THE ART OF LISTENING - IN CHARACTER
“Every Second is a chance to tell the story. Well.”
This phrase, which many of my Mocap Vaults students have heard, emphasizes the need to take responsibility for effective storytelling in the mocap volume. It is the backbone of all my efforts to fill gaps in my RADA training throughout my career working in all media. It is also the reason why I run classes teaching students the techniques that do not submit to the assumed superiority of established Methods.
One class I offer is on Listening. I know, you listen all the time, and you probably think it’s like walking. Get the character right and don’t mess with it! If you do, then suddenly you’ll be painfully self aware, out of character and untruthful. I hear the same argument against studying physical transformation techniques.
Think back. How did you feel when you first stepped in front of a group of your peers and started acting? Chances are you were similarly arse-achingly self aware and filled with artifice. That didn’t mean that you were encouraged to avoid improving your Method techniques, did it? I mean, what part of acting training does not start from a position of unknowing?
However, once you became comfortable with established Method approaches, there was probably little appetite and even less encouragement to continue into new territories of discomfort - physical transformation, psycho-physical enquiry, and yes, listening.
It’s true, you can define listening as an action, but this is a semantic description of a physical behavior. I will address my problems with the reliance on semantic based methods in another post. It's enough to say that I don’t believe in relying on any one method that insists that the body is the servant of the mind, and that clear goal oriented actions are the human experience.
Listening. Actors are pretty bad at it. So focused are we on speaking, that listening is often neglected both as a practice and as a tool to understand and embody character. Meisner’s repetition exercise trains the actor in a certain kind of listening, the ability to respond with instinctive behavior under imagined circumstances. Brilliant, but I believe it’s half the story. The next question must be, “Well, if that's how I listen, does the character listen in the same way?”
It’s not uncommon for actors who are being spoken to by the actor on screen, to leave, replaced by a stand-in, or a piece of day glow tape. The “reverse” can be quickly filmed later in one take. The resulting “listener” footage is often considered cutaway material, and the editor will use a range of clips from small to no movement, sometimes reused in the same exchange, and often out of any original sequence. It is hardly surprising that listening is treated this way - when it is not respected for what it really is - a chance to tell the story in every second.
- And we all know what it’s like to do a self tape while listening to a long piece of exposition being rushed through by the reader!
Now I’m not suggesting that you should lose all sense of truth and turn listening into a pantomime. But return shots are up to 30% of a duologue - and provide a golden opportunity to show what you feel about the speaker, what they are saying, and the world in which this is all being said. It makes sense to look for tools to help figure out how to listen as the character in the character’s world.
A simple google search for tips on how to listen as an actor doesn’t offer much in the way of practical and specific character relevant techniques. Instead the majority of advice runs along the lines of “listen to their [scene partner’s] words. Watch their body language. Listen out for what they are not saying”.
OK. But what kind of words or responses are you listening for and why? How and why are you listening for what’s unsaid. Is how you listen consistent with character in the context of the scene and the story.
Good news. Although ignored by mainstream training, behavioral and communication studies have long established that there are different ways of listening driven by different motivations. These in turn are mediated by listening styles and different categories of nonverbal responses. Listening, like any active behavior, is affected by culture, power, and personality. Knowing what these are, can bring observations from social science, into the imaginative world of character creation.
Take a look around, watch scenes play out on TV, consider what tools you have when the lens is turned on you - listening.
If you are interested in going beyond what most actors are taught, and bring listening techniques into your toolset, go to the classes link here and look for my next online “Listening in character” workshop - make sure you subscribe to the waitlist/newsletter to be notified when new classes are available.
