Acting in character(especially regarding emotions and movement.)

Acting in character has a lot of components people don’t realise. There’s actor’s movement, there’s emoting, and many other things of that nature. You can’t just read the lines how you THINK they should be read. There is something liberating, almost spiritually, about this. It makes me think of the Self in terms of modern Buddhist notions. The self is something you are attached to, it does not necessarily have form, according to this philosophy. To act, you have to let go of yourself. It is almost a Yoga, in the purest sense available. Maybe it is a Yoga, I’m not sure. But what is meant by this, is that you have to become something else. I run under the mistaken approach of, “OK, this what I believe this to be, so I am going to do it based on what I would do…” No. That’s not how it works. So I have to get rid of my sense of self, what the notion of a boulder is, what the notion of a rock is, etc.I read that line in a buddhist book of some kind. Don’t remember where I read it exactly…) and become that character, what they do, think, feel and experience. I demonstrated this quite vividly in the exercises we did today. I had to read a particular line of a play, and demonstrate how to get into character regarding that. We tried different kinds of characters to play, different kinds of ways to express that I am not Nishanth, or Nishi, but something else completely. And then, we had to do actor’s movement. People don’t realise this, maybe I didn’t realise it even, that an actor has to move differently. And it is a different way to move. One of the things about acting is that is multidimensional, non linear. It doesn’t have to be that to be a giraffe I move all weird and clunky. (That was one of the exercises we did.)

That’s all I’ve got right now. I need to get my brain flowing and my body flowing.

Acting with emotion.

Acting with emotions is hard. Maybe people don’t realise this, but acting with emotions is surprisingly difficult, and it’s because feelings are difficult.  They are difficult to process, to reason with, to understand, to let flow unto your body, even. And all of us, most noticeably the millennials but also the older generations too, and especially the generations after mine, have been sort of brought into the emotion sapping experience of utilising mediums such as the one I am using right now, this very moment, ironically. So, acting with emotions is hard as a result. What is acting with emotions? When you are happy, or sad, or whatever, if you are being authentic and truthful, there are noticeable ways that you do that which correlate to and communicate an experience of reality, which is both representative and transcendent of it. (Whoa, I got really profound there.) It’s not really something which can be communicated by thought alone. But I assume that each and every one of you who reads this has felt some kind of profound emotion within your experiences. Maybe you broke up with your girlfriend or had a divorce that was particularly painful for you. Or you had an argument, or you got screwed over by someone. I don’t know. When you are feeling that, and I mean, really feeling it, you will know, and so will everyone else, and it won’t come off as sappy or corny or anything. This is essentially what we practiced today. I feel the profound effects of it already. When you are truthful, to your emotions and experiences, and perhaps a little bit of your thinking to a certain extent, then you are communicating life and that is true art. This is true of writing as well. The saying goes, write one true sentence.

Movement/updates from the acting realm

Yesterday was an interesting day. On my part, I was extremely tired, had a series of disturbing dreams and so on. So it was difficult to stay focused. But somehow, I managed to plough through it. To be honest I feel a little distant from what happened yesterday.. But I know that it was a good day and we were able to accomplish a lot. And my negative attitudes are starting to dissipate. So that’s a good thing…It’s important that I write about my experiences, because even if I do relapse, stagnate or whatever, then if I have this, it’s like a record of what we do here, and what I do or don’t do. It’s a manifesto of my stability, of my acting life. Anyways…We worked on movement, in particular, how to mime and accurately portray movement, more specifically pulling an imaginary rope. My hand eye coordination is getting better. I didn’t think I could learn more of that, but I am. We specifically went through some exercises to more or less simulate the pulling of a rope. We even did some mock tug of war. To be honest I don’t exactly know the intent of these exercises, at least, not formally. But an actor needs to understand movement, how to manipulate his or her body. During this exercise, I was able to enter something akin to ‘flow state’, or at least, some form of mindfulness, not necessarily flow state). We also did several generic improv exercises, including wordball, which is where you have to spout out the first word that comes out of your head, with an imaginary ‘ball’ in your hand, as you pass that to the next person, who then repeats. But I think the most important part of the whole day was when we finally moved forward on our plans for the upcoming year.

 

 

More character development-Movement

Today was a great day at Anodyne, barring the fact that I was an hour late(!) We did a number of exercises relating to movement and then incorporated that into character development. We had to determine how our specific characters from the play we did last move, and incorporate that into our acting. A lot of people think that acting is just memorising lines and simple things like that. Nothing could  be further from the truth. A huge part, probably the most critical part of it all, is body. What do you feel in your body? What do you feel inside it as your character? How does your character move? What do they do? What does this convey, how does this convey their emotions? all of this is overwhelming to me, not necessarily because it’s a huge burden. These are deceptively simple tasks. It takes little effort to people watch for behaviors, or to incorporate movement such as a particular walk or a particular tick or whatever into your movement, compared to, say, learning the grammatical structure of an agglutinative language(Tamil,) or remembering the correct use of a particle, or learning the tones of a tonal language and understanding their meanings in relation to each word, not to mention learning the writing(Zhongwen, aka Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil in regards to the writing). But, to do it well, and to be active and engaged instead of passive? That takes effort and a whole different kind of lifestyle, one that I am not living currently, but am nevertheless inducted into because of what my therapist calls “being called to task”. I don’t even know where to start incorporating that…This is not just a 9-5 job. You don’t punch in and out of acting. This is not working at goodwill, or target, or anywhere else. This is a lifestyle. And I’m concerned(not worried, concerned), that as far as I am concerned, I am not accepting the call to task. Anyways, what does that have to do with movement? I don’t think it does have any connection. It’s just how I feel. But back to movement. We also did some mirroring exercises that allowed us to move freely with other people and learn how to lead them. At least, I think that’s what I got out of it.

