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• Permission to Speak Crown (New York, NY), 2023

• Samara Bay website - https://www.samarabay.com

  USE YOUR VOICE TO GET WHAT YOU WANT

  For over a decade I’ve been a Hollywood dialect coach with clients all around the world, working with movie stars on some of the biggest blockbusters from Wonder Woman to Guardians of the Galaxy—coaching the minutiae of breath and sound, and the nuances of human communication.

  BUT IT’S MORE THAN PUTTING ON FUNNY VOICES.

  As I began working with non-actors, too—women running for office for the first time, employees navigating prickly workspaces, introverts needing to pitch, and entrepreneurs about to go big—my WHY became super clear:

  I’ve been FOREVER fascinated with the relationship between how we sound and how we get treated—and what the hell we can do about it.
  Even when I was little. I remember being comically obsessed with Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl in the musical My Fair Lady who learns what a fancy accent can get you. Same time I had posters on my bedroom wall of Marilyn Monroe, another social experiment in persona-building—the hair was iconic but how about that voice??

  I got a degree from Princeton by studying dialogue: I was an English major who got to read mostly plays. And a total social psych and linguistics nerd. And then I got a Masters’ in acting, with a lot of speech and dialect work, a lot of changing up how we sound to play different roles.

  “Why would anyone change how they sound?” a journalist at Jezebel asked me for a piece on our favorite con-women and their infamous voices.

  I WAS LIKE, PULL UP A CHAIR.
  When Bay works with actors, she approaches developing accents by determining the style of speech best suited to conveying the character’s story. “That actually ends up being what it is for all of us: what story are we telling?” she says. “That’s the question with Anna Delvey. That’s the question with Elizabeth Holmes.”

  And that, even without the conning and manipulation, is what you’re doing too. All of us.

  TELLING A STORY WITH OUR VOICE. A STORY ABOUT POWER.

  WHEN I WAS 24, I LOST MY VOICE. FOR WEEKS.
  I wasn’t sick, but something was clearly very wrong. I had to go to a speech pathologist to learn a whole new way of talking. Honestly, a whole new way of being. It turned out somewhere along the way I had picked up a habit of speaking just a bit below my body’s preferred pitch, presumably because I came across as older and wiser that way. I wasn’t entirely aware I was doing it, but it worked.

  Until it didn’t and my voice was GONE.

  What WAS that?!

  Why had I picked up a destructive way of speaking?

  Did it help me get treated better?

  Most of our habits do… until they don’t. Until we’ve outgrown the benefits of playing small or faking big.

  Data and case studies tell us we get judged or at the very least categorized all day, every day, based on how we speak.
  It’s a thing we don’t talk about much when we’re talking about cultural biases, but we feel it. And we adjust accordingly.

  TILL WE END UP WITH A VOICE THAT ISN’T OURS.
  And won’t lead us to the future we want. Won’t lead us to the power we deserve.
  And THAT breaks my heart. THAT is why I’m here and that’s why I coach.

  So the people who deeply deserve power, GET POWER.

  MY SECRET SAUCE IS BLENDING...
  THE TECHNICAL: a real owners-manual understanding of your actual sounds. Your breath. Your pitch and tone and volume and pace. Linguistic markers for class, race, age, and gender that are charged AF. Your habits and options. Your voice’s possibility.
  WITH
  BIG PERMISSION WORK: cleaning out your mindgunk from a lifetime of, well, speaking while human. Hint: it’s not NOT about white patriarchal capitalist BS.
  SO YOU SHOW UP WHEN YOU SHOW UP.
  With a voice that's specific not generic, brave not safe, joyful not self-serious, varied not squeezed into one boring note, diverse in all the ways.
  So you move the room and get what you want—the gig, the raise, the respect, the vote, the future that is calling to you.
  So you use your voice to get what you want.

• VoyageLA - http://voyagela.com/interview/meet-samara-bay-samara-bay-la-dialect-coach-hollywood/

  APRIL 24, 2017Meet Samara Bay, LA Dialect Coach in Hollywood
  Avatar photoLOCAL STORIES
  SHARETWEETPIN

  Today we’d like to introduce you to Samara Bay.

