The Imagined Energy Of Tactics & Helping The Actor Fuel A Character's Objectives

Demystifying the theater profession, offering a foundation for creative life, and reinvestment in the creative process. This is Dedicated to the Craft, part of the Electric Secrets variety podcast.

I'm your host, Scott Leon-Smith, let's flip the script.

All right, hello again everybody, welcome to Dedicated to the Craft. In the last episode, I talked about objectives and how they will get you more natural and realistic results than motivations. You get better results if you play an objective, a specific action, than you would trying to play a thing like a motivation or a mood.

I also talked about what defines an objective. An objective is a tactic or an action, plus a desired outcome, what your character wants to happen. And those will change throughout a given scene.

So you might have one objective for the entire scene, but you have things to deal with, other people in the scene, and you have to switch your tactics to get your desired outcome because you're not going to get it immediately. In fact, you might never get it. 

And I want to focus on tactics in this episode and how we can first engage with tactics. And that is through energy and imagination.

So, you've heard me say that acting is the work of the imagination and your imagination helps you to commit to this most basic building block of a performance called a tactic. So, if you imagine vocal energy, if I'm speaking to you right now, I'm going to say I might think, okay, my vocal energy has to be smooth. So, when I think smooth, talk smoothly, speak smoothly. You can hear that that has an effect on how I'm speaking. It's the same type of a thing with using tactics. You commit to the imagined energy of a given tactic. And it has to be a very specific action.

Now the fun thing about this exercise is that you can use it with any piece of text you find. You're using the tactic completely out of context. The goal is to explore the energy of the tactic. So, there are no rules except sticking with the text, trying not to ad-lib or add anything to the text.

If it helps you to get started, add libbing phrases to get into the text, that's totally fine. But the goal is to use just the text that is in front of you and commit to the exploration of the energy of the tactic. 

And I'm going to perform several examples of this exercise in this episode.

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So, here's my first example of a tactic. The tactic is Proclaim. Proclaim is a very specific action. Now if we think of proclamation, we may think of a town crier calling out the news of the day, somebody very loud and very brash. But our goal with this exercise is to explore the energy of the tactic Proclaim, the energy of the action.

So, I need a piece of text. So, what I did was just for fun, I went on chat GPT and my prompt was write 100 words of gibberish. And this is helpful in this exercise because then you don't have any preconceived notions of the context of these words. They're just words strung together that you can use to explore the energy of the tactic. So let me just read some of this gibberish that chat GPT gave me.

Flibberflop zooms on the quibbles, wobble snack, grindle fuzz and snorptangle twaddle under the jumblewamp sky. Okay now I can tell that chat GPT is probably relying a lot on the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky. It was Brillig and the sly the toves did gyre and gimbal in the wave. This poem of gibberish that Lewis Carroll wrote long ago. So that may give us some preconceived notions as to how to play this text But remember the challenge is to keep this completely out of context and to explore the energy of the tactic which I'm going to do right now.

So, remember my tactic is Proclaim. So here I go exploring the energy of that tactic.

Flibberflop zooms on the quibbles, wobble snack, grindle fuzz and snorptangle twaddle under the jumblewamp sky.

So, you get the basic idea. I'm just exploring the energy of Proclaim but I can go a lot further.

I can play with volume. 

I can play with dynamics.

I can play with speed.

I can play with mood.

So, all of those things that aren't necessarily actable, things like mood and motivation and metaphor can be used to color the energy of the tactic.

So now I'm going to add something into the energy of the tactic. I'm going to play around with the dynamic of speed.

Flibberflop zooms on the quibbles, wobble snack, grindle fuzz and snorptangle twaddle under the jumblewamp sky. Gourpish blibberdoodle cranks while twindle bats swoosh through the grizzle frank. Zibble zapple zapple.

That was fun.

Now let's play with vocal tone, highs and lows.

