The actors’ play beyond performance, and why it’s rare to spot them crumble in act

Marek Lach
Aug 27, 2017 · 8 min read

People get entertained by watching others adapt to roles, sitting close to them and observe them, understand who they are, what they are capable of personally. Yet acting is a procedure in which abilities and conduct get hard to pick apart as it’s unfolded.

It’s possible to imagine that an actor can behave more brazenly when within a role — like they are cunning, lustful, or mad.

With that they can pierce, gasp and shake the onlookers more deeply, more closely, even when the actors are spurred on through the performance with their own emphasis and words and carried quite separately from the script they perform, as if in a real-time negation.

Playing is a good medium during which to try to reach an understanding with the others on stage, from the utmost inside, and accepted, plead, reasoned, argued within the frame of the play, but in fact turning into a silent discussion of urgent interpersonal relations, with scripted words and motioning all over it, more possible then it’d be if they were not on a stage. On stage negating of real problems and misunderstood relations is easier, since understanding and resolving of confusion arrive more wholesomely in a play.

The wilfull belief, this notion of heightened fragile sympathy to the scene of performance, because of associated emotions, not its details, is understood with the audience that it happens sooner, than a real situation of this type is profoundly understood by fellow actors who can recognise a genuine life concern being included, each time that a performance goes on, because it usually really takes them aback and they feel like seeing real effects of corosive behaviour in the lives of some of their co-stars alters their thinking.

Fellow actors take the impact of some real behaviours and the effects they lead to on stage in more slowly and more astonishedly then how it is scripted. So a true appeal to emotions that is an act at the same time, is received more softly, and more considerately by other actors, than it wold be even by the drawn-in sympathetic audience driven by the scripted story.

This kind of exposition that unfolded between the actors during the play, realising the human scale of their colleagues, then really transcends into a gentle, measuredly pragmatic, heartfelt approach and suddenly affects them, as they are released now a bit, eased, balanced out and changed with a kin of distanced understanding, even after the play ended, relieved and naturally compassionate between them from then on.

Not being taken point-blank seriously allows for some wiggle room to experiment in one’s confidence, insofar as the script of the play is open thus. In such cases, there is a difference between the ongoing performance and the important message conveyed in the background at the same time to someone. So even with a familiar play, the strong reaction of the recipient to it is however quite new and original, once it completely manifests on their face as the story being told, which they thought they knew takes on a life and a significance that touches deeply and is unforgettable, even when imperfect to the original, but the actor, or the singer stirs, scorns, condemns, explains.

When one’s being tasked to perform a heart-pulsing, heroic action role, my underlying assumption here does not necessarily mean that the relevant actor is suddenly tougher, and can withstand more physical stress conditions in other aspects of life, because of having portrayed the role in question.

And what is to the possibility of carrying a character’s role beyond the designated stage, insofar as a character’s manner of speaking and behaving enriches the manner of the real person who adopts it in other situations from then on too.

Not necessarily in a way that they become much more than they really are. But that at least the real actor learns to extract everything there is possible to be had with that role of a character, in the sense of what the character alludes.

Even though no person can defy what is intrinsic in them, that person can at least seek to find out at what exact stage they do exhaust their character’s opportunities, as they come to different territories with it, and may then still find that their real selves are kind of not able to be fulfilled with it, as such.

But a person can at least seek to find out whether by undertaking of an adopted role they now have at their disposal still quite little for the experience of life, or whether they have already experienced enough as is. Forwhat’s most certainly a known phenomenon is that they cannot, and will not, understand the pleasures that acting role entices on them, as being objectively altogether unnecessary, hence burdensome to human experience, but merely as specific, additional manifestations of nothing eccentric, nothing obsolete, but clearly infeasible.

An attitude like that has to entail an unexpressed fact: the actor would not inevitably arrive at passion and desire around even many women in a scene, and would not really conceive of such things being projected at him there, so would not seek it on its own either, merely because he has a romantic role with the actresses. They may create some sort of serene tenure around him that he then goes for beyond the immediate, something independent of the the script, and of the characters they perform for the overseeing spectator.

It may be that their bodies are close to create warmth, but he does view such things on external basis, and produces no trembling due to her ass, for a personal deepening of atmosphere, that environment of instinct goes between, if the male is on set reservedly timid around the female gender.

It can be a scandalous, salacious romantic character scenario, relying on overemphasis in sex, yet by nature he may just not find it integral to achieve the ecstatic experience of tenderness in his life, find no entirely new feeling.

