In these workshops we will be looking at how we learn lines; developing essential skills and a wider range of expression.
Why learn lines by heart
With so much work for the camera at the moment and probably in the future, the temptation for the actor is to rely on reading the script while pretending not to.
This means that we start with a lie and a barrier between us!
There is a big difference for actor, scene partner and audience between reading to the audience from the page and truly speaking to them. We want direct communication from the heart.
When we are taught to read as small children, we acquire the skill and habit of letting the eye move ahead of the voice — seeing is instant and speaking takes time. When reading we are never, in our immediate experience of the 5 senses, actually IN the present moment of the word we are speaking. This is unlike normal spontaneous speech. When we do not know exactly what we are going to say next, and are dependent on the responses of our listener and the developing situation, we are actually IN the present moment with the word.
The craft of acting is to have that ‘appearance of spontaneity’, as Henry Irving said all those years ago.
So we need to consider Time: Past, Present, Future.
Time: Past, Present, and Future
If you agree that reading aloud means that our attention is always slightly ahead of the present moment of Now and if you also agree that the actor, as herself and as the character, needs to inhabit the present moment of action, then you will understand that learning, rather than reading, the lines of the scene is essential. Nothing less will do.
How to learn lines by heart
How, then, will we do this learning?
To learn lines mechanically, with the aim of ‘getting them right’ doesn’t work. This method starts by killing the life, then gets busy polishing the dead body.
Learning out loud is dangerous, too. Our memory is organised to repeat a tune (or vocal inflection) as soon as it is imprinted by sound. This means that the first inflection (voice tune), once heard, is very difficult to change. And this means that that the speaking of a word or line is now in the Past, no longer relevant to the Present moment of action.
You wish to make it new, relevant to the present situation, which has never happened before, because in life there is no repetition. That blink that you just blinked is a new blink. It has never happened before and will never happen again.
But if you have imprinted an inflection with the lines, your voice seems stuck in that old inflection, trapping you.
A practical way to avoid this problem is to say the lines silently, so training the muscle memory which will support the mental memory system. If you need to learn alone so as to be ready for rehearsal, decide to stay silent until the moment when your scene partner is presente. Then you will really hear the words for the first time and respond truthfully and spontaneously as the character. You won’t be listening to your own voice playing that old ‘tune’ yet again!
Keep in mind that you have learned ALL the lines in the scene silently, so that you could, if necessary play any or all the roles. See below
The problem of ‘My character, My lines’
As we work and live in social isolation because of the virus, we have another difficulty as actors. Even in normal times we find ourselves thinking, ‘My character; my lines’ in a scene.
The temptation is to highlight the words on the page, like we did at school to memorise the dates for that history exam etc. This is FATAL! Please never do it!!! Our memory system is largely visual. What we first see imprints on the brain and can get stuck there: those bright blocks of colour striped across the page, over My Lines, make the rest of the page dim, unread and unheard; we start to act in a vacuum of Me, forgetting the through-energy of the story, unaware of others and the developing situation.
Learn the scene
Good actors learn the SCENE. That is what we will be doing together. When we learn the scene, then we understand its necessities, where and why it is happening now in the story of the play, and what our place in it is. And when we really listen to what others say, we find that their words make our next words and actions inevitable and easy to say. Cues and responses are natural and ‘line learning’ just happens!
Be honest: haven’t you once or twice ‘switched off’ during your scene partner’s long speech and used that time to run your next bit through your head, inflections, clever acting effects and all? And wouldn’t you feel annoyed if you found out that she had been doing the same during your wonderful speech?
When we are physically isolated at home with only a camera to focus on, shared experience is hard to find; that is why we need to be specially generous and open to our scene partners at this time, practicing approaches which will be so useful in the future when filming and on stage.
Learn the ACTIONS, not just the words
It’s not just what people say, it’s what they DO. Action can be totally neglected when we are just little talking heads seen in isolation.
Always make a list of the physical actions required by the playwright. Make a space to work in, without the camera, and go through those essential actions in order, silently. So the learning gets into the whole body, legs, feet, fingers and toes, connecting to furniture and people in the scene. Don’t mime opening the door, go outside your room and enter it properly: where are you coming from? Where are you going? Is this new room familiar or strange to you? Who owns it? Who is in the room? Why? Who is the most important person there? The questions are endless!
An example from Uncle Vanya
The other day Olga, Ines and I worked on a scene (the end of Act Two) from ‘Uncle Vanya’ by Chekov and we realised that we had entirely ignored what he told us to do:
(Sonya is alone in the room)
- Helen comes in.
- She opens the window.
- Sonya and Helen embrace; they are both very moved.
- Helen notices the wine on the sideboard.
- She fills a glass.
- Sonya and Helen drink from the same glass and kiss each other.
- Sonya cries……
Now, you don’t have to ‘act’ the direction ‘they are both very moved’. When you do the embrace and, later, they both cry, Chekov tells you about the emotion of the scene. The physical actions that you do do, such as drinking the wine together, change the dynamic of their relationship and tell the story. At the start of the scene the women are apart, then they come together.
