Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Acting Classes Los Angeles- Being Vulnerable

By Kirk Baltz


When it comes to acting, great abilities cannot be formed overnight. Training with acting coaches or participation in acting classes can help actors to acquire much needed skills to aid them in improving in their craft. To do this, actors are required to face themselves as they truly are, vulnerabilities and strengths alike, to uncover their true selves and create lifelike characters.

Every character that an actor creates is multi-dimensional as are the actors themselves. The three dimensions, in particular, that compose the human person are the tragic flaw, the public persona, and our ubiquitous lifelong insecurities and difficulties. An acting coach can not only help an actor uncover his own dimensions but can also aid him or her in using these traits to create dimensional and relatable characters.

Our public persona, according to Carl Jung, is the image that we present to the rest of society and is designed to mask our true feelings, emotions, and insecurities. This created persona presents itself in numerous ways throughout our lives. Like real people, characters also have public personas making it necessary for acting classes to teach actors how to use themselves to develop these facades.

There is no question that an individual's vulnerabilities are often buried deep beneath the surface, making the public persona seem like the dominant characteristic. However, the core of a person lies in their innate strengths, fears, and issues that travel with us from childhood into adulthood. Acting coaches are trained to teach actors to come face to face with their own childhood fears and issues in order to create a truly believable character with great depth and dimension.

That which affects us in childhood remains a part of our lives until the day we die, whether we allow it to surface or not. The same is true of created characters. Both actual persons and characters use this public persona to cover up their insecurities and fears so as to reduce their helplessness in the world.

The mark of a great actor is his or her ability to dig past both their own and their character's public persona to the actual person within. The best coaches will aid their students in both uncovering and portraying the inner workings of the human condition.

Every member of the audience has both a public persona as well as a deeper substance that has worked to create the exterior. Regardless of whether or not they are aware of this fact, creating a dimensional character will never fail to hit a chord with the watcher. All great actors must learn to succeed in this form of character creation.




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