“You act with your soul. That’s why you all want to be actors, because your souls are not used up by life.”
Stella Adler
We all have a heart space, our emotions come from this space. Our emotions are driven by the interaction between our mind and heart space. A character is a mental construct, a filter. A new personality, but it does have emotion on its own. To create emotion, we access the heart space through the character. We focus into our heart for the emotion that is fed by the characters story. We access the heart space, in character, once we have enough of the characters background and details built into our mind. This allows us to feel and hear the characters story. We are able to empathise with the character. We have read beyond the words (subtext) and acted upon the emotions and feelings created from the heart space. We are no longer performing a presentation of an emotion, which is to appear sad, happy, angry, etc. We are now representing the character. When character is hurt, we feel the pain and it is expressed in the words of the script as we say them. We now react to the words, our story. Emotions are created depending on our perception of the reality, via our character filter. To need to remember the words naturally, to take to take them to heart. It needs to become automatic, we instantly react as if we have the words for the 1st time. If we are thinking, we lose the connection to the heart space. This is why rehearsal and practice are fundamental to finding the ability to act representationally. The more we read the script and rehearse, the closer we come to taking the script to heart.
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