THE PHYSICAL STATE OF THE CHARACTER

Bodies are tricky things. They can be injured, or ill. They can be healthy. They can be strong, or weak, or somewhere in-between. Every character exists in a given physical state.

Certain parts of the body may be in pain, and disturb a character, altering the way they gesture or walk, as an inflamed hip or broken leg might.

There will be a CHRONIC state of the body of the character, an on-going state. It is healthy, or it is always sick. There is always pain in the left tibia. He is always tired.

There MAY be ACUTE, or temporary states a character’s body passes through. he has a cold in scene five. He can’t stop sneezing in scene two. She bangs her funny bone at the end of Act One. Acute states pass, but they effect your performance of that character during the time they are active.

Be aware that your character’s body is NOT your body, The character has chronic and acute physical states that must be portrayed by you. This may include such things as height, skin color, and weight, all aspects of a physical existence that isn’t yours.

_______________

EXERCISE: Looking at your character from a play, in a selected scene, decide what their CHRONIC physical state is, including height, weight, skin color, physical strength or weakness, and continuous pains of any sort. Work the scene through at least five times with a partner, and work to clearly portray their chronic physical states.

Now, in the same scene, either spot an acute state, or provide them one. This is a passing physical state, such as pain, or illness. Something temporary. Play that thing five times through, until you know you can play an acute physical state.

LIFE AND DEATH

The audience enters the theatre (movie or stage). They’ve each had their own day. Some of them had a rough day. Some of them skipped dinner to get to your show. Some of them left their children with the local baby-sitter, who they know learned their craft from Attila the Hun. The unhappy guy in the back, his car broke down today. The frowning lady in the second row only came to the theatre because her mother bought her a ticket, but she hates hates hates theatre.

Still, they’ve all shown up, the deaf and blind, the halt and the lame, the disgruntled and the preoccupied. And they’ve each brought with them their daily, monthly, and life long baggage. It sits in front of them, and around them, and over them and under them. They can barely see the world through their baggage.

Somehow, your performance, your movie or play or TV show, has to be so urgent, so immediate, so important, and become so much so for your audience, that they find themselves able to set aside such concerns and woes and thoughts, and utterly commit to the on-going performance before them.

This is a very tall order. This problem stands at the very crux of the problem of entertainment and art.

You have several forces operating on your behalf. First, they’re THERE. They arrived. That means that, to some large extent, they’re WILLING. You recall how willingness was the first thing you needed to develop to play a role? Well, willingness is the first thing an audience must develop to watch you play the role. If they’re there, the overwhelming likelihood is that they’re at least willing. They want to enjoy the evening. They want you to succeed! At least, they want you to succeed before the piece actually begins.

There will be many artists who have decided that their audience is some sort of enemy, opposed to them and their success in some manner. It simply isn’t so. They took their time, paid, and showed up. They’re hoping you can do something for them, something wonderful. This hope keeps the arts viable and alive. Your success at providing them what they hoped would happen will make you and the works you appear in successful.

So, here’s a key to such success: What is happening to your character must be more important, urgent and immediate than ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING WHICH MAY BE HAPPENING TO ANY GIVEN AUDIENCE MEMBER at the moment of performance.

This is pretty important. If what is happening in the piece to your character is not very important, even to your character, then why should the audience care about him? If he can’t raise up a serious amount of concern or involvement for his own fate, why should others care if lightning strikes him? After all, the people in the audience have problems of their own.

This is true of both comedy and drama. In fact, it’s especially true of comedy. A character must feel that what is happening to them is critical, and as close to life and death as possible. Moliere’s great comic characters seem to be ever on the brink of utter ruin and destruction, and no one’s plays are funnier. The bigger the problem, the funnier the character becomes.

Big problems can also, obviously be deeply tragic. Romeo And Juliet are in love and can’t be together. This problem resolves in their mutual annihilation. Macbeth wants nothing small, he wants to be King, and he has no right to be. Hamlet wishes to take revenge for his father’s murder, but to do so, he must take revenge on his own step father and mother. Revenge, in this case, means murder, by the way. Caesar loves Rome, and wishes to rule it wisely and well. His opponents love Rome, and do not want to see one man rule, a tragedy of disagreeing principles which results in the murder of a ruler and following anarchy.

