BP - Basics of Performance (Lesson)
Basics of Performance
Theatrical Realism and Actor Techniques
Societal Changes Leading to Realism
In the late 1800s, significant changes took place all over the world. The Industrial Revolution led to the invention and common use of steam engines, mechanical looms, railroads, photography, telegraphs, etc. This shift in access to increased productivity, faster transportation, communication, and direct visual documentation drastically changed how people could observe the world around them. For the first time, people could communicate within seconds across the globe, travel to locations in days rather than months, and see pictures of events that once had to be interpreted through relatively stylized paintings. This was the first time that families could see the true carnage of war on their loved ones without relying on a more distanced and interpreted form of visual art.
All of this led to changes in ideas across multiple disciplines. For example:
• Biology: Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859)
• Economics: Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1859)
• Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good, and Evil (1885)
• Psychology: Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
For our purposes, this shift in understanding psychology is the most important. This reinvention of how we functioned in the world finally turned inward in a significant way and started to look at why we do what we do and how we function in the world.
Freud posited that the human psyche, or personality, was not driven entirely by conscious choices, but rather by three parts, the Id, Ego, and Superego. The Id is essentially the impulsive, pleasure-based, and unconscious driver of one’s actions. The Ego is the conscious mediator between the unrealistic id and the external real world. This is the part that makes decisions. The Super-Ego incorporates the values and morals of society.
While others also suggested that human behavior had multiple motivating factors, the Interpretation of Dreams was the first text to give any form or definition to the function of the conscious and the subconscious. While our understanding of human impulse and decision-making has changed dramatically over time, this text is still considered by many to be the birth of human psychology.
All of these changes in the world posed a significant challenge for artists as well. The old format of often unrealistic performances was no longer appealing to the audience. Audiences began to crave “real life” on stage. One prominent actor took this challenge in a revolutionary way.
Stanislavski’s System
Please watch the presentation below to learn more about Stanislavski's System.
Constantine Stanislavski was an actor and director that struggled with the inconsistency of performance on stage. He found that one performance would engage the audience and the next night the same choices could be made but the performance would fall flat. He developed a system that would aim at creating “real life” on stage every time. The key principles of his system are:
- Creation of inner creative mood
- “Through consciousness to the subconscious”
- Observation of reality
- Given circumstances, objectives, through-line
- Magic if and emotion memory
- Moment-to-moment acting, the illusion of the first time
- Working within the ensemble
To that end, he developed script interpretation tools that focus on achieving conscious access to the subconscious.
Conscious Means to the Subconscious
Please watch the presentation below to learn more about objectives, tactics, and obstacles.
The script interpretation tools for how actors use the lines are as follows:
- Super Objective - Character’s overall goal.
- Obstacles - The thing that stands in the way of a character achieving the objective.
- Objective - A specific desire of a character within a scene. This desire drives the character to speak and interact with others. The character wants to (action verb).
- Tactic - How an objective is pursued. Characters can use multiple tactics to achieve the same objective.
For example, A character is running a race. What is the super objective? To win the race.
Here is another example: A log falls in the middle of the path. What is the log considered? An obstacle. What is the new objective? To get past the log. What are some tactics the character could use to get past the log? Jumping, digging under, running around, sawing through, and so on.
Finding a Character's Objectives in Literature
- This can be further explored by selecting well-known stories such as The Three Little Pigs, or The Wizard of Oz.
- Consider individual characters and try to determine the super-objective, various obstacles and resulting objectives, and tactics used.
Often objectives and tactics are framed in terms of what the character is trying to do to another character to achieve the goal. For this reason, you have been provided a Tactic List Links to an external site., which is a great resource of actor verbs for making choices on stage.
If the actor uses this approach to understanding the way a character would say a line, it follows that the playwright could enhance the process if the words and choices also fit this goal-oriented thought process.
Beats and Objectives Alternative Structure GOTE
The use of the super-objective, beats, objectives, and tactics is so fundamental to the contemporary actor’s use of the text that it has been restructured and reinvented for decades.
In 1984 Robert Cohen wrote the book Acting One which provides an acronym that helps focus actor choices on how lines are interpreted to have conflict-driven choices on stage. The playwright can use this thought process as well. This shorthand approach can also help the playwright. He used the acronym GOTE where the actor/playwright should ask the following questions:
When engaging in imaginative research of what a character might say in a given situation, the playwright must understand the answers to these questions.
In scenes with dynamic dialogue there is a high level of importance for all characters in achieving their objectives. We refer to this as the "stakes" of a scene. Characters must have a sense of urgency and a need to achieve their objectives; if it isn't important to the character, it's certainly not going to matter to the audience. If dialogue is feeling stale, the playwright can raise the stakes for the characters in the scene by going back and looking at the use of language to reflect the character’s immediate objectives and tactics. Answering the questions for GOTE.
Battle Oriented Objectives
Please watch the presentation below to learn more about battle oriented objectives.
You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
- Theatre is about conflict, and the height of human conflict is war. This makes war a perfect metaphor for most character interactions. The language of battle can be a good way to make certain that the objectives and tactics are active enough to match the conflicts inherent in a script.
- Objectives need to be battle-oriented.
- On a battlefield an army may either advance, avoid, or retreat. Likewise, the character in pursuit of a goal can either Advance, Avoid, or Retreat. To be certain that an objective choice is active, it is often a good strategy to make sure the language of the objective fits into one of these three categories.
Marking Beats in the Text
Using the text of your monologue, identify where your character has a change in thought or focus and put a [BRACKET] around the beginning and end of a single thought.
- This MAY be multiple sentences, but it doesn’t have to be. Generally, more than three sentences would be the longest an acting beat would be.
- Once you have divided up your monologue into beats using the [BRACKETS], go back and number each beat. Using this numbered list as a guide, determine what your character wants in this specific beat. This is your character’s immediate OBJECTIVE.
- An acting objective should be STRAIGHT-FORWARD and ACTIVE. The easiest way to achieve this is by having your objective in the following form: To + (Active Verb)
[CC BY 4.0] UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED | IMAGES: LICENSED AND USED ACCORDING TO TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION