Monologue Workshop

Fellow Dramatists,


I took place in a Monologue Workshop, which opened my eyes to the real dirty stuff behind Drama. 


I never thought that somebody could teach you how to act. Boy was I wrong. The man who took us for the workshop started off by teaching us the Essentials of Acting which are: 

• Energy
• Focus 
• Intention/ Motivation
• Listening
• Giving
• Receiving
• Light and shade
• Believability
• Personal

Energy has nothing to do with personality. It is something which needs to be harnessed. It needs to make your intentions sharper. You need to get out of your safety zone and get rid of all the judgement you hold, as acting has nothing to do with what your model of the world is. By holding on to what you perceive as 'right' you won't be able to believe what you are acting and as a result your audience will never believe you.


When it comes to preparing your scene or monologue, the preparation period must be a journey, as the journey is the work. You need to forget about punctuation, as by going according to the punctuation you begin to sound like a public speaker. It is also important to not copy actors. When it comes to starting a scene or a monologue you need to make sure you have learnt your lines, only once you've learnt the lines can you begin the real work. It is also important to get your monologue early. 


You need to work on how you approach the monologue or scene. You need to find the humanity of the character. Identify the characters needs, for example to be loved, a sense of belonging, security, survival, to be heard. Through your acting you want to be able to get an emotional response from your audience, once you find the emotions inside you the audience will also feel them. When it comes to your character you need to be able to go on and on about them, you must treat them as if they are another human life force, identify the facts about the character, which can be found in the monologue, and then it is up to you to then identify the imagination behind the facts. 


When identifying the facts behind a character you need to look at the style of the monologue, is it realism or absurdism? This can be identified by the writer of the monologue. You need to remember that it is through you that the character is brought to life and that eventually you are merely a life force hosting your character. You need to be able to make what you are doing look easy. You must learn to hear yourself so that you can pick up on the things that you are not doing right and the things that do not sound right.


Once the facts have been established you need to identify the personality behind the actions. You need to do this by asking yourself why do people do what they do? You need to understand that like you, your character is motivated by needs, and that somewhere in our world your character actually exists. 


An important thing to remember is to avoid Trixy acting as it holds no believability.  When portraying emotions you need to think about what comes before the emotion. For example people do not just suddenly feel sad, they can go from being angry and that anger can become a great sadness. One needs to give themselves permission to open up their emotions to the audience. You are your own emotional truth, use this to your advantage. 


In order to to find our emotional truths in the workshop, we each had to find a place in the class where we could either sit or stand, whatever made you feel comfortable. We were told to close our eyes and think about one thing that had made us really sad or angry. Then we had to associate one line with the incident that had made us upset or angry, and repeat the line over and over again in our heads. We had to imagine that we were saying this one line to the person who had upset us. We were told to say the line softly out loud in our own time. We were told to dig deep and allow the emotion that we were feeling to wash over us, feel it grow from the pit of our stomach to the rest of our body. We had to hold on to the feeling and shout the line in our head over and over again, loud and then soft. Loud music was put on and we had to shout own line over the music. Tears streamed down my cheeks, I have never been more moved by any other experience in my whole life. I wish i could find the appropriate words to explain to you the feelings I will keep with me from that exercise. It allowed me to see and feel what should go into becoming a character, what it really means to let go and explore your own feelings. After the exercise I felt extremely calm and rested. It was an amazing feeling.


Lastly we were taught about thought structures. We were told to identify the beats in the monologue. We were told that a character is at it's most interesting when the actor makes it personal and that eye contact is essential.