Theorist background info, context and discussion.

Konstantin Stanislavskij, born in Russia 1863. He is considered to be the man who “created” method acting. He is also the co-founder of the Moscow art theatre (MAT) His system, methods and techniques are still used today to train actors. He grew up in a wealthy family and was introduced to theatre at an early age. His family even had their own little theatre were Konstantin grew up acting, writing and performing. He wanted to be a great actor himself but ended up being one the greatest directors ever. What fascinates me the most is the fact that one man changed the standard of theatre in itself. He gave the world what is today know as just “acting” to many. All the big movie actors use his methods to portray a believable character.  
Two of my favorite examples of this is Heath Ledger’s “Joker” in Batman: The dark knight (2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWgyKDfFC_U  and John Bernthal's Punisher (Frank Castle) in Netflix’s “The Punisher” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWh6A6ZIpfo  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czxlWXqaIzo

The Scene from Batman: The dark knight with the joker (The interrogation scene) is considered to be one of the best scenes in movie history. What is displayed in the scene is the many months that Heath Ledger put into his character. Heath locked himself in a hotel room for weeks on end and perfected the insanity of the Joker. His character and his work with it is considered to be one of the best examples ever of pure and perfect method acting. John Bernthal’s Punisher is also a great one but not equally as critically acclaimed as Heath Ledger’s Joker. Yet his job as The Punisher is one of my favorites and is a great job of method acting. The first scene is The Punisher (real name: Frank Castle) showing Daredevil his place in this world. We see and hear the pain in his voice as he explains why all these bad people have to die. In the second scene we see The Punisher in court, explaining the same thing to the courthouse. And just like Ledger, Bernthal perfected his character using the same methods.

The realism within the characters is what Stanislavkij’s directing style, method, theory and artistic beliefs is all about. He always wanted to show the most believable characters to the audience. He wanted us to feel what the character was feeling and wanted us to be able to relate to him/her,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wDcYxpxjFS9NAmMVoRB04OSb5aDh7fLp7tHoLyxrsP8/edit?usp=sharing

Solo project 1.

Konstantin Stanislavskij: 
His base concept was realism, considered the purest form of acting. Method acting changed the way  actors created their characters. Gone where the days of exaggerating movements and words. With method acting it was all about being real and making the audience believe everything you said or did.

The Stanislavski System:

1. Relaxation, relax while performing.

2. Concentration, respond to your imagination.

3. Work with senses. Recall sensations.

4. sense of truth, trust your instincts.

5. Given circumstances, great the world

6. Contact and communication, improvise with the world.

7. Units and objectives. Divide role into individual units, defined by character goals.

8. Logic and believability, objective = consistency.

9. Work with the text, Uncover and perform the social, political and artistic meaning of the world,

10. The creative state of mind: An automatic culmination of all the previous steps.

Stanislavski’s working method could be compared to his system, it started from within and eventually was displayed on the outside. The method is obviously to project naturalism, the way his method starts is by asking himself all the questions that link him and the character together, these questions would be answered and the answers would activate psychologically and eventually be displayed physically. His working method is about starting from within and eventually finishing on the outside 

monologue reflection

My monologue was very challenging to perform. The words made no real sense and the character had no clear back round. It was fun and challenging at the same time. But for next time I think I'm going to choose something a lot less "theatre" meaning I would perform something more clear. Something that has more of a clear story and have me depend on acting out certain emotions. For this monologue I could perform the words however I liked due to how the words made no real sense :)

Monologue

https://youtu.be/8eJg0n2QJIo

Twelfth night review

Let me start things of by saying that i found the play very boring. Now here’s the reason why.

The play starts of with a cool VR scene showing of the see through canvas by displaying images on it. This was a smart move by them, it got me intrigued and thinking that the rest of the play might be as cool...it was not. The rest of the play was very very confusing and filled with long boring conversation. And that's with disregard of the fact that they were talking in so called “Shakespeare talk”  The fact that the whole play was extremely confusing truly ruined the play for me. And yeah yeah people will say “ oooh but its shakespeare!” get outta here. If a play is so confusing that you have to read a whole book beforehand to understand it then i'm sorry to tell you, it's not a very good play. Now i know that i’m coming of as super aggressive + i sound like a real Shakespeare hater but hear me out. Shakespeare is one of the greatest play writers of all time, there is no argument there in my opinion. His plays have been shown all over the world and are know by almost everyone. But that does not make his plays the most watchable plays. The main function of a play is to entertain you or to make you think. This play does both of that, only that it makes you think so much that (at least I) did not understand what was going on. Listening to 10 minute conversations in “shakespeare talk” really made my head hurt. I truly had no idea what was going on. And yeah i guess you could connect that to the fact that i’m from a county where english is not the first language or that i'm a teenager. But i have been involved with theatre sense the age of 8. So to say that i don’t fully understand theatre would not be reasonable either. At the end of the day i guess the thing that dragged the play down for me was all the confusion and the shake talk.

Afropunk

Collaborative project

I started acting at the age of 8 and fell in love right away. The fact that I was doing improv theatre for the most part really engaged me and opened up my mind and forced me to be creative. My acting career hasn't really been influenced by any play at all. Instead iv'e been in constant amazement by my fellow actors in improv. It really is a wonderful sight to see someone come up with something hilarious on the spot and make you laugh your guts out. The west side Stockholm community where I grew up always had many different ways of engaging the youth with positive activities to stay out of trouble, and my theatre club really stood by that. And then I came here to CA and continued acting, and I ended up in a great theatre class and I'm so happy to still act on a regular basis.

And then our group consisting of (Me, Olivia, Linda and Ray) got the assignment to make a short play based on this stimulus:

We had complete freedom and where allowed to make a play based on any ideas that we got from this art piece.

In the beginning it was really hard finding a starting point for our play, we had no idea in what direction we where going other than that we wanted to do some type of love drama. Something with love slipping away was our main idea. So we started off with that, a love square (cus there's 4 of us...get it?) we started building characters based on our strengths as actors. Linda was the first one to be given a solid role, we all felt that Linda would be the best out of us 4 to be the young lady slipping away from her husband due to her strength of playing sad and confused characters. Next up was Ray, we put him in a position where he could be given a lot of freedom on how his character could be sense we didn't really have a plan for how his character was going to behave. In the sense of, should he be the bad guy? or the good guy? in this play. We all knew that Ray could do both so we let it sit on the stove for a bit. We decided to give me the role of the man Linda was cheating on her husband with. Then We needed a perfect spot for Olivia, and that came to be the wife of my character. It was perfect for her due to how she is really good at displaying her emotions on stage.

Now we had a base for our project, we could finally get started and find comfortable ground.

We had our first draft set up as a basic love drama, really dry and no real value at all. It was just Lindas character (Sara) cheating on her husband and my character (Marcus) cheating on my wife, and then Ray's character (Steve) and Olivia's character (Natalie) falling in love. No real message behind it other than " Cheating is bad "

So we all realized that we needed to expand it somehow.

Thats when I proposed to the group that we should change the script a little, we changed so that Marcus and Sara was not having an affair, but Sara was only looking for a close friend to hang her head on. This gave the play a little more depth which made it a lot easier for us to build upon.