Monday, October 16, 2006
Showing Emotion The Maxwell Way!
Caveman was a good example of how emotion is used in Maxwell’s theatre, for example, the raised voices, cries, songs of emotion and the gestures used in interaction between the actors. However, we must be careful to distinguish ‘emotion’ with ‘emoting’.
There is an organic, emotional preposition embedded in the text and direction. An exclamation mark indicates an aggressive emotional response, thus the actor shouts or grunts, this is an indication of emotion. Also, an act of standing up, with a firm posture, from a sitting position indicates distress and anger, again an indication of emotion.
To emote a character is to give if it another layer of emotion above that of the character. In the exercise today, where we took ‘emotional’ lines then presented them in pairs, firstly as naturalistic interaction, then ‘third party’ narrations and finally a Maxwell-esque presentation of the two lines. In the naturalistic presentation my line, ‘I will always be in your heart,’ carried a catalogue of different movements, breaths, tones of voice and vocal qualities that could lead to the audience grasping a whole range of different responses that could be read rather ambiguously.
However, by using the third party method we placed our actions exactly as we said them ‘he bends down on one knee, hesitantly, and leans forward to grab her arm’. When this was done it was clear that I was communicating a certain, desired emotion to the audience. The emotion was clearly pointed out by the attention to the movement in a seemingly unemotional way; this is seen in Maxwell’s Caveman:
A: You’re showing a bit of leg there.
W: Anthony, don’t.
A: Did you notice!
W: Yes, I noticed.
They Kiss
A mixture of lines and action such as above is enough to illustrate the emotional state. To emote the characters would be complicating the ‘authentic’ nature of the lines. This way of telling the ‘truth’ of the character could be loosely compare to Method Acting, there aims being very similar. However, Sarah Gorman argues, ‘this approach, appears out of kilter, either anachronistic or ahead of its time,’ in her essay, suggesting that Maxwell is either not up to date with the rest of North American theatrical theory or way ahead. Did we show a more real projection of emotion in the naturalistic acting we did today, or the ‘deadpan’ acting?
Simon
