More Stanislavski Exercises

• Today we looked at ways to relieve unnecessary tension when acting.
• Internal Monitor- the way you are tensing and how your muscles are feeling
• External monitor- how you look from the outside
• Eg you could be reaching up to try and get something so that would come from your external monitor but if you are tensing it will come from your internal monitor so will make it more realistic

Exercises:

• We tensed our heads and subtracted 1 from 100, then 2 from that number, 3 from that number etc and found it was a lot more difficult that it normally would be. We concluded this was because we were concentrating on doing two things at once and you do things better when you are in a relaxed frame of mind as your brain functions more easily
• We also had an imaginary fence across the room and had to crawl under it however it was very low and got lower each time. It links to how you should be when acting as because we really wanted to not touch the fence and really pretended it was there, you should have the same motivation when acting even though you are pretending
• We had to lie on the floor and stretch certain parts of our bodies to get rid of the unnecessary tension
• We also had to watch someone stack 4 chairs and put them on a table and shout out which parts of the body they were tensing. They then had to do the exact same thing and we had to decide where the unnecessary tension was eg because we were watching him. He then tried to relieve his tension which should be done when performing to make it more believable to show you are not unnecessarily aware of the audience
• We also had to walk round the room and shout which parts of the body we were tensing when walking normally to relieve it and have a greater awareness of our internal monitor.
• We also had to pretend we were cats and pretend to be defensive and then going to sleep to learn how tension can make a performance more realistic
• We also learnt about our centre of gravity and had to rock back on a chair, stand on a chair and stand on the ground and lean to see how far we could go to show how centre of gravity changes
• We also became rag dolls and had to tense one part of our body and relax the rest to discover more about what tensing one part of the body only can do to the other parts
• Finally, we mimed lifting and moving different objects eg a small table, a table with a glass of water in the middle, a bucket full of water, a cupboard, to use what we had learnt about tension to make our mimes the best mimes we had ever done