Travis James: From Teacher to Director
At the time that he opened New York Speech Consulting in downtown Manhattan (SoHo), New York City, Travis was considering a variety of projects in his new start-up space. He was teaching Off-Broadway actors and singers, and collectively teaching a variety of subjects to non-theatre professionals including U.N. diplomats as well as executives on Wall Street. While using his Acting degree from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in his offerings, where he learned various performance methods, he then went on to pursue a Master’s degree at The New School for Social Research, MFA Program. During this collaboration with other theatre directors in the New York arts scene, Travis began writing his “Accent Elimination ” approach for Non-Actors. It was in this shift period of resurregence of his work which became the inspiration of The Nina Kurtian “Accent Elimination” project where his technique of blending Industrial Organizational Psychology mixed with acting techniques that he developed this unique approach. Travis began teaching and being invited to teach in Los Angeles and known as the “Accent Elimination” of the West Side. Today in its 25th year and making this truly unique approach to speech improvement to teachers and to the public. As both a entrepreneur, director, teacher, Travis was learning first-hand the benefits of collectively experiencing using his theatre approaches in arts education to create one’s own style of communicating outside the world of creating fine arts.
Discovering the Conversaid Method
So after his nearly 25 year journey, and after re-naming the company LiveFaculty LLC and started publishing the Conversaid Method materials. “Travis showed just how far actor training could go with speech, especially when talent and creative freedom are involved,” says Travis, now president of LiveFaculty LLC, but I was convinced that there was more than one place to use acting to enhance early career development.” Travis recalls, “My realization was to include speech in every client’s earliest career development. I got excited about this possibility and it also gave me the opportunity to make that dream a reality.”
A Collaboration Begins
While attending a seminar with Frank Corsaro in 1997, Travis met one of Corsaro’s MFA students at New School in New York City. Her innovative research focused on vocal and movement development in young actors. Now a professor at Pace University and director of research at ARTA, recalls, “About a year into my association with Travis, my whole training with Frank had been focused on how important it was in teaching speech to consider how a student learns to speak, rather than saying, this is how he should be taught in. I realized how important it was for me to be my students primary speech influence, and I was eager to put my training into practice.” Travis hired Lisa to consult on his directing experiments at ARTA, and soon they began the collaboration that culminated in the creation of the Conversaid materials and classroom techniques, first offered to the public in the fall of 2012.
From Entrepreneur to Director
2012 – the birth of a movement. ARTA merged LiveFaculty LLC and the Conversaid Method and program was born. Travis the teacher-turned director now added entrepreneur to his job description as he focused his efforts on scaling the business of his start-up. “I discovered that creating the material has a lot of the same concepts with putting a business plan together, that I’d been an entrepreneur all along.”
In the ten years that have followed those first classes, Conversaid has grown to a nationally-taught in, nationally-acclaimed program that has reached thousands of clients in 36 states and foreign countries. Preschools and daycare centers everywhere have integrated Conversaid and activities into their programs. Travis continues to train potential ARTA teachers, speech language pathologists, parents, performers, and interested people in seminars held in all corners of the USA. and on our website www.Speak-Well.org.
Travis James conceived, founded and developed the innovative Conversaid program for the Accent Reduction Training Association for Speech and Movement, which he founded in 1998. He has collaborated and directed numerous Off-Broadway productions and is a regular contributor of speech and acting articles on the Conversaid blog. He has created speech programs and conducted teacher training for numerous language centers nationwide. A graduate of New York University, he studied Acting and Directing at New School, Actors Studio MFA program and is happily married, and the father of three beautiful girls.