Looking without seeing

One of the things we’ve been doing in Anodyne is working on a potential performance art piece, with the working title of Looking W/O seeing. We are currently in the developing stages of this concept, but essentially Looking W/O seeing is the idea of someone passively watching something or experiencing something without actually experiencing it. So for instance, a simple example would be, “Honey, did you see my keys? I could have sworn I put them here…” “They’re right in front of you. You never noticed them?” On a deeper level, it could be connected to any myriad of things. Aspects of your life, for instance, such as your marriage or your children, (90’s hollywood absent fathers anyone? I think of Mrs. Doubtfire or Hook, two really good Robin William’s movies). Or, it could be more high level, for instance poverty, or homelessness, which is what I have in mind. it could also be applied to the election as well. I personally think that there was a lot of looking without seeing in the election. The media clearly saw what Trump was doing, otherwise they wouldn’t have reported it. But they didn’t really experience it or engage in it. The trump supporters had all the information about Donald Trump, clearly saw the things he did, but chose to turn the other eye or look the other way, insisting that he was a businessman who would bring prosperity to America, despite all the knowledge and evidence that pointed to the contrary. And then you have the fake news, which people devoured like teenagers devouring a bag of potato chips, disregarding anything that didn’t jive with their preferred beliefs, regardless of whether or not it was factual. There is a lot of room here for a performance piece, needless to say. I find that my interest in the homelessness is waning,  for some odd reason,but it’s still there, because it’s a problem that needs to be solved. There is no reason that in the nation’s capital, in major cities throughout the country, that people can’t get the stability they need in a society that revolves around stability(fixed abodes, fixed incomes and so on.) If this were Mongolia, they wouldn’t need to worry about that because Mongolia is nomadic primarily and living a heavy duty nomadic lifestyle means that a certain amount of greater independence and instability is the norm. Which is actually better than I’m making it sound. Anyways, that’s what we’re doing for looking without seeing.

 

Working on character development

In the absence of a viable show during the interim between the last play(My first play!) and the next show that we may potentially do, one thing we’ve been working on is character development. How does one develop a character? What is a character? How do you find what is in oneself to develop that character? Those are the kinds of questions that we are asking ourselves at Anodyne, in addition to developing our shows and our own projects, that we can use to showcase our own ideas based on the theme “Looking without Seeing”. But that’s a totally different ball game, one that I am enjoying very much, but still, another ball game. What I’m focused on, today, or at least, what I’m trying to be focused on, is character development. For instance, we’ve worked on developing multiple characters at once, similar to how many comedians can pull off comedic character acting to prove a point. Trevor Noah does this to a certain extent,, when he uses different accents, but for the purposes of this particular exercises we were inspired by Dave Chapelle.(I’m sure that many of you probably know who Dave Chapelle was/is, but for those who don’t, he is a comedian prominent during the mid 2000’s who was featured on the tv station, Comedy Central.) Dave Chapelle is particularly effective at portraying two characters or more at once, through the expressive use of his body and his voice.  So we tried that, and then we did some intriguing exercises to discover how to embody a particular emotion. We walked around the black box and we began embodying happiness, by changing how we spoke, how we acted, our facial expressions and so on, and then we told a story about something that made us happy. And we did the same thing but began focusing on how to become treelike and more somber.

What I liked most about that particular exercise was that it taught me how to embody emotion, which is something that I need to work on still. I can embody emotion for sure. I am not an incapable actor. But I can improve. For me, there is a disconnect between body and mind. It is at the root of many, but not all, of my problems, in general. But it makes acting a challenge. When I started, I could not help but show my butt to the audience. I’m being completely serious. I had the odd habit of not facing the audience when I was talking or presenting myself. I also spoke very quietly and slurred my speech. And as for embodying the character, forget it. What I mean by that is that people express themselves through their body as well as their words and minds. People can express certain moods and thoughts as clearly as though they had written a discertation on how the felt. Also, everyone has a habit of doing something with their bodies, little tells or quirks that people do either in general or do under certain situations. And there are different ways to express those emotions as well. Not to mention something called Actor’s Movement, which is the idea of period movement.

I think the one of the hardest part of working on a character is getting inside the skin of the character. I was able to to do that to a certain extent with the lead role of the last play, It Could Be Worse,  or Love at Frostbite. That was through careful coaching and studying of the role itself. It’s possible that through more research I will be able to understand roles better, but understanding people is something that needs to be in place as well. That is also something I need to work on, in order to be an effective actor.

 

tI think that that having an interim has made me complacent which is a feeling I do not want to continue embodying. But I am hopeful that the next play will change that, whenever it is. I don’t even know when we’ll be working on Traditions, if that’s even what we will do. I mean we voted on it but I don’t know if that’s what we’ll do necessarily. There’s a lot of projects that we need to do for the year.