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.