6.01.15

In today's lesson we learned about Stanislavski's exercise "TENSION"
"An actor needs a free body" 
Stanislavski believes that if you are not in tune with your body, your performance will not be as strong. He uses a couple of exercises which are there to help actors free their mind which enables them to free their body as well. I really enjoyed these exercises as they relaxed me and enhanced my performance, my concentration levels were also higher as I was relaxed inside my mind, I feel when I am stressing about what to do, my body becomes stiff which affects my performance. One of the exercises we learned involved a chair, we were all sitting on chairs together and we had to stand up, move the chair, and then move the chair back into the same position it was when we were sitting on it. This exercise allowed us all to focus on our main points of tension in our bodies, mine was in my arms and shoulders. This was all to do with our subconscious mind, watching ourselves and analysing how our bodies move when moving the chair and how we felt inside our minds. I felt slightly awkward doing this exercise, as it was strange to just move the chair and then move it back again, it sounds SO simple but when doing it, your sub concious begins to recognise the sources of tension in your body.

• Locate tension
• subconscious watching yourself( moving the chair) 
• relax

The next exercise I enjoyed a lot and felt it really worked for me. It was all about relaxing your mind and freeing your imagination. We were all sitting on the chairs again, and we were told to imagine and visualise that we were all artists, sitting on a green meadow on a hot summers day, painting the landscape. We were thrown into this exercise as we had just finished the chair exercise before. I was not very relaxed, but I still imagined the landscape and then we were told to paint the landscape for 30 seconds, I was very entranced in the excercise and threw myself into it. After we had finished painting the landscape in our minds, we were asked to lie down on the floor next to our chairs, and close our eyes, and to relax our bodies and minds, listening to our teacher. This helped me to relax and I was so focused and in the zone, I felt really calm and my heart rate dropped slightly, which proved to me I was definitely relaxed. We then sat back onto the chair, and began to draw the landscape we had been imagining again, this second time worked better for me, as my body was not tense and my mind was completely relaxed, which allowed me to envision the landscape in more detail and to paint with a higher level of concentration. After the exercise were asked which time we felt more focused, and half of the group said they felt more focused the first time, and the other half including myself said we all felt more focused and relaxed the second time, as we had time lying on our backs on the floor relaxing, rather than being thrown straight into the exercise.   I am going to use these exercises in the future to help me relax my mind and become more in tune with my body because I felt it really worked for me and it was very therapeutic for my mind and body.

2 types of tension

• Built up over the course of our lives unknowingly 
• From our circumstances we are in 

What I need to do as an actor to free my body? Where is my tension? I feel as an actor the main thing that helps me free my body is to warm my body up before I perform, it gets my adrenalin flowing in my body and makes me feel calm and relaxed, I like to jog on the spot or do star jumps before I perform on show nights, this really helps me. And in lessons I feel warm ups help loosen up my body, I feel my main areas of tension are in my arms and shoulders, sometimes I tend to stand with my arms folded and this isolates my arms and shoulders and makes me feel stiff. I like to do arm exercises to help loosen my arms which allows me to become more free with my body, as my arms are definitely my main source of tension. Sometimes I have noticed when acting, I do not know what to do with my arms, if I am standing still, sometimes I feel slightly self concious of my arms and do not know what to do with them so I sometimes cross my arms, which I know I should not do. This exercise today has helped me to realise where my tension is and that I need to warm up before I perform, as it really helps and enhances my performance. I also feel that I can over think things sometimes, and when I relax inside my mind, my body feels at ease, so this exercise has also helped me to relax inside my mind and to not think into what I am doing so much and to just let it happen naturally.

The next exercise we did today involved our Shakespeare scenes. We were put into the groups we will be performing in for Twelfth Night. I was with Sav and we chose ACT 1 SCENE 5. Which is between Viola and Olivia. We were asked to read through the scene together and to pick out 5 lines/phrases which define the scene, we imagined we were peforming the scene to an audience who had never seen the play before and would not know what was going on. So the 5-6 lines we chose, were to make it clear to the audience what was going on. We also had to make it as ECONOMIC as possible, which involved little characterisation, and was more focused on the lines and getting to the point. We used actions and large gestures to define the scene to the audience, the whole point of the exercise was to perform the key points of the scene and to make it as clear as possible to the audience about what was going on in the scene. The 6 lines Sav and I chose were:

• GOOD MADAM, LET ME SEE YOUR FACE
• IS IT NOT WELL DONE?
• YOU ARE TOO PROUD
• TELL ME YOUR MIND, I AM  A MESSENGER
• HOW DOES HE LOVE ME?
• I CANNOT LOVE HIM.

These 6 lines we chose were very clear, and after performing this scene to our class, we recieved positive feedback and were told our scene was easy to understand and very clear about what was going on. This scene is the first scene were the two females meet, and Viola is acting as a man, Cezario, and she is there to deliver a message from Orsino, telling Olivia how much he loves her. And Olivia is not at all impressed and is not interested, but she does develop an interest in Cezario, which Viola is very taken a back by.

We made the scene very physical, and it involved master and servant physicality and also a small game of follow the leader, as Sav would follow me around the stage, after I say "I am a messenger" this was to portray how Olivia is interested in Cezario, and is developing feelings for him. The scene was very humorous, as I was acting as a female, pretending to be a male, and at the beginning of the scene, Sav was sitting on a chair with a scarf over her face and I entered stage right, walking in as a female and quickly noticing Olivia on the chair and began to straighten myself out in order to walk and talk like a man, I looked towards the audience very nervously and began to cough to clear my throat in order to sound more manly and began to adjust my jumper and hair. It was very comical and Sav was also very funny as she was so over the top and took on the Master role, and began to follow me around the stage, and came very close to my ear and took a  big smell of me, and then said " I cannot love him" this was a humorous way to portray to the audience that she is interested in me, and I ran away off the stage after she did this! I feel we were very playful with each other and we should definitely use this in our performance of Twelfth Night, as it worked very well and Sav and I always include humour in our scenes as we have a very good rapport with each other inside and outside of college. All of the exercises we learned today helped me to become more free in my body and to let go inside my mind, which I feel is my main issue at some points, because I do think too much about what I am doing or what I look like. These exercises have helped me to self evaluate and to know what to do in order to become more free in my body.