 |
||
|
The Passionate Speaker
"Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and the council chamber of thought."
– St. BasilA Newsletter for Speakers By Michael Landrum November 11, 2002 – Number 44 Speak, Memory "How do you remember all those lines?" is the most frequent question an actor hears. The answer of course, is rehearsal. While there are people with photographic memories who can recall a page of text after a single glance, this talent is not necessary to play and remember the lines of even the largest role in Shakespeare. (Which role is that? No, not Hamlet, but Iago, the villain who brings down Othello). Stage actors, opera singers and other musicians are among the last of our race to practice the lost art of memorization. Speakers, too, are often called on to recite from memory, though seldom to the level of perfection that an actor must meet in a classic text. Memory was the first art, "the mother of all wisdom," the Greek playwright Aeschylus called it. Memory used to be the primary element in all human culture. For thousands and thousands of years, all learning depended upon the accuracy of human memory. Homer had to remember thousands of lines of epic poetry. All the stories and songs of the ancients passed down through succeeding generations from one memory to the next by the oral tradition, in other words, by speakers. Ancient Polynesian navigators could remember and teach their children the currents and even the different flavors of the water in specific areas of the vast pacific ocean. Closer to our own time, Sam Clemens tells in Life on the Mississippi, how a river pilot must be able to remember a thousand miles of constantly changing features of that great river in both directions. By contrast, remembering a speech should be a mild task. Yet we find speakers married to their notes or reading from Teleprompters. We modern speakers live in a more complex world than Homer did. The total body of human knowledge has more than doubled in the last century by some estimates. Which does not mean an increase of wisdom or genius. Where is the Shakespeare of our time? Or the Leonardo - other than Di Caprio? Perhaps we’re not so advanced as all that. Since we no longer rely on our memory, we have found it unreliable. We have now externalized memory. This computer I am writing on can fit the works of Homer and Shakespeare and every single translation of them onto a single spinning disc. The libraries of the world are now being scanned into digital memory. We are all in a similar position to Henry Ford who did not get past the fourth grade in school. When reporters tried to test his knowledge by asking him for a lot of dates and facts he responded angrily that he could press a button on his desk and fill the room with enough Ph.D’s to answer any question they could think of. "I don’t need to know the answer," he growled, "if I know where to get the answer." Nowadays, any of us with a computer has a keyboard full of such buttons, and can summon more than the equivalent of Ford’s roomful of doctors. . . provided we know a fourteen-year-old high school kid who can keep it running. We’ve lost the habit of using our memory. Perhaps it would be useful to pass along some techniques actors use to memorize their parts. To begin with, reading aloud, in most cases requires some use of the memory. Very seldom will an actor stand up in public and "read cold" from a text she’s never seen before. There are many occasions to read: for auditions, to help a producer find backers for a play, early rehearsals . . . there is even something called "readers theatre" in which actors carry their scripts and entertain a paid audience. In all these cases, the actor will prefer to have a chance to rehearse, to study the words beforehand. This practice allows her to mark the structure of the piece and prepare for the events, emotions and transitions to come. The object of this preparation is to permit her to act around the script, to create for herself and the audience, the illusion that the drama is not being read, but lived. During the performance of the reading, the script should function as a guide and memory aid to the actor. In preparation, she will have established points in the play where she needs to change direction or perhaps try a new tactic in her character’s quest for her objective. It’s rather like a skier descending a familiar course marked by flags, or a traveler using a road map. She glances at the script, quickly reminds herself of the next couple of lines, and smoothly delivers those thoughts and actions before she needs another short glance at the text. If she is experienced, she has learned to read the text much more quickly than she utters the words, so that she can grasp up to several sentences at a time. And since she’s rehearsed them all in advance, the words come easily to her. The audience soon forgets about the script in her hand. In a reading, an accomplished actor can cast a powerful and convincing spell on the audience. Alvina Krause, the legendary acting teacher at Northwestern University, used to do a one-woman reading of a Shakespeare play every year, playing every part herself and reading from a somewhat abridged script. Once, after such an event, an audience member called her office to ask if he could borrow the lantern Miss Krause had used in the storm scene of King Lear the night before. Miss Krause, at that time in her seventies, had used no props of any kind – just the script and a stool on the bare stage. The caller argued with her, insisting that he had seen the lantern with his own eyes. We speakers need to learn from Miss Krause and remember that when we carry a text, it is not for our comfort and convenience, it is to better accomplish our goal. What is that goal? To connect with the audience, giving them fresh, real experiences that can inspire, entertain, inform and convince. The actor’s task, she said, is to "create imaginary gardens with real toads in them." A Thought to Ponder " Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it." -Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592) ©2001-2003 Michael F. Landrum |
|
|||||||||||||||
No part of this site may be reproduced without prior written consent. Site designed and maintained by: A&E Advertising and Web Design | Hosted by: A&E Web Hosting |
||||||||||||||||
