Wardrobe Project (Week 4)

This week we learnt about beats, these are small pauses in the text that add a more naturalistic feel to the scene, as when you are talking to a person in your everyday, you do not just say something with out pauses, you sometimes hesitate or even use fillers, such as erm and hmm. We worked in our pairs from the scene to add beats into our scene the beats helped not only to give you time to breathe, but also to let the scene breath more.


Later we looked at verbs and how you can add more weight to it when you say it in order to add more meaning to the piece, this helped a lot because what most people do is put weight on emotions, such as sad angry or happy this makes that scene look very abstract in a way. Here are some of the verbs we looked at:

Later on that week we looked at an energy state workshop, this is about 9 energy states that can be used to portray a character through their body language:

State 1 Awakening
State 2 Drunk
State 3 Toddler
State 4 Neutral
State 5 You think someone is watching you.
State 6 You know someone is watching you.
State 7 About to catch a ball.
State 8 There is a bomb in the room.
State 9 That bomb has gone off.

Me and Charlotte then looked at our scene to find the different points, where our character's energy states change. We thought that Nell is starting at State 8 because she knows something is going to happen, this being Antony going off to the war, where as Antony's energy levels at the beginning start at State 7 he knows that something isn't right with Nell, and is just waiting for something to unfold. Later both characters reach State 9 a bomb goes off, but not one that is bad at this point, its when Antony tears a ring out of a catalogue and then enacts a marriage, soon after this another bomb goes off this time its bad, Nell finally tells Antony what is wrong and both characters are effected by this.

The Wardrobe Project (Week 3)

At the beginning of this week me and Charlotte shared information that we knew about our scene with the class, this helped to show what we both knew and what we needed to research for the project. We then later learnt about Anton Chekov and Constantin Stanislavski, and one of the things that caught my attention was that Chekov's plays were not a hit with audiences until Stanislavski helped him, this was because the drama that was being taught was very melodramatic and used gestures to show emotion, but Chekov's plays were of naturalism and the melodrama style of acting didn't work with his script, and so it wasn't until Stanislavski helped Chekov by teaching actors to act in a naturalistic style, then after this Chekov's plays were a hit with audience.

One of the main focuses when it came to when learning about Stanislavski was "The System", this consists of 17 things:

• Action: This is about achieving an objective to create a feeling, but for me this doesn't work as sometimes it is very difficult for me to find the objective of a character in a script.
• As If: This is about looking at the character and their situation and then putting yourself in their shoes, I find this easier when the situation has either happened to me or I have seen it happen in someone else's life.
• Given Circumstances: This is looking for the facts, events, time and setting. I enjoy doing this when I have a long period of time to research the character, it gives you insight into other's lives and sometimes can show you that some characters live lives like you, but in a different time.
• Imagination: This is about getting to know your character more, asking yourself things such as what is their job? Where are they coming in from? Where are you going to when you exit? This helps me to live in the moment, knowing where im going when I exit will make me then think about how to show that in my body language e.g. I am late for an event, would mean I have to leave in a rush.
• Concentration of Attention: The circles can be different sizes, and this will determine what's happening in the scene, for instance a small circle (immediate space - solitude in public,) large circle (looking out to the horizon) I like the Circles of Attention because it helps you when it comes to naturalism its basically doing things how you would normally do it even if there are people watching, you have to block them out.
• Relaxation
• Units
• Objectives
• Faith and a sense of truth
• Emotion Memory
• Communication
• Adaptation
• Inner Motive Forces of Psychological life: I find this the most difficult out of all of these because to draw on the bad memory's can leave me low, where as the good feelings can leave me bubbly and over the top, for a long time.
• The Unbroken Line
• The Super objective of the Character
• The Subconscious

We then played out As If or also known as The Magic If, this is were you improvise a situation, but in a way that you as a person would react to the things, with the first attempt we were just given one word and that was boredom, most of the improves were funny and humorous, but the second time we did another improvisation we were given a list of rules, which grasped onto a more darker piece of work from every group.