by Alex Kuznetsov
(research reminders, authenticity enrichers,
reality gatherers)
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Acting as a
profession includes playwright, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, psychologist,
artist, musician, dancer, mime, magician, director, photographer, healer etc.
What works for one, might not for another one.
Acting like any other art is about finding YOUR OWN solution to task and problems you are working on.
1. Actor/Hollywood type. What type in Hollywood do I fit? ? Social type, psychological, physical, etc. - rebellion lead, romantic lead, gangster, simpleton, villain, professor, policeman, student, lawyer, truck driver, etc. From now on you have to learn to understand your place in the whole picture. Who you are, what is your purpose and what you are expected to bring to the whole picture?
2. Awareness of Type casting. What are your strong and weak sides, advantages and disadvantages
3. Awareness of your strong and weak sides as a performer/actor. Work on accents, voices, and plastic movements. Where you feel better in comedy, drama?
4. Observations and imitation. Freedom comes from knowing who you are, what you do and how you do it. Observe yourself and the world around you every second of your life. Find analogue of every character you are preparing in real life. Work on developing the best qualities of a type that fit you the best: (emotional, social, psychological, presence, physical, voice, manners, clothing, hair etc.) How to incorporate all your observations into creating a powerful colorful character. Who is your favorite actor? What do you love about him? What do you think and feel you can learn from him? Observe the characters around you. They are everywhere –people, animals, subjects, insects, buildings, etc. Be specific as much as you can. There is no general policeman or waiter in general. More details the better.
The goal of the class is to concentrate students’ attention on finding their very own way of expressing themselves: creating characters, conflicts, emotions, atmospheres, images, metaphors etc. BEING EXTREMELY SELECTIVE. ("The talent is in the choices." Robert De Niro).
Metaphorically speaking actors instead of developing their own methods of expressing their ideas and feelings (due to the lack of time and process of learning and education) are trying to put on somebody else’s hats and coats and use them as their own without any adaptation.
Class is for risk, expanding, exploring, learning…and then solidifying all the tools and experiences together. Creating a personal laboratory.
Most of our lives we are scared to allow ourselves to stop and experience the moment. We are afraid to be late, to get a bad grade, because everybody else is ahead of us, we are afraid to disappoint our professors, parents, girlfriend or boyfriend, etc.
This class is to be a place to be truly yourself and experience things the way you want.
It does not mean that the major focus of this class is the PROCESS. Process is very important. But lets concentrate on the result of being in the process and freeing ourselves from somebody else’s needs and expectations and focus on ours. In this class we don’t want to please nobody anymore, no parents, no teachers, no policeman, no government, NOBODY but YOURSELF. It’s working on developing the artist in you and being happy to create and be yourself. If you are not accepted in the market for a year or two, it won’t discourage you, because you have your necessary feedback from yourself.
There is only one person in the world who knows how talented you are. It is YOU. Only you know your criteria of art, performance, emotional life, commitment and involvement in creating something totally new and marked with your individuality. Think of WHAT NEW AND UNKNOWN YOU CAN BRING TO THE WORLD? WHAT'S YOUR PERSONAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE HUMANITY?
Moment to moment, be in the space, change of attitude to space and people, energy, centers, psychological gestures.
TURN OFF INTELLECTUAL THINKING (ALL THE THEORIES AND SYSTEMS) AND USE EMOTIONAL/IMAGINARY THINKING.
The energy we are releasing to other is creativity, encouragement, and trust.
Trust is the most important because the main focus of the class is to reveal ourselves, to open up, to take all the calluses off and become emotionally and spiritually naked. We don’t afraid to be funny, childish, silly, inappropriate, embarrassing, criticized, failure, ridiculous, or helpless. We are exploring ourselves for the sake of unveiling enormous energy and memory and there is no shame to explore. In order to learn who, what, how and why you are, the way you are. (Michael Douglas, actor’s studio). We are here to think positive and create only positive energy and ideas.
-We learn by failing. Failure is nothing more than the teacher who gives us the chance to learn from our own experiences.
