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The Actor's Voice |
A Prescott Based Site Dedicated To Theater Artists
A Prescott Based Site Dedicated To Theater Artists
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From “The Actor’s Techniques” in A Challenge for the Actor by Uta Hagen
At a ballet, when the audience sees the dancers ’pirouettes, elevations, stretches, and lightning-quick entrechats, when they are transported by the content revealed by this artistry, they know that what they have experienced would be impossible to achieve without years of training and practice. When they attend a concert and watch the violinist tuck his instrument under his chin, using the fingers of one hand on the strings while stroking the bow across them with the other to make his beautiful phrases, they know they could not emulate him. Nor do they pay attention to the technique: They listen to the music, they watch the ballet. When the actors’ techniques are visible and audible as in the case of artificial, “effective” theatricality, studied poses, mechanically enunciated words “sung” by richly produced voices, when tears are shed merely for the sake of proving you can cry on cue in public, when histrionics and bombast are reveled in, the audience is often impressed because they know that they could not do that either. I am only impressed when the actor’s technique is so perfect that it has become invisible and has persuaded the audience that they are in the presence of a living human being who makes it possible them to empathize with all his foibles and struggles as they unfold in the play. It is my firm belief that when you are aware of how a feat has been achieved, the actor has failed. He has misused his techniques. Unfortunately, when he has succeeded, when his work communicates convincingly as a living person, it is just then that much the audience will be convinced that they can do that, too—the intangible being, “How do you learn all these lines?” Otherwise they consider themselves to be knowledgeable critics, often giving “how” advice to the actor. Sometimes the beleaguered, insecure actor even listens, almost always to his disadvantage. The actor must know since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn’t look like a violin is reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult. The gossipy curiosity about what makes an actor tick, which is expressed on every second talk show, as well as in endless public seminars, the superficial answers given (often accompanied by “funny” personal examples), only aggravate our problems. The audience, as well as the talk show hosts, are rarely interested in discussions of a musician’s finger exercises, a dancer’s plies, a painter’s palette or how he applies a “wash” for a watercolor. Why should care about our techniques? They are our business, not theirs. So, you, the actor, whose entire being is his instrument, let me define the techniques consist of which make up our fabulous craft! Read the rest of Uta Hagen’s wonderful, sage and ageless advice in Uta Hagen, “A Challenge for the Actor”, Scribner, New York, 1991
. by Sheldon Cheney in
The Theater: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft
Mr. Cheney is writing about a level of acting that we as actors should aspire to attain. J.L Only once in a hundred visits do we glimpse rapture or high nobility or sheer purging beauty. And yet each one of us, in his collective experience, has known that other divine theatre. In the playhouses of our time we have been stirred by the old expectant excitement, have reveled in being part of a gay responsive crowd, have felt our nearness to the gods in the hushed auditorium, when everything on the stage and in the world fell into a unison, stilling the conscious mind; have been miraculously purged by tragedy, have been healed with the tonic of laughter at comedy, have felt pleasantly sinful, have been revolted, have been lifted again to the realm of beauty, wisdom, and perfect understanding. This is how it is on that hundredth attendance: Here we are in the mercifully darkened auditorium, whole banks of us facing the glow of the stage. We are a little too hot this summer night. For an hour we have watched people acting in and out of a perfectly ordinary plot, with flashes of humor here and there, a pretty intrigue posed, youth drawing toward beauty. But we have not quite been able to forget the heat. The appealing story, the facile acting, the color and light manipulated now with such virtuosity: everything is pleasant that is just the word. But the actors are obviously working, this show of color and light and designed movement remains an accompaniment, the story is a diversion not too moving to be seen passionately, from the outside, from the hot auditorium.Then in a sentence one of the actors makes us catch our breath. The story, the accompaniment, the night are forgotten. Everything drops into place, quietly, the house becomes doubly hushed, a thousand souls strain forward toward one little group there on the dais in the centre. Our bodies are motionless, our throats con tracted, strange emotions press in, we feel the hot tears welled behind our eyes. A “moment” has come. Before the silence proves unbearable, this actress, this woman standing there before us, must speak, must move. We wait, suspended. In this hush the slightest thing she does or says may precipitate the thousand watchers into tears and grief, into perfect understanding, into gentle laughter. The sudden quivering of her lips — what is that to make a thousand men and women draw their breath in a stifled sob? Her shudder seems echoed in something that is crawling down our spines. Her half-articulated” yes “tears us like a knife plunged into our own flesh.For a few moments we have known a cessation of the outward life of the world. We have known an intensification of the life of the spirit. Everything has been so clarified that a gesture, a poetically right phrase, a sob, seemed to resolve all that has puzzled us in living, seemed to lift us up, to glorify us. This is the moment toward which all drama tends. This is the inundation of the spirit, in beauty and clarity, toward which the art of the theatre gropes. And this, in a world from which divinity and mystery have been unsparingly shorn, this is as near as we are likely to come to the divine and the spiritual. It is the Dionysian experience, our ecstatic participation in the divine life. Unless you have known that moment, you have not really penetrated into the theatre. It is, of course, the thing that escapes all definitions of theatre or drama. And whatever may be the direction of the next great change in the stage art — and epoch-making changes are pending we-may be sure that the artists of the theatre will be working around somehow to this revealing moment, this transcending of surface life, will aim to afford us, the spectators, that clarity, that absolute of spiritual participation.For we are humans, and during some moments the actors have made us gods.
