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.
Themes of the Three Sisters:
Relationships
Desire
Fear
Family
In The Three Sisters Relationships is a clear theme because of how the sisters would engage in relationships whether they are friendly or a little more intimate with the various different soldiers from the Army. Desire is also a key theme due to the sister's want for going back to their home town of origin in America and throughout the whole play we are shown how they try to tackle the task of making enough money to get out of Russia. Fear is also a key theme in how Masha is scared that she will forever be in her current relationship, in how Irena fears at the end of the play that she will forever be a teacher and never get back home. I picked Family as a key theme simply because the whole play revolves around the relationship between these sisters and how they live in equilibrium with one another.
Monday 08
On the first lesson back we began the lesson by sitting in a circle and caught up with one another about the holidays. Once we had done that we were informed of how we were going to act out The Three Sisters and study the York Realist. Rob had then set up a table and two chairs and he got two people (Malcolm and Jeremy) to sit at this table pretended it was a coffee table, and got Malcolm to act as if he was both waiting for his girlfriend to come to sit with the at this coffee table they are both at and act annoyed at the other person for not moving. They also were not allowed to speak to one another. Everyone else was not aware of any of this so we had to guess through their actions what was going on. Some people thought that one guy was gay and he was trying to start a conversation with the other person, some thought that one people wanted to try to start a conversation and become friends with the other person, and some people believed that one was waiting for his girlfriend and the other was getting in the way which was correct. This exercise got those who were watching to communicate their ideas to one another and become comfortable to do this in their environment, and those in the act to try to use and exercise the Circles of Awareness technique to ignore the audience and really be in the act.
Then four chairs were set up and seven people and I volunteered to come up and four people had to sit on chairs and four had to stand up and we had to pretend we were on the London Underground minding our business. Then the people in the audience had to guess what each character was doing and could completely make it up. This got people to debate and remember how everyone in our group is very different and how people may approach problems. After this we switched and the other 8 people all got their own chairs and sat around the room almost as if they were in an exam as they all sat apart from one another. The teacher then asked as to say how we think each student is doing in the test room and some students looked bored, we all agreed that the one looking relaxed and asleep clearly had already finished, and there was even a student cheating.
After this we got into pairs and told one another about a specific day in our holidays which may have been slightly eventful. Then we got into different pairs and talked about our previous partners holiday and picked which holiday we were to pick. Jeremy and I decided on Abdul's holiday which was about him waking up, going to brush his teeth, and then hearing an unfamiliar voice down stairs in his house. When he gets downstairs he sees his cousin that he hasn't seen in years and they have a bit of a reunion. We were given two options in how we were to present out pieces and they were either in style of a Western or a silent movie and we had decided on a silent movie. As we acted in front of everyone we would hold up a sheet of paper telling the crowd what we were doing i.e when I walked down the stairs I held up some paper saying I was going down stairs. After we performed, Sharon had asked us whose holiday was that based of off and it was Abdul's to his surprise, but we had to explain that silent movies were usually quite over dramatic and exaggerated. We then went into a circle and read through an extract of the Three sisters. We learnt it was some sort of Russian Drama and we stopped the lesson there. This was to get us to think about story telling again and to get us to have more of an actors mindset as we have been on holiday for a while and maybe have gotten a little rusty.
Thursday 11
We began our lesson with Rob by him asking the class which characters they have decided they wanted to be. After casting some of the characters we read through some of act one and proceeded to create the room which everything in the play is set in. Rob then asked several of us to get up as volunteers to be casted in a quick scene that he wanted us to do and I was picked to do Solyony. During the scene there was a part when I was acting in a bit of a cocky way against my friend Tuzenbatch to Chebutykin. After Chebutykin and I exchange some words I am no longer speaking for a bit of time and I was instructed to walk around the scene in a comedic fashion looking at what people are doing. I nearly forgot about that and thought it would be much better if I just stood there without making interactions with anyone. I learnt that at all times you need to make your character busy and really embody the character and think what they would do in a specific scene. I also found Robs simple explanation by just walking up there and doing what he liked me to do. So I also learnt from his skills in directing.
