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Fixed Point in Acting and Stage Production - the Key to Clarity on the Stage
08/05/2016
Fixed Point in Acting and Stage Production - the Key to Clarity on the Stage
Let me ask you a question: Have you ever heard these comments about your performance or production? Or, have you left a performance yourself and commented something like; - Confusing, didn’t you think?, Hard to follow..., I'm not sure what the point was..., Lost me..., I didn’t really understand what he wanted to say. Comments like these are all too frequent, whether we hear them or not. I made one of them myself just last week when I was in London and walked out of a big musical saying to my friends; I was just never engaged. Clarity is one of the stage’s most important virtues for good reason. Without it, we can easily loose are audience. We are not talking about dramatic content which is purposefully ambiguous or dramatic messages which are designed to create an intellectual paradox. We are talking about a stage production which gives us a sense of vagueness, confusion, energy lacking action, vapid character development and at its worst, a sense of real frustrating confusion. Clarity's key element is formed around understanding the over-arching application of 'fixed point' FP. Clarity provides the audience with a means of staying with you - connected - traveling in the actor’s skin and soul with an invested emotional and physical response. Clarity gives the element of rhythm a heightened effectiveness. Rhythm is the engine of all art (listen to episode One, Learning to Sculpt Memorable Characterizations with Rhythm). There is a mutually beneficial relationship between a good use of rhythm and fixed point clarity. Together, they offer great strength and potential for the production. The brilliance of clarity is that it makes the audience feel smart. It’s inspiring and edifying to the viewer when they think they understand what's going on. If the audience looses orientation, they are frustrated and loose their engagement with the action and the characters resulting in the audience feeling stupid. What is a FP? It’s a fixed orientation point -an anchor which doesn’t move and from which we can find orientation and a base from which to create dramatic energy. The fixed point principles hold true for all different realms or frames of dramatic technique; the physical, the emotional, the will and the spiritual. Kathleen Ann introduces the techniques for creating strong fixed points in stage productions and surveys its application in various frames of stage work.
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