Word: cooperations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...WHEN you are there," Cooper would say, "your entire self should be there. Let everything you are be right there at the center." After a few minutes, "If you are at your center, and you want to make a noise, please make one." Grunts and hisses and groans, from all the centers of all the bodies, And when the noises stopped, Cooper would say, "Now slowly begin to think about your role. Let your role gradually descent into, your center." A few minutes later, the actors would begin their regular rehearsal...
That people exercise and warm up before a rehearsal does not seem very odd. Athletes do it all the time. But implicit in the kinds of exercises Cooper's cast has been doing is a concept of acting very different from what has often been common in the past. Perhaps it can best be called "gut" acting...
...Take a script of a play," Cooper said one night. "You can approach it in a lot of ways. The most common approach is to try to analyze and understand it. Just who is this character you are trying to play--that's the problem your mind has to deal with. If you understand your character, then you can try to feel like it, figuring out for yourself the whole pattern of its stage life...
...extent that an actor succeeds in feeling like his stage role, he will be convincing on stage. What Cooper has tried to do with his cast in The Bonds of Interest is to get them into character not only through the mind--but through the "center" as well. If an actor can find his center and then make his stage role part of that center, uniting the literary creation with his own gut, he can actually become the character he is trying to create. For the few hours of the play, the transformation will be real. Acting will...
THAT IS THE first goal of the warm-ups. The second is to build up energy among the cast. "This play," Cooper told his actors at a rehearsal last week, "isn't going to make it on literary merit. It isn't going to make in on plot line. If it makes it, it will be because we're sustaining it on our own energy...