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Let's End the Specious Argument of Beloved Dead Masters

In particular, let's end the "argument" between Adler and Strasberg.  There is no substance to their false reasoning upon whi...

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Cognition/Emotion - AGAIN

 PLEASE NOTE, in particular, how composed he is when he begins speaking his thoughts, and incrementally, as he connects to his successive thoughts, his emotion links to them.  Access this video on YouTube, and read the wide variety of reactions to what he said.  Theatre is a collaborative art; the final collaborator is the audience, and each member of the audience brings their own life experience to the performance.  Imagine those people as a theatre audience if this were performed by an actor.  Even if they all remained silent, the actor would feel their reaction(s) from the stage.  Each member of the audience is in no way hypnotized or passive, and just as the actor (if performing correctly) accesses emotion, so does each individual member of the audience, through their cognitive understanding access their emotional reaction to the text; they either loved the performance, hated it, liked the story but didn't believe the actor, didn't like the story, loved it, and argued about it over drinks at some cozy bar before heading home.

Surely everyone who has studied technique is familiar with the exercise that will produce emotion regarding an event from one's own life.   The 2002 documentary Broken Silence presented by Steven Spielberg is an excellent example, over and over again, of its validity.  The trailer to the film is linked below. The actor's challenge is to find a way to connect to the thoughts of the character.  "If I can think the thoughts of the character, I can play the character," I heard Simon Callow say.

https://youtu.be/r9gNaBm8gQA