Dramatic Monologue

You have memorized your monologue. You came up with for your song and can deliver it expressively and in a way that is authentic to your context. Now you have to sing it. How does all this work apply when singing with the original text?

Don’t get rid of anything you worked on.

Sing with good healthy technique. Sing the correct notes and pitches. Be true to the style you are choosing. But really the only things that should change is that you are now changing what your mouth says, the specific pitches it says them at, and over specific durations. Don’t change what you do with your body. Don’t change what you think in your mind.

Instructions

A. Choose at least 2 minutes worth of music that does not have sung or spoken elements.

B. Create a scene using skills from Days 1, 2, & 3. Think of it like you are creating a scene for a movie where the music become underscoring for your context and action.

C. Perform it!

Grading

Here is how I grade my university students. What grade would you get if you graded yourself? What do you do well? What did you need to improve?

__/50 Performance Project 2 : Acting to Music Without Words (Day 5)

            __/10 Visual Research (See Visual Reference Word-bank exercise)

            __/10 WWWWW Research (Including who am I paper for character)

            __/10 Marked Up Score 2.0 (Including Monologue written in)

            __/20 Performance ((Graded on application of what is has been taught so far and Believability, Clarity, Variety, Repeatability)

Instructions :

Prepare a an approximately 90 second monologue by following the methods discussed in Day 3.

Grading

Here is how I grade my university students. What grade would you get if you graded yourself? What do you do well? What did you need to improve?

__/50 Performance Project 1 : Dramatic Monologue (Day 3)

            __/10 Visual Research (see Visual Research Word-Bank Exercise)

            __/20 WWWWW Research (Including who am I paper for character)

            __/20  Monologue Performance (Graded on application of what is has been taught so far and Believability, Clarity, Variety, Repeatability)           

One of the reasons monologuing is so valuable is that it can unlock natural body language. All-day you talk and communicate without planning out every movement with your body. Your body just acts on the impulses that come from living in these moments. This seems like it should be pretty easy right? For many singers, they find that once the music is gone they don’t know what to do with their body.

[Read more…] about Permission To Act On the Impulse

Singing performers have an incredibly difficult task when you consider that, in an ideal world, their singing and acting would both be at the same high level of excellence. The reality seems to be that singing performers seem to come to the art of performance from two different starting points. The first group starts with acting training that then leads to singing as an additional skill to fill out what they have to offer. When push comes to shove acting and text intelligibility takes priority. The second group starts with voice training being the primary focus and acting being viewed as an additional skill they have to acquire.

For the first group preparing a dramatic monologue and monologuing a song should be relatively familiar. For the second group, in my experience, spoken dialogue can be the most difficult to learn and deliver naturally. This section is meant as a tool to help those whose primary performance skill set is rooted in musicianship. For those who started as an actor, this will be useful to think about in reverse. It will reveal to you what the composer was thinking and why they made the decisions they did. It will also help you become more sensitive to what the music is calling for.

[Read more…] about A Singers Guide to Preparing a Monologue for Speaking.