Summary: Music is composed of notes and rests and has a clear beginning, middle, and end. During the rests there is no sound but the piece doesn’t stop. The music unspools a beat at a time and the silences compliment the sounds and make them all the more effective by creating rhythmic shifts and contrasts. Speech is composed of sounds and silences and the silences are required to make the words understandable. There is an unbroken line that holds an idea together and the silences don’t end the idea, in fact they make it comprehensible. When you perform in a play or movie you speak and you pause, you enter and exit. The material has a clear beginning, middle, and end and none of your silences or exits should stop the flow of the story or the life of your character. It is your job to insure that throughout the performance, both unspool like continuous threads even when your character is not speaking or not in a scene. This way, as Stanislavski says, your character “flows from the past, through the present, into the future.” So make sure that your performance unspools and never comes to a stop. On stage, listening and responding will keep that unbroken line going for you. When you are off stage you must have a clear understanding of where your character has gone, what they are doing, and how they feel about things. This way, like a living person, they will continue to exist even when they are not seen or heard. For more on this topic, listen to the full podcast. For podcasts and more, please follow me on Twitter @NotesOnActing You can listen to podcasts at Stitcher On Demand Radio © Eric Barr. All rights reserved. 2013.
