Entering a classroom with a given circumstance

Aim of task: To have a first experience of what Stanislavsky thought a "given circumstance" in class and to be introduced to the topic. To observe how a given circumstance can affect realistic acting.

Description of task: Today, before entering the classroom, our teacher Steve told us to get into a group and told us to "pay attention to whatever we do in the next few minutes." We went into the classroom and Steve asked us a couple of questions and did little games like pretending to be a military general, he also gave us a handout in a few minutes. After that, he shouted "freeze" and he asked us all to leave the classroom.

He told us that now, we would have to repeat everything we did again, since we entered, but we now gave us a "given circumstance": that two of our classmates, Undine and Arshia, had an very intense argument about god yesterday, so intense that they did did not talk to each other anymore. So we had to repeat everything we did before since entering the classroom but pretending like the argument actually happened yesterday. We all came into the classroom but nothing changed really, because Undine and Arshia weren't sitting nearby anyway the first time. The given circumstance was not that relevant when repeating the actions. After a few minutes he told us to stop and go out of the classroom again.

We went out of the classroom and now our teacher gave us a different given circumstance: that our classmate Vincent had released a "silent gas from behind" at some point while we were all inside. We came into the classroom again. Coincidentally I was sitting next to Vincent. I didn't change my actions that much because I am sick and my nose is obstructed, so I cannot really perceive a lot of smell! However, I asked Vincent, "do you feel a bad smell?" after watching everybody around me cover their noses with their hands. After a few minutes our teacher stopped us and brought us out. We realized that actually, those who where farther away from Vincent started covering their nose before those of us who where near Vincent.

Our teacher gave us one last given circumstance. The given circumstance was that, today was Maddie's birthday and Jose, who had a crush on Maddie, had sent an e-mail to the whole class so that we would pretend it was not her birthday, because she was a slut. This given circumstance was the one that changed the action the most. We all came in, and sang Maddie happy birthday. There were groups around the class gossiping about the e-mail and you could clearly see Jose being rather uncomfortable (and some other people were around Jose, kind of reclaiming him why did he do that). After a while Jose passed around a paper that said "Maddie is a slut" which eventually reached Maddie who read it at loud. At this point, Jose stood up and revealed he had a crush on her. It was very funny. The way the "coming into the room" was a little bit similar to the original one only in the start, but in the end, this given circumstance really changed it a lot.

For the second activity, Steve asked for a volunteer. I raised my hand. Steve asked me to give him something valuable, so I gave him my phone and then he asked me to go outside of the classroom. When I came in, Steve told me that he had hid the phone somewhere inside the classroom and that I had to look for it. And started searching around the room and asking my classmates if I could have a clue or if there was any hint I could get to get my phone. Then they started talking about me "looking in the heights" and "projecting my imagination." The words "height" and "projecting" gave me the hint that my phone should be on top of the projector hanging to the ceiling. There it was. Now, Steve gave me the phone and told me to go outside the room for a while. After I was outside the room for a few minutes, Steve called me and told me to come in and be the actor in the play "Alan looks for his phone." When I came in, I tried my best to pretend I was looking for my phone. I could exactly remember the same locations but I tried my best to resemble the order of the locations I had looked through before. However, as I looked for my phone I noticed something.

I was not the only actor in the play "Alan looks for his phone."
This was a problem because, before, I would respond to the laughter and smiles of the audience. I would also respond to whatever comment they made to me. But now, they were all a lot more serious, it did not feel the same. It was like an actor not replying to your lines on stage, the play could not be done without all the actors participating.

Reflection:
A given circumstance on stage is supposed to change our attitude on stage. To really internalize a given circumstance you need to change your whole mental state and imaging all the possibilities that could happen if the given circumstance actually happened.

Conclusion:
When I think of this given circumstance exercise a lot of TOK-ish questions arise to my mind relating to determinism: when we act out what we just did with a different given circumstance, it's like we are creating a separate choice in life. It's something strange; but interesting, I guess.

