Getting Myself into a State

One of my students Torya read yesterday’s blog and asked:

At Uni this week, one of the guys had to play a scene where he was really really angry, had just killed his sister, sexually abused and murdered his niece, and then had to hold a knife to me and beg me to kill him. Obviously, there’s nothing you can do to replicate that situation as an actor – you’re not going to go out and murder someone to “get into character”. The way our director approached it was to make him run around, do press ups really fast, then be in the middle of a really competitive game of piggy in the middle, and finally she screamed at him like a sergeant major while he did sit-ups. This got him really angry and frustrated, and when we ran straight into the scene it pumped the urgency and stakes right up. He then used the memory of that feeling of anger and frustration to inform the scene in future runs.

How would you approach this kind of thing from a PA viewpoint? Do you think it’s helpful sometimes to do something physical to get into the task/”zone”, or would this fall into the “suffering” category of what you’re talking about in the blog? Personally, I’ve found it quite helpful sometimes to do something physically, for example speeding up breathing or tensing up, as well as prepping the task a bit before the scene. What would an alternative technique or method be?

My answer: The quick answer is that our physical state does affect our mental state, yes that’s true, and there are some practitioners, Grotowski comes to mind, that believed actors could access the internal through the external.

This would work particularly well on camera because at the point of the actor being totally in the zone, it could be recorded and the result is captured forever. Yes, if you can piss someone off and film it, you may get real rage on screen. But you may also get an actor that punches the director in the face, if they are truly making them mad.

The trouble comes when being forced to reproduce this on stage for the next 6 months. The idea that simply remembering how he felt, and using sense memory will bring that feeling back time and again is a fallacy. If that were true I could summon up happiness whenever I feel blue by simply remembering some very happy time. Likewise I would always feel immediately and appropriately sad thinking about someone that died. Within two or three days, the angry state will dissipate and the actor will expend unbelievable levels of energy trying to bring it back. His attention will come back to himself, he will blame himself for not being in the state, come out of the moment and the performance will nose-dive from there. Then he will fake it from then onwards. And he won’t want to admit it.

The feelings are like teenagers, they are not biddable, they are messy and are wont to do their own thing, regardless of what you want them to do.

I fear the actor ‘played along’, they were required to create a state (impossible btw) and out of fear of failure and embarrassment, they played along with the getting angry game. I’ve no doubt the actor was affected by the exercise, but I rather imagine they were given total license to enjoy it too.

Someone shouting at me during sit ups is a personal trainer by the way, and wouldn’t make me the slightest bit mad. Or if they really made me mad, I would leave or get mad at the director, grabbing me and aiming me (and my rage) at the nearest actor is then a total denial of the moment. My anger isn’t really aimed at you in the scene, but someone outside the scene, importing my anger in later. That will not work.

In essence, the question asks, how do we get into that state using Practical Aesthetics. The answer is that we don’t.

Emotional states are useless to an actor.

If we need to be angry, we analyse the scene for the character’s drive, we translate that into a real world task, we find a parallel that we can associate that task with, and then we try to change our scene partner. Using a preparation exercise to give us a sense of what doing it is like if you need it.

We cannot signal ‘I have just killed and abused’, who knows what that looks like. Stanislavski said that at moments of great tragedy. We simply look into the fireplace.

I might have him beg you like his parent’s life depended on it. No, he wouldn’t be angry, but he would be desperate, serious, emotional, and he wouldn’t have to try to dig up an emotional state to get him there.

Affecting your breathing is really just aiming to get the physical state you are looking for, and I am all for cheating the result, but even that is fallible and can fail to work just like emotion/sense memory work.

In the end, you can get the right shot recorded in all sorts of simple, accidental and convoluted ways, but to achieve a result that a director wants takes giving the actor something real to do, and a good reason to do it.

-COACH-

Mark Westbrook is the Senior Coach at Acting Coach Scotland.