DISCUSIÓN DE RESULTADOS

Adding sensory detail deepens and keeps fresh any actor’s choice. The brilliance of a ective memory as a technique is the understanding that it is the sensory life (e.g., the pattern of the wallpaper, the sound of the voices in the next room) that recalls the emotional event far more vividly than pondering the emotion (“I felt frightened,” etc.) or even the event (“My mother was screaming,” or whatever).

If the actor is using a substitution, he starts from a relaxed condition and explores his memory for true sensory detail about the person or event he is substituting. He uses all his senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. If he is substituting, say, the kitchen table of his own childhood for the kitchen table the set decorator has brought in, he recalls its color, its scratches, the chewing gum his sister left under it, etc.

Objectives and intentions stay fresh and vivid via the here-and-now physical reality of the other actor’s physical face and body: for example, “Do I see forgiveness in her eyes, hear it in her voice (not just in her words)?”

Sensory life is necessary to bring to life the resources of imagination and observation too. Let’s say the movie is set in medieval times. The actor does reading and research to get ideas for his physical life, which will be entirely based on imagination. But the imaginative work should still be sensory. When he imagines himself sitting in the wooden chairs of the period, he lets himself feel the rough wood against the backs of his legs. When he imagines wearing armor, he doesn’t just think about armor, he lets himself feel its weight on his body. If actors do not root their imaginative preparation thus, in sensory life, their work may become intellectualized and stagy.

Character work based on observation must also be sensorially rooted. If an actor plays a character with a limp, there may be a temptation to make a mere imitation or demonstration of the outward appearance of an uneven gait. Making it sensory has to do with making it speci c—not a generic limp, but a speci c limp, which originates in a speci c sti ness or soreness in the hip or knee joint. The actor puts his concentration on a sensation of sti ness or soreness, but not with any sense of strain or obligation to feel it. Concentration is the operative word. If the concentration is ve or ten percent successful that is plenty; imagination supplies the rest.

Sense memory exercises can be very freeing. I nd in my own classes that sense memory exercises, as long as there is no strain or fear of failure attached to them, o er students a kind of reprieve from the stresses of daily life which distract us from our creative resources. They return us to a child’s sense of concentration on very simple things, such as the color of the inside of a seashell or the texture of a rose petal or the temperature of a cup of tea as it cools in our hands.

Sense memory has very practical uses for actors. When a character in a scene burns himself on a hot stove, the actor playing the role does not touch a stove that is hot; he touches a cold stove as if it were hot. Sophisticated special e ects require actors to perform in front of the blue screen as if they were on a precipice or airplane wing. And

since Shakespeare’s time, the actor playing Macbeth has had to be able to see a dagger where there was none.

An actor working from the outside in might scan his storage banks of observation for the physical movement of someone touching a stove that’s hot, and borrow or imitate that movement. Working from the inside out, however, the actor creates the sense memory of the sensation of burning, and then lets his hand follow its own impulse and move whichever way it wants to, in response to this created, imagined stimuli. I think you can see that for lm, especially the big screen, a sense memory is going to be more believable.

Does this mean the actor actually feels the pain of a burn? Not at all. That’s the wonder of all this acting stu ; the concentration creates an imagined reality; the audience is invited to fill in the blanks with their own experience or imagination.

F^EELINGS

“I think that to sing the blues you have to feel it.” — Billie Holiday

Is an actor supposed to “feel it”? If so, does he feel it as himself or as the character? If the character is scared, should the actor really be scared or should he merely look scared?

A dozen actors will answer these questions a dozen di erent ways. My own answer is, yes and no. I think that when Billie Holiday said (in a radio interview) that to sing the blues you have to feel it, she was talking about authenticity. Authenticity—not feeling, exactly—is the goal, but authenticity is unlikely without feeling. Whatever truth the artist gives us must be true on a feeling level, not just on an intellectual level. An actor needs to surrender to the emotional honesty that is required for a role rather than crank up its emotional intensity. I urge all directors to take an acting class yourself so that you can understand some of these issues at gut level.

Feelings don’t hurt people. Sometimes directors are afraid of deep feelings and this holds them back in their communication with actors. For actors, expressing deep feelings can be cathartic; they may have chosen the profession for the very reason that it o ers the opportunity to go to dark and di cult places. Does the director have to go with the actor to these dark places? Yes and no. You can let yourself deeply imagine the characters’ inner lives, and respect the courage of an honest actor while also respecting his privacy.

Emotions are energy. There is no need to manipulate, bully, shame, or abuse an actor into going to the places you feel are required for the role (even though some of them won’t mind it if you do). You can invite them to invest more in the images of the scene, in other words, to make the work more personal. Or you can o er them freedom, give them permission to “let go even more.” You need in the next breath to promise that you’ll be watching to make sure the performance is not overacted.

Emotion must never be indulged, or even attempted, for its own sake. When actors enjoy their tears and hold on to emotion for the sake of its e ect, showing us how much emotion they have, the acting becomes bad. Whenever an actor feels something, he must harness that energy to a sense of task or predicament. In real life, as I mentioned in the rst chapter, people don’t try to have feelings, and frequently they try not to have them.

Performances are usually much more successful when actors play against whatever feeling they have. It can be funnier when an actor tries not to laugh at a funeral (like Mary Tyler Moore in the famous “Chuckles the Clown” episode of her long-running TV show); more poignant when an actor holds back his tears; more frightening when his rage is contained.