Principles of Acting

Principles of Acting

(Taken from Tom McNallys Acting: The Active Process)

Principle 1: Purpose/Objective

There are many names for purpose: objective, intention, point of concentration, motivating drive, or essential action. One could even call it, What do I want? Your objective should be active: what are you trying to get someone to do? Use an active verb when creating your purpose for being on stage.

Example: Fighting for my life, winning the tennis trophy, pull off the best senior prank.

Principle 2: The Obstacle

Obstacle defines what we must overcome. There must be an obstacle present if you are to act. Ask yourself: What is in my way? The obstacle stands in the way of getting to your purpose and must be dealt with and overcome. Obstacles can pervade a whole play, or appear in a scene and at every moment within a scene. A key idea to remember: the obstacle is not something you can play. You overcome the obstacle and play the purpose. Obstacles can be either external or internal with many sources for both of these originating in the circumstance or the scene.

External obstacles include: good staging, props, weather, costume.

Internal obstacles can include: stage of being, character elements, past life, time, relationship.

Characters and place can be either internal or external, depending on the situation.

Principle 3: Tactics/Strategy

Tactics help you overcome obstacles and achieve your purpose. They can also be called actions. It is what you do to get what you want. Tactics/strategy apply in every moment of every scene. Like the objective, they are what you actually play. You cannot play an obstacle-- you play the tactic. Tactics do not represent the big picture. They are small, detailed, moments of acting, the line-by-line choices you make. A good tactic should:

Advance toward the purpose

Overcome an obstacle

Deal with current circumstance

Be expressed with an active verb

Connect with the other actor

Adjust to the relationship

Change with the orchestration/structure of the scene.

Always connect to the other character with your tactics/strategyenter to win the scene!

All this involves the vital element of listening--paying attention to the other character. What he or she says leads to your next tactic. Also be aware that you can listen on two levels. The first is to hear the words the other says. The second level is to grasp the meaning or subtext of the statement.

Good tactics do not represent an emotion or attitude. You cannot play a state of being. To inform or announce are also passive; they declare action later, not now. What you are seeking are active, playable verbs. Active verbs are ways of getting something.

Ineffective, Non-workable verbs:

To be sad, to be confused, to be depressed, to be elated, to be thrilled, to be frightened.

They are to be verbs, meaning they are simply a set of attitudes.

Effective, workable verbs:

To convince, to impress, to correct, to comfort, to awaken, to insist, to pinpoint, to console.

These will cause you to act, to do something.

Tactics change with the circumstances. Keep in mind where and when the scene takes place, your relationship with others on stage, and the orchestration/structure of the scene. Also keep in mind subtext: the meaning behind the authors words, what the lines mean to you the actor.

Principle 4: Circumstances and Relationships

What are the details that influence behavior? Purpose, obstacles and tactics tell us WHAT to play on stage. Given circumstances and relationships tell us HOW to make acting choices.

Circumstances carry the details that influence every aspect of acting. There are seven (7) major sources of circumstances which you will find in most scenes:

1. The Stakes. What happens if you win/lose the scene? What will it cost you? What are you willing to do or give up to get what you want?

2. Cause and Effect. This has been called the pinch/ouch effect. Why say a line? Why do an action? What are the circumstances? What motivated you?

3. The Style. Are you performing a comedy, tragedy, farce, melodrama? How you play each line will need to be adjusted based on the type of play.

4. Time. There are all sorts of time: what time in history is the play set? What time, season, of the year? What time of day? How much time do you have? Why must you do what you do NOW?

5. Place: How does your behavior alter when you move from a familiar to an unfamiliar place? From a formal to informal setting? From outdoors to indoors? There are public, private, and personal places, and with each type of place comes a way we typically behave in that place or space.

6. The Past Life. There are two types of past life: long term and short term.

Long term past life includes those events from which the distant past which can shape stage action. (example: at a movie you run into someone you lied about and got fired, at a wedding your seat is next to a former boyfriend or girlfriend with whom you had an awful break up, the first day back to school you have class with someone you fell in love with over the summer).

Short term, or character triggers, is what happened just now that literally keys the character into action (example: you just heard something terrible said about you and you charge through a door to confront the liar, you just got a full scholarship call from a university and run in to hug and thank your teacher/coach, you just ran five blocks in a pouring rain to have your first date with that perfect person).

The key here is never JUST walk on stage. When you enter, bring with you your past lifelife is an emotional suitcase and actors pack or carry on stage specifics from their past life.

In addition, consider Independent Life: being on stage, totally immersed in a task. Think of why you are doing this now, not later. Think of it this way: if Character A is concentrating on an activity and Character B wants something, then Character B has to interrupt the Independent Life of Character A.

7. Relationship. To create relationship in a scene, look at two factors: evidence of the relationship in the text and the emotional connection your character has with another character. To achieve this you will have to work on two levels: pinpointing the facts and then turning psychiatrist to discover deeper emotional awareness of that important other. Ask yourself, Who is he/she to me?

Principle 5: Character

When you approach any role, you must search, detective-like, for both the inner and the outer behavioral attributes of that person. The question is who am I? The answer is in the search for the characters life prior to the plays beginning. It is the detailed study of the physical and psychological elements that make up the person you are about to play. You could also call this external and internal character development.

External characteristics: movement patterns, speech patterns, voice, make-up, and costume (things that can be seen, or observed).

Internal characteristics: facts about family background, occupations, personal relationships, and so on. This is done in reference to other actors, and cannot be learned solely from observing the character.

Some actors approach character from outer (external) to inner (internal). The actor can do certain physical things that will create a psychological response in you. One way is through character sculptures where, like a sculptor, you define the action essence of your character and begin to shape, within your own body, a figure which illuminates character elements into a kind of living statue.

Other actors take an inner to outer approach. This can be called emotional memory, emotional substitutes, emotional recalljust to name a few labels. To do this you use a powerful memory or image from your own life and think of it while presenting textual material.

As an actor, your goal should be to integrate both outer and inner processes of character development to have a balanced character portrayal.

Principle 6: Orchestration

For an actor, the term orchestration is used to describe the composition of a performance. It is the ups, down, highs, lows, the louds, quiets, the small moments, the climatic moments, the fasts, the slows, the pauses, the outside rhythms, and inside rhythms of any acting. Additionally orchestration should highlight what is most important in a scene. This becomes the tempo of the performance from beginning to end, and should include variety in showing the journey of the play. When you first read a scene on paper, you will sometimes declare you cannot find changes in your character. Look again. Uncover the surface, and look for subtle subtext. The key is to look for change.

1. Clarify the physical life of the scene and how those actions might alter from the scenes start to end.

2. Ask yourself how you are different at the start, the middle and the end.

3. Find two or three changes from the top of the scene to the middle and again changes from the middle to the end.

4. Identify precisely the smallest, most subtle character adjustments on a moment to moment basis.

It takes time and effort, but play detective, discover the currents that ebb and flow within a scene. This done, you will have discovered orchestration.