Stanislavski Workshop

RESEARCH
Stanislavski's system is a progression of techniques in acting used to train actors to draw believable emotions to their performances. The method that was originally created and used by Stanislavski from 1911-1916 was based on the concept of emotional memory for which an actor focuses internally to portray a character's emotions onstage. Later, between 1934-1938, this technique evolved to a method of physical actions in which emotions are produced through the use of actions.The latter technique is referred to as Stanislavski's system. This approach was developed by Constantin Stanislavski (1863–1938), a Russian actor, director, and theatre administrator at the Moscow Art Theatre (founded 1897). The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how someone can control in performance the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions and art inspiration. His system involves...

• The Method - making an actor put their own experience, imagination and feeling into a role.
• Physical Actions- This activity provokes the actor to think about their character as a real person rather than simply role on a page.
• The Magic If- the basis of assuming the mentality of a character. An actor asks 'If I were there, what would I be thinking?' and then later 'If I were my character, what would I be thinking?'
• The Given Circumstance- The actor must believe in the given circumstances and appreciate it as the truth.
• Imagination- A character does not have a full biography. The actor must find details of a character's life from hints within the text or invent them.
• Circles of Attention- An actor could focus by concentrating on a small circle, himself and one other actor or prop. The actor, once focused on this small circle, extends his attention to a medium circle that includes more actors or larger props. After truly focusing on this, the actor can extend the focus of the large circle of attention to cover the entire stage. If an actor loses concentration, he can retreat into the small circle before building up to a large circle again. This enables actors to achieve public solitude.
• Truth and Belief- Stage truth is unlike real truth as it is not really true, it is merely suggested to be true by the actor. If the actor fails to employ the magic, if they will not reach the stage where they are speaking and acting as a character, this will cause the audience not to believe and, in turn, stop them from suspending their disbelief.
• Communion- Before communicating the subtle nuances of the play with an audience, an actor must commune with the cast. They must be aware of them and the character relationships between them.
• Adaptation- An actor must overcome problems to achieve the best portrayal of a role.
• Tempo Rythm- It is an actor's responsibility to find the correct tempo rhythm of every line and action performed. They should rehearse each line and action until they find a suitable tempo rhythm.
• Emotion Memory- It is an actor's duty to stimulate his own emotion memory from which to draw and build a character. These memories are repeated emotional experiences, rather than the primary experiences they are based on.
• Units and Objectives- The idea focuses on breaking the play down into units of action, and not just acts and scenes. The objectives within them dominate each unit and once reached the unit ends. There must not be too many units, but there should be enough to guide an actor towards realism. Each actor must realise their character's role in the objective, whether they want to achieve it, prolong it, prevent it, etc.
• Super Objective and Through-Line of Action-  The super-objective of a play is the main thrust of the plot, an objective that runs throughout the entire text, it links to all the small units and objectives via the through-line. To gain understanding of a character, an actor must be aware of their character's relation to the super-objective.

WORKSHOP
Stanislavski is all about his different methods, and one of these methods is "realism". We started by researching his methods so we could get an understanding of how he worked. We then seperated into couples (Me and Gareth - Billy and Jake) and had a go at acting as natural and real as possible. I found this quite hard as many of my other parts in plays have been over the top characters in musicals or pantomimes, however I gave it a go. I wanted to come up with a storyline that I had been through before in my life so it could be as real as possible. I know the feeling of a relative dying so we thought about doing a piece where Gareth was a policeman and he was coming to tell me that my wife had died in a car crash. However, as Mrs Marsh said, I wouldn't know what it was like to lose a wife as I haven't had one, so we changed it to be my sister who had died in the crash. Because of the scene being so serious Gareth began to laugh nervously, which therefore was making me smile and prevented me from being emotional, I tried my hardest though and we finally both got through it. My weakness in this is that when i become nervous I smile and laugh and if someone else does this before me I begin to. To help me next time I need to really focus on the task in hand and try my hardest to be as natural as possible and be realistic to the audience.