Transcripts
1. INTRODUCTION VIDEO: Acting Technique Part 2&3: Hi, I'm Martina Vagadr and I'm an actress
and acting coach. Years ago, I fell in love
with the idea of creating truthful performances
and as Meisner says, acting truthfully
reimagining circumstances. Since then, I've been
helping aspiring and established actors
master the art of authentic truthful acting. In this class, acting
technique parts two and three, relationship work and
emotional preparation, we're diving deeper into the emotional core of acting
and relationship work. You learn to deliver
powerful relationships. You learn techniques for emotional preparation
that help you access and channel your emotions truthfully
and precisely. You learn advanced character building methods
and how to work on your behavioral and
emotional instrument through the famous
MeisnsRpetition exercise. Also, importantly,
you learn how to stay safe while working with
intense emotional material. This class can be
taken on its own. However, it does build on the foundations from a previous
class acting technique, part one, the foundations
of truthful acting. If you're curious and you
haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend
starting there. Let's continue our
journey together.
2. LESSON 7 - RELATIONSHIPS: Welcome to the second
part of technique. In this part of the course, we'll talk about
more advanced tools that will take your
work to the next level. And these are relationships
and emotional preparation. By relationship work in acting, we mean that part of the work, which starts with the script analysis and goes all the way to performance that has to
do with the exploration, crafting, and execution of the relationship world or relationship network
of your character. As human beings, our experience of the world does not
happen in isolation. From the moment we're born, we are made part
of a universe of relationships that shape us for the better or for the worse. And that process continues
throughout our lives. Without relationships,
our ability to understand and process the
world becomes very cloudy, and we all know that
a great part of the pain of our contemporary
world in society arises from isolation and from the lack of solid relationship
networks around many of us, unfortunately. Same is true for characters. Characters are human beings. They are us, and like us, they are defined and determined by the
relationships around them. Relationship work, like
all character based work, starts with a script analysis. As you know by now,
our first task is to learn to read a script
objectively in order to understand the characters and
their relationships rather than projecting ourselves and our experience onto
them directly. When we investigate the relationship
between two characters, the first question should aim at differentiating
between what we call relationships
and titles. If, for instance, two
characters are colleagues, this is what I'd call a title. Since colleagues doesn't
actually give us any clue on the true nature
of this relationship, it only describes a function. What type of
colleagues are they? Are they close? Are
they best friends? Are they sworn enemies? Are they flirting
with each other or suspicious of each other? What is key for you
to be able to act the relationship is that you
understand the core of it. What is the core of
this relationship, as opposed to what the
relationship is circumstantially? Like we did with work on point
of view and on intentions, we have to be specific when we investigate the nature of
a certain relationship. I'm sure that you
clearly understand that if we stay at the level of analysis that tells us that these two people are colleagues, we truly miss the essence of the relationship and
the intricacies and layers that are actually
the juice of it and the task of the actor and what's so fun
about what we do. As per usual, the script
gives us everything that we need to know to really
understand this relationship. So if a script is well written, you do not have to invent anything or come
up with anything. You just need to be able
to read it properly, like an instruction
manual, as you know, that contains all the
necessary information. Okay, let's say that now
you have read your script, identified the relationship or relationships that
your character has with other characters, and that you're quite confident that you understand
it analytically, and maybe you also have
started connecting to it emotionally or at
an instinctive level. But what else can you do to really delve into your
relationship work? We have already discussed this. As an actor, you cannot keep too much information
in your head. If you had to think about
all the aspects that make up a specific relationship and hold them all together
at the same time, you'd end up stuck in your head, and good acting
happens in the body, most definitely
not in your head. So as you've understood
by now, in this work, we are always looking
for principles that help you synthesize the information
that you have gathered. What a relationship
is truly determined by is how you feel towards
a specific person. This creates a world of
behaviors and emotions, behavioral and emotional
responses towards them, stemming from how
you feel about them. All the information
that we have gathered from the script is crucial in helping us understand
how the character feels towards another
specific character. So you can sum all
of this information up by asking yourself Okay, given all that I know, how does my character feel about
