Caldarone Marina - Actions: the actors thesaurus

INTRODUCTION

Actions The Actors Thesaurus aims to clarify a widely used rehearsal and performance technique, known by different names, but here called Actioning.

Actioning provides the stimulation for the actor to directly play each line of the text and develop alternative ways of bringing their character to life. The technique encourages performances with accurate and dramatic communication between characters.

Actioning heightens the actors spontaneity, discouraging him or her from monotonously and automatically replicating a tone. Everyone has seen productions particularly of Shakespeares plays where, if they were completely honest, both audience and players alike dont have a clue about whats going on; its all sound and fury signifying nothing. Actioning should keep the actors in the moment and deter what Peter Brook calls deadly acting, where nothing is going on, just words being spoken.

If the actor plays a real and specific action on each sentence then, even though the audience are unlikely to be able to identify the technique or the individual action, the work will be interesting and absolutely watchable because of its precision. Actioning enforces a specificity which can liberate the actors performance and ensure a cohesive integrated character with each moment leading naturally onto the next.

Actioning is a starting point for use in the rehearsal room and for private textual analysis. It really comes to fruition in performance, affording actors the self-confidence to develop and refine their choices continuously. Actioning keeps the text alive by ensuring the drama is active and subject to constant redefinition.

If a whole company takes an hour to explore the principle at the start of rehearsals, a shared dramaturgical language is established. This synchronisation can save rehearsal time and facilitate more efficient communication.

Stimulation Spontaneity Specificity Self-confidence Synchronisation

Actioning is primarily for actors for established professionals and beginners alike, for students or amateur actors, for those with training and those without. Actioning can also be useful for music theatre performers, for actors wrestling with audition speeches, for those who have to breathe life into a one-dimensional television or radio commercial, or for those who have been performing a play for months and need to reinvigorate their performance.

This book can also be used by academic students of drama to deconstruct a script for its sub-textual dynamic.

The Origins of Actioning

Actioning comes from Stanislavski (1863-1938), the Russian actor/director/theorist who formulated a revolutionary acting methodology which seeks to enhance psychological depth and emotional truth in performance. His system, still studied and practised widely around the world, acted as a catalyst for other approaches to acting, including the American Method.

In his work (primarily at the Moscow Art Theatre), Stanislavski pioneered a series of exercises and rules which would allow actors toaccess their emotions more freely and maintain the essential but elusive creative state.

Concentrating on Actioning may be many actors way of short-circuiting all elements of the rather more complex and more psychologically demanding system. Nonetheless, knowledge of key elements of Stanislavskis system is vital before being able to begin your work on Actioning.

Units and Objectives

Finding an action for a particular moment or line of text is dependent upon understanding the Stanislavskian concept of units and objectives (sometimes called episodes and tasks). In each unit of the text, you must decide on your objective (what your character wants) before defining the action (how your character sets out to get it).

Begin by breaking the scene up into units, each containing a single defined objective. Stanislavski makes a useful analogy in An Actor Prepares. For him, the process of dividing a play into its component units is like breaking up a cooked chicken so that it can be eaten. If eaten portion by portion, then the whole chicken can ultimately be devoured. Similarly, the scene is broken into its separate portions or units in order to be investigated. Each unit has its own title, which describes what that unit is about, and each character has his or her own objective at the heart of that unit. Like units, which can be major (whole sections of text) or minor (a single word or short sentence), so the characters objectives are major or minor according to how the second-to-second minutiae of the scene develops.