11. Animation pt. 2

Creativity depends on maintaining innocence and a never-ending curiosity about the human condition...all our discoveries lead to identification with the character and the circumstances in which he lives to animate our thoughts and senses in order to act, to do.

Hagen begins her discussion of thought in acting with three important points:

1. Thought moves with the speed of lightning.

2. Thought is not based on verbally organized ideas.

3. You cannot separate thought from action.

Onstage, just as we are working to project the character's physical behavior, we working to project their mental behavior. To tell the story of the character's thought rather than the actor's thought (which should be invisible at all times), true concentration is required. The thinking during a scene almost always relates to one's primary psychological objective, rather than the outer, physical action that is taking place. Opposites create texture and draw the audience in.

Our thoughts, as Hagen points out, are not verbal. Our thoughts are visual, and it is through the selection of particularized images relevant to our objective that we animate our character's thoughts. Hagen calls these images inner objects (as opposed to the outer objects that one is actually interacting with physically onstage).

Contacting the images connected with the character's objective instigate forward moving, traveling thought.

Can't help thinking of McEleney's "acting thought" lesson here. We can't go internal. There's a bit of acting in it.

Hagen summarizes it in a great way: The actor's thinking depends on the subjective process of weighing his course of action by contact with inner and outer objects.