Flibberflop zooms on the quibbles, wobble snack, grindle fuzz and snorptangle twaddle under the jumblewamp sky. Gourpish blibberdoodle cranks the flangoodle whip while twindle bats swoosh through the grizzle frank. Zibble zapple zapple.

And that is the exercise of exploring the energy of a tactic. And the exercise leaves room for you to challenge yourself, try different things. So why don't we try with the same text, a different tactic, something that is very different from the tactic of proclaim.

So, I'm going to try the new tactic, comfort. So, I'm going to explore the energy of the tactic, comfort.

And remember when you're thinking about tactics, they should be directed away from yourself. Because if you're trying to get something from somebody else. So, the proclaim tactic, I'm trying to get a crowd's attention, right? Because I'm making a proclamation. And I have to hold the crowd's attention. That's my objective. My tactic is to proclaim so I can hold the crowd's attention. So, if my tactic is comfort, then maybe I can think of a desired outcome. I want to calm somebody down, right? So I'm going to use the energy of the tactic, comfort, vocally in order to calm somebody down to get a desired result.

So here I'm going to use the same text. Only I'm going to use the energy of the tactic, comfort.

Fliber flop zooms on the quibbles. Wobble snack. Greenedle fuzz and snorpedangle twaddle under the jumblewomp sky. Gorpish blibberdoodle cranks the flying doodle whip. While twindle bats swoosh through the grizzle frank.

So, you can hear the difference between both tactics and their energies. So, this is a great way to not only exercise your voice and articulation, but to exercise your imagination. So it's honed for the work of rehearsal.

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So, here's a question. What good does tactic energy do me in rehearsal as an actor? Well, when you're looking through your script, you should be ready to rehearse multiple tactics for every scene you're in. For every scene, come up with an objective. A tactic plus a desired outcome. And when you read through the scene, start to notice where your tactics change. And it's really important to avoid the trap of playing the mood of the lines. Remember characters want what they want in the moment. And their tactics sometimes aren't the same as what they're saying. Remember characters can lie. They can be convincing while not telling the truth.

So, here's an example of getting caught in the pitfall of the mood of the words, the mood of the text. So I asked ChatGPT to write a poem. So here's the poem that ChatGPT wrote.

A blank page hums a quiet tune of nothing much, yet something soon. No stars to count, no trees to bend, just whispers lost without an end. I think I asked it to write a poem about nothing.

So we might, if this is lines from a play, or lines from Shakespeare or something like that, we might, as we're practicing our lines, fall into this trap of playing the mood.

A blank page hums a quiet tune of nothing much, yet something soon. No stars to count, no trees to bend, just whispers lost without an end. 

Now that is sort of theater of the mind reading, right?

This is what you might, how you might read a poem for performance. But there's no characters, there's no story, there's no environment, there's no plot around these words.

So the tactics I choose have to be appropriate to the context of the scene and what's happening in the scene, what my character wants, and what is in my character's way. So if we were to apply proclaim and comfort to this poem, let's say I'm going to do the first stanza with my tactic proclaim and the second stanza with the tactic comfort.

A blank page hums a quiet tune of nothing much, yet something soon. No stars to count, no trees to bend, just whispers lost without an end. The sky is here, but doesn't speak. The air is still, yet feels so weak, no time to waste, no time to find a moment's thought, a fleeting mind.

For me, it's so much fun to play with those different tactics because your emotions or what you want in the moment of a play especially in Shakespeare might turn on a dime. So it's important that you understand what this exercise can do for your rehearsal process and for your performance.

It can help you make those decisions as to oh, this is when my character wants something different or my character is trying something different to get what they want. And if it helps, you can create context to these pieces of text that you find. Sometimes you won't be able to help the context, especially if you're, if you just look for a news story to use as this exercise, you'll start to feel yourself maybe reading it like a news reader would or adding some emotion that seems to be present in the text.

And that is again a challenge to not play the context or to play the mood of the words to just play the tactic that you've chosen, the energy of the tactic. And it is important to note that as you're rehearsing and you're experimenting with these things, remember rehearsal, the word rehearsal, if you look at the etymology of the word rehearsal, it means an attempt.

