I-… you know what never mind

personally look into your character’s backstory. If they don’t have one create one.

The upcoming show I’m in has me die on stage (twice!) with me laying basically at the audience members feet. I’m facing up, and should be laying there for about two-ish minutes at a time. Please drop some knowledge for and/or links that might help me if you can :)

I’ve already posted some general tips for finding a good audition song so I figured I’d share some monologue tips I’ve gathered over the last few years! I’ll be honest, I find monologues wayyyy harder to find than a good audition song, particularly because there’s just so much out there and so much you can cultivate. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to avoid when you’re searching for a new piece. So here’s some things that I try to look for in a monologue! 

(Note: A lot of these tips are based on my opinion and what I’ve been taught by my professors. You may hear different things from different people)

(A second note: this list is more for contemporary pieces as Shakespeare/classic monologues are a bit of a different territory)

 Find something active with an active target: Remember that even during a monologue, your character is addressing someone even if they’re not saying anything back. You want the words in the piece to be reaching someone else as your character is trying to get something from them. A piece that begins on an active note that will grab someone right away will be way more compelling than one that doesn’t. 

Find something that is short/ can be coherently cut: Typically auditions are going to ask for a piece that is 1-2 minutes long. If you happen upon a good piece that runs a little long, make sure any cuts you make don’t erase the character’s objective and makes the piece not make any sense. 

Find something within your playing age: I always think this tip is the one with the most variety of opinions but I’ll always take the side of not doing something out of your age range. Someone who looks 15 years old isn’t going to be a believable Blanche DuBois. Also take into account that your playing age might slightly differ from your actual age. For example, I’m 21 but have been told many times that I’ll be playing teenagers for a good while. 

Not all “comedic” monologues need to be laugh out loud funny: This was an important note I got from a professor once. We’re often told we need two contrasting pieces, often one comedic and one dramatic. I’ve found myself going nuts because I couldn’t find a piece that made me laugh. My professor told our class that a comedic or contrasting piece didn’t necessarily need to have the audience in stitches but can be a lighthearted piece that’s not heavy in content. 

A cobbled/”monologue as dialogue” piece: Some of my favorite/strongest pieces I’ve used have actually been dialogue that’s cobbled together. Why? Because these pieces allow you to “hear” your target and actively respond to them which makes for a much stronger and compelling piece! Now, not every two person scene can be cobbled into a coherent monologue. Typically these pieces will feature one character speaking a lot of text while the other character only responds in a few words or a sentence. 

Stay away from overdone pieces: The quintessential tip. Of course, I can’t name many monologues that are overdone off the top of my head the way I can with showtunes (except for Phoebe from As You Like It) but they exist! Typically, monologues featured in a monologue anthology will be overdone. They’re an easily accessible searching tool which leads to many pieces becoming popular. Another way to avoid finding an overdone piece is to not go on Google and search “monologues for women” or “monologues for teenagers”. Those first few pieces that pop up are likely to be overdone. 

I think our frustrations are often brushed off. “Someone else has it worse!” “You’re doing fine! You have nothing to be frustrated about!” “You’re being too dramatic!” 

I’m someone who tends to get frustrated more than I get angry or sad. This has been the overarching theme of my college career. I’ve spent a lot of time getting frustrated over not feeling good enough, feeling like I wasn’t improving, feeling unseen and lastly: having to spend the last year and half of my schooling online. At this point (almost a year into it!!!) I’m pretty much used to being online and living day to day in our current state of the world. But - I still occasionally get frustrated. Sometimes I think about how my last year and half of school wasn’t *supposed* to be only online. I think about how I’m able to enjoy my classes but then think about how they should have been in person. Yesterday it really hit me while I was singing in a practice room and it impacted my ability to practice. I thought I was being silly. I should be lucky that my family, friends and I for the most part have been able to stay safe and healthy over the last year. I’m still able to get an education and improve - why am I getting so upset now? 

In my lesson today I told my voice teacher about what happened, and she pointed something out to me: You’re allowed to grieve. We’ve been living under these circumstances for almost a year now. There has been so much loss and change in such a short amount of time - not to mention the uncertainty of it all. Don’t feel afraid to grieve what you might have lost. Whether it be your schooling, job opportunities, performance opportunities - it’s okay. This has been a wildly upsetting and frustrating time. We don’t always have to be the perfect student. We don’t have to have perfect practice sessions every time or blow our class out of the water with our monologues. Having one bad day isn’t going to set us up for failure for the rest of our careers. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed: stop. Take time for yourself until you’re calmed down and move on. It’ll be there tomorrow or in two days. Remember that this is a stressful time - sometimes we can’t act like everything is normal. 

“Practice makes perfect!” We hear this alllll the time. What else do we hear all the time? “Talent gets you so far but hard work and practice gets you farther”. But what do these statements really mean? What is it that goes into our practice sessions that will make us better artists? I know this might sound like common-sense, but there’s more to practice sessions than just running through material for a bit. 

