Emotion
Emotion is one of the most debatable aspect of acting. The process towards achieving truthful emotion on stage is just as controversial. In my reading of various theorists: Stanislavski, Chekhov, Adler, Strasberg, Meisner, Miller, Hagen, and Gusman, among others, most often I can separate each theorist by their approach to emotion in acting.
It is not surprising that Strasberg and Meisner, out of the work in the Group Theatre, known for its psychological realist shows, work with emotion extensively, although from two different angles: Affective memory work from Strasberg, and Imagination work from Meisner. Both try to achieve the same results using similar methods, but with one difference: Sanford Meisner preaches the use of using imagination as the catalyst, with an element of truth involved, while Strasberg wants the actor to drudge up personal experiences, reliving them in their mind to reproduce an emotion.
This is typically, how Meisner would “emotionally prep” (as he called it) for a scene, or at least how he taught it. Take an element of truth, anything at all that has meaning for you: a parent, a loved one, a sibling; it has to be meaningful for YOU. Then you let your imagination work its magic, setting this element of truth in an imagined condition. If, in theory, the actor gives all power to his or her imagination, it will create some very deep and very real emotions. Strasberg, on the other hand, would simply want the element of truth to be a previous experience that produces emotion for you. Strasberg would encourage the use of sensory details. What did the room you were in smell like at the time of this experience? How cold was it? What color were the walls? By concentrating on these secondary details instead of the event itself, it would lead the actor through a backdoor to the emotions of that particular event. The key difference, in Meisner’s opinion, is the use of imagination. Meisner felt that by using personal experiences, the actor is placing them at risk of using up all their emotion by repetitive use of a particular event.
Stella Adler is also from this same group of actors/teachers, but her text offers much less emphasis on emotional content. This seems like an appropriate area to explore the controversy about emotion. In her book, The Art of Acting, Adler dedicates a chapter to retelling her meeting with Stanislavski, the first practical theorist of acting. Adler had become disgruntled about acting with the Group Theatre. Strasberg’s techniques, which he taught to her and the Group under the guise of Stanislavski’s work, left Adler distraught. When she met Stanislavski in Paris, she explained her feelings of anger toward him because of his contributions to acting. However, Stanislavski requested she meet with him again to go over his system of acting, because he felt she was taught his techniques wrong. Stanislavski was correct. When Adler came back to America, she had her own version of Stanislavski’s system that she taught to her fellow actors, as well as aspiring young actors in the decades that followed.
The most interesting aspect of her book is that she never talks about drudging up emotions like either Meisner or Strasberg. One of the few credits she gives to emotion is in her chapter on justification, the psychological reasoning why the actor performs an action. She states that it must “agitate you, should help you experience the action and the emotion. If you experience nothing, you’ve made a dead choice” (Adler 123). Adler’s approach, to summarize, consists of examining the text, the given circumstances, the actions of the characters in the text, and serving them all as the actor in performance. If the actor dedicates his or her self through all of that work to finding meaningful justification that excites them, they should not have to worry about the emotion, it will be there. The justification of their work is the key element, though. Without proper justification, the actor will go through the actions with no weight behind them, and the performance will be dead.
This is the essential argument for emotion: it brings meaning to our performance. I am reminded of an experience I had, watching a one-act play from a high school. The performance was dull and meaningless, yet the actors were doing their job: They were communicating the text to the audience. I understood the action, yet I was very dissatisfied with their performance. I realized that it was because there was nothing behind the action. Even though the performers were physically invested into the roles, the emotional content was lacking. They were dancing puppets.
Part of me was horrified when I first saw this. They were doing many things right: their bodies were physically tethered into the space, they had created point of views of the characters that established how they would respond to every line in the play. But they were missing two key elements: Emotional honesty and spontaneity. I believe the lack of spontaneity could be a huge factor in their lack of emotional honesty: If they’re simply going through the motions, there can’t be any emotional value in the work.
The point of this story suggests that emotional work is necessary to the life of a theatrical performance. In my own experience, I cannot help but create emotional work, even if that was not the intended result. Even simply manipulating physical factors, the tempo I move, the way I position my body, etc. can have an impact on my emotional state, however small or large. The key, though, when using physical choices in stirring up any emotional work, is to commit to the movements completely, with just enough abandon that you are no longer thinking about what comes next in the scene, but with enough restraint as to not harm yourself or others (and possibly the set, or anything of value). The key, for me, is by committing to these actions, I will surprise myself with the next moment. This requires spontaneity, which will be discussed further.
The trick to emotional work, however, in any form, is personalization. This word takes on a variety of different meanings depending on the teacher. They essentially all say the same thing, but differently. One would be surprised at how much the syntax can impact their acting choices. Personalization can be defined as taking any given moment in a play: A scene, a beat within the scene, or even a line, and relating it to yourself in some way to make that moment meaningful to you. For example, take a character with a mental disability. I have never had a disability, so my greatest job as an actor will be to relate to each scene in such a way as to convey my disability to the audience while staying true to the text. In the particular scene I was doing, I broke the scene down into little chunks, not quite the beats of the scenes. In each chunk that I mapped out, I found an extreme activity and related to myself. When my character talks about enjoying sex with the other person, I personalized the section as “wanting to blow raspberries in her lap”, which led me to trying to stuff my head in her lap when I get very specific about the sexual activities I enjoyed with her. Later, when I tell her she’s like an angel, I imagined that this section was like “discovering that I can crap a piece of gold.” The personalization has nothing to do with loving the actress in the scene with me, but that personalization helped me find the emotional truth of the lines to give them to the actress so that she could play off my honesty.
Use your imagination when coming up with personalizations. Find personalizations that work for you, the individual. Follow your instincts; those are the gold that you have as an actor. Only with time and experience can you figure out what instincts are going to work and which are not.

05/25/2007

Author's Note: First draft

Posted on 05/25/2007
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