Acting

• Role of the actor
• Actor's craft
• Approaches to acting
• Character analysis
• Employment
• Vocabulary
• Warmups and exercises

Collected lecture/discussion notes. Some parts are very fragmented and others redundant, but offered here as a study aid, not a primary learning source. Citations are lost. None of the thoughts are original.

Overhead

Requirements

Talent
Intelligence
Expressiveness
Physical appeal
Stamina
Luck

Process:

Physical, vocal, mental training (constant, on-going)
Audition
Rehearsal

Analysis and research Finding the expression
Performance
Keeping it fresh

The Actor's Instrument

Voice and speech (expressiveness, ability)
Body and movement (capable, expressive)
Mental discipline
Mental: imagination

Four persons of the actor

• Person in the real world
• Presenter of a fictional character
• Presenter of a character interacting
• Surrogate and/or model for audience

Actor's medium is the body

Actor's journey:

• Creation of discovery
• Transformation
• Return

Everything begins with analysis, observation.

"It may be unreal - it certainly can be stylized - but it must always be recognizable as the way people behave if it is to communicate to an audience."
    -Essences, notable things

• Master time and space on stage.
  • Observe not clichés but essentials; observation must lead to invention.
  • Improvisation is an emotional limbering up.

-Simplicity
    Attention to detail should be total, but must make clean and simple.

"Behind every gesture is an inner truth which the gesture reveals."
    Body language
    Physical representation of character

Actor's craft

• Physical: Mastery of body & voice
• Emotional: understanding & control of feelings
• Research: Heightened powers of observation
• Imaginative: Highly developed imagination
• Intellectual: Intelligence to perceive the world of the play

Vocal and gestural are almost inseparable but training is focused on each.

• Vocal:
  • Variables: rate, pitch, tone
  • Breath support
  • Articulation and diction
• Gesture:
  • Presence and awareness
  • Body control
  • Energy control

Preparation of body, voice and mind:

Body:

• Actor must be able to free body to meet demands placed by role.
• Should be able to control body with great precision.
• Center of gravity, tension, musical movement

Three variables of movement:

1. Tempo
2. Energy
3. Shape

Three kinds of movement:

1. stage movement (directed)
2. gestures (spontaneous)
3. stage business (directed, invented)

Voice:

-Vocal intonation is the primary tool for expressing relationships, emotional states.

Complete control essential:

• Breathing mechanism
• Pacing for variety, tempo
• Superb diction
• Command of vocal rhythms.

Actor needs as much versatility and control over voice as over body.
Should know limits and potential for greatest use

Four variables of sound:

1. 1. Duration (rate)
2. 2. Pitch
3. 3. Volume
4. 4. Quality

Speech variables:

1. Articulation (quality)
2. Pronunciation (quality)
3. Inflection (pitch)
4. Projection (volume)
5. Rate

Two approaches to stage speech

• -Used to communicate ideas through words.
• -Used to create a sound composition.

Approaches: external, internal

Internal vs. external: discover feelings and let affect movement or discover movement and let affect feelings.

• Technique: Discover the manifestations of character, emotion, etc., and perfect them. Especially important for styles work.
• "Method": Discover and perhaps recreate the emotional and psychophysical aspects of the character and then let them become manifest.

Konstantin Stanislavsky

Building a Character as first acting text
Stanislavskian Analysis:

• Beat, intentional unit
• Action
• Spine
• Objective, superobjective

• -Make the outward activities of the performer natural and convincing.
• -Convey inter truth of the character. Conviction and believe is required.
• -Life of character is dynamic and continuous
• -Ensemble playing

Two approaches to creation of a character:

1. Strict method or inner work (inside out)
2. Technique or outer work (outside in)

Inside out approach:

-Described in detail in concern with method
-Premise: Totally absorb character so that you think and react as he would, then perform.

Outside in (technique) approach:

-Premise: If you can do all the physical things that a character does when he feels or thinks a certain way, then you don't have to fel or think that way yourself because the audience only sees the physical things. But doing the physical things can make you feel as the character would. The end effect can be nearly the same.

• Tends more to rely on type (dumb, intelligent, etc.)
• Provides sharper distinction between characters, and is more appropriate for "character roles."
• Relies almost exclusively on observation of others (instead of observation of self)

Two approaches in modern acting:

Playwright centered:

Approach: Thorough grounding in character that is created by playwright so as to permit response to playwright's circumstances as character would respond. "Magic If" and "Given Circumstances."

-Principal issue: If actor reconstructs himself as the character, then anything he does as that character must be right and believable.

