Melodrama and Naturalism- week 2

We started the lesson by walking around the space neutrally, Simon and Sarah then began to talk about melodrama and how this type of theatre was popular in Chekhov times and was a key reason why Stanislavsky introduced his form of naturalism. We then where told to freeze and make an image of the particular popular characters used in melodrama; the damsel in distress, the hero, the prince, the villain, the sidekick and the henchman. When doing so we would pause to look at a particular person who embodied the character well and we would explain why we thought their still image was so successful. I found in this exercise that bigger was better and to times my character by at least 3. 

After we had done this exercise we got into groups of 5 and devised our own short piece of melodrama. My group decided to make our piece have a simple story line so that we could really focus on our melodramatic physicality's and voice. Later when we showed our pieces, positive feedback was that we all had identifiable roles, we all faced the audience and kept that interaction strong and that we had a clear storyline all points we tried to incorporate inour piece    so I was happy that the feedback picked up on that and was successful.

We started to look more into Stanislavsky and his theatre form of naturalism. We discussed what we thought naturalism was and decided that it was finding qualities in a character similar to yourself and using that to make your character as truthful as possible. A naturalistic play or performance has to be truthful and believable, after establishing this we got into small groups to create a small piece of naturalistic theatre. My group decided we would set our piece in a lift as it was one of the most simple places we could have picked where no interaction takes place so you can really just focus on people being natural. I found this quite challenging as with naturalistic theatre it is so easy to overreact or do things you wouldn't normally do, I found it quite hard to just relax and feel as if I was just simply standing in a life but I found a way of overcoming this by thinking of a time I'd been a lift and just rein acting that time and putting myself in that mindset. We watched a few different groups performances and then where told to edit it down to around half the time, for my group this wasn't hard at all but other groups found that they would cut out the beginning and the end and just get to the real content, whereas others found that this meant they would cut out more of the pauses or the umms or errs. 

To conclude the lesson we did a short group peice on a synopsis of the cherry orchard. My group picked 4 major points in the story, the arrival, the descussion of selling the house, the announcement of the cherry orchard being sold and the ending. We did this by using freeze frames and physical theatre there was an element of comedy in all the group pieces as they where so quick and a lot of them didn't make much sense. I enjoyed this lesson as we got to improve our understanding of melodrama and naturalism by exploring them through short pieces of theatre made by ourselves.