ATS Shop Talk

One of the more interesting and fun things we run into from time to time is when an actor is working on a character that puts on a front — masks — how they’re feeling, with what’s often “opposite” behavior. Last night in Monday night’s Process class we had a scene in which a woman is talking with her psychiatrist. Her dialogue is generally playful and she toys with him — but really quite aggressively. She’s obviously quite angry just to be there (her husband has insisted she get therapy because of her — the script’s words — ennui), but she does her best to joke.

At first the actor brought in the obvious angry lashing out and it came across pretty one-noted — as one student observed, she at times played attitude rather than action. But when she was asked to “layer” the teasing and joking over that anger WITHOUT losing any of the inner turmoil, the scene became much more nuanced and compelling. The actor also was obviously having much more fun.
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OK, so for some time, we’ve been working with having the actor immerse him/herself in in story while responding to the partner. There’re a lot of different ways of saying this — Pursue your objective AND focus on your partner, Talk AND Listen, Send AND Receive, and so on. It seems like a contradiction — to actively pursue while actively receive and respond.

One thing that can help is to tie your objective to the partner. Insteand of making the choice that “I want to …,” try “I want my partner to….” If your objective is tied to your partner, your front of mind focus can be about guaging how much success you’re having, based on your partner’s behavior. I think this is what we do in life — we’re tuned into those around us, when it’s important to us. Now, in public you’ll find plenty of people that are oblivious to those around them. And I know it can happen in private, too. In that case, for them, you aren’t their partner. If you want their attention and aren’t getting it and you don’t want to call attention to your objective of getting their attention and they aren’t giving you attention (think department store here), you’re going to get frustrated.
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Working with young and new actors is one of the most fun things there is. They have such keenness and infectious energy — they can totally carry you. Every discovery they make is a milestone and the progress seems to go very fast at the beginning of the acting journey. So much of what more experienced actors take for granted, the new ones really appreciate — it really keeps me in that Beginner’s Mind. Questions, discoveries and more questions.

Maybe it’d be a good thing for everyone to “start over” every now and then — question what you’ve accepted, revel in discoveries you thought were behind you? Continue reading →

A recurrent theme at ATS on Monday — owning the words. I worked with a private student in the morning. We were going through on-camera commercial auditioning and while this is a really fine actor that’s making nice headway into both professional theatre and professional talent work, she was “acting.” Acting well and subtly, but with an external veneer that was covering HER. So I had her do a number of different things to get to where the words were hers. She told me the story of the commercial, she told me about her personal connection with that story, she added her own words to the copy, she invented an internal monologue. And finally she just spoke. She pursued an objective — which yes, we’d established early on, but for some reason this hadn’t helped her own the text — and spoke. And she came alive. And we got to see HER uniqueness on the playback.
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I remember when I was in grad school and I was struggling — felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere with my technique, and my teachers agreed. And I don’t remember why, but Dale Rose, who was and still is head of the the performing faculty at UMKC’s Professional Actor Training Program, suggested that I needed to come out more, physically. I told him that I was afraid I’d start indicating. Now Indicating might as well be called the “I” word for trained actors, right? The last thing any of us want — especially when we’re using the style of realism — is to indicate, to overact, to mug, ham-it-up, you name it. Indicating can be as obnoxious and embarrassing to watch as about anything there is. But it can also be pretty subtle. I’ve seen actors that we all consider to be really good and SOME of what they’re good at is just making their indication really subtle and fine.
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In addition to Farrah’s visit, we continued our exploration of story and acting “without a net” through our wide-open scene work.

Two actors check each other out. They both have four lines drawn from a box and a story they’ve decided on and plugged into — complete with choices on a relationship, circumstances and objective. Some actors are also coming in with tactics for getting that objective and a nice internal conflict built into their set-up. And they tune into each other, not knowing the other’s story. At that point, everything that happens to them, happens to them through the filter of their story. The partner says something unexpected and they deal with it. Sometimes the lines sound like they were written by one writer, sometimes they come across as non-sequitors. They have to go all the way in two different directions, seemingly — they have to fully play their story and objective and they also have to respond to what they get from their partner.
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In tonight’s On-Camera class we worked really hard on getting actors to choose specifics with their commercial audition copy. One thing I have them do is to identify the power words and impact words in the copy. Often those words are adjectives or will “add up” to a feel, or tone for the spot. Unfortunately, if an actor tries to play an adjective, feel or tone, they’ll be giving work that’s very general and doesn’t really tap into their unique personality. Actors tonight were able to overcome this by translating adjectives, feelings and tone into playable verbs.

For instance in an Alka-Seltzer commercial, the line is “Does your mom’s magic meatloaf hit you like a ton of bricks?” The actor’s first read was a default read — very general — wanted to show how nice he could be. Who cares??! But when I asked him what bricks do, he said they fall — then I asked him what they sound like and he said they “clunk.” I asked him to CLUNK the first part of the copy, then to BUBBLE or SPARKLE the next part. This particular actor has sparkle in his hip pocket, so he was able to play to a strength. A very specific strength. It was fun. I had another actor NIBBLE copy for the nerdy guy that needs weightlifting, then DEVOUR the “after” part where he needed to be all macho and stuff.
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One of the most popular things among actors that we do at ATS is the open scene. For some time, this meant actors doing “A-B” dialogues, usually written by me. I had developed somewhere around 40 variations of scenes that were quite open to interpretation – in terms of relationship, circumstances, objectives, obstacles and actions (either Interior Action or exterior action — blocking). It’s a nice combination of having to be alive while using written lines and the freedom improv can provide.

Actors get repetitions in making the strongest, most exciting choices they can — with a lot of encouragement and pushing from me, of course. I’m always asking the actor to make specific choices that MEAN something to them — choices that are strong enough to have power over the actor.
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When is your acting work for real? Do you count your acting classes and workshops as opportunities to do the best and most you can toward improving your technique? Are you always prepared for class?

Would you show up for a paid acting job without being prepared? If you weren’t prepared — lines learned, choices made, in a place ready to invest yourself and your talent and training, would you expect to be hired by the same people or company again?

If you’re not prepared everytime you have an opportunity to work — class, rehearsal, stage, film, TV — you’re short changing yourself. Taking your training as seriously as you would paid acting work is the first step toward working professionally, whether for pay or not.
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Last night in the ATS On-Camera workshop, we worked with tapping into and bringing out the individual charm and personality of each actor, for the purpose of making the commercial audition and performance more effective.

We had each actor list a couple of the qualities of their classmates in which the positive charm of their personality comes through. And then each actor had to tell us what they perceive their qualities are, before reading and telling the descriptive terms used by their classmates.

I had to be clear that this isn’t about being a support group or doing group therapy with an acting class. The objective wasn’t to be “nice” to one another, but to objectively state what they see in their classmates as that positive energy that will help them in their commercial auditioning and work, if they tap into it.
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