Week Summary

In this second week we’ve looked at the building blocks of a dramatic situation. The goal has been to specify a few clear choices we need to make to understand and act any given scene. I hope this has provided you with some new tools to help you approach a script in a simple and structured way.

Important to remember is that the whole point of making these choices is not to find the right answers as defined by any experts, but to find what makes us understand the material on an instinctual and emotional level. To make choices that makes sense to us as actors.

We’ve then talked about emotions and how to think about them in our acting. This goes back to what I introduced last week as our greatest challenge. Thinking about what we should feel and how to express that feeling usually means that we’re focusing on a vague result, which leads to self-consciousness and tension. Instead, we should let any emotions happen as a byproduct of what we’re doing and our responses to what’s going on around us.

As an audience, all we really care about is what will happen next. And that’s good news for us as actors, because that means that we can just get on with it and not worry so much about what we think we’re supposed to feel.

Acting is doing. Nothing else.

Last week I also introduced the idea of listening and answering and after making our choices about the building blocks of the situation, we now have a specific point of view to listen and answer from. This means that how I respond to your behavior will be different depending on how I feel about you and what I want from you. If you’re really focused on some problem you’re experiencing but I want you to be excited about the big adventure I’ve planned for us, then that will give me an opinion about your behavior I might not otherwise have had. Or if I think you’re the most delightfully fascinating and whimsical person I’ve ever met I might react differently to your behavior than if I just think you’re pretentious and full of yourself.

Next week we will start looking more specifically at the words of the scene.

So, until then, good job completing week 2. See you again in week 3.