Really Doing Stuff – Part 2 – As If
About 800 years ago, my assistant Ian Watt, a teacher in our studio, wrote a blog about really doing stuff. After a lot of pestering, he’s kindly written Part 2 of that blog, focusing on the area of As-If. Enjoy:
Part 1 focused on the power of TACTICS or how we go about getting what we want.
In Part 2 we look at how we practice TACTICS for real using As If & As Iffing.
There are lots of new concepts for our Step 1 students to grapple with – Repetition, Script Analysis & Tactics and no one sails through classes picking everything up straight away. There’s always some level of struggle along the way – but here’s the thing to remember – STRUGGLE IS GOOD.
One common area of difficulty I’ve spotted is doing Tactics – for REAL. The things we do, they way we do them in our everyday lives evades us when we’re asked to be active in a contrived situation such as a scripted scene.
When our students start with this work, we see a lot of good effort in pretending their way through doing a TASK, but when we introduce As If and As Iffing – something clicks. Each term I’m amazed at the importance of this part of the jigsaw. These exercises take students to a different level of action and commitment to their TASK. Even the less confident students find themselves becoming fully active. Their tell-tail signs of self-consciousness fade away and we’re suddenly watching real people fully going after a specific task. As the well known advert says – priceless!
The As IF is a daydream of how we would do the TASK ourselves. It s NOT dreaming what our character would do in the situation the writer has put them in but a daydream of how YOU would truthfully DO the TASK for real in life. The daydream of the TASK helps you to drop the pretend element of acting out the scene, the way you think the characters might behave and to truthfully do the real stuff you’d naturally do to get a specific TASK done.
I find it helps to think what a specific person would have to do to me for me to need to DO the specific TASK – RIGHT NOW! Giving the TASK urgency and stakes will drive you to get your TASK completed and compel you to get it done. It has to fire you up and drive your actions so give your imagination full reign!
For example – What is the TASK ‘to bring someone down a peg’ like to do? Well it’s AS IF… and you have to fill in your answer with REAL TACTICS and using a relationship type that matches the relationship between the characters in the scene: are they colleagues, lovers, enemies or friends? and choose a matching relationship for your As If.
The range of TACTICS I’d select for ‘to bring someone down a peg’ would be very different for if my AS IF was using my 80 year old frail mother, my big sister, my bank manager or the guy who has just cut me up on the motorway.
The As Iffing exercise is where the students chase their TASK using the TACTICS they’ve daydreamed. They get the opportunity to rehearse their chosen TACTICS & TACTICS until they are truthful and flow quite naturally. It doesn’t take long before the exercise starts to look like the scene.
The anxiety of performing drops away, making sense of the script becomes less important and the intent and drive of the TASK shines through with subtlety as real TACTICS are selected from what the actor sees their scene partner doing in front of them. Then when we stick the script on top of what the students are already doing and we get an amazing, truthful set of actions by real people really doing stuff to each other.
By keeping your attention and focus on your partner and by setting a strong physical cap, you can easily check how close you are getting to what you want from the other person and adjust TACTICS according to how you see behaving.
To get ready for the As Iffing exercise
Make a decision about the relationship between the characters in the scene think about the level of STAKE involved in the scene – (ask what is at stake? Why do you have to do this task? What is at risk if you don’t do it?)
draw up your own daydream rooted in the TASK and NOT the situation of the scene
be specific – don’t leave details vague or you’ll find your TACTICS are vague in the exercise
select a good pool of truthful TACTICS
set a definite physical cap and go after your TASK
aim to change your scene partner’s behaviour
Ian Watt – Acting Coach Scotland