I can’t think of anything more boring than having to give the same speech/lines every day, and more to the point having to show some enthusiasm/emotion when one has to be pig sick of it. Are there any specialised training either do or is just a case of “suck it up”?
It’s a case of “doing your job.” It’s said “A stage actor has to go out eight times and week and do something like they are doing it for the first time.” Stage acting is one of the hardest jobs in the universe.
I’m a teacher, which includes job repetition as well.
One way to keep fresh is to think of it from the point of view of the people you’re talking to. To them the play / guiding / lesson is brand new. Anticipate their reactions. Look forward to the exciting bits.
Be professional.
To expand on this a bit, there is something of a “closed loop” between cast and audience in a stage production. Since no two audiences are ever the same, it follows that no two performances are ever the same. This can be good or bad — acting in front of a “dead” audience can be far more draining than rehearsing in an empty house — but the difference is there.
Another factor is that you always have to be alert for catastrophe (to quote from Michael Green’s Laws of Coarse Acting, “Every production is accompanied by a crisis”). This can range from someone spacing on their lines to the director’s leg breaking through the auditorium ceiling above the forestage; but the possibility helps keep you on your toes.
Regarding the tour guides, I’m sure that questins from the tourists help.
If you want an example of a boring job, how about soldiers on guard duty who just stand at attention for hours at a time in front of some landmark or other.
Being the center of attention is fun.
Being up on stage with everyone watching you is exhilarating, and playing for a crowd is empowering and exciting.
I’m sure there are some tour guides who are bored with their jobs, but there are others who probably really enjoy it. The profession being what it is, I doubt there are many bored actors who stay actors for long.
I was a University tour guide for a year.
I enjoyed it immensely. Yeah, the things I was pointing out and explaining stayed the same every day. But the people were always different.
What makes it fun is getting to know the people on your tour. You learn a bit about them, find out what interests them and tailor your canned lecture for them.
It wasn’t uncommon that I’d end up hanging out at a bar or coffee shop with people from my tour. I certainly enjoyed that, I hope they did too.
Didn’t hurt that I really did find the University to be a fascinating place and couldn’t wait to tell people about it.
Of course, there must be tons of jobs that have this aspect as well - what about airline pilots: taking off, landing, taking off, landing, etc. Boring! Until something goes wrong …
Realistically large slabs of most jobs are boring and routine, just ask people. Do you think your local doctor makes up a new speech for every sufferer he sees during cold season? Honestly ask doctors and lawyers, I know several, most of their work day is tedium. Do you think accountants are adding up figures all day in the hope that one day 1+1 will equal 3?
<ring ring> “Good morning, Mystore. This is Cazzle. How may I help you? No problem, I’ll just put you through to the printing department. Thank you.”
“Cash or credit? Do you have a store loyalty card?”
<ring ring> “Good morning, Mystore. This is Cazzle. How may I help you? Yes, we’re open until seven tonight. No problem! Thank you.”
“Cash or credit? Do you have a store loyalty card?”
<ring ring> “Good morning, Mystore. This is Cazzle. How may I help you? Yes, we do stock those. Yes, we’re open until seven tonight. Thank you.”
“Cash or credit? Do you have a store loyalty card?”
<ring ring> “Good morning, Mystore. This is Cazzle. How may I help you? Yes, I’ll connect you through to the printing department… Oh, yes, we’re open until seven tonight. Ok, connecting you now. Thank you.”
“Cash or credit? Do you have a store loyalty card?”
Yep, sure must suck to be an actor on stage, saying the same things over and over, day in and day out…
I’ve worked a lot as a tour guide and agree with most of the points made above.
Although you are talking about the same stuff on each tour, the way you talk about it can differ each time. It can depend on the weather, the audience, questions, the bus being held up behind a donkey etc etc. It’s as boring as you make it.
The main trick I’ve learnt is not to have notes. This way you are improvising each time and each tour differs. It allows you to go off on tangents and include whatever stuff you think this particular group might enjoy. To pull this off you have to know your subject thoroughly and have a passion for it.
