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The Craft
Fear of Indicating
May 21, 2008
By Jean Schiffman
Fear of Indicating
May 21, 2008
By Jean Schiffman
In one of my first acting classes, the teacher asked us to hear an imaginary sound. We all furrowed our brows, cocked our heads. "No, don't indicate listening," she said. "Really listen!" This was my first understanding of what indicating -- and acting -- is really all about. I lived in fear of indicating ever after. I think many actors do.
Yet indicating happens. In discussing sense memory in her book Acting for Film (Allworth Press, 2003), Cathy Haase gives an example of it: "If it is supposed to be a sunny environment, the actor acts like they are in the sun. They squint their eyes, lick their lips from thirst, and wipe away the sweat from their brow.... [They] use a gesture to indicate what is going on in the environment. These gestures are generally too stagy for the camera." In most cases, they're too stagy for the stage, too.
Indicating, writes Alex Golson in Acting Essentials (McGraw-Hill, 2001), is what you do when you "show the audience what you are thinking or feeling" -- that is, showing instead of thinking, feeling, and doing. He advises, "Don't ever show; just do and trust that your feelings and thoughts will be discovered by the audience." Chicago teacher Ed Hooks, in The Actor's Field Guide (Back Stage Books, 2004), describes indicating as "the acting equivalent of one of those old paint-by-number kits." He explains that you mustn't decide what the emotion ought to be in a certain moment in the scene and then try to come up with ways to act that emotion. Certainly that's a more subtle approach to indicating than scrunching your face or cocking your head, but it's indicating just the same, because it's not being in the moment.
Let's break this down. What are the, uh, indications that you're indicating? On the most basic level, explains acting teacher Bill Esper, when actors are indicating, they're not really listening or looking; they're just pretending. "People in life do it too," he says. "You stand on a corner having a conversation, nodding your head agreeably, and you walk away and didn't hear a thing the other person said."
For acting teacher Wendy Phillips, seeing mannerisms in her students is a red flag that they're indicating. "The instrument gets lazy and they do shortcuts about feeling something, about really being engaged," she says. Phillips is also on the alert for students who seem too comfortable. "Acting is not comfortable," she notes. "If actors are feeling 'Oh, this is going really well' or are feeling too comfortable, they're probably indicating."
Basil Hoffman, in Acting and How to Be Good at It (Ingenuity Press, 2007), defines indicating as "objective" acting. He writes: "When an actor thinks a character should have a particular feeling...speak in a particular way, or behave in a particular way, and then shows the audience what he thinks, he is indicating.... Indicating is sometimes called fake acting (because it is)." Actor-director Ric Prindle says even seasoned actors do it: "You can watch their eyes, and they're looking for the moment to speak instead of just being alive in the moment."
But why does this happen? Several of the teachers I talked to observe this tendency in younger students and think it's because they're taught to act that way in high school and even college, where they perform on big stages in large-scale musicals and broad comedies. Their teachers don't correct them, they develop bad habits, and they don't know how to be in the moment -- the linchpin of all acting. "They feel, 'If I don't know what's coming at me in advance, then I don't know the script,' " suggests Prindle, who has taught drama at the college level. "They don't trust their emotional memory, or their muscle memory." Indicating is a hard habit to break, he says, because it feels safe.
When actors indicate, says Esper, "it's usually because they're pushing for a result, pushing to squeeze the tears out. What happens is they get more and more tense, and the audience doesn't buy it; it's phony.... A lot of times they're trying to play a big scene rather than a true scene."
Past Indicative
In A Challenge for the Actor (Scribner, 1991), Uta Hagen wrote that when her students indicated, it was usually because they were unable to justify their character's behavior. They'd comment on their character's actions rather than genuinely execute them. She had to convince her students that they held within themselves the potential for all kinds of behavior. Hooks uses the terms "face acting" and "playing a result" when discussing indicating; he writes that it "springs from distrust of the audience" -- fear that the audience won't get it. But if you're authentic, they will.
Some actors are just naturally authentic. Esper says that when Paul Sorvino was a young actor with a family to support, he booked a national commercial for Duncan Hines cake mix. He had one line: "That's good cake." After the first take, the director said, "Fine. Let's do one more take, and be a little more enthusiastic." After the second take, the director said, "Great. Now do it again with even more enthusiasm." Sorvino's response: "That's as enthusiastic as I get about cake. If it's not good enough, get another guy." (They did not get another guy.)
"I teach relentlessly that you never act the emotion," Esper says. "You either have it, and that's good and leave it alone, or you don't and there's nothing you can do about it, so you may as well still leave it alone and maybe something real will happen in the next moment."
And in the next moment, guess what? It's still all about the moment -- about trusting the moment. If you're indicating, says Prindle, "you're imitating what the character would do, instead of embodying the character moment by moment." For him (and for others I've talked to), learning director-teacher Richard Seyd's "trigger approach" to tackling a script -- that is, going from moment to moment instead of memorizing, so you never know what's going to happen next -- has been hugely gratifying.
"I find actors playing attitudes rather than trusting the lines and trusting your instrument to react genuinely to what's given you," says Phillips. "They think they're playing a character but they're not; they're playing an attitude -- like sarcastic or mocking -- but it's not really coming out of the moment. It's not really coming out of what the other person did or said. To be present in the moment demands a kind of vulnerability -- an active, not a weak, vulnerability: 'I'm going to play my objective, do everything I know how to do, yet trust that the moment trumps all.' " She concludes, "If you're not really acting in the moment, then you're indicating -- one or the other."
But what if the director, especially in theatre work, is exhorting you to be bigger, to let it show, to reach the back row, and you fear you'll end up indicating? "What directors mean when they say, 'Let it show' is 'You're not compelling enough,' " says Phillips. "So you have to raise the stakes. Make it life or death." The brilliant Irish actor Fiona Shaw proves it's possible, even in Greek tragedy, to reach the rafters while staying completely honest. Her portrayal of Medea, which toured the
Drama professor Richard Brestoff observes that indicating or not is a matter of degree. "It can be subtle or it can be huge, as long as it's connected to something real," he says. "The minute you lose that connection to something natural, it reads as over the top." Hoffman writes that if whatever you're experiencing stays inside you, the honesty of your acting is essentially worthless. True, but if you experience it -- whatever it happens to be -- fully in the moment, you won't have to worry about being fake or about not communicating with the audience. You'll be doing something for real, and it'll show.
Jean Schiffman can be reached at jeanschiff@earthlink.net.
Source: http://www.backstagewest.com/bso/advice-columns/actors-craft/the-craft/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003806065
Published on 01/10/2008 18:01:05