Finding Real Emotion With Method Acting
Author: RoyEisenstein Total views: 5 Word Count: 567
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.
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.
Method acting began in the 1930's with the formation of the Group Theater in New York. Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman formed the theater in 1931. This group formed the theater to create a theater that would train their players in a group atmosphere where there would be no star, but a collective group producing contemporary plays.
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.
There are a number of acting schools and coaches who use the Method to teach budding actors how to bring emotion into their performances. The particular school or acting coach may add their personal touches to the technique, but they are all based on the Method.
This technique has taken many performances by actors that were previously guarded and stiff and turned them into powerfully intense emotional performances. This technique is a successful method of bringing the emotions out of an actor.
There are exercises that the actor will perform to help him or her to bring up the powerful emotions that are available to them if they learn to tap into them. The actor will learn to enter into a state of emotion through the exercises that are learned by this style of acting. The actor learns to use those emotions in the scene that they are performing. The audience that watches a performance that uses this technique is seeing real genuine emotion from the actor.
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.
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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About the Author
Roy is a successful actor who has distinguished himself in developing and pioneering comedy vehicles that shape the genre. An acting coach and instructor, and has taught in Hollywood and abroad at the IAFT, a film school in Cebu, Philippines.
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