When we give a speech we may not always be on a Phoenix karaoke. However, we always have a space that has been given to us to use as our own during the speech. All too often we see speakers doing things that they should not be doing – pacing, circling, hanging out in one corner or another. A stage (or speaking area) is a fantastic tool for speakers that helps to boost the importance of public speaking, but how are we supposed to use it?
As A Way To Show Action
For someone who does a lot of talking, there sure seems to be a lot of action in my speeches. I find myself telling stories in which people do thing, objects move around, etc. It’s great when I tell my audience about all of this motion, but when I’m on stage, it’s even better if I show them.
When I’m telling a story in which a character moves around, I need to make those movements on my stage so that my audience can “see” what’s going on in my story. I can also create a virtual object like a door and open it and go through it if it will help make my story clearer.
One important thing to realize about showing action while you are up on stage is that not all actions are created the same. What this means is that depending on how your story is going, your actions can be delivered either fast or slow. You need to match what you are doing on the stage with what is going on in your speech.
As A Way To Create A Speech Timeline
Many of the speeches that we give deal with the tricky issue of time. The challenge that we face as speakers is that although we may move through a considerable amount of time in our speech, we may not be able to bring our audience along with us if they don’t realize that time is passing.
This is where your stage can come into play. What you are going to want to do is to stand in one position while you share with your audience what happened at a given point in time. Then, as time moves on, you’ll want to move to another spot on the stage in order to visually show your audience that time has advanced.
If you are speaking in the western world, your audience will read from left to right. What this means for you as a speaker is that you are going to want to start your time-based movement on your stage from your right to your left. This will match with how your audience thinks that you should move through time.
As A Way To Structure Our Stage
Some of our speeches don’t actually have a clear sequence of events to them. Yes, we’ve got a lot of information that we want to share with our audience, but each one of the items that we want to share basically stands by itself. You can use the stage to help communicate information like this also.
What you are going to want to do is to want to associate different spots on the stage with different ideas that you want to cover in your speech. As you complete an idea that you want to share with your audience, you will want to physically move to a different spot on the stage.
The power of this technique is that it allows you to show the sequence of ideas that make up your speech. You’ll want to be careful to pick a good place on stage to start your speech and a meaningful spot to wrap things up.