Shakespeare and Moliere understood that, for the audience to be engaged, the problems facing the characters must appear to be truly significant…even if only to the character. But ideally, these problems should seem large to the audience, as well.

There are seeming exceptions to this rule, the greatest being the plays of Anton Chekhov. These are brilliant and funny plays whose characters have what appear to be the smallest of problems. They’re indolent, lazy, uninterested. It seems as if the author is working in direct opposition to what has proven to work in the past. But this is only a first impression. His characters are all deeply troubled, if by nothing else then their own inability to get up and get moving! Their own indolence haunts and torments them. They are infected with a terrible disease, apathy, a lack of concern for their own fate, and this concerns them. Do you see the contradiction? This is, of course, wonderful ground for both comedy and drama.

The greatest playwrights, all of them, from Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Moliere through Brecht, Shaw and Stoppard, and understood that a character is going through must be so urgent, that the audience will set aside their own trials and travails and commit. You as an actor must understand this, and make certain you play as close to life and death as is reasonable, comedy or drama, regardless of the size of your role. Every character wants something. They almost always confront barriers to their desires. The battle is on, and this is what life (and acting) are about.

_________________

EXERCISE: Using a selected scene from a play, with a partner, go through the scene at least five times, playing ever closer to life and death, as though if your character does not get what he or she wants, they will die. Work this through a number of times, please. Don’t stop until the urgency is powerful and compelling, funny and sad. Work until you know you can play close to life and death, even when it’s not appropriate.

Really need followers

Hi folks

I appreciate the few of you who are following! For the rest of you, PLEASE sign up to follow. I'd like to see that there is a reason to continue this. Thanks!

Character Qualities - HUMAN COMMON DENOMINATORS

Human Common Denominators are those experiences very common to human beings. Anything that most of us experience qualifies, including birth, childhood, school, rejection, acceptance, game-playing, winning, losing, becoming aware of sexuality, falling in love, having children, aging, seeing one’s faculties diminish, and death.

Shakespeare understood Human Common Denominators perfectly, and built his plays around them. Othello experiences jealousy; Shylock, greed; Macbeth, thirst for power; Romeo & Juliet, ruinous passion. Human Common Denominators, all. Here is his straight-forward statement on Human Common Denominators, from As You Like It:

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

Human Common Denominators are largely how the audience recognizes a character. They see what a character is doing, thinking, and feeling, and they respond with “Oh, I’ve been through that! Let’s see how HE handles it!” So, you’ve won their interest and understanding, sympathy or empathy.

A smart actor will go about consciously spotting the HDCs his or her character represents, and a smart director will help them. If the world’s smartest playwright thought it wise to build every play and sonnet around these experiences, wouldn’t you think it wise to follow in his footsteps?

When looking over a role, ask yourself what that “person” experiences that YOU’VE experienced, just for a point of comparison. HOWEVER, DO NOT USE YOUR EXPERIENCE TO CREATE THE CHARACTER, PLEASE! This has been amply discussed above. Instead, just note the points of comparison and know that these are HDCs you can use to earn the audience’s support and understanding.




_______________

EXERCISE: Look over a selected scene with your character, from a play. Look for HCDs. Compare what the character goes through with the simple fact that you’ve gone through similar things, without getting into your own life, or a string of painful recalls. Just note the similarities.

With a partner (as possible), run the scene five times, stressing in your performance the elements of these common experiences. Is your character in love? Has he given up on life? Is he desperately trying to succeed at something? These are HCDs. Use them to color your performance. At least five time through, until you know you can locate a HCD, and use it to help an audience understand the character.

Character Qualities - THE SOUND OF SILENCE

There is almost no phenomenon more powerful in a performance, than that of silence. Silence is unexpected. There is so little real silence in life, generally, that silence can be shocking when it happens. In a work of performance art, where words, music, sound is the normal state of affairs, silence can be overwhelming.

