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LEARNING LINES
As an actor learning and rehearsing a role, it will always be best to allow yourself to come up with lots of ideas. Then you can experiment with them, and discard the ones that don't work. This approach is much better than working with a lack of faith in your own intelligence. You don't want to develop the character you're playing only one or two steps in one direction. It's more exciting and skillful to be as creative as you can.
From Orrin: Well, I totally agree with everything you and your participants have said about memorization. It took me a while to understand that the best way to getting your lines down was to understand the whys and wherefores of the lines rather than just trying to memorize them by rote.
However, there is almost always some spot in a script where understanding why something is said doesn't help me to remember the lines correctly. (Or, at least, such has been my experience.
Usually the problem comes with something like a series of names. Getting them in the right order can be important: sometimes because someone's action depends on a cue. If the cue is one of the names in your speech, and you don't deliver it in a consistent manner, then your fellow actor is left on tenterhooks: "When is he going to say the name? *Is* he going to say the name tonight, or will he substitute some other name (Like he did last Tuesday!)."
So here are a couple of tricks that I have found useful to keep things in the proper order:
- MNEMONICS:
This is a memory system developed by the Greek scholars and orators to help remember long passages and speeches. This can be broken into methods:
Rhyme: Rhythm helps lock down a sequence. If you don't say/sing it in the proper order, the scansion falls apart. E.g.: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." "Thirty days hath September . . ."
- Nonsense phrases: Form a sentence from the initial letters of the words you are trying to memorize. E.g.: Remembering the division of the animal kingdom (in order): Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species King Paul Called Out For Gus and Sam
Remembering the six stages of fertilization (in order): Contact, Entry, Blocks to polyspermy, Activation of cell, restart of Meiosis, and Amphimixis. Count Every Blockhead Acquiring My Amphibians
Acronyms: Make a word using the first letter from each word that needs to be remembered. This works only when the list is fairly short and when the order of the words can't be shifted. E.g.: The names of the Great Lakes by using "HOMES" (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior).
- Gimmicks: Word games or tricks to help you remember. E.g.: How to spell principal when talking about a school administrator by referring to him/her as your pal. The rule or belief, principal, ends in "le" not "pal". In flowering plants, the male reproductive structures are the stamen.
- Visualisation: The mind records images better than words. So hook the words to an image. As an example, I had a play where I recited a list of names. Let us say the line is, "Do you think I want every Tom, Padraig, Emily, Rachel or George to come her?" For this list of names, I visualized myself coming into my house and meeting people who would represent each name: At the gate in the fence, I see a man beating a drum or 'tom-tom'. [Tom] Walking up the lawn, I pass a man in Irish costume working the lawn with a rake. Being Irish, his name is Pat which gives Pat-rake. [Padraig]. Emily Dickinson sits on the steps reading her poems. [Emily] Rachel from the Bible is in the porch carrying water. And inside the front door, is King George. After I've run through the list a few times, using the visual images to keep them in order, I then usually find the need for the imaages fades away fairly rapidly as the order of the words gets locked down by repetition.
At the end of the rehearsal, the actors would gather around the prompter, who would go through the script, calling the actor's name, giving the page and line where the error occurred, and passing the sticky note to the actor to put in his script. Within a very short time, your script will tell you which lines you must put extra work in. If there is a stack of sticky notes on that one speech in scene X, you know you have work to do. The big advantage here is enabling you to focus on what needs to be fixed.
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