The Three Sisters - Anton Chekov

Stanislavski's System

Stanislavski (an acting practitioner) created this system in the early 1900's. This system helps actors understand their character and the nature of their character a lot better. This allows emotions and nuances on stage a lot clearer and believable. There are six parts to this system:

• Who am I?
• Where am I?
• When is it?
• What do I want?
• How will I get it?
• What do I need to overcome? 

To answer these questions we would need to:

• Read our scripts and pick out things people say about our characters and what our character says to get the nature of our character.
• Try to figure out how our character would act in certain situations based on what we have found (not necessarily in the play).
•  Read in between the lines to find the objectives of our characters and why they want to get to that point, because if you know your characters wants and needs you would start to understand what kind of emotions they are driven by.
• Also reading between the lines for nuances (don't rely on the stage directions). This helps us to become the character and not just act the character. 

Given circumstances, Subtext and Through lines

This is the information that is plain to see that tells the actor where and when he/she is and what they are doing, these are usually given in the stage directions. This information usually doesn't give the whole story of a character so the actor has room to interpret the given circumstances in any way he/she wants. I read through the script to see what the given circumstances were for me, I found out that my character Aundrey is the brother to the main characters, he's quite chunky and he's more into education. We also see that Aundrey is madly in love with Natasha in act 1 but not so much in act 2. I began to dig deeper (by finding the subtext between the lines) as to why Andrey's feelings became less and I deducted it was because Natasha took over the house and he starts to understand why his sisters hated her. When I was Ferapont it was a little harder because my Ferapont was only in act 3 and on;y said 3 lines, all I was given was that he is old (60+) and that he served in the military. I had to read the whole script to get a through line for Ferapont so I could get some nuances for his character. The through line for a character is basically their story, how they go about getting to their objective.
In act 1 Andrey's objective is to get Natasha to fall in love with him that's why he takes her away from everyone else to confess his love. He succeeds in his objective because the act ends (where we stopped) ends in Andrey kissing Natasha passionately. I think in act 2 Andrey has realised that Natasha has been taking over their house, so now I think his objective is to get away from his home and work because he says 'Its Friday. Nothing to do today, but I'll go in anyway. Find something to do, beats staying here'. This shows that he didn't like his home, but he also says 'Endless paperwork' which implies that he also doesn't like his work. This shows that he believes that staying home with his wife is worse than boring himself to death doing his work.

 Other things we learnt in this unit

Emotional memory

Emotional memory is where an actor finds a real-life experience that they have had that is either similar to that of their character or they felt similar emotions to that character. The actor then borrows the feelings and/or nuances from this experience to make his/her performance more realistic. An exercise that we learnt from our tutors really helped with this process was an exercise I like to call 'Remember, Remember'. In this exercise we had to sit and close our eyes, we then had to think of a time where we were happy (for example getting surprised with our favorite chocolate) and a time where we felt disgust (like having to change a little sibling's diapers). This exercise gave us two memories we could use if we ever needed these two emotions. I added two of my own memories to my memory repertoire for my emotional memory. I think emotional memory really helped my acting during this unit because it turned out that it helped my acting become way more realistic. I used emotional memory more on act 1 because I had to remember a time where I was head over heels in love and move those feelings towards the actress playing Natasha because we had to share a kiss, and even though I had already kissed a cast member before (units 1-4: Romeo and Juliet) I don't think it was as passionate as this one because this one had to last until the lights went out (it wasn't just a peck). Using emotional memory I was able to borrow that passion from one of my memories of when I was in love.

Magic if

Stanislavski came up with the concept of actors asking themselves: 'What would I do if I was in this situation?'. This means that the actor chooses either to put him/herself into the shoes of their character or to act out the characters situation. I feel like asking this question and going into my character's shoes was best for me because when I tried acting out the situations they were not as effective as when I walked in the shoes of my character. I know this because during rehearsals I tried acting both ways. This was because I wanted to see which I was more comfortable with. I figured out that asking this question before I started acting was way better because it made my performance much more believable to me and I've learnt that if I believe it then the audience will.

Learning About my Character

My main focus in this session was to think about why my characters do certain things (their motive/goal). To do this I had to figure out the characters through line, thought processes and I had to play their inner monologues. For example, in act two I had to do some digging into the character of Andrey. I found out that, in the space where we finished act one to the start of act two, Andrey had gotten married to Natasha and they had a baby together (Bobik). I also found out that Natasha is having an affair with Protopopov (Andrey's boss). I think that Andrey knows about the affair because when he is talking to Ferapont in act two he says 'I'm secretary of the district council, under Proto-fucking-popov'. This line could mean one of two things:
1) Protopopov is a really bad boss
2) He knows about the affair between 'Proto-fucking-popov' and Natasha
Also in researching Andrey, I found that he is quite a conserved character in act two, he says ' my wife doesn't understand me and I can't talk to my sisters, I'm scared they'll laugh at me... judge, me'
Another exercise that we did to learn about our character is to imagine our character as an animal (bearing in mind we read our scripts). I thought of Andrey as a cat because he is a lover, not a fighter.