I shouted back, “Acting!”
He said, “I know that. But I can’t understand anything.”
Friday, September 04, 2015
Feelings Are Not Your Friend
I shouted back, “Acting!”
He said, “I know that. But I can’t understand anything.”
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9 comments:
This article caught my attention because it reminded me a lot of one of my old acting teachers. She always had us first focus on the raw physicality of the character, how they moved in the world, where they carried their weight, how they walked and gestured. then we would move onto the logic and motivations in each scene. It was always understood that what emotions were there and how the character expressed them would simply be a byproduct of that work. She never asked anyone what emotion they were playing in a certain scene. I think acting to a feeling in a scene rather than a motivation is tricky because it runs a high risk of feeling false and forced to the audience. It doesn't reflect the real world. In life, you don't hear bad news and then decide, "Ok, now I'm going to be sad." Our decisions and actions are the conscious choices we make in life. Emotions just happen. And that's the way it should be on stage too.
Feelings may be important for interpretation and such, it can takes us up to some certain level. Yet, logic is a vital part that lift up our ability to show what a person interpreted to the better level. Logic and Feelings are like Person A and a chef: a child may use feelings that she has to put these ingredients together in a pan and turn on the flame and if you don’t screw it up you will end up getting a pancake. A chef will however, have some logic and skills at the back of her head so he knows that she can beat the egg white first in another bowl then add to the batter because it makes the pancake more fluffy, skills tells her how much fire to use to fry the pancake. Better cooking tools make her got the perfect circular shaped pancake every time. Us (the audience) got a plate of pancake from both people at the end, but there’s a huge difference there. There’s a consistency and better product quality from the plate of the logic (the chef) than from person A (feelings) which every pancake on her plate may all look and taste different from each other. Logic and Behavior is predictable, like what mentioned in the article. That’s why setting the right logic and behavior to your system makes you deliver things better and consistent.
This article is so interesting because it touches on something I've always found to be a bit ambiguous in theater, and that is what the value of real, raw emotion is. And the article is right, I have watched some incredible performances of actors cry, and scream, and I sat there like nothing was happening, completely unmoved by them laying their souls on stage, and I have no real reason for that. Except that I think seeing someone be really raw and emotional on stage, where you know as an audience member they have lost just a smidgen of control, detaches you from the work. My best friend of 10 years had a rough summer emotionally, and as I was watching her rehearse one day a month ago as Cassie in A Chorus Line she broke down, she really cried, and suddenly I wasn't attached to Cassie anymore, I was thinking about her. Obviously this switch is less dramatic if you don't personally know the actor but I still find it to be true sometimes. As an actor loses control, visibly, the character loses something too. I don't know what it is, but I do know that as an audience member you can see it. So maybe the answer is to never lose control 100% or be completely raw. But what do I know? I haven't taken an acting class since middle school.
There is a very fine line between incredibly moving acting and over-acting. The performance of an actor can be absolutely life-changing (for example, Alex Sharp's portrayal of Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident...), or it can be underwhelming. I think that a lot of the latter effect stems from the actor's ability to understand the role as a whole. Many actors take plays scene by scene, but it is important to comprehend the entire character first. From there, the emotions for each scene can be drawn.
The actor's necessary process of thought to feelings to emotions reminds me eerily of the costume designer's process of function to design to what might be considered "looking good". It is very easy as a designer to get lost in the details of a costume, what makes it more appealing to the audience and more flattering to the actor. Logistically, however, starting with what "looks good" will get a designer nowhere. To create a truly functional, well designed, and ultimately aesthetically pleasing costume, it is necessary for a costume designer - as it is for an actor creating a character - to start with clarity of thought. Who is this person? How do they define themselves? What purpose do they seek to serve in society? How do they feel they need to dress in order to serve that purpose? What is their relationship to the clothing they wear? Do they think they care about what they wear (even though subconsciously everybody cares about what they wear)? Only after this thought has been gone through can the actual process of "design" begin. Ultimately, all things considered, it is the hope of every designer that the said design does look good on the character/actor, flattering even. But the way the costume looks serves no purpose whatsoever if its design is not grounded in some logical, often extremely psychological reasoning. Every human being, whether they know it or not, uses their outsides to express what they feel on the inside. The same can be said for an actor's use of "emotion". That emotion, as is said in the article, looks messy without thought and feeling behind it - as does a costume without function, purpose, and careful design to back it up.
This article makes a strong valid point for all careers really We are in the day and age where we treat our feelings as fact and are constantly letting our emotions be the deciding factors of how we conduct our actions and interact with people. The reality of not pleasing everyone and not taking criticism as personal attacks on someone’s character has seemed to be completely lost. And its tragic to see people use their feeling as roadblocks to stop them from doing good and interesting work. We all at some point in our lives experience similar emotions. Feelings are not at the core of what makes us as human being complex. It is the thoughts that make human beings interesting. We all come at this world with our own experiences and are defined by how we navigate the world around us. And because not everyone is going handle the same situation similarly, our thoughts are at the core of what makes us interesting unique individuals.
The interesting thing about this article is that it begins with a miscommunication between a director and an actor based on the lack of a consistent language. I agree, as does the training here at CMU, that the emphasis is not to be placed on playing an emotion. The author of the article can be slightly confusing to a young actor in that they do not clarify the importance of the so-called 'clarity of thought' translation into the action of the scene. Nothing was incorrect, but that clarification would have been beneficial.
The lack of a consistent language in our profession makes for a consistently difficult challenge to form a language with the company that we are working with. I am unsure if this lack of language is the same across all art forms, but it certainly holds true for theatre. The theatre community would be strengthened if, somehow, everyone came together and decided that 'objectives' meant the same thing everywhere, and 'going for emotion' meant the same thing everywhere. This is holding true with the Viewpoints technique that is being clearly taught across the US. On the other hand, though, perhaps there is something incredible about the challenge of constantly having to form a language with whatever company you are working with. The broad range of understanding could also be a source of what makes theatre-making such a constantly innovative field to work in.
Although I don't think this article is the most articulate in it's thoughts, I think it brings up a good point about the way we look at characters in scenes in theater. In high school I went to school for acting, and in some instances playing a certain emotion seemed like a decent way to go about a scene, but looking at dramatic structure now I see how playing to a singular emotion in any scene is short sighted and flat. If in every scene each character had only one emotion, one motive and one objective all of theater would be flat, and every play would seem like it was filled with stock characters. I agree with the article that the behavior in a scene should inform the character's emotions because in that varying behavior there are multiple layers of doubts, thoughts, objectives and goals, which make up the character's response in that moment. Looking at a character's emotion as a secular thing is like shooting yourself in the foot, it's short sighted and too narrow in scope to understand the greater complexities occurring in the scene.
I loved this article!! This is exactly how I feel acting should be taught in school and approached in rehearsal. I thought it was really interesting that this huge lesson in acting (that could contradict everything an actor has been previously taught) came from a director and not a teacher. I feel like there is a certain barrier that directors feel like they can’t cross in a rehearsal room. As a director, I would be nervous to completely turn a basic principle on its head for an actor, but I know its important and I respect the director in this article for their fearlessness. There are so many actors that cling to their training, and I can’t think of a bigger fault to have in a particular profession. Actors need to be fluid and I think its important for them to have the ability to change their way of thinking from production to production, though I acknowledge that's difficult.
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