Exploring Characters
Today we focused on our characters physicality, for example my character holds themselves very upright and walks with their head first. I carry and equal weight on both sides and have a good balance, this is because I have had a relatively easy life unlike some of the other convicts. For example they may have lived in poor conditions such as cramped housing or being exposed to illness and disease, my character is very different to this because I am presuming that he has a wealthy family and a good education and therefore has lived in a very different environment to the convicts. Arthur Phillip's eye-line is always looking up, this is because he has a lot of confidence, this comes with his status and power. Because he has a lot of power he looks over people rather then looking at them, he doesn't have to answer to anyone as everyone either has to impress me or not upset or annoy me. I walk with a slightly slower pace than the other characters because even though I have lived an easy life I am older than the other people who are lower ranked than me.
We then had to think about if our characters were animals what would we be? I chose to be a lion because in the animal kingdom, the lion is thought to be in charge of all the other animals. This relates to my character because he is in charge of the whole convict camp and the new colony in Australia. This helped me with my physicality because I started to think about how I would be different to the other characters, especially the more shy and nervous convicts like Mary Brenham. This is because she walks in a very closed manner and her eye-line is mostly looking down, this contrasts to my character because I don't have anything to be nervous of and therefore I can walk with a lot of confidence. When moving around the space as our animals, I was crawling however to look different I held my head up higher to suggest my higher status. I found this difficult because many of the people in my class were also animals that had to be on four legs so it was hard to establish a clear differentiation between everyone. After this we had to gradually had to transform back to our characters in 10 seconds, we had to still maintain some of the characteristics of our animals as we changed back. For example my characteristics didn't change much I mainly changed from walking on four legs to two, I still had to keep my head high and my eye-line constantly focused when walking around.
After this we experimented with different greetings with each other whilst walking around the space, when doing this we had to think about who we were passing to make sure that we had the correct greeting for them, this depends on their status. For example when I was looking at convicts, even though I want them to be reformed so that when they return to a normal society again they will be less likely to commit another crime I don't look at them with as much respect as the officers. This is because the officers have worked hard to gain their title whereas the convicts are only there because they have committed crimes that they were going to be sentenced to death for. I noticed that other people looked at me, showing a lot of respect or stepped out of the way to allow me to walk first, this is because they are aware of the difference between mine and they're characters. Also the other officers know that if they want to have a chance of moving up in the ranks the person they have to impress is Arthur Phillip.
We then did a status exercise on a scale of 1-10 of where our characters would be, we had two separate scales, one for the convicts and one for the officers. This is because some of the characters may have a high status among the convicts such as Liz however they don't have a high status among the officers. We did this to get to know other peoples characters so that we can differentiate the relationships between them, this is so the characters and relationships are clear the audience.
After this we had to lay on the floor, completely relaxed and use Stanislavski's Emotion Memory technique. This is a technique that is commonly used by actors where they use an emotion that they had once felt, they then apply this to how the character is feeling. For example if the character that someone is playing is supposed to have a deep anger, the actor would think back to a time when they felt angry or annoyed and then use this emotion to develop their characterisation whilst playing that particular part. I found this hard because my character has authority over everyone and has to make important decisions whereas i cannot think of a time in my life when i have had alot of authority. Therefore i was unable to relate an experience that i have had in the past to help me with my characterisation, because of this is need to explore other ways of improving my characterisation.
This is from Stanislavski Stystem:Emotion Memory 20th December 2012 Can be found at https://heatheractingwork.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/emotion-memory/ (6th February 2015)
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