Facing fears can be an exhilarating experience for actors.
Strengths and Weaknesses The strengths and weaknesses of a committed actor can be paradoxical. For this area I chose to consult with an acting colleague of 17 years. I thought it was necessary to have an objective perspective to honestly describe what has been observed from someone that knows me, personally. The following paragraph from a close friend and veteran actor explains this quandary in her description of me. Poole, a veteran actor (2016), described what is needed when committing to the craft:
Strengths - understand and incorporate the process into your preparation. Use the rehearsal process as the main focus for exploration and options. Use bold choices for
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Jung (as cited by Smith, 2007) discussed how through transference and countertransference he temporarily recovered lost souls:
Jung also felt his mental patients at the asylum of Burgholzli were lost souls, hanging out in the land of the dead, an intuition that persons undergoing psychosis are lost to the everyday world of ordinary reality and are lost in the imaginal realm of non-ordinary reality (the collective unconscious). On occasion, Jung was able to pull such persons out of this lost realm and back into ordinary life. Certainly through his analytic and psychotherapy practice, he was able to facilitate the recovery of souls, not through trance journeys, but through analysis of dreams, of transference and counter-transference, and through the power of a deep relationship with him (Kindle Locations 1989-1993).
In acting or with guided imagery, transference in part, is communication between entities. Hagen (1991) emphasized the importance of imagination and application of transferences with the character. An actor increases their ability to be open to other actors because of a sensitivity of transference; creating a meaning in a story. An actor’s training can expose him or her to multiple realities which may enable one to gain greater awareness while in a guided imagery experience.
Emotion-Memory
New actors may find it difficult to be vulnerable. A committed acting
The outstanding component of acting is that it is an aspect that calls for a wide variety of skills. A single person to form a totally different personality from that possessed by the acting person must synchronize these skills. Some of the most common skills necessary for an actor are vocal projection, physical expressiveness, speech clarity, well-developed imagination, emotional facility drama interpretive ability. Also not to forget mentioning other important capabilities that an actor must have are; utilization of accents, body languages, dialects, improvisation, mimicry, emulation, stage combat and observation (Jurkowski and Francis 44). Another fascinating fact about acting is that it combines both talent and special training programs. Due to this fact it offers opportunities to any person who has an interest in becoming a theatre performer. The training has as well availed a chance for the emergence of professional actors who never seize from learning new elements from now and then. These people are among those who undergo training in various sub-disciplines making them diverse and multifunctional. An actor can be good at singing, dancing, partner work, scene work among others. Bundling all these qualities into one single person is a fascinating element which makes them fit for any duty that might be availed to them. Therefore acting as
An actor must develop a full sense of his own identity. This means that the actor is not limited to their usual character, he wants to dig himself out of character within the subconscious, even though he himself does not recognize and repulse this character. Perhaps this character is deep inside the dark side of the actor; perhaps it only appears when actors stay with their family; perhaps this character is produced in daily life by the subtle influence of others arising. Whether the characters suit actor's behavior in daily life or not, these character can be developed to expand the range of actors. Moreover, reading biographies and histories and putting themselves in roles who are described in books promote the growth of actor
An Actor Prepares is quite an undertaking. Stanislavski strives to communicate to his audience the highly theoretical and, therefore, obtuse concepts of acting. Theoretical concepts are many things, not the least of which is accessible to a broad audience. Stanislavski attempts to remedy this dilemma by formatting his book as a fictional class with fictional characters who explore and learn about the theoretical concepts that he possets are essential to truthful art. This classroom format makes the book particularly accessible for acting students who can recognize themselves in the various students of the book as well as the trials, tribulations, and eventual successes that these fictional students experience along the way. This fictional classroom follows a similar progression to our own Acting 101 class because like Stanislavski’s imagined students, we have begun with the most elementary, sophomoric aspects of acting and built up from there. Many of the exercises that the students in An Actor Prepares
He argues that “Natural acting strives to create an illusion of reality by consistency on the part of the actor who remains in character and tends
He left The Neighborhood Playhouse between 1958 and 1964 to become the director of The New Talent Division at Twen-tieth Century Fox in Los Angeles, CA, and also pursued a film acting career. However, he re-turned to The Neighborhood Playhouse in 1964 again as head of the Drama Department and continued through 1990. It was during these years that his “Meisner Technique” truly inspired a new age of actors to live in the moment of their characters and respond truthfully to their scene part-ners rather than simply returning memorized lines. He’d have signs posted through the school saying, “Act Before You Think” and “An Ounce of Behavior is Worth a Pound of Words.” He focused on improvisation in the classroom, teaching that truthful acting is based on instinct and intuition. He taught,’'the emotional rhythm that goes on inside the actor is the least controllable part of any performance, but it must be present in the right proportion if the scene is to work.’' His teaching inspires authenticity in the actors performance by living and reacting moment to moment in the scene.
