Mother Courage And Her Children At The National Arts Theatre

Yesterday our theatre group went to visit a Brecht production in the National Arts Theatre.
The theatre was called the olivier and was the first theatre in that style and shape with the stage at times being a semi circle and at other times a full circle

Lessons on Naturalism

During the course of the past 2 weeks as a group and as individuals we have worked on techniques to achieve the most naturalistic methods to act with. We have used exercises from the practitioner Stanislavski to build up naturalistic and believable characters. 

One of the exercises i felt that helped me the most ,although slightly putting me out of my comfort zone was one of where we had to think of a memory that had, had a great effect  on us in the past. Mine was an upsetting memory and we had share it with a partner. Our partner then gave us a separate scene, in which we could apply the emotions from the memory into this scene in the most naturalistic way possible. The point of using the painful memory was to give us a realer and more beilievable insight as to how our character would feel during this scene. It helped us act as 'real' as possible and made us really think deeply into how we would acually feel rather than just trying to act. The process however was quite challenging as i felt it triggered a lot of emotion, therfore we had to be able to learn to disattach from this feeling as well. 

Another exercise we did was more imaginitive, where we had to create what we thought our character look like mentally , this was a good exercise for character buliding as we thought into what they would wear and their appearance. Music was used to help stimualte our minds and give us a sense of being in that time era. It helped us gain focus and make up an idea of our characters background.