An “incorrect” or accidental silence, such as when an actor can’t recall a line of dialogue, can be devastating, embarrassing for actor and audience alike. I once worked with a famous actor, who was performing Hamlet on a nightly basis. Every night, he would get to the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he would put in (intentionally, one assumes) a longer and longer pause between the words “To be…”, and the words “Or not to be”. One night, this very self-indulgent pause hit 28 seconds! Try that right now. Get a watch with a second hand. Say “To be…”, and then fill silence with some sort of emotion or interesting thought or SOMETHING, for God’s sake…for 28 seconds. The audience did more than squirm, and I’m certain many of them whispered “Or not to be, you idiot”. I know everyone backstage did.

This was not an accidental silence, but a foolishly intended silence. Let’s understand something about silence and acting, something very important. A silence in a performance MUST BE EARNED. You are asking your audience to bear up with your silence, to assume that something is happening inside the character which prevents dialogue, something deep and profound, or something so funny he can’t bring himself to speak for fear of embarrassment. Silences should never be accidental, they should always be actor’s choices. No silence will work if the audience does not understand the reason behind the silence. No silence will work if the audience DISAGREES with that silence! You must earn their understanding and approval for that moment of silence, or skip it. The audience must feel that the selected silence is inevitable and necessary, whatever it’s mood and motivation.

Works of theatre or film which employ many silences for “dramatic effect” are deadly boring as a rule, and you know it. This is self-indulgent garbage, the actor, writer and director enjoying emotional excess at the audience’s expense. Don’t fall victim to this. Any number of silences may be possible, if you bring the audience along with you, into the heart of that silence. But NOT ANY NUMBER OF SILENCES ARE DESIRABLE! Too much silence can not only bore, but as is the case with too much of anything, too much silence can dissipate the power of silence itself. It becomes a round of “Oh no! he’s thinking again!”, for your audience. It demonstrates a serious lack of discretion on the part of the director and actor to so indulge.

Accordingly, you will want to select your moments of silence. When can silence be used to most powerfully move an audience? That’s what you want to know. Most silences happen for one (or a combination) of three reasons:

-The character needs time to think or feel his way up to the next line
of dialogue or action.
-The creation of a moment of comedy or dramatic power.
-For emphasis, to accent something as important, to underline it for the
audience.

And don’t assume that silence itself can’t be used to create laughter. One of the funniest scenes ever takes place in the film Victor/Victoria, where Blake Edwards shows us a restaurant with cockroaches loose in the food, from outside the building, looking in silently through a picture window. All is calm, then, suddenly, everyone erupts in panic as the insects are discovered, but we hear nothing. We only see the comic devastation. Another such scene can be found at the ends of Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, when the hero and heroine enter a totally silent bus. Funny and telling.

In our line of work, one controls the audience with a flow of sound and emotion and ideas. Silence comes out of the blue, and is one of our greatest tools, being unexpected. Use it wisely.

_______________

EXERCISE: Take a scene with your character from a play with a character you can play. Look it carefully over. Then, run it with a partner at least five times, putting in a silence everywhere you can. use “pregnant pauses”, thoughtful excursions. Don’t worry that the silence is ridiculously excessive. Don’t concern yourself that the scene is three times longer than it should be. Just get the feel for a proper use of silence to allow the character a moment to think before speaking or acting, to create drama or comedy, or for emphasis.

Next, select ONE spot in the scene which, based on this last experiment, seems to support silence well. Do the scene several times, just placing and using that one silence, until you can do so effectively.

Next, select a different spot in the scene which can support a silence, and run the scene with only that one silence, until you can do it effectively.

THE EMOTIONAL STATES OF THE CHARACTER

Characters are representations of human beings. Human beings feel emotions. Often, those emotions are in the full control of the person “experiencing” them. Sometimes, they are not. The emotion one is experiencing will enormously alter their behavior, and their reactions to others. An angry man does not respond in the same way to communication received as does a happy man.

We’ve talked a lot about characters USING emotions to get what they want, as in the tactics and beats step. However, there will be emotions that assail the character, seemingly from outside and beyond his control. As an actor, you will need to understand this and locate such emotions. These will alter your character’s actions, thoughts, and reactions to the environment and other characters.

