BTEC Drama

Stanislavski believed that rather than simply acting out an emotion, there was a way of drawing on a memory that is similar in detail or feeling to their characters situation. By doing this, the actor has a better connection to their role and therefore it seems more real. The first thing to do in trying to recall an emotion is to strip away all your current feelings, which could affect your emotional memory and alter the moment that you are trying to recall. To do this we first began to walk around the space, focussing on each other so that we could find a way of slowing down all at the time. This moved our concentration away from our own thoughts and towards simple actions, helping to make our minds blank. The next step was to relax our bodies. We lay on the floor in order to remove movement so that we could focus on getting rid of the tension in our bodies, breathing in a controlled way as we did so in order to continue to slow our thoughts. The aim of this was to put ourselves...

The Pillowman- Stanislavski’s Super objectives and Understanding the Characters. Stanislavski taught his students about the importance of a characters Objectives and Super Objectives, which are the driving forces for all of a characters actions throughout the play. Objectives: The motivation that propels an actor through each individual unit of a play. These can be feelings, ideas and goals. Super Objectives : The over- reaching objective. Stanislavski describes it in a document called “An Actor Prepares”. It talks about how any action that you may choose to carry out in the play should be influenced by the super objective, otherwise it will not be true to the character. “In a play the whole stream of individual, minor objectives, all the imaginative thoughts, feelings and actions of an actor, should converge to carry out the super-objective of the plot. The common bond must be so strong that even the most insignificant detail, if it is not related to the super-objective, wi...

In this section we learn more about Katurian through the form that Tupolski fills out. The interesting thing about Tupolski, is his complete lack of “normal” reaction to the events occurring around him. He seems to see the whole investigation as a game or more simply a series of motions. Now I am kind to Katurian, Now I mock Katurian, Now I try to scare him. And this seems to be repeated on a constant loop. The form, for example, is another part of Tupolski’s game and is meant to disorientate him. He asks questions such as “Next of kin?” even though he learnt the name of his brother in the previous question and I think it is clear that Tupolski already knows the answers. His attempt appears effective, as the character of Katurian is slightly panicked whilst repeating this line. The fact that Tupolski is asking this shows that the detention centre is a dangerous place. He has already told him that “bad things” could happen, but Katurian is still trying to convince himself that h...

Today we blocked out the beginnings of Act One, Scene One. Now that we have been cast, we are beginning to block out the scenes of the play. This first look at the scenes won’t go too far into the examining of individual lines but is more about staging and identifying motivations and key lines in the text. Today we looked at the very first scene of the play, where Katurian has been arrested and finds himself in a detention centre, having no understanding of why he has been brought here. In this section of the scene he meets the other two main characters, detectives Tupolski and Ariel, and learns that he has been brought here because of his stories. In The Pillowman, I play the character of Tupolski. My version of the character will be female, but I will reference Tupolski as written in the play. Tupolski is the leading detective in the investigation and he truly believes that Katurian is responsible for the murder of three children. One of Tupolski’s main characteristics ...

Today we considered how we would act and stage Scene 2 of Act 2, in order to create a clear separation between what was real in the play and what was one of Katurian's stories. We discussed ideas of altering the set first, including: Opening up the stage with lighting Adding colour to the lighting to suggest a fantasy world Altering set- so for example having a backdrop of some kind that could be turned around to reveal words from the story. Another way of looking at it was the characters. We wanted to create a sense that the actors playing the parents and the child knew that they were acting in order to prevent the scene from appearing to realistic. We decided that this would work best with exaggerating certain movements but limiting the number of actions on the whole. In the rest of the play, an actor has to be aware of the movement that they are doing all the time, because it is important that they continue to play the character even when they don’t have any lin...

Today we began to explore the play for our performance unit, the Pillowman. In two groups we staged the first five pages of act one- this is the scene where Katurian is first arrested and we meet the three main characters of Tupolski, Ariel, and Katurian. Before beginning to act the section we first recapped our current knowledge of the play. This is important as it brings context to the scene, and influences the intonation and our understanding of lines, how characters interact depending on their relationship and how proxemics are used on stage to show status.   The first thing we wanted to do was to create a moment of orientation (as in the theory of Stanislavski) in which we could convey these basic ideas: Katurian is unaware of what is happening, or why he has been brought here Ariel is a physically menacing character Tupolski is in charge of the investigation; his menace is still clear but layered with a calmer tone. Both Tupolski and Ariel are disgusted by K...

Recently we had the opportunity to work with a member of Frantic Assembly during a full day workshop. What I most enjoined about this experience was not just being opened up to a new style of theatre which I now really love, but also being able to experience the kind of atmosphere that the Frantic Member created. There was no negativity surrounding the process, and in fact the environment was such a comfortable place to work in. In the past, I think stress has really inhibited my ability to create, but this has shown me the importance of creating a positive and supportive space to work in as a group. After an intense warm up, we first worked on a slalom exercise. We had to run a course around sets of chairs, mirroring the person’s movements who ran beside us. At certain points our path would intersect either with that of our partner or with another group that was finishing or was about to set off. In order to manage this with the speed we had to maintain, it was important to be ac...