Today in our Performance workshop, we begun with a famous Stanislavski method used in the System; Relaxation. Stanislavski had a theory that relaxation enabled your body to become a relaxed actor who can move more effectively. It also enables you to access thoughts and feelings of that character. Learning about how relaxation can improve a performance helped me to understand how to prepare myself before a performance and I have decided that I will be using this method in the future. Once we had relaxed our bodies by carrying out actions such as; laying on the floor or rolling to align our spine, we moved onto a game. As a group, we created different situations and gave them to someone to act out to which we would respond whether we believed it to be truthful or not. Rhianne was the first person to act as a young Muslim girl who had just found out she is pregnant. I analysed her facial expressions and actions which I think she portrayed really well. We decided as a group that her performance was truthful. The next person that went up is Josh, who was acting out as if he was in the middle of a heat wave. At first Josh came in and went straight into his performance, which made it untruthful and unrealistic. We decided that it would be more effective if Josh actually made himself hot which in the end became a much more truthful performance. This game enabled us to see how the person performing felt a sense of vulnerability on stage when in the moment. I feel that they both received constructive criticism. However, we all had different opinions on what we felt was truthful as the audience had different perceptions. Once we had finished this exercise, we moved on to a new exercise. I had to pick somebody that I had seen today on my journey to school. I decided to choose an upper class business woman who seemed to be in a rush. This enabled me to improve my skills in characterisation. I tried to find the character physically and pick out elements of their attitude and make it become part of me as an actor. Sarah gave us situations e.g. Finding a ten pound note or stepping in dog mess, in which we had to respond in our character. This relates to the 'Magic if' which is another part from the System. Asking myself 'What if this person did this' helped me to understand the character I was playing clearly as I was putting myself in realistic situations. After we had finished this task, we got into pairs and created a scene where our two characters would meet. I paired up with Tia, who played a young teenage girl with an attitude. I think that this helped me develop an understanding of contrast and how different personality's can be portrayed. We had to use only four lines each in our conversation. We then looked Want,Do,Feel, a simple version of Stanislavski's system. Want was about the characters objective which means what the character wanted. For example, if somebody is at a train station, their objective would be to get the train or to get work. Do was an action they would follow out, and feel is what they would be feeling at this moment in time. I took into WHAT with most consideration. I asked myself questions such as 'What kind of person am I?" and "What is my upbringing". This helped me to develop my character further. We watched each others groups and tried to explore each characters objective which I found very interesting to watch and helped me by watching others for inspiration.
I found actioning very interesting because I think it helps to build an understanding of how the character would be. We looked at a variety of scripts and created actioning verbs to ensure a better understanding of how they would be said. I had never heard of a subtext before we learnt about it today, which made me feel very positive about learning new things which would help me in the future. Subtexts have an impact on how you say a line. Lastly, we analysed the beginning of The Cherry Orchard and applied all the things that we had learnt, which in Stanislavski's system are called 'Bits'. In my opinion, this lesson really helped me to fully understand different aspects of Theatre.
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