The Great Acting Blog: “Actions Banish Boredom”
I recently attended a seminar where the speaker delivered his speech in a reasonable fashion – he spoke clearly, with a decent amount of force and seemed to know what he was doing. The only trouble was, he was, well … he was just plain boring. I fought to maintain my focus on what he was saying but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was wrong. On reflection, the problem was he just parroted out his speech in exactly the same way as he had prepared it, he was just re-creating his preparation, there was no creation in the moment, he was not striving to communicate something in particular – in short, he lacked an action.
Doing actions is real, in-the-moment creation. The action is discerned from the script by the actor (or speaker), and is typically challenging, meaningful, energising, more than merely speaking the lines in a fairly natural, fairly clear way. If the performer does the actions fully and intensely, the results will be fascinating, various and true.
Don’t just trot out your well prepared dialogue in performance. That’s not creation, it’s not acting, it’s verisimilitude. And it’s boring.
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