CHAPTER 3
The Voice and the Breath
Throughout the previous two chapters, I have repeatedly reminded you to remember to breathe. Each new step in the process of relaxation and concentration must be accompanied by checking the breath in order to investigate the moment fully. It is in the simple process of sufficient breathing, so that the emotion of the moment can move freely through you, that you discover what the moment is all about. Through the breath, we discover what we are experiencing in our entire selves. Just try it yourself. Take one of the sense memories that you used from the previous chapter, and each time you discover a sensation or memory, concentrate on the breath. I think you will find that the breath opens up the experience and makes it more alive.
It is not by chance that it is said that actors breathe life into their parts. Actors take the written part and give it a breath, a voice, and a soul. When actors read parts, they see them in their minds. They have impressions and ideas that flesh out the scenario and make it come to life. The imagination of the actor takes away special nuggets from this reading process, which it will use to begin the creation of the character whom the actor will eventually play. One of the essential elements of this process is the actor’s own breath, the life-sustaining flow of air that accompanies every moment of our lives and must also flow through the life of the character.
As you deepen your relaxation and direct your concentration to tighter and more refined circles of focus, this breath, which gives way to making sounds and eventually the voice, is the beginning of the recognition of the impulses that are being released from within. You must continually remind yourself to breathe, especially when you are beginning work on a character. Many questions arise that need to be answered, and it’s easy to forget that breathing is part of the process.
Proper breathing is an obvious fundamental of any acting technique, but what I’m talking about is how the moment-to-moment reality is dependent upon the free and easy breath being appropriate to the emotion of the moment. In film acting, since it isn’t necessary to project the voice, the breathing and vocal patterns should be more as they are in everyday life. They aren’t consistent; they are surprising, and they often catch you off guard. This is one of the essential differences between film and theater acting. In film, the breath and the voice can be more consistent with the details of the moment, rather than being a set of preplanned directions dictated by the demands of the play and the performance space. The film actor is asked to deliver the details of the moment as realistically as possible: a secret whispered and shared in the dark, intimate words that get stuck in your throat, screams and cries that would throw a stage actor out of the show for a week because of voice damage, long periods of intense listening that are photographed in close-up. All these moments must be filled with the subtle nuances of your own unique personality; they are rarely filled by words. The camera has the power to perceive the smallest nuances, ones so subtle that they would never read onstage, but when they are photographed, these nuances become radiant. It is the breath that carries the nuance to the screen and communicates its meaning to the audience.
For the actor on the stage, vocal production and projection take precedence over the emotional moment when speaking. For the actor on film, the emotional moment and its nuances take precedence.
However, even in film, when the pressures of performing create an intense atmosphere for the actor, the breath (and the voice) can become stilted and too controlled. When this happens, the actor must go back to the relaxation checking process, focusing the concentration and breathing into the moment. This happens to the experienced professional as well as the beginner. Wherever you are in the spectrum of acting experience, training, and technique, the approaches to managing the problems of shallow breath and stilted speech are the same. From the very beginning, work on these problems should be integrated into the work on yourself and the character.
To explore the process of how the breath and voice are integrated into a character, we should first choose a character to work on as a basis for doing the exercises. This is a discovery process, a discovery of yourself and you as the character.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT PRACTICE MATERIAL
When choosing a part to work on with the intention of using it as a basis to expand your knowledge of either a technique or of your talent, it is best to follow some important rules:
1. The part must be of your sex and appropriate age range. “Age range” is a professional acting term used to describe the range of ages that you are able to play at any given time in your life. Age range is extremely important in the film world. Since the camera comes in very close to photograph your face, you must look believably like the age that you are playing. The age range usually runs in five- to ten-year spans around your real age. For instance, if you are thirty years old, then your age range runs approximately from twenty-five to thirty-five years old. Sometimes, the age range is less than ten years, depending on the person. It is rarely more. This doesn’t mean that you will never play a part outside of your age range, but for our purposes now, we will stay within it.
2. Choose a part from a well-known, successful play or movie. It’s best to take a part from the beginning of the piece to work on. Don’t choose a piece that has been written by you or a friend of yours. Also, make sure it’s dramatic text. No poetry, transcripts from novels, excerpts from diaries, etc. If possible, start at the beginning, when the character is first introduced. You should avoid the climaxes and final speeches for now.
3. The character should be saying something that you find interesting, something that is important to you. It’s best if you feel passionate about it.
