Shadow emotion
Me as Tevye
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Objective
Objective is one of THE most important things to remember as you develop your character. Without it the scene can fall flat. Why? People instinctively empathize with that basic human characteristic. People who doggedly overcome their obstacles to achieve something. Even the bad guys. You have to have wants and desires and go after them with persistence. It is within the core of "conflicting interests" where we find conflict and tension and this helps create all the drama and comedy. When I perform, I'm thinking objective, feeling some emotion and responding to what is happening around me in the scene. But it is the OBJECTIVE that I seek, realizing that I may have to use various strategies (based on the script) to go after that objective. I may play it coy, or might get right up in some one's face and make demands, but I will be trying to get something that is desperately important, simply because all people are selfish. We have self interest in everything we do. So going after something that is very important to us brings realism to the character. You must have objective!
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I was talking theroy in my class last week.. I wanted to make sure that students had understood what was in the course manual. This week I'm going to put them through their paces and try to get them to stretch emotionally, learn to control the emotion, maintain and suppress it at the same time while still letting it manifest itself in physicality. To me, that's the beauty of playing a character that allows you to study emotion--you get to play with this like a painter using a canvas. We're also going to work on actions (business) and I'm going to show them how I'm doing that with the script from a current play I'm doing. I'll do this by physically showing them the line by line process I use to invent certain actions so they can see the difference between acting emotionally with objective and telling an emotional story rather than just spewing out lines.
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