-We ourselves are creations. We, in turn, are meant to continue Creativity by being Creative ourselves.
-When we open ourselves to creativity, we open ourselves to Life’s creativity within us and our Lives.
This class is a
special place of safety, a place of growth.
Purpose of every
artist (writer, director, actor) to tell a story.
Every good story has certain ingredients. 7 are a must:
All these exercises are developed to re-experience life in all its forms. All theories should only work in one direction – to experience world. Only experience can be conveyed to the audience.
Warming up.
1. Physical body (Every exercise with body starts with your imagination. It is very important not just move in certain way but create in your mind atmosphere and circumstances that will force your to move this very way. Audience senses your atmosphere and thus accepts your move as a proper one.
a. Dance with all body, hands, legs, head etc. Expressing yourself and the song. Dance with happy, angry, sad, challenging, etc. Fantasy is the most important.
b. Balloon with entire body
c. Floating
d. Moving to certain point in most unusual way
e. Animals, walking on the moon, hurricane, frozen, ice, robot, conveyor, fill the room with your presence, with your body, shrink to the mouse
f. Working with the subject (hat, scarf, fan, chair, hair, etc)
2. Voice, Sound
a. Different registers, breathing (Strelnikova)
Talking to each other using a sentence (tongue twisters) using list of actions. Love, questions, hate, inviting to date, to have sex, let’s have a drink, get out of here, frustration
b. Create the list of characters: people, animals, man-made-objects and play with their imaginary voices. Try to find a specific voice, articulation, rhythm, and intonations of all of them. Play imitating commercial announcer, sport reporter, bum, politician, parent, homeless, etc.
c. Read the books with a lot of dialogues out loud with all your voices
3. Imitating
Just put the camera in your imagination in front of yourself and capture your own life on film. Whatever you do, talk, listen, eat, think, every second of your life. And after that try to understand where your emotions and reaction, thoughts and attitudes are similar to the character and where they are different. AND OF CAUSE WATCH OTHER PEOPLE WITH THE SAME CAMERA. COLLECT THE IMAGES, EMOTIONS, AND REACTIONS. Create your own library.
b.
Sound them,
drum them, gesture them.
c.
Subjects.
Imitate sounds of the world around you
d.
Imagination.
Practice thinking with your IMAGINATION, not only with your INTELLECT !!!!!!
Improvisations in any possible way.
e.
Fearless as a
lion, scared as a mouse, having a light movement of a spider, nervous as a cat,
lumbering as a bear, majestic as an ostrich, moving with the insinuating
composure of a tiger, light as a gazelle, sly as a fox, lazy as a whale,
possessed with the energetic playfulness of a dolphin or as fleeting as a
hummingbird or fly.
Actor’s job is to reanimate the author’s writing. In order to do it, actor should dig in the writing and find out all the information the writer was trying to put in this scene. Actor should be able to uncover every bit using all tools he/she has and understand the meaning and directions the writer is leading. All these analysis are to help you navigate your performance. To get the job one needs not only give a good performance but give remarkable performance and to stand out from the crowd and being able to take the directions from director. For example, when director/casting director ask you to speed it up, you should know how to do it.
1. Analytical, Logical. The right course of creativeness operates from the text to the mind (those first readings of the role and the absorbing of what the author presents); from the mind to the proposed circumstances (the gleaning of the facts and what they imply to us about the character); and from the proposed circumstances to the subtext, from the subtext to feeling (emotions), from emotions to the objective/desire/will and then to action. Simultaneously your mind and spirit produce all sorts of images – physical, emotional, musical, speech, movements, etc.
2. Emotional. Everything we do is connected with our emotional life. Acting is about being emotionally naked, open to life, event, and people. Words/ Sounds may be reflected in the mirror of our emotional life. Sometimes they are reflected in direct/straight way, some times – indirectly. That is where SUBTEXT plays very important part.
3. Imagery, image analysis (These analysis gives the artist/actor most fully completed and whole oriented image to copy) That’s why if you have fully developed image of the character logic of the character and the scene will come by itself. Michael Chekhov approach.