the other character? Who are they to each other? Very much like in real life, you could understand your relationships
by asking yourself, Who is this person to me? How do I feel about them? Try your best to keep this
answer short and to the point. We want this to be a
way to bring together all the information
that you have derived from the script. Is this person a burden
that you have to bear? Are they your or die? Is this person your home or the love that you
don't think you deserve? You will see that if
you sit with any one of these very short but
evocative sentences, a relationship will form in
your mind and in your heart, and a world of behaviors
and emotions will be available to you and will
ground your performance. You can take this
a step forward and apply a principle that I
believe is very powerful, especially at the beginning
of your work to help you, most importantly, to
get out of your head. Once you have
defined the essence, the core of a certain
relationship, you can ask yourself
if there is anyone in your life towards whom you
kind of feel similarly. Say that the relationship
in the script is one where the other character feels like
a burden you have to bear. Does anyone in your life
feel like that to you? It could literally be anyone. If in the script,
the two characters are lovers at the end
of their relationship, but you have a friend or a
relative that feels like that, that feels like a
burden, then you can definitely use the seed of
that experience in your life to readily access a
world of emotions and behaviors that you can apply to your work and to
your stage partner. Picture the person from
your life and stick it on your stage partner's
face and see your actions and
reactions transform. I'll give you a very
practical example. If you are my partner in the
scene we're acting together and I visualize my actual
life partner on you, I immediately know
how I feel about you, what makes me meld, and also
what really ****** me off. Do you understand? You
may not have such a one on one correspondence
relationship in your life, but you may have someone
that evokes elements of it. Use those seeds and grow them with the information that
you have from the script. Use a mix of real
life and imagination. One thing you have
to make sure of here is that you choose someone
from your life that has an impact on you that makes you feel in a
specific way because it's that impact that
is going to make your body act and react
in a specific way. Think practically, imagine
someone made a remark on some aspect of your
physical appearance or of, you know, your career choices. I think you react very
differently if it was your mom or your boyfriend or a friend making that comment, right? This is what I mean. Relationships have the power to radically shift the
dynamic of a scene. Read scripts and screenplays. All good screenplays and plays have great relationships
to explore. So read, read as
much as you can, immerse yourself in the work of the masters and
become one yourself.
3. LESSON 7A - PRACTICE SESSION: THE POWER OF RELATIONSHIPS: This is a practical
exercise to show you how powerful relationships
are in shifting a scene. Normally, as you know, you'll be able to find all
the information you need on the nature of a
relationship in the script. In our case, I'm
going to use, again, our scene Boston employee
that, as you know, is a little bit more flexible
and open in this way to facilitate me demonstrating
these principles to you. Let's explore the
following options. Come in. These are very good. Nice work. Thank you. Can I help you with something? Yes. I wanted to talk to you about the
race we discussed in my last performance review. Ah. Yes, we discussed how we would visit the
subject in January. Well, it's January. I see. Well, I'm pretty sure we decided we'd discuss the subject once. The Clarence project
was completed. It is completed. Is
it? You're holding it. I'm holding the
first draft of it. Are there any corrections? No. It's great work. So the
project is completed, then? These are very good. Nice work. Thank you. Can I help you something? Yes, I wanted to
talk to you about the raise we discussed in
my last performance review. Oh. Yeah. We discussed
how we would visit the subject in January
and well, it's January. Let's see. I'm pretty sure we
decided we visit the subject once the Clarence
project was completed. It's completed. Is it? You're holding it. Okay. Are there any corrections? No, it's great work. Right. Then the project
is completed, no? Come in. Oh, um, these are
very good. Nice work. Thank you. Can I help you or something? Yes. I wanted to talk to you about the raise we discussed in my last performance review. Oh. Yes, we discussed how you
would visit the subject in January and
well, it's January. I see. Well, I'm pretty sure we decided we'd visit the subject once the Clarence
project was completed. It is completed. Is
it? You're holding it. Um, I'm holding the
first draft of it. Are there any corrections? No, no, it's, uh great work. Well it's complete then. No. Come in. These are very good. Nice work. Thank you. Can I help you something? Yes. I wanted to talk to you about the raise we discussed in my last
performance review. Oh, yes. We discussed I would visit
the subject in January, and Well, it's January. Let's see. I'm pretty sure we'd side visit the subject once the Clarence project
was completed. It's completed. Is it? You're holding it. I'm holding. Okay. Are there any corrections? No. It's great work. Well, then the project
is completed, no.
