"Don't work too hard" is something I often say to actors. This means being subtle in the way directors give direction and actors respond to direction. So I often invite actors to use imagery rather than words to shift performance. This is what directors call making an adjustment. Adjustment. What a great word. To adjust means to move very slightly, to calibrate or fine-tune. Through a tiny shift you can achieve transformation. Through the micro we can achieve the macro.
Imagery can prompt you to achieve a tiny shift that you can't make with the blunter tools of your conscious mind.
I recently worked with an actress who was a little nervous about a big scene coming up. The effect that this slight sense of apprehension had had on the text was that the language and the sounds had become squashed and compressed, as though the text had been vacuum-sealed. All the blood and guts had been sucked out, leaving only the dry bones of the lines clattering together.
Even that is an image-based descr…