Konstantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (17 January 1863 – 7 August 1938) was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner and actor. He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.
Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion. Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923—4) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911—12) established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre. By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays.
source: Wikipedia
Stanislavski's Technique
I've been practising this technique since I first started to take acting classes, when I was eleven, without even knowing that it was a technique. I find it the easiest one, the most meaningful for actors, the most important of them all because it requires talent to make it right and it is also my favourite technique of them all. I've read Stanislavski's book about it and I found it really entertaining to go through all of the events with him, to see how he created it step by step. At first I found the naturalism very hard to make, throughout the time I started to love it and now it is the best feeling in the world to do this technique. It is like I can command my brain how to be every day, I learnt how to change my moods in a second and how to cry in maximum 5 minute. This technique involves bringing up from the past the correct memories that you need to create any moment and any character. To be in the skin of the character you have to know him first, to use techniques like the hot seat to understand it better. When you are using Stanislavski's technique you don't pretend that you are a character, you are not you anymore. You are the character. We've also been using this technique to create our characters last year in the play "Much Ado About Nothing" by William Shakespeare, where I played the role of Beatrice, which I found very boring in the beginning but until the end of the whole process she became the best role I've ever played in my whole life, I loved her and I became her.
Uta Hagen
Uta Thyra Hagen (12 June 1919 – 14 January 2004) was an American actress and theatre practitioner. She originated the role of Martha in the 1962 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (who called her "a profoundly truthful actress"). Because Hagen was on the Hollywood blacklist, in part because of her association with Paul Robeson, her film opportunities dwindled and she focused her career on New York theatre.
Noted stage actress who has also done limited work in TV and film. Born in Germany and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Her Broadway debut was in "The Seagull" in 1938. She won her first Tony (and other awards) in 1950 for Clifford Odets "The Country Girl". Her second Tony was for the role of Martha in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?".
She later became a highly influential acting teacher at New York's Herbert Berghof Studio and authored best-selling acting texts, Respect for Acting, with Haskel Frankel, and A Challenge for the Actor. Her most substantial contributions to theatre pedagogy were a series of "object exercises" that built on the work of Konstantin Stanislavski and Yevgeny Vakhtangov.
She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981. She twice won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play and received a Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999.
source: IMDB & Wikipedia
Uta Hagen's Technique
"Acting is behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances" - her technique is based on this saying. I think that her technique is similar to Stanislavski's, using the same naturalism in an imaginary background.
These are some of the rules that are defining her technique:
- Know who you are and find your own sense of identity so you can bring about a genuine life for a character.
- Your inner image of yourself may not match your outer; find awareness of total self in all situations.
- Get to know and accept yourself.
- Be able to connect feeling to behaviour; learn to pinpoint your responses and resulting behaviours.
- Fill a warehouse with sources upon which to draw for construction of character.
- Aim for a cat’s spontaneity; unanticipated involvement in the moment.
- Your own identity and self-knowledge are the main sources for the characters you play.
- You experience most human emotions by age 18.
- Read, visit, look at paintings, to put self into a situation.
- Be self-aware, not self-conscious; don’t be regular.
She also made some useful exercises practiced over the years by all of the drama students that studied her techniques, including me. We received her exercises last year as a homework, I found them super entertaining and extremely helpful in my development process as an actress. We also used her technique for the greek play "Antigone" where I played the role of Antigone which I really enjoyed playing because she was a brave, impulsive and loving character.
Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938, London) is a British playwright known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.
Her early work developed Bertolt Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of Epic theatre to explore issues of gender and sexuality. From A Mouthful of Birds (1986) onwards, she began to experiment with forms of dance-theatre, incorporating techniques developed from the performance tradition initiated by Antonin Artaud with his 'Theatre of Cruelty'. This move away from a clear Fabel dramaturgy towards increasingly fragmented and surrealistic narratives characterises her work as postmodernist.
Churchill was born in London, England, the daughter of Jan, a fashion model, and Robert Churchill, a political cartoonist.After World War II, her family emigrated to Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Churchill was ten years old. In Montreal, she attended Trafalgar School for Girls. She returned to England to attend university, and in 1960 she graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college at Oxford University, with a B.A. degree in English Literature. She also began her writing career there. Her four earliest plays, Downstairs (produced 1958), You've No Need to be Frightened, Having a Wonderful Time (1960), and Easy Death (produced 1962) was performed at Oxford by student theatre ensembles.
