Last month London’s Royal Opera House posted a video of two young brothers who are attending the opera for the first time and go from apathetic to excited over the course of the recording.
The title of the piece frames the boys’ wonder by quoting their question, “‘How do they hold a note for so long!?” You know from that question that the kids are engaged with the experience.
So why do actors and musicians roll their eyes at a Q&A when people ask how they can remember all those lines or all those notes?
I mean, sure it is cuter when kids say it, but aren’t adults expressing the same degree of wonder at the achievement?
The reason performers roll their eyes is because learning the words and notes is the default expectation for the job they are doing. An actor might be asked if they have any experience in classical acting styles, but no one is ever asked if they can memorize the lines.
There is more skill and technique involved in sustaining a note or doing a credible job portraying King Lear than there is in memorizing lines and notes.
(Though to be honest, there are a lot of different techniques you can use to memorize lines but no drama class teaches them. The actor is left to discover and create a method themselves. It would probably make actors’ lives easier if they did have coaching and a list of techniques to try.)
Three years ago, I highlighted a technique for dealing with the “how do you memorize..” question from a HowlRound piece Brant Russell wrote on post show discussions. Russell suggests that “how do you memorize…” is essentially a first date type question. You don’t really care about the answer, you just want to get your date (or the actors) talking to you.
Having all be in a situation where we wanted to fill an awkward silence, I am sure we can all empathize with that impulse.
But looking at the Royal Opera House video, I have to consider if maybe the question isn’t also the manifestation of a 10 year old kid inside expressing his/her wonder. Is dismissing the question with a quick “its what we do” type comment stifling the sense of wonder we want to cultivate in audiences to keep them coming back?
Though it seems to have suffered a crisis of formatting, Brant Russell’s piece has some good suggestions of what to do when you are leading a discussion.
But if a question like this gets asked as you are exiting the stage door or some other informal setting and you feel like your process is unremarkable, it might be best to call upon the memory of your earliest effort or that of colleagues for an amusing anecdote.
Saying, “Well my current practice is pretty boring, but when I was starting out I used a tape recorder and this one time…” can keep the sense of interest and wonder alive for people of all ages—if it’s only to comment on how OLD you must be if you used a tape recorder.