Because we were all 3 stuck in our rooms miles apart we couldn’t play the actions out together. So Olga found some objects like pens, a little ornament, some paper, etc. and she sketched out the layout of Vanya’s diningroom: window, door, sideboard, piano etc. Then she moved the images of Sonya and Helen around the room in order of their actions. This made the physicality clear to us for the first time. We had got stuck in ‘feelings’ and had forgotten the active story!
Working with actors auditioning on camera, I am reminded to spend time and attention on what they will be doing as well as what they are saying.
They use the real room where they will film their audition process, and that room can play its part in the lives of the characters they play.
The Storyboard Script
Another very effective way of ‘learning by heart’ is to use the idea of a ‘storyboard script’. This means that we draw a little picture of each word (or small group of words), thus transferring the printed words on the page, which never change or move, to an active, progressing flow of images that you will then transform into sound.
I will attach an example of this technique, using a short poem and some lines from a speech.
Because I can’t scribble my pictures on this machine I will draw them on paper, photo them and send them with this. I hope that you will all take this opportunity to do your own drawings of the poem and speech, just to find out if you enjoy doing that and if it helps you to ‘make the words your own’ and so to learn them effortlessly with a ‘heart connection’.
How to start the storyboard script
How you appraoch these learning systems is important. If you start by wanting to ‘get the lines learned’ any technique will fail. Why? Because you will be wanting, expecting, projecting into the future, trying for the result and not living in the process. All those things that spoil and frustrate your joy in acting!
As you learn with love, in the present moment, you solve your acting problems…. What a bargain. ’2 for the price of 1’ as they announce in a sale!
The best response I had from an actor using this technique was that she found that she ‘knew the lines without learning them’. That is what I hope it will give to you. And it is also very quick and it lasts! Our memory likes to use sleep time to store information, transferring it from the short-term to the long-term memory; so a good test is to find the lines again the morning after you first met them.
Now, it is not possible to draw precise pictures of sense! So, that at once frees us from ‘trying to get it right’. The playful struggle to find an image that conveys meaning is fun in itself and, in the time it takes and the depth of thought it demands, the actual word on the page becomes alive and personal to the speaker. Those words would not be MY (the actor’s) words.
They are given by the playwright as the voice of the imagined character in the imagined situation. As the actor recreates them with her scribbled diagrams the words reveal their power. The actor is then in the present moment fully engaged in transmitting the message: playing the scene.
Image… Imagination
Words on the page are themselves images of objects: concrete objects recognised by the 5 senses, and abstract things understood though unseen / unheard / unfelt. Those abstract things often need to be made into concrete images so that we can talk about them. We use Imagery to do this: metaphor, simile, all the poetic devices.
With our scribbled drawings we transfer the printed word to an image and so learn the line in a series of self-drawn pictures. In this way we have the experience of the character, the speaker in her imagined situation, ‘seeing’ in our own mind’s eye the images that she is representing by means of the words she speaks. I call the technique ‘storyboard script’ because a storyboard is made to draw each shot/scene of the film that is to be made.
Stanislavsky talks of the ‘internal film’ — the continuous changing picture in our minds when we imagine anything. In acting, that movie needs to be the movie of the character. She ‘sees’ what she is talking about: the forest, her brother, the king, what happened on Christmas Day, the hoped-for exam result / the dreaded exam result that might happen…
What we want as actors is to have the direct experience of the character, not of the printed words on the page. If we learn the scene by drawings — in the scene we draw ALL the dialogue, that of our role and what the other characters say — we learn the direct experience. This can only be expressed fully and accurately by using the words that the playwright has put on the page.
Paraphrasing is not allowed!
Greta’s speech
Here are a few lines from a speech by Greta Thunberg to the United Nations:
This is all wrong.
I shouldn’t be up here.
I should be back at school on the other side of the ocean.
I want to steal those words off the page, leave them there and make them a part of me, so ‘channelling’ Greta’s experience through my voice and body to share with my listeners,
‘Telling someone else’s story to an audience’ as Judi Dench describes the actor’s task.
My storyboard script of those three lines
Note how I’ve represented her thoughts as pictures.
Blake’s poem
This is a poem by William Blake, a working artist, poet and mystic.
I want to share it with you because it sums up all that I am trying to express about joy and freedom of spirit. The language is rather unfamiliar to us now and for some of you English is not your first language. So I will give you a ‘gloss’ to help understanding.
He who holds to himself a joy
Does the winged Love destroy.
He who kissed the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.
………..
(Blake writes as a man, of course. I am using ‘she’ in my gloss because that makes it more personal for me.)
The person who grabs and holds on to that feeling or achievment that she craves for, actually destroys the spirit she desires. The image is of a little angel with wings, crushed to death by being selfishly smothered by the holder.
The person who kisses that little winged angel as it flies away from her, allowing the spirit to be free, to reach others, to be part of nature and God, liberates herself and the spirit through love and so is able to live in the eternal present moment, as in the sunrise, each moment being a new beginning.
My storyboard script of his lines
To read more articles, click here. I’ve also written more about the storyboard script in my book.