So, you're just attempting something. It doesn't have to be perfect. But as you're preparing your script, you should try to choose tactics that seem appropriate for the scene because of course it helps the collaborative process. You have a director and sometimes the tactics you choose might not be working for the scene. So that's how this exercise helps as well.

If the director asks you to find a motivation for a particular scene, well, you find a tactic. You find something to play and action. Remember, directors have a lot on their minds and they aren't going to choose a specific verb for you. They're going to give you a direction like I need some intent here.

I need a different intent. I need a different mood here. I need this to be faster. I need it to be slower. So they're thinking in terms of dynamics and what is working. And the way you should think as an actor is what tactics and objectives are going to help me reach what my director wants from this scene.

So, you'll be changing your tactics up based on what is working in the collaboration.

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Here is the best part of this exercise. As long as you are choosing a specific action, you can use verbs that are completely abstract just to give yourself something to play. That's what it's about, finding something to play. That is an action. And it could be a verb that you don't normally use with human beings. So I'm going to choose the tactic spatter. Now you're probably thinking, well, spatter is something you do with paint. Well if I bring my imagination into it and I commit to it, spatter can also be vocal energy. And it may not necessarily be something that you can use as a tactic in a scene, but it might lead you somewhere interesting. Just as an exercise, exercises are meant to help us make discoveries about our character. And we are free as actors to use abstract, weird, ridiculous things to help us make those discoveries.

So, I'm going to go back to my gibberish speech because that seems kind of appropriate for the verb spatter. So let me exercise the vocal energy of the action spatter. Here's another interesting thing that happens when you're doing this exercise. You can start to imagine a character forming. A character with specific features, with a specific way of speaking and moving. And this exercise using an abstract tactic could help you develop the physicality, the voice, the manner of speaking of characters that are fantastical or over the top. Caliban from the Tempest comes to mind.

Maybe somebody like Fagin from Oliver. Maybe if you're using this exercise in rehearsal, the director might say, okay, that's too much. Bring it back. Well, I can bring it back very easily. I can color my actions with some kind of a mood or a dynamic. I can be quieter.

Fliber flop zooms on the quibbles. Wumble snack. Greenville fuzz and snorped-angle-tottle under the jumble lump sky. Gorpish blibber-doodle cranks the flying-doodle whip. Something like that.

And it may still be too much. And my director may ask me to find something different. And I say, okay, let me try a different tactic. Okay, so as a last example, I'm just going to randomly find something online to exercise those three tactics that I've exercised through the course of this episode.

So I'm just randomly clicking on a story. This looks like a good one. And I will switch tactics through the story as I read it. So I'll start with Proclaim. Then you'll hear me move into Comfort as a tactic.

And then you'll hear me move into Spatter. Here I go.

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Hey, that was fun. So if you use this exercise, sometimes it will be difficult to not judge yourself or to think that it's silly. But that is what most acting exercises could do anyway. One of the biggest things about acting is getting over yourself and getting over the need to not be judged by people. And this is one of those exercises where you really do have to allow your imagination to work for you. Allow your imagination to help you commit to these tactics and to use the energy for the purpose of making discoveries.

I sincerely hope you enjoyed this episode of Dedicated to The Craft. In the next episode, I'm going to show you how to apply tactics to a script. I'll choose a character and start reading through a scene and coming up with possible tactics that I might try to develop that character and help me make discoveries about what the character wants, what's going on in the scene, and what might best serve the rehearsal. 

Thank you so much for listening and be sure to check out the Shakespeare segment. It is called Rustic Shakespeare and it is a great companion to Dedicated to the Craft. I will take you through the preparations that I'm making for the characters that I'm playing, Shakespeare characters that I'm playing, and then I'll apply tactics and objectives to Shakespeare.

Stay dedicated. I will see you next time.

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