Konstantin Stanislavski

Who is Konstantin Stanislavski?

Stanislavski was a Russian Theatrical actor. He was famously known as a great character actor and many of the plays that he directed gained an amazing reputation as a legendary actor of his time. All of the reputation he garnered came from a system he had created of acting training, with techniques such as given circumstances, the forth wall, circles of attention, emotional recall, objectives, and various other techniques.

Naturalism:

This is simply a phrase to describe the attempt at creating the illusion of reality in acting.

Objectives:

When doing anything in life, there is always a purpose for what you are doing. An example for this is if somebody buys an apple, they could have the motive to buy it for a family member, a homeless person, and even themselves. This is what objectives is based off of, but its used in acting. How you would use objectives is if you can see your character entering a scene with somebody they hadn't seen for a long time but weren't friendly with either and they wanted to get away from them as quickly as possible, then the objective would be to avoid the other character. Once this is acknowledged then this can be implemented into the act. This technique is great in all different ways for acting and it enhances the illusion of the world of a play coming to life.

Circles of Awareness:
The 'Circles of Awareness' is a technique at which requires you to essentially focus your awareness at a particular point of a stage, maybe even a person and from there you expand your awareness to the spaces neighboring you and then even beyond that point to the people sitting at the back of the stage. This technique of being aware of the positions of objects around you and other actors helps you to create those memory neurons and become accustomed to standing in the same position each time this will also aid in you executing the same actions too. As there is a limit to the actors perceptive awareness they will not be distracted by that family member in the audience watching them.

Emotional Recall:

This is the technique of remembering a past memory of an event to trigger a certain emotion from the subject. An example of Emotional Recall in the works is when you see actors on the television crying. They could be doing this simply because they know how to fake cry, but actors like Bryan Cranston who acted in breaking bad admitted to remembering a sad event which had happened in his life which really turned his act into something of great enough worth to win Oscars. The greatest advantage in this technique is the fact that the majority of society can understand and go through different emotions all the time so to trigger one isn't going to be too much of a challenge, but to channel it into your work may take some practice.


In class we created the Stan wall which contained information of the process of what should be going on through your head when acting. Points such as being in the moment are very important when acting because you need to be able to (at the best of your ability) react and act to everything that is happening to you at all times on stage so to be able to focus on the present is a great ability. To also be observant of behaviors of other actors around you as they act with you and to understand who they are and how they relate to you is also a great skill to have because I could react completely differently when my mum says something to me compared to when an acquaintance says the same thing.