4. It should be a block of text of at least ten or fifteen lines that is completely uninterrupted by another character talking. If another character’s text is interspersed with yours, the monologue should still make sense if those lines are omitted.
5. The character’s experience in life should to some degree parallel your own. In other words, the character should be struggling with issues that you understand because of your own experience and knowledge. The best situation is when you understand what the struggle is but have yet to come up with a resolution on your own. Perhaps, then, you and the character can discover something together. It also helps if you and the character come from the same economic background.
6. Avoid high or physical comedy, period pieces with difficult text, parodies, or surrealistic material. These forms require more complicated approaches to be acted properly. Don’t use sitcom material. This doesn’t mean that the piece can’t have a sense of humor or be complex, but it’s best to stick to fairly contemporary works whose characters are people you feel you know.
7. If you are a beginner in acting or someone who has acting experience but just hasn’t gotten film work, then avoid any part with an accent other than your own.
In other words, try and choose a part that is as close to you as possible. If you have difficulty doing this or are unfamiliar with the repertoire out there, ask someone to recommend roles to you. Even the know-it-all guy who works in your local video store or theater bookstore may be able to help more than you might realize. People who love film and theater are usually more than willing to share what they know if they are asked. Once you have chosen the part that you want to work on, read through the entire script once or twice and then put it away. Choose the segment that you are going to work on and write or type out the monologue on a piece of paper. Don’t even worry about memorizing it.
THE FIRST STEPS TO GIVING THE CHARACTER YOUR VOICE
What we are going to do now is to start to incorporate a fictional character into the relaxation and concentration process. One way of doing this is to read some of the words that the character speaks, but only as you, without trying to impose characteristics on them. You should always start with what you can do easily and avoid (at least for now) searching away from yourself, making things more complicated. Reading words from a piece of paper is an easy thing to do if you are just being you and not worrying about playing a part. The work on the character comes later.
Take your piece of paper with the words on it and your Journal and go to a place where you will be able to work. This place should be somewhere where you could make noise if necessary. Do a physical warm-up if you know one. If you don’t, stretching, jogging, or jumping in place are all good things to do to get the blood flowing and the breath connected to the body.
Once your breath is moving freely through your body, sit comfortably and do the Mental Relaxation exercises. Take your time here. If you have just read the script, the character you have chosen will already be working within you, though you might not be consciously aware of it. I have often heard people say, “You work on it, and it works on you.” We generally have much more information in ourselves than we need to play the part, so just try and stay in the present moment and investigate it fully by using the system of the Mental Relaxation. If you stay in the present moment, it will lead to the next moment and the discoveries needed to play the part.
Here are some things that you should be aware of while you sit doing the Mental Relaxation:
• Place all your concentration on your breathing. Allow the thoughts, images, and feelings to flow through your breath freely and easily. Sometimes, the idea of blowing an image up like a balloon or keeping a feeling alive, as if it were a feather afloat in the air, helps to keep the breath connected to the moment.
• If the breath gets caught or you feel yourself spacing out, sigh. Sighing is done by bringing the air high into the chest, then letting it all out at once. It releases tension and uncovers things you didn’t know were there. Ask yourself, “When do I sigh in life?” It’s often when you have feelings that you can’t express. Sighing is often a flag signifying that emotions need to be expressed.
• Don’t sit on the breath by allowing it to fall down into the navel area; keep the breath moving in the upper chest. Emotions are most easily expressed and released when the breath is high in the body. Just watch an excited or upset child’s breathing or a very angry person’s breath pattern, and you will see how the chest moves as if the emotion were riding on it.
• When you feel yourself getting distracted, feel a strong sensation, or can identify an impulse happening anywhere in the body, make a long continuous AHHH sound. The throat should be open, and the sound should waver with the changes that you experience while you are making it. This sound can be soft, or it can be very loud; it depends on the moment.
• Direct your concentration back and forth between the relaxation process, breathing, sighing, and making sounds.
After about fifteen or twenty minutes of Mental Relaxation, pick up your piece of paper with your monologue on it and read the first line. You know, I always find that the nice thing about a piece of paper with words on it is that it doesn’t change. It is a concrete object that can be moved, carried, crumpled, and thrown; it will still have the same words written on it. You don’t have to be worried about destroying it, and you shouldn’t be afraid of it. If you have problems saying any of the text, the problems can be fixed later. Speech and pronunciation are different steps in the process of acting; in fact, they are separate studies altogether, studies that have easily accessible answers. The words are simply there; they won’t suddenly change or shift like you might. You can worry about memorizing them later. You are the changing force; you are the thing that brings about the metamorphosis of the words into the character. The words only give voice to your changes, and your breath gives them their meaning by the way that you say them.