  Samara, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
  I coach actors for television and film, either working alongside them on set, or preparing them for an audition or role at my home office. I started out coaching off-Broadway theater when I got out of grad school, about ten years ago, and was an adjunct professor of dialects at Pace University in Manhattan. Then I moved to LA during the recession and worked those first few years on a couple of indie projects here and there as well as prepping actors for big-budget blockbusters like X-Men: Days of Future Past. Slowly but surely, I built up a client base out west and started getting requested by actors and producers for their projects. More recently, I coached the leads in Focus Features’ Loving (for which my client Ruth Negga got an Oscar nom!) and did some work on Bright (Edgar Ramirez), Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (Pom Klementieff), Why Him? (Keegan-Michael Key), and am currently in New Orleans for 6 months coaching the cast of AMC’s Preacher, on season 2.

  Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
  There were many years there where I was working on insanely cool projects but in between I’d be unemployed, or coaching actors one-on-one out of my home office but with enough downtime that I would begin wondering if I was on the right track. Because I’m interested in a lot of different industries, I would use that downtime to pursue work in the publishing world, creating content for blogs and brands, I would work on local projects with friends that were political or artistic. And I would wonder if or when the puzzle pieces would fit together. It was really about three years ago that dialect work started to come fast and furiously and my business took off, and I was finally able to let all of those questions go.

  Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Samara Bay or LA Dialect Coach – what should we know?
  Dialect coaches, for the most part, don’t specialize. Our job is to teach an actor a dialect, be it Standard American if they’re foreign or a regional or foreign accent if they’re American. This means on any given week I can coach a Brit to sound like he’s from Los Angeles, an Angeleno to sound like she’s from Boston, and a Bostonian to sound like he’s from South London. Sometimes it’s more exotic — last year I coached 1800’s Appalachian Georgian and a specific Burmese dialect, as well as three different African dialects and a made-up dialect that was meant to sound mysterious. A little time with a native speaker (often a sample I grab off the internet if I don’t have a local source) provides the foundation and I teach myself the dialect from that (using the International Phonetic Alphabet, a linguistics tool), and then teach the actor in a way that feels coherent with their acting choices. Each of us coaches (and there aren’t that many of us!) have this skill, and what sets each of us apart is just the manner in which we teach our actors. It’s quite personal, because acting itself is so personal. Each individual I work with has his or her own take on the character we’re working on, and a style of approaching acting, and it’s my job to give them new sounds for their mouth while honoring their instincts, making them feel comfortable and confident, and hopefully helping them find a way that the accent makes them act BETTER, not worse. Because I’m on the younger side compared to a number of the coaches working in TV and film, I often work with younger clients at an earlier stage of their careers, and then we get to grow together as their careers take off. Which has been a delight!

  Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
  I’ve lucked out with amazing mentors along the way. I would not have started out working in New York City right away without the help of a stunning coach named Kate Wilson. Not only was she an early inspiration (I spent a summer with her at the Public Theater in Manhattan, learning voice and speech and Shakespeare from her), but once I was out of grad school, she began handing me jobs she wasn’t able to take herself. Stephen Gabis was another coach who graciously did that. And in Los Angeles, I have a wonderful agent thanks to some more-established coaches who referred me. Because there aren’t that many of us, and we each work solo, we all crave interaction with each other I think, and enjoy sharing resources and ideas. Francie Brown has been extremely helpful, as has my voice and speech coach from grad school, Thom Jones. I’m honored to be their colleague. And clients have become advocates as well! I’m working on Preacher because the glorious Ruth Negga, who I worked with on Loving, suggested me for season 2 when they needed a coach. I’m flattered, and also thrilled to get to work with her again. I’ve done four projects with the fantastic Edgar Ramirez at his request, as well as helping him prepare his address to the United Nations last year.

  Contact Info:

  Website: www.LADialectCoach.com
  Phone: 646.831.0404
  Email: LADialectCoach@gmail.com
  Instagram: @samarabay
  Twitter: @samarabay
  Yelp: LA Dialect Coach — https://www.yelp.com/biz/la-dialect-coach-west-hollywood

• Sister - https://sister.is/spotlighting/samara-bay

  SPOTLIGHT: SAMARA BAY
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  SAMARA BAY is a dialect coach for actors in TV and film and a professional speaking and communication coach. She is also the host of the podcast Permission to Speak with Samara Bay.

  Samara took Concepts & Conception in spring 2019 and is a founding member of The Sisterhood. She caught up with Amelia Hruby in summer 2020 to discuss the power of public speaking, building an intentionally impactful business, and getting a book deal during a pandemic. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

  CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR BUSINESS?
  I’ve done dialect and public speaking coaching for over a decade, both for actors in Hollywood on big budget television and film projects and for non-actors in a number of industries. Leading up to the 2018 midterms, I was coaching women running for office pro bono through MoveOn.org, working with first time candidates to help them tell their stories better and to help them do their stump speech better so they weren't so worried about all the things that inevitably happen when we're not used to speaking in front of people.

