Finding Real Emotion With Method Acting
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.
One approach that can bring some realism into the performances of the actors is the Method acting approach. There are many acting coaches that use this method to teach students how to give a genuine performance.
In 1931 Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman formed the Group Theater. This theater company was started to develop a company that would present a unified performance to the plays that were produced by the theater. The word group in the name of the theater is significant because it was the desire of the founders to create a theater with no stars and only a group of actors that were all equal in their contribution to the performance.
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.
Acting coaches have since taken the approach and added their own elements to the Method. Each different style will have a personal touch that has been included by the acting coach.
Many actors who were previously guarded and giving stiff performances have been able to open up and use the emotions that are in their own experience. This method is a powerful tool for bringing those emotions out of the actor and into their performance.
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 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.
An actor who uses this approach is opening himself up to the emotional pain of his or her own life. This is what it means to be an artist and not simply an actor.
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