Constantin Stanislavski's Method Acting

Constantin Stanislavski was born in Russia in 1863 and disproved of the acting style at the time, he felt performances did not reflect reality as acting techniques were mechanical and lacked real feelings. To counter this overused system Stanislavski formed his own acting school and devised a system to help actors bring reality into their performances, today this is known as 'Method Acting' or more simply, 'The Method'. In the Shakespeare duologue my partner and I have produced I used some of Stanislavski's techniques to enhance my performance and create a more realistic character. In the scene I play the character Olivia who is desperately in love with the character Viola who is disgised as a manservant named Cesario and is trying to gain his …show more content…
To do this Stanislavski devised what we call the “Fundamental Questions”, which help the actor gain an understanding of the character as a person and where that character is at a particular moment in time. It also helps to gain an understanding of what the character wants to achieve in the scene and throughout the whole play, the super objective, helping the actor understand what tactics their character will be utilising to get what they want. The fundamental questions were very helpful to me especially the question “What surrounds me?”. That question helped me to visualise the place where the scene was taking place, in my scene's case: a garden, and immerse myself in the characters world. Immersing myself in the characters world helped me to tune out the people watching and what was going on around me in a similar way to the circles of attention, it helped me to only focus on what was happening within the scene and how to act in the mental image I had of what would be surrounding the