David Chiu

Today I received a bad critique for my performance in class. The major points were: My actions were not clear, I should’ve put more thought into the preparation of my scenes, I needed to give better direction to the actress acting opposite of me in my second scene, and finally, that I really need to learn how to tap into my emotions and play them to the fullest.

This week, we continue to work on nursery rhymes in class, preparing 3 different “mini-scenes” using the nursery rhyme text as the only dialogue. Last week, Tom’s critique of my scenes were that I was not emotionally invested enough in them and the performances looked like I was “acting”. Therefore he wanted me to work on them and bring them back this week. Today, I added a couple more details to each scene and tried to deepen the emotion. I think they did come off better than last week, but it still wasn’t good enough. Tom said, “I know you have trouble accessing emotion, but you need to work on it and practice until you are able to access it when you need it. You gotta think of this [final] scene as your one shot in a movie where they have a close-up on you and this is your chance to prove that you’ve got real talent. I would have wanted to see you in pain and crying. ” Ouch.

He’s right. But it does make me frustrated because this is something I really should have learned to master during the 1st-year of training. Yes, I am better and I am able to access those emotions, but not consistently or easily. This is one skill that I need to really, really practice. If I am able to really pull out true passionate emotions in all my performances, I know this would set me way-ahead of my competition.