So please, don’t read even the first line with a preordained expression that has no connection with how you really feel in the moment. Just read the words on the page as though they had nothing to do with the script and everything to do with your immediate state. If you have thought too much about the part and how you think it should be played, this will not be an easy thing to do. You have already created a preconceived notion of how you should sound. Your mind has worked too quickly, and you have already made decisions, which will condemn your character to a narrower sphere of existence than is necessary. You have already gotten “stuck in your head.”
GETTING STUCK IN YOUR HEAD
When you stop being in the moment—that is, stop experiencing the entire body and all the senses in this very instance of time—and start thinking about what is happening instead of feeling it, the moment cannot be properly investigated. You have allowed the process to leave the physical body and go into the mind. This is often referred to as being stuck, or being in your head, or the worst state—being stuck in your head.
One of the biggest problems with being stuck in your head is that you are not aware of it, or if you are aware of it, you don’t think that it’s a problem. It seems normal, which it is for many circumstances; it’s just not good for this circumstance. So, you need some way of recognizing that it has happened. Then, you can extricate yourself and move on.
Being stuck is often signaled by a near stoppage or shallowing of the breath. If your concentration is tipped toward checking your breathing, then you will be able to get back to the body, the experience, and breathing fully into the investigation of the next moment.
THE PRECONCEIVED IDEA
When my students are presenting a monologue for the first time, they always want to memorize all the words, come in gangbusters, and present a complete character ready for the camera. They aren’t able to do this on the first try. They panic and freeze, because they don’t know what to do to begin simply. I always tell them, “Don’t worry, the Academy Awards aren’t for another six weeks, and you weren’t even nominated this year, so we have plenty of time to explore. Just relax and start breathing. Just look at us and breathe.” They experience tension and anxiety because of their own expectations. All I want them to do is to look at us, breathe into the moment, and read the first lines. That’s where they should begin.
The unconscious workings of an actor’s talent are a vast field of contradictions. No one knows how it really works, but one can safely say that it works differently for everybody. One thing is probably true of everybody, though: the things we want the most are most difficult for us to do. If you are up against an extreme desire to do well as an actor, and almost certainly you are (it tends to come with the territory), then you will experience the pressure to succeed. The desire to measure up to your own expectations will be very strong.
In the world of film, with its idols and enormous faces confronting us in the dark and now with all the platforms in social media and online, the expectations that you have to measure up to these images can be very daunting. They take on the role of a god or idol, and you will always fall short of your own expectations. It is often the case that in the initial work on a character, these expectations will arise and impose themselves on your work. Your voice will not be connected to the present moment, because you are not connected to it. You are thinking about something in the past (your first impression of the character) and how you want it to affect the results of the future (your performance of the part). It is not the present moment.
When this happens, you have formed a preconceived idea about how the character should be played, and this will get in the way of your discovery process. A preconceived idea will cause you to get stuck in your head. These ideas start to enforce themselves upon your behavior. You find that you are dictating the moments to yourself to comply with your preconceived idea. It is possible to stop this from happening by simply concentrating on the breath and going back to the body and your own organic reality of the moment. The breath will breathe life into the moment, and you will start the process of discovering the parts of you that the character has inspired.
Very seasoned professionals can create characters that they have played in various incarnations almost instantaneously. Comedians do this all the time. They have done their groundwork, and now, they are just delivering the goods. Students and actors who are trying to expand their instruments have to go back to the discovery process. Even seasoned professionals, if they are worth their salt, continue the discovery process instinctively at every chance. They have learned through experience how much more exciting their work is when they do this.
The Inner Monologue with Text
Let’s go back to sitting in the chair. You have just read the first line of the monologue. If you find that your preconceived ideas about the character are already at work, then just stop, take a deep breath, and try to do the following:
1. Believe that your inspiration will make sense of all the things that you are trying to do, and just stay in the moment. You must trust yourself. Don’t try to answer all your questions at once. Remember, at this point, it’s not about right and wrong, it’s just about doing and investigating.
2. Check the eyes and the back of the head for rising tension and release this tension by sighing or making the AHHH sound.
