Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan

Boing Boing: How actors remember their lines

This is quite an interesting one:

According to the researchers, the secret of actors’ memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words’ meaning — the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them — as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.

I think this is important because I know when memorising song words, I do exactly the same thing.

How do I know this?

I often sing the wrong words, that have the same or a similar meaning. For instance, well I can’t think of anything right now, but I do it all of the time.

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Caroline O’Connor is magnificent in Bombshells, playing at the Adelaide Festival Centre this week. It helps that she has been given a fairly solid play to work with, but her brilliance at bringing the various characters to life is stunning.

The play is a series of apparently seperate stories, but in reality they are all linked, in some way, and we see shades of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in finding the links between them.

The story starts with Meryl Davenport, a busy mother - a bad mother, perhaps, who is more worried about what other people will think of her than anything else. Her day is full, and she never gets time to do everything she needs to do. Jaq assures me that this is what life is like.

This first act is frenetic, and seemed to me like it went on forever. It was my least favourite part of the play, but it was still alright. We see a fleeting glimpse of a neighbour, who grows cactii. And who’s husband has just left her…
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Livien - Journal of Jennifer Sando » Fearing August

This weekend, I am going to see La Boheme. I haven’t been to see an opera in more than 5 years now - the last time was when I lived in Brisbane and it was La Traviata. I went with my family and we were all dressed up ‘to the nines’. (Geez, I hate using over-done phrases like the one you just read - but my friend said it to me earlier and now it’s just stuck there). I remember being stunned that the Queenslanders tended to see it more as a casual occasion.

I recall the first time I went to Queensland on a holiday being surprised at the patrons in the Casino not wearing ‘nice’ clothes.

That is, they were in shorts, tee-shirts and thongs. This was in the Gold Coast though…

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For the uninitiated, Tripod are an Australian 3-piece band who compose and perform ‘comedy’ songs. Probably their biggest claim to fame is the Tripod Song In An Hour segment they used to do on Breakfast with Adam & Wil on Triple J. The hosts used to come up with a series of (unrelated) topics that the boys from Tripod then had to make a song about in one hour, and perform it at the end. The always managed to pull through and usually the songs were quite amusing.
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John Williamson’s “masterful final act” (according to The Australian, but I didn’t know he’d stopped writing plays) Influence is currently playing at the Dunstan Theatre in Adelaide. Since we haven’t been to see anything since A Number, and Jaq won a raffle with a season ticket, we went to see it on Saturday night.

John Waters is “Ziggi Blasco”, a conservative, hate-mongering talk radio host, along the lines of John Laws, Alan Jones and their ilk. His wife was a former ballet dancer - she was never really top of the heap but once performed the lead role of a production in London, but only because the two top dancers were both injured. Anyway, she is the most vile, vapid creature who is unable to believe that a) she isn’t going to make it big again, and b) other people have challenges in their lives that are much harder to live with.
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Starring Marcus Graham (Yum, according to Jaq) and Frank Gallacher

The final showing of A Number, by British playwright Caryl Churchill was at the Space Theatre last night. Without going into detail about how we went and saw it because Jaq is a big Marcus Graham fan (I’ve never even seen E-Street, but I loved Good Guys, Bad Guys), I’ll say that I enjoyed it. To begin with, we were right down the front, only metres away from the actors, and in the first scene, where they appeared on-stage quickly, made us feel like part of the action.

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That’s purpose is just to trigger Wordpress to update the Post count of each Category.

I’ll leave it here incase I need to redo this operation. It took me ages to tick each category box…

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