If you are going to be a great actor, you must be able to create vibrant imaginary worlds to live in while you act. You need more than an explanation of the character. You need an experience that gives you a reason to speak, move, struggle, listen, and respond. And you must be able to do this in front of strangers and on cue.
Many actors who came to my classes, including experienced professionals, could analyze the story and develop a character's biography. They knew about beats, actions, circumstances, and objectives. But when I asked what it meant for them to “use their imaginations,” their answers could become vague.
Those analytical skills are vital. But a list of correct answers is not yet an acting process.
What happens between understanding and experiencing?
You may understand that a character is terrified of losing someone and still have no specific way of making the relationship matter to you. You may know that a room is dangerous without having created anything in your imagination that changes the way you enter it. You may have chosen a compelling objective and find yourself pushing the same action through an entire scene.
This incomplete approach can fail you in several ways. You may have expressive inhibitions that become stronger under observation. You may lack a specific process for creating an imaginary world. Or you may understand the character's action so narrowly that you miss the conflicting needs and desires underneath it.
“Commit more” does not solve every one of those problems. An actor needs a teacher who can help identify what is missing and offer a way to work on it.
Some classrooms respond to difficulty by shaming the actor. At the other extreme, a class can become so absorbed in personal disclosure that the work loses its relationship to professional performance. There is a balance: develop expressive availability and imagination, then apply them to the demands of a script.
Actor training has a purpose. It is not psychotherapy. The student does not have to expose private experiences or manufacture distress to prove seriousness. The question is whether the training helps the actor work with greater freedom, specificity, range, and choice.
Learn tools that actually give you something to do
After an actor becomes more available, there is still a great deal of craft to learn. You need specific tools for creating the world of the play and your relationship to it.
Sensory process can help you explore a place or an object through detailed sensory questions. Imaging can give you a vivid relationship to something absent from the room. Externals can help you enter a character through movement, costume, sound, or another physical quality. Archetype Work can expand the qualities available in your voice, body, and imagination. Improvisation can turn an idea into an encounter.
These are tools to experiment with. Their usefulness depends on what the actor needs and what the material requires. One actor may need a more specific image. Another may need to stop preparing and receive the person in front of them. Another may need the circumstances clarified before any exercise will make sense.
A teacher should be able to help you distinguish among those situations. A student should gradually learn to make those distinctions independently.
Why does the character need to act?
Think about going to a job you hate. You can analyze the circumstances: rent is due, you need income, you have an obligation. But you may also experience the fear of losing your home, the thrill of imagining a different future, or the love you feel for someone who depends on you.
Perhaps you are supporting an ailing mother. You feel responsibility and affection. You may also feel exhaustion, resentment, guilt, and the longing to pursue your own life. Several things can be true at once.
Those possibilities give an actor much more to work with than a general instruction to be responsible. They can change the way you answer the phone, put on a coat, or ask someone for help. Your behavior takes place inside a particular human life.
Intellectual understanding and lived imaginative experience can inform one another. Reason is part of human behavior too. The useful question is what makes this action necessary for this person, in these circumstances, now.
Learn tools for experiencing the profound hopes, dreams, and desires of the characters you play. Let those discoveries sharpen the action and the relationship. Then the doing has somewhere to come from.
In acting as in life: who you are being and what you are experiencing interact with what you are doing.
Jason Bennett, Scene Study Isn't Enough, original article.
The exercise must reach the scene
Is acting only about creating intense emotional experiences? Of course not. And should you be focused on how you feel while you are acting? Absolutely not! No, no, no.
The work must make you more available to the story and the other actor. If you become absorbed in checking whether you have achieved a feeling, your preparation may be getting in the way. Return to what is happening between you.
Try the scene after an exercise. Did anything become more specific? Did the other actor affect you differently? Did you discover a new action or a new obstacle? Can you respond to direction and repeat what is useful without mechanically reproducing an emotion?
Those are practical questions. A powerful private exercise is only part of the work.
Keep the whole actor in the room
Scene study is essential. So are the instrument and the tools that allow the actor to inhabit the scene. You need an education that connects them.
Keep developing your imagination, your voice, your body, and your ability to recognize what is happening in you. Keep learning how a script works. Build a repertoire of tools, and test those tools in rehearsal.
Acting is not just doing, although it is doing for sure.
In acting as in life: who you are being and what you are experiencing interact with what you are doing. Train the whole relationship.
