Stanislavski

Today we looked at doing a number of workshops to attempt to try and teach each other the different pieces of his work. I looked at using circles of attention to try and look at his attention to detail in terms of actors understanding and sensing themselves as well as their surroundings. This is important as an actor as it can give a believable performance to an audience if the actors and their characters look and focus on different aspects of their surroundings based on their circumstances. 

By putting a large amount of detail into a character, giving them other unrelated circumstances that perhaps will affect the character, offers an insight into that characters back story that the audience can pick up on and use. This is one of the elements that I will adopt into when i create characters as I believe that the added amount of detail can open up the characters to the audience in a way that allows them to relate better or at least feel like the characters are actually believable. 

Lee looked at purpose, and his activity involved having someone enter a room with a specific purpose to influence how that character would interact with the set. I quite liked this element and plan to implement it into my character development as it makes it extremely believable for an audience to see elements of the purpose within the movements and actions of the characters. 

However, Stanislavsky's attention to detail also involved fleshing out the characters more by getting actors to practice by shadowing a person in the room, to copy their movements and mannerisms directly. This is an element i find extremely challenging and don't plan on implementing it into my own acting and character development. Although it does allow for an actor to base his acting on a given root allowing him to better understand his character, I find it quite challenging and will not be attempting to use it in my own acting.

Later that week we had another workshop with other elements of Stanislavsky's work. I found Sahitya's workshop on looking at "the Magic If" to be interesting. It looked at putting the characters into situations to see how they would react. I personally do not find this an effective technique as it requires a good understanding of the character beforehand. 

However, Naz's workshop on looking at questions that characters must ask themselves is very interesting in exploring characters and what they think about their own situation, themselves and other people. This technique is extremely difficult to do, however if done right can give a lot of details of the character for the actor to think about and implement into his character development.

Overall, some of Stanislavsky's work is extremely useful and I will implement it into my own acting and character development, however not all of his elements and attention to detail are as relevant to me and what the amount of detail I would like to put in to my characters and to how naturalistic I would like to be as a character or as a director.