Preparation for specialist study UNIT 7

Assignment 7


Task 1 - Acting technique



Konstantin Stanislaki is a practitioner who teaches four main techniques to encourage actors to perform with emotional truth. The first technique is given circumstances, understanding the details about the character and their backstory can help you develop how the character thinks and behaves. it gives reason to the lines we are reading, what has happened before the scene, what are the characters backstories, when is it set, what are the problems the characters are overcoming etc; all of this gives depth to the characters/scene. These include:


What is happening? What’s the situation in the scene?

Where and when does it take place? Historical period, time of day, location, weather, etc.

Who is involved? What are the relationships and statuses of the characters?

Why are the events happening? What has led up to this moment in the character’s life?


He also teaches the 7 stages of tension which is a more physical approach to building a character, affecting how they carry themselves and how much tension they hold in their body. These stage include:

Exhaustion/No tension: The body is completely relaxed (e.g., just waking up, very tired).

Neutral/Calm: Normal, relaxed state without any extra energy or stress.

Curiosity/Concentration: Some interest or focus, where the body begins to engage slightly (e.g., listening carefully).

Alertness: A readiness, aware of surroundings but not stressed.

Suspense: On edge, like something is about to happen (e.g., waiting for something crucial).

Crisis/Decision-making tension: High energy, crucial moment where a choice or action must be taken.

Explosion: Outburst of emotion, physical or emotional breakdown (e.g., rage, terror, uncontrollable


The next technique is called the ‘magic if’, which is when actors put themselves in their character’s position to see what they would do or feel if they were in that situation. This helps actors find personal connections to develop the emotional truth.

He also teaches about sense memory, engaging 5 senses to create an immersive experience for the actor and audience. These senses help the actor connect and commit to the character and the whole story.


To put these technique’s into practice, we first were given a no context scene, and had to answer all of these questions to create our own given circumstances, and give reason to the lines in the scene. We were given a short script, and had to write answers to all of these questions, and keep them in mind when performing the pieces. This is an important technique as it affects the character a lot, for example, have they eaten food or are they hungry (so a bit fractious), is it morning or night (are they tired or energised).

Then, we walked round the room, flowing through all 7 levels of tension, moving our body’s depending on which level we were at. This can be used when playing characters, e.g some characters may be on edge so would hold themselves full of suspense.

I used the ‘Magic if’ during our assessment of ‘The Flick’, in which I asked myself how I would feel in my character (Avery)’s position. This was helpful as I was able to find similarities and differences to develop my understanding of her. I also used lot’s of his techniques in my performance of DNA. I used the ‘Magic if’ to think about how I would react in the situation, the given circumstances to develop my monologues, and the emotional memory to think about how I felt when being a part of a group that I don’t really fit in in.



Uta Hagen is an American Actress and teacher who’s techniques emphasise realism and truth in performance, by drawing upon personal experience. She built on Stanislavski’s work, and emphasises authenticity and inner truth. This involves use of the emotional memory to recall past experiences to develop your understanding of the characters emotions, therefore making the performance more believable. Substituting your feelings in helps to fuel the character development, relaying your emotions to a situation similar that you have experienced.

She also teaches about the use of the 9 questions, which all add depth to what your trying to portray. These are:

Who am I? What are the circumstances? What are the relationships? What do I want? What’s in my way? What do I do to get what I want? Where am I? What time is it? What do I do before the scene begins?

There are 2 exercises which can help put these technique’s into practise. 1) Emotional Activation, respond to emotional prompts through subtle change in breath and expression. 2) Relationship Exploration, improvise a short exchange to explore emotional dynamics.

We completed these exercises in class by looking in the mirror and reacting with our expressions to different emotional prompts. Then we got into pairs, and created a scene in which one person broke up with the other. We then were given a no context scene in which we had to answer all 9 of these questions, to enhance the performance and increase our understanding of the character and their emotions in the scene.


Finally we studied Stanford Meisner, who’s technique centres on truthful reactions and interactions, fostering spontaneity through exercises like repetition. He had a different approach, and focused on external responses rather than internal. He has the famous quote: ‘Acting is the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.’ Meisner pushes the importance of living truthfully, even when playing fictional characters in imaginary situations, reacting instinctively and drawing on natural human behaviour. He also teaches moment to moment acting, which is staying fully present in the moment, being responsive to what’s happening immediately in the scene. This gives actors a heightened sense of spontaneity, and therefore authenticity. He developed techniques to enhance instinctive responses. These involved: repetition exercises, to respond truthfully to a partner’s behaviour, emotional preparation, to connect to emotions before a scene, and independent activity, to do a task truthfully whilst reacting naturally.


