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Fundamentals of Acting Journal #2

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27 views3 pages

Fundamentals of Acting Journal #2

Uploaded by

superhoppop
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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You can’t really talk about acting directly, everything we know to say is couched in

metaphors.

It has to do with identity, and we don’t really understand so much about it.

Music is translated into notes, we haven’t really translated what we do, into something that

can be constantly replicated with a result that we can anticipate.

The actor’s gift is “the imagination.”

Acting is the ability to believe you are someone else.

One place to study identity is in the actual speech of a person.

Take something that they said and try to repeat it more than word for word utterance for

utterance. It is in the way utterances themselves are manipulated that identity comes

forward.

The goal is to tell a story from multiple points of view. It takes many people to tell the story

of a society or community.

[the audiences doesn’t have to] sit in their one position

At the end im still me, I didn’t lose anything I gained.

Trying to bring detail, tell the same stories, about different people, without the stereotypes.
Two reasons I picked up from Ms. Deavre Smith on why acting is somewhat mysterious are:

1. You can’t really talk about acting directly, or explain it directly, and as she put it,

“everything we know to say is couched in metaphors.” 2. That acting is all about identity,

and to again use her words, “we don’t really understand so much about it.” The first reason

is interesting because there are some elements of acting that can be directly explained,

especially on the technical side, because playing to the light, working with sound cues and

costumes, etc. are real parts of acting. Heck, you can directly explain some elements of

posture, blocking, and maybe a smidgen of theory. The metaphors come in at the same

point as her second point, that we don’t really understand much about identity, or at least

the identities of others. She talks a lot about listening as a means to better understand, and

thus emulate, other people and identities in your roles. When you have to explain things to

others, you can’t just say “Do you remember the time?” because even if they did, you and

the other person will have experienced that differently, standing in two different places,

looking at things from a different angle, and probably thinking different thoughts. The bridge

for that gap is metaphors, and they are hard to use. They can be interpreted in different

ways, can be very specific or extremely broad, old and worn or impromptu and unexplored.

It makes it very hard to convey exactness, and us humans have decided that word

mysterious is used when we don’t know exactly what is going on.

To go back to the listening part, it is important because the job of an actor is to replicate,

emulate, or create an identity, and to be that for the audience. (OOH that could turn into a

really good definition of acting!) When you are trying to recreate or emulate, you HAVE to

have information on what you need to do from the perspective of those people, and even
when creating an identity from scratch it is often built with inspiration and feedback. Every

single one of these things requires listening. Every facet of acting requires listening, and I

think that is why Ms. Deavre Smith believes that listening is so important.

As for utterance for utterance vs. word for word, I think 1. It’s a metaphor. Get that nice little

tie in. 2. It’s meant to reemphasize her points about listening and detail. She really makes a

point about how intense listening is required to achieve the intense detail that can make

acting extraordinarily good, so to mimic someone on a level of utterance for utterance, you

must intently listen and focus on the detail.

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