Receiving our parts and studying Stanislavsky. week commencing October 30th

Wednesday the 31st October

I am part of the group that will be performing the 1896 play The Seagull, written by Chekhov.
On Wednesday, the class went at our designated times to meet with Sharon. We discussed what we thought the play could possibly be about. We as a group had realised it is definitely Russian; given the name of the playwright and the characters. Now researched I never expected it to be late 19th century, we thought it would be possibly the 1920s, especially how the characters spoke.
We decided we would take the original script, but make it our own. Make it modern; maybe not 21st century to keep with the context of how the characters are speaking but early to mid 20th century, I.e; latest 1960s. We in pairs, with pieces of sugar paper and a marker, wrote down ideas of what comes to mind when we think of The Seagull. We came up with themes of freedom, and wanting to take off with their ambitions.  I suggested that when we see seagulls migrating, you never really see one specific among the crowd, they all tend to blend; one of the characters feels dissatisfied that nobody sees him for himself but for his mothers sheer fame. Seagulls are also seen as scavengers, they scavenge for homes and food; this is another sub-theme we thought the play could be about.

We then discussed what Stanislavsky had studied and practised and what made him renowned in the arts industry;

He practised Naturalism within the industry. Everything was natural. It was family orientated, and focused within people and their families, similar to soap operas today. But it is known as naturalism because the passing of time was applied, e.g; if someone was to bake a cake, they would have to make it from scratch, these plays could be up to 2 hours long. He wanted people to watch the play and be-able to connect with it fully because everyone has a family, unlike Brecht who later would create pieces with hidden meanings behind them, yet you emphasise with its characters.
He stressed that that actors really delve within their characters. This brought in the terms ,    Through-line , objectives and actions. The Through-line is the journey the character has been taken on throughout the play. they may have started off jolly and innocent, and in the mundanity of their family world. Yet across the play, the character may have had life thrown at them in disadvantages and soured and decomposed in personality.
The objective of the character is what the character essentially wants within that given circumstance. It is what motivates them and gives them drive to complete a goal they want to achieve. So, say they feel dissatisfied and incomplete, they will want something to complete and fulfil their given needs. But it is the Action, that allows the character to complete their need. So they will go off to find that certain something that completes that need. A Super-objective is what the character wants out of the whole play, so across a timeline. The character may want to settle down and have a family and that may be their direst goal that want out of everything.

We finished off Sharon's lesson, with what we feel that we get from the play and what overall theme/s the play withholds. we all realised that each character is some-one what dissatisfied within their predicament. And they all want something more from life than what they have; alike a seagull, wants to scavenge for their true meaning of what they want and and their ambitions, and soar away from the pack to fulfil their goal.


Thursday 1st November

Today the main topic of our lesson was Subtext. Subtext is the two way meaning of a line within dialogue. The simple line, "Oh... its you", could take the actor on a two-way street when delivering it. It could be said with dread, and disgust. It could also be said with compassion and sheer love. The art of subtext is that the line is subtle and appears as though it should be said how it is written, yet due to the given circumstance and context of the relationship between the two characters, is delivered in an unexpected manner.
Rob gave us an exercise where the duo pair are a shop assistant and  customer. The customer had to be very edgy, picky and most of all annoying as hell, but the shop assistant has to keep their cool for the whole entire time. The purpose of this exercise was that the characters had to have a hidden meaning behind what they said while delivering them, without giving the audience the impression of rudeness. But with next being given the circumstance of the shop closing at 5 and the customer comes in 5 minutes before shop closing, which the audience knew the character wants to be somewhere else.

we used what we learnt here and applied to the scripts and parts we had been given today.