  In terms of my business, I’m the host of iHeartMedia podcast Permission to Speak with Samara Bay, and I’m writing a book. The podcast is about helping people use their voice and believe that their voice is actually what power is and can sound like in the future. It is about changing what leadership in America looks and sounds like, but it is also on a practical level about upspeak, vocal fry, Hillary Clinton being called shrill, and all these floating data points about our voices that we don't really have the language to talk about or the space to find solidarity in. I also signed a book contract all about that this spring. So suddenly I have a book to write during a pandemic!

  I LOVE THE TITLE OF YOUR PODCAST. WHAT DOES “PERMISSION TO SPEAK” MEAN FOR YOU IN YOUR WORK?
  I think of it in two ways, because there are two things that make us able to show up literally and metaphorically when we're being asked to speak in public. In terms of “permission to speak,” the speaking part is really my “expertise.” I talk about vowels and consonants and the musicality of spoken English when I'm coaching actors. And that ends up being relevant for non-actors, because when we get in front of an audience we don't always trust our natural instincts.

  That brings us to the other half, which is the permission part. Talking about how we use our voice doesn't really matter unless we have a mindset or a framework that gives us a sense of permission that who we are is actually who should show up to speak. We have these voices in our heads—one of them I call the generic monster—that tell us that surely we're not who they want. Surely listeners want the version of us that’s a little less quirky, a little less funny, a little less weird, and a little more like everyone else who does thing X. And it doesn't help that most of the public speakers that we see have either been coached to fit into or accidentally fallen into the category of what straight white rich men sound like. That’s seen as the standard and everything else is a deviation.

  So part of the permission piece isn't just for ourselves. It’s also looking outward as listeners and remembering who we hear speak. I mean, it sounds comical to say, but we need to remember that AOC exists, that Emma Gonzalez exists, that Tamika Mallory exists, that the way that Barack and Michelle speak is different than how George W. Bush spoke. We have to remember that there are so many examples of people really leading the way of what the sound of the future could be. We just tend to forget them when we think about ourselves, and we hide part of ourselves when we hold ourselves to that old standard.

  WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY HIDING PARTS OF OURSELVES AND HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN IN OUR SPEECH?
  I think there are also two different categories of how we hide. One of them is really technical, and it’s in the speaking category. Vocal fry and upspeak are perfect examples of the ways that we use our throat in a way that our throat was never intended to be used in order to tamp down our emotions. Because perhaps our emotions aren't appropriate in the space where we’re speaking. Or perhaps we're worried that we have an accent that is going to get judged so we use a lot less pitch than our natural pitch range. Then we end up speaking a little bit more monotone. And we might actually be safer speaking in monotone, because we reveal less in monotone. Every room is different, and everyone’s situation is different, and I have to say that sometimes there are legitimate reasons to hide.

  The other part of hiding ourselves is the permission part where we do all kinds of things with our body language to hide the aspects of ourselves that make us unique. I always like to say that the work I do with people is really about helping them find more freedom and joy by connecting with everything that is real. And unfortunately, on a cultural and individual level, we often associate public speaking with being seen and being judged. We feel it as having a real tightness rather than freedom and a real heaviness rather than joy.

  HOW DID CONCEPTS & CONCEPTION CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS IN A SIGNIFICANT WAY?
  When I signed up for Concepts & Conception, I was in the process of pitching my podcast and had just met a book agent who was interested in what I did but wasn't sure that there was a book there yet. Through Concepts & Conception I was able to think really clearly about what I wanted to do—not so much in terms of a business model, but in terms of the thing that the world needs that I'm uniquely positioned to give it, and in terms of what brings me joy in the doing.

  I was somebody who had an abundance of clients through word of mouth and my agent, but I’d never done the work to capture the essence of my business. I took C&C at exactly the right time to get to the heart of what I actually cared about and how what I cared about could fit into the greater ecosystem of the world we live in and the world we want to live in. Within two months of finishing the course, I’d filed as an S Corp and within a year I’ve become a full fledged podcast host and producer and I’ve signed a book deal!

