Article Advise

submitted: Oct 6th 2008 | by: RoyEisenstein | Total views: 2 | Word Count: 558 | |

Many actors pretend the emotions that their characters are feeling while others bring the real thing to their performance.

Actors who feign their emotions during a performance are called being presentational. When this approach to acting is used the audience will know that the actor is not being genuine and will respond accordingly. The entire performance will be judged to be unbelievable by the audience and it will affect the performances of all the other actors in the company.

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.

The Group Theater is the place where Lee Strasberg first began to develop the Method, which is how it is known today. He drew upon the inspiration of Konstantin Stanislavsky for the approaches that would be used in this method of acting. The actors who use the Method are taught to use the experiences of their own life to work through the emotions in the piece of acting they are performing.

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 approach to acting is a lifelong commitment to the process. The actor will always be learning about their own emotions and their response to the events of their life. They will always have a well of emotional experiences to draw upon whenever their performance demands it.

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.

About the Author

Eisenstein is a successful actor who has made a career of developing and pioneering comedy vehicles that shape the genre. An acting coach and instructor, and has taught in Hollywood and overseas at the IAFT, a film school in Cebu, Philippines.

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