#fucked up how well ur brain can hold onto things like the exact details of how someones voice sounds

[strawberrypaw]

oouuhg

#fucked up how well ur brain can hold onto things like the exact details of how someones voice sounds #literally was scared awake this morning by a hyper realistic dream where i was in my basement and heard my stepmom calling my old name #i have not spoken to that woman since like 2018... and i think the last time i saw her before that was like... late 2015 lmao #my dad very specifically makes sure she and her freak son arent around if i ever come over to the house because he Knows #he doesnt ever acknowledge it or do anything about it but. he has also never outright denied it or told me i was wrong either lol #he forbade her from ''parenting'' me when i was 14 bc she was too cruel even by his standards which is Impressive #i was a peer and a rival in her eyes by the time i was 13. some freudian shit on her part. made everyone in the house deeply uncomfortable #insisting that a 13 y/o is an evil conniving manipulator on equal footing with a 40 y/o woman probably made me weird huh.... #i get it i know.... im a stand in for my dead mother and no one will ever see me otherwise lmao #okayy okay im done <3 #mau

[theboykingofhell]

(acting anon from earlier!!) i read ur whole thing and its FILLED with rly good info ty!! im british and im looking to start getting into acting but i always shyed away from it in schools etc cause there's always be a dance side to it and :/ no ty id rather eat nails than dance ever. but im rly interested in the acting techniques n stuff u mentioned and id defo read as many posts abt it as u wanted to write :0 ty for your time!!

OK YEAH now that i actually have time and by that i mean i have no time there’s like three things i’m supposed to be doing rn but i want to stall starting them lmfao I’MMA TALK MORE ABOUT THIS RN

imma be real i cant remember all the things i mentioned in that post i wrote and i cant be bothered to go back and look so IF YOU EVER HAVE A SPECIFIC QUESTION LITERALLY ASK ME ANY TIME

oooooooooooh... yeah.. love... babe.... go to acting schools lol it’s not even JUST the fact that they literally teach you how to act but. you. need to network. god. especially since you ARE british, acting schools are very important because a lot of companies will pretty much hire you based on what school you went to. just the short amount of time i was there made this VERY obvious that it is VERY hard to get picked up by a company if you haven’t gone to school, and getting picked up by a company is how you get consistent theater work for YEEEEEEARS...!!! also, usually a school will give you a rly good chance to network by having some sort of showcase at the end where you can get in contact with a bunch of agents and the more famous the school, the more agents see your work and try and help you out!!!!

and, like... the whole dance bit is just a hurdle you’re gonna have to jump. it’s def rly important to just partipate in the classes, you don’t have to be GOOD but it gives you just that little bit of awareness over your body and your movement that you might not have had before and that’s rly important, especially on the stage!! i felt the same way about singing but, man, the more you work at it, the more mangeable it gets. and you don’t want to have this grudge on you forever because it’ll really limit your work :/

but i mean man you don’t actually have to, there’s no set way to become an actor! if you find work, you have that work, it doesn’t matter how you get there t b h. i just think it helps and the more skills you acquire, the better of a chance you have to get that work...

(i RLY suggest lamda, it’s a hard school get into but it’s one of the best if not the best and also the education is beautiful and ALSO lamda-trained actors get the most consistent work because the uk just nuts all over itself about lamda-trained actors)

BUT YEAH. ACTING TECHNIQUES. GONNA FINALLY ADD A CUT LOL

i’m only gonna talk about these vaguely cuz tbh i’m not as ~studied~ as i should be because i’ve been far too lazy until now to actually sit down and read acting textbooks but HERE’S THE GIST....

stanislavsky is like... pretty much the most well-known most taught acting technique. so many of the other techniques you learn BUILDS on his work. there’s a huge range of shit that he’s got to offer because his and later similar teachings are SO focused on realism (which tbh is a very new thing in acting), but some of the most important is stuff like emotional recall and objective work aaaaand character building by using yourSELF and projecting it onto the character. it’s a very psychological form of acting and it’s... MY BASIS but not actually my fave!

