Creating Character
Wed, 20 Sept 2006, 08:27 pmLabrug12 posts in thread
Creating Character
Wed, 20 Sept 2006, 08:27 pmWhat does it take to create a character? For the Actor, Director and Playwright?
Taking the lead of several posts found both from the thread What is this thing called acting? and the recent poll, Why do we do it?, let us look into what are the different techniques that we all use when creating a character.
Method Acting, Stanislavsky, Grotowski, organic, Shakespearian, what-ever. Maybe it's a process that you have developed yourself. Have you ever been challenged by a part so much that it left a mark you have never been able to shake? Or are you able to create a character and dispose of them like yesterdays old suit?
Tell us your tales and let us all learn form your experience.
Jeff Watkins
Labrug
http://au.geocities.com/labrug
Shakespearian
Wed, 27 Sept 2006, 10:49 amThe book I am currently reading called "Playing Shakespeare" talks about this very thing. Overplaying the part can reduce the impact of the message. Shakespeare had the idea and Hamlet was his vehicle of instruction.
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.
I warrant your honour.
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action; with this special o'erstep not
the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is
from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful
laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the
censure of the which one must in your allowance
o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be
players that I have seen play, and heard others
praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,
that, neither having the accent of Christians nor
the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so
strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of
nature's journeymen had made men and not made them
well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
I hope we have reformed that indifferently with us,
sir.
O, reform it altogether. And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;
for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to
set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh
too; though, in the mean time, some necessary
question of the play be then to be considered:
that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition
in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.
Absit invidia
Jeff Watkins
Perth based Actor/Performer
who can also sing ... and occasionaly dance
Fight/Sword Choreographer
Virgin Director
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