Respond to the presentations.

Nan Zhou

Ms. Guarino

IB Lit & Performance

22 Jan 2018

Ways of Acting

In the class this week, all the members of our class shared their presentations about the famous actors/actress. These presentations introduced not only the actors and the actress themselves, but more focused on the acting technique they created. Some of them encourage people to imagine the situation that their characters are in and think what they did when they were in such a situation. There are also actors that led people to imagine what they would do if they are in the same situation. They don’t want people to put their own experience in acting because they think that is not good for the actors.  A few of these actors encouraged people to focus more on their body movements. However, by the end of the presentations, I had an struggle. Should people just imitate what they had seen or done when they are acting, or should they just imagine what might happen and be as creative as they can in their performance.

    Lots of these famous actors/actress are related to Konstantin Stanislavski. Or in other words, they are mostly the students of Stanislavski. Mr. Stanislavski is a Russian actor. His method of acting is called the “system” of acting. Stanislavski created the foundation of this method. However, Lee Strasberg speeded the method and taught it to many other people. He make his students think of their experiences when they are acting. Like “how did you feel when...” “what did you do when…”. In that way, people can express their real feeling and make the acting more nature and realistic. He also inspire people to live the way that their characters lives in order to have a deeper understanding of the character. In my opinion, this method is very important for acting. People have to feel the same as the characters do in order to put that emotion in their performance. If one don’t even have the feeling in his/her mind, how can they spread the emotions to the audience. Sanford Meisner supported the similar method as Lee’s. Meisner strongly believe that people should put personality into the character. One of his quote was “Acting truthfully in unreal circumstances.” This quote inspired lots students. Michael Chekhov was another students of Stanislavski’s. He believed that method acting leads the characters to a rich internal life that can eventually help the audiences to understand the characters deeper as well. Peter Brook made some contribution to spread Stanislavski's idea as well. He encourage students to imagine themselves in an unreal situation and act it out. The activity we did was to walk on an imaginary rope. I enjoyed the activity a lot and I think activities like this can not only increase people’s acting ability but also help with their imaginary a lot.

    However, the actor that I introduced was quite different from the rest of others in the presentation. Vsevolod Meyerhold wished to help people to express their feelings using a method called biomechanics. This method helps develop and inspire people’s emotion potentials using series of body movements. He even let his actors put on masks so that their faces don’t take away audiences’ attentions from their body movements. He also uses the method called Symbolism. When he uses symbolism in his plays, the things in the play will not represent just itself, but much more things. In my opinion, Meyerhold is more focused on the theme of the whole play rather than the skill performed than a single actor. He believes that play can be a tool to reform the nation and to bring more ideas to people.

    All the actors/actresses introduced in these presentations had made great contribution to the development of theaters. I believe, by using their methods flexibly and correctly will help our performance skills improve enormously as well.