Style For Actors

A Handbook for Moving Beyond Realism

Robert Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135258382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

"Style is a journey from tourist to native. It is living in the world of the play, not just visiting it." - from Chapter One

Anyone who has ever struggled with capes, fans, swords, doublets and crinolines should make Style for Actors 2 nd Edition their constant companion. Robert Barton has completely updated his award winning handbook for the 21 st century with contemporary references and up-to-date illustrations. This is the definitive guide to roles in historical drama.

The past is a foreign country, and this outstanding book is concerned with exploring it from the actor's point of view. Specific guides range from Greek, Elizabethan, Restoration and Georgian theatre to more contemporary stylings, including Futurism, Surrealism and Postmodernism.

Barton takes great care to present the actor with the roles and genres that will most commonly confront them. His analysis moves from entire genres to specific scenes and characters. A huge resource of nearly 150 practical exercises helps a newfound understanding of style to make the leap from page to performance.

PART ONE FINDING STYLE

MANY OF US ARE confused by the whole idea of “style,” since the term is used in so many artistic forms and activities. We also sometimes fail to recognize a style because we are so accustomed to it or alternatively to explore a style because we have decided it is so remote from our experience. This section is about recognizing and owning instances where we stylize our behavior to suit a circumstance. Many actors are terrified of moving outside contemporary realism, but fantasize doing so. These chapters offer reassurance that style exists all around us, that none of us is totally ignorant, and that in fact all of us have style knowledge on which we can draw.

The text begins with two chapters about style in daily life: sensing it, analyzing it, and using it to understand our own experiences. We all know far more than we think we do and travel outside our realistic behavior more often than we may have noticed.

The first chapter is about recognizing what you already do and know. The second presents ten categories for examining and entering a world—in the theatre or outside it. These categories are carried forward through the remainder of the book. They provide structure for all inquiries, since the answers to the same basic questions, as they vary from times, cultures, and genres, can illuminate not only the answers, but the questions themselves.

The third chapter analyzes the differences between a limited contemporary actor and one who comfortably performs the classics, to determine what characteristics all good style actors share. This chapter deals with significant style issues that influence all periods and genres.

1. RECOGNIZING STYLE: The eyes of the beholder
2. ANALYZING STYLE: Survival questions
3. MASTERING STYLE: The classical actor

1 RECOGNIZING STYLE
The eyes of the beholder

STYLE IS SOMETHING we all want and fear. We want to have “real style,” but to be more than just “stylish.” We want to be a master of style, never slave to it. We want style, without mistaking style for substance.

Since our feelings are ambivalent towards it in our own lives, most of us are tentative in our early efforts at style in the theatre. To understand style acting, we must recognize it in living, where the word is used synonymously with: form—manner—method—way—fashion—vogue—mode—chic—craze—fad—rage—practice—habit—air—distinction—typical presentation—characteristic behavior—elegance—wording—means of expressing—and execution.

Style is the way something is done, rather than the core act itself. In writing classes, separate grades may be given for style and content. A beautifully written essay may say nothing, or an awkwardly expressed one may have profound insights. Style is also perceived in terms of expectations. Contemporary realistic theatre, where each actor is cast close to age and type, is standard. It is our dominant style. Any time a show moves away, it is called “stylized” or is described as done in “The ‘fill-in-the-blank’ style”. You stylize an event by boldly removing it from everyday, expected behavior. The more stylized a production, the more conventions or rules of make-believe the audience must accept, in order to appreciate it.

For an actor, “style work” may refer to any journey outside of mastered, known territory into new ground. This often involves changing yourself enough to believably enter another world, formerly unfamiliar to you or to most audiences. The same happens outside the theatre, where people who are thought of as having real style are those who move with relative ease between worlds.

DEFINING STYLE

STYLE IS A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AND THEN ENTERING IT BASED ON WHAT YOU SEE

If you see the world as a vicious concrete jungle, you might wear leather and studs and often use the “f” word. If you see the world as an enchanted romantic garden, you might wear flowing chiffon and improvise poetry. If you change your mind in the middle of the day (stuck in chiffon, spouting the “f” word), you have trouble reconciling feelings with presentation. Style is the external manifestation of some inner drive. It is a set of choices in action, a relationship between what you feel and what you present in the world. The world may be a club, a country, a period, or a play. It may be all of the above.

A film scholar noted difficulties in mounting serious plays about infidelity in France, because the French tend to view the subject humorously or ironically. A belief shared by enough people is perceived as the dominant style. If you see a character in a French film being told about a neighbor’s affair, what do you expect that character to do? Shrug? Smile? Wink? Briefly philosophize? Probably. Rage? Weep? Register shock? Get a gun? Probably not.

Too often in the theatre, outward manifestation of inward belief is picked up without the belief itself. When you attend a bad production of a period style play, you may see a series of poses, without a sense of anything going on behind them, as if a director had said “You should all shrug a lot and then smile because that’s what French people do” and had neglected to explore the various motives in the culture that might encourage the act. Without belief, the whole venture looks hollow. There are likely to be shrugs in all the wrong places.

STYLE IS WHAT IS SHARED BY CHARACTERS IN A PLAY (OR PEOPLE IN A GROUP), WHILE CHARACTERIZATION IS WHAT MAKES THEM DISTINCT FROM EACH OTHER

All characters in a play share qualities, a collective characterization that ties them together. In some musicals, they all wear sequins and tap shoes (even to the office), and when someone says “I’ve got an idea!!!,” they all lean way in to him and shout “What??!!” simultaneously. Yet, the sweet hoofer from Kansas in the chorus is clearly different from the temperamental, vamping star, even in this “stylized” world. They share style, but as distinct entities within it.

The balance between interesting, idiosyncratic, even quirky character work and consistent, detailed style work is what makes an exciting production. We want all the humans in the play so clearly defined that we won’t confuse them, but we also want them to share enough to tie the play together. Offstage, most of us wish to “fit” into our communities comfortably, while still distinguishing ourselves as unique and special. We like to be part of the neighborhood without being mistaken for our neighbors.

Many plays and films are about group style wars. In Romeo and Juliet, two families, who seem very similar to most of us, war over their differences, which seem so obvious to them that nobody in the play ever bothers to say what they are. In most productions, it looks as if the Montagues don’t like the fact that the C...