A Word About Destination: How Your Character Moves

You’ll hear actors talk about destination, business and gesture when they’re discovering a character. Today, let’s talk about destination. Sit on your chair backwards, because it’s edgy, and drop a beat.

Destination is more than where you’re heading on stage or your next mark, although that matters too. It’s how and why you move. Glenn Close calls it “how your character disturbs the air,” and she is basically an acting shaman, so listen up. Destination is your whole exploration of a character’s physicality.

Emotion is great, and more than that, it’s necessary. But in any frame wider than a close-up, you have to make physical choices that illuminate who this person is. Emotion that doesn’t produce the fruit of physical behavior is half a performance. Commercial actors, this applies to you too. If you’re in a medium shot and asked to react, what do you do, not feel but do, when you win money on a scratcher, realize your wallet is gone, get a sudden headache, or taste something fantastic or awful? Behavior matters.

Watch Jeffrey Tambor direct a few scenes on YouTube. He does what Larry Moss does: frees us from the silly fear we’ve all acquired of over-acting. He encourages behavior, even forces it sometimes for the sake of exploration, and addresses the actor’s whole performance, body included, with a sense of play. Here are two ways to start cultivating your own.

1) Where is the center of your character’s energy?

A celebrity, a construction worker, a mother, a surgeon: each carries their energy somewhere different. Larry Moss describes in The Intent to Live, which you should own, helping Helen Hunt discover that her character’s energy lived in her feet. Makes sense; she was a waitress. She tried to walk as though her feet were the main source of her survival.

Answer this for a character you’ve been working on, or want to. Then start moving, leading with that part of your body as you walk around the space, and go from one to ten in intensity. Then watch Marlon Brando in Streetcar. First with the sound off, then with it on. See what you learn about the scene from his behavior alone. His physical choices are thrilling.

2) Why am I moving?

Where am I going and why does it matter? If you don’t have a compelling reason for the behavior, don’t do it, or find the justification. You can’t pace around hoping something sticks, a mistake I have made many, many times. Make a choice, fail, revise.

Here’s a tedious, very useful exercise: track your movements for a day. From the moment you get up, record where you moved, how, and why. When we have to do something naturally on stage we sometimes struggle because we’ve never noticed what we do when nobody’s watching. My first real Shakespeare scene in college, I was Desdemona, and the scene starts simply enough: I wake up. I’m fairly sure my waking up involved a ridiculous sigh and a Disney princess arm stretch. I had never once thought about what I actually do when I wake up, so I generalized. Don’t do that. Start paying attention to your private moments. You’ll be amazed.

If you have questions, or you’d like to audit a class and see what a difference behavior makes, call us at 480-313-9901. We’re always happy to talk.