IB Theatre – The senses

Friday 24th October 2009

To start the lecture everyone started with a little run through of our pieces, trying to understand what exact mood the character was following for my chosen section.

Once we had established the general mood, for me I found that my character Jimmy is very agitated and annoyed with his wife’s behaviour at the time, we did another imagination type activity:

Senseless – This activity is very much linked to the works and ideas of Stanislavski, and his ideas behind naturalism. Everyone took a space within the room and lay down, relaxed on the floor. The leader of the activity then went through various senses, with us using our imagination in order to relate these to experiences etc.. For example, A strawberry, this would trigger the participants’ imagination to the smell of a strawberry. Feelings and emotions were also used, in order to trigger are memory of certain emotions and feelings and the idea is to recreate this within our pieces, and the emotions portrayed by our characters.

This for me was a very useful activity, I could see Stanislavski’s theory behind this activity; being able to place your emotions and feelings into another characters shoes.