This week we worked on Elizabeth's monologue for her musical audition!
We worked on a couple things: we mapped out beats, paraphrased and worked on nervous ticks, mapped out dynamics, and worked on character development.
Mapping out beats:
In a monologue or scene, we want to avoid sounding like we're reading a script. In order to make them sound as natural as possible (or off the cuff as a crazy character), we map out the natural pauses or beats through out the scene. Because this scene is all over the place the beats include character shifts where we do a complete 180 as well. It has a lot of very BIG beats!
Paraphrase/ nervous ticks:
The script in a play/musical/or movie is extremely important. So, one of the biggest things that freezes someone up on stage or in an audition is when they forget the words. It's also the thing that makes someone sound unnatural or like their reading from a book - worrying about the script!
The thing about the script is that it has plenty of time to be important later - in any sort of audition process, the director - or whoever you're auditioning for - isn't looking for someone who can memorize a 1 minute monologue. They're looking for someone who can act!
In order to pull the student out of their heads, help them memorize the CONCEPT of the monologue or general ideas and points the character hits, we paraphrase the whole thing!
We put the monologue into words that Elizabeth would actually say as the character and find the most natural way to say it, had her memorize the mapped out version - and then worked on her becoming the character instead of memorizing the words!
Dynamics:
Because a monologue for an audition is so short - we need to make sure we show as many different things as we can! In order to do this - we map out the emotional dynamics of the character, making sure that there are at least a few extremes so that Elizabeth could show a few different sides of her acting!