Applying Stanislavski to short scenes- week 5

Key Terms

• Circles of Attention
• Emotion Memory
• Subtext

We did an exercise where we imagined we where at a Bus stop this exercise combined imagination, Given Circumstances and What if. A narration was given of a scene in which we where standing at a bus stop, early in the morning on the way to a job interview. After that we where told various other given circumstances like you are chewing chewing gum and you see a bus coming from a distance and we had to react truthfully to this. With all the given circumstances the thing that made it truthful and successful was the thought process whilst doing them: 

You are chewing gum – what flavour is it?

You have a bag on your shoulder – how heavy is it?

You see a newspaper by your feet- what is the headline, is it interesting to you 

You see a car on the other side of the road- a couple are having an argument are you intregued, shocked or not bothered 

You see a bus coming in the distance- how do you react to this are you happy, relieved? 

We then began to explore circles of attention? This was where or how big your attention was whilst reacting to the given circumstance. I found that when the circumstance was about me eg. Chewing gum my circle of attention was smallest, when I was looking at a newspaper slightly further away my circle of attention was in between and when I was looking at the approaching bus my attention was largest. Circles of attention or concentration provides the actor a means of maintaining and regaining focus as necessary and also to help provide the area to give attention when on stage.

“Solitude in public; using different circles of attention on stage to focus the attention on the stage: re-focus up on an object if attention is lost and create circles emanating around that object”

Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares

We then went on to a neutral text exercise where we where given 6 proves of dialogue between two people and had to interpret the meaning or scenario of it in our pair. 

Me and Jacob interpreted this as a young couple, person A who's purpose is to get B to bed and B who's purpose is to ignore A's seduction and continue to do what ever they were doing in our case watching TV. We then looked at subtext and what the person was thinking inbetween speech my three peices of subtext where 

A: Hello

A: give me a bit of attention 

A: Are you coming 

A: he better switch that telly of and come upstairs 

A: oh, ok. Bye then 

A: fucking men and their fucking football 

Working out the subtext gave us a clearer intention of the character and scene compared to before when we just applied the dialogue to the scenario. We then delved deeper into the character and looked at 7 questions:

Who am I? - a girlfriend 

When am I here?- around 3 on a Saturday afternoon 

Where am I?- at our flat 

Why am I here? -I'm here because I live here 

What do I want? - I want my boyfriend to come to bed 

Where have I come from?- the kitchen 

Where am I going?- I'm going to the sofa to get my boyfriend then upstairs to the bedroom 

After doing this the scene was visually more interesting and made a lot more sence to me and Jacob as it became more naturalistic because we both had a clear purpose and could fully commit to that purpose. From this I learnt that fully working out a character and applying these questions and subtext to their dialogue can make the scene more believable not only for the audience but also for you.