I want to share with you all the exercise that Prof. Davies had me do when we met to rehearse/explore Valentine's "What light is light, if Silvia be not seen" monologue in 3.1.
This exercise helps ensure clarity, power, and specificity in your delivery/acting and therefore comprehension for your audience...
STRESS EXERCISE
1. Find a chunk of your lines that you want to explore thoroughly to ensure verbal precision and power.
2. Look at the first line in that section/speech. Pick what you think is the most important word in that line; this word is the line's "primary stress." Pick what you think is the second-most important word in that line; this word is the line's "secondary stress." Many lines will definitely have a tertiary stress, but for this exercise, with few exceptions, force yourself to pick the two most important words in that line.
3. Speak the line aloud - emphasizing the primary stress word most and the secondary stress the second most - to see if the meaning of the action/antithesis/argument of the line is impeccably clear. (I think it's best if you have someone else to listen to you, as I had Prof. Davies; not having tried this exercise on my own, I'm not sure if/how well it will work just listening to yourself.)
4. If the meaning is not any clearer, change the word(s) you're emphasizing for the primary stress, secondary stress, or maybe even both. Try it again out loud. Repeat until successful.
5. Move on to the next line and do the same thing. You get the idea.
As we all know, much of the energy of Shakespeare's lines comes from antitheses, which are literally almost everywhere in Shakespeare. With this exercise, you can take a chunk of text that you might otherwise be tempted to just breeze through - thereby sacrificing its specificity and power - and really make the argument/antitheses/motion of the speech's meaning verbally palpable.
(NOTE: Prof. Davies did admit that sometimes you may not be able to pick just two: for instance, in the speech we rehearsed, Valentine's line, "Fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive." He said that we had been sticking to the exercise so closely and conservatively that we'd earned a few extra stresses for that line.)
FOR STEP 4: instead of changing which words you've chosen, you could also try simply reversing them: making the word you initially picked as the secondary stress into the primary stress and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteALSO, the LAST word in a line is likely to be the most effective primary or secondary stress. When in doubt, try a line with its last word as your primary stress. This helps propel your delivery into the next line among other things.