SUZI SALTER – YEAR 1 BA MUSICAL THEATRE.
ACTOR AND TEXT PROGRESS PORTFOLIO
Over our first time at Leeds Conservatoire, during our Actor & Text classes we began to discover the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavski. Born on 17th January 1863 in moscow Stanislavski was a Russian acting practitioner whose method was built on finding ways to access your character. “Stanislavski wrote detailed notes as he developed his acting system. These notes became a series of books “An Actor Prepares,” “Building a Character,” and “Creating a Role” that became the foundational text for training actors in Russia and the United States.” https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-stanislavsky-acting-technique-65716/ Stanisvlaski’s work changed the way actors thought about human behaviour. He is considered one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern acting. Through this portfolio I will be discussing what I learnt and how I have put Stanisvlaskis into my acting practice.
An objective is the thing that a character wants or desires. A super objective is the same but is based on what a character wants or desires over the course of the entire play or show, whereas a character can have multiple different objectives in the span of one scene. A super objective should be present throughout the entire story. In class with Tyrell we looked at Checkov’s play ‘The Bear’. In our first lesson working on this we read the entire play as a class and then began to discuss what we believed the characters Super Objectives would be. We decided that Popova’s super objective for the play is ‘To seek revenge and punish her late husband’. I have found Objectives a pretty easy thing to understand as It is a technique that I have used many times before, and it is something that I have continued to use over this past term. For example, in my acting through song classes I sang ‘Someone else’s story’ from ‘Chess the musical’. I decided that Florence’s objective in this song is ‘to allow herself to follow her heart and justify leaving Freddy to be with anatoly.’
Uniting, also sometimes called eventing, is a way in which we can divide text in a script. A new event will begin when something happens to change a character’s objective or something happens to change the energy of the scene. Tyrell used the example of if you were to be having a normal conversation and someone says ‘I am going to kill you’ your objective would now become ‘to stay alive’ and a new unit or event begins. As a group we read through the play and individually decided where the events would be and as we came together as a group to discuss we realised that they weren’t as clear as we thought they were.
We deciphered that these are the lines that trigger a new event to occur:
1.”it’s not right madam”
2. an urgent pedal at the doorbell
3. ENTER smirnov and popova
4. she makes a swift exit
5. I’m going to stay right here until you hand over the money
6. You don’t know how to behave in female company
7. Kindly go away and leave me alone
8. I demand satisfaction
9. EXIT popova
10. What an astonishing woman
11. I’ve taken a liking to you
12. A prolonged kiss
I then went through and wrote down what each of Popova’s objectives changed to during each event.
- To be left alone to mourn.
- To prove loyalty to her dead husband
- For smirnov to leave
- N/A ( she is not present)
- To make Smirnov understand
- To make Smirnov behave
- To be left alone
- To fight Smirnov
- N/A (she is not present)
- To kill Smirnov
- To figure out her feelings
- To kiss Smirnov
Actioning is a process we learnt about in class with Tyrell. And follows the structure of I (verb) you. eg. ‘I pressure you’ and tactics are how you would achieve that or your objective. “Put simply, the Actioning technique requires you, the actor, in the early stages of rehearsing a play, to divide up your own lines into separate phrases or thoughts, to assign each thought an ‘action verb’ which expresses the underlying intention of the line, and then, having assembled this series of verbs, to attempt to speak and act each thought in the manner of the chosen verb. The verbs themselves must be ‘transitive’ – in other words, something your character can do to another vii character, such as ‘prod’, ‘ridicule’ or ‘encourage’, rather than non-transitive verbs such as ‘muse’, ‘cry’ or ‘hesitate’, which tend to pull your focus back onto yourself. This means that each thought, spoken with a particular action verb in mind, becomes an attempt to affect another character in the manner implied by that verb https://www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/asset/3265?cmsAsset=1
We practically worked with this by spitting into pairs and breaking down a couple of lines of a scene and giving actioning verbs to each or our lines. Darcey and I worked together on this bit of text:
We played around with a couple of different ideas. Eventually we settled with these as our actionings .
