Presentation Review - Blog Post

This week, we learned about a lot of different acting methods that will be helpful in the future. Out of these I definitely had a few favorites, I will have to say that one of them was my own. This was specifically due to the fact that Meisner’s acting method I think is very useful to get into portraying emotion and responding to situations rather than acting to situations. With his method you can make a scene feel more genuine rather than one that is specifically for the screen or stage. This is helpful to me, because it allows for much more time to get into character. The other one that I was really fond of was Grace’s presentation about Viola Spolin. This presentation was a good one because it was very engaging but the techniques that viola used were good for getting to know your stage partner(s). This is helpful because when you play games that force you to think about how people portray different emotions and what they do under certain circumstances. We practiced this in the game where we had one person go out of the room and came in to ask us questions, while trying to figure out who they were, and also when we talked on the phone and had to pick an emotion to show in our ‘phone call.’ Following that one, I thought the presentation about Lee Strasberg was really interesting. To me, this one was helpful in learning more about method acting. I had heard of method acting several times before, but now learning more information about it and where it came from was helpful in order for me to understand it and feel more confident on how to really become a character. Stella Adler was also another person which I learned quite a bit from. We only got to watch a video about her method but it was interesting to me that she studied under Stanislavski and turned his method into one that's different and her own. I slo loved how in the video when she was talking about pants and how you don't completely stop what you're doing in a scene, but it also doesn't take up more of your focus than the actual acting and listening to what your partner is saying. All of these were amazing to listen to and learn about how different people came up with better ways so that you can have a better technique for when you put on your performance and getting into character so that you can fulfill what you need to do as an actor on the stage. These presentations were very beneficial especially without Glass Menagerie scene coming up because we are working in groups so using some of the games to be more comfortable around each other will help alot and using some of the other techniques will prove helpful when we are doing smaller things in our scene so it is clear that we are not just standing there rigid and doing something that improves the quality of the scene.