Embarrassment and Boredom – Positive Impulses in Acting Improvisation

• Authors: MUSILOVÁ Martina
• Year of publication: 2024
• Type: Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
• Description: The emotions of the character an actor is playing may not be the only ones the actor experiences. Alongside them, the actor perceives himself – concentration, bodily relaxation, ability to focus attention to the play and his playfulness and momentary creativity. K. S. Stanislavsky, for example, speaks of the actor's Sense of self and creative state, which needs to be awakened and developed. The paper will focus on two feelings that are generally evaluated as negative, namely the feeling of awkwardness and the feeling of boredom. Both of these feelings strongly affect sensory, motor, and affective systems and cognitive processes. The feeling of awkwardness can paralyse the actor's activity, but with increased body tension. The feeling of boredom dampens activity but reduces body tension. In the case of an active transformation of these feelings, the creativity of the improvising actor can develop. In the case of the feeling of awkwardness, it is the awakening of bodily perception, muscle/body memory and greater expressiveness that better communicates with the audience. For the feeling of boredom, it is the activation of the actor's attention to alternative goals, encouraging his creativity and authorship. On the example of written reflections of students of the discipline of Dialogical Acting with an Inner Partner (a specific form of improvisation; founded and explored by Prof. I. Vyskočil), the transformative power of feelings of awkwardness and boredom and their ability to awaken completely positive emotions of wonder and joy in the play will be shown.