Acting Is Physical: “Being” in every word, “Meaning” every word

Notes from Word of Mouth @ A/C Stu­dios/Early rehearsals for Riant Theatre’s pro­duc­tion of The Upside Down Mir­ror by Emanuel Fleischmann

First we form habits. Then they form us.
~Rob Gilbert

Habit is either the best of ser­vants or the worst of mas­ters.
~Mark Twain

As long as habit and rou­tine dic­tate the pat­tern of liv­ing, new dimen­sions of the soul will not emerge.
~Henry van Dyke

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When I’m learn­ing a role, at some point, I write out my dia­logue. This 1) helps me to remem­ber it (a tech­nique I learned from Ed Hook’s The Actor’s Field Guide: Notes on the Run) and 2), it helps me to focus on each word.

A third incred­i­bly help­ful purely phys­i­cal tech­nique I’m prac­tic­ing is quite sim­ple — breath­ing: while self-rehearsing, I let my breathe fully drop, all the way, down to the bot­tom of feet, before speak­ing, and then I just go slow enough to “be” in each word.

Specif­i­cally, here’s my new self-rehearsal technique:

1. I read and read and read the play to get the sense, the mean­ing, the thought or intent behind each line of dia­logue. It’s not that easy, at least for me, but it does becom­ing eas­ier with experience.
2. Once I’ve got the mean­ing, then I inte­grate the breathe into the mean­ing: I let my breath fully drop (so I can feel what I’m saying),
3. and I pay close atten­tion to my part­ner and what I’m try­ing to communicate

So what does it mean, really, to inte­grate the breathe into the mean­ing?

A great way to inte­grate full breathe is to build up the text one word at a time (“Breath­ing The Text” from The Actor Speaks: Voice and the Per­former, p. 170), using full breathe, voice, full round words, slow and lots of air sup­port. This is the phys­i­cal part of act­ing, where it all has to hap­pen. Every­thing that comes before is home­work, prepa­ra­tion, but with­out this phys­i­cal sup­port, this phys­i­cal approach, all the home­work and prepa­ra­tion comes to (almost) noth­ing … it all goes back to Shakespeare:

As you explore the phys­i­cal nature of words, you quickly unearth some of the most fun­da­men­tal joys in the mak­ing of lan­guage. These ver­bal plea­sures are rooted deep in our his­tory like ances­tral sounds and voices hark­ing back to its very birth of the Eng­lish lan­guage. They include: allit­er­a­tion, asso­nance, & ono­matopoeia.
– Speak­ing Shake­speare by Patsy Rodenburg.

And this work has been pay­ing off in rehearsal — I e-mailed Deb­o­rah this update:

Hey Deb,

Just to fol­low up on your obser­va­tions about habits: some­thing new hap­pened to me in rehearsal yes­ter­day. When I first started act­ing three years ago, within about the first 15 min­utes, I decided that the less direc­tion I got — the bet­ter! As time went on, when I did get direc­tion, it was the usual stuff –usu­ally — e.g., line read­ings, ques­tions about ‘what’s my action,’ etc.

Yes­ter­day, I got a shock­ingly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. Van, the direc­tor said to me (and I’m para­phras­ing), ‘you know, that last sec­tion, you col­ored every word and I could see/feel what you were tak­ing about, you were in every word, but in some other sec­tions, you sound like your just read­ing the lines, it’s a bit flat. I want you to do every thing the way you did in that last section.’

Now that’s inter­est­ing! I’ve never got­ten that kind of com­pare and con­trast direc­tion before. The sec­tion he liked? I just did what you taught me — breathed, slowed down, etc. In the sec­tions he didn’t like? I tried to ‘act,’ I pushed, I for­got to breathe, I rushed though the lines, or I didn’t lis­ten closely enough to my partner.

So, the chal­lenge now is con­sis­tency. This is exactly what my goal is in these small projects: to CONSISTENTLY apply what I’ve learned. I think it’s that my old habits haven’t quite died while the new learn­ing is still become a habit, but if I keep work­ing cor­rectly, time will take care of that! Thanks for teach­ing me!!!

— Cheers,
Christopher

P.S. when the direc­tor says “big­ger!!!” (some­thing I hate hear­ing), I just slow down even more so that I can breathe even deeper, and the result seems to makes him happy. Who knew it was all really so easy!

Deb­o­rah e-mailed back:

YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Slow down………Color (mean) every word………..Listen………..Bigger = more air/voice.….….…..Breathe down to your groin. That’s all. It’s easy!

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Tagged as: Acting, Deborah Carlson, Patsy Rodenburg, Rehearsal