3. Speak your thoughts aloud as in the Inner Monologue. Place all judgments of your performance of these exercises on the character. In other words, if you are very critical of yourself, then the character has a critical nature. If you feel too big and strong for this moment sitting in this chair, then it is the character who has these feelings about her environment. Whatever your thoughts, speak them out loud.
4. If you find yourself getting stuck in your head, try Gibberish.
5. Make loud AHHH sounds to release the buildup of mental and physical tension.
6. If you feel nothing is happening, then do the same thing you did in step #3: put the way that you feel on the character and make very loud AHHH sounds. Speak your thoughts out loud.
7. Occasionally, look down at the text and say whatever line your eyes see. Don’t be concerned with order; the page has the order, and it will be there for you later. Allow your inner instrument to use your breath and your voice without your interference.
8. Keep going back to checking the breath. Make sure you are getting enough air.
9. If you are a trained stage actor or a singer, try not to fill your chest with air and support before you speak. Speak softly, so you don’t need as much support. Be diligent about checking for tension in the upper body region.
10. Go back and forth between the Mental Relaxation, breathing, sighing, the text, Gibberish, and the Inner Monologue, until the text is just another part of the discovery process, no more or no less important than the other things that you are doing. Give your own words the same power as the words of the character. Keep moving forward into the next moment.
11. If you feel the need to get up, move around, or lie on the floor while you are doing these things, please feel free to do so, but stay in the chair for at least twenty minutes before getting up. If you get up and move around too quickly, you can miss some of the more subtle impulses that are very useful to this process.
12. After at least forty-five minutes, pick up your Journal and write. Write whatever you like. It’s best if you can write an assessment of the exercise, adding your thoughts about the character as you go along. You can also include any revelations you have had about yourself. However, many times you’ll want to write about something that seems, at the time, totally unrelated to the exercise you have just completed. Don’t worry about it, just go ahead and write whatever comes to you first. There’s usually important information there that you will be able to use later on.
THE JOURNAL AS INNER VOICE
The Journal is a useful tool for actors. It gives them an added space to work in that is very private. It is where they can assess what they have just done immediately after they have done it.
When you write in your Journal right after an exercise, you have a way of remembering everything for later. Often when you are working, the impressions have been so plentiful that it is difficult to remember them all. It is also true that something that made no sense to you at the moment becomes clearer with time, or vice versa. The Journal takes the burden off of the memory, which allows the actor to relax more thoroughly. It serves as an inner private voice. What you write after an exercise will often reveal surprising results. It unlocks the creativity in a different way, expressing many things that were there lying below the surface, unable to emerge. The Journal has given you the opportunity to voice these things privately. You have just given rein to many impulses and images, much information has passed through you, and now, you need to make a record of it that you can go back to later.
Sometimes, the writings will say things that would be difficult for you to say out loud, even if no one else was around. It is the expression of this inner voice that the actor needs to be thinking of while he or she is saying the text of a character.
Assessing the Exercise in Your Journal
Each person develops his or her own style of Journal writing. Since it is a private space, it must make sense only to you. I teach a lot of artists and animators acting, and they often cover their books with scribbling and drawings. It works for them; no one else has to understand it. As in the Observation Exercise, the Journal work is not a literary exercise. The sentences don’t have to be complete; spelling and grammar are not important. What is important is the information that you are saving for yourself.
There should be a system of question asking and answering that you set up for yourself. Ask and answer some of the following questions:
• Was I able to be aware of getting stuck in my head? If I was aware of it, how did I change it?
• Was I aware of my preconceived ideas and how they got in my way? What did I do to change my behavior, and where did it lead me?
• Could I just stop what I was doing and breathe into the moment? What happened when I did this?
• How did the breath change the moment?
• Did I learn something I didn’t know about the character by allowing it to live through me? What was it?
• Did the text continually come out the same way even though I tried to change it? Why do I think I had this difficulty?
• Am I satisfied with my work, or am I dissatisfied because I am pressured by an idea of performing for an audience in the future?
• Was I able to stay in the moment? When I was in the moment, what did it feel like?
• What is the next thing I would like to accomplish for this character?
• Was I speaking in my own voice, or did my voice sound foreign to me?
• Did I find myself avoiding certain lines or passages in the text? Why do I think that was?
• Did I hurt my throat by speaking or yelling too loudly, or was it difficult to get the sound out at all? What were the emotions connected to these moments?
