Evaluation - The Cherry Orchard

one of my main strengths was my voice, I effectively projected and pronounced my words and used it to convey meaning. This benefited from the vocal warm ups we performed before hand and having energy in the scene. In rehearsals a note that i had was finding the levels in the scene. Lopakhin goes through a huge array of emotion for such a short scene, linked to that i needed to heighten the emotions i had the increase the various levels in the scene. i think i achieved this on the performance. I achieved it through going over the scene and looking back at the units i created and objectives I made. the objectives for each unit were what helped most to achieve the heightened levels, going back to them and analysing them specifically helped to find the true meaning in the scene and find realism. I also found it easier in the performance to be immersed fully into the scene.

When you have an audience you are forced to take yourself out of the room and into the scene you have many people watching you and it is necessary to block them completely out to keep focus and the best way to do that is to be fully part of the scene feel as though you are truly going through the scene as it happens. Without an audience it is harder to create a fourth wall as you can allow yourself to be in the room as it is more rather than creating the world you are in fully.

In many people's view lopakhin is not a ‘good’ character however in order to play him i had to find his reasoning behind these actions. When you are performing it is not as simple as good and bad but peoples drive to achieve something and deal with the obstacles in their way. This is where the system helped. Finding objectives and intentions helped me to build the scene and character. To understand a person you must understand what drives them to make those actions and you may perceive to be good or bad.

If I had longer to develop Lopakhin i would start to develop his physicality more. Lopakhin is not a straightforward character as he has the initial upbringing of a peasant so his nature is that of a peasant but he is putting on an act himself of a higher class. he is a merge of inherited poverty and learnt wealth. This also makes him an interesting character as he himself is putting on an act. if i had more time i would work to find the moments where he shows each side more and the company around him in that moment that effects that. I could also develop hid objectives further and split his units further and add active verbs to the script to continue his philosophical analysis and develop realism.

I believe I did effectively convey his objectives as in the moment it felt truthful and natural. i felt a flow in the scene and felt his levels flow into each other through reacting of of Elois, her performance felt incredibly truthfuly which helped me to react truthfully.

Guilt

Through performing my scene it gradually became apparent I me that lopakhin is driven heavily from guilt and his need to avoid it and supress it.

Weather it's his guilt of buying the orchard or from the guilt he has of what his ancestors went through, he is continually doing his best to of load it. I also think he is in denial about his guilt this is shown through his constant need to vocalise to the other characters his child hood. This is almost like a self reassurance that he is a good man. 

He deals with his self made guilt of buying the orchard by telling himself it's Ranyevskya's fault for not listening to him. 

Textual Analysis

In this scene Lopakhin goes through a huge range of emotions in a very short space of time

I this first part of the scene he has just come back from the auction and is terrified to tell Ranyevskya that he has bought it. He doesn't answer Ranyevskya's question directly showing he doesn't want to revel the answer but rather try and avoid the question.

 When Lopakhin starts his monologue, he is trying his best to let down Ranyevskaya as best as he can. He holds some guilt because of the fact he bought the orchard. However he feels it was the only way and comforts himself ion the knowledge he tried to get Ranyevskya to do something with the orchard, he offered her a solution.

When he starts to describe the auction he starts to loose him self in the excitement of it all and explodes with joy claiming the cherry orchard is his, he vocalises his owner ship over the property. This gave me an insight into his character and is a very good example of his super objective to To loose the label of his past and distance himself from poverty and the class of a peasant. I believe that in this moment he realises that he has lost his peasant label for good, as he then goes on to talk about how his father and grandfather were once slaves in the estate.

When he begins to talk about his ancestors he turns to an angry tone as he starts to reminisce about his youth and what his ancestors went through. Lopakhin has now achieved all that he wanted this is shown in his disbelief of what is happening 'I'm asleep - I'm imagining it- its all inside my head'

Lopakhin the goes to shed his quilt onto Ranyeskya, He tells her it is her own fault she lost the orchard. This appears to be his way of dealing with the quilt of buying it and seeing her break down in front of him. there is then a power change in he scene were lopakhim becomes master of the house and thus takes power of the scene, Then after all he has been through as a peasant takes on the same role as the people who kept his ancestors slaves and demands everything to be as he wants io.

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin represents new money, coming from nothing and using his business mind  to achieve status. If he was to be put into modern society he would resemble a thatcher era capitalist, were social status meant a lot and what you owned was everything.  

16th September

Laban Efforts

Laban efforts are  way in witch to start building a character and there physicality.

The 8 efforts give you details on how they are carried out. We used them as starting blocks for our characters. We did an exorcise er tried to embodies these efforts. this was useful as it showed how subtle changes in the intention can change the action a lot. this helped me to focus on what mu intentions were as this showed that small changes can change the out come, your intention needs to be very clear.