Nothing livens up a show like Grab Ass Saturday! The person who grabs the most asses onstage by the end of the night wins! Yay! (Note: I do not recommend this strategy.)
And those are the interesting parts. Flying from LA to Sydney is 15 hours of boredom and 20 minutes of interesting bit.
I spent a summer taking tours through a local farm house museum.
I learned that to keep it interesting for me, I had to get the tour group involved.
If I could get the kids to ask questions, it made it more interesting for all of us.
Stitching samplers, made with the hair for friends and family, and chamber pots used to get the most interesting conversations going.
Tell me about it. If I have to explain why keeping a mileage log is important for taxes one more time, I think I’ll lose it. But, realistically, I know that I’ll give the same speech twice tomorrow and will manage to avoid losing it somehow.
To address the OP more directly: It helps a lot to be passionate about what you’re doing. I like teaching and talking about taxes and the canned presentations that I do every other month never bore me. (They’re workshops I give through a networking group). I’m also in a situation where there’s some audience interaction, so each presentation is slightly different.
A friend of mine did a lot of acting in high school and college and was much the same way. He also felt that he was continually pushing the quality of the performance. For example, he’d change the emphasis or pacing of a line.
When I taught classes, I would deliver the same lessons three times a week.
What kept it interesting, to me, was the different audience and the fresh opportunity to make jokes-- er, I mean, improve on your lesson. Often, I’d deliver my lecture, think of a way to make it more understandable or funny, and then deliver the revised lesson the remaining two times. Sometimes you have students who ask good questions or crack better jokes, and that helps a lot.
It’s also a good way to practice public speaking. When you’re delivering a lecture for the fifty billionth time, your brain goes into automatic, and you can recite everything without really thinking about it. This leaves you free to think about whether you’re making eye contact, speaking too loudly or softly, pacing too much, emoting too much, etc., and generally reflect on how you come across when speaking to others.
I’ve read hundreds of memoirs by actors. There is much bitching about the monotony of working in films, and I can sort of understand why most of 'em are on drugs! But I don’t believe I have ever read an account of an actor who hated performing on stage in front of an audience. Other than the occasional bout of stage fright and evil co-workers who try to upstage them, they all LOVE their jobs. The energy is totally different and every show and every audience is different.
I can speak to the tour guide aspect, as I just a few hours ago finished a walking tour of a local historic district for my Historic Preservation class. First, audience participation helps, either through asking direct questions of your audience (“Does anyone know how (local historic tradition) came about?”) as well as inviting questions from your audience. I think I surprised my tour guides by asking whether the family home we were looking at was the same family that owned one of the 3 surviving arcades downtown, which not only gave them a chance to answer affirmatively but also explain the significance of arcades in an era without air conditioning. That probably broke up the monotony nicely.
Also, passion is important. I worked in a museum where I routinely answered the same dozen or so questions regularly, but I was so passionate about the history that I didn’t mind at all.
I was a tour guide for the Nationality Rooms Program at the University of Pittsburgh, and I don’t think it was like being a stage actor at all. More like improv. We had to learn the facts about the rooms and pass a written test before we were allowed loose with our own tour group, but after that the choice of which facts to present, and how to present them, on any given day with any given group was up to us. I have had much, much more boring jobs than that!
I cannot let this statement go by without commenting. Nobody can do a show eigh times a week and do drugs. It is not humanly possible.
All stage contracts have clauses that an actor can be let go immediately for any reason. Anyone with a drug problem will find their asses on the street before they know what hit them. There is a long list of people who wanted to do stage work and were doing good stagework when sober, but couldn’t stay off the drugs.
Also remember that extremely few stage actors are irreplaceable. As soon as an actor is giving a poor performance, there are about 1,000 other people who would love to have the change to do the role.
Theatre is one job where the people have to give 100%. You cannot do a show with less and expect to it survive.