CCM professor coaches local actor for film role

The War That Made America, a documentary airing on PBS tonight, tells the story of General George Washington during the French-Indian War. The show stars Cincinnati-based Bob Elkins as Washington's Seneca-speaking interpreter.

To learn the role's Irish accent and Seneca lexicon, Elkins went to Rocco Dal Vera, an associate professor in the drama program at the College-Conservatory of Music and an experienced voice and dialect coach.

For the audition, Dal Vera researched and translated the lines, then taught Elkins the Seneca pronunciations from phonetic spellings.

"I enjoyed the challenge… to find all that material," Dal Vera said. However, he did not worry about perfection, saying a loose translation would be more authentic for an interpreter.

Elkins' and Dal Vera's preparation impressed the producers. "He came in and blew them out of the water," Dal Vera said about Elkins.

Auditions are nothing new for Dal Vera. He sang, acted and was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and Actors Equity Association while growing up in Denver.

"I was one of those kids who knew very early on that theater was for me," he said.

He attended the United States International University in San Diego, where he earned a bachelor's degree of fine arts in music theater.

Del Vera lived and worked in Los Angeles afterwards, where he joined an improvisation group called Off the Wall.

While there, he coached voices for various televisions shows on a weekly basis. He also ensured dialect accuracy in Raiders of the Lost Arc.

"I was working steadily as an actor in Los Angeles and just picked up a couple of classes teaching voice and speech on a whim," Dal Vera said, "and really fell in love with it."

After nearly 12 years teaching, he returned to Denver where he earned his masters in theatre voice and speech coaching from the National Theatre Conservatory at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

"As soon as I graduated from that program I was recruited by Wright State University," Dal Vera said. He headed Wright State's bachelors of fine art program in acting and began a new musical theatre major before he left for CCM in 1998.

He is the only professor who sees his students from first audition to graduation.

"Nobody's more interesting than actors," Dal Vera said. "Even though I was making much more money acting, I began to find that the richest experiences I was having came from coaching other actors."