The challenge is not new, in 1913, American actor William Gillette dealt with this very same issue in his speech “The Illusion of the First Time in Acting.”  He said that actors must “apparently search for and find words by which to express [their characters’ thoughts] even though these words” are already known to them.  He went on to say that the goal of the actors’ work is to make every audience “feel that it is witnessing, not one of a thousand weary repetitions, but a life episode that is being lived just across the magic barrier of the footlights.  That is to say, the whole must have that indescribable life-spirit or effect which produces the illusion of happening for the first time.”

In the wonderful book and accompanying tapes, Playing Shakespeare, Shakespearean scholar and director, John Barton stresses the need for the actor to do the same thing when acting Shakespeare.  He says, that actors can’t just say the words written by a writer…not even Shakespeare.   Actors must “find the words or coin them or fresh-mint them.”

In this podcast, we’ll begin to look at how to think of your lines not simply as words that pre-exist in the text and we’ll examine ways to ‘find’ the words as you speak them.

What does this have to do with acting? One of your jobs as an actor is to create the images associated with the language the writer gives you, so that when you say the words they have meaning and connections for you.  That sounds obvious.  But how often do you actually go through the entire script and create personalized images of the people, places, and things in the world the writer has given you?

Stella Adler talked about the importance of personalizing a prop, which means making it your own.  Well if personalizing your props is a good idea; think how important it is to personalize the words that you have to speak.  So give the words images that work for you and create substitutions that generate responses in you.  Doing these things will help you to discover the emotional content of the words.

Begin by looking carefully at the language your character uses and let it work on your creative and intellectual sensibilities.  Then begin the process of imagining the world of your character and the people and places he or she talks about.  This will help you to personalize the language and make it your own.

Now, it isn’t a contradiction to let the language work on you and then for you to work on the language.  It is a circular of influence where the language affects you and then you affect the language—and the cycle continues.

Maybe I should have called this podcast Daydream Believer because that’s what I think actors should to be at this early stage of the work.  You need use your imagination to see the world of the play and then you have to believe in the words you speak.  This will give your words life and help you to say them as if you were thinking them up and saying them for the first time, every time you say them.

This week I want to look at three ideas that will really help to make your performance in a staged reading soar. First, you must slow down so you can find the beats, speech measures, or thought units in your lines. Remember, we speak brief groupings of words that form an idea. Therefore, as you work on the text, you must break it down in into understandable units. These units are separated by pauses, which are either logical or psychological. When you rush through the text in a reading, you tend to race over these moments, turning your lines in flat, colorless words. But by slowing down, you’ll discover the moments and give yourself the chance to play them.

Second, you also need to make sure that you are using your voice in interesting ways. Find places where you can get loud, find those places where a whisper works.  Play with your vocalizations to find interesting choices that support the text and your character. Vary your tempo and speed.  Use syncopation. Use all of the vocal tools available to you instead of slipping into a flat and monochromatic voice.

Finally, although you can’t walk around in a stage reading, you can use your body and you should. Let your body react and respond as you would if you were moving. Your physical adjustments will not only communicate to an audience they will also change how you breathe and speak and this will help you play the character in the appropriate given circumstances.

So if you act in a staged reading, use all the tools available to you.  Slow down and find the thought units.  Use your voice in interesting ways and allow your body to move and respond.

Doing the stage reading reminded me of how important these showcases are for writers, actors, directors, and producers. So this podcast is for anyone involved in a reading whether you’re a playwright, director, or actor.

The most common staged reading is a “standing reading” where the actors read and perform while standing still with the scripts on music stands or in their hands.  In this kind of reading you’ll be working with a director for just a few hours to shape and reveal elements of the text.  The director must understand the script and guide the process as the actors begin developing their characters, defining their objectives, and working on the tempo-rhythm of each scene.  Tempos and rhythms are essential to telling the story and since you won’t be moving you need to make sure that your the vocal tempos are appropriate for each moment.  It is also essential that your voice and diction are clear.  While there isn’t time to work through every single moment, you must shape the most defining ones to insure that they have builds and substance.

The most important things actors can do in a staged reading are talk to, listen to, and respond to the other actors.  By doing these things you will be helping the writer to develop the script and giving the audience a performance.  By paying particular attention to your face, voice, and tempos, you will be giving the performance a sense of emotional movement even though you are standing still.  And most important of all, avoid the temptation to rush.  Take your time and try to hit as many beats as you.  Once your start to rush, everything will run together and your performance will be boring for you and the audience.