4. LESSON 8 - EMOTIONAL PREPARATION: I just want to take a moment to congratulate you on
your progress so far. You have already gathered a lot of information and tools that you'll soon be applying to your work if you're not already. In this class, I'll
introduce you to one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox,
emotional preparation. For brevity, we'll call
it emotional prep. Have you ever wondered
how to ground yourself in a very
strong emotion or how to tackle a highly emotional
circumstance in a script or how to deal with a character receiving
a text message, for instance, and
instantly breaking down. How can you access
truthful raw emotions and make them available for exactly when
you need them to be and with a high level
of specificity, as well? We can address all of this
through emotional prep. We will also address a valid and common concern
in the next lesson. How can you experience incredibly strong emotions
without hurting yourself? Let me first take you through emotional preparation,
and then rest assured. I'll show you that this is not a dangerous game for
you, quite the contrary. As you've understood
by now, as actors, we cannot really keep
too many details in our heads and try to
act based on them. We'd end up completely
stuck in our minds, trying to recall everything
we need to recall, to do justice to a certain scene and whatever the character
is going through. That sounds like hell to me. You'd be frozen in your
almost impossible attempt to recall everything and end up at best with a
massive headache. So even in the case of
emotional preparation, like with point of view
and relationships, we want to find a unifying fundamental principle
that will allow us to access our incredibly
generous emotional well without having to squeeze
our brains and our bodies, trying to recall this or that. Let me give you an example
straightaway so we can talk about emotional prep in
more practical terms. Let's imagine that
in your script, your character is
meeting a friend just after leaving
their mother's funeral. The script may present
us with a character, your character,
entering a coffee shop and sitting in
front of a friend. Regardless of what is going
to happen in the scene, whether you contain your
emotion or let it out, how do you ground yourself in such an emotionally
charged situation? You have just
buried your mother. This is not something you
can exactly ignore, right? The very first thing
that you need to understand is what
this circumstance means to your character. If your character had, say, an abusive, violent mother, for example, then
her passing may mean freedom and the beginning
of a new life for them. Or there might be
conflicting emotions of love and hate there, but it won't be just
sadness and grief. If on the other hand, Mm was loving and a very important part of your
character's life, her passing may mean incredible loneliness and grief for your character and a
tremendous sense of loss. So you'd need to brainstorm a little bit at
first to understand truly and viscerally what this situation means
to your character. Then I'd like you
to come up with a sentence that sums it all up very much like we did with the character's point
of view about the world. You can come up with what
we call a prep line, which similarly goes like this. This is a woman, man, person, who and then you add the core, the significance of this
event for your character. The prep line, however,
differs a little from how we formulated a
character's point of view about the world. And this is because
emotional preparation is a tool of the actor more
than it is the characters. Emotional preparation, in fact, bridges the character
and the actor. So we must find a
prep line that whilst encapsulating the
significance of a certain event
for the character, speaks directly to the actor's heart and
emotional instrument. You see the prep
line is right in the middle between you
and the character, because we do need
to find access to your emotional instrument to embody what the character
is going through. The prep line should act on you, the actor as a trigger, as a button that you push
and that plunges you directly into the correct emotional ground
you need to experience. Going back to our example, if you have discovered
that losing um causes your character grief and despair and that they feel
completely lost, how can you call this and sum this up so that
it speaks to you, the actor and helps
you experience this? What prep line should
you come up with? I think I personally
come up with something like this is a woman
who's lost her home, m being that to her, or this is a woman who's lost the ground
beneath her feet, if this is what allows
you to tap into a sense of being
lost and desperate, or this is a woman who's
lost the warmth in her life. You see, all of
this could convey what the character
is going through. And so it's now a matter of understanding
what speaks to you, the actor, and
what can take you, the actor, there to
that emotional state. If Mama, on the other
hand was abusive and losing her felt like
being finally free, then your prep line
could be something like, This is a woman who
can finally breathe. This is a woman who's finally allowed to live.