________________

EXERCISE: Using a scene and character selected from A BAD HEIR DAY, locate emotions the character may be feeling which would be beyond his or her control.
Then, decide how experiencing such emotions might impact the character’s actions and thoughts, and how this might change your performance. With a partner if possible, run the scene at least five times, allowing the emotion or emotions selected to influence what the character thinks and does. When you’re certain you understand how that emotion can influence your character, and how you would portray that influence, move into the next part.

Select an ARBITRARY emotion to influence the character, one not suited to the scene. It does not need to, and in fact, shouldn’t make much sense. Run the scene five times using that new emotion to hinder and control, or push the character. You’re looking for the ways an emotion can alter a performance, and the audience’s perception of a character. Do this until the new emotion controls the character and his thoughts and actions.

Do this again with a third emotion, in the same way as above. You should now have a pretty fair idea of how a character is influenced by an emotion.

UNIQUE QUALITIES OF A CHARACTER - THE CHARACTER'S EDUCATION

Every character has had some sort of education. Some characters are ‘street wise”, and their education came from the school of hard knocks. Others are Harvard grads. In other words, characters are people. To play a character, you’re going to need to figure out what their educational background is, and put this into your character history.

An education largely dictates the type of language one uses, and this is one of the most important tools the actor can use to determine the character’s educational history. You can “back-engineer” your understanding of the character’s education by a hard look at the TYPE of words he or she uses. Are they big, literate words? Are they “specialized” words, nomenclature that fits the character into a certain profession or set of beliefs? Are they ‘street-wise” words, portraying your character as a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks? Is there a lot of slang in their dialogue? Is the slang current?

By the way, it is both the words and the way the character strings them together – the sentence structure, which inform.

Determining the educational background of the character will also help you decide what sort of objectives, tactics and beats the character might have. These are always limited to some extent by education. It’s the “Opportunity Cost” principle in economics. If you invest your time or money in one area, you no longer have the time or money to invest in another area. Generally, a person with one kind of education has not had time to get another kind of education, and so is limited by both the education he DID receive and the education he DID NOT receive. A guy educated on the street knows how to get along on the street. He may make a terrific salesman or athlete or pimp. He would not make a good physician or physicist – he doesn’t have the education. This is not to say he couldn’t go out and GET that education, but we are interested in the character’s current state of existence.
______________

EXERCISE: Select a scene from a play that has a character you could do. Look carefully at the sort of words used. Do they suggest an educational background for the character. You’re looking at words and sentence structure for that scene. Take notes on what you learn about the character. Look at your notes and make some decisions regarding the character’s education.
______________

Good ideas from a Casting Agent

Here's a link to some interviews from a casting agent. I agree with most of what she has to say, and I think you'll find her ideas useful.

http://www.marciliroff.com/site/videos

The Size of the Media and the Performance

We’ve touched on this briefly. Film is a very large, very intimate, very “real” (or “reel”) medium. The pictures are huge, and every little pore will be exposed for scrutiny, every article on the set, every stitch of costume. On film, there is nowhere to hide, and your smallest gesture is magnified to gargantuan proportions. Film is not much of a medium for metaphor. Everything is so large and literal in film, that the size of the action and characters force film generally into a literal mode. This is why there is a great premium placed on “truth in acting” in film.

Theatre is different. There is distance between the actor and his audience, distance in which he can hide a little bit. The actor can look small, up there on stage.

There has been much talk over the years about how “big” an actor should play for the screen, in as opposed to on stage. I don’t generally believe that the actor should much alter the size of his performance to accommodate the camera. There are too many great “big” performances on the screen to debate this, very much. This does not take into account the fact, however, that if the actor flails about and bobs and weaves, he’s going to find that the camera can’t follow him around. So somehow, all that “big” physical energy does need to be squeezed into smaller, more controlled gestures to maintain the shot. The size of the performance doesn’t change, but the body is used differently in order to express the performance, to account for the camera and microphones.

However, one often does need to expand the size of his performance a little bit when on stage, if not used to performing in the theatre. The lack of proximity of the audience requires the actor to play a bit louder (unless on a microphone) and bigger than in front of the camera. This can be an interesting adjustment for the actor trained in TV/film.

