How Actors Memorize Their Lines

There Are Some Tricks…

image by Brooks Leibee on Unsplash

Among all the questions about the artistic milieu, this is one that “normal” people ask us most, actors. After all, in other professions, hardly anyone has to memorize pages and pages of text. There must be a technique behind this, right?

Yes, there is. I use one that I find incredibly efficient. But I can say one thing: the big secret is to practice. When you get used to memorizing large amounts of text, it is easy to remember large amounts of text.

When we begin drama school, the amount of text they give us to memorize is small. That is purposeful, of course. The brain of a “non-actor” is not prepared to learn in significant volume. With each passing semester, more scenes appear, and more lines need to be memorized. In the third term of the school where I graduated is that we started taking voice lessons. And, with the voice class… The Death of Afonso the Sixt arrives! (Internal joke for those who are students of the Teatro-Escola Célia Helena).

“The Death of Afonso the Sixt, King of Leon and Castile…” is a TWO FULL PAGES monologue in which the herald — the one who makes the official announcements of the kingdom — tells all the developments of the monarch in question’s death, Afonso VI of Portugal.

TWO PAGES.

It is more text than what is contained in this article!

Imagine you, who until then memorized two, three lines, having to remember TWO PAGES. Worse: at the end of the semester, you have to say the memorized text, in a herald voice, to the teacher and the class.

It’s not easy.

When I had to memorize “Afonso the Sixt,” I created one of the techniques that I use today to learn texts.

I dismember it.

I take a series of phrases — five, for example — and read them aloud ten times. Then I try to speak them without consulting the script again ten times. WHEN I SUCCEED — otherwise, I start all over again — I skip to the next five sentences and repeat the process. If all goes well, now it’s time to speak the five initial sentences AND the five sentences that I just memorized. Once again, if I can say everything without mistakes, I skip for the next five, and the cycle…