Changing Emotions

Improv exercises dealing with the audience calling out changing emotions are wonderful tools to exploring very different states of being in the same environment. You may have begun a scene using object work to create an imaginary world that you then inhabit. When a new emotion is called you are forced to incorporate the new emotional state into the world you have created. 

How you actually go about feeling the emotions and expressing them depends on where your own individual pulse guides you. However, there is a powerful approach you may want to explore called the Stanislavsky Method. In his book An Actor Prepares, the great director Stanislavsky describes how real acting involves really feeling the emotion on a deep level and refraining from making stereotypical gestures. He values emoting internally and finds external emoting to be fake, something the audience simply will not be affected by. For example Stanislavsky would argue that showing the emotion, anger, by rolling your eyes and clenching your fists would be a fake way to go about it, one that the audience will not buy for the simple reason that you, the performer, are not really experiencing the emotion. Instead you should allow your self to really feel that emotion deeply and allow how you speak, how you move, to simply happen in response to how you feel the emotion.

If this interests you, play with it. It can be a lot of fun.

May the pulse be with you!

Abhay

Image: Wabian 2 developed at Waseda University is able to express emotions.