1. Using things that normally would throw us off to enhance our scene
2. Feeding off of other actors in the scene
3. Finding, Filling in, being confident with, and lengthening beats
Using things that normally would throw us off to enhance our scene
One of the most important things to learn in acting is the ability to improvise - whether you want insurance in case you forget or drop a line, someone else forgets a line and you have to fill in important context to move the scene forward, or (what happened today) you get a case of the giggles in a previously mapped out "serious" scene, you can't find the laugh that you need for a funny scene, or someone throws something into a scene by accident that you need to react to while maintaining the integrity of the character you've created.
We have worked before on paraphrasing as it relates to improvising a scene(and we will work on this more next week), and today we added to our improvisation skills by learning reactive improvising.
Today we talked about and worked on rolling with the punches - if you get the giggles mid-scene - don't let it throw you off or feel like you're ruining the overall mood of the scene - think of how to work it into your character and use it as an authentic reaction that the character could have.
We also talked about what to do if you are one of the other characters and someone changes courses mid-scene- how to go along with it, and how to react.
Any action that is put into a scene should never be ignored - it makes it seem unnatural, or like you are trying to read from a piece of paper - regardless of how memorized the scene is. The best thing to do is to react to things in real time.
For example - One of the characters in our scene was supposed to be "unimpressed" and "not giving anything to those trying to gain her trust and affection". Because the scene was funny - the student, Tatum, started laughing. At first, she stopped, thinking she had ruined the scene.
But after we talked about improvising and using it in her character - we switched her character choices slightly to - anytime she giggled, she was making fun of the people who were so clearly out of touch with her character's needs and/or her being a little bit hysterical that these people were in charge of freeing her from jail - where she felt she would have to stay.
She was able to turn something that was throwing her off - into something that further added to the scene - and looked even more natural because it was a natural reaction.
Everyone else in the scene reacted to it in real time as well - making the scene more interesting and natural.
Feeding off of other actors in the scene
Another big thing that we worked on today was pulling your weight in a scene. Each actor in a scene counts on the others to help them move the scene forward; they each feed off of eachother's energy, use eachother to find the pace of a scene and size of actions, to find the movements and levels of voice inflections. If one actor puts less energy into the scene than it needs - it requires the others to not only put even more energy, but adjust their character's choices to makeup for the character who has decided to not give everything to that scene.
Because each actor, regardless of the amount of lines the have, or where they enter the scene, is just as important as the others - you have to give just as much as those around you.
We worked today on feeding off of each other - and using other people's lines to move the scene forward by using their beats as opportunities to act and react to what they were saying - giving the one speaking even more to take from for their own actions.
Finding, Filling in, being confident with, and lengthening beats
We have worked for several weeks on finding natural beats (or pauses), putting extra beats into a scene as acting choices, and lengthening beats so that we are properly using them to move a character description and scene forward.
Today, we started our class out by me assigning each of the students a character and having them choose their own beats that they would be using in our scene. I then had them totally commit to their chosen beats - lengthening them so that we could clearly see the choices they had made and why.