Action and Entrance

Description

A lovely simple way of starting scenes and very helpful for people doing longer scenes for the first time.

One person enters the stage and starts doing an activity. Someone else then enters the stage with an emotion and establishes a relationship with the other actor.

Make sure the first move is not to criticise the activity.

Tips

Become totally involved in the activity, believe in the reality of what you are doing. The focus should be on your activity and believing it is real, not on waiting for your scene partner to come in (as your character doesn’t know someone else is about to enter). Give the objects width and weight as they would in real life.

If playing second character entering the stage try to bring an emotion or attitude on stage with you. It’s like your character has come from somewhere else, they don’t just enter the stage cold, as they have already been living off stage.

Once together in the scene focus on the relationship, you don’t actually have to talk about the physical activity. For instance when people are washing up together they are rarely talking about the actual washing up, they will instead be talking about something between them.

The activity establishes the location, the dialogues establishes the relationship.

Variations

Decide if you are good or bad at doing the activity.

Decide if you love or hate doing the activity.

When entering the stage experiment with different emotions to enter with, especially base emotions like happy, sad, fearful, angry.

Purpose

• Longer scenework.
• Believing the scene is real.
• Establishing location.
• Establishing relationship.
• Using emotions.
• Character.
• Object work.
• It deliberately creates an environment where mistakes are very likely, but nothing bad happens and we learn to have fun in the failure.
• It’s also a commitment game, and we encourage people to go for it even when they might get something wrong.

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