AUCKLAND CENTRAL MEETINGS ARE FIRST AND THIRD MONDAYS

Auckland Central      
No further meetings until further notice.  You are welcome to attend the Waitakere meetings, details below.

                                  

Waitakere
56 Beaubank Rd. Kelston
2nd and 4th Wednesdays in the month  7.30- 9.00pm
Ph. 818 6993    George Dabb 

Next meetings:

April 11 2007
April 25 2007
May 9 2007
May 23 2007

 

 

Whangaparaoa

1/69 Polkinghorne Dr.
Usually 1st Friday in month  10.30am
Ph. 09 424 4388  Ron Stanwell (the meeting may be elsewhere)

NEXT MEETING   February 2 2007                                             

    AUCKLAND  NEWS

 

 

  

Emergence of outline for 2007 New Zealand Speakeasy conference

 

 

After considerable discussion, concrete details are emerging about the National Conference to be held over May 18-19 in Christchurch hosted by the Canterbury Speakeasy Group.

 

The venue will be the Coppertop conference room in the Commerce building of the University of Canterbury. This is a spacious and well appointed facility.  Accommodation is arranged through the Academy Motor Lodge in Creky Road near the venue and opposite the Communication Disorders Department. Per person costs are expected to be around $80.

 

Patron of New Zealand Speakeasy Judge Andrew Becroft has agreed to be a speaker on Friday evening 18 May. Other speakers are being engaged.

 

The Conference theme is to be “New Directions” and the national oratory competition topic, “Thinking outside the Square”.

 

The Conference dinner is to be held at The Thai Orchard restaurant in Riccarton Road, a short drive away.

 

Please contact Stephen Hoare-Vance regarding registration, or any other queries at; shoare_vance@hotmail.com, phone 03-3326707, 0274-458827 before 1 March 2007   

 

 

 NZ SPEAKEASY CONFERENCE  2005 Brief Report 
Congratulations to Quenten Brown on being awarded the President's Cup for 2005 and to Philip Khouri on winning the award for Best New Member      Also to Ngaire Renton (Otago) who won the Oratory Cup.  Otogo was adjudged Best Branch  and will host the 2006 Speak Easy Conference in  Dunedin.    Around 50 people attended the afternoon session where the guest speaker, Dr Susan Block from Melbourne La Trobe University gave a very interesting talk and Workshop. She was followed by Shelley Williams from START.   The meeting concluded with Open Forum and a dinner later in the evening.    A more detailed report will be on this page later. 

 

Quenten Brown receiving the President's Cup from Dean Cook

 

James Fox NZ Secretary and Dean Cook NZ President

 

 

Otago Represenitives (Best Branch Award) - Vanessa Cave, James Fox, John McMorran, Ngaire Renton

 

Dr.Susan Block presenting Philip Khouri (Auckland) with the Best New Member Award

Ngaire Renton (Otago ) winner of the Oratory Cup with Dr. Susan Block
 

 

  

PAGE 2  AUCKLAND SPEAK EASY PRESIDENT'S REPORT 2OO5

               AUCKLAND AGM 2005

                                                                                                                                                            
   Latest statistics of hits on the website         
 

For last 12 months details as follows: 

HITS ( to February 2006 )

2006 2005 (nearest thousand )31300 15000Most popular pages

causes 6481 6000

homepage 4070 5000

guestbook 2740 3000

therapy 2411 3000

tips 1862 2000

members 1460 1700

support 1321 2000

news-Auckland 1155 1300

special - kyu won 1400 {Last year’s figures were inclusive of

special-Perth 1286 {these and other special reports - 7000

 Search Terms - most common:

stuttering

stammering

causes

speech therapy

 

• Get your fluency assessed every year for Free…

AUCKLAND SPEAK EASY ASSN.
Contacts:

Reg. Office and Contact-  George Dabb Ph. 818 6993  e mail  gdabb@paradise.net.nz 

Annual Subscriptions   (Due 1 April)
Auckland Central   $45 
Homegroups         $35

Associate            $20
(Those who are outside the Auckland area or who are unable to attend Speak Easy meetings)

The new brochures with information about Stuttering are now available from  Quenten Brown  quentenb@paradise.net.nz

or George Dabb gdabb@paradise.net.nz   Ideal for schools, Citizen's Advice Bureaux and Medical Centres

The Auckland AGM for 2005 was on Monday April 18  Full  Details on Page 2

 Stutterers' Words Flow More Easily on the Stage
e mail from Warren Brown June 12, 2002
By JESSE McKINLEY

On Sunday night David Nachman, a handsome 15-year-old and Hunter College High School freshman who has stuttered since
the age of 3 stood onstage at the Blue Heron Arts Center on East 24th Street in Manhattan and confronted one of his
biggest fears: a theater packed full of people, all waiting for him to speak.

