You read the catalog description, now what is Acting One is really about?
It is a zoo.
You find here boys to pick up the girls, girls for modeling games, soccer and hockey mom with kinds in elementary school, retied firemen and grannies, disturbed kids of all possible genders, and the rest of human race who take for "humanity credit"!
I think that pets, especially, dogs and cats should be able to take it too!
If we want to have fun, they should be in also!
What "acting"?
By the second week half of them are gone.
Don't bather to memorized their names.
There many accidental students in this world; most of them in acting classes.
Listen, the paradox is that "late" Stanislavsky (1934-38) was very much into physical action (a la Biomechanics). But if we to look close into analysis of episodes (not scenes) and more so the beats of action, we will be force to stage every moment, to choreograph the motions. Here Method naturally becomes BM!
Method -- Apollo
In acting you need all the help you can get -- that's why I asked the Greek gods to be present in classrooom and watch you 24/7/365.
What about the nudes? Oh, this is for our inspiratuion, for all five of us, the male intructors team. By the request from the gods, you know.
8.28.03. I have to introduce a new character, a special student in my class. "I have to have weekly conferences with you, professor," he looked at me with those big strange eyes. "Why? Are you falling behind?" "Yes, sir, there are some subjects I have difficult time to comprehand." "Like what?" "Emotions..." "What kind of emotions?" "All emotions." "Be specific," I said. "You see, Mister Anatoly, I understand everything, but I do not feel it..." "Only a machine doesn't feel," I didn't like this strange conversation. "I am a machine, sir, sort of. I am an alien, sir." There was a pause. "Illegal alien?" "Yes, I am this extraterrestrial, ET... We understand everything about humans, except for the arts -- and expecially, acting."
What did I have to do? He was officially enrolled, did the homework and never missed a class. I have to get my ET through the art of theatre, I have to make an actor out of him!
Questions
Keep in mind, this is pre-acting class, an introduction to Biomechanics (Acting II) and Method (Acting III); we will return then to the subjects and topics introduced here!
Notes
Here, on webpages, expect only the notes. I wrote it for myself, to remember what I need to talk in class about. Yes, I am expending the notes, but the real texts could be done only when (if) I get to the textbook. Important for me is to decide what is the most important for acting one student to know right away. And in which order the subjects and topics must be introduced.
"The Kids" (Acting One): I suspected it; now, I know. They are young, very young. The fact: I have them straight from H.S. and I have to start there -- the transition to college and adult life.
Well, acting is this endless transition from adolesence. Theatre is a professional childhood, the duality of being an adult who preserves the freedom of childhood. Instead of forgetting play and game, we have to learn how to control it and learn how to learn from playing. This is what we usually call "creativity"...
In most cases of openness of a child is alreadybroken when I see them in my Acting One class. They are closed, insecured and trying to cut the past, the only world known to them since the birth. They were asked by society to "behave," to "grow up," to become "serious" -- they are afraid to express themselves, to try, to experiment. What a paradox! Everything we learn and know comes out of the process of trying -- and, yes, being foolish. We have to be silly, when we go for something we don't know. How else? What possibly I can gain from doing what I know? Acting is jumping into what I don't know -- this is the only way to learn something new.
Apollo, please, be a friend of Dyonisus!
Representational and Presentational (technical) acting.
"Put life into all the imagined circumstances and actions, until you have completely satified your sense of truth, and until you have awakened a sense of faith in the reality of your sensations." (An Actor Prepares)
I have to insist on "cold readings" -- no, you can't jump into "acting" without understanding the drama! Slows Reading (Nietzsche) forces actors to look at the playwright's mind, teaches them to take directions... How could you give, if you do not know how to take? If they can't take direction from the play, I, director, have no prayer -- and, of course, forget the partners on stage. Should I even bring in the public?
This is why I say -- PRE-ACTING, please!
"This ABC and grammar of acting, are, comparatively speaking, not difficult, although in the majority of cases they take years to acquire. Without them, it is impossible to live on the stage, impossible to forget one's self, impossible to throw one's self wholeheartedly into one's part and bring real life on to the boards.
This is a felicitous definition. How can anyone read fluently and feel it, when the letters and commas keep distracting his attention? It seems to me that I have gone through the elementary grammar of dramatic art, mastered it, got used to it, and that now, and only now, my real work -- mental and spiritual -- begins, only now creation, to which the true path has been opened, can begin. The main thing is to find the true path. Of course, the surest is that which leads nearest to truth, to life. But to reach it, one must know what truth and life are. There it is then, -- my task: to get to know the one and the other. In other words, one must train one's self, one must think and develop morally and give one's mind no rest. Can I command sufficiently energy and stregth and time for this? I do not know, but at any rate I am thankful that I have at least elucidated and motivated the task before me, at least I need not wander any more in darkness, but can settle down to work as far as it is in my power." Stanislavsky
Unlike Biomechanics (left), the Method Acting is the INSIDE-OUT system. Psychological realism believes that if actor can put himself in a right state of mind, the motion will come naturally, by itself.
So, what do we need to put ourselves into this "right" mood?
First, the Identification Idea: you have to believe that you are the character.
ACTOR = CHARACTER
I am Hamlet. Period.
Is it possible?
Stanislavsky thought that this total identification is not only possible, but is the nature of acting and theatre. We forget ourselves and give our mind and body to the fictitious character, which therefore becomes REAL.
The method of supplying the character with the real feelings we call "Emotional Recall" (when an actor recalling his own experience similar to the situation his hero is in). Here comes in something you perhaps heard already: Relaxation, Concentrations... Because you have to departure from your own present state of mind and transit to the character's situation and his world.
So, we add to our formula:
Actor => Character (Text) => Role
How about HAMLET = ME
Oh! That's personal. Everything about acting is personal.
Are you ready to be naked on stage? Can you reveal your pain, your sorrow, your hopes?
NB
Madness? Well, everything about art and theatre is crazy. Children are crazy too, they believe in so many unbelievable things!
4.20.04. Another semester is almost over. Main problem -- they don't know how to work on their own. Mostly we do in class. Each of them has countless hour to invest --and minutes in classroom. How to make them learn to use this reservoir of energy. How to talk about talent, when they can't get closer to themselves? How to turn this passive learning into "aggressive"? If they are about to "work" on monologue or scene, they should know how to "work on themselves"! Yes, I am looking for breakthrough, for the moment, when they get this critical mass of knowledge about theatre, when they have their own aims...
Stanislavsky: "What's false here? You're playing feeling, your own suffering, that's false. I need to see the event and how you react to that event, how you fight people -- how you react, not suffer... To take that line... is to be passive and sentimental. See everything in terms of action."
Oh, the paradoxes! We pay over 20 mils to see a movie star for a less then an hour on the screen! Why? What possibly can we get from "superman" or "spider man"? What do we pay for?
Yes, the fantasy. The return the hour of the child. When I can fly, when I can do what I can't do...
What is the world any child enters, becoming an adult?
Yes, any child wants to be an adult, to be in control of his life, day, hour, minute... In most cases the price is the death of this child, a replacement by a machine (the totally controlled entity). They look at the parents -- and they revolt, because they are terrified. Is this what life is about? Behavior is bad acting. Adults behave, not animals. Animals act, this is why pets are so quite -- we need them, they are the last link to our childhood. We envy them, they are free.
So, is the balance of the freedom and control possible? The answer is -- only when we have both, we can have freedom -- and this is the profession, and why they being paid so much. Six billion people need to know that becoming an adult doen't mean "death" -- this child in you never dies, even when you die.
Don't fool yourself, be foolish, learn how to parent this child in you...
Oh, I'm getting into theory and theology of theatre again!
To summarize, the essence of acting experience is the feeling of becoming somebody else. Providing both conscious and unconscious pleasure, this self-transformation roots that explain the antitheatrical prejudice that make individuals suspicious of it. To insist that actor merely play his everyday self instead, as the Strasbergians would have it, is an expremely dubious approach. It is, as Jonas Barish pointed out, an example of the antitheatrical prejudice, ironically coming into the theatre itself.
Strasberg himself displayed a deep suspicioun toward acting, which appeared over and over again in his teaching and writing... "If you want to be an actor, don't act. Be."
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* All scripts and texts on this site are intended for educational purposes only! * my notebook THEATRE * 2008 blog