Do you understand? When it comes to
emotional preparation, you have to be a little
patient with yourself. At the beginning,
you'll likely feel the resistance of your
emotional instrument, not wanting to go
to certain places, and you feel like you're
hitting a wall. This is normal. You're literally mapping out your emotional instrument and discovering how to command and
feel all of your emotions. And this is not an easy
thing for most of us. So what can you do after you've come up with
your prep line? You literally have
to sit with it, sit down with your prep line
and allow it to impact you. The beginning, there are
things that you can do to help yourself get
in touch with it. For instance, you
can listen to music, as you recall, your prep line, or you can write, or
you can visualize an image that would pair up
well with your prep line. If I was thinking about my mum, for example, I'd be
thinking about her hands. For some reason, I feel her care and vulnerability
through her hands. You see, this is a
very personal thing. So it's a very exciting and transformative
journey through mapping out your
emotional instrument and discovering what
you're made of. You work on this, you literally increase your emotional
instruments flexibility, and you teach yourself to progressively access
emotions more readily and in a
more specific way. You see, it's not enough to cry. We're crying very different ways based on what happened to us. And if your emotion
is not specific, your storytelling
is not specific. It simply becomes an empty
display of emotions. So sit with a prep line and
spend the time that you need with it to be able to
access that emotional ground. Don't be satisfied
just touching it, go all the way in,
understand it, feel it. It's a common
misconception that if you experience an emotion too
many times, it will dry up. So it's better not to touch it too much in order to get
a fresher performance. Our emotional instrument
never dries up. When you practice and you
allow yourself to explore the depth of an emotion,
you get to know it. It becomes yours, and it will be readily available when you
get back to the script. All you have to do is keeping one thing in your
mind, the prep line, and that will prompt you and prime you for
the emotion you want to allow and experience in a certain moment of
a certain scene. Regardless of when the
emotion hits in the scene, if you have found your prep
line and have sat with it and truly connected
with the emotional state, you won't be left wondering how to access that emotion
in that moment. You will know exactly what it feels like because
you've experienced it, you've been through
it in your practice, and then it will be
a matter of doing it over and over
again of practice so that you can allow more and more emotion and
openness in your work.
5. LESSON 8A - PRACTICE SESSION: Care script - FINDING THE PREP LINE: For this exercise, we'll
use another script from a film I've made with my film production company
here in London. The script is called Care. I give you here a breakdown of the story of these
two characters, so you have enough context to understand what
they're going through. Synopsis. David is a
personal carer to Willow, a young woman who has
been diagnosed with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative
neurological disorder for which there is
currently no known cure. David strikes an
immediate friendship with Willow the
moment he meets her, and the two become
very close friends. Afraid of the inevitable future, and as her condition
painfully deteriorates, Willow has no other
option but to ask David, the only person by her side, to help her find a way to end her life when the moment comes. Torn between moral beliefs
on her sister dying, the pressure to fix
his relationship, and the desire to help Willow, David finds a way through the seemingly
impossible situation. Kate, Kate is Willow's
younger sister. Kate had always been
the rebellious one. In high school, she hung
out with the wrong crowds, but it had always been
about having fun. Other than a few
school suspensions, nothing really terrible had happened in her
rebellious teens. During that time, Kate
and Willow's relationship was not particularly
close given the age gap, but there was definitely
sisterly love. However, everything
changed when Kate witnessed the horrific accident which killed both their parents. Willow, after the accident, feeling the need to protect her younger sister,
shifted gear. She became overbearing in her
protectiveness over Kate, who finding it difficult
to cope with the loss, started abusing drugs and
making bad life decisions. Kate became increasingly
resentful of this, and there were frequent
arguments in the household. One evening, following a
particularly heated exchange, Kate stepped out of
the house Willow and she were living in
and never came back. The two sisters have
not spoken for years. David, the carer.
David is a caregiver. Following the tragic death of his sister when
he was very young, David became withdrawn and suffered from depression
for many years. More recently, David began
to change his life around. He went back to school to train as a personal carer and nurse. The trauma of witnessing
his oldest sister die from a degenerative illness had
never left him, however. Old ones and traumas began to resurface when
about a year ago, he began caring
for a young woman, Willow, who has been
diagnosed with ALS. David and Willow immediately
struck up a friendship. However, a recent desperate
plea from Willow, asking him to help her
and her life has put him in the untenable
situation where he must choose between watching
Willow die slowly or illegally helping her and her life to spare her suffering. Okay, I've given you here quite extensive notes on the
story and on the characters. Now that you have
all this knowledge, take a moment to read this
scene and let it sink in. Take a moment to note for yourself who these
characters are, what their point of view
about the world is. How could you define Kate? This is a woman who? What? Make a note of your working
hypothesis for now. Do the same for David.
