19 Apr PERFORMING BY NOT PERFORMING
A lot of actors feel a lot of apprehension when they are actually on set, doing a scene, and practicing their craft. This is because, most of the time; they are preoccupied with the performance aspect of acting. The root of this is fear: the fear that they’ll make a mistake, that they’ll flub their lines, and that they’ll fail to convey the authenticity and the emotions behind the scene.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you are a student of Top Hollywood Acting Coach Brad Heller; then the performance aspect of acting should not feel like anything. It should, in fact, feel like nothing: not the apathetic nothingness of someone who doesn’t care, but the absence of any affectation, of; as Brad so aptly put it, “having to do something while acting”. For Brad, acting should be natural and organic, not staged or practiced. In his acting classes, Brad emphasizes the core phases of Non-Method Acting which are Preparation and Execution. These are two different acting tools. The Preparation phase is where Heller Approach actors do breathing exercises and say the name of the emotion they want to evoke to inform their acting. This is the phase where practicing the scene is done repeatedly so that when the actor goes to the execution phase, it becomes akin to “muscle memory” to deliver the scene. As Brad said, that’s “when we trust all the work, and we just play.”
To know more about what acting should feel like, check out this youtube video FREE Acting Lessons: What Should ACTING FEEL LIKE?