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Applying Emotional Colors and Tactics to This Content-Less Scene--Content and Meaning Quickly Emerge

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Applying Emotional Colors and Tactics to This Content-Less Scene--Content and Meaning Quickly Emerge Part Two: EMOTIONS Emotion (noun): the affective aspect of consciousness: a state of feeling: a conscious mental reaction subjectively experienced usually directed towards something and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. Etymology: from Middle French, emouvoir "to stir up" and Latin, e-movere "to-move." There is a popular saying in the acting field, “50% of acting is reacting.” This statement holds a great deal of truth when you consider that human behavior is motivated not only by our thoughts, but by our feelings about those thoughts. If we had no feelings we would be mere automatons. Our emotions are what connect us with humanity, provide the social glue to our relationships, and mark our behaviors with truth or untruth. EMOTIONS can reflect personality, displayed by the way we react to situations, the feelings we express with our words and actions, and how these feelings are reflected in our stature, gestures, behaviors, and tactics. A person’s manner of moving through space, interacting with others, speaking, gesturing, and even thinking is all colored by emotion. Therefore an actor must not only investigate the character’s emotions in all areas of the performance, but the actor must also consider how he carries emotions that will then color his performance of the character. Since the actor is the canvas for his art, and the actor is a living system who has developed a lifetime of habitual and responsive thoughts, emotions, and actions himself, he must be aware of these levels present within himself, as well as in the character he portrays. This chapter will address emotions by discussing emotional colors, emotional tactics, and an introduction on embodying emotions. The Manifestation chapter will then provide detailed instruction on embodiment, as well as clearing embodied emotions by attaining a neutral state. As you read on and learn more about how emotions affect acting, consider this, if your words and actions were devoid of emotion, how interesting would your performance be? If two actors were simply standing, facing each other, saying the same lines, like the "Give it to me" and "No" sequence from the end of the Thought chapter, over and over in a scene without blocking action, would you notice differences in the actors' individual line delivery? The essence of those differences is emotion. A famous study by UCLA Psychology Professor, Albert Mehrabian, discovered that when a person is expressing thoughts on feelings and attitudes, the actual words a person spoke had only 7% out of 100% impact on their audience, the rest of the impact was on nonverbal communication (body language 55% and tone of voice 38%). Another study from the British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that all nonverbal cues had 4.3 x that 1 of verbal cues (or an 81%/19% split). Emotions, which are conveyed through tone of voice and body language, are more important to expression than words – for our words and actions are colored by emotions. Emotional Colors and Emotional Tactics Emotional colors are the variations of emotions and feelings exhibited by a character. Call them moods, feelings, emotions, personality or states of being, they all ultimately influence the behavior of a person, often as an unconscious action. Have you ever heard of someone being referred to as having a colorful personality? The emotional colors displayed by the character an actor portrays are the results of the actor's work and preparation, much like in life the emotional colors of a person's personality are the results of a lifetime of an individual's own character building. Emotional tactics are when a person intentionally chooses to approach or react to a situation in a specific emotional state. Consider times when you might have coached yourself as you approached someone about a difficult subject or controlled your emotional reaction to a surprising situation. You were most likely using emotional tactics, for you were consciously selecting your emotional actions and reactions to better suit the situation. Young children perfect emotional tactics, for they learn early on before they are able to speak that their emotions create reactions from adults. They quickly manifest this recognition into intentional tactics to achieve what they need or want from adults. As children grow into youth and later adults, this ability simply becomes more refined, so refined many of us don't realize we are doing it any more. A person can regularly experience both the conscious emotional tactics, as well as the unconscious emotional colors of personality and mood. Since actors first approach their work with a deconstructive process, starting with the evidence the script provides of the character's behavior, they first build their character's emotional actions from a conscious state. The actor will intentionally apply most of the emotional work in the form of physical character building and scoring emotional tactics throughout the script. Once the actor has made these initial decisions, during rehearsals and in performances, she may find herself going in and out of conscious and unconscious emotional actions and reactions. At this point she is going between emotional colors and emotional tactics. She has fully integrated her intentional preparation work with spontaneous interactions with her given circumstances in performance, which is an ideal combination. Later in the Manifestation chapter you will learn more about how to embody emotional states and apply these embodiment techniques to acting and scene study. At this point in the process, we will focus only on the simple act of making intentional emotional tactic choices in the script. 2 Intentional Emotional Scoring Vs Spontaneous Reactions Some acting books and classes might simply focus on the actions a character makes, stressing the objectives and stating something like, “Emotions will result from the strong pursuance of the objective.” Although emotions will result from the actions and interactions within scenes, many more emotional colors result from applying conscious and skillful dynamic emotional tactics that are clearly aligned with the character's thoughts and actions. Many actors in the field have been known to say, "I don't intentionally apply emotions to my work, I focus on the actions." What many people don't realize when they make these statements is that action is filled with emotion, and that emotion is active. Emotion is often so misunderstood that actors and directors interpret emotion for large emotive moments on stage. Going back to the basic etymology of the word emotion, e-movere "to-move" implies action, and a movement starting from within and radiating out. A more detailed definition of emotion reveals even more references to action and movement, a conscious mental reaction subjectively experienced usually directed towards something and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. It is important for an actor to recognize that these behavioral changes include such subtle actions as breath, postural angles, muscular shifts, and gesture. The actor is expressing these behavioral actions along with his actions on stage, however he may not even realize that they are indeed the foundations of emotion and expression. This actor, although he states he is not applying emotion to his acting, actually is exhibiting layers of emotion, however without a full knowledge of all aspects of what he is truly expressing. You are going to be much more in control of you craft if you recognize that your acting can be hindered if you are unaware of how emotion and expression is exhibited by the whole self. If ou are not mindful of your personal habits, have a limited emotional vocabulary, allow a bad day to affect a performance, or place too much reliance on emotional inspiration or reacting off the output of other actors, you will practice the acting profession oblivious of an extremely large percentage of your impact on your audience, your character, and other actors. Since our emotions and feelings constitute much of our personalities and behaviors, it is important for you to not only learn what you are doing, but how you are doing the action. The acting teacher Michael Chekhov refers to this how as the Quality, "the Action (and Will) expresses "what" happens, whereas the Quality (and Feelings) shows "how" it happens." You must learn to become aware of this emotional quality in your acting work and how you can use it as an intentional acting tool (emotional tactic), as an integrative behavioral element (emotional color) and recognize how it rises up from your own personal behavior either in support of the role or contradicting the role you are playing. 3 Emotionally Daring Monologue I am working as the Emotion Coach for a community performance project where the script is created by stories extracted from community members and culled by a playwright into a series of monologues, scenes, and songs with a unifying theme. Some of the actors in the performance are people who contributed stories to the production, and I am working with one such actor, helping her prepare her monologue for performance. The actor is a thoughtful and sensitive writer who contributed an analytically poetic coming-out story of her new identity, having been someone else years before, and now stands before the audience, proudly staking her claim as transformed anew. We have already talked about the monologue and identified the emotional colors and tactics shifting throughout. However, as she rehearses the piece, I see her physically retreating up stage, behind furniture, and even stepping back and sinking down in her posture in all the moments that we have identified as her being proud, courageous, feisty, and brazen. After reminding her a few times to address these conscious emotional tactics, and seeing her fall back in fear and sink down into sadness in each of these moments, I consider the possibility that her own fears and sadness of her personal past, being the writer of this monologue, might be preventing her from living the present active choices of the piece.
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