Here’s the 4 basic skills we’re teaching:
1) cold reading skills so that you can look at their partner almost all the
time and not worry about being able to easily and quickly pick up words off the page
2) emotional openness and spontaneity
3) getting your emotions from you partner and the imaginary circumstances, not from your idea of how you should be reacting
4) developing the habit of initiating your own openness, spontaneity and
risk-taking as a habit whenever and wherever you act.
You need to be able to do all of the above at the same time at least 90% of
the time to meet the professional standard and be competitive in the
business.
It all starts with emotional openness.
The choices you make for your performance of any scene are arrived at through doing your scene over and over again with an open heart and mind.
Those choices you finally decide to include in your performance are the end result of what you learn through the emotional experiences you have each time you rehearse your scene. You arrive at your final set of choices by going through a process of allowing yourself to fully experience and fully express your instinctive emotional responses to each moment of a scene, without worrying about right and wrong.
There is no purely intellectual process which will lead to your best and unique performance of a scene. Your talent comes from your instincts.
We’re all emotionally controlled and guarded in some ways. Being
emotionally controlled and guarded is the opposite of being instinctive and
spontaneous so it’s bad for your acting.
Everything we do is to get people out of their own way by not being in
emotional control and guarded, so that they can let their instincts take
over and be truly spontaneous.
By being instinctive and truly spontaneous moment by moment, each actor will be able discover his instinctive responses to each and every moment in the scene, during each run-through and thereby discover his best and unique performance of each moment of each scene he performs.
Copyright 2006 David Kagen
All rights reserved
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Excellence in On-Camera Acting [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
The following is an excerpt from Marlon Brando’s autobiography, BRANDO Songs My Mother Taught Me:
“On the day Gadg (Elia Kazan) showed me the complete picture (of ON THE WATERFRONT), I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room. I thought i was a huge failure, and walked out with out a word to him. I was simply embarrassed for myself.”
Marlon Brando went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in ON THE WATERFRONT. It turned out to be one of his finest film performances.
Please think about this when you are so sure your acting “sucks.” Our own feelings about how we are doing in a performance are unreliable. That’s hard to deal with while you’re performing, as well as afterward. You’ve just got to keep hanging in there and keep giving/committing 100% regardless of your personal feelings, and let others be the judge.
This is what we help people learn by practicing in our Los Angeles On-Camera acting classes.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
Copyright David Kagen 2006
All rights reserved
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Meisner’s ON ACTING Study Guide [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
Find each of the following principles in the Sanford Meisner’s book, ON ACTING, and study them over and over again. These are the core skills Meisner discusses that we teach:
1) Meisner quotes George Bernard Shaw who said…Self-betrayal, magnified to suit the optics of the theater, is the whole art of acting. By “self-betrayal,” Shaw meant the pure, unselfconscious revelation of the gifted actor’s most inner and most private being to the people in his audience. (This is at the heart of all good acting. You’re supposed to reveal the most personal, private feelings you have in the course of doing a scene. That’s the hardest part.)
2) Your talent comes from your instincts; from your instinctive emotional responses to your partners emotions and your instinctive emotional responses to the imaginary circumstances
Most of us have ways we control our feelings and ways we control how other people see us. All that control is the opposite of being spontaneous and instinctive when you act and is therefore terrible for your acting. Your controls prevent you from being deeply emotional and expressing the deepest human aspects of yourself in a scene. In order to be a good actor you have to want to reveal yourself emotionally, not hide your true feelings and not fake feelings in your scenes. Never say,”that’s as far as I’m going to go emotionally.”
3) Acting is living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances.
4) The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.
5) Getting your attention off yourself is the big battle won.
6) An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
7) Let the words be the canoe that rides on the river of your emotions.
Act before you think.
9) The pinch and the ouch – that acting requires your immediate visceral response to everything that happens.
10) Acting is reacting – reacting to your partner in each and every moment.
11) Act impulse to impulse, not cue to cue.
12) Try to be as mindless as possible when you act.
13) Don’t change until something happens to make you change.
14) Don’t hold onto your preparation/ideas about any scene.
15) There’s no character; it’s always you in the scene. It’s a part of you that is the “character.”
16) Your emotional reactions in scenes should come out of you like “Elenora Duse’s blush;” from the heart, not the head.
17) Always assume you’re getting something from you partner. There’s no such thing as your partner not giving you anything. There is no such thing as nothing.
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At our school we are going to the heart of the matter with regard to acting. Learn what we’re teaching and you can work, and do good work, in the film and television business. Though you do need some experience acting on your feet, the getting-up-on-your-feet part is usually very simple for the camera and doesn’t take much to pick up; not anything close to what it takes to learn how to be instinctive and bare your soul.
The following email from one of our students who was in HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG with Ben Kingsley sums up what we’re trying to get across:
So the main thing I learned on the set of House of Sand and Fog or I should say had been reinforced that I have heard you ask of us in class is not try to perform the final product. That it is really a discovery, that everyone is searching for. You the actor, the other actors, the director and even sometimes the DP depending on the shot. You might have some vague idea as a jumping off point but its really about letting go of those ideas to let the discoveries birth. And the ideas are not really “ideas” about how the scene should go but more how you the actor/character feels something. How the Imaginary circumstances affect you. And even after you have rehearsed or even shot a few takes it is still about LETTING GO and really trying to let even more discoveries happen. It never stops.
The other high point was watching Ben Kingsly, Jennifer Connelly, and Ron Eldard work with this Director who I respect very much. The director really put the work and the art first. This made him a bit hard to deal with at some points, but it was great to see everyone just put the ego’s aside and just continue to collaborate. It wasn’t to hurt anyone’s feelings it was a commitment to getting the best work. I loved that.
Copyright 2006 by David Kagen
All rights reserved