"Emotions are to Actors What Colors are to Painters"

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.

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.

An emotional moment in "The Beams Are Creaking"