Monday 15
We spent the first lesson pairing up with others and we were given instructions to make them move forwards and to the side around the room whilst they stood in front of us with their eyes closed making it a trust exercise. After this we were told to pretend we were going to enter a room of our choosing and react to the objects or people inside. There were some people pretending they were on a secret mission and then people like me who were reacting to coming home from work and seeing a couch with the television on. After this we sat in a circle and Rob acted us for which characters we were interested in being and I said Chebuchtykin. This would be because I liked the characters background in being a doctor yet he is so misunderstood because he doesn't remember much from medical school and he is quite depressed as his life has lead nowhere at all, yet he still hangs onto life. Beside the way the character is presented I saw how he was played in a theatrical version of the play and I thought it was absolutely brilliant and would be a challenge I was up for! We then read the play for a while and some people took turns in reading different roles due to wanting to try out more than one character. We ended the lesson by playing a game at which one person is sent out the room and everyone else has to pick which celebrity they are, and so when they re-enter the room people need to make it as subtle as possible but say things to the person that relate to the celebrity they are. If they get it they win. This was a fun game to play and made us all bond too and have many laughs.
Monday 21
At the beginning of this lesson we sat down on chairs spread out around the room and imagined different scenarios that Rob had told us to imagine whilst our eyes were closed. This related to the idea of emotional memory. When Rob would tell us to imagine we were picking up poo from the ground our body would naturally react to this by maybe our shoulders tensing or change in breathing patterns, and to be aware of these changes is how emotional memory works and it is also the basis of how you could use it in your acting. We also worked on vocals and how it's very important to be speaking using your full lung capacity as it makes your voice project further and gives more energy to your speech. We also did some tongue twisters just to work on our grammar and ability to speak in clear English. After we had done this and enough people were in the lesson we went down to the theatre in college and began practicing the first scene from The Three sisters.
We went into two different groups, one group sat in the audience and discussed how they would act in different parts of act 2 to get a head start whilst people like me who are in act one got up on stage and began acting. In the beginning of the scene when my character Chebutykin appears in the hallway I walked across stage and said my line after doing so, and I found it quite helpful that even though I did something which was alright acting, Rob the director tried to work off of it to make it even better. On the third page when I talk to Irena Rob directed her to look at Solyony who was sitting next to me in an irritated way which meant for him to move out the way. I had to then react off of this and nudge my shoulders whilst looking at him in an unsure fashion and this really did bring the scene to life in my opinion. It added a comedic sense it to and made it go more from a bunch of teenagers walking around reading lines to the Prozorov Household, which is where most the characters live. Throughout the scene I would make my character whose an old army doctor make a Hohoho noise as he laughed almost like Santa because that would have made the character seem much older. Yet Rob declined that I should do this and keep the laugh just like how I would laugh, because even though what I did may have made him seem much older, the element of emotional memory would not have been used which is the point. There were also times when some students were being too quiet during they're acting which was when act two was being acted out and so Rob told students to make sure that they were speaking from their belly.
Monday:
Today we began our lesson in a circle just doing some physical exercises including bringing up our shoulders and tensing them and just releasing them to let go of tension.We also said some tongue twisters such as A gazillion gigantic grapes gushed gradually giving gophers gooey guts, a loyal warrior will rarely worry why we rule, a quick witted cricket critic, and a missing mixture measure. We do this to work on using our full lung capacity and by bringing power from projecting from our navels. Interestingly enough this is what farmers and people who had to carry very heavy objects did when they using to move for example big logs or rocks. By projecting your voice or shouting sounds not from the throat or chest but from around the navel you can create great amounts of power. The other reason for this is to learn to articulate as, due to the current culture, many of the younger people of the next generation don't seem to speak clearly and take grammatical short cuts in their speech. After we did some stretching and those exercises particular vocal exercises we sat down and quickly talked about what our characters favorite cakes would be, and mine was some classic carrot cake with some fruits decorating it. I believe this exercise was to try to make us understand more of what our characters are like as people in the play so we can further embody them. After this we got up and started acting for the play. We started off by doing the end of act one which was a first. We were all acting quite well as we projected our vocals well and used spacial awareness to ignore the audience. It was clear that our training under Rob and Sharon on Stanislavsky's techniques were paying off. We then did act 2 in which I had to play Veshinnin to take the place of the other person who was to play that person. I was doing a scene with Masha which was meant to be a bit awkward and romantic but because I had never played him I felt I should have experimented. I played him almost as if he were very tired and zombie like without much energy and so by doing this I saw that the effect clearly completely changed the meaning of the scene and made it somewhat comedic. I learnt from this that you can completely change a play to become funnier or more serious just depending on the amount of energy you put it to the character.