4. Montage, structure, form or composition. After reading the scene (play, script) is very important to see the whole picture and get a sense of composition or montage, how author creates and develops the story. The very true actor’s target and point of focus is audience’s perception, its intellectual and emotional/sensible spheres. Everything is connected and everything is relative and consists of hieroglyphs. It means there is no absolute thing. Everything is considered only in the composition with others. Beats and blocking. It is very important to remember that ACTING IS ACTUALLY REACTING to different stimuli and when and how actor react to them. Listening and sensing are very important skills.
5. What do you want to communicate to the audience? And what would it make an Oscar performance? Spice your performance to make it outstanding.
6. Style, genre, author.
7. Theater is a very raw form of art. Every character of the play must be either visible, audible or tactile.
1. Event. Life is a chain of events. In real life everything is connected to each other. That is why it is very important to bring pre-event to the scene. Events (list of events-before, now, after). Events. What happened before (back life or prior-event), happens now in the scene and what are consequences (how it effects everybody). Every biography or news on TV, newspapers, phone conversations are about the events. List two questions or first statements: who and what is happening. Acting is about recreating the life of the human being in relative environment. So first major goal of an actor is to recreate the event, then who is involved and how.
2. Character. Who (the character) does What (the overall scripted event), When (in what period of history, at what time of year, month, day and hour), Where (in what country, state or province, region, town, location), Why (the apparent reasons for doing what is done) and How (the manner of doing).
3. While watching other actors or directors one should pay attention on how he/she creates the image, character, emotion, atmosphere in a very specific way.
4. Relationship. Every story is about some change, it contains some dynamics in it. What is a relationship in the scene and how it changes? Describe it. Is it mother and son, lovers, husband and wife, businessmen, etc.
5. Control. Who is in control of this part of the scene and where it changes?
6. Beats. The things that happen to the character, and the actions he/she takes in response. Also the thoughts and feelings, which dominate and cause those actions, change from moment to moment. They help to focus the actor’s and the character’s attention and feelings on the most important and most productive concerns in all individual beats.
Scene analysis
1. Life Objectives, Super Objective. Find Character’s life objectives and super objective. What’s character’s ultimate goal in this scene and his entire life.
2. Conflict. THE CORE OF ANY FORM OF ART IS A CONFLICT. What is the conflict, between what and whom, and how it is reflected in characters’ behavior, mez-en-scene, rhythm, etc.
3. Sing it and gesture it. To help to understand the scene emotionally sing the scene with sounds, no words. Give an emotional sound of character’s state in the beginning of the scene, during event, and after the event.
4. Emotional graphic. It is very useful to use the event in the scene. Describe in your words what is happening in the scene. Start with the opposite to event.
5. After creating emotional graph find the actions that reflect best these emotions. (Having a drink, cracking the knuckles, cigarette, enfold the head, bite the nails, eating etc)
6. What kinds of your very own emotions are produced by this scene (characters or events, atmosphere)? Be as specific and as deep as possible. Bring to the stage as much as you can.
7. Find the words, phrase, sound, gesture or something you love and enjoy very much and taste it, develop it and play with it.
8. Feeling of the whole
1. What images are produced while reading the scene – people, animals, objects, form, etc. Music of the scene, rhythm, color of the scene
2. Feeling of the scene, atmosphere, style, genre, etc.
3. Give to your speech a psychological gesture and action. Work with your lines to produce the action verb, images, feelings, and emotions.
Approaches
Internal and external. Find yourself in the character and the character in yourself.
1. Way of thinking. Logic, Subtext, background, upbringing, social class, education etc.
Character Creating. Details.
Remember every character in the world history is alive inside you, in your conscience or subconscience. You just need to open the curtain and develop them at your need. Where am I alike the character and where am I different?
It is absolutely necessary to use one own body, emotions, reaction, will, etc to create a character. Don’t pain the character outside of yourself, pain it inside.
So it is always safe to start with Stanislavski’s magic IF, “What would I do and how I would behave if I was in this situation?”