This is a man who. Make a note of your working
hypothesis for him, too. Now go back to the scene. This is Kate and
David's first meeting. Do you see how emotionally
charged this scene is? I marked as a starting point
Kate's line she sent you. I've decided to assign you the scene from
this point because Kate has now understood that David is connected
to her sister, and she has been given
this massive piece of information regarding Willow's
deteriorating condition. David, too, is here with
a great emotional burden, as he is desperately trying
to find a way to help Willow. You really cannot act this scene properly without
emotional preparation. It would miss the entire
ground that is making it so layered and compelling
and not obvious. So now ask yourself, what does this situation mean emotionally for
these characters? What does it mean for Kate
to learn that her sister, with whom she has a very
conflictual relationship, but towards whom she also deeply has a lot
of love is dying. And what does it
mean for David to be here trying to
get Kate's help? Can you come up with a prep line for Kate and one for David that would allow you to hold everything that they are
feeling in this moment? Let me help you
here. Consider this. The situation,
whose significance, you have to consider for
Kate is the fact that she learns here that
her sister is dying. What does this mean for Kate? Kate feels hate and love towards
Willow at the same time. She's incredibly hurt and really struggles to see a
way forward in life. Even though she's
very angry at her, she also loves
Willow, Deep Down. Willow is a home, even
though she fled it. Willow is the person that, despite what Kate says, will never truly abandon her, and Kate Deep Down knows it. She's the only family Kate has left after the tragic
passing of her parents. And now even her
the last pillar, the last safety in Kate's
life, is about to die. Now, truly, Kate risks losing the only anchor
that she has left. How do you think
Kate would feel? Would she feel like the ground is shaking beneath her feet? Would she be desperately trying to hold on and keep
it all together? Is she resisting the
excruciating pain, pretending not to be interested? If these suggestions help you, feel free to use
them, of course. But come up with your prep
line. This is a woman who? What you need to
consider for David here is that Kate is the last
chance to help Willow. He feels that what
Willow really needs in this moment is the support and
love of her little sister, someone that could
give Willow what he David was unable
to give his sister, as he was just too
young to help her. Helping Willow the right way seems to be a way for David to also make up for what he couldn't do for his own
sister when she was sick. Do you see the implications here if he fails to help Willow? He feels he absolutely
needs to help this woman like he couldn't help
his own little sister. So what does finding
Kate mean to him? How crucial is it to convince
her to go back to Willow? He knows he cannot
get this wrong. This feels like his last chance to get things right, in fact. How could you sum this
up in a prep line? This is a man who?
Take your time and try out some
different things. In your workbook, I'm
giving you examples of what could work
here in this scene, but I'd rather you come up with your own choices in
terms of the prep line. As we have said
that the prep line really is an actor's instrument, and a wording that may speak to me may not speak to
you or vice versa. So explore and allow your emotion instrument to
follow you and open up.
6. LESSON 9 - PROTECT YOURSELF: IMAGINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND LEARNING TO LET GO: Stay safe with
strong emotions and why you have to
experience them for real. There are people who say that the actor's job is not
to experience emotions, but to make the audience
experience them. Although the audience certainly needs to experience emotions, I'll cut through this, in my opinion, nonsense
very directly. In life, we are moved when you see someone going through
something for real, not when we see someone pretending to go
through something. In fact, that second case
makes us feel manipulated, and this creates a distance
between us and that person. So, truly, I don't understand why anyone would assume that the audience would want to be manipulated in a
similar way, right? We tell stories to move people
and to connect with them. We want them to experience
something specific. We truly have one of the most beautiful
tasks in the world, but it does come
with responsibility, and one of them is
not to assume that we can fool the audience
because we will not. Also, pretending it's
a lot less fun than actually experiencing
things truthfully, which I know is the reason why you decided to purchase a course called the truthful actor
in the first place. Okay, now let's address
a real concern. How do we stay safe when working through very strong and
difficult emotions? This is a very
legitimate question. First, I want to stress that you set the boundaries
for your emotional work. Under no circumstances will
I ever ask you to delve into your trauma in order to
access any type of emotions. Know, for Meisner, acting is living truthfully under
imaginary circumstances. And what's crucial here is
the element of imagination. From a neuroscientific
standpoint, there is no difference
for a system between an event that has really occurred and one that
we imagine and feel vividly. The great example of this is
dreaming or lucid dreaming. Your body experiences
the circumstances of a dream as if they
were truly happening. So as actors, we can
absolutely act truthfully, immersing ourselves into
imaginary circumstances and experiencing powerful
emotions without calling our traumas
into the picture. This is very, very
important to me. I always say that we're interested in your intimate,
not in your personal. And what this means is that we want you and your emotions, but we don't want you to hurt yourself reliving your past. And by the way, the
audience cares about the character and not
about you anyway. We were all born with a very free and available
emotional instrument. As kids, it was very easy
for us to cry and laugh to imagine and believe in the truth of what
we had imagined. As adults, unfortunately, this becomes more difficult.