Thursday:
Today we continued to develop our work on scene 1 and we also briefly discussed the themes in the play which are:
Family: As the play is based on the Prozorov family
Conflict: Between the married couple Masha and Kulygin and Soloyny and Irina, also between the sisters and Natasha
Relationships: Between family members and between the members of the army and the family
Dissatisfaction: Irena not getting back to her birth country, Tuzenbach dying by Solyony
Our biggest weakness is the first scene as it seems that we can't go through it without a character forgetting their lines or taking too long to begin to speak so hopefully people can adapt to the script and adopt a more convenient approach to their method of acting. People still need to work on trying to make the play more lively and have characters who aren't talking interacting in the background the create a more home-like vibe.
Monday
This lesson with rob we went through the play as usual and did scene 1 and 2,3. Some people were instructed to put more effort into embodying their characters more and to play the lines like drums one after another and quite quickly, to simulate what a conversation would be like in the real world with people talking over one another quickly. There was much more energy this week and though there is still a mixture of pessimism and optimism from different students I do feel like we can pull this one off like we did with Romeo and Juliet
Wednesday
We spent one lesson with Rob in the morning just going through all the scenes to make sure everything was at its best standard, we were not given any pointers at the end considering we had improved on most bad aspects of our acting for example taking too long to go from one scene to another and to also put more personality into it and not just say the lines without real meaning behind them.
After we had finished our final rehearsal we went down stairs and prepared for our final performance. Many of us were quite nervous that includes me. I felt nervous not about how I was going to do but about the overall ensemble and whether others were going to let down the whole team. Nevertheless time went on and eventually we acted out our play. As soon as I got up on stage the nervous energy instantly got transferred into confidence and I felt like I owned my role and that everyone else had done perfectly well. No one came off as scared or nervous on stage and we all worked together, using high amounts of our energy and our talents to make it great. Even our directors seemed a bit shocked about our performance and that there was a great amount of unexpected energy that just happened.
Thursday
On Thursday we worked with rob and was told by Sharon afterwards to write a review
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.
Themes of the Three Sisters:
Relationships
Desire
Fear
Family
In The Three Sisters Relationships is a clear theme because of how the sisters would engage in relationships whether they are friendly or a little more intimate with the various different soldiers from the Army. Desire is also a key theme due to the sister's want for going back to their home town of origin in America and throughout the whole play we are shown how they try to tackle the task of making enough money to get out of Russia. Fear is also a key theme in how Masha is scared that she will forever be in her current relationship, in how Irena fears at the end of the play that she will forever be a teacher and never get back home. I picked Family as a key theme simply because the whole play revolves around the relationship between these sisters and how they live in equilibrium with one another.
Monday 08
On the first lesson back we began the lesson by sitting in a circle and caught up with one another about the holidays. Once we had done that we were informed of how we were going to act out The Three Sisters and study the York Realist. Rob had then set up a table and two chairs and he got two people (Malcolm and Jeremy) to sit at this table pretended it was a coffee table, and got Malcolm to act as if he was both waiting for his girlfriend to come to sit with the at this coffee table they are both at and act annoyed at the other person for not moving. They also were not allowed to speak to one another. Everyone else was not aware of any of this so we had to guess through their actions what was going on. Some people thought that one guy was gay and he was trying to start a conversation with the other person, some thought that one people wanted to try to start a conversation and become friends with the other person, and some people believed that one was waiting for his girlfriend and the other was getting in the way which was correct. This exercise got those who were watching to communicate their ideas to one another and become comfortable to do this in their environment, and those in the act to try to use and exercise the Circles of Awareness technique to ignore the audience and really be in the act.
Then four chairs were set up and seven people and I volunteered to come up and four people had to sit on chairs and four had to stand up and we had to pretend we were on the London Underground minding our business. Then the people in the audience had to guess what each character was doing and could completely make it up. This got people to debate and remember how everyone in our group is very different and how people may approach problems. After this we switched and the other 8 people all got their own chairs and sat around the room almost as if they were in an exam as they all sat apart from one another. The teacher then asked as to say how we think each student is doing in the test room and some students looked bored, we all agreed that the one looking relaxed and asleep clearly had already finished, and there was even a student cheating.
