Active Reflection

This last week, we have been working on a new way to learn the script, Active Analysis. Its interesting as rather it doesn't focus on the lines but instead works with the objective of the line. Learning the lines than trying to find the objective tends to develop a fault, even if the lines are just read over and over, the actor tends to get a mental picture of how the line should be said and has a hard time changing it radically. Working without the script, though, throws the actor into the characters position and objective. This causes the actor to develop their own lines, and thus events, that reflect the normal play. Thus they identify with the characters and lines.
It was rather difficult as a technique, for several reasons, but created useful results. The main issue was improving but not straying from the text and changing the bit too much. It was also hard to say every line. Especially in our bit there were lines that we would accidentally skip over and cause the bit to end suddenly, this didn't cause any issues though. The hardest bit though was developing it in the right fashion. At first we simply evolved on what we first did with the piece, but later we evolved off of several different forms of preforming it. This worked much better than before but also caused issues. The changes that we wanted proved to be mutually exclusive and we were forced to choose what we liked best from the different ideas, and we had a hard time deciding which to include.

Richard Spencer