Is there a relationship between logic and movement? Can the behavior the actor initiates violate the logic of his intent? Yes, and Yes. One of the most obvious examples of this is Shakespeare. You probably witnessed actors having a tough time with the language. The struggle comes from the violations in the logic of the behavior in relation to the speech. There is a certain logical synchronization of the behavior and speech when an actor nails Shakespeare. You wouldn’t know it because it doesn’t show; it seems natural and it flows. But when the rhythms are out of phase, it’s painfully obvious. The actor struggles with the speech and in their heavy state of concentration their bodies lose the connection and their behavior and intent becomes confused, and the words are almost forced out.
There’s no time for the actor to be brilliant or clever on the stage – just truthful. The words spoken have to be an inevitable result of the feelings and behavior, not vice versa, as so many actors practice. We rarely notice it in ourselves in everyday life since we are, for all intents and purposes, acting as ourselves. There seems to be a logical synchronization between our behavior and our speech. When there isn’t, it’s noticed. In more extreme cases, it’s referred to as “mal-adaptive behavior”.
The “normal” is determined by the social protocols as determined by society and culture. When those are violated, the person is often accused of being weird or strange. Don’t most of us go out of our way to avoid the “weirdos” we spot intersecting our path? I suggest you try to speak to one someday and observe their behavior closely. It’s quite fascinating. And one can only wonder, what journey did they take in their lives to end up using such behavior?
The more intriguing question is what behaviors translate to the stage? Some actors may do things on the stage that seem fake or don’t seem believable even though they may be accurately and truthfully depicting something that actually occurred. And likewise actors often portray things that are fake, yet seem believable as if they actually happened. The logic of behavior for the actor is a logic of performance – what the audience perceives as logical in the context of the theater, not necessarily the logic of what occurs in reality.
Because the prose of Shakespeare is foreign to most actors, since it is centuries old, it takes some study to incorporate such rhythms and nuances in one’s behavior in order to make it look natural on the stage, including knowing the context of the situations the speech conveys in relation to then and now. Finding that relationship is the matter for the director’s interpretation. With luck, the actor will be skilled enough to be able to behave in a way that justifies that interpretation. Then it is not so much a matter of being enjoyable to watch, because whenever I catch myself “watching” a play, I’m not involved, and I’m just watching a technical display as a spectator. But when I’m intimately connected with the performance, then I am involved in it, as if it is happening to me.
An actor needs to know how to take all the information at his disposal, including his own intuition and creative imagination, and take all the liberties necessary to behave in a way that justifies the context of the meaning of the prose. No small task, but if the actor has a repertoire of experiences and observations of how and why behavior happens, and has the ability to intuit the a priori circumstances that created the situation, he or she is much more equipped to be able to find those moments that makes the work squirm inside the very souls of the audience.
Most of what I see in the theater today is technical exposition (yawn). But there are those rare times when I see something that moves me, often without me noticing it first, then drops into my heart like an anvil. I wish such performances were a regular occurrence. I’m not talking about those spectacles that stroke or bruise your ego, I’m talking about those masterpieces that force me to deal with my inner self, and grapple with the questions of what part I play in this world, and what function I pretend to have in my own seemingly fabricated world.