10th September Tuesday
To start the day we started by sitting Semi Supine to
stimulate relaxation in the body and adjusting positions of the spine.
Stanislavski was a big believer in an actor being able to relax he encouraged
actors to feel relaxed so they could get in touch easily with their emotions and
truly become the character he believed it help an actor know his surroundings
and to focus on the character in more detail.
We played a game in theatre called the I DON’T BELIEVE YOU
game which is where an actor is given a situation and the rest of us watch and
they perform this situation to us and if we do not believe them we simply say
and tell them why and they have to repeat the situation I think this is a great
game as it allows us if acting the situation to find out what an audience see
as realistic acting or what we can change and if we are watching then we get to
still see how different actors think a situation will work out and compare to
what we believe will happen.
One of Stanislavski methods was the Magic If method so in
this exercise we were told to pick someone we had seen on the way to school but
did not know. Think we picked a random
person to make us think more on the certain details of the person and his
characteristics. We had to transform into this person physicals and remembering
that we cannot actually be this person as we are only acting as them but we
could change the physicals between us and the people we picked. We were given a
bit of time to study the way this person moved and what they did and the weight
of them. As actors we were then given MAGIC IFS to see how we thought this
person would react to these situations so while walking round the room Sarah
would shout out a What if for example
...what
if you found £20 on the floor
...what if you stood in dogs shit
...what if you had a cup of coffee
spilt over you
...what if you had lost your wallet
And we were to respond at first I felt a bit challenged as I
did not know this persons personality only physicality so it left room for the
actor to use imagination of their character for finding £20 I chose that I would
pick it off the ground but do it only when people were not looking as I am a well-dressed
man and should not be seen picking money off the street. The dog shit was a bit
more difficult as my character has a bad leg and broken arm so thinking how he
would move and where he would go to get rid of this off his shoe I chose to go
to a near wall and wipe it up against it as the man I was watching may have
been going to work and hurrying so needed to find the quickest place. The cup
of coffee I acted as if he was angry and shouting at someone as he was on way
to work and now his clothes were ruined. Lost wallet was panicked and looking
round the ground and just retracing his steps as this man seems to me like he
would keep a lot of money on debit card in bank and does not want to lose it.
As an actor this work got me thinking about when reading a script and how much
there is left for the actor to decide on how to play the character as some
writers will tell you exactly what this person should be like and leave no room
for the actor to make a decision.
We then got into pairs where we used the same character
but this time we had to imagine what would happen if these two people met and
what would the situation but during rehearsing these pieces we stopped and
looked at the Given Circumstances which Stanislavski states is ‘the plot,the facts,
the incidents, the period, the time and place of the action.’ Having the facts
of the performance and what is happening as an actor can help you give more
truthful performance as it allows the mind and body know the setting and time
and this may help you understand how your character felt and why this happens.
In the scenes we made next we were told to think about WANT
> DO > FEEL
The want in a scene is what is your characters objective in
the scene and then the do is how are you going to do this action and the feel
is what your character is feeling in our scene my objective was that my
character wanted to get to work but was already late and has to deal with rude
people. For Stanislavski and objective was called a UNIT and through the script
if you had one you would break it down into units to show what you were doing
in scene. Knowing what you want in the scene helped us keep focused on what the
end goal is at the scene and you must remember what you are wanting to do as
your objective to achieve it. For lines in our scene we were not allowed more
than 4 lines for each character which was useful as the scenes were only to be
short and the two
We then started a small scene called hello with characters
but in different pairs and to start this piece we went through the script and
at each line we were to write next to it what the objective of this line was
for example to inform or to question the scene we created was a man lonely and
had just had some upsetting news while his friend is trying to get him out of
the house. It was mind blowing to see all these scenes with the exact same
script but with all these different meaning and the chemistry between the
actors.
The next we looked at the I love you script and it was the
same principles of the last scene so we went through the text and found the
objective and then set the scene as an actor repeating these methods is a good
way for them to stick into your mind so you will always remember to do this.
The class then went on to look at the act one cherry orchard
and annotated the text and split it off into units depending on the story and
looked into the characters we also went into the role of the stage directions
which is to inform actors on the setting of a scene and what happens when
talking is happening or not happening.
Now when I look at text I am able to pull out what are facts
and I can also pull out information about a character and the scene which is
happening.
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