The late Jeremy Whelan (whose method we employ in teaching
our students) had a motto in Mosaic Acting: "Emotions are
to Actors What Colors are to Painters". The most common
mistake actors make is to fall on one side of the ditch or the other: to try to
"dig up" an emotion by focusing on an experience in the past
("Ah, but what if you never had that experience
before???) or to try to "show" the emotion on their face they think
will "look right". Instead, how about actually feeling the
emotion?
Humans have hundreds of emotions and varying degrees of each.
The amateur actor often falls prey to thinking we are limited to only
variations of "mad, sad, glad", thus, many actors performances, as
well as productions, fall flat. There is no limit to the number of colors an
artist can mix before painting each stroke of the brush on canvas, so why do
we, as actors, limit ourselves in feeling, and then showing, our emotions on
stage? Fear? Perhaps. But I believe it is lack of understanding and exploring
what and how we feel, and allowing it to be seen from every cell in our body on
stage.
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| Some of the hundreds of emotions humans experience |
Emotions have been described as discrete and consistent
responses to internal or external events which have a particular significance
for each individual person. While generally many emotions look the same on the
outside, they may not feel the same from one person to the next. So, just
because the playwright says your character feels a certain emotion
does not mean any two actors will feel that emotion the same way, nor show it
the same way either. DO the homework. Don't understand a word, or simply
want a deeper understanding? Use a thesaurus! Find out intrinsically what your
character feels, and make that feeling your own. This
is the only true way for an audience to believe as well as feel with you
during a performance, and that makes the difference between watching an actor
"act" and a watching real living, breathing person on that stage.
This in turn, will always make for a more enjoyable experience for
them as well.
.JPG) |
| An emotional moment in "The Beams Are Creaking" |