With just a few hours of rehearsal and a few days of homework, you can coax a lot out of a script.  But you must invest in the reading and give it your all.  That is exactly what Larry and Katherine did with the script for Class.  They took their time, found, and played moment after moment and turned in a reading into a performance.

A Thousand Cuts

For a long time, I’ve been talking to you about different acting techniques and how each one is important.  But acting is like making music—it requires many notes, many techniques strung together to make the performance sing.

O’Keefe and Newcomer arrived on the set having done their homework.  They found physicalizations for their characters and spent their days in that character zone, a place somewhere between themselves and their characters so they could easily move back and forth into the work.  During the shooting, they lived off of one another and responded to whatever the other gave him.  They maintained the energy and tension required by the script through hard work and commitment.  And they both played with attitude, meaning that they understood how the character felt about the world of the script, the inhabitants, and the situations.  These shifting attitudes helped to define their characters and interactions.  And finally, their acting choices were interesting, varied, and compelling.

I hope you get a chance to see A Thousand Cuts and these two fine performances.  But more important, I hope that watching other actors will encourage you to think about your acting and inspire you to work on every aspect of it.  The more you layer, the deeper you dig, the more you prepare, and the more carefully you listen, the more interesting your acting will be for you and for audiences.

Welcome you back to Notes on Acting.  I hope you enjoy the new site and that you share these podcasts and reviews with your friends.

While we were away, actor KF wrote to me.  He had questions about an acting class because he sensed that he was being encouraged to use his own personal emotional traumas to feed his work.  He wondered whether this was a good idea and if it was, what would happen when the personal trauma was resolved.

Well, I agree with Stella Adler when she says, “You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences.  The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his acting choices and feelings.  Look to the given circumstances,” she insisted.  “And use your imagination.”

Your imagination is your most important acting tool. It makes it possible for you to play different kinds of characters in different types of scripts.  Not only do you have to use your imagination to create images of people, places, and things, you then need to connect to them.  Sometimes we connect to a moment or a character because they are similar to people or things in our own lives.  Other times we have to use our active imaginations to generate empathetic responses.

So depending on how you like to work, using a real item or real memory might be useful.  For others, those real emotions or emotional recall might just get in the way. Remember your goal as actors is to live honestly in imaginary circumstances and that also means revealing the inner world of the character so it can be seen.

So try different approaches and find out what works for you.  Many people love Lee Strasberg’s work and incorporate emotional memory into their acting.  And just as many think that Stella Adler hit it on the head when she insisted that acting is using your imagination to get inside and live off of the given circumstances.

There isn’t one way to act and you’ll probably find that in your own career you’ll use different approaches for different roles.  So be open and receptive.  Don’t fight against the emotions that you experience, that will only undercut your work.  And do everything you can to develop your imagination and your active imagination.

Welcome back to Notes on Acting.  I hope you enjoy the new site and that you share these podcasts and reviews with your friends and that you comment on what you hear and read.

Another new year is upon us.  As we end one and start the new one, is easy to look back at the year gone by and examine the things that have gone right and wrong.  We can learn from these events as long as we don’t get too caught up inspecting the past.  Last year is gone and there is no re-living it.  So if you decide to look back, do so with clear eye and then move on.

At this time of year one can also look forward and make plans about what you would like to happen during the coming year and create actions that will help you to achieve those goals. While planning is a good thing to do remember that plans shouldn’t be cast in stone.  Plans have to be specific action steps and you have to be willing to change them as situations change.  That means you need to be flexible and willing to respond to your life and the world around you.

Finally, as we start 2012, remember that your career and life itself are marathons not sprints.  They take both mental and physical endurance and that comes from training you mind, body, and discipline.  So instead of writing a list of resolutions, sit down and work out a realistic training plan that will prepare you for the projects and challenges that are sure to come your way.  And then get to work.

Happy 2012.  I hope it will be a happy, healthy, and creative year for you and yours.

In the War of Art, writer Steve Pressfield defines resistance and then helps us to get over it, under it, and around it by becoming a pro.  While the book will inspire you, it is written with clarity and specificity so that you will know what you are facing and have strategies for overcoming it.

