Abusing Emotions in acting occurs often. Self Activating emotions with Emotional Preparation can lead to overusing emotions. It takes time to learn acting techniques to release emotions after acting. Releasing emotions after acting is just as important as talent in acting.
If you don’t end up overusing your emotions, your emotions will be more accessible. If you overuse your emotions it can become abusive. Your emotional spontaneity depends upon how often you relax after being emotional.
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Key Quotes from this Article:
“Actors run the risk of emotional abuse”
“A burn out of emotional life has a greater chance of happening when conjuring emotion”
“Being Present in acting is necessary to avoid abusing emotions”
Copyright 2018 Simon Blake
Few Teachers ever address abuse in acting or with Emotional Preparation. Most Directors say outload they will do whatever needed for the ‘film shot’. This is why Actors need training and persistence in practicing emotions in acting. BOTH going in and activating emotion and coming out an emotion!
Abusing Emotions in Acting is common and runs rampant in the industry. In any industry that expects results. Watching professional wrestlers you can easily see that often their professional acting skills turn into one ball of rage and anger. Shortening their careers because they do not manage their creative aspects of their performance craft is common. Abusing Emotions in Acting by expecting full time intensity in life is often the culprit on the topic.
Actors can run the risks of emotional abuse which often starts with improper ways of using emotions. It is essential to understand the freedom that emotions need to have in order for the reality of your scenes to be real and the fakery or trickery of manipulation does not occur emotionally in your work. This is why Independent Emotional Preparation is key.
Scenes that are manipulated by Actors manipulation of their emotions often end up on the editing room floor never to be seen by any audience and are usually hopefully never seen in the outtakes. Manipulation of emotional life is not the doing of Emotional Preparation although some teachers have incorrectly taught it as such.
If you manipulate your emotions your emotions will not trust you. If you manipulate your emotions too much your emotions will not want to relax into interaction.
Emotions require relaxation in order to achieve interaction.
Abusing Emotions in Acting connect the topic of Real Independent Emotional Preparation and technique. Emotional Preparation is kind and gentle to your emotions as Real Preparations integrate all levels of life and integration processes in with an emotional state of being. An Actor is capable of integrating their entire being by the tool of belief in the scenario of them.
Emotional Preparation not putting their entire weight of their being on a conjured emotion or manipulated concoction of emotions. Involving belief in Emotional Preparation makes the Actor more sensitive to their entire being and allows them to naturally tire during their presence working as an Actor.
To avoid Abusing Emotions in Acting there is a balance present with Emotional Preparation which is not present in conjuring or forcing an emotional result or a specific emotion into existence. The success of conjuring up an emotion is often at the cost of lack of integration into a scene’s reality as well as a lack of integration into an Emotional Preparation structure.
A burn out of emotional life has a greater chance of happening when conjuring emotion up for a performance style of forcing emotional currents through an intended doing. The constriction of an emotion is the result that can often cause injury to Actor’s emotional abilities and can cause the Actor to not want to work with their emotions any longer.
The truth about the harming of emotions is the truth of any abuse, all abuse causes damage to the Actor and the worse is the damage that the Actor can cause to themselves by not allowing their natural expression of their emotions to occur. Repeating actions often lead to Abusing Emotions in Acting. Watching forming habits during rehearsals is important.
Another consideration for Actors to be aware of is the working at level or attempting to work at a level beyond what we can achieve is another specific way that Actors can particularly cause themselves to burn out Emotionally.
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Training emotional life for films and theater productions is not about extremes or achieving extremes. It is about safely accessing yourself in a way that you are capable of achieving similar results over and over again with the truthful spontaneity of real life.
The integration processes that an Actor will encompass is that which will give purpose to the reasoning behind their art. This is what writers have often done well or very cleverly is given good endings to their written works.
The climax of emotional intent is always an accumulation that usually is desired to be seen in stages that rise to the crescendo. The reality of this movement allows the Actor to achieve the gradual stages of the work scripted.
In the training of the exercises often times the work can become more drastic because the Actor decides to leap further than they can expect of themselves. Take the plunges in the workings of the safety of Emotional Preparation and build up the emotion abilities that are desired.
