A very good morning!
As I passed the door to the rehearsal studio yesterday where Natalie is rehearsing Crossing Over with good old Arc stalwarts - Jordan, TJ and Letitia, I could hear roars of hysterical laughter. I must admit to having felt just a little jealous. I knew they were in 'that' space, I recognise the energy seeping through the door. They were working hard because I could hear the fun. They are working on a very funny script by Clifford Oliver, that regularly leaves actors in rehearsal collapsed on the floor heaving with laughter at their own creation, often tears running down their faces. Of course its not only tears of laughter that erupt sometimes in the rehearsal room during the making of a piece. Depending on the play there may be tears of grief or frustration. And there may be no tears.
In any event this is the mysterious job an actor must do when creating a character and the complex web of relationships dictated by the script and facilitated by the director.
In blog 22 I talked about the creation of a 'home' for the character, which is one of a range of starting point exercises I employ. If it works as it should, it will begin to locate glimpses of the emotional territory under investigation. In reflecting on the exercise actors will begin to articulate the emotional suite they intuit for their character. These have generally arisen from a mix of pre-rehearsal thoughts on text and character and the stimulus provided by the Home exercise. In any event the core emotions will be accessed from the only place they can be, the actor's own biography and experience. The circumstances of their character in the narrative may be entirely unknown to them, but with a little internal excavation coupled with imagination they will usually access them quite quickly. There will inevitably be nuance, and a need to approximate through personal emotional reference but they will have uncovered the territory for further exploration.
As well as meaning and interpretation of text getting to grips with the emotional landscape of a character is a primary task for the actor. I think of it as a little like how a musician must come to understand the workings, sound and tone of her instrument in order to fully express a piece of music. The actor's instrument is their body, imagination and emotions. They too must have access to the full range of its possibilities technically, physically and emotionally.
When I first started working as an actor, a director told me that a practical way to think about finding and expressing emotion in a play was to consider it as E - motion, namely energy in motion. This has always been a guiding principle in my work, and allows me to work with actors to access deep emotion without straying into too much biographical detail or moving into therapy! Energy along with skill determines the flow of all performance regardless of style or genre. So 'energy in motion' can be focused and directed. This means its possible in any given moment to shift from one emotion to another with ease.
In our own everyday lives with real things happening to effect how we feel, it might often be that we experience being stuck in an emotional state, that however hard we try we might feel is impossible to shift. Our own personal dramas are much tougher to control. And this is where our lives and our task as emotional archaeologists veer in different directions. In a one hour play, our character is likely to shift to a number of emotional spaces. It would be deeply unhelpful to a piece if the actor accessed sadness in the opening scene and got stuck there for the rest of the play if he needed to be in a place of joy by the end!
And this is where emotional training and technique are paramount for the actor and should start as early as possible. Its one of those things that people often argue about, wondering if its something you can just do or if it can also be taught. My take on it is that much of it can be taught in training. If you have ever experienced love, sadness, grief, anger, fear, shame, loneliness or joy the chances are you have the basic tools! That with a core talent to express, empathise and imagine coupled with good technical training and self discipline are pretty much what you need.
I believe its a mistake to think that you have to be awash in a deeply associated real emotion in a performance. People often misinterpret the work of the master director Stanislavsky to mean you have to 'become' the character in order to express it. This interpretation of his fine works on acting have led to offshoot schools that might be loosely described as 'method' acting which often seen to me seriously miss the point and in any event are based on a fundamental lie. You can't actually be someone else, however associated you have become physically and emotionally with character and to whatever ends you have gone to live it. There is always the 'you' in there as editor and manager, without which control you would be in danger of moving into madness! The whole thing is about artifice, the audience understand that and then it makes it possible to suspend their disbelief and judge the quality of the emotional truth presented on the basis of authenticity, accuracy and skill.
A very simple exercise I came up with a long time ago to support the development of emotional technique and the skill to shift emotional state at will is I love you, I want you, I hate you.
Its a simple exercise and is also quite a lot of fun! Have a go.
Director's Suggested Exercise of the Day
I love you, I want you, I hate you.
Working in pairs, choose someone you know least well as person A and person B. Person A goes to the far end of the studio and sits down facing the wall. Person B goes to the opposite end of the studio and stands facing person A's back. Person B is tasked with deciding on which of the three emotions they want to take to person A. They stand with that intention for 30 seconds and when they are ready they walk to where Person A is sitting and they sit down with no words or sounds and place their back against the other with their intention. Person A must then use all their sensory acuity to decide which emotion they have been brought. The choice of emotions can of course be different, however I tend to stick to these three because they can be tougher to distinguish. Person A may know instantly and get it right or hover for moment and get it wrong or simply guess. This exercise is about developing physical sensory receptivity, and not about winning. The exercise is then repeated a further 5 times by person A and then the roles are reversed. In discussion afterwards the director encourages reflection on what went on, how people read each other, what clues helped them to know which emotion it was etc; Look at breath, sound, temperature, speed, tension etc as ways of encouraging this reflection.
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