  I mean at the beginning of Concepts and Conceptions, one of the very early assignments is a two year and five year vision. And my two year vision has basically all come true within one year. Which is amazing especially considering that this is such a tough time in terms of our nation's health.

  WHAT WAS ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE THINGS YOU LEARNED IN CONCEPTS & CONCEPTION?
  One thing I learned from C&C was how to bring gentle, loving and communal thinking to business rather than hyper-focusing on the individual in business. I also learned what white supremacy culture actually means, what feminism actually means, what capitalism actually means, and the difference between having a business that is you and having a business that isn't you. So while I was coaching a lot of clients before I took C&C, a huge takeaway from that course was to think of scaling my business in terms of growing bigger intentionally, not just getting bigger because bigger is better.

  I'm also one of those people who got a Master's in acting and always thought that I’d only ever encounter problems in business. Taking Concepts & Conception made my imposter syndrome around never having gone to business school go away. And now I’m glad I never went to a traditional business school, because the people who do that aren't getting what Feminist Business School lays out, which is how to bring your full self to your business so that it and you sustain themselves and make the world a better place.

  WHO WOULD YOU RECOMMEND THIS COURSE FOR?
  I would recommend it for anybody who feels a sense of heaviness around their business and wants to feel lightness or who's feeling disempowered in business and wants to feel empowered. I think there's a real magic in the work Sister’s doing. Feminist Business School is incredibly robust and loving and exactly what somebody needs if they’re feeling stuck but also ready to make a bold move.

  WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AND YOUR BUSINESS?
  Honestly this spring, I had all of these really cool workshops being scheduled that got canceled and I’m still mourning them. I’m also mourning the ability to write this book while simultaneously interacting in real life with real people. Right now, my business is redefining how we think about public speaking when we are redefining what it is to be in public. Part of me is overwhelmed by how different public speaking has become in the age of being afraid to share breath with other humans.

  Personally I would love to find as much ease as possible writing this book and as much communion with colleagues, clients, and community as possible through the process. Partly because it'll make the book better. Partly because it'll make me the author better. And partly because it will only be possible when this pandemic is over. And I want that to happen for all of us as soon as possible.

  I also have a five year old who theoretically was going to start kindergarten in the fall and who had, until March 13th, been in full-time childcare. And although I have an extremely egalitarian relationship with my partner, there is nonetheless huge swaths of mom guilt that I was not having to deal with previously. And there are huge decisions I have to make on a daily basis about what my writing style is for my first time writing a book, now that that’s happening during a time of psychic burden I didn't expect.

  I'm not complaining. But it’s also real. And if I'm being honest about what saying that out loud does to my body, the answer is a lot. So I try to dance every day. I try to sit down. I try to do what I learned from Sister about really taking responsibility for my own freedom and joy before I sit down at a microphone or before I sit down at a computer every single time. Sometimes I do it resentfully toward the annoyance of the world. And sometimes I do it, and it does exactly what it's supposed to do and absolutely shifts me. Those times I am better for it and everything I'm working on is better for it.

• Slate - https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/accents-dialect-coach-samara-bay.html

  The Psychology of Teaching Actors New Accents
  Hollywood dialect coach Samara Bay explains her process for helping stars master different accents.
  BY ISAAC BUTLER
  MAY 25, 20219:55 AM
  A white woman with a big smile.
  Samara Bay Samara Bay
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  On this week’s episode of Working, Isaac Butler spoke with Samara Bay, a dialect coach for TV and movie actors, including Penélope Cruz, Rachel McAdams, and Keegan-Michael Key. They discussed her pathway to this career, the thorny history behind the classic mid-Atlantic film accent, and how she teaches the building blocks of accents to her clients. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

  Isaac Butler: The platonic ideal of a dialect is not something that people actually speak. It reminds me of all of the paradoxes of realistic acting in general. If a character spoke as fully contextualized as we speak in our daily life, you’d be like, “This character has no consistency. They’re talking in all these different ways. What the hell is going on?” It wouldn’t look anything like what dialogue looks like in a TV show.

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  Samara Bay: Don’t tell that to writers. I feel like they’re trying to capture the authenticity you’re speaking of, but you’re right. We expect a certain consistency when we’re watching something.

  It’s interesting that you come at those paradoxes from this other angle. Lots of actors make really detailed character biographies to try to figure out who their person is. You do some of the same stuff in trying to figure out how they talk.

