This post follows my previous one about Drama School Auditions where I lay out preparations and advice on what to do. You can find Part 1 here.
It’s probably quite obvious that you should, once you’ve found your pieces, learn them. However one of the most frequent questions I get from non or inexperienced actors is:
“How do you learn all those lines?”
You can just bang your head against the wall until you can drone out the speech word for word like you did when you were a kid in a school play, or you could work out what the hell you’re actually trying to say.
I touched on it briefly in my last post, but knowing what the hell you’re talking about why you’re doing it and how you’re trying to do it is almost more important than learning the lines. If you know all of this you can really understand what you’re talking about and thus will find it easier to learn the lines.
I am of course talking about the Ws: What, When, Where, Who & How.
Shakespeare is hard, no one is trying to trick you or make you feel inferior (as some people seem to just find it easy, they however are in a minority), it’s just hard for most. You can easily combat this by simply learning about the play. I would argue you’ll get a lot more from the text by reading it aloud. Many people have researched and synopsiszed Shakespeare’s work . Read them see if there is a character breakdown of your particular character and then ask if you agree, it’s OK to disagree with someone’s opinion, but you need to keep asking yourself WHY.
After a while you will start to do something I like to call bean-bagging. By building the world of the play in your mind, if you forget a line, or miss a beat you have a ‘beanbag’ to fall back on. This isn’t an exclusively ‘Classical’ technique, you can (and should) use this for a modern text as well.
In real life we don’t know what we are going to say, and we speak in context. Where we’ve just come from, What we want to do, When we want to do it, How we want to do it and Who we are and Who we are with. This we do in a blink of an eye because, even if you’ve gone to india to ‘find yourself’, you still pretty much know who you are without that journey.
We live in context. So should your character.
For this reason you should try and find the context of the people/characters you are trying to act. These characters have lives and motivations, motives and habits. It’s your job as an actor to find them and be them (which sounds a bit -wanky to be honest but sometimes you HAVE to be wanky). As you build an understanding of the world and the charaters in it, you build a supportive bubble around you, filled with lovely context. This beanbag you can fall back on when you get lost, or lose your place.
Write down your thoughts on the Ws, answer each one clearly, without going too far into your imagination, look at the text you’ve been given and understand using that WHY things happen. When you get lost go back to this list and reconnect with those ideas and truths you created. A deeper understanding of what you’re saying and why, will really help put your foot in the door in ANY kind of audition.
What does this have to do with getting text in your head? It’s kind of a simple concept: By knowing what you’re saying your more likely to remember what to say. It’s always helped me and I hope it helps you.
I’d like to note that these posts aren’t going to be in any particular order, eventually it will become a pool of advice that you can grab from. As it stands there are two, but that’s going to change soon.
Paris.
