This week we had a special guest who joined us in our physical work on Friday, Pilar Nuñez, who is a Peruvian actress who used to perform in the theatre group "Cuatro tablas". She will work with us and teach us about our voices in acting. At first the class was a bit awkward, for we didn't know her very well (at all) and so it was a bit difficult to show her our voices, for as she explained later, the voice is the most intimate part of an actor, and its not easy to let it out in front of strangers at first. But as the class went along she explained to us a lot of practical things like for example how our pose showed if we were ready to react (which is done by bending our knees), and how the voice and our gaze can lead our body instead of going the other way round. She also talked about our mask, a mask that all actors have which separates us from our character, yet it transforms us completely, and how our face expressions and the direction of our eyes can create this mask that should be confident of itself, and once a certain action is done,  our mask cant fade away, it has to stay there. Which got me thinking about how some actors approach their characterization; because some actually try to immerse themselves in a character, to the point of actually becoming it and end up being affected too much by it. So being aware of a kind of "mask" is really important because if not we can end up damaging ourselves.She also told us that we shouldn't look at another direction or suddenly question ourselves about we just did after we perform an action, because confidence on what you do is crucially important in remaining in character. A very interesting exercise she showed us was to take our tongue out and open our mouth as much as we can, because we usually hide our tongue because we deem it as something quite intimate, and this way we would show no fear at all, and our mask would enable us to lose fear and be able to explore our voices fully.

Has anyone ever immersed him/herself so much into a character, that actually became it and lost their previous personality?