Acting is easy! All you have to do is to RE-ACT.

I am serious. Reaction to the text is subtext, react to your parner's actions, react to the changes, react to the audience....

The problem is the selection. What is important?

Well, you have to know where the ball is! You have to keep your eyes on the action, my friend. You have to be where the action is!

You have to know the target...

Very often I actors holding the ball without any clue what to do with it.

You throw it, the ball. Where? To the audience! This is your main partner. That's the ADDRESS of your line. Always. Do you speak to your partner on stage, to God, to yourself -- the ball goes first to the public. Only when they understood your line, swallowed it and ready for the next -- you get the ball back! Don't go for next step, see where they will throw the ball. Not where the ball is, but where it will be!

Move yourself there -- and catch it!

No, don't pass it right away! Now the public needs to know that you got THEIR lines! You need to do the same; take it in, duggest and then -- go!

Go, go!

I use this game in classes when we do the cold reading. It's away a TRIANGLE! Golden Triangle, I call it. I insist that the class is to insert reactions after every line, before your partner or you speak the next. Maybe they didn't understand, how can you go further? They do not know where the Ball (Action) is!

Acting = ReActing

InterAct

THE INVISIBLE ACTING

"Never get caught acting." -- Lillian Gish

Action!
Cut!
Wait! You are not ready. Because I am not, the spectator.
Actor lives in many spaces at once. He lives in my inner space. In my mind. Where else do you think acting takes place?
Intermediate acting is about this inner acting.
Inner space and time. Inner monologue. The words not spoken. For every word in monologue I ask for two, three, fore not being said. In actor's journals I ask to write the streams of conscience, the thoughts, related (association) images and feelings, memories. This nightmarish exercises in writing help to open the mental space in actor.
"Paper Acting" -- a preparation.

Do you want to know a secret of good acting?
Small things. Very small. They, the little things, separate a good actor from "acting." "Acting begins with a tiny inner movement so slight that it is almost completely invisible."[1] The border line between visible and invisible is real acting. Making invisible visible, remember? It has to be "inner" -- we follow the process, the becoming. Never go for shortcuts; as with electricity, the energy produces nothing if it's not controlled, processed, transformed into other forms. You have to be ready to act, and -- I, your spectator, must be ready. Acting is a preparation to act, the rest is easy. If we both are ready, the acting come "naturally."

Artist?

Meyerhold's formula: Actor = Artist + Medium

There two actors in each actor. One "directs" the other. The definition of artist:
"the art of the actor here stands between the plastic arts and poetry." Goethe.[2]
In his "Rules for Actors" he writes: "In ordinary life, too, the actor must remember that he is to be part of a public presentation."[3] Artist is always there, artist "acts" all the time. Observation, analysis, imagination -- the artist.

"Play actors? No, we are artists, noble artists, and it is you who are the play-actors." (Alexander Ostrovsky _Forest_)

"You" are the people who do not act, who "live." Or think that they do.

NOTES

Pre-Acting is the real ACTING!

Read SPECTATOR directory, you will understand that you are the medium and the public is the real creator of the show. You execute their will, the drama in their hearts! You answer the questions they have on their minds....

Not only about the story and plot, but about LIFE. Their lives! What else do you think they are interested in? Why do you think they came to theatre? To know you, Hamlet? They came for their answers which they can't get anywhere else! Not from the books, not from the movies, not from the doctors and friends, family and even themselves!

I see, you do not believe that you know the answers. You think that is not possible to answer somebody who you never met....

This is what ART does, my friend.

You have to believe it. If you can't, you will never make it.

Trust me.