In 1972, she wrote Owners, a two-act, 14-scene play about an obsession with power. It was her first stage play and "her first major theatrical endeavour"; it was produced in London the same year. Churchill's socialist views are expressed in the play, a critique of the values that most capitalists take for granted: being aggressive, getting ahead, doing well.
Churchill gradually abandoned more conventions of realism, and her loyalty to feminist themes and ideas became a guiding principle in her work. She won an Obie Award for best play with Top Girls (1982), "which deals with women's losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment." It features an all-female cast and focuses on Marlene, who has relinquished a home and family to achieve success in the world of business. Half the action takes place at a celebratory dinner where Marlene mixes with historical, iconic and fictional women who have achieved great stature in a "man's world", but always at great cost. The other half of the play, set a year in the past, focuses on Marlene's family, where the true cost of her "successful" life becomes poignantly and frighteningly apparent.
source: Wikipedia
Churchill's Technique
Before we started to study Churchill's theatre technique, I've read her book, "The Skriker" which confused me and fascinated me so much that I wanted to find out more about this fascinating woman who wrote the only book that made me think about its deepest meanings and discovers biblical and social issues highlighted in a hidden way in all of the Skriker's monologues. We started to learn more about her techniques in college, we had to read her play "Top Girls" and to choose to perform a scene from the play. I chose to be Marlene because I found myself in her workaholic, obsessed with success, selfish and independent character even if she is not portrayed as a good person until the end. It was really fun to play it with my colleagues, we get along, we built up the tension between the two sisters and we made the arguing part between Marlene and Joyce a bit funny for the better understanding and the entertainment of our audience. We enjoyed playing it and we received a good feedback for our short performance. Churchill's technique is a form of epic theatre, meant to vocalise her feminist concerns including sexual conflicts, inequality of genders and violence. Her work features her commitment to the socialist and feminist politics. She encourages the audience to question the roles that she created which are portraying the defamiliarization effect of epic theatre. She takes feminism to another level by introducing the audience into her world, where everyone can evolve and change their mentalities just by asking themselves the questions her plays are planting into the readers head, the ones that stroke around social issues of that time. Her characters are reconstructing the history in a feminist way so that the work can understand that the two genders are equal and that whatever a male can do, can also be done by women in the same or in a better way.
Steven Berkoff
Highly acclaimed English actor, playwright, author and director continues to set the benchmark for stunning, intense performances on both stage and screen. Berkoff was born in Stepney, London in August 1937 and received dramatic arts training in both Paris and London and then moved on to performing with several repertory companies, before he formed the London Theatre Group in 1968. Berkoff had actually been appearing in uncredited roles in UK cinema since 1959 and started to get noticed by casting agents with his performances in Hamlet at Elsinore (1964), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975).
Mainstream film fans are probably most familiar with Steven Berkoff via his portrayal of a trio of ice-cold villains in several big budget Hollywood productions of the 1980s. Firstly, he played a rogue general plotting to launch a war in Europe in Octopussy (1983), then a drug smuggling art dealer out to kill Detroit narcotics officer Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and thirdly as a sadistic Russian commando officer torturing Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).
Berkoff continued to contribute scintillating performances and was quite memorable as Adolf Hitler in War and Remembrance (1988), The Krays (1990) and the haunting The Tell-Tale Heart (1991). Further villainous roles followed for the steely Berkoff in Fair Game (1995) and the Jean-Claude Van Damme kick flick Legionnaire (1998). He excelled in the camp comedy 9 Dead Gay Guys (2002), played UK crime figure Charlie Richardson Snr. in Charlie (2004) and then appeared in the passionate Greek film about mail order brides simply titled, Brides (2004).
