Making the stage your visual aid

The August 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine has an article by Bill Brown titled Use the stage as a visual aid and subtitled how to enhance your message by moving with precision and purpose. He described three ways (which I have expanded on):

1]  Reenact a personal story or illustration.

2]  Incorporate the image of a continuum, or scale.

3]  Use your creativity.

For the first way he mentioned having seen Craig Valentine (the 1999 Toastmasters World Champion of Public Speaking) tell a story about being on a tour boat. Craig had used one part of the stage to represent the bow and another for the stern, as shown above. Bill told another story about working at a radio station, and moved around to three stage areas representing his boss’s office, the newsroom, and the studio.  

For the second way Bill described an expressiveness scale which ran from monotone to raving lunatic. Or, as shown above, it could be a time line. (I got that idea from a four-minute YouTube video by Craig Valentine titled Public speaking secrets: 2 reasons for movement on stage.)

For the third way Bill discussed using the stage as an imaginary map of the U.S. showing where a couple had moved – from Detroit to Boston to San Diego.

The stage also can have abstract but real props added. On August 22, 2008 I blogged about Give ‘em props. In that post I noted how Ellen Hermens described a speaker who placed a paper circle on the floor and stood on it to show ‘this is my point of view.’ Then he stepped away and took a critical look at that point of view from another angle. (That’s a simple version of the red carpet circle at center stage for a TED talk). Another point of view might be represented by a loop of inexpensive yellow polypropylene rope.  

In another blog post on January 17, 2017 titled Using imaginary or abstract visual aids I described how an airport was represented by paper cutouts and yarns (or ropes).

Craig Valentine’s tour boat also could be abstractly represented using 1” wide strips of yellow poster board, as shown above. If you make 45 degree miter cuts at one end, and then tape two pieces together, you will get an L that can be unfolded to make a stern corner of Craig’s boat or a corner of Bill’s room.  

Use your imagination, and you will find lots of ways to make the stage a large visual aid for your speech. The stage curtain came from a gif by KDS444 at Wikimedia Commons.