It feels like being more myself and less my character, but equating my feelings and delivery, my "actions" with the actions of the character I portray. Zen expresses this concept, "Do nothing." It feels like doing less than acting and doing more than pretending. The best acting is not acting, or non-acting. Ironically the best actors try to stop "acting," and try to speak or sing or move or act without pretense. It is so inherent a function of human life that we lose track of it and become so mired among the trees that we cannot see the forest, the broader perspective. We don't think of acting because it is so obvious, because it would be like thinking of chewing while chewing. The element of music and the physical act of singing demand so much emotional involvement and physical discipline that acting in opera becomes its own art, related to singing and related to acting, yet distinct.Įach moment in life is fraught with emotional and cognitive choices, and we choose, consciously and unconsciously, how we react to circumstances. It means more than that because singing in an opera implies a wholeness of functioning that transforms acting into something different from acting in a spoken drama.
Operatic acting means acting while singing in an opera. Actors interpret the characters for the audience, bringing the richness of their experience to the portrayal, highlighting aspects of the character's personality and physicality that are important in comprehending the underlying themes and messages of the opera. Actors portray characters, trying to bring them to life, to make them believable for the audience during the tenure of the play. And the natural boundaries of the stage inhibit reality. At the same time, it is not naturalistic, because the people we portray do not act necessarily as we would act in the same situation. Acting is not pretending, because in acting we bring out what is truly inside us it is not pretense. What are the precepts of this acting? What are the basic rules or procedures involved in acting? It is easier to describe what acting is not. One needs to act so convincingly that the audience becomes unaware of this convention and engages only in the drama and the beauty of the music. The primary objective in operatic acting is to convince the audience that you are someone you are not, and to do so while you participate in the operatic convention of singing words that in real life (or spoken drama) would normally be spoken. Opera singers perform well until they think about singing.
Operatic Acting Operatic Acting by Bruce Schoonmaker