Words and acting
August 13th 2009 03:39
When your boss, or your friends, or your spouse has a conversation with you, where's your attention? Well, of course it depends on the situation. You're probably thinking over the content of what they're saying, and thinking about the ramifications of it, and you're thinking about what to say next yourself, and you're thinking about their body language and emotions.
In public speaking courses, there's always some line about "70% of communication is body language". I'm very skeptical of that as an unqualified statement (how do you define "communication"? how do you assign percentages?), but certainly people are very sensitive to others' reactions.
So you're doing all of the "communication" side, but there's also other dimensions to your consciousness. You're fantasizing about a girl you glimpsed on the bus, or you're feeling your stomach grumble because it's nearly lunchtime, or you hear someone in the distance screaming for more photocopying paper, or you're smelling the other person's bad breath. At the same time, you're probably working on some task -- you're typing, or washing dishes, or drinking a coke. And all of this stuff going on in your consciousness will likely leave at least a trace in your behaviour -- microexpressions of distraction or pleasure or pain, etc.
Now, compare real life to acting. If they're a new actor, then they're probably thinking about the words, and trying not to stuff them up, and all their attention is on the words. Instead of countless things going through their mind, there's basically one.
This is the essence of why words a pain in the butt -- they get in the way of the acting. If you're thinking (or even worried) about the words, then your head's not in the scene. You're dead to the world. You're not behaving like a real person. In particular, you're not thinking about what's going on with your fellow actor. And the situation can be exacerbated by memorization -- you've taught yourself to go through a particular routine, you've memorized a verbal and a somatic script, and you perform this inflexibly, with no sensitivity to what happens to happen on stage.
How does the audience perceive this difference between real lines and memorized lines? Well, how do you know that a newsreader is reading and not improvising? There's lots of little cues. For example:
-- Punctuation-speech. The newsreader pays attention to punctuation to make meaning clear. We're taught to speak punctuation a certain way at school: for a comma you pause for a certain length of time, for a full stop you pause for a certain length... But real speech has a much larger stock of expressive devices -- much more tonal variation, many more pauses for different situations.
-- Regularity of speech (tone and duration). In real life, speech is irregular. Not only because you have to search around for the words to express yourself, but because saying a word affects you. Some words are emotive -- names of your friends and family, names of things sacred to you, words like "Holocaust". Other words inspire, if not emotion, then "thought-pause" -- for instance, if you're dealing with abstract concepts. At the opposite end of the scale, you have the stereotypical flat, monotonous, regular voice of a newsreader...
-- Breath-rhythm. In real life, you breathe more naturally, and allow yourself to take breaths, sometimes at inconvenient places. Whereas for memorized or rehearsed passages, frequently you've planned out where to take breaths, or, worse still, you try to get everything out in a single breath. But people will notice this.
-- Behavioral components. This is a hard thing to talk about... If you ask someone to describe how their lounge room is set up, often you can see them seeing it. When you're using your memory to talk about places and events, there are observable reactions as you relive the experience -- even for something as mundane as lounge rooms. But if you're speaking of something to which you're not connected, then it's just words, words, words.
So if there are these problems with reciting memorized lines, and if attention to words gets in the way of acting and "being in the moment", well, what's the solution? How do you get people off the lines?
I think there's lots of possible solutions, and there isn't one fix-all. Another post for another time... This is, in fact, one of the basic problems that motivated Stanislavsky -- how to keep the acting spontaneous, night after night, after so many weeks or months of rehearsal or performance.
From an actor-training point of view, you can train people to put their attention elsewhere -- for instance, on some physical activity, or on the other actor.
From a directing-rehearsals point of view, it can be useful to start with the behaviour and action (perhaps by way of improvisations -- Kazan and Stanislavsky did this), and to introduce the words at a later stage.
From an actor preparation point of view, there's countless ways to work on the lines. For instance, going through a script, and thinking about the images, or creating sense experiences to accompany the words -- sounds, smells, temperature...
From a performance point of view, giving yourself something real to occupy your attention can help -- an object in your pocket to squeeze, the taste of a drink to think about.