Fun fact: I hate practicing. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m nowhere near a perfect performer. I love learning about the craft, I love getting better and I love my lessons where I’m told what I should be working on. Therefore, I hate practicing because no one is actively telling me what I’m doing wrong. When I first started taking consistent voice lessons (and even currently) I had the hardest time figuring out what I should be doing in the practice room in order to better what I was doing in lessons. I’d get so frustrated and felt like I was getting nowhere (not to mention the fear of other people hearing me which is a subject for an entirely different post). Over time, and through talks with my voice teacher, I’ve made some discoveries on what makes a good practice session and how to go about it. So, here some of the things that help me get a good session in! 

(Note: This post focuses mainly on singing practice, but the tips can be applicable to other types of practice)

Showing up for any amount of time: You might hear endless opinions from others on how much time you should be spending practicing. There’s weight to this of course, but we often equate quality to quantity. A difference will be made because you’re investing an amount of time into your craft. It takes a while to build in the habit of blocking out some time during your day. It should not be how long you practice but what you’re doing while you’re practicing that’s effective. Which brings me to: 

Fifteen minutes of dedicated practice will be more effective than 30 minutes kind of practicing: If you only have time to warm up/do exercises and steadily focus on one phrase of a song, that’ll be more effective than 30 minutes of directionless singing. It’s not about how much time, it’s about how you use the time. And what I mean by directionless singing is that if you’re singing but not checking in with your body, your voice, your acting choices - then what are you working on?

Checking in with your voice/body: I always begin a practice session with warmups and vocal exercises. These exercises are there to make sure we’re utilizing the technique we learn in lessons and to check in with ourselves before practicing. Sometimes, I spend more time on exercises than I do on the song I’m working on for the day to make sure I’m on track with technique. 

Knowing when to stop: I want to emphasize this one a bit more. Sometimes we try to push ourselves more when we’ve run out of energy, or we’ve run into a place where nothing we do is going to be effective anymore. For example, one time I was working on a classical song my teacher and I were doing in lessons. I began to get frustrated and thought I didn’t sound good and I couldn’t do anything right and I got upset. I put the song away and pulled out a Disney song I’d worked on before but I couldn’t get through one phrase because I was too in my head. If you find yourself at this point, stop. At the point where you’re too in your head to do any more effective work, you’ve done what you needed to do for the day. And it’s okay!

Have at least one goal/aspect to focus on: We can’t fix everything in one session. Something my teacher likes to remind me is to have one aspect of technique or the song I’m working on to focus on that day. Some days I’ll focus on the rhythm of a song or part of a song. Some days it’s all about the acting choices and others it’s about focusing on the dynamics. Whatever it is, having a goal or two to focus on during a session is what will make it a good session.

It’s practice, not a performance: This might be the toughest one. I’m such a perfectionist and even when I’m practicing I want to do everything 100% perfectly. But, that’s not the point of a practice session is it? We practice in order to recognize and correct our habits and to make discoveries come time for our next lesson. Say you spend your session only working on the first verse of a song but didn’t get farther than that; great! Practicing is doing things over and over until we have a sense of what we should be working on. It takes a while to understand this, heck I still need to remind myself of this! 

I haven’t written one of these in a long time! As I’ve stated before with these posts, I like to highlight even what might be considered the smallest of victories to showcase that this career is a marathon, not a sprint. We will face more small victories than big ones throughout our careers/lives, and while we usually share those big highlights, we need to celebrate little victories, too! 

The little moment I wanted to share happened earlier today. Not sure if I’ve written about it on here in the past, but throughout my time at college I really haven’t done any solo singing performing. I’ve been in voice lessons for three years and really only sing for my voice teacher and the occasional audition. Because of this, I have horrible nerves when it comes to performing. Now when I have to sing, I get so tense that it affects my voice - leaving me obsessed over how I sound and disappointed. Thankfully this semester I’m taking a course that focuses on acting through song. I’ve been DYING to take this class the last few years at school and I was so excited to have time for it in my schedule. For this week, we had to bring in any song we wanted to introduce ourselves to the class. Of course, my nerves started as soon as I read the syllabus. I know that singing is a huge part of the course (which is why I’m taking it to boost my confidence), I was still so nervous to sing in front of other people. I settled on “Home” from Beauty and the Beast as the song has a lot of meaning to me (plus I know that song through and through). Because of my tendency to tense up and choke when it comes to singing, I was sure that I was going to be so upset with how it turned out come class. I ran through the song every day all of last week, praying that my nerves wouldn’t get the best of me. 

Fast forward to this morning. I had butterflies in my stomach all morning and tried my hardest to suppress them. I went to the practice rooms to warm up and run through the song one more time before class so I knew I’d be okay. Of course during one of the runs, my voice started to crack. I figured that this was a result of me thinking too much and overrunning it, leading me to fear that this exact thing would happen. When I log onto class my professor told me that I was going second. By the time it was my turn, I could see my ankles shaking. BUT - I was fine! I got through it! I was a bit shaky in the beginning but all of the moments I was nervous about went fine! For my first time performing in front of a large group of people in a really long time (not to mention over zoom), I was actually satisfied with myself, not to mention proud!