An Actors Tools

Actors utilise many tools in order to successfully convey ideas to an audience. There are many techniques an actor must possess in order to convey their ideas to the audience. These include physicality, focus, characterisation and improvisation. Actors use these techniques to improve their improvisation skills and improve the quality of their performance. In the workshops conducted during class, students focused on improving these techniques in order to maintain a satisfactory performance. Physicality is one of the most significant techniques that an actor possesses in order to express their ideas and emotions effectively. It is based on body movement and motion. Our group performance did not include any dialogue and was based on the theme of ‘Greed’. The purpose of the performance was to put forward and show the audience how conflict can arise between people and how power can corrupt relationships. Putting this performance was a hassle getting everyone together at the same time although we managed to use our rehearsal time effectively. This performance required various physical movements which helped establish a level of understanding and believability towards the audience.

As well as physicality, focus is also a main technique an actor develops in order to present their performance. Focus is when a performer concentrates their attention on a person, object or event. Focus intends to capture and engage the audience to a particular point. It is effective because without it an actor is not able to present their character successfully and they would not be able to express the story through the actions conducted by the actor. An example where focus was enhanced throughout a workshop was when we had to create a pose representing the emotion that the teacher announced. The aim was to focus on the emotion and stay in the pose for as long as we could regardless of intentional distractions surrounding us. Another technique that is fundamentally used is characterisation, as it evokes a sense of representation towards an object or person including the process of conveying background information about the characters. It may be portrayed in everyday conversation and reconstructed to create a scene.

Without characterisation the performance would lack an objective. Through this tool the audience are able to engage and believe in the context of the performance, enabling them to have an understanding. An activity we worked on to improve our characterisation skills was when a couple exchanged high and low status between each other and how to change a clichéd and stereotypical background of a character into something unexpected, different, and spontaneous. This is very helpful to me as an actor as it encourages me to differentiate the various types of characterisation skills. Finally, having improvisational skills when acting is extremely significant as it may come in handy when a performer is stuck in a situation where he or she needs to rely on improvising. Improvisational skills consist of offering, accepting, and extending or advancing during the scene. This also prevents the audience from losing interest and understanding of the performance. In conclusion, by utilising and interpreting these various tools when acting, our performance skills are improved immensely and they definitely help to successfully convey ideas to an audience.