There are many questions that you can ask and answer. These are just examples. One should develop a habit of questioning and seeking answers in all acting work. The Journal is like a map that you are charting. You are wandering through new territory, and you will need more than bread crumbs to find your way back again. It charts your path. It reminds you of where you have been and helps you find out where you want to go.
THE TRAINED VOICE
Actors and singers with trained voices encounter different problems when trying to adjust to film acting. Their instruments have been disciplined for projection, power, and stamina. The muscles that create a trained voice are strong and ready to support them when performing. These muscles affect the stance of the whole body and are often not willing to disengage to allow the more natural speech that is needed for film. These muscles, when not used for projection, can create a great deal of tension for the performer new to the film medium. The performer feels like he isn’t doing enough, because he no longer has to worry about the volume.
The best thing to do for this problem is to become aware of it. To be more conscious of the muscles engaging when you are speaking, choose a difficult classical monologue that you have memorized or performed. Lie down on the floor and breathe. Start your emotional preparation and allow it to take a strong hold on your body. Do the monologue sotto voce, as if you were speaking to someone who was leaning over you, listening very closely to every word that you are saying. It should feel very intimate. Be aware of taking the time to be completely relaxed while speaking and breathing. Pay particular attention to your back and leg muscles. Don’t worry about devoicing (a voice that is only half produced and close to whispering), especially when the emotion is powerful.
Try to relax all of your back muscles and allow the breath to move high into the chest. Allow the emotion to take control. Break up the patterns by including the Inner Monologue and taking pauses for breathing. Work very slowly. Every time the muscles engage to project the voice out, try to relax them and lower your volume. Keep the jaw muscles slack. This may cause you to lose control of pronunciation, but don’t worry about it for now. You’ll be able to fix that later.
If you have a highly skilled vocal technique, then you have already set up a dialogue with your instrument. You should be able to adjust it to a more intimate context. After doing the monologue lying down, try it again, this time sitting up while still on the floor. Then, take it to a chair and so on, until you are standing up and moving around, while still maintaining the intimate nature of the speech. This exercise should set you on the road to finding a way to adjust your instrument for film.
The comment will often come up in my acting classes that the actors couldn’t be heard while doing a monologue or scene. I always ask whether or not the observers believed the behavior of the actors. That’s what I am watching for: Did I believe the actor’s body language? Was his face expressive? Was it interesting to watch? The volume of the performance isn’t important to me all the time. If I found that the behavior was truthful, that I believed that the actor was in the place or the situation that he was trying to portray, then I am not concerned about whether or not I can hear him. The voice at proper levels of sound can be fixed later, or even added in later, as is often the case on film productions. (Recording the voice after the film has been shot is called “looping.” The actor stands in front of a very sensitive microphone wearing the headset that is attached to it. He watches his film performance, as he speaks the words in sync with his character’s lips. This requires great listening skills.)
Devoicing isn’t a problem in film acting for the most part. We often devoice in life when we are unsure of ourselves or when we are experiencing strong emotions like fear. Shyness, a quality fascinating to watch, often causes devoicing, as well. Sometimes, it is a signal that the actor hasn’t found an essential element for the character, so the voice will pull back or even stop altogether. This happens to allow the actor to investigate what is missing and fill the moment with the nuances of her own discovery process. One should never just plow through and force the voice to cover with volume what is missing from the inner life.
Eventually, even the film actor must bring up the volume slightly, so as not to hurt the voice, but it doesn’t have to be a priority, as it is in the theater. Once actors preparing for film work program this into their process, the process becomes much easier, and the instrument is free to relax and investigate more thoroughly.
On the stage, sound, including the actor’s voice, signals the audience to direct their attention to that sound. In film, the audience watches what is on the screen before them. What they should pay attention to has been chosen for them by the camera frame. Many times, the one who is speaking is not the one who is in the frame. The one we are watching is the one who is listening, just as the audience is.
The essential elements of all acting are the same, but the process of preparing for a film role takes different steps and priorities from stage acting. Everything must start with the relaxation and the focus of the concentration. Then, the breath must move through each moment to investigate it fully. The voice expresses the moment in either sound or words. You should always start with your own words; the actual text comes last. To make this process work takes a lot of skill, and time must be invested.
The next four chapters are about using the senses to create different aspects of your character and performance in front of a camera. You always use the process of relaxation and concentration as your starting point.
We will start with listening. Within the intimate box of the camera frame, it is this skill that takes the place of the powerful stage voice. Listening to the other actors, listening to the world around you, and listening to your own inner voice.