The Emotional Instrument
A fun exploration of how actors internally identify and recreate emotion to
portray character and bring a dramatic script to life.
Teaching artist: Richard Clairmont
Grade: level 3
Lesson: Adopting a neutral, non-expressive stance, students learn first to silently and privately identify emotions as called out by the instructor and then, on cue, to create with their bodies, a statue that communicates that emotion.
Target learning: Experiences the ‘inwardness’ of emotion, i.e., how emotions can be re-created and experienced privately without communicating them.
Criteria: Maintains neutral stance while identifying and maintaining inward emotion.
Target learning: Recognize connection between emotion and specific image or memory.
Criteria: Privately and silently identifies specific memories associated with the identified emotion.
Target Learning: Reinforces understanding of the close association between emotion and body language using “statues”.
Criteria: Creates a still physical gesture or stance representing their understanding/experience of the identified emotion.
Vocabulary (click here for the glossary)
communication
emotional instrument
gesture
imagination
mime
neutral stance
physical instrument
sense memory
statue
tableau
Resources
Various classroom texts and reading material for research about how characters experience emotion in the context of story.
Materials
Adequate classroom space.
Resources introduced and creative process
Teaching artist:
Demonstrates “neutral” stance, describing it as the blank slate used by actors in the way a painter uses the empty canvas, or a writer starts with the empty page. Also points out the need to be aware of impulses to scratch, tug at a sleeve, giggle, and so forth, indicating how the actor has control over the instrument in the same way as a violinist over the violin. The actors physical and emotional instrument cannot play the actor any more than a violin plays the violinist.
Once neutral has been maintained, teaching artist calls out the name of an emotion, e.g., surprise. Students are instructed to maintain the neutral posture while experiencing surprise inwardly as a “sense memory” by thinking (if need be) of some time they were surprised. Students are likewise instructed to hold the emotion inwardly, continuing to feel it, while maintaining neutral. At the instructor’s direction “Go,” students create with their bodies statues that depict “Surprise.” Describes how mime and gesture relate to statues, and defines tableau as a group of statues communicating an emotion or scene.
After several rounds, class is split into two groups, with group one, performers facing group two, audience, in neutral. In turn, audience members then identify emotions to be called and depicted by performers. After several more rounds, groups switch.
Assessment
Reflection Questions:
Were you able to maintain your neutral?
What helped you?
What was the most difficult part of maintaining neutral?
Did you have control over your instrument, or did your instrument have control over you?
Describe a memory you used to help you feel your emotion?
Was it hard or easy for you to feel an emotion on the inside without communicating it?
Essential learnings
1.1 understands applicable theatre vocabulary
1.2 develops skills and techniques
1.3 applies audience skills
2.1 applies creative process
2.2 applies performance process
2.3 applies responding process
3.1 expresses feelings
3.2 communicates with a specific purpose
3.3 uses personal criteria to make artistic choices
Theatre Performance Process:
While this exercise deals more specifically with craft, it includes a performance aspect in the sense that students create their ‘statues’ for each other.