Creation of character from analysis:

1. Who is he? Biographical data.
2. What does he want? - in the play (spine)
3. What are the given circumstances? What are the propositions and environment for the character?
4. How does the character, in pursuing what he wants, respond to the given circumstances?

• Presumes all events in life are causally linked. Nothing occurs without a potential for explanation.
  
• Presumes any moment or instant has a history which has led to it; the moment is the more real in a play when all factors which caused that moment to occur the way it occurred are known.
  
• All efforts to strengthen the character and his right response. Use emotion and sense memory, etude improves, etc.
  
• In final work of rehearsing with method, artistic selection is used. All reactions are intensified and magnified to meet the demands of the theatrical moment. Responses are "ordered" aesthetically to achieve the effect desired by the playwright.

Actor centered:

• -Establishes the actor as the principal creative artist in a work. Playwright is secondary.
• -Early work done by Viola Spolin and son Paul Sills. Improvisational work on game theory used to develop working skills - concentration, imagination, pantomime, ensemble, sensory awareness and observation.
• -Became performance technique for The Committee (San Francisco), Second City (Chicago), The Premise, Ace Trucking Company, etc.
• -Some groups began using to develop scripts (early 60s): improvise on premise, free associate, transformations.

Grotowski

• -1967 Jerzy Grotowski conducted a workshop at NYU and toured in 1968.
• -Founded concept of "poor theatre" - complete actor's theatre with no technical augmentation not absolutely necessary. Regarded theatre as a temple and actor and audience as celebrants.
• -Demanded total commitment from the actor - willing to undergo fantastic rigorous training and give self totally in work.
• -Masks created by contorting faces, extreme vocal characterizations, fantastic physical feats in roles.
• -Pieces developed essentially from ideas and scenario of a play.
• -Not regular company, but laboratory always experimenting, must new work not yet recognized. Other groups made use of training aspects and some preparation and philosophical aspects, but no American group has approximated the kind of intense committed theatre of Grotowski.

Other influential groups:

• Living theatre: Julian Beck & Judith Malina; political theatre, improvisational
• Performance Group: Richard Schechner & Joan McIntosh; political theatre & still Grotowski. Improvisational; heavy ritual.

Character Analysis

• -what the character knows
• -what the character wants
• -what has just happened to the character

These are the major part of the subtext of the speeches. The character acts and speaks in ways that are informed and shaped by these questions.

[Stanislavsky: Who am I? What do I want? What am I willing to do to achieve it? Where have I come from? Where am I going?]

• What does the character want?
  The want should be playable, preferably an action rather than just a state of being.
• What is the character willing to do to get it?

• What a character does
• What a character says
• What other characters say about him or her
• Playwright's commentary (stage directions, essays, interviews).

Employment:

• Some regional theatre
• Summer stock
• SPT (Small Professional Theatre)
• Industrials, video production
• Disney, theme parks
• Otherwise, New York or California

==Unions: Equity, SAG, AFTRA, Am. Guild of Variety Artists
==Should be able to perform as a singer, dancer, actor.

Vocabulary:

Stage directions: UP, DN, L, R, C

Body position:

• Front or full open
• 3/4 closed or open
• Profile or 1/2 open
• Full closed or full back

Instructions:

Warmups and Exercises:

• Running leaps and yells
• Stretch-release
• Limber articulators
• Sound and movement
  • Pairs
  • Transformation
  • Machine
• Mirrors
  • Face only
  • Body (rapid change)

Technique exercises

Walk in character (slow motion, speed up, develop and feed intent)
• 80 years old (feet, ankles, knees, hips, weight, abdomen, shoulders, neck, elbows, hands)
• Transform to 12 years old

Internal or method exercises

• -Transform to natural age: invent a where and realize environment, invent a why, invent a who (age, occupation, etc.), add a physical deformity.
• -Walk justification exercises.
  • Determine who, where coming from, where going to and why.
  • Change environment, keep intent but justify location.
  • Locations: School building hallway, country road, playground, garden, city business sidewalk at 9:00 AM
• -(4 up) Stand in front of bakery window hungry, decide why and how hungry, enact it.
• -(4 up) Wait outside a door == invent reason and circumstances.

Improvisations:

Individual:

• Archeologist entering alone into Egyptian tomb, first in 3000 years.
• New ruler, before court, open coffin of predecessor == remove crown and place on own head.
• Wait outside a door == partner coaches other on objectives, justifications, given circumstances.
• Single action in a variety of environments: locked museum, deserted rail terminal, lighthouse.

Pairs :