The Rehearsal Process

Today we discussed Affective Memory, a popular system by Stanislavski.


Wikipedia says: "Affective memory was an early element of Stanislavski's 'system' and a central part of Method Acting, (two related approaches to acting). Affective memory requires actors to call on the memory of details from a similar situation (or more recently a situation with similar emotional import) to those of their characters. Stanislavski believed actors needed to take emotion and personality to the stage and call upon it when playing their character. He also explored the use of objectives, actioning, and empathizing with the character."

I had never heard of Method Acting before and to this was a completely different insight to acting I had never come across before, it was quite hard to think of significant events in my life and use them towards something completely different, I thought it was a kind of 'pretending' in a way, and using that emotion as a lie. Whereas when I portray emotion in all of my performances I like to empathise with my character and put myself in their shoes and imagine myself in that situation which normally works for me and I feel is a lot more efficient, although I still want to test myself and use emotional memory in my performance playing Alison.

So today with Jill, we sat in a circle and each told an emotional story we had experienced. We then had to use the emotion we had just developed and use it in a random scene or story. Andrew began, and told us all an emotional story he had experienced, Jill then asked Andrew to use the emotion and the fear of his story and use it to simply tell us the story of the Three Pigs.

We had obviously all heard the story of the three little pigs, but never like this. Once Andrew had finished telling the story of the three pigs, there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Andrew used the fear and the sadness of his story into a silly nursery rhyme, but Andrew didn't make it sound like any silly nursery rhyme, it was a believable, honest story, and we all believed it and it really got to us all. Jill then explained to us that on stage, actors actually use affective memory and then as soon as they are off stage they 'let it go' which is the effect.

Stanislavski also believed in:

Magic if - To help create any role, I've always found it helpful to attempt many improvisations. In the System this is known as the 'magic If'. The magic If opens up so many possibilities for the actor and can no doubt help them to explore new emotions with a variety of characters. But to aid the Magic If is the 'given circumstance'.This is the basis for the actor and the role. The given circumstances are: the story of the play, it's facts, (the characters in the play, who they are and their purpose); events (what happens in the play); time and place of action, conditions of life and finally the actor's and director's interpretation; the production, the sets, the costumes, the properties; lighting and sound effects. We use this exercise often and is one of our favourites, it's always one we do the day after a show and even though we play it so much, the joy of it is that every time you play it, it's never the same! We often create different scenarios and place them in envelopes and swap round and perform them.

Truth - The fact of the matter, truth is different for your character and their world than your own truth. The goal of any actor is to create the illusion of reality, or truth, while performing. The goal within this Stanislavski technique is to create the "truth" of your character and his world by "believing" the world of your character is real. Only through imaginative creation can this process be completed.

Relaxation - Stanislavski believed that in order to make a character true, the character must be approached from the inside. That means drawing on the real inside life of the actor, most specifically drawing on memories. The actor also has to create the inside life of the character: the character has to have inner thought, back story, beliefs, and so on, just as a real person does. When the actor answers questions about the character, they should speak in the first person.

"I am…" "I want…"

Jill does this often in rehearsals and also this is a laugh it does give us the chance to be our character and create that believable background. For example, last week me and Jess were sat at the table on the set we created and Jill came over and said she was going to join us for a cup of tea and act like we know her and she was asking questions like 'Oh I love that where's is from Helen?" and Jess would laugh and make a silly answer, but then when we realised what Jill was doing we reacted with serious answers. When we were going through our lines, Jill would interrupt and say "Oh really, why do you think you feel like that?" and I would reply by saying "Well I think it's because Jimmy said to me once..." and doing this really help us build up that believable background for our characters.

Concentration - As an actor, you should not rely on details to guide your performance. Rather, you must use these details to form the skeleton of your character. Concentration is the only way to guide yourself throughout the scenes. Personally, i've found that details such as character personality, relationship between other character and the world of the character are essential for a good performance. 
-notes from wikepedia

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Wednesday 5th June

Today we continued rehearsals and discussed our set. We decided we would have a single chair and a couch. Alison and Helena would sit on the couch together and we decided that the only person that would touch the single arm chair was Jimmy as we wanted to emphasise the fact that it was Jimmy's chair and only Jimmy's chair. When doing a read through rehearsal, we experimented with moving in different ways when saying certain things and we wanted to all of us to say and hear each line as if it was the first time we had said or heard it. We also watched videos on method acting with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Method acting is also a method of Stanislavski's. This idea was first called the ‘System’ by Konstantin Stanislavsky, and later, as further developed by Lee Strasberg, ‘The Method’. The Method trains actors to use their imagination, senses and emotions to conceive of characters with unique and original behavior, creating performances grounded in the human truth of the moment. In the video with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, his wife is shouting at him and he reacted naturally by slapping her in the face, when it was not in the script at all and the actress playing his characters wife wasn't aware he was going to slap her. In Look Back in Anger, there is so much anger and emotion in the scene we're performing and we want to use method acting to empathise with our characters and act and talk naturally like we think they would.


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Thursday 6th June

Today we carried on rehearsing whilst Jill was walking round and watching snippets of each perfoming. She watched our scene twice and gave us excellent feedback with minor improvements to make such as listening to what the other character is saying and reacting using stanislavskis naturalistic style of acting. We also used props for the first time and used old fashioned tea pots and tea cups to worked with as previously we were miming and it didn't feel as natural and realistic when we were rehearsing so it was really helpful to have both the set and the props.


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