Jung was highly committed to grasping the meaning of psychotic thinking, and left behind precious insights to treatment scattered through his works written between 1906 and 1958. The tendency of today's psychiatry is to attribute the psychotic process to alteration in the brain's anatomy, biochemistry and electrophysiology, thus exempting the subject, i.e. the afflicted person, from responsibility for attachment to reality and their sanity. Jung understood schizophrenia as an 'abaissement du niveau mental', a similar phenomenon to the one encountered in dreams, and caused by a peculiar 'faiblesse de la volonté'. He contested that complexes in schizophrenia, in contrast with neurotic disorders, are disconnected and can either never reintegrate
Jung became interested in alchemy when he read a book and realized that the subject was the historical counterpart to his study of the unconscious. As a psychiatrist, he observed his patients dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations. One of Jung’s patients had a dream of an eagle soaring into the sky and then it turned and ate its own wings
Carl Jung was a swiss phychiatrist born in 1875. As a child he was close to his father, but he also felt a deep love for his mother. He believed that his father was a weak man. In Jung’s eyes, his mother was happy and cheerful, yet depressed. With his mother’s differecenting personality, Jung saw her as two different people. Whenever Jung had issues or problems as a child, he would look to his dreams and fantasies for answers. Jung specialized in psychiatry at the University of Basel. He studied under Freud yet he did not agree with some of her theories. Jung had his own ideas about personality develops due to what he observed from his parents and the people around him. Jung strongly believed that a person’s personality develops more
Another technical reality you need to consider when using film and television is your face. As per this context, most actors rely on face to express their feelings in wrong way by either bugging their eyes or talking from tense jaws without noticing. This will send a wrong message to the audience. From Larry Moss point of view, to be a leading player in features like films, television and certain roles in theater, actors must have qualities of stillness and simplification. This act is mostly referred to as presence and it has to be portrayed from the eyes of the actor. The face of the actor has to be very still since the performance has to emanate from the eyes of the actor. This does not mean an actor has to be stone faced and self consciously minimal but he has to be subtlety. An actor should portray these emotions through their eyes so that he could carry away the audience emotions. Some parts especially in comedy are more expressive facially than others. Actors should not use their face or body to signal their feeling to the audience but they should actually feel them. This act is referred to us indicating your performance in film industry. Indicating your performance as an actor is a very bad mistake since it portrays how fake you are as an actor. Another thing you need to consider as a good actor is having a good taste and being smart in making your choices in a particular medium.
Jung’s mother Emilie had serious mental problems. People would refer to her as “eccentric and outgoing” during the day, but at night she was said to be “strange” in a sense. She spent a large amount of time by herself in her bedroom where she saw “spirits”. Jung’s mother left the family to live at a psychiatric hospital for a period of time shortly after Jung had turned three years old.
Stepping into the assignment I was immediately opted to google random quotes and find one that I felt I could understand the best. Upon my scrolling I stumbled upon a quote by Johnny Depp. Yes, Johnny Depp not Shakespeare or Marlow like most people would assume. The quote is: “With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.” This quote struck me as intriguing and made me rethink my perspective on acting. The main concept of the quote is to be yourself otherwise you are lying not only to yourself but to your audience. The quote also sheds light on the concept discussed in class where we need to represent parts of our personality in acting. We could try and mimic an actor but it would not be our own work. After contemplating all of these meanings I began to brainstorm the numerous possibilities of how his quote distinguishes acting skills and how it can be applied to daily life.
Acting in Davis’ play was difficult because I wasn’t in the right headspace for an extremely serious play. I can be an angry person when I’m at my limit, but calling that emotion to the surface for acting was not easy. I had a lot of trouble focusing on accomplishing all my tasks while still being angry. I think with more practice, it will be easier for me to get into the mindset of an actor for future projects.
Understanding the relationship between performance and everyday life can be grasped as a great difference. Being able to comprehension this notion especially in acting as your own self can make a person better understand one’s self and others around them. Looking upon many written works over my course of research, I evolve into a key of knowledge from the texts I have looked into to. From a broad range of texts to choose from this literature review will cover the relation between the writings and my argument.
The practice of method acting has become no less than a cultural phenomenon during the last eighty or so years. The idea of an actor throwing himself so far into a role that character and man become one intrigues and horrifies most. Of course, there is more to it than that. The technique of method acting became prominent in the mid-twentieth century thanks to teachers like Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio in New York. In essence, the method involves a search for truth in a role, wherein the actor or actress recalls emotions or reactions from their own life to inform and identify with the character. While this approach has produced no doubt some of the best performances of the modern age, there are numerous drawbacks. When an actor dives
Great performances in media do not always have to involve theatrical acrobatics. An actor’s range or displays of genuine, emotional depth are necessary to build a character that is alive and multi-faceted. But, an actor’s ability to encapsulate a narrative within one’s own character is what is truly a display of an artist. Poetry has a phrase to describe the use of as few words as possible to encompass vast terrain of depth called the economy of language. Actors may not know it, but they operate on very similar guidelines. The small choices in an actor’s repertoire to move the body at a certain angle, to speak at a certain octave, the confidence by which one conveys a piece of dialogue. This “economy” of persona l expression builds a narrative of whom this character really is. The choice of a certain actor can change the implications of a character as well. For example, the well-known George Clooney’s educated and liberal personal background influences many movie goers in multi-dimensional ways. The crucial choice can change what a certain audience will see the person’s actions are relatable or even moral. Basically, sometimes great performances come down to the right people being put in the right scenarios and given the right tools. Enter Bud Corts and Kyle Maclachan.