The Motion of Emotion

This fall I decided to take a scene study class.  It was some years since my last class so I wanted to find one that would be a creative outlet and also serve as an opportunity to grow as a teacher by collecting additional research and material for my own techniques.  I was fortunate enough to be accepted in Austin Pendleton's class at HB Studios.  First off, Austin is an amazing teacher.  He has a great gift for encouragement.  From a teacher's point of view his inspiration lies in his uncanny ability to constantly lift his students up instead of tearing them down.  He nurtures and encourages each actor's existing individual technique so they can grow with confidence. There is always good work and there is always room for improvement--which is always a GREAT place for an actor to be.  Then the other night Austin had to leave class early so we had a substitute.


SIDEBAR: I can feel the expectation for the "substitute bashing" to begin but that is not my intent.  Obviously there is that natural suspicion for someone new--someone who hasn't earned your trust.  I know I have a tendency to bring  those feelings with me and I expect my students at first to feel the same way about me--but just because you have a SUB doesn't mean there isn't something to learn.  And for the record THIS sub held his own.  He too was encouraging and offered useful feedback.  More importantly he made a great point that as actors--and teachers--we find ourselves dealing with different ways of talking about the same thing.  The vocabulary that one teacher or director uses can be very different than what we are accustom to.  So in acting, learning to filter feedback through your own vocabulary is a great skill to develop when constructing your technique.  Then  you can  adapt to any given situation you find yourself in whether in class or production.  I like to call it...you guessed it...TRANSLATION.  Seems simple enough but sometimes we get so stuck in our own view that we can't HEAR what is being said because the vocabulary we have grown to trust is hardwired to our process.


So back to the last hour of class--our substitute was giving feed back to an actress and he suggested something that is a very popular approach for fulfilling a difficult emotional performance.  Without going into the details of the scene I'll just say this...the character's objective and event of the scene was to convince her lover to stay with her because what they shared was far truer and more passionate than anything he could ever experience with his wife.  In the feedback the actress was asked if she had ever personally experienced a relationship with the same kind of desire and passion as her character.  She answered that she had and was actually currently IN that relationship.  SO it was then suggested to her that she use that personal experience to imbue her scene partner with the image of her current lover to inspire deeper desire and passion within her character and her performance. 


SECOND SIDEBAR: You know, I should say here that each actor has their own way into the work.  There is no definitive technique for every actor.  We all subscribe to a similar school of thought--which is usually a hybrid of MANY techniques.  The bottom line is that the actor must discover the character's truth and be capable of discovering it over and over again each night and every performance.  However, I believe there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do this.  I want to encourage the healthy way.


I'm sure that by challenging this feedback (and practice) I'll be stepping into IT but here goes.  I believe that this type of personalization in the work is risky and potentially dangerous.  I think it encourages bad habits and faulty short cuts.  And I think it is the line in the sand for many acting techniques.  For as long as I can remember studying acting, I have been exposed to techniques that love to blur the lines between the actor's personal emotional experience and the character's emotional experience.  From my earliest memories in high school of "sense memory" exercises to mime opening a trunk and pull out an object that is dear and sentimental to provoke an emotional response--to Meisner repetition that focused exclusively on my own personal emotional experience and "truthful" responses in front of an audience (even if it WAS just a class)--to technique classes in Chicago that boiled down to actors going up in class so they could either have a personal emotional break through or confess their attractions for fellow actors in order to make out because after all that was REAL.  We have all experienced these classes for better or for worse because at the end of the day we are all after the same result--SINCERITY OF EMOTION.


Stanislavsky addresses this early in his work.  And rightly so.  Understanding and recreating truthful emotions is one of an actor's greatest fears and challenges.  Probably because we are more concerned with the IDEA of how an emotion is supposed to be experienced--based on our OWN feelings of experiencing them in real life.  But how many of us TRULY KNOW what we are feeling in the heat of an emotional experience?  Very few of us I hope!  We should be too busy emoting to notice!  I doubt any of us are THAT self aware to dissect our own emotional experience in real time.  And if we could wouldn't that alter the experience so that we are no longer living our OWN life truthfully?  Thus resulting in a "performance" of emotions?  BUT I'm getting off topic...in acting a character's emotional life is always based somewhere in the actor's memory of sensations.  Which is unavoidable because we are the medium of our creation.  I believe that is why Stanislavsky called upon the subconscious here because of the "second hand account" that memory plays in our technique.  Memory of EVERYTHING is subjective to the viewer right?  Therefore, in our minds we build concepts of emotions and behavior based on our memories of our own experiences and our observations of others.  Then sadly most of the time the lazy actor just "pulls out" those concepts when their characters call for them.  Most of the time we are mislead to thinking that good acting is based on recreating our own emotional experiences--as we remember it--and then passing them off as our character's.  As a result we focus on the emotion and the behavior of that emotion as the benchmark for success--this will ALWAYS slam you into a creative dead end.  But time is short and results are what's important so the short cut of personal memories is pushed front and center.  It is believed that by digging up a personal emotional memory you can trigger "sincerity of emotion."  As a result this will FEEL exactly like you remember it which MUST be truth because it yielded a successful and believable performance.  But WHO'S truth?  Not to mention that trigger will fade and lose its emotional potency and you will be forced to dig up another memory.  Then every time you "refresh" your memory you move farther and farther away from what is going on with your character and deeper into your own emotional experiences.