There is also the issue of pacing. One can move more quickly through a speech or series of actions on film, than on stage, generally, because of the amplification factor. The actor is very large on the screen, and loud, so that his every gesture and nuance is easy to spot by the audience. Thus, he can move a bit faster than a stage actor. Additionally, today, the audience can replay a film as many times as they wish, on DVD. The stage actor has only one pass through the material to communicate it to his audience, so he must take a little more care, and be a bit more conservative in his pacing. But an audience is an audience and expects to be entertained, so don’t take these comments as a license to perform at the pace of the grave.

In the end, acting is acting is acting. Regardless of medium, a character must be created and portrayed convincingly. Audiences are essentially the same from the movie theatre to the theatre (though theatrical audiences probably have more money).

_______________

EXERCISE: Take a scene you’ve run through many times. Run it five times, playing each selected action as large as possible, until, even though it’s large, there’s a certain sort of sense to it (limited). Then do it again for five runthroughs, and take the same ideas and gestures and play them as though you were not allowed to move or gesture in any large way, or you’d be off camera. Maintain the intensity and actor’s choices you played with the first part of the exercise.
_______________

Playing Against Type or Result

Actors tend to be cast by type. People who look like bad guys get cast as bad guys. Ingénues are cast as ingénues. By always being cast per your type, you are going to find yourself limited severely in several ways. First, the roles you are going to be cast in will always be the same role! That’s bad enough. Worse, though, everyone who hires you will be expecting the last ten performances you gave, without change. Just “do what you did”. While this is a way for some actors to make a living, and while I’m not in any way arguing against getting paid for acting, there are ways to expand upon your career and your ability and not get caught in the very narrow alley of creativity many actors find themselves in for an entire career! They come under a general heading: Play AGAINST the obvious.

Play against type.

Let me give you some examples. Bad guys don’t think of themselves as bad guys, generally. They believe that they’re motivated by just cause, and are doing the right thing. Very, very few people would tell you “yeah, I’m the scum of the Earth, and I’m proud of it”. They’re much more likely to present to you a laundry list of the reasons they use to justify the terrible things that they do. So if you are type cast as a villain, play against type. Make the character right. Make him know he’s doing the right thing. Let him feel aggrieved. Let him be amazed that the world cannot see his kindly nature and justifications. This could earn you some much needed laughter, by the way. Playing against type can often add to the humor quotient of a piece!

You’re playing a mentally challenged individual. Such people do not try to appear stupid. They work very hard to appear “normal”. So do that.

You’re playing a drunk. Most drunks try NOT to appear drunk, even as they are so shit-faced they can’t walk. So do that.

Often, someone wildly in love will put up a huge show of not caring, for fear that if it were known they were in love and they were rejected, they would never recover from the loss of face. Pretending NOT to be in love while being madly in love is an ancient staple of romantic comedies, and even drama. It works.

Your character is injured, but must finish the race, so he works very hard to appear healthy. Such choices can not only expand your career and make the roles you play more interesting, but they can also earn you some vulnerability points.

________________

EXERCISE: In a scene from a play you've worked on, read your character (with a partner), as a drunk trying not to appear drunk. Do this at least five times, or until you’re comfortable playing against type as a drunk.

Do the same scene, as if your character really cared for the other character (which is good for this play, as they basically don’t care for each other). Five times, or until you’re comfortable playing against type in this way.

Humor In Acting

Is there anything more dire, more unpleasant than to have to spend several hours with a humorless and pathetic drone of a human being, short of being placed in an Iron Maiden (a popular torture device from the time of the Spanish Inquisition)?

Yes, there is something more dire. PAYING a lot of money to spend several hours with a humorless and pathetic drone of a human being, that’s worse. And that’s how the audience feels when they see a performance (or complete work) lacking in all humor.

Part of our job, and this is something easily forgotten, is to entertain. Even the worst bad guy can have a sense of humor, albeit black. Even the stiffest Dudley Do Right good guy can laugh at his own stiffness for a moment or two, can’t he.

Generally, people do not care for others who cannot laugh at their own insufficiencies. And make no mistake, we all have insufficiencies enough that we should be laughing, given that the alternative is despair. I’ve worked with a few…very few, thank the powers that be…actors who had limited senses of humor. I didn’t care for them much as people, and I truly did not care for their performances.