His screen performances are but one part of the brilliance of Steven Berkoff, as he has additionally built a formidable reputation for his superb craftsmanship in the theatre. Berkoff has written and performed original plays including "Decadence", "Harry's Christmas Lunch" "Brighton Beach Scumbags" and "Sink the Belgrano", as well as appearing in productions of "Hamlet", "Macbeth" and "Coriolanus" to rapturous audiences right across the globe. Furthermore, he has authored several highly entertaining books on the theatre and his life including "The Theatre of Steven Berkoff", "Coriolanus in Deutschland", "A Prisoner in Rio", "I am Hamlet" and "Meditations on Metamorphosis".
source: IMDB
Berkoff's Technique
We started to study Berkoff's technique in October 2017. At first, we made a research to find out more about him and his technique and then we started to work in groups on a scene from "Metamorphosis". I played the man/insect that was transforming in our vision, Sara was behind me playing the role of the insect's wings, she was also doing the moves and the sounds of its heartbeat, so the action became really physical and we used exaggerated moves. At the same time, Jessica and Rose were playing the roles of the other characters in the play and were narrating the actions. The scene looked really abstract and kind of scary. We received a good feedback for our creativity. I've learnt that Berkoff's technique is defying the forms of naturalistic theatre, using exaggerated physical moves to take the audience into every play's small journey and put them through the states they need to feel in order to understand the story.
Our research as a group:
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Bertholt Friedrich 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Living in Munich during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes with theatre plays, whose themes were often influenced by his Marxist thought. He was the main proponent of the genre named epic theatre (which he preferred to call "dialectical theatre"). During the Nazi period and World War II, he lived in exile, first in Scandinavia and then in the United States. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife, long-time collaborator and actress Helene Weigel.
source: Wikipedia
Brecht's Technique
At first we individually made a research about Bertolt Brecht and his theatre technique. I found out some facts about his life, then I started to read about his technique, in order to understand how I should be using it. Brecht's technique or the "Epic Theatre"is meant to highlight important social matters like exploitation and injustice and to make the audience think of a solution while they are watching the play. His plays have the purpose to open the mind of the watcher, making him aware of the fact that what's happening on the stage is not reality, but just the interpretation of it. He says that
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”, we can see in this quote that his intentions are noble, he wants to educate the audience by using his art. One of the key features of his technique is the Alienation Effect, which he says it is "stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them". Also, the technique involves breaking the forth wall as in talking directly to the audience, the use of songs to interrupt the actions and harsh and bright stage lighting, using plaques to show the action or speaking the stage directions out loud. In order to fully understand his technique all of us together prepared a short play in Brecht's style, directed by our teacher that we played in college, in front of an audience.
Repetitions of the play:
Samuel Beckett
One of the twentieth century's most original and important writers, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Samuel Beckett was the author of 'Waiting for Godot' (1952), one of the few plays in theatrical history to redefine the possibilities of the medium. Long fascinated by the cinema (especially silent comedies, a major influence on much of his work, including 'Godot'), Beckett apparently approached Sergei M. Eisenstein in the 1930s and offered to work as his assistant, but Eisenstein never replied. Although most of Beckett's work was written for the stage or the page, he did write one original film script, the 20-minute (almost) silent film Film (1965), which starred his idol Buster Keaton in one of his last film appearances. He also wrote or rewrote several plays for television.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, poet, and literary translator who lived in Paris for most of his adult life. He wrote in both English and French. Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd".
source: IMDB & Wikipedia
Beckett's Technique
We started off in groups again, we made a research about Samuel Beckett, learnt some interesting facts about his life then we started the process of understanding his technique. We all remembered the piece of theatre written by Samuel Beckett that we read and watch on YouTube last year when we first started the course,"Waiting for Godot". We had to reproduce a scene from the play in our groups, so we can have a better understanding of the play and technique. Beckett's technique, often associated with the "Theatre of the Absurd", is more theatrical than literary, he uses stage language (mimesis, imitation of an action). The absurdist fiction of Beckett manages to shock the audience by attacking political or religious certainties aiming to make the audience aware of the issues seen through the writer's eyes in the same time showing them that the solution to these problems can be painfully easy, making the end of the play funny and absurd.
Our research as a group:
Practice
We used Berkoff's and Beckett's techniques for the independent play we made in groups. We had to make up a 10 minutes long piece of theatre, I was in the same group with Jessica G., Yasemin, Laura and Lauren. We started off with a timeline that made the creative process easier for because it was well organised. We finished a bit sooner than we expected because in the first couple of weeks most of the people in the group were showing up to classes and that was a good thing because we had time to rehearse it more. Our play is called "Cupcakes or knives?" and it is about the danger that kids are exposed to when they are using the internet. The storyline followed a girl from an orphanage that fell in love with an older girl she met online. She lives in an unfair world where she is surrounded by mean girls and falsity. Her name is Olivia. Although she is kind of famous online for the videos that she posts singing, she doesn't have any friends. The girl that she finds online feels like a breath of fresh air in her vision. Later she is betrayed by the same girl and she realises that she can't trust people that she met online, that's when her whole world fell apart.
