Richard taught us some techniques like; magic if, magic if is a technique developed by Stanislavsky, this technique is all about imagination and the way magic if is used is by asking yourself ‘what if?’ this allows you to think deeper about your character and about other characters and their relationship or how the play, plays out. Given circumstances is the act of reading around the play to find the ‘facts given’ so and example that we’d look for would be; how old is the character? oh here on page 4 line 73 it says they are 65 years old now that we know that and were not guessing stuff about characters or set/scenario, its the facts that we’ve been given and not the things we have guessed, it needs to be in the script to be a ‘given circumstances’. these techniques can benefit me as an actor because by knowing them I can improve my characters and add so much more creativity and flavor to them and just make them so much more interesting, to catch the audience of guard.
Konstantin Stanislavsky developed most of these techniques but also developed the ‘system’ for method acting, which was developed by practitioners like, Lee Strasburg, Stella Adler. Lee Strasburg created the ‘method’ after Stanislavsky created the system, inspired by curiosity, both Stanislavsky and Lee went into the profession of teaching, to teach young actors about their discoveries. Stella Adler developed “her own method”, built on the studies and discoveries of Stan & Lee. this wasn’t a hard task for her since she is the ‘only american actor who studied with Stanislavsky’. Stella Adler, and her techniques and her ‘unique method’ are all about imagination, techniques like ‘magic if’ are big on her method. She created a technique/exercise where you pour every ounce of imagination you can into one little object, you create a character/person out of the little object and your imagination , you create a backstory with this person get attached have good memories, and in the end you could choose to break and kill them, and if you kill/break them depending on how you feel and what emotion you felt at that exact moment the technique/exercise was perfect.
We worked on our voices during our music lesson with Olexandra, a fair amount. We researched and worked on our voice box’s, and our ‘voice print’. Voice print is the equivalent of our fingerprints but for our voices, it means that everyone has their own unique voice and no one else has the same exact voice as someone else. we also studied our voice box’s, and learnt that as we grow older our voice changes due to the Adams apple in our voice box, because when we’re children our Adams apple is smaller, our voice’s are higher pitched than when we are adults because our Adams apple grows and as it does our voices get lower, women don’t have such a big Adams apple so their voices are higher than men’s voices.
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