  When we have a script in front of us, the actor and I get to decide: are you going to drop your “G” at the end of that “-ing” word or not? You have options, and what are those two different things going to feel like? If you say “runnin’ and jumpin,’ ” it’s going to feel different than “running and jumping.”

  We humans, in our real moments of real communication, use language so much more creatively than we give ourselves credit for. The sounds get elongated. The musicality is all over the place. We use pitch up and down. When we’re really in ourself and really need something, we use so much vocal dynamics. Then when we’re playing a character—whether we’re an actor or we’re just on a podium and we’re playing the character of ourself talking in front of other people—we often tend to minimize and try to not sound “weird.” Especially if we’re doing dialect work, we are perhaps worried about getting it right. I have to be there to remind them, you’re a character. You’re a human—as this character—who wants to use language to get what this character wants. I dare you to be as creative vocally as this character as you actually are in real life.

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  When you’re on set, are you also touching up the accent as it goes away on takes?

  Here’s what set life looks like. The director usually sits away from the actors, often in a different space entirely, staring at usually two to three monitors, depending on how many cameras are shooting simultaneously. There’s a few director’s chairs set up. The director sits in one. The script supervisor sits in one. The script supervisor is this lovely human with this massive amount of paper trying to figure out continuity and making sure that every word is being said and every arm is in the same place for every take. Behind them is usually two chairs: a writer or a producer and me. What a fun and weird and lucky perk of dialect work that when I’m on set for those 12 hours, I’m in the creative hub.

  Obviously, different directors work differently and some are more collaborative than others. In the greatest scenarios, they are interacting with me all the time. Either, That bit sounded odd, or They’re a little low-volume, do you think it’s because they’re not feeling comfortable the accent? You want to go in, or should I? We’re discussing how best to interact with the actor during this really sacred, strange time when they’re on set with the cameras on them.

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  The camera’s not rolling, but it’s in this suspended space between takes. Part of being a good dialect coach is knowing when it’s about dialect and when it’s not, and knowing how much the actor can take in terms of notes from me in between takes. Often when I come in is when the hair and makeup people come in between takes. We’ll do a take of the scene all the way through, and then the director will yell, “Cut!”

  Then the hair and makeup people would go in, and I slide in too. Depending on who my actor is and what I know they need, I will either give them just eye contact and a thumbs up if they did a brilliant job and I know they’re feeling a little nervous, or I’ll remind them of a tiny sound that maybe slid a little bit in that take and I know that they can get it right. Actors, beautiful artists that they are, range pretty dramatically. Some of them would get really anxious getting a note mid-scene, and some would get really anxious not getting a note. You read your people.

Bay, Samara PERMISSION TO SPEAK Crown (NonFiction None) $28.00 2, 7 ISBN: 9780593238684

A feminist approach to public speaking.

Drawing on her work with actors, academics, businesspeople, and politicians, speech and dialect coach Bay makes her book debut with an encouraging, practical guide to public speaking for women who have learned that to succeed, they must strive to sound "like a straight, white, rich, remarkably large man." Because of the restrictiveness of the patriarchy, many women have retreated into silence or developed tics such as upspeak, hedging, and apologizing. In chapters that cover topics including pitch, tone, accents, word choice, and emotion, Bay focuses on how voices connect to power. "When I say power," she clarifies, "what I mean is respect. When I say power, what I mean is control over our bodies and our finances and our destinies. When I say power, what I mean is the opportunity to run the show and feel our feelings." The author liberally sprinkles the text with lively anecdotes about her many clients as well as the findings of researchers. She offers exercises, such as breathing, guided meditation, throat relaxation, and finding one's optimum pitch, but she rejects the idea that women should artificially lower their pitch in order to sound powerful--as Margaret Thatcher and Elizabeth Holmes did. That strategy, she warns, validates "the hierarchical system that says high voices belong to small, cute things, and low voices belong to power. The solution is to reject that." Similarly, Bay rejects the idea that women should tamp down emotion if they want to be taken seriously. When people speak with feeling, she writes, "they reveal that they are determined, angry, heartbroken, joyful, alive." Audiences respond to strength and warmth, and the author consistently reveals her own warmth toward her readers. Coaching, she writes, involves "not facts but a huge hug of it's-not-your-fault and you-are-not-alone validation, which is what I know actually frees our voices and allows for joy in communicating."

A generous companion for building confidence.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bay, Samara: PERMISSION TO SPEAK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562383/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8992f4fa. Accessed 11 Jan. 2023.