The Wardrobe - Week 3

20th January
- The Wardrobe

• My scene, scene 7 is 8 years before the publication of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
• Debating between putting the wardrobe at either spot A or B, I prefer spot B but we're going to experiment with both options to gain a better sense of which would be better.
• Looking at finding the Historical details of our scene

22nd January

- Chekov

• Anton Chekov was boork in 1860 and died in 1904 due to tuberculosis. He was a russian playwright and a leader in naturalistic drama writing, he trained as a doctor whilst pursuing a career in journalism and writing short stories, he wrote his first play in 1887 and in 1898 he joined forces with Stanislavsky and produced work that screened at the moscow art theatre and this was where his plays found success.
• Naturalism - Mirror of real life, people and events
• The pause is vital, the truth is revealed
• An event changes nothing, yet the characters are affected forever
• Chekov's plays are a portrait of provincial russia in 1900
• Symbolism -  Hope represented through key character
• Theatre of Mood & Atmosphere - less focus on plot
• Indirect action - understatement, broken conversation or off stage events.

- Stanislavsky

• We looked into Stanislavsky, his life and his work and how this all plays a part in our performance in the play and how to better utilise or acting techniques and learn new ones.
• Stanislavsky worked closely with Anton Chekov with whom he revolutionised the acting world by introducing realism into the equation of melodrama.
• 1885 went to drama school and left after only three weeks, stating that it taught him what not to do in the world of theatre. 
• He created the system

- The System

1. Imagination
2. Imaginary Moving Picture
3. Action
4. Units & Objectives
5. Emotional Memory
6. Circles of Attention
7. Solitude in Public 
8. The Magic If 
9. Given Circumstance
10. The Super Objective and Through Line

23rd January

- The Wardrobe

• We worked on one of the parts of the system "the magic if" through this we went and worked on several situations that Karen gave to us and reacted in a way we thought would be within the realms of realism, in my opinion what came of this was quite often over exaggerated emotions and reactions within the given situation and I felt it was not entirely within the realms of realism.
• One of the exercises we did was when Karen came up to me and just told me to go with it and so I did she then told the class I had lost my ring, my grandmothers ring and I had to react to the situation in a way that was believable. I slyly put my ring in my pocket at that point and began to bring myself into a state using emotional memory to remember a time when I had lost something else and remembered the blind panic you get, in the end I managed to convince about half the class that I had really lost my ring the others were either completely skeptical or had heard me jump when Karen first came up to me to give me the instructions.