Rote Memorization

With one week left of my first acting training program, I finally have a scene to read. That means I have lines to memorize. At first blush this part of acting isn’t the most fun. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually had to rote memorize. I’ve always associated rote memorization with British schooling.

When my grandfather was young his parents and teachers called him a genius. Their measure of genius was school performance, and school performance in a 1930s British colony was very much rooted in rote memorization. My grandfather was evidently quite good at it. We still have his notebooks from Cambridge. Many had several handwritten copies. That was how he would memorize, by writing his notes over and over again. It worked, but I can’t help but wonder if part of his genius was rooted in what we might today call obsessive compulsion. In the days of smartphones and the internet, rote memorization is far less useful. Acting remains an exception.

My acting teacher defined rote memorization as memorizing the words without the meaning. In practice, that’s hard to do if not memorizing gibberish. With language fluency our brains automatically convert words to semantics; to their meaning. But I’m quickly understanding the rationale behind the instruction to memorize lines by rote.

I’ve found even when trying to memorize by rote using techniques that abstract my lines from their meaning, my brain still sometimes wants to swap words out for others with a similar meaning. There’s one in particular that I’m still fumbling a bit. The line goes, “my god it was in awful shape, perfect ragtime.” My brain wants to put the word terrible in that line. Certainly, the description makes it sound terrible. But that’s not the line. The job of the actor is to say the words as they are written. Rote memorization is perfect for this, to learn them exactly. It’s also not as bad as I thought it would be, though it’s certainly time-consuming.

It would have been more difficult for me to rote memorize when I was younger. With a shorter attention span, I can hardly see how I would have been able to stick with the material long enough to commit it to memory. I have memorized speeches before, but they were mostly my own, and what came from my mind more easily stayed in my mind. Now I am practicing memorizing any string of words and sounds. It’s an exercise in commitment, but very doable. I can now understand how texts were once passed orally before they were written.

Put simply, it’s a matter of time. If one’s only job in life is to learn and remember a text, then maybe pass it on to another, then one could indeed remember quite a lot. In a time with more people than technology, I can see how one could assign a dozen priests at birth to remember a given chapter of a book, like a religious text. If one’s role in society is to remember one chapter of a book, that’s certainly doable and I’d bet people would do it quite well.

I don’t yet know how long these lines will stay in my memory once I commit them. I can’t say I remember all of the speeches of my past, though I remember snippets from some of what I deem my more dynamic ones. It’ll be interesting to see what I still remember a year from now.