Highlights from the first semester ['04] reflections of a B-CC Theater Conservatory student

     The first day of advanced acting was filled with eager, anxious young actors and actresses who believed they had some essentials of acting under their belts. I, in particular, thought I was pretty good at becoming someone else on stage—I could get up there and shed all aspects of myself and play a completely different person. But as the class evolved, we all began to discover the great paradox of acting --- that is, playing a part does not call on you to become someone else. Instead, it calls on you to discover things within yourself -- soul, spirit, intellect, and emotions, in order to present the illusion of a certain character on stage. That character is someone of your creation, something you have made by reading a script, interpreting, and carrying forth parts of yourself. Acting is not solely performing for an audience. It requires tapping into things in your own life, and fantasy, and making that connection on stage. Sigmund Freud said; “[A true artist] understands how to elaborate his day dreams, so that they lose that personal note…he knows too how to modify them sufficiently so that their origin in prohibited sources is not easily detected.”

     This first semester was eye-opening for me, and I’m sure for many of us, because it required us to break barriers we did not know existed, and essentially to look at acting in a whole new light. We began the process of becoming actors and actresses as opposed to “acting.” To become an actor is a lifelong journey—and not something that can be learned and mastered once, forever. It is an art that can always be improved, that requires the aspiring actor to effectively tap into her life and produce something meaningful for an audience. In Advanced Acting, semester one, we began this journey. My initial response was excitement to be embarking on a personal journey, but also fear at what I really had inside that could be revealed, and brought to the stage, and whether I would be able to do so.

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“...The repetition called for brutal honesty…I seemed to have this irrational fear…this was an inhibition at first, because it also restricted me from really saying the first thing that came to my mind.” –9/10/04

     In the beginning of the semester, my acting skills were hindered by my inhibitions. I wasn’t used to the idea of saying the first thing that came to mind, without censoring it. I would edit thoughts before blurting them out, and take time to think about how what I said might be perceived. I was afraid feelings might be hurt, or I would be laughed at. Even more so, it was second nature to think things through before saying them, and at the start of advanced acting this was a big obstacle I had to deal with. However, as the semester progressed, I let myself become more vulnerable, and less censored. I slowly developed into what we strived for with the Meisner repetitions—to be on stage with absolutely no inhibitions. The breakthrough of this was when performing my final repetition with Dan. On October 17th I wrote, “…I definitely felt a breakthrough because finally Dan and I were both equally fully immersed and focused on our repetition.” While on stage during that repetition I let myself become fully absorbed in my “as-if” and completely let go of thoughts of insecurity on stage. I used profanities, cried, and screamed at the top of my lungs-unfazed by the fact that people were watching…

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“I’m used to being thrown a script and working from there.” –9/5/04

Before starting advanced acting I had always gone about scenes in essentially the same way: get script, memorize lines, practice delivering lines, perform lines as practiced. It was uniform, fake, and stale. That’s why working with “Joan of Arkansas” was such an important experience. By using a combination of Mamet and Meisner’s ideas on dealing with scripted material, I was able to develop an actual method to preparing and performing my scene. Instead of practicing the same blocking and delivery of lines every time, the idea was to move and speak naturally under the given circumstances, thus producing a more genuine scene. At first I was intimidated by the idea of directing our own scenes, but I quickly grew used to it. “It’s been such a different process for me, because we’re not jumping right in by ‘pretend’ acting.” Dan and I worked off each other to produce a scene that was “in the moment” as opposed to pre-planned and boring. The reason this was “real acting” as opposed to pretend acting was simple; we were reacting as we would in our imaginary circumstances. It was necessary to still keep the basic fundamentals we learned when first working with repetition; eye contact, listening intently, and honest point of view. These basics are what kept the scene fresh, and real. Performing the scene, I finally made the connection between the exercises from earlier and performing scripted material.

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“The idea that the character doesn’t exist-that you create it, instead of it creating you-was a bit unsettling because it went against all my previous acting knowledge. But as I slowly adjust my mind to that idea, I not only realize how much easier and more logical it is, I can also see how it can be ten times more effective.” –11/5/04

The most startling thing so far in this class has been the realization of the absence of character. My previous experiences with acting had lead me to believe that you played a character—a imaginary person that you created and then became. However, acting this semester has been an epiphany — the startling realization that there is no character except the one I am able to create. This leaves room for creativity. It is liberating, but at the same time intimidating. Character is an illusion created through hypothetical situations imagined by the actor, and “externals” played by the actor. This has been the core of my change in acting method, and has helped me move away from “pretend acting.” While working with “Joan of Arkansas,” instead of creating a character, I created actions for Laura. The most effective way to play these actions was to create a hypothetical situation for me—a parallel in my life—that was specifically very different then Laura’s action. The externals I created for Laura were devised from how I thought she would act in such a situation—for example, my voice had a softer tone, because they were in a library, and Laura is well mannered. Playing the role of Laura as myself—as opposed to “Laura, the character” was a drastic change in my acting method, but an Improvement, I hope, because my actions were no longer feigned. I still remember struggling over lines that called on me to go beyond my life experience, or what I personally couldn’t imagine responding to. For example, there was one line -- “haven’t you eve been somewhere where you felt you couldn’t get out—and that the air around you was made of brick?”—that I, myself, could not imagine feeling.