When I went to my first INTERMEDIATE Improv class at the Groundlings School in Hollywood this past Monday, I was feeling that my lack of any acting training would make the class extremely difficult. I thought I would have to know how to do accents.
Fortunately, I was wrong! One of the first things the instructor said was, “An accent is not a character!”
He went on to explain that an accent only indicates where a character is from. It does not add anything about the personality of the person. Are they smart, upbeat, depressed, angry, argumentative, the list goes on.
Creating characters for improv scenes involve transforming the performer in three different ways:
Physical
- Change your physicality from head to toe. Squint or open your eyes, change the shape of your mouth, change other aspects of your face, change your posture, and change the way you move, for example.
Vocal
- Change the Pitch and Tone of your voice. Make it more nasal or more throaty. Speak more articulately or mumble more. Have a larger or smaller vocabulary than you normally do.
Point of View
- The personality of the character comes through their Point of View. Are the continuously optimistic? Are they argumentative? Are they viscious? Do they have a fatal flaw that everybody else notices about them, but they don’t?
That’s it. Simple? Maybe not. But with practice, twice a week for the next six weeks, I am sure I will get the hang of it.
I will be layering on small things from each of the three areas. And I will be grounding my characters in reality, which means creating characters that will work in any scene!
But most important of all, the character cannot be me. I look forward to learning how not to be me!
