Noticing, experiencing, affecting and being affected

They say that one of the differences between acting on the stage and acting for a camera is the stage actor ‘performs’ and the camera actor ‘experiences’. I do not subscribe to the division, I think the stage actor often has to project things over distance, but it does not mean they are not experiencing.

By experiencing, I mean they experience something in themselves and they experience something from others.

Personally I believe actors for both stage and screen should allow their own experiences to affect them, and also those experiences of others.

We should allow ourselves to notice those things that others experience and to be affected by them.

In Practical Aesthetics, and Meisner and Meisner-related acting techniques, we use repetition games to do that.

However I always feel our acting students get hung up on the pressure of the moment, on calling behaviour, on finding the right vocabulary, on the self-consciousness of being ‘called’ or on being in front of others – some for the first time.

There is an exercise that acting teacher Tony Barr used and I think it’s a wonderful way to start thinking about noticing, experiencing, affecting and being affected.

We’ll just call it: The Listening Game. It was created by a psychologist Dr Nathaniel Branden and I hope its benefits will become clear.

Meisner believed that actors don’t listen to each other. In acting, we don’t listen because we know what’s coming next from our scene partner and focus on our own next lines. In life, we often do not listen to those speaking to us, and focus on what we will say next. When we do listen we focus on what they say, but although we hear, we rarely actually listen.

In the Listening Game, two actors sit as close together as they can without touching, they also sit as comfortably as possible.

One actor is the speaker and the other is the listener. They will change roles once the first speaker has finished.

The listener’s role is perhaps the most important, their job is to just sit and listen with complete but gentle focus on the speaker. The listener has no obligation to do anything at all, but should they have a genuine impulse, they should not deny it. If nothing happens, that’s just as good, so the listener should have no need to do anything, only listen carefully.

The speaker is read some incomplete sentences by the acting coach and they repeat the dictated part of the sentence and then complete it with their own answer. They repeat the first part and add a new ending each time until the acting coach offers them a new incomplete sentence.

So the acting coach says: when I was young I… and the speaker repeats that and completes the sentence.

Speaker: When I was young I believed I could control the outcome of sporting events with my mind. When I was young I collected stamps and bought and sold them at school. When I was young my parents owned the local shop. When I was young my parents separated and I didn’t see my father very much. Etc, until the acting coach offers a new incomplete sentence.

The Listener simply takes the other person in, and listens to them.

At some point, the attitude and feelings of the Speaker will leak out, consciously or unconsciously.

Since the Listener only needs to listen, and if they trust that task and do it honestly and openly, they will perceive things in the speaker that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. They will also be affected by the speaker and the things they perceive.

The listener will get impulses to laugh, cry, touch the speaker, hug them or move, this all comes from just listening. They should learn to trust these impulses, they were caused by noticing, listening and experiencing the hidden part of another person, but it all starts with just listening.

Imagine scenes where you were genuinely being as affected as the students are in this exercise. No wonder Tony’s students were and are so successful!

Of course the listener may experience distraction, confusion and lose concentration, but they should keep lightly placing their attention back on listening to the speaker and enjoy receiving they pick up.

This is a non-invasive, fun, friendly, low pressure way to get people to really notice, experience and be affected by others.

Try it.