Stage Acting NYC: Theatre Group
Stage Acting NYC: Theatre Group
Stage Acting NYC: Theatre Group
Stage Acting Excerpts
Theatre GroupL Stage Acting
Finding Your Light
Much like finding your mark in film, finding your light on stage is a tricky technique. Unlike film, where a mark is set up specifically for an actor, lighting in a stage production is set up more generally to light the scene. It's up to you to find your light. The easiest way to do this is by feeling the light on your face and in your eyes. Stage lights are set from above, so when you step into your spot, per your blocking, feel where the light shines on you. Ideally, you should feel the heat of the light on your face and if you were to look up, you'd see the light angled at around your forehead. Be careful of standing directly under a hot light, however, as you will get "washed out" by the light's glare.
Have a Voice
A thespian's voice is one of the most precious possessions s/he has. Here are a few ways to keep it safe and warmed up:
- Only drink water that is room temperature or warm. Cold water will constrict your vocal cords.
- Before a performance and between scenes, sip hot water with lemon.
- Slippery elm lozenges are a great quick-fix for scratchy throats.
- Support your voice by using your diaphragm, not your throat, to control your breath and vocal cords.
- In between shows, keep your jaw loose. Bette Davis used to walk around her apartment with a wine cork held loosely between her upper and lower front teeth. Try it, it works!
Learn Your Directions
Acting on stage requires the knowledge of a new kind of navigation. When you are on stage, directions are oriented to you as the actor. (Conversely, House Left (HL) and House Right (HR) refer to directions oriented to the audience.) In a script, you'll see blocking that may read any of the following: SL, SR, DSL, DSR, USL, USD. Here's what they mean:
SL: Stage Left Your left when you are standing on stage.
SR: Stage Right Your right on stage.
DSL: Downstage Left Moving toward the audience, to your left.
DSR: Downstage Right Moving toward audience to your right.
USL: Upstage Left Moving to the back of the stage, left.
USR: Upstage Right Moving to the back of the stage, right.
Downstage and Upstage refer to the old days of theater -- think Shakespeare -- when stages were "raked," or sloped. When you moved toward the audience you were literally moving in a downward direction and upward when you moved to the back of the stage.
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Stage Acting: It's Nice Work if You Can Afford It.
WE are subsidizing the theater." Those words, addressed to an audience in a Lincoln Center auditorium last weekend, weren't spoken by a corporate suit bragging about slapping the company name on the fire escape at one of the city's often needy nonprofit theaters.
They were spoken by the actor Tim Blake Nelson to a group of 100 or so of his fellow performers at the National Congress of Actors and Acting Teachers. What did he mean? Essentially, that actors help keep the theater in business by supplementing their meager stage paychecks with other, more remunerative kinds of work - "Law & Order" guest spots, voice-overs, commercials, even that old standby, waiting tables.
That's not really news to anyone paying attention, just common knowledge rephrased in an unusually discomfiting way. And unlike corporations and civilians, the actor doesn't get a tax break for the charitable contribution he makes to the nation's cultural life by working for a pittance. Applause aside, he doesn't get much in the way of thanks, either. No drinking fountain named after spear carrier No. 2 in that Off Off Broadway production of "Coriolanus," temping by day to give himself the chance to practice his craft and pay off debts from acting school.
For regular theatergoers, not to mention regular moviegoers and television watchers, actors are a bit like the weather: usually good, sometimes bad, but always there. Unless they reach the heavenly and lucrative realm of bona fide celebrity, and thus become subjects of swoony profiles in glossy magazines, we don't ask where they came from or where they're going, why and how they do what they do.
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