Second step is Vakhtangov formula: “What would make me feel and behave as the character does?”
Vakhtangov advanced Stanislavski system by introducing style, form, expressiveness (individual point of view).
Characterization is both a process and a product. It is a process in the sense that developing a character begins long before the actor sets foot on the stage and continues through the final curtain and even when audience goes home and digest and talk about the show. A character in a play, like each of us, is constantly growing and changing in response to his/her experiences-the people, places, things, and situations with which he/she comes in contact.
Characterization is a product in the sense that the character is essentially complete and fully formed by the time the audience first sees the character. What remains to be seen is the moment-to-moment development of the character in relation to the development of the play.
Never play a
result only.
1. Specific
personality traits which makes us individuals. They stem from the background of
our lives: social class, education, spirituality, family and personal
relationships. These influences uniquely determine how we see, hear, and
respond to life.
2. What is the character’s purpose for story development.
3. What is the super objective or global attitude/thought/feeling of the character that spice the rest of the actions and objectives?
4. Center of the character, his dominant. What is the event and what is happening to the characters during a scene?
5. Building the conflict through mez-en-scene.
6. Where character is “positive driven” and where is “negative”
7. What is the neurosis-provoking moment (open or hidden)
8. Inner and outer obstacles.
9. Behavior patterns
10. Survival skills and techniques
11. Conditioned response, emotional or psychological reflexes. Character reflexology.
12. Separate inner life and outer life. If you don’t have any words does not mean that you don’t do or feel anything. Inner life can be very intense. Inner torments of overwhelming struggle. Where unhappiness turns into pain, doubts or confusion into self-torture or self-loathing, happiness into anguished ecstasy, shame into suicidal self-abasement, anger into murderous hate and resentment into the rumbling of an earthquake.
13. Props that can help you to open and display the character or create the 3D image
14. Kinds of activities, props, schedules, commonly used terms, practical wardrobe, preoccupations, daily “automatic role behavior” items, inner language and thoughts
15. What’s the fixation of the character.
16. What is your NPM. (Neurosis-Provoking Moment). Where is your irritability (раздражительные зоны), erogenous
17. Define the emotional, imagery goal you want to reach in the certain parts of the scene.
18. Your attitude toward the world, another character, props etc.
19. Your social, emotional characteristics (masks, behavior, patterns etc) of the character. Your personal investment.
20. Opposites.
21. Character Sounds, interjections (eh-he-he, oh-ho-ho), coughing, laughing, etc.)
22. Gestures (calm hair, rubbing nose etc)
23. Motivations. Objectives. What motivates human beings are their dreams. Dreams of love, dreams of fulfillment, dreams of success, dreams of beauty and power. It’s what we wish would happen that makes us do everything we do.
24. Commercial choices. Love, sex and humor. To make character commercial is to make him/her recognizable. To make it commercial is to make it as much personal as possible. Sense of ease, coolness.
Character analysis
Guideposts (not in the order of importance because it is individual)
1. Rate
2. Inflection
3. Pitch
4. Dynamics
5. Intonation
1. Relaxation
2. Concentration
3. Imagination
4. Improvisation
Viewpoints, perceptual landscape of the audience, and the inner fields of focus of the performer.
1. Time
2. Space
3. Shape
4. Movement
5. Story
6. Emotion
7. Rhythm
8. Color
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
White: Purity, unity, high spiritual devotion, ecstasy
Purple: Power, greatness, honor, respect
Violet: Holiness, humility, reverence, sublimity, beauty, high spirituality, healing, art, mysticism
Blue: Truth, peace, faith, religious worship, meditation, loyalty
Indigo: Intelligence, integrity, mystery, deep concentration, self-understanding
Yellow: Intellectual search, self discipline, desire for knowledge, laughter, optimistic
Gold: High spiritual calmness
Pink: Sympathy, compassion, love, gentleness, sincerity, kindness, refinement
Orange: Intelligence, learning, assurance, self-confidence, balance
Red: Strength, respect, power, vitality, love, health
Green: Energy, hope, balance, youth, health, success, pride
Lavender: High spirituality
===
Brown: Avarice
Black: Depraved
Dark Green: Jealousy
Olive: Deceit
Dark Yellow: Suspicion
Cloudy Red: Greed
Scarlet: Anger
Crimson:
Magenta
Umber
Silver
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. Relaxation. I am breathing. Feel every part of my body and my body is not an obstacle to my mind, in harmony with my mind, imagination. My voice is relaxed, deep and has full range. (Breathing, mouth, tongue and physical exercises).