"God, I wonder what my mother would think if she ever knew I left this place," David said, speaking the opening words
of a scene softly but clearly. "She loved living here."

David was just one of seven teenage and seven adult actors who performed last weekend at the Blue Heron as part of the
inaugural production of the Our Time Theater Company, a new troupe devoted to being "an artistic home for people who
stutter."

The company was founded last fall by Taro Alexander, a 30-year-old actor who has been a company member of the
downtown performance hit "Stomp" for three and a half years.

Mr. Alexander, who has stuttered since he was 5 years old, said the idea for the company came to him long ago, during
his days at a performing arts high school in Washington.

"What I found was that when I performed I was completely fluent onstage," he said. "I could speak completely
normally. I was amazed."

What Mr. Alexander had touched on was something that speech pathologists have long observed: stuttering often
disappears when people perform or sing. The list of performers who do stutter or have had a stutter is long,
including Carly Simon, James Earl Jones and Bruce Willis.

Dr. Diane Paul-Brown, director of clinical issues in speech-language pathology for the American
Speech-Language-Hearing Association, a national trade group for speech pathologists in Rockville, Md., said: "Acting is
a different form of communication. People who stutter are able to get into a different role and to speak with
fluency. They're not communicating information about themselves, and that's one of the things that reduces
communication pressure."

The cause of stuttering, which affects some three million Americans, remain mysterious, combining both physical and
psychological elements. Vowels are not difficult for stutterers; plosive consonants like D, P and T are.

But according to the speech-language-hearing association, 50 percent of people who stutter have a family history of
the disorder, suggesting a possible genetic link.

Whatever the reason, stuttering can be debilitating. The actor Austin Pendleton, who is member of the company's
advisory board, says he remembers times when "people who stutter who would literally not leave their rooms."

"It's a thing you spend your entire life addressing," said Mr. Pendleton, who has stuttered since childhood. "I
remember all through my adolescence I would announce to people I wanted to be an actor, and they would look utterly
bewildered."

Paradoxically, Mr. Pendleton said he was probably best known for his work in "My Cousin Vinny" (1992) in which he
played a stuttering public defender.

"If you use it properly, it can become part of the life of the character," he said. "The whole joke of that part was
that he had a stutter, which is just more evidence that God is a kidder."

At Sunday's performance, the primary effort was to just get the stories across; all of them were written by company
members. The first act, which featured teenage performers, stayed light, with three short sketches about football
players, a satire about Romeo and Juliet and a takeoff on "A Star is Born," which ended with the entire cast singing.
And while there were several moments of verbal struggle, the performances never stopped.

Lee Caggiano, a speech pathologist from, Syosset on Long Island, whose 19-year-old son stutters, was in the
audience.

"While I thought the performers were brave, I think it was more important for the audience to see what some of these
kids have to live with," she said. "For a parent it can be excruciatingly painful. You know they are in pain, and you
don't know how to help."

The second half of the evening was decidedly more serious, with one sketch featuring Zied Hamada apologizing for his
speech impediment to his dying mother. It was a scene, like many others that night, Mr. Alexander said, drawn from an
exercise in which actors wrote monologues addressed to important people in their lives.

For all the emotion involved, Mr. Alexander and his troupe also have a healthy sense of humor; the program for the
show noted that the performances would last "anywhere from 2 to 10 hours, depending on the actors' fluency."

And while this weekend's run of three shows was brief, Mr. Alexander has bigger plans. The company, a program of Naked
Angels, the Off Broadway troupe, plans to go to Anaheim, Calif., this month to perform at the National Stuttering
Association's annual convention. Beyond that, Mr. Alexander would like to find a permanent home for the troupe and
increase the number of actors.

"I just think the arts are such a healing thing," he said. "It's actually very simple. You don't really have a voice,
and then all of a sudden you have a voice. You can see what kind of power that has."

MORE NEWS

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