Philip's+ideas

Stanislavski IB Night Workshop Ideas By Philip

1. The audience as a whole should be broken up ideally into groups of 3. Meisner, a branch off of Stanislavski, says that for the purpose of learning there should be 2 actors, or people undergoing the activities and a third Observer. The Observer, or third person of the group, undertakes the role of watching the other two in the activity and learns through watching. All three people should be constantly switching their roles. This could work in a group of 4, instead of 1 observer there could be 2. The observer’s role includes being a kind of conductor for the activities, specifically starting and stopping etc. 2. A possible warm up: The Repetition Game, both partners A and B sit in chairs and face one another. The Observer starts the activity by saying “start,” and then one of the two partners makes a statement about the other partner like, “green sweater” or “blue eyes.” The partner whom the statement is about then repeats the statement, and then the other repeats it so on so forth. The statement has to be true about the person and if its not the Observer should stop the activity and start it again. After the some the time, the Observer should stop the activity. If over the course of the mimicry the phrase green sweater becomes for ex: green setter it is fine. The point of this activity is to promote awareness, and listening to your fellow actor. There should be no rush and no competition in saying the phrase. 3. Building “Putting into language” onto the Repetition Game: The same thing with further development. Using the above example, lets say one partner has a green sweater and the other has a reed sweater. The red sweater partner says “You have a green sweater” the partner with the green sweater cannot say that “you have a green sweater” because the other partner has a red sweater, thus he/she would say “I have a green sweater.” The game would continue following this new element. The Observer should be the overseer in this game, if a partner pauses for to long the Observer can restart the process, also if a person just mimics what’s being said out of habit the Observer should halt the process and start again. All the while the statements should be true and deal with the physical nature of the other person. 4. The 3 Movement Game: Partner A thinks of a provocative question and asks it, partner B must repeat the question without thought, then partner A muses out loud about partner B’s reaction

A: Does anyone really love you? B: Does anyone really love me? A: gauges reaction, ex: You got slightly rosy so my best bet is that you were embarrassed etc.

(Morgan): Philip! The Repetition Game is really cool! It's actually one of my favorite exercises, and one of the coolest things about the way Meisner trained people.

We may have to ask Mr. Hadley if it's not straying too far from the base though. Meisner taught a different kind of realism than Stanislavski did. His was based on experiencing the action as it was happening in the scene, with every action having a cause, everything being a reaction to something else, where Stanislavski was more about emotional recall, and making everything as real as possible in that way. If we want to talk about different kinds of realism, then this is awesome, but if we want to focus on Stanislavski, we may want to save it for another time.