THE INTERMEDIATE WORK

EMOTIONAL PREPARATION:
A self stimulation of your emotions.

Emotional preparation demands that you strengthen your imagination. This is a self-stimulation of your emotions, where you are required to use all of your senses when acting. We teach this so that the actor will show up on stage totally full emotionally. In some circles this is called, "making an entrance". Emotional preparation makes clear that you've just come from someplace meaningful to you. Ironically, emotional preparation has nothing to do with what is coming up in the scene; it only ensures that you're prepared to be emotionally responsive to whatever you encounter. By practicing coming from someplace specific and meaningful, to someplace specific and meaningful, the actor is trained to be 'on' from the start. At Palm Beach Acting School many actors find that this is a turning point in their training. After taking an emotional preparation class, many people discover that they can't wait to get up and be in the moment emotionally. From this point forward, every time that you get up to act you will prepare emotionally. (Emotional preparation is basically only used for the first moment of the scene or exercise.)

When people go to a play, or to see a movie, they get caught up in the moments that move them emotionally. They might not remember the actors' or director's names, and they may not remember everything that was said. But, most people remember how the experience made them feel!

BUILDING A RELATIONSHIP:
Must always know who, what, when, where & why ... but never how you will act!

While doing these exercises, a relationship between you and your partner is required. Who are you to each other? Are you husband and wife? Are you boy friend and girl friend? Or, are you brother and sister? Do you have a painful past history? Whatever the situation, it must have a strong emotional content.

What ever is happening in the moment is always more important than any story or set up. Always know who, what, when, where and why. But, never know how you will act in a given circumstance. How you will act must always be spontaneous and moment-to-moment.

You must know specifically how you feel towards your acting partner. You must know if the last time you saw each other was a good experience or a bad experience. This affects the way you feel and behave when you see your partner for the first time. You must always know the situation and it must be, like all elements in acting, specific and meaningful.

MEANING:
Silence is absolutely golden.

What you say means far less than what you feel. In fact, without feeling, what you say when you act is meaningless. You will learn that there is no such thing as "nothing" on the stage at Palm Beach Acting School. Silence always has a meaning. Sometimes it is what you don't say that makes the situation meaningful and truthful. The training demands that you explore different things to discover what affects you and in what ways. Every great actor has developed a powerful imagination. The truth of the situation will always dictate the depth of emotion and meaning the actor is required to bring to life. The discovery of what is emotionally meaningful to you in your imagination is a powerful tool, which will be employed every time you act.

THE SCENE:
Always pick material based on how it makes you feel emotionally.

The exercise you learn in the beginning work evolves into an improvisation that is used in problem solving at Palm Beach Acting School. Every scene presents a certain problem that the actor must work out on a personal level. Additionally, the director may ask you to do something in the scene which you may not understand, so the improvisation is used to find a personal way of bringing meaning to that which you have been directed to do. The dialogue is there to support the action of the scene, or the "doing".

Scene work and auditions begin with a first readings or "first rehearsals". Everything that you learn up to this point will be needed when you begin your first readings. First readings, also known erroneously as "cold readings" must be fully, artistically executed. This is what you do in all of your auditions and with every acting assignment. Getting the actor to bring a clear, fully understood performance to the writers' text, from the start, takes practice and lots of it.

Always pick scene material based on how it makes you feel emotionally. Fill in the spaces between the lines where the acting takes place. Find the reality and truth of the scene. Let the circumstances unfold and play moment-to-moment as the playwright intended. The spontaneous unplanned feeling is best when we do scenes. The behavior must be supported by the words. Let the dialogue ride on top of the emotion. It is never about the words. All scenes must be done with a real point of view of what it is about. The scene is not made by being emotional; it is made by being human!

IMPROVISATION TOWARDS A SCENE:
To clarify for yourself how you feel about each moment.

This is a technique at which the actors have already done their first readings, and are now ready to work on the scene. This is to find out how you feel about a scene. The IMPROVISATION is set up much like a regular exercise, with a strong situation that is in parallel with the scene. Improvisations should take you in one direction and the scene in another.

In the improvisation, once connected and working off of each other, the actors are asked to throw in the dialogue, or even make it up. Doing a scene in your own words will help clarify each moment and how you feel about it. What is the human aspect of the scene? This clarity will come out when you do the scene with all the writers' words. The idea is to maintain the emotional depth and behavioral responsiveness of the exercise while listening to and answering with the authors' words. When the actor is freely responsive as a matter of habit, bringing the text to a state of truthful human behavior is nearly automatic.

The approach at Palm Beach Acting School asks you to get in touch with what is inside of you and to bring it out for everyone to see! There is nothing more personal than how an actor relates to a scene. Give yourself over to the reality of the situation. Fight for the right to make mistakes, and give yourself permission to fail. This is how you learn. Who ever learned anything by getting it right every time? It is in this spirit of experimentation at Palm Beach Acting School that leads the student to finding his or her own personal artistic understanding to every acting assignment.