To put this into practice, we got into pairs and stated an observation about our partner, who repeats it back to you, adjusting with natural reactions. This repeats and continues, with the focus of staying present, listening, and reacting truthfully. This is helpful to keep us trusting our instinct instead of having planned reactions, which is a lot easier to do when you really listen to what the other person is saying.

I used Meisner’s techniques during our connections piece, Normalised. As my role had no lines, it was very important for me to focus on reacting, which Meisner helps with. I aimed to stay in the moment, reacting to things as if it was the first time I was hearing them whilst staying in character. We had rehearsed so much, we had done lot’s of repetition, meaning when we performed it we were able to respond truthfully.


Task 2 - Laban’s Physical Theatre


‘Just as the voice must be able to convey character of emotion, so must the movement of the body, from a large gesture to the merest flick of the finger’.

Laban’s physical theatre is a system for understanding and expressing emotions through movement. Its framework helps actors and choreographers analyze and utilize the body’s movements to convey meaning and story. Effort, or what Laban describes as dynamics, is a system for understanding more subtle characteristics about movement with respect to inner intention. This can be broken down into different parts, the 4 elements of Laban.

The first element is spaceIt’s important to be aware of the surroundings, adapting to the environments, and using the space to highlight different sections of the dance to separate it. The space can be direct or indirect. It also involves the placement of the movers, to balance the space. The next element is weight, which can be heavy or light. Another is speed, which can be sudden or sustained. And finally flow, which can be bound or free.

Effort actions include: float, punch, glide, slash, dab, wring, flick, press. We did an exercise in class where we did an action based on each word. It wasn’t necessarily a dance move, but a movement that matched criteria of these words. These actions can be used to change quickly between the physical manifestations of movement.

Relationships is another important part of his techniques. This includes partner work, or ensemble work, which requires trust, good chemistry, proxemics, character relationships, strong connections to be able to move as one to create a certain look. It’s also about different muscle groups working together, different dance styles working together and how the movement matches the emotion of the piece.

Also, the dynamics of a piece is important as without it there would be no routine, it creates a structure and gives excitement to a piece. Dynamics can add texture, change it from hard and soft, long and short, snappy, slow, or reverse.

There are also lot’s of different shape dynamics as well, such as shape forms, modes of shape change (shape flow, carving, directional), shape flow support, and shape qualities (sinking, spreading, retreating, advancing, enclosing and rising).


In teams, we produced a piece of physical theatre in the style of Laban. The initial stimulus was a photo of a person standing still in the middle, with everyone around him moving quickly. Through the process, we started it with the concept that as people touched her they became heavier(weight), and she became lighter, till we were all heavy and she was light. We were then given instructions to add certain elements to the dance. We added a canon, so we each reached out away from the centre in a canon motion. We also added a lift, where the person was carried forward in the air. We had already included a change of formation and a change of pathway. The video of our work can be seen at the bottom of this page.


Task 3 - Ensemble singing

To do a vocal warm up, we start with our posture. Our shoulders straight, knees soft, feet at shoulder width apart, imagining a piece of string holding up our backs. This helps to get the best out of our voice by opening our lungs and diaphragm.

Then we begin to stretch, doing a facial warm up. We massage our face, rubbing our cheeks, nose and mouth to get them loose. We drag down our fists on our jaw to release any tension. Then we massage our tongue placing our finger under our mouth/jaw. Then, continuing warming up the mouth we do some lip trills and tongue circles(one way then another).

After, we do some breathing exercises, going in through the nose and out through the mouth, this is because our nose has lots of little hairs which help block any bad air, and our mouths breathe out any that gets in. It also warms the air before it enters the lungs. We do lots of deep breaths, by breathing in for 4, then out for 4/8/12/16. This exercise is important to train our breath for when we're singing and need to hold long notes etc.

Then we work on our diction. We do different consonant sounds, plosives(BDG, PTK) and fricatives(FThV). Furthermore, we do tongue twisters. Some of these may include: ‘Red lorry Yellow lorry’, ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore…’, ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…’, ‘The blue black bug bit the big black bear…’.

Then we move on to sirens. We can do this with a ‘ng’ sound, a lip trill, or a tongue roll. This helps us use the full range of our voice, reaching the highest note and lowest note. This is a semi occlusion, meaning it has a narrowed vocal tract, which aims to help release excess tension from the muscles that you use to produce your voice.

Next, we do some scales and arpeggios, tpo once again stretch our voice and warm up the vocal cords. We do a five note scale, or octave jumps such as singing somewhere over the rainbow.

Finally, we tie all of this together with some warm up songs. These use all the different aspects of the warm up in one thing. Some of these songs include: ‘12345’, ‘Oh when the saints’, ‘To stop the train’.