From a directing-on-the-spot point of view, there's tricks, like giving the actors permission to vary from the lines and to improvise, giving one actor something with which to surprise the other ("When he says that, slap him"), or simply, magically, saying the right thing to get the right response...
One trick I like (I'm told that Chekhov was also fond of this) is "Speak the subtext." What is the actor really saying? -- maybe "Where are you going?" in fact means "You're a dirty whore". Well, get the actor to say "You're a dirty whore", and to mean it, and then get them to speak the actual text as if saying the subtext.
In public speaking courses, there's always some line about "70% of communication is body language". I'm very skeptical of that as an unqualified statement (how do you define "communication"? how do you assign percentages?), but certainly people are very sensitive to others' reactions.
Macro rather than microexpressions...
***
Now, compare real life to acting. If they're a new actor, then they're probably thinking about the words, and trying not to stuff them up, and all their attention is on the words. Instead of countless things going through their mind, there's basically one.
This is the essence of why words a pain in the butt -- they get in the way of the acting. If you're thinking (or even worried) about the words, then your head's not in the scene. You're dead to the world. You're not behaving like a real person. In particular, you're not thinking about what's going on with your fellow actor. And the situation can be exacerbated by memorization -- you've taught yourself to go through a particular routine, you've memorized a verbal and a somatic script, and you perform this inflexibly, with no sensitivity to what happens to happen on stage.
***
How does the audience perceive this difference between real lines and memorized lines? Well, how do you know that a newsreader is reading and not improvising? There's lots of little cues. For example:
-- Punctuation-speech. The newsreader pays attention to punctuation to make meaning clear. We're taught to speak punctuation a certain way at school: for a comma you pause for a certain length of time, for a full stop you pause for a certain length... But real speech has a much larger stock of expressive devices -- much more tonal variation, many more pauses for different situations.
-- Regularity of speech (tone and duration). In real life, speech is irregular. Not only because you have to search around for the words to express yourself, but because saying a word affects you. Some words are emotive -- names of your friends and family, names of things sacred to you, words like "Holocaust". Other words inspire, if not emotion, then "thought-pause" -- for instance, if you're dealing with abstract concepts. At the opposite end of the scale, you have the stereotypical flat, monotonous, regular voice of a newsreader...
Songs like the Beatles' 'Across the Universe' specifically play with audience expectations regarding breaths
-- Behavioral components. This is a hard thing to talk about... If you ask someone to describe how their lounge room is set up, often you can see them seeing it. When you're using your memory to talk about places and events, there are observable reactions as you relive the experience -- even for something as mundane as lounge rooms. But if you're speaking of something to which you're not connected, then it's just words, words, words.
***
So if there are these problems with reciting memorized lines, and if attention to words gets in the way of acting and "being in the moment", well, what's the solution? How do you get people off the lines?
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (1863-1938), father of modern acting
From an actor-training point of view, you can train people to put their attention elsewhere -- for instance, on some physical activity, or on the other actor.
From a directing-rehearsals point of view, it can be useful to start with the behaviour and action (perhaps by way of improvisations -- Kazan and Stanislavsky did this), and to introduce the words at a later stage.
From an actor preparation point of view, there's countless ways to work on the lines. For instance, going through a script, and thinking about the images, or creating sense experiences to accompany the words -- sounds, smells, temperature...
From a performance point of view, giving yourself something real to occupy your attention can help -- an object in your pocket to squeeze, the taste of a drink to think about.
From a directing-on-the-spot point of view, there's tricks, like giving the actors permission to vary from the lines and to improvise, giving one actor something with which to surprise the other ("When he says that, slap him"), or simply, magically, saying the right thing to get the right response...
One trick I like (I'm told that Chekhov was also fond of this) is "Speak the subtext." What is the actor really saying? -- maybe "Where are you going?" in fact means "You're a dirty whore". Well, get the actor to say "You're a dirty whore", and to mean it, and then get them to speak the actual text as if saying the subtext.
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