Notes from Seth Thomas’ character lecture a few weeks ago. Seth’s basic premises are taken directly from An Introduction to Human Communication: Understanding and Sharing (7th ed.) by Judy C. Pearson and Paul Nelson. The premises:

• Seventy percent of human communication is nonverbal.
• That seventy percent can be broken down into specific areas.
• You are always communicating, in the sense that even if you’re not actively presenting something you can be read for meaning at any time.
• Any improv character, even if nonhuman, will communicate like a human.
• If you’re not actively creating your character’s 70 percent, you’ll default to your own.
• In most cases, you can set your 70 for the upcoming scene and not have to change it even when new circumstances are introduced. (Seth said that he started thinking about the 70 partly because he knew he was going to think about a scene before going in but didn’t want to be writing it in his head beforehand.)

(At this point I should mention the discrepancy between Seth’s approach, which seems to be geared toward creating a complete character onstage, and the approach of Bill Arnett and Shad Kunkle, which assumes that in most cases you’re basically playing variations of yourself. In other words, there seems to be some disagreement as to how problematic it is if your own personal 70 is showing.)

Side point: Sitting represents submission. In daily life you are paid to submit, e.g., sitting in your seat at work. But in the theater, people pay to submit, which means that they are surrendering not only time and money but also will to be entertained. (Meaning: better entertain them.)

Four categories of choices: mind, body, soul, and sound.

Mind

• Dominant proof: logical, emotional, or personal. The standard by which the character assesses the world. Logical and emotional are what they sound like; personal is based on relationships with other people.
• Life condition: Where is the character at in his/her life?
• Button words: arbitrarily pick words that push your character’s buttons.

Body

• Default: Very important. Seth pointed out that most of us tend to take on the character’s attributes while active onstage but then revert to our own default physical position when not the focus of the scene. Find the position your character assumes when inactive.
• Affect displays: emotional life as expressed physically, e.g., facial expressions, body language, etc.
• Emblem/illustrator/regulator: these are different knds of gestures with slightly different relations to language. An emblem replaces language, as when a throat-slitting motion is subsituted for the phrase “You’re going to die.” An illustrator accompanies language, as when pointing while saying, “The door’s that way.” A regulator modifies language, as when the answer “yes” is modified by a shrug.
• Level of territoriality: How much of the stage is your territory? If none of it, you’re always potentially trespassing on someone else’s. If all of it, someone is always potentially taking liberties with your possessions.
• Personal bubble: How much space do you need to keep between you and other people? (It could vary from person to person.)
• Touch value: How touchy-feely are you?
• Life condition: what kind of physical shape is the character in?

Soul

• Personality
• Message to the world/subtext: what the character would say to everyone if she could say only one thing.
• Purpose: it could be trivial, but it informs everything you do. “Mike Myers’ purpose in life is to surround himself with hot chicks. So look at the Austin Powers movies. He’s achieving his purpose.”
• Life condition

Sound (Seth uses “Persona” but that throws me)

• Silence: is powerful
• Articulation: how your teeth, jaw, and tongue work together to create the sounds that come out of your head. You can completely change a character’s articulation just by physically changing how you hold your mouth or tongue.
• Pronunciation
• Nonword sounds
• Voice pitch and inflection
• Voice quality: mellifluous, guttural, etc.
• Voice rate and volume: fast or slow, loud or soft

Seth also points out that this list isn’t definitive and that you’ll find your own choices to make. He says he usually walks onstage with a physical default position and a message to the world and starts adding from there.