Glasgow Acting Coach says: “All Great Acting is Improvisational”
All great acting is improvisational. I don’t mean they just make it up as they go along – although that’s also EXACTLY what I mean. The scripted lines are written in stone, BUT… what the actor does in each moment on stage, or each take in front of the camera, that should be entirely spontaneous. It is a terrifying tightrope walk, but there amongst the danger and dread is the key to the most immediate and intimate performances. An actor likes to set themselves a track and stick to it, I move here, I say this in this way, I stand with my hands on my hips here and smile, yes yes, it all looks very good and it is comforting to the actor that they know what they are doing… BUT it is bullshit. The reason I believe this is that within a few run throughs, the actor is already trying to reproduce the time it worked the best and very quickly after that it loses all immediacy altogether.
Immediacy is when something has never happened before and it is what all actors strive for in their performance, the sense that this has never happened previously. But of course, traditional acting and rehearsal techniques have us repeat and repeat, as if that were the way to make something seem more spontaneous. To become an improvisational actor, that is to walk the tightrope without a safety net and the exciting of undertaking such a task is unrivaled. Do you love the buzz that acting gives you? Well, imagine the buzz of actually acting and reacting in the moment, responding to what is actually happening, rather than what you imagine is the thing that is meant to happen in that moment. Oh, seriously, this improvisational acting, it takes real nerves of steel. But the results are matchless.
Yet, despite being improvisational, the actor still works within the given parameters of the scene and in line with the writer’s intention, and yet – each moment, or each take is different. Slightly different. Not black and white different. But degrees of difference, and those degrees MAKE all the difference.
Attempting to bring the same performance back take after take and moment to moment is going to deaden your performance in the end, or rather quicker than that!
The only way to create truthful, authentic, organic performances is through spontaneous and improvisational acting, How do we get there? Well, that’s another story….