exist This YouTube videoI talked about the “emotional trap” actors fall into, choosing one overriding emotion and playing it with the same intensity throughout an entire monologue or scene, and how it can quickly become boring.
If traps are boring, how do we make them interesting? How do we make it fun?
Well, various. Diversity is key to maintaining audience engagement. Diversity and specificity.
What should we do? We have to take the audience on a journey. So what we need emotionally is we need an emotional journey. So it could be an emotional journey in a monologue, it could be an emotional journey in a scene, it could be an emotional journey in a dramatic performance or a piece of a play, a movie, a TV series, etc.
How do we access our emotional journey? There are two types that we should consider in our performance. One is linear, where we start with a specific type of emotion and then move along a monologue or scene, ending up in a very different place than where we started. So to speak.
The second type of emotional journey that is useful for actors is the 360-degree emotional journey. You may end up back where you started, but you have to emotionally work your way back to where you started.
In both cases, the emotional journey keeps us moving forward, allowing our thoughts and the actions of our characters and what we do to others to shift and change in terms of our emotional connections to others, which makes things come true for the audience. Saying becomes interesting, varied and concrete.
It’s all about the journey!
