How can you use the skills from your Physical Life Inventory to your acting practice? How would it help you as an actor more generally? How can you use it for a specific character?
When I was first handed the Physical Life Inventory, I figured that I would already know the answers about myself, having been myself for 20 years. I was actually thoroughly surprised to find out that I needed to stand, walk around, and sit down and think about what I was doing to actually answer a good amount of the questions. This especially applied to questions like the active motion questions, such as “Is your pattern of movement fluid and effortless or jerky and labored? How obvious is the changing of gears as you accelerate or change direction?”
Applying the skills from the Physical Life Inventory to my acting practice can be very useful as it truly breaks down every single aspect of portraying a character, many of which I, and many other inexperienced actors would probably easily overlook. I, myself, have never acted in any performances on stage, but I have seen many throughout high school as I worked backstage or lights during the performances. Between watching the official shows with an audience, and the numerous rehearsals during tech week, I saw many of the performances several times over. I believe I saw footloose on stage a total of 11 times. From witnessing these official performances, and numerous rehearsals, I did notice that the actors tended to be much more animated than they were when they were just at school during our classes. Reading some of the Physical Life Inventory questions reminded me of how the actors would act during the shows. For the time being, I really need to focus on all of my actions when attempting to portray another character, although I am sure over time, it will perhaps come to me more naturally than it does now.
One might be able to use the Physical Life Inventory for a specific character the way we did for our performances in class on Wednesday, January 14th. For the assignment, I had observed my sister. I figured I had been mocking and imitating her for years just to annoy her, so I was probably somewhat decent at doing it for school purposes. The Physical Life Inventory helped pinpoint certain aspects of how she acts that I otherwise would not have thought to have considered when portraying her.
It isn't as surprising as you would think...we rarely think about ourselves in this way. It takes attention to ourselves. We spend so much time sorting out what others do and how others move...these are hard wired, evolutionary needs, but we don't often have to think about it for ourselves.
ReplyDeleteYour poor sister ;)