now, a lot of parts of it is very useful. emotional recall, for one, is SUPER nice. it’s a very good way to build that vulnerability up, tear down a lot of walls and explore how to summon emotions up....

my first exercise with stanislavsky, i remember them making us lie down and pretty much meditate, and then you listened as the teacher described a bunch of things: your favorite beach as a child and what it felt like, all these sensory memories about the smells and tastes and sights of the beach. and then it moved on to the night of your first kiss, your first love, and then your first loss. a nice basic range of basic emotions, and then you build on that.

stanislavsky (and stuff like uta hagan who wrote a RLY great book that i havent finished reading yet but it’s a GREAT way to rly build on the technique) rly encourages taking yourself and putting it into the character. SO!!!! if your character is going through their first break-up, summon the feelings and memories of your first break-up and push that into your lines, so on and so forth.

the big criticism with stanislavsky and all the techniques like them is that it COULD be very unhealthy for you... considering it’s all about reliving and reliving old memories. and i agree, i mean, one of my favorite plays and one of my monologues of choice for auditions is from a play where the main character is kidnapped and raped, and i’ve been kidnapped and raped before so i am CONSTANTLY and purposely triggering myself just to perform that monologue well. THAT AIN’T RIGHT! helps tho! 

(stuff like method acting falls under stanislavsky and his successors strasberg and stella adler, so....! you can see why not everyone fucks with it)

MY criticism about stanislavsky, which is why it doesn’t work as much for me, is that it’s very VERY heavily text-based. uhhh THIS IS LONG ALREADY SO SOMEONE SEND AN ASK ABOUT OBJECTIVES AND I’LL EXPLAIN but they want you to do a lot in the moment that makes it very distracting if you don’t have this process pinned down and that’s AGGRAVATING FOR ME ANYWAY

chekov is another technique that’s interesting, again not a fave but VERY helpful. this one builds character more from the outside in, it’s all about like... a lot of very subtle details that you can add to the background to add color to your performances. a lot of it is about atmospheres, attitudes, body language, and how that affects your character and how your character is thinking through the scene. it’s VERY reactionary and very fun because you don’t have to think NEARLY as much. 

pretty much you form... gestures, or moods for your characters, and instead of perfoming an ‘action’ (stanislavsky thingy, i’ll explain that in another post i guess), you’re using this ‘gesture’ to explain yourself. it is far FAR more abstract than stanislavsky, which is a lot more technique and exact, and it’s very vague, which does make it very hard for people. it also doesn’t stress realism like stanislavsky and company does, so it’s not as popular at the moment!

 meisner technique is my second favorite technique and kind of hard to explain because i haven’t rly gotten a comprehensive course in it yet besides a few workshops and activities, but it’s a technique that stresses STRESSES ‘listening’. that’s something you hear a lot as an actor, it’s one of the hardest things to really get but it’s also, truly, the essence of good acting. you can’t be a good actor if you don’t listen, because if you don’t listen, you’re not in the moment, and if you’re not IN the moment, you’re just... reciting lines!!!

it’s so hard to explain so i’mma link a cute video i just found because it shows a lot of variety and also shows the actors messing up a lot and it’s cute omfg

it focuses a lot of repetition (either of the same one line for each person or they’re both doing the same line back and forth) which forces the actor to not think about what’s being said but how it’s being said. you’re stuck in the moment because you KNOW what you’re gonna say, you don’t have to worry about saying anything else, all you gotta worry about is what the other person does and how you’re gonna react to it. if they suddenly start screaming in your face UHH YOU’RE GONNA SCREAM BACK HOW DARE YOU? and it’s automatic and SO natural and that’s why i love it, because you don’t have to THINK through it. you don’t rly think through your life like they make you do in other techniques, so i adore the ability to not have to do that on stage.

however i’ve never gotten far enough in the technique to find out how to apply it to a set script but it might just be about building that openness to just... DO and BE and let whatever happens happens, which is NICE

