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.