(Sarah - Anything Can Happen 2022)

Today was the culminating session for the 8-week Improv From the Heart class. Over weeks, our ongoing homework was to explore on our own time people from our past that hold a strong emotional 'charge' for us. We were also to find a poem or song with lyrics that move us strongly. Today each person in class will have the opportunity to use this personal research in a scene.

Meisner is more than the repetition exercise; it is an entire theory. Finding people from our personal lives and mining those relationships to find true and tangible emotional 'strings' to pluch inside of ourselves is a technique. The same is true of poems or songs that move us. What these 'resources' allow improvisers/actors to do is to lose themselves in their emotional world. We want to build something so real that we believe in it fully, more so than the reality of 'just' being an actor on a stage. 

We don't want to 'play at' being angry, or 'show' the audience that we are angry - we want to chose an emotional reality, make the moment as real as possible, and then let it go where it will go. All of this work is called emotional preparation. Actors need to know what happened the moment before the lights go up. This needs to be more than just an intellectual decision. It must be felt and explored. The way we explore that is to play with our own emotional landscapes in order to reliably use them to find emotional truth in the moment.

After warming up with the mirror exercise and walking through the space with our lyrics or poems, we paired off to do scenes using our emotional preparation. One partner was to receive the words without reacting, while seated. The other partner was to use emotional preparation to get ready to confront a person for the last time, and get what they need to get from that person.

There were lots of questions before we did the exercise. People in class were afraid that they had picked the 'wrong' person or the 'wrong' poem/lyrics for the scene. The idea isn't to have emotional preparation perfectly match the emotion, but rather to let the degree to which it moves us be the momentum for the scene. It should feel emotionally full and real, and we do not need to direct which way the emotion is going to go. 

In my scene I found myself needing to tell an ex-friend the truth about her betrayal and what it did to me. What I needed was for her to hear it before she died, to understand how deeply she had hurt me and why I wasn't interested in forgiving her. I felt very raw. I hardly ever get to explore the dark corners of my mind in my regular life. I spend so much time trying to look good, be acceptable to others, and get along. That is exactly the recipe that got me into the mess with my ex-friend. So it felt cathartic to show my true emotions to her finally, through this scene.

I noticed that most other classmates were soft or forgiving or sad, and at first I judged myself for having done the scene 'wrong'. Then I remembered that one of the reasons we need theater is to explore and understand our own unexplored traits, the things we push down or push away and end up demonizing in others. By allowing and accepting my hostility to be real and drive the scene, I was able to find another 'color' to paint with as an artist/actor. I don't want to play one-dimensional characters, nor do I want to see one-dimensional characters on the stage or screen. I want to play and understand the depth and breadth of human experience, and that's what this exercise helped me begin to do.

We ended the class with a seated round of group repetition. I observed what I believe to be the conditioned social response of wanting to smooth things over and make things 'nice'. I also observed my desire to call people out for this conditioned response. 

Moving forward, we can continue to deepen out practice by reading the Meisner book, "On Acting", watch videos on the technique, practice emotional preparation on our own time, and practice the repetition exercise with others. In the next ten minute play I am preparing for, I do have ideas on using people from my life to do emotional preparation, as well as song lyrics to give my character an internal emotional 'charge'. This class showed me how much choice and awareness go into building and understanding a character, and how to trust that change happens on its own in a scene. If given the opportunity, I would definitely take this class again.

The next session of Improv from the Heart starts in June.

Sarah Elovich - Writer, Actor, Writing Coach (Re-Write Yourself)
Alameda, CA

Sarah’s IFH Journal - Day 6

Sarah’s IFH Journal - Day 4

Sarah’s IFH Journal - Day 3

Sarah’s IFH Journal - Day 2

Sarah’s IFH Journal - Day 1

Improv from the Heart