After this we got into pairs and told one another about a specific day in our holidays which may have been slightly eventful. Then we got into different pairs and talked about our previous partners holiday and picked which holiday we were to pick. Jeremy and I decided on Abdul's holiday which was about him waking up, going to brush his teeth, and then hearing an unfamiliar voice down stairs in his house. When he gets downstairs he sees his cousin that he hasn't seen in years and they have a bit of a reunion. We were given two options in how we were to present out pieces and they were either in style of a Western or a silent movie and we had decided on a silent movie. As we acted in front of everyone we would hold up a sheet of paper telling the crowd what we were doing i.e when I walked down the stairs I held up some paper saying I was going down stairs. After we performed, Sharon had asked us whose holiday was that based of off and it was Abdul's to his surprise, but we had to explain that silent movies were usually quite over dramatic and exaggerated. We then went into a circle and read through an extract of the Three sisters. We learnt it was some sort of Russian Drama and we stopped the lesson there. This was to get us to think about story telling again and to get us to have more of an actors mindset as we have been on holiday for a while and maybe have gotten a little rusty.
Thursday 11
We began our lesson with Rob by him asking the class which characters they have decided they wanted to be. After casting some of the characters we read through some of act one and proceeded to create the room which everything in the play is set in. Rob then asked several of us to get up as volunteers to be casted in a quick scene that he wanted us to do and I was picked to do Solyony. During the scene there was a part when I was acting in a bit of a cocky way against my friend Tuzenbatch to Chebutykin. After Chebutykin and I exchange some words I am no longer speaking for a bit of time and I was instructed to walk around the scene in a comedic fashion looking at what people are doing. I nearly forgot about that and thought it would be much better if I just stood there without making interactions with anyone. I learnt that at all times you need to make your character busy and really embody the character and think what they would do in a specific scene. I also found Robs simple explanation by just walking up there and doing what he liked me to do. So I also learnt from his skills in directing.
Monday 15
We spent the first lesson pairing up with others and we were given instructions to make them move forwards and to the side around the room whilst they stood in front of us with their eyes closed making it a trust exercise. After this we were told to pretend we were going to enter a room of our choosing and react to the objects or people inside. There were some people pretending they were on a secret mission and then people like me who were reacting to coming home from work and seeing a couch with the television on. After this we sat in a circle and Rob acted us for which characters we were interested in being and I said Chebuchtykin. This would be because I liked the characters background in being a doctor yet he is so misunderstood because he doesn't remember much from medical school and he is quite depressed as his life has lead nowhere at all, yet he still hangs onto life. Beside the way the character is presented I saw how he was played in a theatrical version of the play and I thought it was absolutely brilliant and would be a challenge I was up for! We then read the play for a while and some people took turns in reading different roles due to wanting to try out more than one character. We ended the lesson by playing a game at which one person is sent out the room and everyone else has to pick which celebrity they are, and so when they re-enter the room people need to make it as subtle as possible but say things to the person that relate to the celebrity they are. If they get it they win. This was a fun game to play and made us all bond too and have many laughs.
Monday 21
At the beginning of this lesson we sat down on chairs spread out around the room and imagined different scenarios that Rob had told us to imagine whilst our eyes were closed. This related to the idea of emotional memory. When Rob would tell us to imagine we were picking up poo from the ground our body would naturally react to this by maybe our shoulders tensing or change in breathing patterns, and to be aware of these changes is how emotional memory works and it is also the basis of how you could use it in your acting. We also worked on vocals and how it's very important to be speaking using your full lung capacity as it makes your voice project further and gives more energy to your speech. We also did some tongue twisters just to work on our grammar and ability to speak in clear English. After we had done this and enough people were in the lesson we went down to the theatre in college and began practicing the first scene from The Three sisters.
