Lesson 1

Todays lesson was basically an introduction to studying 'The Seagull' and so quite a lot of the lesson was spent reflecting on Stanislavski's system and figuring out 'how not to act'. We also worked on giving ourselves physical objectives e.g 'To leave' or 'To stay'. This meant that we had to achieve our objective whilst acting and we were told to do this using only one word. For example, once in pairs, A was given the physical objective 'To leave' and had a psychological objective of 'To not hurt' and they could only say the word 'Yes' whilst B was given the physical objective 'To keep from leaving' and the psychological objective 'To love' whilst only being able to say 'No'. This meant that A had to leave without hurting B's feelings which proved very difficult especially since B was completely in love with them.

During this task I was B and I found that the task was very effective and proved that words don't matter so much as how they are portrayed. I learnt this because delivering just the word 'No' was just as effective as asking my partner not to leave -if not more so.

It really allowed me to be:
- Spontaneous
- Act on instinct
- Create emotion in my voice
- Play around with the way that I said the word 'No'

We then went onto doing 4 moving freeze frames to show our objectives. This was quite interesting because at first we did this with no words and then we added in 4 words. I'd never before experimented or thought about how just feeling so strongly about something or being so committed to an objective couldn make it come across so effectively.

We then put on a little performance as a class that ties everything that we had done together. It was really fun. The performance started off with us all milling in the space and then we took one of the audience members hands and asked them something like 'have you seen him?', then we took them over to our partner and started having a conversation which we included them in. For example, our scene went something like this:

B - You packed?
A - Yeah but do we have to go? I want to go to her...
B - You don't know what you're saying! You need to sober up
A - ...Please understand
B - Understand you?
A - It's best for the both of us
B - No, you don't understand what you're saying. I'm the one you love. Remember?
etc.

Having an audience member in our scene meant that I was then able to interact with them and accuse them of being the person that A wanted so badly and my objectives of 'to keep from leaving' and 'to ignore' turned into 'to hate' and 'to torment'. This was completely performed from instinct though because we had to act according to the audience which went very well.

The scene then went onto the freeze frames and finished with the yes and no partner work.

I also really liked watching the other groups and it was very clear that we all made very different choices when putting on a performance. For instance, Simon's class took a comedic approach to the task at hand which was enjoyable and hilarious. Whereas Sarah's class were very serious and had a strong ensemble. I really like the use of paper folded in half to represent the seagull. The way that the actors moved the pieces of paper really made the experience magical and gave the paper a bird like quality.