We often sing songs in Tom’s sessions, splitting into harmony parts to add depth to the songs. We sang through all the songs in Pinocchio, we once sang ‘down the road’ from stranger things, and we sang ‘You will be found’ from Dear Evan Hansen.

An example of our dance/song 'American idiot' can be seen at the bottom of this page. 


Task 4 - Acting for Screen

I played the role of ‘Eve’ in the feature film, Curtain Call. This was my first screen project which taught me a lot of different skills, and was an excellent learning experience. We filmed for the whole of January, I decided to learn almost all my lines in December to prepare myself fully, and understand my character more. The filming schedule was full on, and we worked more on the actual filming than the rehearsal, which is very different to stage. In a stage performance you spend all the time rehearsing with a small amount of time actually performing. However, we did get the opportunity to come in for extra rehearsals to get given the directors instructions and learn to work with the rest of the cast.

It is different to stage, in that the camera captures all the angles it needs, meaning you don’t have to turn out to face the audience constantly, you don’t have to project your voice as their are mics to pick up the sound, and you don’t have to improvise when things go wrong, as it can just be cut and restarted. Acting for screen is also more about the subtleties in your expression. As the film is shown on a screen with lots of close ups, the viewers can see your emotions clearly, and they do not have to be explicitly shown or exaggerated like they do on stage. I enjoyed acting for screen, as I could work with the subtleties and show a lot of emotion behind the eyes, something which I think is a skill of mine.

We worked a lot on continuity, keeping things the same between takes. For example, I had a wig on at the start, but after half way through, so we had to ensure that my wig was on and off for the right scenes. We also had our makeup done before every shoot, so the makeup artists had to be careful to keep it the same as the shoot before. But, there were details that had to be kept the same in between takes. Such as walking forwards on a certain line, keeping your hair in the same position, starting the scene in the same pose, etc. It’s also important to keep the rhythm and speaking aspects as similar as possible, as to not ruin the flow of the take. The repeated takes was to get different camera angles or to correct mistakes in the previous one, therefore the actors had to focus on keeping the same.

I also did A table scene in lesson, which was a short family argument scene. This was very different, it was very short and filmed in 4 takes. A close up of each person and one wide angle. We were having a family dinner in the scene, so it was important to eat at the same time each take, drink at the same time, move the fork at the same time etc.


Task 5 - Theatre production roles

My production role for DNA is costume. After some convincing from me, our cast decided to not have it in school uniform, as we imagine the story to take place during a half term, or school holidays as the kids have so much time to hang out and meet up. But, Eve will be in uniform at the end, to show how long she has been lost for. To help decide what to do here, I made a poll on teams which everyone voted in to have uniform or not.



To help people understand what they needed to wear, I gave everyone some outlines as to what their costume should be. : try use things you already have, casual teenage outfits, 2010-2020 vibe, things you would wear outside, no large logos and match it to your character.


To put all my ideas together, here is a mood board of costumes I created, based on other companies productions of DNA, and outfits I think would be suitable.



I also developed some ideas for each character, these are as follows.

Jan and Mark: - casual outfits that coincide with each other - perhaps wear something that matches - jeans - cool jackets

John Tate: - joggers for bottoms - trainers or branded shoes - hoodie? thick coat? - something that shoes him trying to be cool and hard looking

Lou: - very basic - too anxious to wear anything outside of the box - joggers/comfy clothes

Cathy: - show off her chavviness - scruffy but cool - shows her confidence - bit wacky

Richard: - straight leg jeans - colourful hoodie - plain jacket

Leah: - very simple but nice to impress Phil - jeans and a top - flared jeans possibly? - puffer coat

Phil: - casual clothes - straight leg jeans, hoodie and coat - beanie of any colour - backpack

Danny: - smart clothes - nice jumper/sweater - glasses - any bottoms and shoes

Bri: - wacky clothes - glasses - converse - something bright

Eve: - school uniform - covered in muck and blood - no shoes or coat - messy hair - ripped tights or trousers

I kept a log of what people were wearing on my phone, and tried to get as many photos off people before the show, unless I had seen it in person. Everyone who didn't send me a photo let me know what they were wearing to check it was suitable. Here are all the photos I got:











And here are the photos of the costumes in the show:














To help with Eve's costume, me and two other students covered the shirt and skirt in fake blood, and mud from an eyeshadow palette. We ripped it up with scissors, and focused the blood around the rips, making sure the cuffs of the sleeves were covered in mud. To make it even more realistic we took it outside and stood on it on the grass to get some real mud on it as well.




Overall, I think the costumes worked very well onstage, we were all happy with the decision to not wear uniforms, as it brought out the differences in our characters more, and added to the atmosphere of the play. Even Kelly agreed that it was a good choice!