In real life emotions are a complex mysterious part of the human experience.  In acting they shouldn't be.  As such, I believe that emotions are a side effect of action--fueled by a healthy imagination of the character's life and the given circumstances.  Stanislavsky puts it...

"Sincerity of emotions, feelings that seem true in given circumstances--that is what we ask of a dramatist."

And Meisner calls it...

"Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances."

These are the great mantra's of the modern day actor but I want to take a look at Stanislavsky's just a bit closer.  He calls "sincerity of emotion" the "the living human emotions, feelings which the actor himself has experienced."  This is very personal to the actor right?  But then he says "feelings that seem true" and explains it as "by true seeming we refer not to actual feelings themselves but to something akin to them, to emotions reproduced indirectly, under the prompting of true inner feelings." 

So what are these TRUE INNER FEELINGS if not your own emotional memories?

AGAIN!  I do not argue that a huge part of the acting experience is drawing inspiration from your real life experiences and your personal perspective.  I believe that who you are...your real life complex emotional mysteries...or as Stanislavsky put it, your subconscious is what True Inner Feelings are.  They are with us all the time and as I mentioned in my post on the actor's Sensory Storehouse, we have been collecting these true inner feelings all our life.  So I believe we already know all the sensations within the range of human emotions.  We KNOW what love feels like.  We KNOW what grief feels like.  We KNOW jealousy and rage.  The only thing a specific personal emotional memory is useful for is to associate the "unknown" sensation--or connecting the dots from sensation to experience--but the details are of no use to our character.  If we are playing a character who has lost a child and we have never gone through that ordeal in real life then it is not necessary to drag up a memory of what it felt like when our childhood pet or grandparent died in order to trigger a sincerity of emotion.  The focus shouldn't be on the emotion of loss or sadness.  Those are qualities and as a result you will end up playing the quality instead of the truth.  We all KNOW what it feels like to lose something.  The scale of that feeling is relative.  What is more important is what generates feelings and why.  What's the value of that loss?  Who are you without what you lost?  Who were you with it?  How does it affect your everyday life?  All your emotions are sitting on the shelves of your Sensory Storehouse like every other personal memory.  They are there waiting and ready.  Stanislavsky believed that you needed to coax your emotions to the surface with your imagination.  He was dead on!  I too believe that your imagination is the key.  By directing your focus on imagining specific detailed given circumstances then you will begin to create values for your character.  Then, just as with real life, your character's emotions will be effected truthfully and organically
by the actions of the story.

I recently read a very provocative statement in the book Stanislavsky's Protege: Eugene Vakhtangov by Ruben Simonov.  He speaks directly about the actor's emotions on stage .  Vakhtangov states "there are only two 'alive' feelings on stage: I feel good if I live creative, sincerely, well, those repeated feelings; or, I feel bad if I live them insincerely and badly."  When I read this it clarified everything I've always felt about an actor's life on stage or in action.  The separation of actor and character must always exist...and I believe that it is impossible for that separation NOT to exist.  This is the healthy way to approach acting.  Your true inner feelings--who you ARE--is what you bring to the role.  You offer your imagination and your well of life experience to the character.  It doesn't matter if that well is shallow or deep because with sensitivity, imagination, and clear purpose nature will take over. 

I'll end with this.  A week ago I was watching Inception for a second time.  In a scene with Cobb and Ariadne the dialogue struck a chord with me and while it was about dreams, I think the parallels to creativity and acting are unavoidable.  Take a look.

Cobb pauses, thinking.  Remembering.

INSERT CUT: Mal, hair blowing, turns to Cobb smiling, laughing. 

He smiles back.  They are on the same bridge.

COBB

I know this bridge.  This place is real-
(serious)
You didn't imagine it, you remembered it...

ARIADNE

(nods)
I cross it every day on my way to college.

COBB

Never recreate places from your memory.  Always imagine new places.

ARIADNE

You have to draw from what you know-

COBB

(tense)
Use pieces-a streetlamp, phone booths, a type of brick-not whole areas.

ARIADNE

Why not?

COBB

Because building dreams out of your own memories is the surest way to lose your grip on what's real and what's a dream.

 - Inception, by Christopher Nolan