Glasgow Acting Coach on: Perspective and the Actor
As actors, we must live in what Eckhart Tolle calls ‘the now’. We must be present, and we must work in the moment, as terrifying as Mamet’s ‘unforeseen’ can be to us, when we choose improvisational moment to moment acting, and not the ossified and deathly prescribed performance.
Acting is about acknowledging the truth of each moment and working from that as the basis of your truthful acting. It isn’t about being ‘true to life’, or ‘true to the text’, although respect to the obligations of the text is a must.
Acknowledging the present moment, taking in and noticing, really listening and hearing what our partner is REALLY saying, not listening deafly to the pre-scripted words, but hearing the actor themselves.
But the truth of the moment is not enough. When we attempt to act on behalf of a character in a fiction, when we stand in for them, we must in some way represent their desires too.
In my approach to acting, we call the actor’s representation of the fictional desire ‘ a task’. Something achievable to do in the real world, actor to actor.
But having a task is not just pursuing it, but also seeing the other actor through it. The task becomes a frame through which we see all of the other actor’s behaviour.
So, yes, we acknowledge the truth of the moment, but we see that moment through a lens, a filter coloured with the task.
If I am getting a commitment and my fellow actor begins to giggle, I can see that through the lens of my task, they are not taking my desire for commitment seriously. They are laughing it off. In the moment, they may be laughing about anything, but the task adds context for me, it makes me see their behaviour with a perspective, it gives me an opinion.
When Sanford Meisner said acting was ‘living truthfully under the given circumstances of the play’, this is what he meant. Yes, be yourself, behave instinctively, truthfully, in a moment to moment way with the actor before you, but more important, the circumstances of the scene must colour what you do. This finds its way in through the task that the actor must achieve in the scene.
It is no less truthful, you are still seeing what is happening, you are just choosing to interpret that behaviour through the perspective given to you by the TASK. If you want the other actor to ‘drop the subject’, until they are physically showing you that they have dropped the subject (through what we call a PHYSICAL CAP), you can just presume they haven’t. And work from that place, from that perspective. After a few moments of practice, you are truthfully responding to what they are doing in each moment, you hear what they are saying and interpret it through the screen of the task, the frame of the task, the lens or filter.
This can be practised in exercises such as Repetition with Task.
COACH