I
Believe
This About Acting
Conclusion / 5
BY
ANNE FIELDING
Very often, in the actor's attempt to take on a
character, he will use
all sorts of makeup, wigs, and accents. These can be helpful, but they
sometimes obscure the real person, and then we have neither the actor
nor
the character.
Within and Without, Depth and Surface are in all acting.
We go deeply
into a part in order to come out with fullness and believability.
Michael
Chekhov wrote of the "psychological gesture." If you put your hand to
your
head, something will happen to you inside. If you extend your arms
wide,
something will happen inside. You can start the other way around. You
can
begin with a memory of something deep in your mind. In every part,
however,
within and without must be one.
An example of these opposites working together occurred
to me when the
Hamlet Revisited Company was in rehearsal for Shakespeare's Hamlet:
Revisited. We had come to Ophelia's mad scene, and Ell Siegel gave
me a directorial suggestion which swiftly brought together Ophelia as
frighteningly
in herself, and also out of herself with distraction. Mr.
Siegel
suggested that as I came to the line of her song, "Fare thee well, my
dove,"
I slowly extend my arm as if I were holding a small bird; then release
the bird and watch it fly into the air, as though something very close
to me were going far out into the world. I have played this scene many
times, and that gesture never fails to cause a deep emotion within
me.
In the world of acting, there is a need for a central
idea which combines
both technique and purpose—what Stanislavski called the "broad base."
Eli
Siegel's Theory of Opposites advances and gives a further dimension to
all that has been learned about acting. We actors need a purpose that
we
can see as lastingly right.
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