Come Back to Your Senses: The Five Senses

Actors face difficulty communicating truthfully when they resort to the mechanics of what they’ve practiced, and not the truth of what they see, smell, taste, hear and touch on stage. Delving into the five senses can help you truthfully navigate your way around the stage. For instance, consider how the smell of a special perfume reminds you of your wife. Feelings of love stir up in you simply from using your sense of smell. How you respond to different tastes is no different. Consider how you taste something too hot and it burns your mouth or a sip of your favorite hazelnut coffee, causing chills down your back and content thoughts. Sense also helps when applying endowment; using physical objects your character is acting with, and giving them the same characteristics, as they would have in real life or in the scene. For example, as an “actor” you may be required to drink a mug of water, which to the character is “coffee.” By knowing how your mouth reacts and physically responds to drinking coffee, you will be able to truly taste and react to the “coffee” or the water you’re drinking in the scene. Touch is also important when considering relationships. For instance, you don’t perform the same hug for everyone, do you? No! You’d be in a bit of trouble if you hugged a college professor the way you hugged your best girlfriend. These senses are all things to keep in mind to perform accuracy with other characters on stage, depending on the relationships.

In your every day life, be more aware of how you react to all of your senses. If your character has to cry at the funeral of his or her dead mother, think how you, as an actor, would react if that mother were your own? Don’t you think these feelings or at least similar feelings would occur that could eventually grow into something more? In order to respond truthfully to what is required of your character, you must truly see. The ultimate goal is for an actor to develop all five senses to apply when necessary, but this takes a lifetime of practice. When using the sense of hearing, it is important to actually LISTEN, not just “hear your cue.” Accept these words for the first time, hearing them from your characters point of view, not from you as an actor, (who already knows the outcome.) We also communicate with our eyes and expressions in real life. It is important to interpret an actor’s words by how they move them. Simply holding eye contact with an actor is uncomfortable and unnatural to that of real people. When people in life communicate, they hold eye contact at times, but not in all cases. Sometimes, they talk and look away when they are angry. There are many things that occur within the emotions of a character. For example, the outside intrusions that distract eye contact or affect an individual speaking to another may occur. Ultimately, the five senses are vital aspects of truth that an actor can use to communicate by applying them on stage. Avoid the clichés and always stay truthful to the moment-by-moment circumstances.
Come to your Senses.-Actors Nook Team