October 2008 Archives

Question: What's the relationship between the audience and the actor?
Answer: People sitting around watching other people pretend to do things.
~ observation attributed to Bart Simpson, but I can't find the ref.

The observation is funny because that's essentially the relationship, and it raises the question: how can we (the audience) be sometimes so captivated, so drawn into a story or a particular character?

The answer has to do with what actors call "being in the moment."

Most actors reading this will know what I mean by being the moment, but non-actors might be puzzled about this means and why it's important.

Basically, it's the ability to experience a play, what a character says to you, what you're going to say as if it has all never happened before. Everything you say, you say it as if it's just occurring to you now. Everything is NOW — you don't know what's going to happen next (even though you do).

This is why audiences are captivated and so drawn into a story or a particular character. It's the distinguishing trait of a great actor and great acting.

In order to both better understand what it means to be "in the moment" and to get a better handle on how to do this, rather than consult a top acting teacher or coach (though they are the best source) I decided it might be interesting to go way outside the traditional box and pose this question to a leading neuroscientist, Dr. Larry R. Squire (Ph.D), director of the Memory Research Laboratory, part of the Functional Magnetic Imaging Center in the School of Medicine at UCSD.

What could I possibly ask this guy? Well — this: