The text discusses how actors strive to give natural performances to please their audience. It highlights the importance of imagination, teaching, and the movement of the mouth and lips in portraying actions that appear lifelike. The text also offers insights into exercises using points on a plane to enhance the appearance of movements in performances, emphasizing the beauty and usefulness of such practice.
Real Activities
Why actors strive to create natural actions.
They are all made to please the audience and viewers, among whom some performers, and often most, pursue their role more for profit than for the love and honor, which is why it seldom occurs that they have entirely natural actions. Similarly, the best works find it sufficient to perform well, unless they can, through sufficient teaching and especially by using a powerful and lively imagination of the situation and the matter they have to perform, know how to make their play inherently natural.
To conclude the actions, one must also note that since in most activities speech was carried out, one should pay great attention to the movement of figures, particularly regarding the movement of the mouth and lips. For we know that many deaf individuals can understand spoken words by observing mouth movements; thus, we can also assert that the movement of lips in figures should reasonably well convey and clarify the subject being dealt with, as has been discussed previously.
If one is inclined to discover beautifully engaging actions for entertainment, one can very conveniently do so by using five provided points or spots; these are arranged in such a way and at such large or small distances as one wishes, or one can assign another setup, wherever it may also be on a straight line.
And these actions must always be arranged so that the head, two hands, and each of the feet correspond to one of the five provided points. It is indeed a beautiful and useful exercise; and often, by chance, such actions are delivered that we stand amazed at them; in fact, those that would be impossible to conceive.
Translation Notes
- "Tooneelspelers": refers to actors or performers, literally translates to "stage players."
- "Natuurlijke Actien": means natural actions, referring to acts that appear authentic and lifelike.