Practicing Consonants & Vowels in Acting Auditions

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. Charles Grimes, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village about rehearsing a monologue. Let's think about the particular sounds, the consonants and the vowels, that your monologue is composed of. This is exceptionally useful when you're dealing with a verse monologue such as from a Shakespeare play or a Ben Johnson play or Moliere play. You want to be able to put yourself back into your high school poetry classes and think about things like euphony, alliteration, consonance, so we're talking about how pretty or un-pretty the sounds are. We're talking about repeated consonant sounds, such as alliteration, that's going to draw the line together, and you want your mouth to be prepared for it and you want to be able to know how it feels and what it means. And consonants have to do with repeated vowel sounds. And again we're going to think also about the hard consonants and the soft consonants, and the liquid vowels. We're trying to get a sense of the texture and the feeling of the words you're about to say. Your responsible for that is another level of analysis and the thing you can experiment with in rehearsal. Let me just give you a couple lines of verse from Twelfth Night, and I'll give you a few examples and I'll throw in one other word just to see that you can know what I'm talking about. Here's a speech from Olivia in Twelfth Night. Why then, methinks 'tis time to smile again. Oh world, how apt the poor are to be proud. If one should be a prey, how much the better to fall before the lion than the wolf? The clock upbraids me with the waste of time. So if you're performing verse, you want to think about its essential poetic qualities. Notice in the first line, why then, methinks 'tis time to smile again. And we have three long I sounds-- why, time and smile. And those are consciously there to repeat each other. And also to get a sense of the time that is passing, the time that is dragging by and pretty soon the clock is going to ring, and Olivia is going to have to wake up and stop wasting time. So this makes sense to us as we peruse the line. Oh world, how apt the poor are to be proud? So we have some hard popping P sounds which are repeated and picked up again in prey. If one should be a prey, how much the better to fall before the lion than the wolf? So those P sounds merge into the B sounds which is a harder version of the P. So the line becomes a whole continuous utterance leading to the end at which point the clock strikes. So in terms of your timing, your intuititve feel, for your words as poetry, you need to do some of your analysis in terms of consonants and vowels, so notice their repetition in terms of alliteration and consonants."