Bible - only once and never again. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, and precisely how he wanted to say it.

The vowels, consonants, alliteration, assonance and the syllabic structure of the lines themselves are clues that we use to discover their meanings and the ways in which they should be spoken aloud.

All of this textual study brings us, finally, to a place of performance. When performing Shakespeare (or any playwright), two truths become evident: You have to know what you are saying and you have to listen (even when the only lines assigned to you are Elizabethan trash talk).

Knowing what you are saying is fundamental, but often overlooked in performance, in business and in life. It means that you are equipped to speak passionately to your point, it means that you understand both the literal meanings of your words and their ultimate implications, and it means that you are working towards something active. You are informing, you are hurting, you are comforting, and you are inspiring.

Listening is the linchpin. It's in the listening that the actor achieves greatness, that the presenter makes a lasting impression on her audience, and that the acquaintance becomes a fast friend. In acting, you're in a dialogue -- with yourself, with the audience, or with a partner. In a vacuum, you might perform beautifully without listening. Give that same isolated performance without taking your cues from a partner on stage or listening to your audience, and your words ring false, flat, or just plain fail. Try giving a pre-prepared inspirational speech or reprimand to an employee without listening to their concerns, explanations or reactions, and you will lose them in your first few sentences.

In my most recent acting class, an instructor told us simply: Writing is acting is life. It's an equation that works for consultants as well as artists. You have to understand what you are saying in all of its complexity. Then you have to listen in order to learn the most effective and far reaching way to say it. Illuminating is consulting is life. Service is business if life. Motivating is public speaking is life.

Mainly, though, the book report was just Shakespeare and more Shakespeare. After all, there's only so much you can do in an hour. My kasina team members humored me and my obsessive enthusiasm for the complexity of speeches like the Chorus' opening monologue from Henry V.

Of course, patience has its rewards. Once we had worked on the famous speeches, we moved on to the Shakespearean insults. There's nothing more cathartic than listening to a coworker who has investigated what he is saying, how he is saying it, and what affect he wants to have on his partner, then cry out, "More of your conversation would infect my brain!"

His partner considers this, takes it all in, and finally responds with, "What a disgrace it is to me that I should remember your name."