Write at least 1 paragraph (4 sentences or more) responding to 1
of the questions below. Then write at least 1 paragraph responding to
another student's response to 1 of the questions.
Questions from Chapter 12:
1.
"You don't hear me talk much about emotions. That's because emotions aren't doable. Actions are doable, and if you do them correctly, they prompt feelings." Give an example of when an action prompted a feeling (for example, being given a rose.)
2.
"To remain in your personal past, which made you cry or gave you a past emotion, is false, because you're not now in those circumstances. You're in the play, and it's the play's circumstances that have to be done truthfully by borrowing what was physical from the past action, not the emotion." In your own words explain what Stella Adler means. Do you agree or disagree with her?
3.
"Whenever you enter or leave the stage, you go into circumstances. That means you have come from somewhere and you're going someplace. A good actor doesn't enter from the wings. Before he enters he makes a preparation. He's found a need to walk on that has nothing to do with the stage manager's cues." Give a specific example when you (as an actor in a show) did or did not enter the stage as if you had just come back from someplace else. How did this help or hurt your performance?
2.
ReplyDeleteI think she means that a lot of actors can 'make themselves cry' by thinking of their old dog Lucy dying, and she doesn't think that is a good method. She is saying that you have to be so invested and dedicated to your character that when something happens to make them cry, it's because it hurt you enough to make you cry. She wants you to be in the moment, not pausing to imagine something sad. I understand her point, but I also think that there are definitely times that drawing from your own past emotions is beneficial.
For example, in the show the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith played a young man whose father had left him at a young age. Incidentally, Smith's father was also missing in his life. In the show, Smith lived with his uncle's family. In one scene, Smith's character was (according to the script) supposed to mention his dad and sort of refuse to talk about it anymore, as a sign of emotional distress, etc. etc. etc. However, when they were filming the scene, Smith and his uncle in the show improvised. Smith started ranting, for lack of a better word, about the selfishness of his father and how unfair it was to him, and somewhere on the way, he stopped just acting, and actually became the character. He drew from his own emotions and lost control of the scene, but it became one of the most emotional and heartbreaking scenes that the comedic show ever had. Stella Adler doesn't think that acting is truthful, but I think that is a perfectly fine way to promote emotions. Honestly, I think that's the most beautiful kind of acting. Personally.
I know Kylie isn't actually here, but I want to reply to this.
DeleteThis is kind of a hard subject, I mostly agree though. It's one of those things where if you need a specific emotion, you might need inspiration for that emotion. But at the same time, if you get in touch with your past to bring out the emotion, it may come off as a different emotion than the character's emotion. Like if I needed to be sad and recalled a memory to make me sad, it's different from my character's sadness. Does that make sense? It's kind of keeping the dignity of the play, and respecting that character. Now to take experiences, (as mentioned in one of the future chapters), is okay. But if it's done to the point where the character is being molded by you and you not being molded by the character, that's when it gets a little out of hand. If people know how to get inspiration, but not change the character, then it may work. With Will's character, it's almost a little different. Mainly because (maybe it's because his character's name is the same as his), but I feel as though Will and his character could have been interchangeable throughout the series.
All in all, I do agree that a carry-on emotion from personal experience can be a beautiful thing, as long as it doesn't harm the character.
I was a little confused by that part. I remember there was a monologue I had to do in class where it would have been stronger if I started to cry so I used a past death to stir up certain emotions. That event was very different than the monologue I was performing so I was pulled in two different places and unable to perform the best monologue I could. Luckily for Will Smith his past experience and his role lined up so he was able to create an amazing performance. I believe this is what Stella is talking about.
ReplyDelete3) In Into the Woods, the step-family road in on the horse drawn carriage as they left to go to the castle. When we entered I don't think any of us were acting as if we had just left our home. We were too concerned about the carriage wheels catching on the curtain and shuffling our feet to move the carriage. I think this definitely hurt our performance to the point that maybe it wasn't worth us passing by on the stage. We didn't make our performance big enough to give it meaning in the short period of time. I feel that if I was in the audience I would have questioned what the giant horse and carriage were doing in the middle of the stage. We made it just a group of people moving from one side of the stage to the other, rather than two girls with their mother and step-father going to a castle to find a husband to wed.
ReplyDelete3) I entered as the Prince from Into the Woods at one point by fixing my attire and re-buckling my belt. I insinuated that I had just stumbled into the woods after a satisfying session of lady-flesh and was off to find my next maiden. I thought it added to the character because it helped the audience imagine the the devilish antics the prince had just pulled, pulling them deeper into the illusion of theatre.
ReplyDeletePerfect example. It looked and seemed like, to the audience, this scene had been taking place the whole time while you were off and once you returned it wasn't like it was suddenly awakened, it was just in the view of the audience. The story continues whether you're there or not, so you have to make it seem like you were to keep the fluidity. This was a perfect example of it, and a halarious one at that.
