Sitrep 3: Feb. 9, 2025

I’m continuing to think about Buselle, Kaplan, and Yates' “ethics of care” as applied to 21^st-century acting training, specifically as it relates to teaching acting students a process for creating emotion. Employing practices culled from intimacy direction and noting Magelssen’s call for the prioritization of actors’ well-being, I offer a few steps towards a pedagogy of care when it comes to teaching actors how to create and utilize emotion in realistic acting work and then subsequently how to help actors separate themselves from the mimetic experience and reground into reality when the work completes.

               Step One: The way the topic is introduced to students is crucial to contextualizing the work of emotions and giving students agency over the entire process. It is good to isolate emotion training as a specific unit within a broader course of study, so students are aware of what is being asked of them when, and also so they understand the proportional weight that the unit on emotions has in their overall study. For example, when focusing on emotion in Meisner training, I note how we are spending 6-8 weeks directly addressing emotions as part of a two-semester long study. This reinforces the idea that while emotions are one part of acting work, they are certainly not the only skill acting requires. By recognizing that emotion work is one piece of a larger craft and not the end game of an actor’s work, it removes the idea that conjuring emotional depth is the de facto pinnacle of all realistic acting and helps students see that emotion work needs to be synthesized into a more complete whole.

Step Two: To treat emotion work like any other facet of acting training, the topic of emotion needs to be further demystified. This starts by acknowledging exactly what is likely to happen to the actor when working with emotion, what the norms of experience are for actors during this part of the training, what constitutes a healthy and unhealthy range of experiences that one might have as they participate in this work, and offering a series of ways for students to process, discuss, and seek help with their experiences as they occur. Central in this discussion is an explanation of how emotions work, and crucially, why they matter in acting. Magelssen’s article stresses only one aim for emotional work, and while it is true that utilizing lived emotions contributes to the overall truthfulness of realistic performance, isolating emotions in acting training for the goal of “being more real” is an incomplete, and as the article makes clear, dangerous pedagogical practice. Emotions in acting should never be sought as an end result. Magelssen unfortunately neglects to point out that 21^st-century students are generally called upon to perform objective-based work, and that emotions are useful because they are motivators of human action. Acting pedagogy cultivates students’ ability to access a wide range of emotion in order to further their ability to take action in a truthful manner. Emotions are simply an engine to drive behavior, which is the ultimate aim of the realistic actor. Any other use of emotion is self-indulgent, resulting in anti-dramatic work in the Aristotelian sense. Possessing this knowledge empowers actors to gauge their performance not on the strength of their overall emotional largesse. It allows them to regulate the use of emotion in performance by comparing it to what is essential at any given moment to achieve their truthful expression of an objective.

Step Three: I’ve found it necessary to work to neutralize charged terminology around emotions as being either negative or positive. This is similar to the way Busselle, Kaplan, and Yates describe the reduction of connotative language in intimacy direction work. The associations with certain kinds of emotional expression as “negative” and certain emotions as “positive” in North America are cultural assumptions not necessarily based on objective reality. Here again, Magelssen’s article overlooks this point when describing actors’ identification with “negative and conflicted states of being” (21).  In my experience, students often feel equally or more vulnerable attempting to recreate emotional states of extreme joy as they do when attempting to create moments of sadness, etc. Since the language used can impact students’ perceptions of what kind of experience they are about to have, it is useful to treat all emotions as part of a lived human experience without assigning values to each one. In North America, where comfort is afforded revered status as a valued life pursuit, we tend to think of any discomfort as “negative.”  Yet, each student is given more agency when they are not told in advance through connotative language what kind of experience they will ultimately have when feeling a specific emotion. Furthermore, refraining from labelling certain emotions as negative or positive serves to reduce the levels of fear in the room and better equip students to be more comfortable accessing a greater range of emotion in their work. This makes their practice more holistic. By working to adjust students’ terminology of how they talk about emotion, I am regulating the idea that kinds of emotion have specific values associated with them and treating all emotion as simply another part of healthy acting practice.

Step 4: When teaching the techniques that students utilize to access emotions, it is best practice to give students options and choice, starting with the understanding that for many moments onstage, actors need not utilize any technique at all for creating emotions. However, when technique is required, it is useful for students to have a variety of tools that they are confident will help them achieve the kind of performance they wish to create. To do this, I might compare related practices across different acting methodologies and ask students what they feel works best for them. Having options helps students feel free to assemble their own practice for their own reasons, preventing negative feelings towards any particular technique or themselves if they struggle with certain exercises. It is also important to make clear that whatever methodology the students select, they are not required to reveal every intimate detail of how they are working to anyone. These practices serve to direct the goal of emotion work away from pleasing a professor or director to something more within the students’ own determination.

Step 5: Magelssen’s article concludes with a discussion about helping students de-role from heightened emotional experiences. His interview with acting teacher Catherine Madden is extremely helpful in articulating this point: “Actors need to know how to get in and out” and “the goal is to leave the room challenged but not damaged” (30). This distinction is key, as is helping actors identify their own personal process for accomplishing this. Achieving this vital task generally involves helping students become aware of the differences between the imaginary world of the story and their own present reality. After a scene concludes, this can be something as simple as having an actor touch an object that is part of the present physical reality. Another option is to get an actor to acknowledge the distance between the way they chose to work in the scene and the current moment afterwards. For example, if an actor were to create an imagined situation in which their best friend betrayed them to help them achieve an emotional state, once the exercise concludes they might be asked to think about where their best friend is at this precise moment, or to send them a text to say they are thinking about them. This restores the sense of reality and distinguishes the actor’s real world from the emotional work the actor was doing in their scene. If students are still experiencing heightened states of emotion after a scene, they might also be asked to evaluate whether the emotion could have been used to motivate more physical behavior within the scene itself, and if the answer is yes, students are granted an opportunity to re-rehearse or try out behaviors that help them experience the emotion within the imaginary world they created the emotion to serve. And finally, students are prepared with examples of ways that working with emotion may result in emotional experiences outside of rehearsal, why this occurs, and options for handling this when it does. Through all of these methods, students are learning ways to leave the rehearsal and performance behind and thus exercise control over their acting process.

Emotions are, in life, an essential aspect of human behavior. Because they are part of life, they are part of acting. A pedagogy of care for teaching acting students how to access and use emotions in their work means mostly putting students in charge of their own experiences and teaching them how to evaluate their work against a standard they alone define. Empowering students with productive agency in their craft is one way I’ve come to define an ethic of care in acting training.