by J.P. and Jean (with apologies IDG computer books)
1: DRESS AS IF YOU WERE GOING FOR A JOB INTERVIEW. Show some respect to the director and the staff. (no costumes!)
2: READ THE SCRIPT!! If you are auditioning with original material, read carefully the sides you are given.
3: (if it is possible) CALL THE DIRECTOR AND FIND OUT HIS OR HER VISION.
4: FROM THE SCRIPT, LIST ALL OF THE CHARACTER GIVENS. If you are given sides, do the best you can with what you have.
5: MAKE SOME CHOICES ABOUT THE CHARACTER. These choices may not be the ones you will make if you get the part, but they will tell the director that you can, at the very least, make choices.
6: STICK WITH YOUR CHOICE THE ENTIRE AUDITION UNLESS TOLD OTHERWISE. For example: Don’t make the choice that the character is sarcastic in a scene only to drop the sarcasm half way through the scene.
7: BE WILLING TO ADJUST THE CHARACTER IF THE DIRECTOR ASKS. Don’t get so tied into your choice that you cannot do what the director asks of you.
8: STAND STILL!! Unless you are moving with purpose, don’t fidget!!
9: PROJECT AND SPEAK CLEARLY!
10: HOLD THE SCRIPT UP SO YOU CAN KEEP YOUR FACE UP, BUT NOT IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. Try not to read the script. It is better to deliver the line interestingly than it is to get it letter perfect. (Auditions only).
11: IF YOU HAVE A MOMENT BEFORE YOUR NEXT LINE, AND THE LINE IS SHORT, TRY TO MEMORIZE IT AND DELIVER WITHOUT SCRIPT.
12: NEVER MEMORIZE THE PART BEFORE YOU AUDITION. Too complicated to explain in a “Dummies” article but just trust us.
13: HAVE FUN! It is hard when you are nervous, but the more fun you have up on the stage, the better you will audition. The Misunderstood Method
The father of modern acting and of “The Method” is Constanin Stanislavski (C.S.)(1863-1938). Often there is confusion around “Method” and “Method Actors”. People who have met an insufferably arrogant, overly dramatic, toad will label all “Method Actors” as bad. If we go back and study Stanislavski and his work, we will find a wonderful technique, that he called his “System” We should not discard Stanislavski’s work just because we meet one or two fools who call themselves “Method Actors”. That would be like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Many great teachers have formed schools expanding on and tweaking Stanislavski’s “System” over the years. However, Stanislavski’s “System” is the basis for all good character development in the modern theatre, and to study character development you should know something about the origins. You may not know you are using the elements of the C.S. System, but you are. We are all method actors! Many of Stanislavski’s ideas, which are key to character development, you will recognize from your acting classes. Tempo/Rhythm, The “Magic If”, Objective (intent, action), Emotional Memory, Commitment and Communion,, and Urgency and Energy are just a few of his principles. Sound Familiar? Of course, you are already using these principles in your own character development process. Stanislavski also believed acting was reacting; you cannot create a character in a vacuum. Instead of walking on a stage with your lines leaned and pontificating them with clichéd gestures and movements, C.S. believed in creating the character inside yourself and bringing that character out from the inside. Then your character “reacts” with the other characters on the stage and this creates a moving and profound experience for the actor and the audience. Although method acting has gotten a bad name at times over the years, there are several concepts that are central to the method, no matter what you might be calling it. If we can remember attempt to master these principles, we can create deeper and more interesting characters on stage. 1. The actor must justify every word, action and relationship onstage. The actor moves and speaks spontaneously, but everything is thought out during rehearsals to ensure the maximum emphasis on motivation. Finding the spontaneity with in the structure is what makes this work difficult but rewarding. Wandering around the stage saying lines without purpose makes for a wishy washy and vague performance. Stanislavski said that the actor’s greatest enemy is vagueness. 2 In finding the character’s motivation, actors search for objectives, actions and intentions. Actors discover the character’s super—objective, or ‘spine’, that motivates all the actions on stage. Characterizations have depth and punch. 3 The character’s super-objective must have urgency: every action and objective must have an immediacy (‘how badly do you want the objective, and what consequences will occur if you do not attain it?’). This includes creating obstacles that prevent easy access to achieving the objective. 4 To support the objective, the actor creates subtext, or thought processes, that motivate the character’s actions. Every word in a play has an underlying, non-verbal base which informs and supports the playwright’s written word. The playwright’s words serve as a surface blueprint; the subtext supplies the role’s interior definition. 