The Actor's Blog

Attitutude and Profesionalism in the Theater
So much of our time as actors is spent rehersing.

I received my acceptance letter today for RADA's 8-week Acting Shakespeare Course. I'm very excited, and I look forward to exploring Shakespeare's text fully. It has been my dream for quite awhile to attend RADA, and now I am actually going to get the chance.

Lately I've been working on my walk. I've been frustrated because all of my movement teachers require different standing postures. In voice, we are told to stand with our weight forward, imaging that our spine is cushioned with air. In Tai Chi, we are told to sit down in the back of our feet, and to allow the pelvis to drop down. In movement, we are told to lengthen upward. I don't know which position is correct. All I know is that my back is killing me from experimenting with the way in which our Tai Chi teacher has told us to sit, stand, and walk. I don't know if it's a good pain or a bad pain. I wish our teachers were consistent in their teaching.

I talked today with Dwight about my language concerns. He was helpful, but I'm still not altogether comfortable. He basically said, "Most actors go their entire life without finding a balance between intellect and passion. It's easy to tip the scale too far in either direction." He insists that the servant is a character, honestly responding to what he has seen. I've scheduled an appointment with Dwight on Tuesday to actually work the monologue. These ideas are always simpler to intellectualize than put into practice, which is what I hope to do. What good is an idea that exists only in concept? He said that it might take me a very long time to find this balance. It could take a year, four years, or an entire career. I'm hoping it won't take that long, but if it does, I'm in for the long haul.

Perhaps the word that haunts my acting the most is balance. How do I find balance--balance between passion and coolness, balance between staying real and fulfilling the technical requirements of a text, and balance between using my body and stillness. I've always approached my work by starting with the language. I study the language very carefully and search for clues. Are the sentences long or short? Where must I take breaths? Which words need to be stressed? How can I serve the text without imposing myself on it? When dealing with verse text, I become even pickier with my questions. What's the tempo of this line? How can I suspend this thought? What do I have to do to hand the thoughts off to the audience? How can I make the audience understand what this means? After I've done this type of work, I will then figure out how to build a character who organically satisfies the demands of the text he is speaking. This is when objective work, animal studies, character biographies, and the like come into play for me. The problem is, how do I handle choric speeches?--speeches that are inherently unreal: speeches in which the language is the character. The messenger speech from Medea that I've been working on is particularly challenging. The character has just witnessed a truly horrible site: he has seen a woman and her father die a brutal death. However, when he reports this information to Medea (who he knows is responsible for the terror he has witnessed), immediately after having seen this horrible event, he uses very high, articulate language. The function of the character is purely choric: he is there to relay information. To play the character naturalistically doesn't make much sense to me. If this were real, there is no way he could pull himself together to say anything--let alone launch into an 80-plus-line exposition! The character needs the words to deal with the situation. The character is the words he is speaking. When I performed this in class, my language teacher told me that I went too far with the language, that I paid too close attention to the form. The problem was that I was stuck at step one of my little outlined process. All I had was language and form with no character. Since I didn't have a character, I couldn't do the organic work and then throw away my attention to the form. As a result, my performance was a bit superficial. I'm struggling trying to figure out how to deal with such a speech. How can I make such a speech believable, while acknowledging that the speech is completely unnatural? It's very tough. I've scheduled an appointment with my language teacher to discus this, and I hope he will be of some help.

In acting, we've been talking a great deal about playing action, not character. It seems simple enough. The word objective has been drilled into my head for as long as I can remember. In concept, it's simple: If you don't want something in a scene, you are going to be out of action and boring. The difficulty comes when I try to incorporate my character work. Craig often tells me that I'm playing my character and not my objective. He's right. It's so tempting for me to slip into another character's body and work so hard at maintaining the character's distinctive qualities that I forget the fundamental principal of acting. When I "play character," I become very disconnected from the actor's with whom I am sharing the stage. My focus shifts to me and away from the scene. I guess the key is that I have to make strong character choices that are derived from my character's objectives. I have to be careful about layering unnecessary physical or vocal garbage on the text. Today, after we ran Act 1 of The Devils, Craig told me that my posture was bad. I responded by saying that I was consciously making my posture bad for the character--and I was. He said it wasn't specific enough. Apparently, I just looked like an actor with bad posture instead of a character with bad posture. This is tricky for me. I have to learn how to make my acting choices organic. I've got to keep pushing for authentic work, and I'm working hard at it.

Voice work has started to shift from channel work to work emphasizing an increase in range and resonance. We've been working a great deal on loosening and isolating our lips, which allows us to carefully place our sounds high up in our head. For a warm-up, we spent a lot of time with our heads half dropped making a "MEEEEEEE" sound by bringing the top lip to the bottom lip and then pulling it away quickly. This sound is made in the bridge of the nose, so we placed our fingers on our nose bridge to feel the resonance created by this sound. We then moved onto a "MAYYYYYYY" sound. The "MAYYYYYY" sound is a very outward sound, and we traced the path along the top of our cheek bone, starting form the bridge of the nose, to create the sound. The next sound was a "MYYYYYYYY" sound. As we created this sound, we traced the path from the top of our cheekbones down around the cheek to the mouth. After practicing these high-pitched sounds individually, we combined them. After combining them, we put them together to get, "MEEEEE MEEEEE MEEEE, MAYYYY MAYYY MAYYYY, MYYYY MYYYY MYYY." I then got to put this to practical use on my Media speech. First, I said a few lines from the speech with my head forward, placing the sound high in my head. Then I said the same lines in an upright position, allowing the resonating chambers stimulated in my face to be active. It was a great exercise. My voice teacher liked my work and commented on my hitting notes that I am usually incapable of reaching. It's very easy for me to allow sounds to become caught in my throat, but this exercise helped me push the sounds forward. I always have to be careful about falling back into my habitual.

