When choosing my role as an actor, I delved into research about the various acting style I can carry out to help ensure I gave myself good platform for my performance. Firstly, before I carried this task I had to look at what style of playwright Caryl Churchill is into; more or less the themes of her plays. Roughly, her plays focus on feminism issues, tyrannical matters and sexual affairs mostly political. The play Love & Information is a play based on the human’s insatiable need for information with disregarding our need for capacity of love. The play is humanist in its purest form; I believe my acting style had to be malleable in a sense; which brings me to one of the 3 acting styles I thought of using for the final performance.

1. The style I looked into was classic acting which was created by Constantin Stanislavski. He created a system where it uses the actor’s feelings and experiences to help build a connection with the character they are portraying. In doing so, the actor puts themselves in the characters thought process, builds some familiarity to help with a better portrayal of them. This method made me, think about the play’s essence in a general means. The play is essentially a need for information, so I thought many times how eager I was for any sort of information. For example, I remembered a scenario when a relative was taken to the hospital for an illness, but I wasn’t in the country so I waited eager by the phone in anticipation for the news on their health condition.  I imagined myself in the Terminal scene, where the patient was pleading with the doctor to find out their condition. I felt an almost resonance with the play’s ploy and it made me consider this method because it focuses on putting myself in the shoes of the character.
2. Secondly, the second type of acting that I researched was Chekhov’s Acting Technique. This method focuses on when an actor puts in to motion the character’s need or internal dynamic in the form of an external gesture. Consequently, the outside gesture is “suppressed and incorporated internally, allowing the physical memory to inform the performance on an unconscious level”. This means that the actor must express the character through outward actions, which helps gives them a trait you associate them with. For example, a certain hand gesture they perform when they’re angry. This forming a body and mind connection. This method can prove helpful when being spontaneous during rehearsals; it might provide a spark for missing piece for a part of the play.
3. Lastly, the third type of acting I researched is Method acting. This method focuses on the actor becoming engulfed in the role of the character they’re playing in the play/film. More so being the character all time and living your life as them whenever is necessary. For example, there was an article about actor Jared Leto staying in character as Joker by sending his co stars obscure gifts. This method might suit my needs for the performance, but it gives a great insight as to how another method I could look to in future roles. However, the idea of staying in character does intrigue me because they’re a few scenes where the characters are similar, so if there’s a way I can live like them then I’ll be inclined to test out this theory outside of rehearsals.

Overall through extensive research the types of acting have their merits, but I feel like Stanislavsky’s method is suiting to me because I can visualize myself more in character. This still makes me understand them to point where I can relate. I can pursue that type due to my familiarization with the need to get information.

This session is a culmination of how we want we want our plays to look like. We rehearsed them more again but with more detail, we looked at the use of even added an outside source such as sound or a prop. We continued the same notion from last week, but with more emphasis on the style of play. During, the discussion at the we spoke about what are our expectations from the play and how we want the members of the audience to perceive us. In doing, so we spoke about of what we want our definitive roles to be in  the play; which we spoke about going round in a circle. The idea was that we don’t have to conform to just one role but can dabble in others as long you don’t make it affect your creative process. As we were going around in circle and stating our roles and explaining, it dawned on me as why i wanted to do more than just perform. Additionally, we it came to be my turn, I elaborated that I wanted to do performing/acting firstly and directing in small capacity. The idea is that I wanted to look at how the style of the performance be manipulated through different lenses whether that is a group or an individual.

In this session, we extensively looked at the scenes we familiarized with more than the others. As the play is quite we separated the plays into 2 parts so it helped with the cluster. This session was more of an outlook on how each scene fits our performers acting style. This was important because merge our ideas together, in terms of how the settings of the scenes are. The process of this was creating a new way of viewing the plays; more or less re imagining them. Churchill’s vision is still intact but we can definitely add more to it. We handpicked the plays we gravitated towards the most to; this helped us build a bond with the plays and expanded our creative process. We even spoke about created our own scenes to add into the final performance. Some students reenacted their scenes for us and we gave them feedback and how it good it was and how it needs improving. Churchill’s direction in her plays carries us on a journey through randomly placed scenes but however, we spoke of a way of how to piece them like a puzzle together.

This week was a continuation from the previous, but in fact we focused on how performers react to different lighting situations. As you should, for our plays we are focusing on Caryl’s Churchill’s Love & Information play. These are comprised of various short and long plays that all have connection to one another, whether it’s subtle or oblivious. Her vision is to always to get her views across ranging from social, moral and political. These plays are a window in how she operates as playwright and it’s up to us as audience members to interpret. However, this workshop was lighting based which made us try to figure what each would look like with a certain set of lighting For example, the scene Terminal; this was used with lightning square with the doctor’s face being in the shadows which gave the scene a more ominous look. The scene is about a patient pleading with a doctor for the results of how they’ve got to live, and the doctor seems hesitant to deliver the news. Moreover, we played around how the doctor’s demeanor can be such as reluctant, evil, sad, or even optimistic. Each demeanor added a new dimension of how the scene made be taken into context. We gathered feedback at the end of the session and discussed that we should experiment with tones of voices and even accents to a degree.

Above is the different lightnings that were used in rehearsals when performing terminal.

In this week, we focused on acting using everyday life scenario’s such going on the train to work, standing on the escalator or visiting and art exhibition at museum. The goal behind these scenarios was to understand how quickly we can organize the rostras. With knowing that our performance was based on using the them, we had to figure how many situations we could perform whilst making sure we set as quickly as possible. The performance side of this was, being ourselves in terms how act as a normal human being. It was interesting how conscious you become of how you are, when performing this. You start question if you really do these certain actions on daily basis. It tapped into a new side of my acting I wasn’t fully aware of yet. This gave me ideas of I can perceive my movement, when we finally got into the script reading.