The Great Acting Blog: "Poetic Acting"

Poetic acting is expressive but not expository, it is intense but with a sense of ease, it's minimal, but most importantly, it seeks to express something in-the-moment, but which cannot always be explained away. On a practical level, the actor commits to doing the actions of the scene, and does not worry about the outcomes. This approach can lead to facial expressions, small movements, bits of emotion, which the actor may not even realise he was doing until after he has seen his performance on screen (he may never realise them on stage). These unconscious, unfettered, unplanned expressions are the poetry of acting. Poetic acting is very different to expository acting, or “doing a character”, whereby the actor consciously and rationally designs his performance, explaining the character with thought-out detail, and detail which may not even be germane to the scene at hand. Designing a performance is not necessarily the same as including those things which are essential to creating the illusion of character – for example; if one were to play a hunchback, a prosthetic hunch may be employed.

Poetic acting gives expression to human experience which cannot be dealt with in any other way - for example; if, in the scene, the actor tries to conceal a difficult emotion (perhaps has to tell a lie in the scene), the repressed energy may express itself, for example, as a displacement, such as the actor handling an object or adjusting an item of his clothing. These small actions may not necessarily “mean” something in terms the literal plot of the scene, but are the symptom of some deeper movement within the actor. The wonderful, subtle expressions may never happen for the by-design actor, because is controlling everything to the extent that he doesn't allow deeper movements to occur within himself, and so there is no poetic spin-off during his performance.

The full implications of a poetic performance may not be fully understood by an audience on an immediate, conscious level, but the performance does create a sense of harmony (even when the action is tumultuous). That's why the poetic actor produces richer results than the by-design actor. The by-design actor may produce a performance which is more immediately impressive, may at first appear to be “natural”, but it is usually generalised and superficial, and the effect dissipates fairly quickly, whereas the poetic actor's performance may at first give the impression that nothing is really happening, and his effect may creep up on the audience almost imperceptibly, but all of those organically created moments of his performance add-up to something deeply affecting, they leave us unsure, they hang in our minds long after the action has finished, lodging themselves there (even if it is only certain moments of the performance which do this). 

I intend to use the poetic form of acting for my feature film, Noirish Project, and I do not mean my own perfromance only, but the performances of all the actors in the film. The camera-work and editing will be pared back, and the script is flat and minimal, with scenes where the characters are hanging around and waiting. It is out of these seemingly empty situations that I hope this poetic form of acting will emerge to create wonderful, unplanned expressions, with the minimalism of the film giving them centre stage.