Skin and Bones

As a part of our second year's Independent Projects, one of our second  years, Bita, wrote a play called "Skin and Bones." This play was rather abstract, with a lot of physical actions. It was about the story of her life. It relied a lot on musical features, there was no vocal dialog between the actors but there was always music in the background. There was also a projector that kind of presented the environment in which the scene was taking place.

This play made me realize how important physical actions are in theater. Just as in Commedia dell'Arte, physical actions on stage communicate a lot to the audience. This was entirely about that, the only communication that happened between the characters was physical. Here are some pictures of the performance:

Stanislavsky's presentations

Influence of Stanislavsky in the United States:

• Stanislavsky developed a method which aimed at accessing "truth and honesty."
• Actor feeling: something Stanislavsky developed to emulate a character.

Stanislavsky influence in the US:

• American theater was never very well accepted over Russian theater
• Method acting emerged in the US through Russian immigrants
• The method used "emotional memory" as the basis of technique
• In method acting, the actor would have to rely on past experiences to recall and reproduce them on stage.
• Lee Strasbourg was very important influencing the United States as he had learned from Stanislavsky.
• Even today, Stanislavsky's method is used by actors in the United States.

Realism and Naturalism, the difference:

• Naturalism is much more reasonable, naturalism will explain the objective reasons by which each of the actors do their actions while realism will try to explain the actions in the play the most literal and "plain" way. Naturalism was influenced by the ideas of darwinism and science.
  

Life of Stanislavski (for presentation)

• He was born as Constantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev, in Moscow, 1863 but later changed his stage name to Stanislavsky from an actor he met during amateur theatricals.
• He had excellent education, including singing and ballet lessons.
• He started performing at 14 at his father's theater.
• By 1888 (25 years old) he directed and acted in performances for “Society of Art and Culture” which he had founded.
• On 1897 Vladmir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavski established the Moscow Art Theater which intended to protest against artificial theatrical conventions of the time.

• Starting with Alexey Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich and then with Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, his theater started becoming popular for his realism and naturalism.
• In the next two decades, the theater continued being popular with plays from different genres, including: Maxim Gorky's sociopolitical drama The Lower Depths (1902), Leonid Andreyev's symbolic The Life of Man (1907), Maurice Maeterlinck's enchanting fairy tale The Blue Bird (1908), and Hamlet with settings by Gordon Craig (1911).

• Stanislavsky believed that, through study of the play, analysis of the role, and recall of previous emotions, the actor could arrive at the "inner truth" of a part by actually experiencing the emotions he conveyed to the audience.
• The actor must be able to repeat his previously experienced emotions at every performance.
• Stanislavsky's training aimed at stimulating the artistic intelligence of the actor, developing his inner discipline and controlling external means like voice, diction and physical movement.
• All of the best Russian actors of the 20th century emerged from his training methods.

• He published a book, called “My Life in Art.”
  He conducted several dramas of revolutionary significance.
• The Moscow art Theater was venerated as the fountainhead of “social realism.”
• His last years were concentrated on giving the final touches to his writings and he died on 1938 (75 years old).
  

Attention exercises for Stanislavski - center of attention

Aim of Task:

As we have started to learn a little bit about Stanislavsky and his techniques for actors on stage; today, we did some exercises of attention focus of the actor and the audience. The objective of this exercises is to improve the attention of the actor and observe some things that the actor does while observed by an audience.

Description of Task:

First, we divided the classroom into groups of four. This exercise would be about multitasking. One person would be sitting on a chair while another person would be standing just in front of him, doing several movements, one other person besides the person in the chair, asking him random questions, and one last person on the other side asking him simple calculation questions.

