Emotional Journey

In this YouTube video, I talk about the ‘emotional trap’ that actors get stuck in where they pick one overriding emotion and play that emotion at the same intensity all the way through the monologue or the scene and how that gets boring very quickly. 

If the trap is boring, how do we make it exciting? How do we make it interesting? 

Well, variety. Variety is the key to keeping your audience engaged. Variety and specificity. 

How do we do that? We have to take the audience on a journey. So then what we need in terms of emotion is we need an emotional journey. So that could be an emotional journey within a monologue, it could be an emotional journey within a scene or it could be an emotional journey within the act of the play or that segment of the play, film, television series, etc. Journey is key. 

How do we get an emotional journey? There are two types we should consider in our performance. One would be linear where we start on a particular type of emotion and then we move along the monologue or the scene and we end up somewhere very different to where we started. A to Z so to speak.  

The second type of emotional journey that is useful for actors is the 360 degree emotional journey. You might end up where you started, but you had to go all the way around emotionally before you got back there. 

In both cases, the emotional journey keeps us moving, keeps our thoughts and character’s behaviour and what we’re doing to the other shifting and changing in terms of our emotional connection to it and that keeps things interesting, varied and specific for the audience. 

It’s all about the journey folks!