1st October - Continuing of Stanislavski

As usual, we would start off with our yoga sessions and as taught on our first class, we used the previous exercises as a warm up to get our body stretched. For this class we were taught more exercises but for the upper body. These exercises worked our waist, abs and our legs (even though you are working your upper body!). After this we had our calming session where we laid down, relaxed and reflected on our university experience so far.
Once yoga had finished, we continued our work on Stanislavski. Our preparation work for the class was to look over our given scripts so we know more about our character. The reason for this was because we had to do two separate workshops around this. I didn't get the opportunity to perform in these workshops but I still got a good experience in watching them to see what the outcome would be. The first activity was called 'Getting your chair'. This is an improvisation workshop where you, as your character, have to walk up to someone sitting down on a chair and persuade them to give you their seat. It was interesting to see all the completely different characters come together. The next workshop we did was a different way of portraying the 'Magic If'. This was done with hot seating. For this activity you only need two people on the set. As their characters they would have to pick a room that their character would be sat in and make out that that is the room that they are in rather than the other room that the other character thinks they are in. For example, one of the characters was called Jean from Miss Julie and another was a simple man looking for a zoo. Jean is from a very much older period than this other man as he was from our current time period. As they are so different, it was interesting to watch the contrast in what the characters were saying to respond to each other. Jean acting very professional trying to be of service to this other man and this other man just trying to get on with his own thing. This activity concluded our session.

So far, this class has been my favourite so far as it has really given me a taster of what CTP is all about. It was interesting to use Stanislavski's work to make two completely different characters come together in an improvisation which actually made it quite comical to watch.