Building a Character

With the technological and scientific advances, the 21st-century actor can have a better understanding of his organism, wich is his instrument. The body is the medium through which emotion is expressed. Whenever we experience a strong emotion — fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise — our experiences express themselves physically. Our muscles contract or relax; our movement and posture shift; our facial expressions change. And, without their being completely conscious of it, other people instantly perceive it. Emotions are body movements and feelings are the cognitive interpretation of these movements. If the actor accurately modifies his physicality to portray his character, the character’s feelings and thoughts will be unexpected and surprising to the actor himself.

The human organism functions as a constant loop of information between body and brain. This communication happens via images, sounds, touch, smell, and taste experience. But since we are visual creatures, images are most important to us. As actors create powerful and compelling images, they will be able to modify their bodies to create a new looping of information between body and brain. This new loop then becomes the real way a character perceives the world, and the performance that results feels genuine and authentic. This mechanism can be called the “Emotional Distancing Phenomenon” (not to be confused with Brecht's “Distancing Effect”). The actor becomes a kind of spectator of his own character, and it’s not unusual to hear actors say that while their character was going through enormous pain, they themselves felt joy and fulfillment.

The goal is to train actors to expand their creativity and to experience true emotions without having to tap into their personal psychological experiences. Actors experience the emotion in their body, and feelings emerge from this “body state." This allows the character to experience real feelings and thoughts that better serve the situation or scene and free the artists’ creative power in a totally new way. This allows the actor to find intentions, objectives and know their character from the inside out by simply and literally being in her/his character's body. This workshop will give actors the tools to enhance their creative power, have absolute control of their bodies, build truthful and unique characters for movies, television or theater, and make their acting craft more fun, spontaneous, surprising and above all, passionate.

We’ve developed a series of exercises to achieve this. First, the actors work with the Neutral Mask. The Neutral Mask is the simplest and enables the actor to widen all of his or her senses. The Neutral Mask is the starting point to build the character. A silent mask, it allows actors to establish a relationship with their environment based on calmness and perception. With five senses open and their minds calm —in almost a meditative state — actors learn one of the fundamentals of acting: to be in the present moment with great concentration. After working with the neutral mark, the body is ready to interact with the actors' creative power. They will choose five images that define essential traits of a character. They choose an animal, an element of nature (air, fire, water, or earth) and three adjectives (mischievous, jealous, and greedy, for example). The actors then use these images to create a new body state, which affects how that character experiences emotions. They end up being surprised by the spontaneous and unexpected actions of the character they’ve created.