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.