Building Images

Building Images
Part 3, Five Approaches to Acting Series
by David Kaplan

Paperback text
72 pages, 8.5 x 11

$11.95 USD
ISBN 978-1-60182-183-6
Published January 2007
Hansen Publishing Group

There was, for a time, an ongoing war between actors who worked from the outside in, like Laurence Olivier with his fake noses, or those who worked from the inside out, like the disciples of Lee Strasberg with their emotional memories. Yet these opponents had something essential in common to their approach to acting: what an actor does is create an image of himself. Some approaches to acting stress images are only to be taken from personal experience, the best, perhaps the only potent images, they claim, come from childhood. Some approaches to acting declare the most usable images are fantasies, the more outlandish the more freeing for performers and audiences.

The source of an actor’s imagery may be different, but the techniques for applying them in rehearsal and performance are remarkably similar. Building Images, Part Three includes practical techniques for an actor to build imagery — external and internal — in rehearsal. Building Images, Part Three offers strategies for text analysis based on imagery, and offers strategies for maintaining and deepening imagery in performance. Building Images, Part Three gives examples in film and from the history of acting. It separates “the Method” from Stanislavsky’s System and explains why an actor would want to use one, or neither.

Gluing on a nose or soul-searching for emotional memories, when actors discover images that move them to play, those images — whatever their source — can be built up with an approach that ignites a performance with an inner flame.