Displaying your talent to an audience that is positioned to see you directly with good view is the way to destroy the ability for your talent to be seen, especially when on film. Repeating Abusing Emotions in Acting by forcing yourself into an intense uproar too often without craft to exhale can lead to the abuse.
Any displaying or effort to incur attention from outside of your situation or circumstance is a violation of the terms of agreement of the theater and film on any platform unless it is a scripted and discussed occurrence that is an intentional production mechanism that directly addresses the audience.
You do not want to try to split your own personality up into keeping track of the audience and also what is right in front of you on stage or in the circumstances of the film.
Winking or giving cues to another within your circumstance at the same time you are present within the situation or scene is also not an accomplishment that you want to try to achieve which will always result in an edit from an editor or a restarting of the scene. In stage it is even more crucial that you allow the moments to occur in any way that they occur to you after you let go of your Emotional Preparation.
The letting go of Emotional Preparation is not a thorough internal process that rids the emotional life from within you, it rather instead is a concentration and a change in direction of focus upon the internal self to the external stimulation. Knowing the limits of their concentration avoids Abusing Emotions in Acting.
Beginners need to understand the limits of their concentration and that they may only be capable of refocusing from placing their attention from their internal process to the external stimulation. It is fine to work with how you learn.
This book has described the most thorough process of the most sincere and capable Actors but often the learning Actor will need to work at a level of discussed in this paragraph which is a “Simple Release” of Emotional Preparation which entails the actor’s attention going from themselves to another or outside of themselves. Making sure that you are not Abusing Emotions in Acting, or manipulating is key with simple release techniques. You may anticipate things but being sure that you are going to let go and see if the work does happen rather than force it connects the abuse patterns.
Most teachers will teach that the actor should focus on another Actor but in truth that is not usually the occurrence in life and how the exercises and scenes are set up. Often there are steps to takes and doors to enter before encountering the other person. The switch of internally stimulating yourself to receiving external stimulation is a switch that with practice will incur an incredible achievement as this switching actually relates to your ability to turn your instincts on and off. You are turning over your instincts as you turn your focused attention from internally to externally. When you achieve this level of internal switching you are well on your way of emotional comprehension and the ability to reset yourself which is an exciting time for the learning Actor. Abusing Emotions in Acting relates to giving yourself the time to get to know yourself.
The Emotional Preparation process of internal stimulation must be attached to the instinctual reality of outside stimulation which then will entail an instinctual response to the actor without any intellectual process. The ability for the Actor to achieve instinctual response without intellect is another achievement of doing within the Emotional Preparation process.
The realities of emotional thinking or emotional processes is the deeper level of instinctual response. It is the level of allowing stimulations to accumulate within yourself because the listening is so accurate that the ability to absorb the actor on an emotional level is present.
This level of working with Emotional Preparation is closer to what masters in the process do and work with as they logically do not figure out their encompassed circumstances but instead actually emotionally figure out their circumstance by working off the others with them with their emotional instincts.
The development of this would take at least another nearly a year to develop although very sensitive human beings may achieve this sooner in areas that they are used to achieving high levels of sensitivity or emotional connection to.
The more that the actor has to offer in ways of emotional connection experience with others the more they adapt in the ways with the exercises and the scenes. Most people in life who are this sensitive are in very particular circumstances in life as they are often said to be overly sensitive to life. For these types of Actors what helps them is the learning of the instinctual level of expression as it helps them to learn the impulses they need and when to use them.
Emotional Preparation is the propulsion into a given point within an emotional circumstance. This is not a beginning exercise of observation which often gets confused during exercises in classrooms. The fun of the Emotional Preparation is not knowing how far into the emotional circumstance you have gone into. The reality of difference allows a great dichotomy of textures within the work to the willing partners in Acting because the realism of emotional life kick starts the infectious emotional life that Emotional Preparation offers from the immediacy of the scene or exercise.
Authors Note: I keep stating exercise or scene because at the top levels of this work it is important to be able to interchange the reality of doing the scene with the reality of doing the exercise with very little difference. The discovery processes of doing the scene and doing the exercises mesh together with the growth of the building of the scene. Sometimes in order to make a scene better it is important to do more exercises and vice versa. Finding the sense of play within the two dynamics is a growing period that will keep building up upon itself until it is time to do the production. In theater it is important as doing exercises between scenes can often be the technique of keeping the emotional life alive during a long 10 months run of the same show.
