Okay so I just finished a pretty succsessful run of "oedipus the king" for my colleges winter production. We had our postmortom yesterday and I got one review that said I had no inflextion in my voice.. what exactly does that mean and whats a good way to fix it.

My main question though was about being vulnerable on stage. Our next show is "Antigone" and i really want to show that i am improving. My advisor told me that i need a monolouge that showed strong voice, but also being vulnerable on stage. He told me to look at madea which i will do but as he told me, the being vulnerable part is going to be the challenge for me.
In real life I have trouble being vulnerable. it's just not really who i am. but I know that in order to become a great actor I have to be in touch with my emotions more.
what is a good way to do this? I'm trying my hardest but it seems so impossible right now. I try just listening to the scene and letting that do the trick and I also try to think of bad stuff that happens to me, experiences and stuff but nothing seems to work.

Hi!

I played Haimon in Antigone and it is a very emotionally challenging play. The key to showing vunerablity onstage is to really connect with your lines and let yourself go and not be afraid of what the audience thinks or your fellow actors think.

Really listen to what you're saying onstage and relay your feelings to your fellow actor or actors. It's in you and believe me your actors will feel your passion or whatever emotion you
display onstage. You just gotta bring it out and I know you can. Hope this helps.

yeah i get what you are saying. and i guess i knew what i had to do all along..
im just not sure how to do it.
like i said i've been trying to really just listen to what is going on in emotional scenes and let that fuel my reactions but it doesnt seem to work.
which must just mean that im not really connecting to it..
and i've just been informed that this director is picky and its a small cast ...
oh boy ..nervous!

It sounds like you were told this by your college advisor. If he was giving pointers to you after the show, I assume he is also a director or acting teacher. As such, it is wrong and irresponsible for someone in an educational position to give you such commentary without telling you how to go about learning what you need to know in order to improve.

Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in a very public environment is something many of us struggle with. You should talk to one of the acting teachers on campus. The reason we study the craft of acting is to learn techniques that allow us to be freer and to get over these types of hurdles.

Good luck!

Hello,

This is a great question and it is a fundamental reason for actor training.

Without easy and profound access to one's vulnerability, I don't see how one can be a successful professional actor. Lack of access to vulnerability results in lifeless doing, and in indicating. Worse, it results in an inability to see what is going on in the script in profound ways.

In my own training, I studied all the major acting methods, and none of the worked to get through to my vulnerability. It wasn't until I found "The Psychology of Selves" by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone, which I found after working with Master acting teacher Eric Morris.

I recommend his books, Being and Doing, No Acting Please and Irreverent Acting. There are dozens of exercises for accessing vulnerability in those books. They are hard to read, those books, but they changed my life.

And then my life was changed many times over by the work of Hal and Sidra Stone (as have the lives of MANY professional actors who have worked with them).

Learn about The Psychology of Selves. It's a theory of the development of the personality which is brilliant. It states the fact that we are all born completely vulnerable. This vulnerable child we are born as remains at the core of who we are our entire lives. The universal Archetypes, or subpersonalities, evolve AROUND the vulnerable child to protect this core vulnerable child.

Each of us develops a unique subpersonality structure to protect this core vulnerable child.

For example, I was raised to be rational and unemotional. So, I developed selves/archetypes that were rational and thinking. These thinking parts of my personality reject vulnerability as weak or stupid. They have rules for me that I'm not supposed to let anyone see my vulnerability. In fact, if they got their way, they'd kill my vulnerability.

Or in another family, a person may be taught they are always supposed to be sunny and happy. I worked with an actor like this the other day. So one of her primary ways of being is that whenever her UNDERLYING vulnerability gets triggered, she smiles and laughs. This laughing/happy archetype takes her out of her vulnerability. This got rewarded when she grew up in a family where it wasn't ok to express this vulnerability.

By learning what Archetypes you were raised to be in, you can begin to control this process. You can learn which archetypes you had to GROW and which ones you had to shove down to survive in your family.

This is how everyone's personality develops...

Some people are actually raised to show vulnerability. I've worked with actors like this, too. They have trouble turning it off, and get typcast in vulnerable roles all the time. That's just as big a problem for them.

No way of being brought up is better than another. Whomever you are, in terms of your archetypal structure, is whomever you needed to be while growing up.

Now, as actors, you must learn about this process. You must learn what is easy for you to access, and what is disowned. As you do this, your vulnerable child will be safer and safer to emerge...and...more available to you in your acting...when you use your imagination.

Archetype Work and The Psychology of Selves put all the old acting training together. Some teachers and actors don't know about this work yet. The older generation is closed minded about it, like they are about many things. But you can learn about it. You can go to our website, to the reading room, and read free articles about the Psychology of Selves. This work changes lives, and acting careers.

You can also get the book "EMbracing Our Selves" by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone...and then get "Embracing Each Other" by Drs. Hal and Sidra Stone. This work completely changed my acting.

And I teach it to professional actors. I've watch it completely change the acting of even the most successful professional actors I've worked with, when all the old-fashioned training failed.

It is specific, it is logical, it is profound. In fact, this work can't fail...unless a person has brain damage. And I mean that literally. The METHOD of Archetype Work that we teach always gets results, because it is based on how our brains actually work and on how our personalities developed as we grew up.

The Drs. Stone have specific audio programs dealing with some of the major archetypes actors need access to to do great work, like The Inner Child. Without accessing to this vulnerable child, you can't have an acting career (or intimacy with anothr human being, by the way).

So we teach all this work at our school, only I obviously adapt into a highly practical process for actors to use on the job. The results are amazing, plain and simple. Please write to me with any questions you have about the subject. And I wrote an article that addresses this subject here: Great Actors Access Vulnerability

You can learn effortless and instant access to profound vulnerability on cue. And it's fun, safe, it isn't therapy, and it works everytime.

I'm someone who had NO ACCESS to vulnerability when I was young actor, just like Meryl Streep. Now, I can call it forth anytime, anywhere. And I teach it to others. It's a big point of training. And anyone who thinks it isn't is in LA LA land. - Jason Bennett

By the way, I wrote that post at about 1 a.m. and I'm sorry for the grammar errors, I was half asleep. Oops.

I want to add that the cause of ALLLLLLLL conflict in scripts is the triggering of the character's vulnerability. Learning about your own vulnerability in life, and learning a vocabulary of human vulnerability is vital to being a professional actor. It's a big part of how you see the deepest struggles and conflicts in scripts.

I've heard of one acting teacher, though I can't remember who, centering her entire approach to actor training around work with vulnerability. That sounds like she might be on to something.

Again, ALL conflict comes as a result of a person's (or country's) vulnerability being triggered. The more you learn about and embrace, without collapsing into, your own vulnerability, the better an actor you will be.

- Jason Bennett

man i couldn't have asked for better answers. thanks you guys,, i will have to read those books and see what happens. wish me luck!