Memory (human) hints and systems (needed) Desperate (understatement)

Well, you see........I got the lead in this show. And its a great part. And its like 72 pages that I have to memorize. And I have gotten old. Or to be more fair to myself, out of memory practice? In theatre school, this much script would have been a cake walk, assuming I ever got a part this big. Make no mistake, I have this show down cold, this character and I are one....the emotions flow and the part is magic.
But getting the sequences and the big chunks to flow so I can access those emotions seems to be my problem.
Anything that helps you remember....any trick, large or small. I would be eternally grateful....
Now I have to go over my lines some more......
--- merged: Jan 20, 2012 11:11 AM ---
oh and cynth.... I hope this is in the right forum, didn't there use to be a Tilted Desperation forum? Tough to remember.....

 

First of all, congratulations ... you're going over your lines some more. Just "Getting on with it" is the number one resource.

Secondly, you already have the answers you need, if what you say about your skills at theatre-school is correct. Go ahead and dive back in your whole-body experience to when you were at theatre-school, preferably, have access to some script you worked on back then. Re-construct how you used to memorize - where you were, what you were seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking at the time. Were other people around at the time or were you alone? Did you and fellow students do a lot of word-bashing etc, or was memorizing a solo experience? Were you sitting when memorizing, or were you strutting around the room? Were you memorizing it as an isolated text THEN adding memory of emotional flow and blocking, or were you memorizing the whole experience, book in one hand, striding and gesturing with the other, until eventually, you'd refer to the book less and less?

Thirdly, here are some methods which you may or may not have been applying when you were at theatre school. I shall present them as a model with coherent workflow.

Carry on doing what you are doing, and as you do so, begin to break the 72 pages into meaningful sections - acts, scenes, dialogues with specific people, show-stopping monologues, etc. Those chunks become your tick-boxes for the purpose of assessing your progress. Some chunks you'll learn sooner/more easily than others.

The chunks you learn most easily are ones which, sooner than you expect, you will be able to gabble through at any time ... while travelling, in the bathroom, between one client/customer/work colleague and the next, while falling asleep, while walking from one room to another, while hunting for your keys as you enter your home, while waiting for the kettle to boil. Layering the emotional flow will be very easy, and emoting in a semi transparent way ... so the 'real' world of the kettle, your front door, your walking from room to room etc will be more vivid than the internal 'full inner body' rehearsals you are developing increasingly smoothly. More and more, you will be walking around 'as' the character, whilst effectively managing your daily life. Then, when you make special time for memorizing/rehearsing, you will access that mass of oh so easily accumulated 'hidden' rehearsal time, and your role will be developing with richness and choice. Richness, because you will have practiced nuances through infinite repetition. Choice, because you will have practiced under many distracting conditions. If you have rehearsed Mark Antony's Funeral Oration while walking to your bedroom, getting undressed, falling asleep, waking with it on your lips and in your minds eye and body, going from colleague to colleague and being Mark Antony while in the bathroom, there will be NOTHING which can distract you when you are rehearsing and performing with your other actors.

The chunks you find you are having trouble with ... you will know to target them for special 'concentrated' attention, because by now, you will know how great it feels to have those other sections running, well oiled, smoothly at each and every time you even fleetingly think of them; so you will want these more challenging ones to be up to speed ASAP ... at 'gabble through' and 'mentally rehearse under adverse conditions' ASAP ... I mean ASAP, so you get ALL the plates spinning at the same time. The ones you are having trouble with will have identifiable patterns about them ... some bit a third or half way through or whatever, where you will have made the same glitch: THAT's the bit to target ......

...... and make dang sure to practice running into that bit from a line before to a line after ... so that your work on correcting the 'problem bit' itself will be layered/integrated with the sense of FLOW THOUGH - you are going for dissolving the glitch, rather than SOlving and faltering. Your outcome is that the glitch will have disappeared as if it had never been there. There were no cracks, there were no paving stones, just the flow of narrative.