Movement work has also been a struggle for me. I'm not a dancer. For some reason, learning artificial dance choreography doesn't augur well with me. I can read a soliloquy and learn it quickly; I can learn blocking attached to the context of a text with ease, but when it comes to dance movement, I have a hard time connecting with the work. I think there are several factors that play promote this: I am shy with my body; I am uncomfortable doing movement that has no organic context; and I think too much. My teacher in a review once wrote that I often seem to be in deep thought about something else. He wasn't altogether wrong. My concentration on this type of work sometimes isn't very focused. A lot of the work we do is very physically demanding, and sometimes I succumb to the desire to collapse. I don't mean to. It just sort of happens. I need to learn how to manage dealing with pain in physical work. I'm not talking about "broken bone" pain or "bad pain" rather the pain inherent in holding a stretch for an extended period. Today we stood in a generous second position parallel, turned one foot 90 degrees and were asked to hold a lunge for a very long time. I struggled and wasn't able to hold the position as long as my instructor would have liked. I collapsed. When this happens I get angry at myself. I feel as if my body is robbing itself of the work that it needs the most. I need to work on building up endurance for this type of pain. Tai Chi has been a major help. I've learned to relax into positions and not hold on to my muscles with tension. In Tai Chi I rarely have trouble anymore holding positions for a long time. Maybe it's my attitude toward each class that is affecting my work. I need to approach my movement work with a more positive outlook. Easier said than done.

Form, passion, artistry, and business. What are these words? Form: Performance considered with regard to acknowledged criteria -- understanding the intricacies of verse speaking: rhythm, tempo, inflection, and word stress. Passion: A powerful emotion, such as love, joy, hatred, or anger -- becoming emotionally invested in a character, indulging this investment to produce authentic human feelings and reactions. Artistry: Artistic quality or craft -- choosing work that is interesting, daring, uncomfortable, unique, and relevant, not willing to pander or compromise. Business: A commercial enterprise or establishment -- being able to eat. The first three words seem to fit together nicely. Form enables an actor to be passionate in his work, thus enabling him to do work that is artistically satisfying. Then we come to the dark, scary, slimy, and downright frightening word: business. Does acting in this county have to be a commercial enterprise? There was a lecture yesterday, where the domineering orator poked fun at actors who look down on sitcom or commercial work. He basically said, "Acting is a business, not an art form." Wow. Is this true? Does America look at acting as a commercial product rather than a culturally enriching art? How has this happened? Why has this happened? Do I have to abandon artistry for food? Is this a choice that I'm going to have to make? What am I doing training, working my ass of everyday, improving my acting if all that matters is the way I part my hair and what clothes I wear? My desire is to do good work, which in a rational world one would assume would be a path leading to success. I'm disillusioned by the way acting is thought of in this country. I'm angered by the lack of government funding. Actors seem to be little more than models who have very little respect for their craft. This has to change. There has to be some sort of revolution. If only. I guess I should start working on my manifesto . . ..

Hello, blog. Nice to meet you. I plan to record my troubles, successes, and progress in you. I suppose if I'm going to write in you, I should at least tell you a bit about myself. I am pursing a BFA in theater from a conservatory. The training is rigorous, demanding, at times frustrating, and at times rewarding. I've been so annoyed with my work recently that I feel I need to have someplace to vent. Well, enough with the introduction; let's give it a go:

Breathing is easy. Without breath, there is no life. Everyone knows how to breathe. There was a time when I thought I knew how to breathe. Not anymore. My voice work is killing me. When I think about my breath, I become tense and stoic. My breathing becomes forced and my words become obscured by their own medium of communication. I always thought that dealing with language was my strongest area as an actor. I'm not so sure anymore. I'm constantly aware of 100 things that I'm doing wrong at any given moment in the day. My language teacher told me the other day that I have a very strong sensitivity toward language, but when I had to speak a text in voice class, I became nervous and gave a somewhat overdone delivery of the Medea speech that I'm working on. My voice teacher practically laughed in my face. "You really performed that one!" she said, struggling to control her laughter. I tried again, erring this time on the side of coolness. No luck. She said I was staring and lectured me on how people move their eyes when they talk. I'm conflicted. I need to find balance, but I don't know how to go about finding it. My discretion doesn't seem to be providing me with much help. When I tamed my speech down, my teacher told me that I needed to color the words more. Apparently I went over-the-top the first time and was too meek with my second delivery. I would talk to my voice teacher about my problems, but she's a very intimating woman and isn't very welcoming of inquiry. That's another thing that's holding me back. Often times in the class, I'm trying more to keep her from exploding at me than I'm trying to actually do the work well. I get nervous every time I have to speak to her. She's a ticking time bomb on the constant verge of explosion. I have to keep telling myself that I can't let these psychological problems get in my way--but my intellect is having a difficult time convincing my body of this.