1. Awareness and observation. I see people and talk to people and I hear them. Communicating. If I am not able to communicate to people in my character before the audition forget your character and loose it completely. Then do the audition “I” in given circumstances.
2. Spontaneity. I employ and incorporate everything in the room, what happened to me yesterday, today, at the moment of the audition as the things that help me not blocking me. The more life and emotional, social, everyday life baggage I bring to the audition the better.
3. Concentration. I remember what I am doing here, I remember my goals, objectives, conflicts, lines, characterization etc
4. Humor and Mischief. Keep sense of humor no matter what. Mischief is very important.
5. Process, growth and development. Enjoy every moment of it and have fun because it is a process, not result, and every time I go out there I have my chance, my audience, my chance to practice and test what I planned, want and worked on
6. Child. Forget everything and just go for experience you enjoy.
1. Your personality. What the auditors do need from a reading is a full experience of who you are and what you can do. Plus an opening night performance.
2. Connection. Actor’s job is to show how much you are connected to the character’s feelings and thoughts. Character is just a different combination of your own feelings and thoughts.
3. Love. Don’t feel anxious and don’t take auditors as your enemies. Love whatever you doing. Enjoy it. Love for whom you doing it. Share your love, knowledge, imagination, talent, creativity and joy with them.
4. Awareness and observation. I know everything I need to know to do my best performance I can at that particular moment. I incorporate everything around me in time and space to give best colorful performance. I look and see I listen and hear. I establish very personal contact with the auditors and very personal impression on them.
5. Self-confidence. If you got the audition it means they like you already. They trust you as you look at the picture. They are willing to cooperate with you. They willing to stop this tiresome process of seeing hundreds of people and hire YOU. I am looking good and I feel good. And this is going to be very good performance. I am right for the part- I feel it, I know how to play it.
6. First impression. Know that fist impression is the strongest. After long tiresome day auditors are exhausted to see the boring and untalented people. Think of cliché that might be dominating in the readings and create very different. Create very personal entrance, very personal story relating to the character and the story in the script.
7. Be yourself. Use the character to open you, not to close you and hide you.
8. Pace. Whatever you do, drama or comedy PACE is very important. Especially for TV. So all your stakes and choices should be to make your reading fast and bouncy.
9. Choices. Keep in mind that casting director is seeing hundreds of people and is tired. Make your performance from your very entrance remarkable and memorable. Bring in all your energy and talent with your first step. If the scene does not give too much to play with spark your imagination/personality/observations. You need to find something that inspire you and mirror your talent. Incorporate everything you can to make your performance memorable even things that are not in the scene. Make your stakes high. (Does not mean yelling and screaming.) Make is as personal as you can. Put your own emotions and attitude for the character you are playing. What you would like this character to be, but based on your own observations and experiences. Don’t ask them what they want – Show them what you’ve got (as many versions as you can). If they know what they want they will direct you. (Most of the time CDs don’t know what and who they are looking for, that’s why they are having auditions. So bring your talent and creativity). Play “negative driven” or weak, fragile character instead of “positive” one.
10. Spontaneity and improvisation. Unpredictability in choices is very important.
11. Develop your own acting approach to a role. Like every artist solve a problem in his/her own way.
1. Acting is a process. Don’t play results, play the process of getting from one point to another.
2. Every character is a problem personality character. What’s his/her problem? What are his/her insecurities, self doubts, fears, guilts … Flounder in the muck of their problems. Again and again acting is a process. If you playing lead-hero, it is about process of being hero, dealing with the problem inside and outside, overcoming all the above, coping with the darkest side of life. What are the driving forces to become the positive character, hero, or anything else? Create the distance and graph from one point to another.
