In-Depth Acting by Dee Cannon

Author:Dee Cannon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OBERON BOOKS LONDON

NEXT STAGE: HOW TO FIND CHARACTERISTICS

I suggest after you have a working list of inners and outers to now extract three or four that you think represent the essence of your character; the qualities that are the most dominant when you meet someone for the first time. Outers are usually easier to access than inners, as inners are more hidden so I don’t advise using them at this stage. Let’s say you pick the following as the overriding characteristics:

Sociable

Charming

Confident

Ambitious

This doesn’t discount the rest of your list it’s just the best starting place on which you can base your character. Once you have your four characteristics, you then have to ask yourself – How far away are these characteristics from you? If they’re not very far from you at all, you might well be able to base the character on yourself, your younger self or perhaps even your older self. In this case you’re lucky to be able to identify with the character so easily and you should then start focusing on developing the inner life of your character, which you set up in the same way as outers.

What if your overriding characteristics are further away from you? Let’s say:

Organised

Impatient

Religious

Proud

Firstly, you have to find a ‘personalisation’; i.e. someone you know to base the character on. Start with your close circle: your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, aunt. Then spread the circle to cover your cousin, best friend, co-worker. Then widen the circle to cover politicians, someone from history or even a famous actor.

This is a great starting place to try to find your character. Of course you will be filling in all the inners as well, but for now we need a real person to base these four characteristics on. It doesn’t mean to say the person you’re basing them on doesn’t have other qualities but remember we’re only focusing on the overriding ones. I will be talking about personalisation in much more depth in CHAPTER 6(ii).

I would like to stay focused though on characteristics. Let’s assume you have found a personalisation for the character but three out of four of the above characteristics are far away from you; impatient, organised and religious. If these are not really in your armoury you need to bring them up to the surface in order to play a character that is ruled by them. We are going to explore how you can use objects and music in isolated exercises to help you find these different qualities.

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