Most often, tactics fall into two broad categories: intimidation and attraction. It’s also available as a handy app for your smartphone. Probably the most widely used book for this is Actions: An Actors’ Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone and Maggie Lloyd-Williams. Thankfully, there are many great sources for highly playable action verbs available in print or online. We all have a limited vocabulary and repertoire of actions and verbs at our fingertips. It will require more thought and a friendly relationship with a thesaurus, but it will result in clearer acting. Notice that the construction I with you or I to you will remove directness and immediacy. Resist making the basic sentence (I you) more complex. At other times, it may be more appropriate to shift tactics broadly: I reject you - I beg you - I ridicule you - I worship you. Sometimes you’ll select a sequence of tactics in an undeviating intensification of the same approach: I nag you - I browbeat you - I bully you - I throttle you. Your tactical action pathway toward your goal can be direct or a crazy crabwalk past the obstacles in your way. It will inform your physical and vocal behavior and generate specific choices that express your character’s internal struggle in ways both authentic and theatrically available to your audience. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a list of actions you’ll memorize and embed into the playing of your monologue, scene, or song. Write the action you’re playing above every breath phrase.
Complete this magic phrase: “I you.” This isn’t the goal statement it’s the method statement - the way you’re making the other person fulfill your ideal outcome. Once you’ve made these choices, your beat is broken into what we call “breath phrases.” SELECT YOUR ACTIONSįor each breath phrase, choose an active, present tense verb. For songs, you’ll sing it, then mark the breath divisions. Songs require you to consider the logic of the thought, your breath endurance, and the musical phrasing. It’s often easiest to speak the monologue and mark where you naturally breathe. A simple slash mark between the words in the sentence where you choose to breathe will do. CHUNK IT UPīearing in mind that every time you take a breath you’re taking in a fresh thought, mark the places in each acting beat where you inhale - every time. Now, write the objective clearly next to each beat, because that’s what you’re constantly fighting to make happen during that portion of the song or monologue. If you feel the objective shifts within the piece, draw a clear line through the text where that change happens. You won’t always win, but you still try as though you could.
“I want to force him out of the room.” “I want her to propose to me.” “I want to usurp his power.” “I want her to kiss me.” Keep it simple, clear, and achievable within this next few minutes. Start by determining what it is you’re fighting to make happen now.
Either way, be sure you’ve included all the punctuation. For songs, type out the lyrics as a monologue or in poetic form, if that works better for you. So, take action.To apply this idea to a monologue or song, start with a clean copy of the text you can write on. It requires courage, it requires bravery and it’s not easy, but if you can work off the other actor, if you can understand a script, your last step is to take action. One of the most difficult lessons to teach someone is to stop them pretending and to let them leap out and just take action. Of course, it’s not that simple, but I suppose what I’m saying is that if you are given the actions to perform, quite a lot of the rest takes care of itself. When you perform the psychological actions of the character, you become engaged on all levels, you are emotional, mentally and physically connected to what you are doing. What’s more, it is not that you need to become the character, but that by taking the actions of the character, the character becomes you. You do not need to believe you are someone else, you need to take actions on the character’s behalf. All the very best actors are doing is taking action under the imaginary circumstances of the scene. Something to head towards, a target to give their action some direction. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t think, feel and emote, just that the over-concentration on these things is unnecessary and so let us focus on the actions of the actor as the mainstay of any technique of acting, if such a technique is necessary.īut for the actor to take action, they must first have a clearly established goal. When you give an actor a clear ‘something to do’, they come alive, they take action, they act. It’s not thought, it’s not feeling, it’s not emotion: no one knows the thoughts, feelings and emotions of fictional people.