We were also given our scenes and characters. I play Lopahkin and the scene is the end of act 3 were Lopahkin comes to tell Ranyevskya the orchard has been sold. First went through the scene and started to work on the what it was about and the objectives.

Yermolai Alexeyitch Lopakhin

Character analysis-Lopakhin

Super objective

To loose the label of his past and distance himself from poverty and the class of a peasant.

Stanislavsky's system

What makes a truthful performance? 

I believe a truthful performance relies on allowing the actor to be comfortable to be vulnerability. For an actor to be truly honest they need to create a psychological environment on stage were they feel at ease. if an actor does not then this can result in a filtered version of a truthful performance which will lack the deep humanity and raw human emotion that creates a truthful performance.   


Relaxation

Stanislavsky taught relaxation, this is to help the actor find memory and access emotion. Stanislavsky thought that by relaxing you are more able to access memory as you free your mind of other things, this means you free your mind up to focus wholly on accessing memory and in turn emotion. I think this is a valuable tool as accessing those memory completely will take a lot of focus, if you have other things on your mind you are not completely committing to the memory and will not achieve a truthful performance. by relaxing in the semi supine position you can commit to the memory.

Magic If

We then remembered someone we saw on our journey to school and started to take on their physicality.
The person I took on was a man I saw on the bus; he was around 50 had a ill fitting suit with a jacket on and he was also reading a kindle.
To achieve his physicality I tried to think of what sort of person he may be and how that translates into his physicality. I created him as Someone who likes to keep mostly to himself but if needs be he can be sociable. He is the sort of man no one really notices, he did however have a strong sense of purpose. this translated into strong certain steps that were direct however he walked with a sense of distance from others was walked carefully. He also lead with his head showing his mind is what leads him, he is intellectual not athletic.
We then moved onto magic if. Stanislavsky used magic if to help actors develop a character by looking at how they would react in certain situations. Even though situations are simple the characters deep fundamental personality is being questioned.

...what if you found £20 on the floor

I this 'if' I looked around to see if any one was watching and quickly and subtly picked up the note and went on with my day. This showed me the character is self concious of others seeing him picking up the note in fear of confrontation or judgement. I started to think he is scared of others judgement not people them selves, a development from when I thought about his physicality

...what if you stood in dogs shit

I imagines this guy as being quite calm so when he stepped in dog shit he I did my best to keep it as shuttle as I could as he would hate it I'd any one see him step in it. He was however on the inside quite annoyed and was restraining his anger

...what if you had a cup of coffee spilt over you

When hot coffee was spilt over him he just tried to get out I the situation as quickly as possible reassuring the other person everything was fine, he then moved on quickly annoyed. These are the sort of confrontations he can't handle and makes him extremely uncomfortable.

...what if you had lost your wallet

The man is very organised and would not loose his wallet, so when he did I searched for it an then remembered I had just left it at the office and turned back to get it. He would not loose something as important as his wallet but his job demands a lot of him and he is constantly concerned with how he appeared to others. This translates into him being preoccupied with other thoughts and forgetting things like his wallet

with the characters we had created we got into pairs and created a short scene. at first the scenes were not very naturalistic and lacked reality. By adding in when where and why you can immerse the character into the world, subsequently their action reflect this and create a real performance. these facts that we established are called given circumstance, they are facts usually established by the text that must be included in the performance


We then added in WANT > DO > FEEL this helped to give the characters a purpose for the scene, my character wanted a cup of coffee as quickly as possible, the do was going to a coffee shop to get one, he felt annoyed as his coffee took a while. WANT > DO > FEEL helps allot as it give your character a clear purpose to a seemingly simple scene that doesn't have any  narrative, this gives you a realistic motive to get a coffee.

Hello

We then took this idea of WANT > DO > FEEL and applied it to a short text, we also look at adding active verbs to each line. adding theses active verbs to a text with no other context can change the narrative a lot.
at first we thought the text wasn't very naturalistic. However by adding the active verbs we started to create a naturalistic narrative that fitted with the text.

Melodrama

We explored the different features of melodrama.
We did this by creating our own melodramatic prices and including various archetypes we explored earlier in the workshop. The archetypes we looked at were a Hero, Prince, Villain, Mother and a sidekick. An archetypes is a model of a character often very familiar for example a hero has a strong stance and a puffed out chest, looking proud and strong. A Villain may have physical deformities, a lower stature and maybe 'evil' facial expressions. This could be a cunning smile.

We then got into groups to work on our own devised piece that included the archetypes we looked at earlier. Because the were in a melodramatic style were over the top with heightened emotions and bold movement even though melodrama is very far away from naturalism it helped us to work out what naturalism isn't by analysing each others pieces.

A damsel in distress and villain

This A damsel in distress and villain. This is typical of melodrama as you can identify the archetypes By just looking at them. The damsel in distress ha got a frighted look leaning back with her hands on her chest scared. the villain has and 'evil' stare, he also has a physical deformity shown by his walking stick ad crumpled hand.