If the Actor is only capable because they have only developed to the level of instinctual expression within the exercise or the scene, they will depend upon their instincts to decide the timing of their expression. This is interesting because this is again their artists paint stroke that entails them to achieve their own timing outside of their logical doings.
The achievement of instinctual expression is the accomplishment of finding one’s own timing and acting upon one’s own impulses. This too can mature with time just as most things do within the learning of Acting.
The work that is offered in this book and in the classrooms that teach similar abilities is the work of not only learning yourself but also construction of self. How to truthfully construct yourself to the ability to learn who you are and later in the advanced advanced work that the person can achieve the ability of being able to change their regular behavior through techniques of layering emotional life within themselves that can actually change forms of expression with very little effort.
When you have achieved this level of Acting capability you can go for hours without stopping your impediment or demeanor because you actually know how to change your emotional demeanor from the ability of knowing who you actually are at the core level.
We have very few talents that are capable of doing such in present day. The art of understanding yourself as an Actor to the level of being able to influence at will your own personal behavior very rarely exists and takes years to accomplish. If you can achieve the ability to understand your core Emotional levels and study the instinctual impulses that are yours alone.
If you can find your own Rythm and timing of who you are as a person and what you actually are really like at the core level. If you can be honest with and heal the inner wounds that harm you in your daily life. If you can work hard enough and do enough work to achieve the ability of practicing and internally understanding how you could behave differently if the construction of your own life was set up differently, then you are a potential for the ability to achieve a change in your behavior by changing something within your Emotional make up of your Emotional Preparation. You likely will need 15 – 25 years and will likely be able to achieve between 1 and 3 parts that could be really believable.
The learning of changing behavior on a personal level will have to be another book of the future as it gets far too much to absorb within the learning of the books I have written. It is important not to be too ambitious and to work in the range of emotional life that you presently are capable of. The learning of the work and the ability of doing the exercise for the purposes of eventually doing scene work, films or theater productions is the focus of learning within the pages written here. The expansion of self that occurs within the Emotional Preparation process is inherent to the ability of doing enough of the work to achieve the internal reflection from experiences that took place in a safe environment that also had the reality of life to its fullest. The environment of physical protection but not emotional protection is the key to stretching the abilities of self and building the infrastructure needed for self-reflection.
Emotional Preparation is a personal thing but everyone see’s it in your work and see’s whether or not you are able to achieve the the letting go of it. The audience and the classroom do not see the seed of your Emotional Preparation, but they do see the result emotionally of your Emotional Preparation. The storyline of your actual life is not one that is needed to be shared as reality tv series love to do. To the trained Actor the storyline of your actual life is your own precious gift that you have to work with in private.
The reason why the design of the Emotional Preparation was designed to not include the storyline of the Emotional Preparation is because the storyline hinders the connection between the Actors emotional lives. It is more powerful to be sensitive and receiving of emotional content from another actor without knowing what has occurred in the past. The other mastery of the Emotional Preparation process is that the emotional life of the Emotional Preparation if matched to the storyline of the scripted material will magically appear to be truthful to real life and the emotions felt within the scene will look like they occurred from the prior experience of the scripted material or are being caused by the scripted materials circumstance.
The reason why the encouragement of not hindering the connection between Actors is stressed is because many novice Actors try to fake the emotional life for the moments in the script where they think that emotion should be. This preplanning is a fraud to the reality and intelligence of the audience and production. Fraudulent masking of reality action cannot hide the truthful inner life of anything within a scene or an exercise even when done with the utmost of effort.
The highest reality of the industry is very little emotional burn out from the Actors tend to occur because most do not attend their scene work with an Emotional Preparation the way they should. Others that are regulars in the industry fake it and say that they do have emotional components when in fact they do not. Conjuring of emotional life is actually an advancement to the fakery that occurs in acting with people offering planned expressions to cover the fact that they have no emotional life. Fake tears should not be needed with trained professionals.
The reality of being takes out the fakers and sets the tone within any production, which is the same reason why working with children involved in the cast is such a risky business. Children have not yet learned to lie to themselves about fake stunts in acting as much as adults have so, they have a more innate sense of being that is present. All it takes is one actor who is actually in a state of being to influence the entire production into a realism that is not only real but a sensation.
