Monday 15 october

today we had studied the art of Jim cartwright's Road. we had looked at many different techniques of performing these specific scenes. we had looked at antonin artaud, brecht,berkoff and stanislavski. With the style of stanslavski he intends the play as it was naturally intended.

When we performed with the style of brecht we had used many different techniques. With brecht we tried to make the audience uncomfortable as possible. By doing this we tried aiming all of the context towards the audience as if we were speaking/shouting at them directly. With this technique the audience will feel uncomfortable and think that they are also included within the dialect of the play and story line.

Stanislavski

Stanislavski

“Magic If”

Stanislavski believed that the truth that occurred onstage was different than that of real life, but that a 'scenic truth' could be achieved onstage. A performance should be believable for an audience so that they may appear to the audience as truth. One of Stanislavski's methods for achieving the truthful pursuit of a character's emotion was his 'magic if.' Actors were required to ask many questions of their characters and themselves.
 Through the 'magic if,' actors were able to satisfy themselves and their characters' positions of the plot. One of the first questions they had to ask was, "What if I were in the same situation as my character?" Another variation on this is "What would I do if I found myself in this (the character's) condition.
The "magic if" allowed actors to transcend the confinements of realism by asking them what would occur "if" circumstances were different, or "if" the environments were to happen to them. By answering these questions as the character, the theatrical actions of the actors would be believable and therefore 'truthful.

Through the use of system, an actor is required to analyze his or her character's motivations. Stanislavski believed that an actor was influenced by either their mind or their emotion to stimulate their actions and the actor's motivation was their subconscious will to perform those actions. Therefore, motivation has been described as looking to the past actions of the character to determine why they completed physical actions in a script.

                     

Antonin artaud

Antonin artaud

Artaud believed that theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, therefore he used a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound, and other performance elements.
The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid
Artaud wanted to put the audience in the middle of the 'spectacle' (his term for the play), so they would be 'engulfed and physically affected by it'. He referred to this layout as being like a 'vortex' - a constantly shifting shape - 'to be trapped.
He also theorized that without cruelty within the theatre then the element/atmosphere would be powerless and useless. He then reported that all plots should have some sense of cruelty in the storyline. Artaud wanted to erase all aspects of false reality with the element of cruelty.
Artaud thought that society and the world of theatre had become an “empty shell”. In the Theatre of Cruelty, he was trying to revolutionize theatre - figuratively burn it to the ground so that it could start again. He was trying to connect people with something more primal, honest and true within themselves that had been lost for most people.