DeleteMy entrance had to be subtle. It's good to enter with purpose and direction, however a grand entrance is not always appropriate for some scenes. Therefore, I chose subtle gestures to insinuate my off stage actions without disrupting the flow of the play.
ReplyDeleteI like that you said you had to be subtle. Not every situation needs a character to come on stage and call attention to themselves. In fact, sometimes it adds to the drama or can be humorous if it is the exact opposite. As you said, you didn't want to disrupt the flow of the play and I don't think you did. You understood your character and what he was doing offstage, so you knew it only made sense for him to slip back on in front of the audience.
DeleteI also like the fact that you said you had to be subtle. When you come on stage there are times when your character needs to be noticed, and there are times when you want the audience thinking, "well hey, where did he come from, what's he gonna do here?"
Delete3. As Lucielle in "Axe of Murder" my most prominent part was when I ran into the blackbox screaming like a mad woman because I thought I saw a dead person. While it became fairly evident that I had run out of the theatre, I also feel that this entrance was rather confusing. As a character I ran out during a sequence of strange lighting, so I feel as if people didn't fully know whether I had disappeared or been murdered. Clearly though, my crazy woman scream added to the air of urgency being created towards the end of that terribly cheesy play.
ReplyDelete1. When I was upset/crying over Repunzal's death that I had witnessed, i stumbled, wept a little, made my voice crack as some may do or expect when one is crying. If I have no emotion when my love dies then I tried to desplay sadness or something with my actions. Well, that is untill I moved on oh so easily.
ReplyDeleteThis is what I've talked about in what feels like half of my comments. Feelings are meaningless, action is the key. We don't start with feelings and create action off of that, we start with action and the feelings are a guaranteed side effect. I think I mentioned this to Kylie, our body doesn't know that we're lying to it - so if you say to yourself, "I'm feeling confident, I'm the greatest, I'm not nervous at all," your body will send the hormones that inspire confidence. In acting it's the same way, you have to do the action for it to happen. The feelings don't just naturally come that way and that's the end of it. We notice the feelings because it's what we relate to, but we relate to it because we saw it come from the action and made the judgement about what the feeling of that scene is ourselves and because the feelings in that scene are the only thing we, as the audience, know how to describe. We don't say "that scene was so powerful, he touched that coffin so gently!" No, we say "that scene was so powerful, when he touched the coffin you could see the incredible sadness within." We are drawn to the action, the action is what is meaningful and significant. Show, don't tell, let the audience fill in the feeling because it just comes naturally from the action.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI would like to slightly disagree. While action can spur feeling, feeling is not meaningless, and can come without action first. If every feeling HAD TO be accompanied by action...the beginning of any scene, monologue, or play would be fairly bland until the action a character makes. I am a firm believer in action and reaction, but I think that it is vice versa this way. Feeling can cause action and action can cause feeling. There is no definite answer to what a human being reacts with. I know Stella Adler says that emotion isn't always super important, but there is no way that there is always a definite formula for what causes feeling or action.
DeleteMeant Kiley*, not Kylie. And this response was for question 1.
ReplyDelete1. Oh, man. One action that really pulled a feeling out of me is when the Baker slits my stomach open so that Little Red and Granny can just hop on out. This action led me to feel angry, agony, and defeated. As the wolf, my goal was to eat. I'm an animal, so it's instinctive that I eat something. But the undertone was within me wanting Little Red because she looks so delicious. "Delicious." Okay, let's just say it as what it was- The Wolf was a pedofile. He wanted that little girl. He worked so hard to get this girl in his stomach and he is now content and full with his life; all of a sudden, he gets ripped open and his meals come out of him, and he eventually dies. Super dynamic= super emotion. I wouldn't be happy if I had Thanksgiving dinner and then someone decided to slice all of my digested food out of me. The Wolf's meal wasn't fully digested yet, but still.
ReplyDelete3.) I suppose thinking about where a character just came from before they arrive on stage is something that helps me get into character even more extensively than just thinking about all the other information I know about a character, mainly because it allows me to utilize my imagination to visualize the character's experiences and use those experiences to fuel the performance. Like Stella Adler said, we don't want to pull emotions from places in our lives because chances are the correct level of sadness/happiness/anger etcetera will not be there. But imagining what the character was doing before they entered the frame of the audience's view or even what they were doing before that helps me draw experiences from their life and not mine. I suppose a good example would be when I played the Beast this past year, I did think quite a bit about what he does in the castle when he's not on stage and even about what the long years have been like for him. The guy can't read, he probably can't write, he's egocentric, depressed, and lives in a nasty castle where everyone is too afraid to talk to him. He probably does a lot of thinking. Negative, negative thinking. So, I did envision years of creating a self prison in which the Beast stewed over how unfortunate and unfair his situation was, years of self hatred and ridicule piled up into one tiny room with a dying rose in it. When he's offstage, I imagined him sitting in the room grappling with the foreignness of this new hope and whether or not he even deserves it. It definitely helped with the awkward parts of the play where he couldn't interact with others, and also when he exploded with anger, which had a justification of "I'm yelling at you, but I'm really mad at myself." This is also probably why Stella Adler stresses the development of a healthy imagination so much. But that was earlier in the book.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Keenan that this is why Adler works so hard to get her students to develop their imagination. I think all of points he made about the Beast being lonesome and self loathing are important to really understand because they create his motives. However I highly doubt and would hope that Keenan has not had these feelings before or been locked away in a castle for an extensive amount of time. In order to get into character he would need to be able to try and imagine that situation. Its characters like this that really prove that you can't always draw from your own experiences to get the emotions necessary.
