Reading Material EP 020
When reading any kind of material for performance - scripts, texts, voice over work etc, we break down have vital it is to get off the "verbal line" and go for depth of entry.
And a lot of times I hear people read material to me and I can hear that they're reading material to me, which is not the point of communication, if you're going to be sharing it with someone through a medium other than yourself reading it. So, in other words, if I were to read something to myself and just get the information, then that's no different than someone else reading it to me just to get the information. This is really important when it comes to any kind of narrative, any kind of storytelling anytime of oral communication. Okay, so if we look at it from that perspective, now, how can I make it more real for you because otherwise you most likely have heard something like this before? I want to make it really real like so that you'll never forget this and you'll always want to infuse your work with something more. If I were to go to a recipe book and I looked at the recipe book and I see a recipe that includes lentils, onion and garlic. And it says parsley, right is one of the things Okay, and if I cut the word parsley out of that book, and I chop it up and I put it in the dish, I mean that's laughable, right? Because that's not parsley. That's the word on the page that that tells me I need to go and get parsley and have it in my kitchen in order to prepare this food. And then when I have parsley and it's next to basil or or chives or cilantro or whatever it is, how do I know it's parsley? Why pick it up? I look at it right? It's green as a certain feel. And then there's different kinds of parsley, there's flat, there's Italian, there's curly, I pick it up. I smell it maybe even tasted. Now I have parsley and now I can do whatever I need to do that parsley for that dish. But even that's not enough because I need to know in this context, is this parsley a part of the dish like is it in the dish like where I'm going to taste it? Or is it something that I'm just going to use to sprinkle on top as a garnish? It's the same thing when it comes to scripts. It's the same thing when it comes to a specially coded words like I love you or I hate you or get out of my house or I never want to see you again. Those kinds of word phrases those kinds of experiences are so emotionally loaded by what we have brought to it from our life experience or from what we've seen in other texts when we're reading stories. And by and large, we're going to be pulled so hard to go with the classic interpretation of whatever that is, when in reality just like parsley, parsley could be a garnish. Carnage could be part of the whole meal. We don't know yet because we don't have enough context. So in reality, those markings on those page, just like the word Parsley is a reminder to you that you need to have the experience of parsley at that moment, a thought and a feeling a point of view. And if you are saying well my character is a professional chef and they deal with this all day long. And this is just like a laundry list. Well, that's fair enough to there's always exceptions. always exceptions to the rule. And again, we went back to a literal a literal translation of Oh, parsley, well, that means that they could be a chef and then that's part of what they say every single day. But let's take it into context of someone who's ordering a dish at a restaurant and they want to make sure that the waitstaff gets it right. It's like I want to make sure that there's extra parsley because I love parsley, or I want to make sure that no parsley touches that table because it makes me crazy to have even a sprig of parsley on my dish.. If you love what you're listening to please subscribe and then share with fellow creatives. For more, go to JoshuaTownshend.com