We protect ourselves. We go through
experiences that shape us and also traumatize us. And some emotions get stuck
around certain traumas. There may be an event
in your life that, for instance, got really
attached to your sense of shame. How do you command
that emotion back without hurting yourself
or going into the trauma? Think about the
traumatic experience like a volcano with a
fuming crate on top of it. Do not under any circumstances, climb the volcano
and jump into it. That is dangerous and good
luck coming out of it. If you need to
access shame and it feels very much like shame
is inside that crate, it would be enough for you
to vaguely feel the heat of that volcano for a
fraction of a second for you to feel
that seed of shame. And by the way, you won't
need to think about your Schrom at all as
it's clearly inside you. Just allow the emotion attached to it to come
through a little. Now, take that seed and expand it through
imaginary circumstances. Do not go back to the volcano. With time, you might be
able to turn back to the volcano and even look
at it or getting closer, but that is not necessary, and you decide if
you want to do it. What this process
does is that it allows you to reclaim
your emotions and disconnect them from the trauma so that you can use
them in any contexts. It's completely accidental that shame in you got
linked to that event. It could have gotten attached to or entangled with something
completely different. But it's great to know
that as an actor, you can claim the fullness of your emotional
instrument back, disentangling your emotions from the random events in your
life they got attached to. Again, this takes care a little
bit of patience, please. But with the right dedication, you can see how
this allows you to have your emotions
back so that you can use them without triggering any traumatic
response in yourself. I've done this myself,
and I keep doing it, and it has personally given me a lot of freedom and
joy as an actor. Obviously, if you
feel that there are certain areas of traumas
that are too overwhelming, please don't delve into them and seek the advice
of an expert. But again, as an actor, you don't even need to
look at them at all. Just take the seed of the
emotion that is attached to them and expand it through
imaginary circumstances. Please remember that
your well being and mental health comes before
any emotional exercise.
7. LESSON 10 - TAKING OUT THE CHARACTER: You now have the whole
toolbox point of view, intentions, relationships,
and emotional preparation. You know a lot about your character and
about your script. It's time to explore
the character yet from a different angle through the taking out the
character exercise. What you need to do now is exactly what the name of
the exercise suggests. You need to dress up
like the character, and walk out of the
door. In character. You can actually start in the comfort of your
own house, wake up, roll out of bed like
the character would, have breakfast, have a shower, read the news, how
they would do it. Move through the house like them and do what they would do. Then go out and meet the
world as your character. At the beginning, this is
a little uncomfortable. I know that. It may feel like everyone will be
able to detect that you're acting or you may feel like you look a little
weird or self conscious. This is all absolutely normal. But remember, strangers in the streets or in a shop
or in the dance class, for instance, have
no idea who you are. So they'll just take
what you present them with as you and not
really question it. Let me stress something here. Do anything that you
feel comfortable doing, but do not put yourself
in trouble, please. This is not the reason why we're doing this
exercise at all. It's not a matter of being
extreme in what you do. It's a matter of
inhabiting the character, embodying it so that your body learns how to behave in
this new point of view, and it becomes free in it. It's a very powerful tool
because the more you do it, the less you have
to think about it. This is the moment
when all the work on the point of view
that you've done fully sinks in the body and you feel what it means
to be someone else, not think but feel. Remember what we said? Becoming someone else means knowing what it feels
like to be them. The point of view
is in your body. It's for your body and
should speak to it directly. I've done this countless times, and it's now a little
less uncomfortable to take my characters out.