5 In finding the subtext of the role, the actor rejects generalizations, emphasizing instead the specific given circumstances of the play, everything from period style and social fashion to the way a character behaves, lives and relates to other characters and situations. The more you know about the character, the more believable you will be in that character. 6 In defining the given circumstances, actors behave as if they are living in the situation of the play. In doing so, the actor must bring his or her imagination into focus, participating in creative choices that will enhance the text and flesh out compelling ideas that lurk beneath the words. 7 An emphasis on truthful behavior; feelings must never be ‘indicated’. Rather, the actor works from his or her passions and emotions, which is often referred to in Method acting as working from the ‘inside out’. Method acting director and former member of the Group Theatre, Elia Kazan, building on Stanislavski's theories, wrote that for Method actors, experience on the stage ‘must be actual, not suggested by external imitation; the actor must be going through what the character he’s playing is going through; the emotion must be real, not pretended; it must be happening, not indicated’ . 8 To accomplish the experience of real feelings, the actor works moment-to-moment on impulse, talking and listening as if the events on stage are actually happening in the immediate present. In Method acting, characterization is not fixed, hut a fluid and spontaneous response to events on stage. The following is a quote from Stanislavski’s Building a Character, where he tells the reader exactly how he feels about actors who refuse to do the work to create character. “Now there are actors of still another type. Do not look around. You have not had the time to develop into this kind. These actors hold the public through their original ways, their finely wrought special variety of acting clichés. They appear on the stage for the sole purpose of exhibiting them to their spectators. Why should they bother to transform themselves into other characters since this ~would not give them the opportunity to show off their forte?,
“A third category of false actors are the ones, who are strong in technique and clichés but who did not work these out for themselves, they merely have acquired them from other actors of other times and countries. These characterizations are based on a highly conventional ritual. They know how every role in a world-embracing repertory should be played. For such actors all roles have been permanently cut in an accepted stencil. Were it not for this they could never play nearly three hundred and sixty-five roles a year, each one after a single rehearsal, as is done in some Cities in the provinces. “I trust that those of you who feel inclined to follow this dangerous path of least resistance will be warned in time!”
However you go about your character development, I hope that understanding some of the principles of Stanislavski and his “System” will help you.
Break a leg!
Hodge, Alison ed, Twentieth Century Actor Training, Routledge, New York, N.Y., 2000. Moore, Sonia, The Stanislavski System, Penguin Books, New York, N.Y., 1960 Stanislavski, Constanin, Building a Character, Routledge, New York, N.Y., 1994 (27th printing).
The Progression of Character Development
1. Read the script, read the script, read the script!! If you have the script for audition and have already read it – read it again! Read once fast, read again to get the story and read a third time to start getting a sense of your character.
2. Start asking yourself questions. I like to use Uta Hagen’s six questions as I read and go into the “three I’s” that J.P. uses later as I take it apart.
3. Research. Ask questions of your director. Look on the web for information about the era Interview someone who has if familiar with what your character is going through.
4. Go back and ask yourself more questions about your character
5. Determine what your character WANTS – the SUPER OBJECTIVE What drives your character throught-out the entire play? Keep it simple. It’s hard to play “I want to do what I want and have my parents tell me that I am a good girl and find a man who loves and approves of me” It’s much more powerful if you say you want to be LOVED AND ACCEPTED.
6. As the rehearsal progresses, start getting a sense of what you want in each scene or bit of a scene. You should go through this with your director but you may not have a director who will help you with this.
7. Know your conflicts
8. Constantly reassess. If the scene doesn’t seem to be working, ask yourself if there is a better objective or an objective that gives you more URGENCY.
9. Remember that the actor’s worst mistake is VAGUENESS. Play your role with URGENCY, COMMITMENT, CONVICTION AND CLARITY.
10. Start to add VARIETY to your character. An actor who always plays anger as loud and shouting is boring. Find different ways to play your feelings. Same thing for joy, manipulation, sadness. If you want to see sadness played the same in every scene for an entire movie watch Haley Berry in “Monster’s Ball”.
11. HAVE FUN!!!!!
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