For example, an actor who happens to adapt to the popular premise of
Casanova’s many impulsive relationships and boastfulness, then the actor
would essentially speak their wishes loudly instead of keeping them
private the more, although he would not necessarily direct them towards
anyone in particular, or anything other than what they already have nearby.

If, on the other hand, the actor in his role is speaking to someone
at home directly, they could probably easily learn to speak about
feelings rather than actions as such.

Meaning that in all and whichever situations, they imply what their overarching problem is, and watch it picked up willingly by those who want to do so. To the question of whether you’re hungry, a response of something like — “I ache in the wake of sturdy lakes, as bees fly on by.” — this sounds romantic, if you want to see it that way, or melancholic, but also hungry.

Startlingly, there is almost no research to be found on the issue of acting intimately, and how this really affects participants. What I mean is that when an actor performs a role, it is not assumed that she herself undertakes personal negation between herself and the other actors, or the audience.

It is not normally assumed that the actor on stage may use it as sort of a canvas to make appeals, or to challenge difficult resolutions that are in principle completely unrelated to the character’s ark, and maybe even completely unrelated to the production, but rather related to her own world, aimed to be establishing of a pattern beyond acting, but of necessities in life, if only subtle nudging then, not to break the scope of possibility within the play.

Which can in fact be anything, almost — like help with moving, rationalising choices to parents, or something as little as adjust the heating, or come for a meeting in regular hours, or move ahead with consulting, to not induce the practicing of lines in areas near her childhood memories because she is a different person now, or not to bend too much because it is in fact not easy to do, or to come in regular hours, not just anytime — a negation, hopefully sufficiently explained, of serious matters, concurrently with performance.

In such a case as we have outlined here, performance functions like a canvas on which certain difficulties of life between people on the stage are resolved better, because they have to be expressed subtly, but also kind of expressively one-on-one, and in a manner that wouldn’t abruptly break the tone of the play on stage. Now, a certain degree of this already happens before a play, or a filming starts, where the actor makes clear what are they willing, or unwilling to perform, like if they are willing to lay in bed.

However, such ordinary understanding of communication and alternation of a role, or script between a particular actor and director is not done on stage, and it does not alter a situation outside of acting either.

We can of course understand that a character who was originally supposed to get naked, and now they won’t because actor who won’t participate in such a scene — then the actor is certainly transferring a little bit of their own attitudes onto the character in question, and this has a theoretical resemblance to our concern here, but practically is different, for it’s an attitude to be judged before even entering the stage at all, based on the role’s script. This attitude of the actor does no longer matter when resolved.

In other words, an uncomfortable actor will not get the uncomfortable role, and that is a known fact, that will, after establishing, not get brought up more. It is not something to be resolved, certainly not otherwise then in relation to the role, rather it is a matter of fact, meaning, that the issue is not a question.

Only one thing remains to be considered at this stage still, and that is a somewhat overarching look at the fact that resolving life as someone plays is already going on in practice, more in the sense that if a horror scene is being put on, and the actress knows about it, nevertheless, her heart-rate well accelerates in that banal moment, and this hazardous effect is often not something the audience seeks to inflict, but it is a scare so momentary and so internal that, in fact it is one of but few individual, unplanned traits that leak into the performance, even if few people notice it.

Then if we accept the above three paragraphs, we have to logically conclude that despite an acting role being presumed no different from any other when intimacy is agreed to be preformed on screen, that there are in fact certain very spontaneous, and somewhat tangible differences regardless of the fact that the actor doing it is as possibly confident, as they can be from any real scrutinising direction, that doesn’t do any imposing, so to go ahead with this:

…research focuses on the use of gesture that accompanies speech, and the ways in which the two are not separate as previously thought. He suggests that gestures are closely linked to speech, and yet present meaning in a form fundamentally different from that of speech… (Kemp Richard, in 2010).

What these differences are indisputably, becomes hard to detect, because even though real, they may not be erased simply when fount out, as they are ‘ticks’ that could not get replicated, maybe replaced with time, although certainly not eliminated, or brought to a halt, when it’s a case of bodily impulses having a charge, and commanding the otherwise in-control mind.

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Marek Lach

Written by

Interested in #narrative compositions, and in #psychology for the purposes of #storytelling. https://mastodon.xyz/@mareklach. Blog on: https://tautolog.org

Musing Spectacle— theoretical ideas, reconciled for practically dispositioned minds

— normally but theoretical life ideas, acquainted for the practically dispositioned minds

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