Instead, specific occurrences of recollection of bad memory or awful experiences often happens with the actors.
Further Note: Expecting yourself to have all these reactions without stimuli is a lot of pressure. Instead of choosing to work that way incite within yourself an Emotional Preparation to gain yourself impetus and gumption. Your reactions will automate if you have inner life to float upon.
The Emotional Preparation will give you an intrigue into your surroundings that you would not be able to pontificate even if desired. Picking the right emotional chord will gift the intrigue into your acting and you will be more participatory and interesting.
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900+ Independent Activities List to use for your acting.
518 Emotions List – To Use to Organize your Acting and Emotional Preparations
Acting Classroom
Two students – go off to the backstage to Emotionally Prepare. Everyone sits quietly in the classroom and theater.
Teacher – I used to be more ready and interested in helping people adjust themselves to their talent. I find myself at a point where in life I don’t help people out anymore unless they really seek to learn the information.
The students look at each other in a bit of shock and aw. Alice who appreciates this teacher’s kindness is particularly conflicted listening to him. She thinks ‘how could he be more open in teaching us’.
Teacher – Abusing Emotions in Acting is something to watch out for while you are Emotionally Preparing. Do the work but be sure to exhale from it. Take breaks then when you work really commit into it, but gently. Let something in the work activate you unless it just happens in Emotionally Preparation. The key Abusing Emotions in Acting is not a goal of acting. Some people misunderstand that.
So many people are disconnected with their own sense of self that they cannot find their own expressions. Many general populations live their entire life emulating other expressions. Over half of civilization are caught themselves in abusive cycles. Many Actors marry emotional experiences and miss the spontaneous experience which is not Abusing Emotions in Acting.
Other Actors attach themselves to becoming the observer of life rather than actually living life. As a studier of life maybe you will at first be exuberant to express what you witness, the way I was about a decade ago. But it is healthy as you learn this work to develop a personal guard up regarding life.
This guard or boundary will help you separate what is the mundane world and what is your acting realities. As you deepen yourself through actually expressing yourself in your work you will disconnect from those who are less genuine than yourselves. This is a price you do pay as an Actor and an Artist. /
Many Actors adjust to their observations in life which changes after they start to observe the real disconnect that many people have in this world. You also begin to notice each other’s self-disconnect the better you get to know each other.
Take out? (The world is wonderful but expressing things that are not your own personal truth convolutes it. As you get to know each other your work tightens to be more responsive to what you know matters to each other. )
Student – What do you mean that the Actors adjust. Is this a positive thing?
Teacher – the observations of life as well as in scenes become more aware and the Actor becomes less corrective of other Actors and more accepting of what the others are actually like.
Student – So they are more in the moment?
Teacher – Yes, more in the moment in a way but also less willing to stop another from learning their own errors. The Actor matures when learning their craft and when earlier on I their training they were more constantly in adjustment to everything including fleeting moments of the other. Later on, they are in adjustment to things that are more personal or more
Other student – I have found this in my work and wondered why you didn’t call me out on it. I thought you were going to say that I wasn’t in the moment enough in my work, yet you said nothing.
Teacher – This is because of your own evolving. Your work changes from what you notice and what is important to you to respond to and that is your own prerogative as an Actor and Artist.
You became more selective about what you responded to, not because you were not taking in the other, but because you were personalizing the experience with the other in a more sensitive way. You were not Abusing Emotions in Acting you were active and engaged.
The work starts as two students enter the stage in an upset state with each other. – Scene starts.
Emotional Preparation Technique Book Draft Chapter 11
Copyright 2018, Simon Blake
Draft Copy
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About Simon Blake
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Simon Blake has studied OVER 30 000 – 40 000 acting exercises and studied over 8-10++ thousand acting students work in acting. Studying their Emotional Preparation to their Spoon River Work. Studying every area of Meisner training work with well over 30 Teachers including himself.
“Meisner In and Out Exercise, which was later known as Doors and Activities give a basic building blocks to modern day acting”
Simon Blake runs and operates the website EmotionalPreparation.com which teaches Actors how to add Emotion to their acting using improved acting techniques.
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