DeleteI agree that having a healthy imagination is an important part of being an actor. Having a healthy imagination allows you to become your character more easily. It allows you to really connect with your character, as you can imagine what they've been through, what they're doing when they're not on stage, what they're thinking, and other things. As Keenan and Katie said, you cant always pull emotions from your own life and apply them to your character. You have to pull it from the character's life, and that requires using your imagination.
Delete3. In Beauty and the Beast, my character, Maurice, is travelling through the woods to an invention fair, when he gets lost and then chased by some wolves. The end of that scene has Maurice notice the Beast's Castle in the distance, and then run offstage to the castle to escape the wolves. The very next scene had him entering the Castle, trembling from the cold outside and from being afraid of the wolves, and kind of exhausted from all the running and falling he did while escaping the wolves. Because the Castle scene immediately followed the scene with the wolves, I was able to come on stage, into the castle, still having the mindset that I had just been chased through the woods by wolves and needed shelter, because that had just happened to me on stage a few short moments ago. To me, I had just come from the woods, and I was entering the castle directly from said woods.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great example. As actors, we have to be ready to be thrust into any kind of circumstance and we have to be able to make everything flow. If you had entered the castle scene like you had just went for a nice walk through the woods, the audience would have been terribly confused considering you were almost mauled to death by wolves in the previous scene. Just because the lights go out, doesn't mean what happened in the scene should be forgotten. Or that you can't react to something that happened already in the current scene.
Delete2. This idea goes with the idea that if you do it, you will feel it. Stella says you can't can't fake emotions- which, you really can't. Emotions are sort of like windows to the soul, and faking them just seems rubbish. But if you use your imagination, will yourself to do the actions like your character, and let your character take over, so to say, the emotions will come naturally. As I said in a past post, no character is 100% you unless you're playing yourself. So even though your character might be sad because her grandmother died, and your grandmother died, doesn't mean you can borrow those emotions from your past because the character's circumstances are different.
ReplyDeleteIt goes with Stella's imagination spiel. And I agree with it. Our mind is a pretty powerful tool as actors, and combing all these elements together create something very truthful that the audience can get into and enjoy.
I think the emotions are faked, but the distinction Stella Adler makes is between trying to fake them physically and faking them in your mind. Like she said, actions are doable, but emotions aren't, but she's referring to both in a physical sense. The reason we can't use our emotions on stage is because we need the character's and not ours, but what's the only way to access those emotions? By making them up or, to put it bluntly, faking them. But, again, the distinction is between faking them to the audience and faking them to ourselves. If you can convince yourself of being someone completely different (and of the emotions that fit with the environment and plot line), you sure as hell can convince the audience.
Delete1. In Othello there is a moment where Othello is finally convinced by Iago that Desdemona is cheating on him and he just loses it. Desdemona tries to comfort Othello and he responds to that by slapping her in the face. I didn’t need the script to tell me how to react this. I didn’t even need Aaron to actually hit me to know how to feel. After being hit, I recoiled and held my face trying to hold back tears. For my character, it provoked feelings of shock, horror, betrayal, and fear. For myself, just seeing Aaron move to hit me provoked feelings of fear, which were enough to help me feel like I didn’t have to act.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really good example of actions prompting emotions. The actions that Aaren did were sharp, violent, and it seems natural that they would have provoked feelings of fear or terror. Stella always says, acting is truth, etc.; along with the fact that nature is truth. So, if something is natural, I guess that also makes it truthful. I also recall that scene being really provoking and powerful. I really think that scene benefited from the truth that came with it.
Delete3) Before I enter the salon with my friend Whitney in Legally Blonde, we are supposed to be already talking so that when we enter and walk across the stage, it looks like we’re engaged in a conversation that has already been going on. Not one that just started when we stepped out of the wings. I had trouble with this at first, but I think it helped me if I actually did start to whisper to my friend, then when we walked on stage we would just mouth the words. I sometimes was more preoccupied with listening for my cue line than looking like I was having a really interesting conversation. I didn’t want to miss my cue, but I had to look totally distracted at the same time. It was difficult, but the director had us enter and reenter so many times, that I was able to multi task a lot better on stage and not look worried.
ReplyDelete