3. Take your stakes as high as you can. It does not mean yelling all the time. It means create certain circumstances that will force your personality (character) to be extremely active, emotional, creative, etc.
4. Be as specific as possible in everything you do. There is policeman in general, no thief in general. Know everything about what, how.
Specifics
1. Acting is about experiencing real things in real time. The audience needs to believe it is really happening to the actor. One says that actors are like children, not because they make grimaces, but because children are constantly experiencing things, they are not theorizing, they lack of experience and that is why they are so open to the world. They love experiences; no one can stop them from touching, grabbing, biting, stealing, lying etc. They need experience in order to grow. Actor should be a child on the set/stage. No theories, no any knowledge-just pure exploration and need to long the real time physical, emotional, psychological, social experiences. What is the main idea behind any communication? It is sharing the experience with people. It might be thought, emotion, atmosphere, image, etc. AUDIENCE does not pay money to listen to your comments or annotation. They are paying money to experience things they cannot do with any other. So the Goal is to make audience experience what you want them to with a sense of immediacy and unpredictability. We learn through experience and experiencing. Talent is simply great individual capacity for experiencing.
2. Acting is about sharing. Share your life through character, tell the story.
3. Acting is about being honest and sincere. If you cannot make it then fake it.
4. Acting is reacting and being vulnerable and emotionally naked to the world.
5. Acting is about being specific. All our reactions to the world should get a very specific form, color, emotion, and psychological gesture.
6. Put the mask to open yourself to the character/world/(explore yourself), not hide behind the character.
7. Audience pays money to see not only what you become because of the character but also what character becomes because of you.
8. Acting is not only about being equipped with all kind of tools and techniques but also about choices you make as an artist. When you play a character what colors you choose to use in order to portray him/her. What is your particular style, taste, cultural preferences, etc. Mimi Leder on the set of THE BEAST mentioned that European actors are not much concerned about looking good and star image but more focused on inner character life. Most of the time Europeans have more survival experiences, drama sense, more pain, energy, they appreciate thing more because they have to fight for it. My experience of first years in the States is becoming a child again and seeing things for the first time, tasting things more sharply, being in completely new circumstances. “Playing Chekhov”-about first Stanislavski’s tour.
9. Acting is about being able to operate not only with words and subtext but with the emotions and atmospheres.
10. To become a pro you should be an artist/musician using all kind of available tools, including your body, voice, energy, etc.
11. Intimacy, sincerity, revelation are the most important part of any art.
Just my advises
1. Don’t push too hard to make it, don’t put everything, all your efforts in your life to make it in Hollywood. If you don’t make it tomorrow, next year you are unhappy person for this or next year. If you enjoy the process, you enjoy being in the process, enjoy what you are doing no matter what, like an artist enjoying expressing him/herself. ENJOY THE PROCESS not the result. Enjoy your creativity, enjoy being yourself, enjoy learning the world outside and inside yourself, move forward and create. You will be a happy person by doing so.
2. When playing the character be very specific with every word and gesture. Keep in mind all your observations of the people, atmosphere, animals and other stuff in your life that will help you to build the character. Draw the person; write his features on paper, describe him/her behavior.
3. Before doing the scene describe in your own words what you want to achieve. Who, what, how, emotions, objectives and so on.
4. Work hard at home and in the class but don’t show that you are working on the set, in front of the camera. You should never be caught acting/working.
5. Keep working on the sides and characters you had auditions for and did not get. It means that CDs are considering you for these types of characters and your type, physicality and personality match. All you need is to improve your skills. Sooner or later you’ll get the part.
6. IRRETIONAL IS THE KEY TO SPONTANEITY.
7. "It's important not to indicate. People don't try to show their feelings, they try to hide them." Robert De Niro
8. Life is what’s really happening to us while we are making other plans.
4/17/03 11:49:20 AM