LAST THING THAT I’LL TALK ABOUT IS FUCKING GROTOWSKI YE  S. ok so a lot of techniques overlap, so by this i’m also talking about lecoq and peter brook’s acting techniques. it’s all physical theatre which is all about the GROTEQUE and like UGH there’s so many fascinating things honestly just google ‘theatre of cruelty’ because it’s FASCINATING

the emphasis is... not rly on realism altho the acting i’ve seen come out of it is the most realistic i’ve seen? it’s rly gritty and about accessing the most... EXTREME of emotions, it’s about rly grasping human nature and twisting it and bringing it on stage. peter brook especially (who has a book called the empty stage or something like that that i got to read) stresses that... theatre shouldn’t be about costumes and sets and whatever, it should be just about the actor, and that you can do a PERFECTLY GOOD show with a completely empty stage, with just the actor in the center.

it also has an emphasis on YANKING the audience into the show and being very interactive and like... nothing’s held back, it should be hard to watch, THEATRE SHOULD BE CATHARTIC AND FUCKED UP AND YES.

so physical theatre involves pulling emotions from the body through your movement. life isn’t just about the mind, after all, your body holds emotions through it, there’s chemicals and hormones and what your body does on its own and against other bodies and just. again, hard to explain so HERE’S SOME COOL VIDS THAT SHOWS DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES AND COMPARES THEM ALL

i lied there’s one more technique i wanna mention: it’s called alba emoting! it, again, builds on the idea that trying to access emotions through the brain is UNHEALTHY AND DANGEROUS and that you can, instead, try and access it through the body! how???? cuz emotions are PHYSICAL. you feel sadness and anger and love and whatnot in your gut and chest and through your head and all through every nerve in your body, right????? so why not try and mimic that for the stage???

it’s SUPER COOL because! what you do with alba emoting is: affix yourself a certain way. it involves certain body postures or positions, certain expressions sometimes... EVERY time it depends upon a different breathing pattern... and all you gotta do is do it. and your body doesn’t know better, it gets tricked into it...!

so, if i were to alba emote fear... it’s hard to describe through text rather than do it but this one might be the clearest one... part of the positioning is to have your hands up in front of you, as if you’re trying to ward someone off or shield yourself. you have your mouth open, you have your eyes stuck to the floor in a submissive sort of way, (there’s more that i cant describe but then) you start to make yourself hyperventilate by taking short, quick breaths through your mouth. after a few seconds of this, your body just starts SHOOTING adrenaline through you because it starts thinking WHOA SOMETHING BAD’S HAPPENING I’M AFRAID?FUCKFUCKFUCK

and that continues until you stop! you can stop at any time and then just go. you get left with a ‘residue’ (which is very chekov in nature in that it ‘colors’ your performance) where you can just act and do the lines and do your actions (stanislavsky) without worrying about needing to push any fear into yourself because it’s THERE, it’s PRESENT and whatever happens in the scene will either alliviate it or make it worse!!!

it’s a BEAUTIFUL way to prepare for a scene right before you go on stage too omg. last semester we were doing julius ceasar, and there was a scene where i had to play a servant who just witnessed a murder and just. go in and beg for my life and the life of my master. so i did the fear emote, and then my friend (playing my master at the moment) decided to talk to me in character and give me the order to throw myself in front of the murderers and LMFAO by the time i ran on there i was like fucking in tears i was so terrified HA

THERE ARE SO MANY MORE TOO IT’S SO FUN YOU JUST GOTTA GO AND SEE WHAT WORKS FOR YOU WHOO!!!!!! HOPE THIS WAS FUN AND HELPFUL YES

#ACTING TAG #GOD THIS TOOK LIKE A HALF HOUR LOL #I WANTED TO PROCRASTINATE BUT NOT T H A T MUCH SO I'LL ANSWER THE SECOND HALF OF YOUR ASK LATER #Anonymous #ask tag