The War of Art is a wonderful book to get you through those times when every creative pathway seems blocked.  While it is easy to read, it is much more than a self-help book.  It is a thoughtful examination of the need to create and the challenges to that desire.  While some readers might find parts of the last section a little too spiritually based, the material is worth your time and I encourage you to read through it.  The Art of War is a book you will find yourself going back to throughout your career and life.

For the next few weeks while I’m updating the Actingis.com website I will be posting encore podcasts. For those of you who are new to Notes on Acting you might not have heard these podcasts and for regular listeners you might enjoy reviewing some of the concepts discussed earlier. This week is an encore of Act On Act Off from July 2009.

In his book Everything I Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten Robert Fulghum reminds us that the most important lessons often come from the most unexpected places. Moreover, we often miss that a lesson can have many different applicants. When Mr. Myagi told the karate kid to go and wax his car, Danny thought it was a waste of time. He had come to learn karate, not to clean up for some old man. “Wax on, wax off,” wasn’t just a picky way of applying finish to the old man’s car. It was a lesson in karate. Later Danny learned that the karate lessons were actually life lessons. 

Most of us, just like the karate kid Danny, don’t recognize that many of the lessons we learned in classes, gym, music lessons, dance classes, and dojos are actually valuable acting lessons that, if applied to our work, can enhance our performances.
The coach screaming, “Keep your eye on the ball” might have angered you. But his lesson, which is all about concentrating, is essential to good acting and is one of the fundamental principles in Richard Boleslavski’s Acting: The First Six Lessons. Dance teachers, karate teachers, and many others have reminded us over and over to relax. Tension destroys our ability to react or move fluidly and this too is an essential for actors. And so is the admonition to “Breathe.”
The point of this podcast is that your elementary teachers and coaches introduced many of the most important elements of acting to you long ago. When they taught them to you they didn’t relate them to acting but that doesn’t make these lessons any less valuable. Your job is to reconnect to these lessons and apply them to your acting. It could make you the Acting Kid.

Eric Barr.  All rights reserved

For the next few weeks while I’m updating the Actingis.com website I will be posting encore podcasts. For those of you who are new to Notes on Acting you might not have heard these podcasts and for regular listeners you might enjoy reviewing some of the concepts discussed earlier. This week is an encore of The Character and You from June of 2009.

If the disappearance of an actor into a role is the definition for great acting, what can we make of most of the acting we see, where actors don’t disappear? Where the characters seem to move and sound like the the actors themselves?

Remember when you act you are a part of a group of storytellers, with each one playing a particular character. And character is combination of the writer’s ideas and you. The writer provides a blue print and a sense of the character’s actions, but you supply the subtext, the personality, the body, the voice, and spirit that makes the character human. Your presence gives the character flesh and bones, mind and spirit, imagination and memory. Your very presence gives the character life. And in fact the reason, you are cast, most of the time, is because of the personality that you bring to the role in the auditions. If it was just a matter of reading the lines as written, there would be little reason to audition many actors…they would all do just about the same thing…give reasonable line readings. It is what you bring to the role that is being examined in the audition process.

Your job as an actor isn’t necessarily to disappear into a physicalization or to hide behind a mask. Your job is to play the appropriate character in an honest and clear fashion and to react and respond to the characters and situations around you. When you do, your performance will be great. It will be about the character and about the story and not about you. So take your eyes off yourself and focus on your character. And you too can become a great actor.

Eric Barr.  All rights reserved

This week I continue the story of working with horse whisperer Buck Brannaman. It turns out that the lesson I learned from Buck while working with a young and nervous horse was the same one that my acting teachers had been trying to impart and one that an aikido master also taught me. That lesson was about relaxed concentration, which some call mindfulness.

So what does this lesson from a horse trainer and from a martial artist have to do with acting? Everything. I have come to believe that mindfulness, relaxed concentration, is the actor’s most important tool and that it is the foundation upon which everything else is built. The insights you gain from having a quiet mind and being aware of what is actually going on around you are the basis for all of your acting.
If you go through life with your eyes only half-open and with immovable pre-conceptions in your head, you won’t see anything more than you think is out there. If your mind is awash in a constant buzz of commentary and criticism, your world will be small and your acting will be a reflection of that. If you are onstage and your mind is racing from place to place rather than aware of what is happening, then your acting is going to be disconnected from your partners and forced.

But by learning to be relaxed and concentrating, by seeing the whole picture and what is really going on, your acting will be natural, responsive, and interesting for you and your audience.

Eric Barr.  All rights reserved