We went into two different groups, one group sat in the audience and discussed how they would act in different parts of act 2 to get a head start whilst people like me who are in act one got up on stage and began acting. In the beginning of the scene when my character Chebutykin appears in the hallway I walked across stage and said my line after doing so, and I found it quite helpful that even though I did something which was alright acting, Rob the director tried to work off of it to make it even better. On the third page when I talk to Irena Rob directed her to look at Solyony who was sitting next to me in an irritated way which meant for him to move out the way. I had to then react off of this and nudge my shoulders whilst looking at him in an unsure fashion and this really did bring the scene to life in my opinion. It added a comedic sense it to and made it go more from a bunch of teenagers walking around reading lines to the Prozorov Household, which is where most the characters live. Throughout the scene I would make my character whose an old army doctor make a Hohoho noise as he laughed almost like Santa because that would have made the character seem much older. Yet Rob declined that I should do this and keep the laugh just like how I would laugh, because even though what I did may have made him seem much older, the element of emotional memory would not have been used which is the point. There were also times when some students were being too quiet during they're acting which was when act two was being acted out and so Rob told students to make sure that they were speaking from their belly.
Monday:
Today we began our lesson in a circle just doing some physical exercises including bringing up our shoulders and tensing them and just releasing them to let go of tension.We also said some tongue twisters such as A gazillion gigantic grapes gushed gradually giving gophers gooey guts, a loyal warrior will rarely worry why we rule, a quick witted cricket critic, and a missing mixture measure. We do this to work on using our full lung capacity and by bringing power from projecting from our navels. Interestingly enough this is what farmers and people who had to carry very heavy objects did when they using to move for example big logs or rocks. By projecting your voice or shouting sounds not from the throat or chest but from around the navel you can create great amounts of power. The other reason for this is to learn to articulate as, due to the current culture, many of the younger people of the next generation don't seem to speak clearly and take grammatical short cuts in their speech. After we did some stretching and those exercises particular vocal exercises we sat down and quickly talked about what our characters favorite cakes would be, and mine was some classic carrot cake with some fruits decorating it. I believe this exercise was to try to make us understand more of what our characters are like as people in the play so we can further embody them. After this we got up and started acting for the play. We started off by doing the end of act one which was a first. We were all acting quite well as we projected our vocals well and used spacial awareness to ignore the audience. It was clear that our training under Rob and Sharon on Stanislavsky's techniques were paying off. We then did act 2 in which I had to play Veshinnin to take the place of the other person who was to play that person. I was doing a scene with Masha which was meant to be a bit awkward and romantic but because I had never played him I felt I should have experimented. I played him almost as if he were very tired and zombie like without much energy and so by doing this I saw that the effect clearly completely changed the meaning of the scene and made it somewhat comedic. I learnt from this that you can completely change a play to become funnier or more serious just depending on the amount of energy you put it to the character.
Thursday:
Today we continued to develop our work on scene 1 and we also briefly discussed the themes in the play which are:
Family: As the play is based on the Prozorov family
Conflict: Between the married couple Masha and Kulygin and Soloyny and Irina, also between the sisters and Natasha
Relationships: Between family members and between the members of the army and the family
Dissatisfaction: Irena not getting back to her birth country, Tuzenbach dying by Solyony
Our biggest weakness is the first scene as it seems that we can't go through it without a character forgetting their lines or taking too long to begin to speak so hopefully people can adapt to the script and adopt a more convenient approach to their method of acting. People still need to work on trying to make the play more lively and have characters who aren't talking interacting in the background the create a more home-like vibe.
Monday
This lesson with rob we went through the play as usual and did scene 1 and 2,3. Some people were instructed to put more effort into embodying their characters more and to play the lines like drums one after another and quite quickly, to simulate what a conversation would be like in the real world with people talking over one another quickly. There was much more energy this week and though there is still a mixture of pessimism and optimism from different students I do feel like we can pull this one off like we did with Romeo and Juliet
Wednesday
We spent one lesson with Rob in the morning just going through all the scenes to make sure everything was at its best standard, we were not given any pointers at the end considering we had improved on most bad aspects of our acting for example taking too long to go from one scene to another and to also put more personality into it and not just say the lines without real meaning behind them.
After we had finished our final rehearsal we went down stairs and prepared for our final performance. Many of us were quite nervous that includes me. I felt nervous not about how I was going to do but about the overall ensemble and whether others were going to let down the whole team. Nevertheless time went on and eventually we acted out our play. As soon as I got up on stage the nervous energy instantly got transferred into confidence and I felt like I owned my role and that everyone else had done perfectly well. No one came off as scared or nervous on stage and we all worked together, using high amounts of our energy and our talents to make it great. Even our directors seemed a bit shocked about our performance and that there was a great amount of unexpected energy that just happened.
Thursday
On Thursday we worked with rob and was told by Sharon afterwards to write a review
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