The person seated on the chair had to imitate what the person in front was doing while answering the questions by the two other people. It was a difficult task because none of them took priority over the other two, you had to do your best to answer the questions and mimic the movements at the same time. It is difficult to keep the focus on all three spots at the same time. When it was my turn, I tried to be as calm as possible so that I could answer the questions. I tried to prioritize the movements and leave the answers for after I had synced the movements

After the group exercise, we did something called the "center of attention" with the whole class. Our teacher, Steve, asked one of my classmates, Dorte, to leave the room where all the class was and do not listen to anything that we were going to discuss. Dorte agreed and went away for some minutes. Steve told us that he was going to call Dorte to come in, but he wanted us to stare at Dorte with natural body position when Dorte came in, with unbreakable eye contact. As soon as she came in all of us stared at her and we saw her sit on the chair in front of all of us. We did not say anything, just stare at her the whole time. We could see little, small smiles of nervousness while she was sitting there. Her body position was also defensive, she used her hands to cover her knees and her feet were held back. She also kept on looking around on everyone, as if she was expecting somebody to stand up and attack her and she wanted to be completely aware of when that would happen!

After that, Steve asked Dorte to leave the room again. We discussed all of the things that showed her defensiveness towards the audience and her nervousness with all the group. Steve told us that it is common for the author to feel nervous in front of the audience, and that Stanislavsky thought giving the actor a task on stage would shift the attention of the actor from the audience to the task; reducing how nervous the actor was due to his unawareness of the audience.

Steve called Dorte inside again and asked her if she had any homework to do. Dorte replied negatively. So when Dorte came in, Steve asked her to untie her shoelaces. We were still staring at her, everybody. Dorte still behaved a little bit defensive, she did not want to do what Steve told her to do. It seemed as she wanted to keep some distance from her and everybody else. There were some signs of nervousness, like looking around with her eyes.

Reflection:

It is interesting to see how we handle focus in different things. The multitasking exercise shows three kinds of different mental ability, kinesthetic (copying other people), logical (performing math questions) and verbal ability (answering questions). On stage, an actor has to focus on kinesthetic and verbal abilities separately, and coordinate them together. This can be a very difficult mental task and it is something the actor has to be trained for. Moreover, appart from being aware of the kinesthetic and verbal tasks, the actor deals with the pressure of the audience which might disturb his focus. This is what the second exercise taught us. When we stared at Dorte, with her doing nothing, she had no task to do. Her only focus was the audience and this is why she started to be a little bit defensive towards everybody. However, when she had a task where she had use her kinesthetic mental ability (tying her shoelaces) she had something to focus on apart from the audience which made her reduce her signs of defensiveness towards the audience.

Conclusion:
As an actor, it's important to keep track of where your focus is on-stage. You have to be not influenced by the audience. As we saw on this exercise, as you have a your focus on something that requires a use of your verbal and/or kinesthetic abilities it is easier to shift your focus and forget about the nervousness that being in front of an audience can cause. In a realistic performance you do not have tons of people observing you and, since Stanislavski looks to achieve a realistic performance, he does this exercises so that you can ignore the audience that would not be present in reality.

Reflection after LPC performance

Aim of Task: To do a group reflection on our Commedia dell' Arte cannovacci preparation and performance.

Description of Task: After our teacher, Steve, talked to us about what he thought of our performances in general and how he could compare them to performances by previous theater groups, we decided to do an activity that would serve as a reflection of the whole process in each of our groups.

After we joined in groups, what we did is that we had to take turns for each member in our group. What we would do is that, for each member in the group, each other member would say one sentence starting with "I really liked working with you because..." and another sentence starting with "I wish you would..." Although we did not have time for everybody in the group to go, we did mention some things to some members of the group. I really wish I could have gone, it really contributes to your personal growth to be told what you did well and what you did wrong.

Reflection: This whole process of preparing a Cannovacci for an audience taught me some things about group work in general. When I chose theater, this is one of the things I expected from the course, learning how to work with people better.

Conclusion: The performance was not the most important thing we got out of all of this, the most important things we got out of all of this are the things we learned through the process of preparing the performance. What we learned was definitely related to something that is useful in several aspects of life: teamwork. Moreover, we learned about theater and had an enjoyable experience. It was really a lot of fun.