This is an article from the New York Times this week, staring my favorite
and the always remarkable, Mr. Mark Rylance. A discussion on how to keep
an actor's work feeling fresh and full of discoveries. A small look into
Mark's acting process, and helpful as we have been doing our scenes for a
little while, to push forward to finding new things. Read on...
-Dylan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/theater/16improv.html
I found this article fascinating. I recently was talking with one of my peers, who was discovering that spontaneity in the moment is one of the best and most alive things you can have as an actor. We talk about discoveries and finding new thoughts all the time in acting class, but how do you actually practice doing that outside of scene work? I think Rylance is really going after the freshness and aliveness of living in each moment as though it has never happened before. It makes perfect sense that improv is a warm-up to achieve that goal. It forces you to work in that part of your brain that is present. Most of us know that one of the easiest ways to kill an improv is to get in your head about it. What’s outside of me? What is my environment? What is happening right now? Improv immediately takes you into that area because the future is unknown. You are creating the script as you move forward in time. Everything is fresh and new. And yet we are not entirely conscious of where it is heading. We might say something that we think will take us one direction only to be interpreted in complete contrast to our initial idea, Then we are forced into a new direction, a new beat. So the warm-up is to bring us into the ever-changing present moment. How can we impact the moment now? What is surprising? There is so much to be discovered rather than forced I guess.
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