But don't get me wrong. I always get a little nervous whenever I take out
a new character, especially if they
really display behaviors that are quite outside
of my habitual ones. But as soon as I break
the ice with it, it's a lot of fun and it makes my ownership of the character
incredibly more powerful.
8. LESSON 11 - HOW CAN I WORK ON MY EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIOURAL INSTRUMENT? - THE REPETITION EXERCISE: I have waited till
the end to cover the very famous
repetition exercise, which is at the core at the mesna technique,
as you may know. Aside from the fact that it's not as immediate to
teach it online, the truth is that you
can really take care of your craft and the work
you need to do without it. However, I decided to
introduce you to it in case you had an acting partner that wants to
explore it with you, and in this case, repetition can be a fantastic
tool to work through resistances and make your emotional and behavioral
instrument more flexible. Repetition exercise
aims at teaching the actor to really
inhabit the moment with no judgment and to
be able to clearly see what's in front of them
and listen to their partner, creating a truthful,
emotional journey together. If down well repetition
shows you resistances and gives you the opportunity to work through them
with your partner. Remember, the person who's in front of you is
holding the mirror, so to speak, and at
any given moment, they see you better
than you see yourself. Exercise for two actors. Actor A and Actor B
stand across each other. Actor A starts by saying the first thing that
they see about Actor B. Start by naming something very
simple, physical evidence. For instance, you
have a red shirt. Actor B repeats, I
have a red shirt. Then actor A again,
you have a red shirt. Keep repeating
mechanically until you notice something else that
catches your attention, and then you can mention that. Maybe the other actor blinked and so you
notice their eyes. So go ahead and
say, you have eyes. Do not pre empty this. I want the repetition here to be very mechanical,
nothing attached to it. No emotional involvement
nor judgment. The purpose of this first
step is to teach you the difference
between truly seeing what's in front of
you versus judging. We tend to make assumptions and judge almost everything
that we see. Not necessarily in a bad way, but we see and categorize based on what we like and don't
like and so forth. We may notice someone's eyes, for example, and come
up with an assessment, which is the same thing
of a judgment and has to do with how
we perceive them, beautiful, ugly, tired,
excited, et cetera. The moment that we
make a judgment, we're outside of the present
and back into ourselves, into our heads, into our worlds. I want you to stay outside
of yourself and open. I want you to see
without judging. You can understand that if you judge physical tangible aspects, you will get
incredibly judgmental or defensive when we
talk about emotions. It seems like an awkward
first step for this exercise, but you will see how challenging
it is to just see and not decide what you want to
see instead, not judging. Any of the two actors
can change the call, but don't change
the call too often. Change it only when you truly
notice something different, not when your head
lies to you and tells you that if you don't
change it, it will be boring. This first exercise,
by anchoring you in your senses and not in your
judgments in your heads, aims at taking you outside of your head and pushing
you back into your body and in
the present moment where an actor should always be. Boring does not come from repeating the same call
for 10 minutes straight. It comes from you being
absent in your head. The formula of
repetition is always, I. So you have red T shirt,
I have a red t shirt. You have a red t shirt,
I have red T shirt. Whoever changes makes the new
care has to say something. Whomever receives it says I and will repeat what
was said to them. Repetition we'll see
it in a moment is about affecting and
being affected. Like in a normal conversation, except what repetition
does is it strips back the language so we
cannot hide behind it, and we're forced to
work with our emotions and behaviors instead,
training them. As humans, we always
use language to hide. If today you were upset for some reason and I asked
you, how are you? You'd likely respond
through language. It's all good? We've discussed
this in our lessons. Repetition takes away the layer that allows us to hide language, and it forces us to work with
our emotions and behaviors. Oce you and your partner feel like you have
understood and mastered this mechanical
exchange, let's step things up. Actor A now calls what
they see about actor B. But this time, I want it to be about their behavior
or emotional state. Examples of calls
are you're sad, you're nervous or you're tense, you're protecting yourself
or you're relaxed. The other actor responds
repeating the same call, and you continue repeating, like in the previous step, mechanically, keep
this mechanical. No emotions involved until you feel comfortable and grounded in calling and seeing emotions and behaviors instead
of physical things. It's now time to
step things up to the real repetition exercise. Stand in front of each other. Any of you can start
with the call. Call what you see in the other person,
emotional behavior. Now, I want both the person who makes the call and the one that receives it to have
a point of view about it. What I mean by this is that
if actor A calls on Actor B, you're sad, I want to see how actor A feels about the
fact that Actor B is sad. How does it make you feel? How does what you
see affect you? Remember, this is a fundamental
exercise for acting. So the point here
is to affect and be affected to truly create a communication
stripping language back. How do you feel about what
you see? Does it upset you? Do you feel like
comforting them? Does it annoy you? Whatever
you feel, show it. So if, for instance,
I'm actor A, and I see that actor B sad, depending on how I feel
in the moment about it, I could say, You're sad. You're sad. You're sad. I may be pained by it, or I may be annoyed, impatient about it,
or worried about it. Be true to what you feel in
the moment and remember, this is not a judgment
on the other person. It's simply the truth of how you feel in a specific moment. Now it's Actor B's
turn to respond. If Actor A called you're sad, you'd repeat the call
and respond I'm sad. But how does that affect you? If you feel like you're
not sad, respond. I'm sad. If you feel that you are,
you may respond. I am sad. If it makes you angry, you may respond. I am sad. If you don't feel sad, challenge the call, but don't change it. Don't say I'm not sad. Rather say I'm sad. You see, the point
of this is to train your emotional and
behavioral instrument and to show emotions
and behaviors. I'm sad, I'm challenging. I'm disagreeing, right? If you're lazy and
say not I'm not sad, you've just killed the entire purpose of the exercise here and hidden again
behind language. Like previously, don't be in
a rush to change the call. Only change it and any of the two actors can do it when you truly notice
something different. Begin trying this exercise for 5 minutes and see if
you can stay present if any resistance
comes up when you start expressing
behavior and emotion. Like with everything, it's
just a matter of practice and you'll soon be able to
create a beautiful, emotional roller coaster
with your partner.
9. Lesson 12 - HOW CAN I WORK ON MY EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIOURAL INSTRUMENT SOLO?: Another very powerful way
to work effectively on your emotional and behavioral instrument if
you're on your own. And I would recommend
this in any case, because it's incredibly
useful to bring awareness to what you actually do
is to record yourself. Use a line from
any script or use the lines of the scripts that
we have analyzed together. PressRc on your phone or camera. Say your intention first a few times until you feel it
has sunk into your body, and then say the line
with that intention. For instance, if my line is, I love you and my intention is, I'm guilt tripping you, the
exercise goes like this. I'm Gil tripping you.
I'm Gil tripping you. I'm Gil tripping
you. I love you. Very different than
having as an intention, something like I'm getting you to see that you
mean the world to me. I'm getting you to see that
you mean the world to me. I'm getting you to
see that you mean the world to me. I love you. Now, check your video back. Are you doing the
right intentions? Are you doing what
you set out to do, or is there a discrepancy
between what you thought you were doing and
what you're actually doing? This is pretty normal
at the beginning. We may think that we
are doing something, but the truth is
that it really looks like something else,
something pretty different. And this is the origin of all misunderstandings
between people. We may think that
we're being direct, but actually it looks more like we're attacking
the other person. Think about a recent
argument with a family member or your
partner, for example. There is a number of reasons
for this phenomenon, and primarily how we're
socialized and how we're taught not to
express some emotions. So we end up expressing a socially acceptable
version of them. However, as actors, we need
to gain awareness of this and really make sure that what we do is what we set out to do, or we'd miss the character. So if what comes out on camera doesn't look like
what you set out to do, make changes and try again. Keep working on this, and
you'll see that you'll be progressively realigning your emotional and
behavioral instrument, and you'll be a lot more satisfied with
your performances. And they will begin look like
what you had envisioned. Don't give up, enjoy
the process, critical. Always aim at improving, but also be forgiving and
kind to yourself as that's the necessary attitude alongside determination to
make any progress. Do not ever, ever judge
yourself in this.
Martina Avogadri
