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Finding Real
Emotion With Method Acting
By
Roy Eisenstein
Many actors pretend the
emotions that their characters are feeling while others
bring the real thing to their performance.
When there is an actor who is
faking the emotions that their characters are feeling,
there is always an element of disbelief. Actors who
pretend to feel what their characters are feeling are very
apparent to the audience that is watching the performance.
This can take a great deal of genuineness from the entire
production when the actors use this approach in their
performance.
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When method acting is used,
however, there is a feeling of realism that is created by
the actors in the performance. There are many acting
coaches that teach this style of acting to their students.
This helps to create actors who understand the truth of
real emotion in their performances.
In 1931, the Group Theater
was created by Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and Harold
Clurman. The Group Theater was designed to present a
unified approach to performing the plays of that time.
There was to be no star in the company and all of the
actors were part of a movement that would achieve success
for every member of the company.
Some of the members who were
a part of the Group Theater were Kurt Weill, Lee J. Cobb,
Paul Strand, Paul Green, Clifford Odets, Michael Gordon,
John Randolph, Joseph Bromberg, Franchot Tone, Will Geer,
Howard Da Silva, Luther Adler, Stella Adler, John
Garfield, and Elia Kazan.
It is with this company of
actors that Lee Strasberg developed the method of acting
that later was to be called the Method. The inspiration
for this style of acting came from the work of Konstantin
Stanislavsky. The actors are taught during rehearsal to
bring real emotion into their performance by calling up
the experiences of their own life.
This method of discovering
real emotions and experiences is done through the act of
improvisation.
Through the years, the Method
has gone through many incarnations as it has been passed
through the hands of different acting coaches. Acting
coaches add their own personalization to the method to get
the best performances out of their students.
The Method has given some
very stilted and guarded actors a way to bring the truth
of emotion into their performances. The intense exercises
are designed to help the actor open up and add some
emotion into their performance without pretending the
emotion.
The exercises that the Method
uses will help the actor to draw upon their own life
experiences for the emotions that their characters are
feeling in the scene they are performing. It is about
moving from a state of being into a state of emotion and
then using that state to perform the scene. When an
audience watches an actor who is using this technique the
performances can be powerful and raw. There is genuine
emotion behind the acting.
The Method is not something
that is learned and finished. The act of learning the
Method is something that the actor will continue for the
rest of their career. It is a process of learning to tap
into the life experiences that everyone has and using them
in the performance.
Once the Method is learned
the actor will be able to use the exercises in whatever
performance they are doing at any time.
This method changes the
performance from an acting performance into an art form.
The artist is always able to put his or her own passion
and emotion into the performance while the actor simply
pretends.
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Roy Eisenstein is a veteran
of comedy and hidden camera reality television, who
has made a career of developing and pioneering comedy
vehicles that shape the genre.
Eisenstein is an acting
coach and mentor, and has taught in Hollywood and
abroad at the IAFT, a
film school in
the Philippines.
Article Source:
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