Keeping Your Memory In Shape
Aug 6th, 2010 by Alan Yu
So recently I had to memorize a whole load of dialogue for a scene and for the most part it seemed okay. This then reminded me of all the times where when I couldn’t memorize my lines very well it seemed to be attributed to things like my meals.
Yeah, I guess it sounds a little weird when you say it. For example, people always say that things like fish are brain food. I definitely do notice the difference in how much faster I can memorize lines when I have meals like those for example.
Although, there are some people that can memorize like one whole page worth of monologues in one cold read. I definitely don’t know what they are doing to train their brain and memory to work that well. 
If your at an audition it’s not supose to be a memory contest. They want to see you act but sometimes they don’t want you to look at the script and you barely have any time to prepare. Some can just look at the page for one second and memorize that whole thing! i wish I could learn that too!
When I was taking classes one of my former instructor(no longer teaching in Vancouver) would never let me look at the script. He let the other people in the class look at the script. Most of the time I didn’t know any of my lines. He also told me that I can change the words but don’t change the meaning.
All the monologue he gave me he knew every single word and I had to have everything memorized or he me to read it 100 times during the week. Once you read it so many times you head get sick or bored.
and if I did have everything memorized he would make me jumped around like boxer and I would end up losing all the lines.
Oh, this was for an actual shoot.
But in general I agree that you don’t need to memorize things word for word. It’s just nice to keep yourself in shape where you can memorize things with ease by taking care of yourself.