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This is Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village about rehearsing
a monologue. A big challenge for any actor is tapping into their own emotions so that
what they're performing on stage appears real and powerful to everyone involved including
directors and casting agents. Let's talk about a couple of ways that actors try to do this.
And again, it's a very odd exercise when in which you're speaking someone else's words,
but showing some representation of your own emotion on stage. Often, we hide our emotion.
We try to appear neutral, calm, but we're not interesting in seeing neutral and calm
characters. We want emotional characters. Thanaslovski was one of the famous acting
coaches of all time. He talked about an as if-- a mental exercise, in which you put yourself
in the place of the character and imagine, what would make me feel the way the character
apparently is? So you're taking something from your own life, making an equation from
your own circumstances, and allowing that to determine what you're thinking and feeling
in that moment. Two other ways to do this, are what's called a given circumstance, and
a sense memory. In a sense memory, you meditate back into an experience you had by recreating
all the sensory and physical details that you can come up with. If you do that long
enough, it puts you in that very same mood that you were in when the event happened.
Another technique that is not so internal is what we call the given circumstance. Hank
will explain how he uses this and what it means to him. The given circumstance is just
an exercise about your imagination. You want to imagine that something's happened to you
and it is something that will compel you to use your emotion for the monologue. For example,
if I want to seem happy, I might imagine that I've just been given a paycheck for a million
dollars. A million dollars seems unreal to me, I might just say a hundred dollars say
to get my paycheck. Or I might imagine that I just kissed a pretty girl. Thank you Hank,
and one of my favorite sense memories is when a very pretty girl stood me up and that helps
me perform Waiting for Godot, a very depressing play by Samuel Beckett.