We created together as a group this piece of theatre. We first started with the idea of the play then we continued with developing the characters by using the hot seat technique with everyone in the group, so we can get to know better our characters, I've had Olivia's role. Later, we started to write the ideas of every single act and scene and when we knew everything that was happening in the play we started to write the script of it. We had some issues when we chose the characters because one of the people in our group felt insecure with her role and she wanted us to change the character from male to female so we had to change everything around. The story changed almost completely one week before our performance but it was not a problem because we kept the key features of the play, the same acting techniques and some of the lines. When we performed the play in our college's theatre one of the people in our group didn't show up so we had to replace her with someone from other group that didn't know anything about the role. The good thing is that no one noticed that she was replacing Lauren, the audience really liked our piece and we got a good feedback as well, despite the fact that we had to replace someone.
For our final assessment we had to perform one more time this piece at Pimlico Academy in front of a younger audience and then to work with them on a workshop made by us. Every single group had different exercises to play with the kids. We had the mirror game, zip-zap game, the freeze frames game and improve in the end. It was an amazing experience to work with younger people, I never imagined it could be so nice to run a workshop, we were really happy about it, their teacher and ours as well.
This is some of our work as a group:
We started off in groups again, we made a research about Samuel Beckett, learnt some interesting facts about his life then we started the process of understanding his technique. We all remembered the piece of theatre written by Samuel Beckett that we read and watch on YouTube last year when we first started the course,"Waiting for Godot". We had to reproduce a scene from the play in our groups, so we can have a better understanding of the play and technique. Beckett's technique, often associated with the "Theatre of the Absurd", is more theatrical than literary, he uses stage language (mimesis, imitation of an action). The absurdist fiction of Beckett manages to shock the audience by attacking political or religious certainties aiming to make the audience aware of the issues seen through the writer's eyes in the same time showing them that the solution to these problems can be painfully easy, making the end of the play funny and absurd.
Our research as a group:
Practice
We used Berkoff's and Beckett's techniques for the independent play we made in groups. We had to make up a 10 minutes long piece of theatre, I was in the same group with Jessica G., Yasemin, Laura and Lauren. We started off with a timeline that made the creative process easier for because it was well organised. We finished a bit sooner than we expected because in the first couple of weeks most of the people in the group were showing up to classes and that was a good thing because we had time to rehearse it more. Our play is called "Cupcakes or knives?" and it is about the danger that kids are exposed to when they are using the internet. The storyline followed a girl from an orphanage that fell in love with an older girl she met online. She lives in an unfair world where she is surrounded by mean girls and falsity. Her name is Olivia. Although she is kind of famous online for the videos that she posts singing, she doesn't have any friends. The girl that she finds online feels like a breath of fresh air in her vision. Later she is betrayed by the same girl and she realises that she can't trust people that she met online, that's when her whole world fell apart.
We created together as a group this piece of theatre. We first started with the idea of the play then we continued with developing the characters by using the hot seat technique with everyone in the group, so we can get to know better our characters, I've had Olivia's role. Later, we started to write the ideas of every single act and scene and when we knew everything that was happening in the play we started to write the script of it. We had some issues when we chose the characters because one of the people in our group felt insecure with her role and she wanted us to change the character from male to female so we had to change everything around. The story changed almost completely one week before our performance but it was not a problem because we kept the key features of the play, the same acting techniques and some of the lines. When we performed the play in our college's theatre one of the people in our group didn't show up so we had to replace her with someone from other group that didn't know anything about the role. The good thing is that no one noticed that she was replacing Lauren, the audience really liked our piece and we got a good feedback as well, despite the fact that we had to replace someone.
For our final assessment we had to perform one more time this piece at Pimlico Academy in front of a younger audience and then to work with them on a workshop made by us. Every single group had different exercises to play with the kids. We had the mirror game, zip-zap game, the freeze frames game and improve in the end. It was an amazing experience to work with younger people, I never imagined it could be so nice to run a workshop, we were really happy about it, their teacher and ours as well.
This is some of our work as a group:
