Well, I had an acquaintance who, on the subject of smoking, told me about his “relationship to the cigarette”. He enjoyed each and every cigarette. He unwrapped the package, peeled back the foil, place a smoke between his lips, drew in the first drag. He felt the warm heat at the back of his throat, the smoke through his lungs, and he felt and tasted the tobacco flavor as it fluffed back through his mouth as he exhaled. He said it was quite bizarre, and agreed it’s a nasty habit, but it was such an intimate physical process in some ways, and yet one he would go through practically unconciously because it had become a habit.
I’m guessing that based on your prof’s “feeeeel the space” type of gobbledegook, she was trying in some backasswards way to encourage you to feel the relationship of what you were doing without thinking about it. You knew your lines and your blocking was memorized, so maybe she meant you should be in the moment without thinking about it, as naturally as a smoker holds a cigarette and knows without looking when he needs to tap the ash.
Okay, I’m trying too hard.
She was having a nic-fit and was fixated on her next drag.
You were too much in your head. In her mind, people who smoke are more in their emotional centers than in their intellectual centers.
You were too neat and clean, up-scale, predictable, safe. In her mind, people who smoke are more ‘earthy’ and dangerous and unpredictable (often seen as desireable traits in an actor).
She would have had some obscure artz type thing to say no matter what your answer.
“Randy. Tell me. Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“Yes”
“Meet me after class I have someone you should meet for an aura cleansing”
“You should switch to menthol’s, They will make you seem larger on stage”
“You look like you haven’t had one in days, you need to relax more”
“Can I have one?”
I think this is more or less along the right lines - I mean, there are some acting geniuses out there, so it’s probably not quite such a simple job as GuanoLad describes, but I do think it sounds like the teacher in this case was just full of pretentious, self-important wank.
i.e.
Teacher: Randy. Tell me. Do you smoke cigarettes?
Randy: (somewhat nonplussed) No, I don’t.
Teacher: You should really start, I think it would help put things in perspective for you.
Randy: What do you mean by that?
Teacher: I mean to present myself as an impressive, even perhaps interesting, person.
I just want to clarify something here. I wasn’t implying that acting is easy and anybody can be a Tony winner if they follow my simple rules. Clearly there’s characterisation, timing, naturalistic performance, and experience involved.
But there’s no need for being a tree, or bending into shapes that represent “anger,” or any of that “method acting” nonsense. It’s all wank.
Understood. Although I think there can be a certain value to method acting - in the less extreme case, it’s just a process of getting very familiar and bedded down in the role.
Not to hijack the thread, but I can’t let that pass without registering my disagreement. [hijack]Method acting is frequently parodied and as a result, there is a huge misconception about what it is and what it isn’t. The two exercises you cite, for example, aren’t anything that would ever come up in studying method acting.
It is about things like script analysis, and applying a logical action to each line. The actor looks for Victories, Obstacles, Tactics and Expectations in the line, in the scene and in the play so that one remains in character throughout. The performance becomes more flexible while remaining committed, because everything is filtered through an understanding of the character’s wants, and no matter what unexpected events happen (missed line, falling piece of scenery, sudden shift of tactics from your scene partner, etc.) the performer remains ‘in the moment’.
So, in general, I’d avoid describing any approach to acting as “all wank”, as it only closes you off to some potentially useful information. I’ve worked with people on both sides of this divide, and both sides have insights to offer. [/hijack]
From this point on whenever I go anywhere I will step into my power bubble first. I think this will make a dramatic improvement to my life. If that fails I will just take up smoking.
As Le Ministre says, the first part of your sentence has absolutely nothing to do with the second half of your sentence, which leads me to believe you don’t know what you’re talking about.
</graduate of arts college, holder of acting degree>
Note, incidentally, that that doesn’t change the fact that the teacher’s comments about cigarette smoking are almost certainly self-important, obfuscatory bloviation riding over a should-and-could-have-been-more-directly-stated simple truth.
Let me put things in perspective for your teacher.
She’s an idiot. Can I assume you didn’t attend undergrad at Julliard or NYU film school? That means she is probably some hippy New Age flake who spent her career “acting” in off off Broadway local theater and whatnot or dabbling in auditions for cereal commercials because no normal job would allow her to be “free” (or some such crap). So by whatever mechanism people become theater professors in schools that typically never produce a significant numbers of people that actually go into theater as a career, there she is. Giving flaky, inane advice on something she probably doesn’t really even understand all that well.
**Le Ministre de l’au-delà ** at least sounds like he/she knows what he/she is talking about. I know shit about acting, but it seems to me that there would be enought technical aspects to it - body mechanics, facial expressions, how to speak, how to walk, what to do with your hands, etc - that one would not need to resort to New Age bullshit.
While there is certainly more than one respected style of acting, and different teachers tend to uphold one over the other as “better”, it sounds like your professor’s method was “Stupid.” She probably says a lot of things that are meant to sound like she has some deep insight, but she is really just talking out her ass.
Hey now, let’s not say things we can’t take back. My undergrad theater department produced David Schwimmer, Julia Louise Dreyfus, Warren Beatty, Stephen Colbert, Zach Braff, and of course, Charlton Heston.
As far as the specific professor, I did not like her very much, but I have to respect her for her professional history acting on Broadway and in several major motion pictures, as well has her national recognition for excellence in performing arts, and an extensive directing CV at Chicago’s largest playhouses. (And I’m not sure, but I think that Schwimmer was in her class for three years.)
And I should reiterate, for the purposes of the thread, that I no longer need acting advice, since, first, I’m not in the field any more, and second, I could probably be considered an expert anyway, having gone through many years of training. I truly think that her statement, lo these many years ago, was intended to be personal advice of some kind, which is why I thought I’d have the SDMB take a swing at it.
Thanks for the enlightening and hilarious replies so far!
You may be knowledgeable about acting, but you don’t seem to know much about parsing a sentence.
“OR”
When you include the word “OR” in a list, it separates the items so that they are not directly connected with each other.
I was not equating method acting with bending into shapes, I was including it in my list of stupid acting practices.
Now, you can argue with me on the individual items, but not on my conflating two items as being similar, because I was not doing that.
I know what method acting is. It’s getting under the character’s skin, living their life, so that you almost start to believe you’re them, therefore giving a more realistic performance. And my opinion is this is not necessary, and more trouble than it’s worth. Any good performance that an actor gives after doing such a belaboured thing could have been achieved just by imagining.
