One of the causalities of 3 years of Stanislavsky training for these young high school actors is that they are deadly afraid of risk taking and even more afraid of “indicating.” If the moment is not coming from their pooling of moments from their own world they fret. If the moment even smells of artificiality they panic. If it comes from the body before it comes from the mind, they go crazy.
But then – how does one play the scene that requires the big explosion of anger or the sudden sink into loss, tears and sadness. How can one work up enough personal history to hit those heights and hit them on time? Sometimes it requires more than psychology – sometimes it just requires the body. I am having such challenges in Shadow Box. There are moments that require a sudden burst of rage or a sudden wave of hurt and sadness (and frankly tears). How to get to those moments? One tactic I have always found helpful is to simply indicate the moment as much as possible. I ask the actors to come to the moment and force the cry, force the hyperventilation, choke up and let it all run out. It will be fake – yes! It will be too much – yes! It will not work in the course of the actual play when performed – yes! But what this forced, indicated moment will do in the rehearsal process is to give your body permission to have moments. Your breath and shaking of arms will get rid of the fear. You are exercising the “muscles” needed for these moments.
Surprisingly, once the body has experienced the physical life of these moments, and has courageously walked through the bluntness of “faking it” you will be able to reach these moments on a more organic level. As the rehearsal process draws to a close and a story must be told, the indicating is put away, and a return to the story is needed. Now, when working through the objectives an obstacle that sharply threatens you is found, you will be able to find the tears and the terror WITHOUT having to indicate. You have done all of drills and now you are ready to score a few points in the game.
5 comments on “Jump then Swim”
This is actually a quite brilliant bridge between the representational type of performance and the presentational.
I think most of us struggle with trying to feel feelings that we don’t feel when we’re new to acting, and teenagers with little life experience and lots of fear about being made fun of can especially suffer from inhibition.
Especially with Shadow Box, which calls for such intense emotions in a situation few of us have had to deal with as youngsters, it makes total sense to just dive in with the body and use the rehearsal time well. Wish I had thought of this long ago.
🙂
I think another challenge to really emoting on stage is the fact that in real life we tend to bottle up those emotions so as to not over react and be considered out of control. I was interested to read that practicing the emotion can free you up to be able to make it real when acting. I know there’ve been times in a movie or play when I’m impressed with how well and realistically an actor played an emotional scene. Unfortunately it’s really noticeable when the opposite happens. Good food for thought. Interesting blog, I’ll keep reading.
In my opinion, your thoughts are very clever and every drama teacher or actor can learn from you many tips how to be really good, confident, brilliant person. Thank you for writing this blog – I like it so much and I hope I will find more interesting articles here.
I can definitely see where “practice makes perfect/ fake it ’till you make it” applies here, and it’s true.
However, I would also imagine that when we truly allow ourselves to fully experience the emotions that being a human presents to us, we can identify with these feelings and recall them deliberately (in fact, we do it unconsciously more often than we’re aware of).
We live in a world where we’re taught to run away from our emotions. We can’t possibly experience the magic that feeling allows us to experience when we do this – even when these things are painful.
I’ve heard that actors often recall painful memories when it came time to produce an emotion for a scene.
So yes, I think the combination of authentic recollection of our emotions combined with the practice of bringing them to the surface intentionally is the ideal combination for what you’re describing in this post.
I often wondered how it was possible for actors to go through the emotions as fast as some of them do, but after a bit of practice, I am sure they have the triggers they need in place to get the water works to go. Great post!