Humor is a symptom of intelligence, and the ability to see the difference between what is and what should be. All comedy is based on the idea that we just don’t live up to what we should be. Classical tragedy is about mankind striving for perfection. In comedy, the hunt for perfection is surrendered, replaced by lower and simpler pleasures. In tragedy, the soul rules. In comedy, it’s the body. But, sad to say, even when mankind aspires to be one with God or the Gods, he’s still dragging along a body for the ride. In the darkest of tragedies, there should always be a sly glimmer of humor. Hamlet preaches to a skull, and speaks in ironies about the sort of work of art man is. If Hamlet can jest, any character can, if subtly.

There have probably always been actors capable of raising a smile while in the dark grip of drama. Some of these are “over the top”, playing a bit large for the moment, or are inappropriately small given the tragedy surrounding them. Some are self-deprecating, at moments when they most need their confidence. Regardless, their reaction is INAPPROPRIATE for the surrounding events, and this is funny. The great tragic hero, climbing the jagged mountain with bloodied fingers, only inches from the top and nearly able to grasp the hand of God…will suddenly scratch his butt and nearly fall. Why? He’s human. He’s flawed. Like all of us. And we will love him for his flaws and accept him as one of our own. Though he is greater than we, we’ll root for him, as we do for Hamlet, Lear, and the others.

Perfection does not need to, nor should it include, a lack of humor. And no character represents a perfect human being. Find the flaws and exploit them occasionally, maybe as a surprise. Humor, so long as it isn’t inappropriate to the piece and the moment, is golden.

________________

EXERCISE: Take a scene from a play, one you’ve worked earlier. Decide where in the scene the character displays or might display flaws which would show up as physical actions. Start with the easiest and most obvious moments. Run the scene with a partner five times through, experimenting with these moments, until you feel you can accurately display character flaws which are comic.

Then, find moments in the scene which would NOT seem to support a character’s flaws being presented. Decide on a single flaw which could physically show up at that moment, one which will reveal the tension or pressure the character is experiencing. Some physical trait, action or glitch that let’s us know he’s in trouble or upset without having to tell us. Play the scene through at least five times mastering this display of inner incompetence or failure or angst. At first, play it broadly, very obviously, and then, make it ever smaller and more subtle until it’s just big enough to be seen by an audience if they’re paying attention. When you know you can present a character flaw and get a laugh from it, at any size of play from large and obvious to small and subtle, you’re done with the exercise.
_______________

Communication and Acting

Actors are expert communicators. They are able to communicate very complex ideas, very quickly. In fact, they communicate the entire essence of a human being, a character, and often do so simply by entering the shot or stage and embodying the role.

Why do you go in front of the camera, or on stage? Is it to get paid? To be famous? To be loved, or to get sex? All of the above and more? Well, these are not the best reasons to enter into this very difficult, insanely competitive profession, If, on the other hand, you are an actor because you love “let’s pretend” and you love to communicate, you’re in the right place and with the right rationale.

Every gesture, every word, every vocal inflection communicates. Your existence, as we covered earlier, communicates. And many others will stop and listen to you, and watch you, and be eager to receive your communication, if you are a good actor. Isn’t that wonderful, and a wonderful reason to be an actor? people will listen to you, and care about what you’re doing. You may move millions of people to tears or laughter, just by communicating well. Then, you’ll get paid! Just for doing the one thing you can’t help but do if you exist…communicate.

If your attention, once through Step X, is not on how you will COMMUNICATE the decisions you’ve made, first to the other actors and director, and then to the audience, then you’re not acting, you’re doing something else. You’re job is to play a game brilliantly, a game of “let’s pretend”, and to communicate it so well that it is clear, understood, and moves others.

How do you improve your communication skills? Start by understanding that a communication starts with you, and must be received and understood at the other end. Are you actually initiating communication with the intent to be accepted and understood on the receiving end? If not, you should be. Get your intention to communicate to the audience firmly in play. Then, communicate the script and all those decisions you’ve made, and make sure they get it without nudging them in the side with your elbow and winking. Have it as your conscious purpose to communicate brilliantly.