I have never thought about how acting worked. I assumed an actor was trained to express different emotions and when a script came they acted what was necessary. I never thought much deeper than that when it came to acting. Now, I wasn't completely wrong with this assumption, what I lacked in my thought process was where the actor gets these emotions from. As we learned in the intensive, there are a few notable ways to achieve this. One could use one of Constantin Stanislavski's techniques, which involves an actor to draw from their emotions for a character from past experiences and remembrances of the actor. Or one of Sansford Meisner's techniques such as repeating, where an actor spontaneously makes a comment based on his or her partner, and the comment is repeated back and forth between the two actors in the same manner, until it changes on its own. I learned that there are many techniques that can be used and it all depends on preference. Personally, I thought that Robert Lewis' technique made the most sense. His theory revolved around the idea that there are many branches of an actor's preparation for a role. Meaning an actor's emotions aren't the only factor that should be taken into account when practicing for a role. If an actor is playing an astronaut, an actor should study up on astronauts. However, for my independent project, this idea felt a little silly. I played a drug dealer and I felt I had the stereotypical drug dealer down. However, I had a hard time relying on the second half of this equation, my emotions.
For my independent project, I acted in a play written by Julian. I played the stereotypical drug dealer with a big heart. When it came to acting before and during the intensive workshops, I just read what I thought was right. Figuring out what a character is doing and why they're doing it, usually isn't a problem for me. And judging from the feedback I've gotten in the past, it's kind of worked in my favor. I just acted what I thought those situations would be like in real life. However, my original technique did not work in my favor for this particular role. Acting like typical, loose drug dealer wasn't an issue. It was simple, really. The biggest problem I had was at the climax of my particular scene where Grace's character hits on me. When I first went over the scene, my first instinct was to of course be shocked, but at the same time be sympathetic. I was leaning more towards sympathetic. When I asked how I did, everyone told me that I hardly looked shocked. I tried again. Still wasn't surprised enough. I kept trying over and over again and I couldn't figure out why I was having such a hard time putting myself in that place. I wasn't sure if it was more a personal disconnect, that I wouldn't personally act that way in that situation therefore I couldn't put myself into that situation, or whether it's because I'm more of an introverted person and I just couldn't push myself to get to that place. Then I realized that it wasn't necessarily about the situation being so real, but more entertaining. Not that someone couldn't act in the way I did in real life, but I felt that most people would probably keep more of their true feelings to themselves. The problem I had was not being able to trust my own instincts and feelings. I found it so difficult to exaggerate the truth for some reason. A lot of the time during practice I couldn't bring myself to really go for it because I kept thinking that it wasn't the truth. It became weirdly personal in a way that I wasn't expecting.
In the end, I'm not sure how I did, mostly because I don't think while I'm acting. My brain completely shuts off and I just feel like I'm saying words. It's a strange feeling because when I'm done I don't have much recollection of what I did. I believe that the workshop helped me a lot on my acting because now I have an idea of where everything comes from and how it gets there. It's also interesting to watch others act in real life. I get more of a sense of what people are doing and why they're doing it, and it's pretty interesting. I'm not much of an actor and I'm not sure how much acting I will do in the future when it comes to plays and things of that nature, but I do know that this workshop has helped me with my acting in everyday life and that's much more than I expected to get out of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment