The actor does not memorize.
Not because he/she has a memory capacity, but because he/she does not learn by heart in the way that students have to memorize a mathematical form or a paragraph from the history book.
The actor ‘learns’ pictures, reacts to stimulants and experiences feelings. With this kind of inner force the actor ACTS. Acts, internally ( lives, feels, suffers) and externally ( acts with concrete actions, movements, speech, etc). Actors, with the help of their imagination and sensitivity, and of course their experience, read under the lines and discover the sensitive, emotional material that exists beyond the words and meanings.
They live this sensation and coherence of the feelings, and this living of words, makes them say the lines, as the author wrote them, possibly in another historical period and place.
In this way, they “translate” words into images, stimulants and experience and then again into words. Only now, the word of a play is full of emotions and experienced. So, the actors “live” another “life”. And many times, this life is real (or even more) real than the real life. The words gain motivations and color, rhythm, movement and emotional weight and the text is fermented together with the actor and his/her expression, it is printed into his/her cells.
In this way, the actor can re-product the words spontaneously and accurately, whenever he wants, without great intellectual effort.
He/she just has to find the beginning …. the start of the line of emotions, then one emotion brings the other, one feeling is born from another and everything comes naturally. Like the hooks of a chain ones always brings the next.
In actor’s case, we cannot speak about memory in the real sense. But there exists a different kind of memory. The memory of Emotions. Every feeling that the actor lives, corresponds to a certain expression. It becomes a speech with structured syntax, rhythm and intonation.
In Creative Learning, we use all these “ingredients”, to consist a learning process and not an artistic creation. We form an environment, an atmosphere in which we choose to exist with the children that are sensitive to emotions. An environment rich in stimulants to serve as a ground for children’s imagination.
Motivation is an instantaneous fact that can happen inside us (a thought, a remembrance) or outside us (something we receive with our feelings only) and which actually causes changes in our emotional situation.