Our focus for this unit is Naturalism. With Stanislavski being a fan of the ideas of Realism, we decided to focus on his history and the way he liked to do things, keeping in mind who he collaborated with and the practises he uses to train his actors. Stan's "system" is a systematic approach to training the Russian actors in the 20th century and some actors in theatre and film swear by it to this day.
This system featured three main sections:
- Mind: This would refer to getting into the mindset of your character and this would require tonnes of research into the character whether this would mean reading the play that the character is from and drawing facts about them or if it's an original character, decide these facts for yourself.
- Feeling: This section depends on experiencing a characters emotions. This requires jumping into the mindset of the character trying to personally experience their lives first hand. Most actors don't take this so literally and simply imagine how it feels to be their character and link back to their own personal memory; for example if a character were to feel very angry, an actor would link this back to a time where they were equally angry. However, some actors, including the likes of Heath Ledger, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, take this to a whole new level and fully immerse themselves into the lives of their character. Whilst Heath Ledger was preparing for his role as The Joker, he locked himself away in his hotel room in London and played around with the voice and laugh of The Joker and kept a diary written entirely as the character of The Joker.
- Will: This part refers to taking into account the given circumstances of the character and his/her scenario. These circumstances are given to you within the play and means you won't have to assume these things but at times there will be details you will want to know about your character that aren't mentioned. This is where Stan's "Magic If" comes into play. Thinking objectively like this makes you asks questions about your character and you get to decide the answers. If you're wondering what your character's favourite animal is and it's not mentioned then you can make that assumption yourself. Also, you can make assumptions as to how your character or how another character might react to previous actions.
After establishing this, we read through our scenes and we wrote down our thoughts on the characters in the scene. Charlie and I were given a scene from the play "Punk Rock". Below are my opinions on the characters:
- I feel the relationship between Chadwick and Will is very forced
- Will is a burden on Chadwick
- Will is a liar
- Chadwick relishes in telling Will about Lilly - But then feels sympathy as he realises its hurt Will's feelings
- Will hasn't got good social skills
- Chadwick is uncomfortable with Will
- Will wants to get closer to Chadwick
- Chadwick ignores Will at first
After reading through the script and combining our thoughts, Charlie and I blocked and performed the scene.
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