This leads smoothly to "Linking", the final step in this process: While you are getting individual chunks to the same fluidity ASAP - I DO mean ASAP (Cdwonderful ... you've been to theatre school, so I'm sure you are already on the same page with having ALL the memorising completed ASAP, but for people in future years who, without your experience, may read this thread for reference, then I'm emphasising the obvious), the process of creating fluidity needs to be applied to linking your flow-through regarding the chunks themselves. The method is identical ... practice the last half page of 'this' last chunk, and straight into the first half page of the next chunk. The principle is identical: remember when I said "Those chunks become your tick-boxes for the purpose of assessing your progress. Some chunks you'll learn sooner/more easily than others"? Well it applies here to the bits between chunks: at this level of memorizing, if you've got Chunks A, B, C .... Z spinning, then you'll have the higher level set, A/B, B/C, C/D set of links to make solid in your memory/inner body/feeling-flow/thinking. Also, as before, some of these links will be easier to remember than the others. Apply the same strategy as we've looked at for identifying, organizing and bringing up to speed those full chunks. Here, "Targeting" and "Checklist" will be about living through, in all senses, the transition between chunks.

For now, I will make no comment on how to solve individual glitches. There are plenty of micro-memory strategies, but I BET you know a lot of them from theatre school. I have limited myself to the advice I've given above, because ONE major difference between back then and here now, is that at theatre school, you were doing it 'all the time'. You'd naturally have been going over the material, because your environment was organised for you to do so. I have generated a surrogate environment in which you may most seamlessly achieve 'all the time' in your present life.

To conclude:
1) SEAMLESSNESS is the fundamental quality, and that is what you are going for. "FLOW" is a major word in your post. Your outcome is to get all the levels of flow ... all those plates to spin at the same time, and to be able to keep them spinning in rough as well as clement weather. To have flexibility and choice. The more you have practiced the bits, and the ways the bits flow together, then nothing will be able to mess up your flow. The more you have practiced them in odd conditions, the more unshakable shall be your performance. For example:

We start the process with a seamless whole, and, correctly, we chunk down: a smooth path becomes a pavement - with paving stones and cracks .. sometimes even ........... abysses ...... between ......... stepping-stones. We need these in order to structure our learnings: milestones, fences and policed crossings to help us to learn to walk the route with our eyes closed, and, if necessary, in a storm. As we begin to get competent, we become like mountain goats, leaping from stepping stone to stepping stone ... perfectly sticking to the route and reaching the destination safely, but .. noticeably bouncing. More competent, and we become like pedestrians on the pavement, we walk, smoothly, though with various foot-lifts and narrowly avoided trips, and our natural stride is compromised as we are sometimes stepping on cracks, other times having to avoid them. Most competent: WE know we created stepping stones and pavements, but nobody else does. The cracks are now so fine as to have almost disappeared. Indeed, in some cases, they have disappeared, the scaffolding has been taken down, and for us, and for the audience, there is nothing but the SEAMLESS FLOW as we simply are the character who lives our life through the play.

2) Cdwonderful, You are the LEAD. Therefore, HOW you lead will be something your fellow actors cannot NOT follow. The earlier you develop your perfect flow, the sooner they will be UNable to NOT fit your flow. You will be like the magnet, which strokes the nails until they become, themselves magnets, borne of your charge. If you have developed your perfect flow, not only will they fit it, but they will, through osmosis, be influenced by your presence to achieve something resembling their own perfect flow. Result: they will be less likely to put you off by being insecure in their own parts. You and the entire production will reap the rewards of what you are doing now, and the audience shall remember you all forever.

Best wishes and ... All Power To You!

 

Congratulations!

A star is born.

We knew him when......

 

Congratulations. My best memory trick is just unending repetition, but I'm not sure how that works when you have to also display real emotion, and some spontaneity in a role.

 

I don't know of any tricks in general for sure, but I've heard some things. One is that you remember things best that you go over right before bed. Something about sleep being when memory gets solidified for longterm storage and the closer to sleep you are the 'fresher' those things in your brain to be solidified. Another is brute force, one way to make your brain realize it needs to remember something is to do it over and over and over and over and....you get the point.

One thing that has worked for me in the past: writing it down. Pencil and paper (typing doesn't work) For some reason once I've taken the time to write something important down I couldn't get it out of my head even if I wanted to. Case in point my daily planner (when I kept one): I almost never read the damn thing and almost never dropped the ball because the mere act of writing it in there was sufficient to make me remember it. While you might not be able to write all 70+ pages it might be worth a shot in some trouble spots.

 

thank you all, especially Zen. Going back to my roots has helped as well as the methodology for undertaking it again, still am not off book, but feel like I have a fighting chance at getting there. Going over it before bedtime and pounding it in by rote as well. Thank you Hektore.
Kraven, you soooooo silly. Love it. And Cavy, the emotions are in the performance. But with out the words instantly available.... the emotions have no jump off point. Thank you as well.