Popova: “I order you”
Smirnov: “I belittle you”
Popova: “I question you”
Smirnov: I impress you”
Each pair got a chance to perform their scenes. We started by just ping pong-ing our actioning sentences back and forth whilst performing the scene. Eg. “I order you” “i belittle you” “i question you”etc. We then gave each of our actioning phrases a gesture to go with it. Tyrell describes this to act almost like a “spell”. The gesture is the thing that commands what your intention is. The gesture is almost the tactic of how you are trying to achieve your objective whilst saying the line. For example, when it was our chance to perform we matched “I order you” with Popova pointing her finger at Smirnov. “I belittle you” Smirnov held his gun out. As a group we were encouraged to really over exaggerate our gestures and vocal quality whilst performing these and really pretend that we were casting this ‘spell’ on the other character. We then went on to eventually replace our actioning sentences with the actual lines from the script, whilst doing a less exaggerated version of our gesture. I found that it actually made a drastic difference in the delivery of our lines when we had a detailed intention and tactic behind each line. I did, however, find that it made me say my line the same way every time, which made the scene feel a little bit over-rehearsed and I wasn’t really able to live truthfully in the moment. I think that going forward I will probably not give an action to every single line as it feels like a bit too much and has the potential to make me get stuck in a singular line delivery. Moving forward I think finding an action for specific lines that I deem as more important could help.
Stanisvlaski defines given circumstances as a set of conditions that define a character in a play. In class with Claire we explored the idea of creating our own given circumstances. We looked at scenes from Love and information by Caryl Churchill. The dialogue in this play is pretty vague and we don’t get much information about the characters or context of what is going on from the text. In cases like this it can be helpful to create your own set of given circumstances, so that you can build and create a story and know who you are / what is going on in the scene or play as a whole. We did this over the course of a few different lessons. Working on different scenes from Love and information each time.
When looking at the scene ‘Secret’ (pictured on the top), Prirya, Monique and I decided that our character’s relationship would be sisters. Olivia the younger one was much more innocent and well behaved whereas Sasha the older sister was much more eccentric and sure of herself. We decided that the context of the scene would be that Sasha had just gone round to her ex-boyfriends house and burnt some of his things because he had been incredibly horrible to her. Sasha wouldn’t want Olivia to know as she doesnt want her sister to view her as a bad person and her objective is to protect her younger sister. To help me with creating my character I created a pinterest board for her so that I could really visualise who she was a bit better. This is what I put together for Sasha.
We then each got a chance to perform the same scene to each other. Changing the given circumstances has an incredible effect on the scene even though the text is staying exactly the same and it was really interesting to see how many different ways the same scenes were being played out. Going through the process of creating our own given circumstances was incredible. Having experience in creating our own given circumstances will be useful for stand alone songs like ‘songs for a new world’ where there is little to no context, or in shows where we aren’t given much background details on who the characters are and where they come from. It makes it so much easier to begin to find details about your character.
In class with Claire we then explored the idea of ‘Hot seating’, one of Stanislavski’s techniques.
Hot seating is a process that invites actors to be interviewed as if they are their character. I created a list of questions to ask monique and priya:
-what did you eat for breakfast ?
-how is your bedroom decorated?
-what is your favourite song at the moment ?
-Did u have a favourite childhood teddy ?
-what’s your relationship with your siblings like ?
-what’s your favourite movie?
-what’s your favourite meal?
-what’s your relationship with your parents like?
-do you have any hobbies?
-what’s your biggest fear?
-if you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
-what do you do to relax?
-what would you do if you won the lottery?
-what colour are your bedsheets?
-who is your favourite singer / band?
Knowing the answers to questions about my character’s childhood and mundane things in her life really helped me to understand who she was on a deeper level. In yourself you know what colour the bedsheets you have on currently are without really having to think about it therefore you should be able to say the same thing for your character if you’re asked. I also found it quite freeing as there were no “wrong” answers as we were creating the characters ourselves.
As we hot seated those characters’ we discovered more about who they were and were able to see them as more three dimensional people I found useful to help discover things about my characters. When asked about what kind of music my character listened to I had quite a clear idea. So I was inspired to create a playlist that my character would listen to. I’ve found this quite useful and I think that moving forward I will try to create these pinterest boards and playlists for characters that I am going to spend an extended period of time with. I find it useful to get inside the head of my character and know things about how they live their day to day life.
Overall throughout this unit I have found that I find lots of Stanislavski’s approaches super super useful and can see why he is the backbone of so much acting technique that we still use to this day. I will continue to approach my work with these techniques and play around with the toolbox that Stanisvlaski has created to find a system that really works for me and my work.
