Tag: role

End of the Stanislavski Journey

Posted on by John Hutch
Stanislavski creating a role book cover
Stanislavski: Creating A Role (book cover)

So I’ve finally come to the climax of the third Stanislavski book: Creating A Role. It’s been a long journey, trudging through all three books, including the first ‘An Actor Prepares’ and the second ‘Building A Character’. It’s taken me a good couple of years, if not longer, of having a read, putting it down, picking it up weeks later and then forcing myself to mow on through their endless pages of words and technical terms. Not easy when you’re dyslexic. But at last, I’ve completed the final page.

So what have I learned?

To be honest, a lot of it is common sense when it comes to acting. But Stanislavski goes into greater detail – the deeper aspects of the acting role; stuff like “you must know Who you are, Where you come from and Why you’re here when you first set foot on the stage” through magic “what if’s”. It’s very deep and mind numbing at times. Reading the books is almost like trying to process heavy translations from another language, into meaning in your head. For someone with dyslexia, such as myself, who finds it hard to absorb information quickly, the books are heavy going and will definitely require a second read in some parts. But it’s been an insightful journey none the less.

Where to next?

I’ve ordered The Complete Stanislavski Toolkit from Waterstones, which I’ve heard, from so many people, is far easier to understand and read than the original three books separately. So hopefully I’ll draw greater meaning and understanding from it.

 

What about you?

If you study Drama and Acting, do you find Stanislavski a hard read? What do You make of him and his books?

 

Feel free to Comment below, Share and Like! All your opinions matter to me =]

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The Death of a Ship

Posted on by John Hutch

I’ve just lost my ship in a space battle on ‘EVE online’. It’s quite a saddening thought. All those lovely weapons I had and the ammunition. I was using a Gallente Destroyer, and taking on the big criminal dooshbag in the epic story ark. Yet, for some reason, when in imminent danger of destruction, my warp computer couldn’t turn us around and head to a safe point. Might have been a glitch. But it’s failure to operate resulted in the destruction of my ship.

Luckily I was left floating in space, inside an emergency survival pod. I made a quick warping exit, before anyone else could fire upon me and completely end my life. It rather sickened me that the game wouldn’t kick the warp-drive into action when I’d told it to. Now, I am shipless.

I’ve had to journey to the nearest station – some 9 jumps away – and purchase a new vessel of the same calibre. But this one is without weapons or ammunition attached. The journey took even longer due to the fact that the life pod wasn’t equipped with afterburners, which act as extra thrust speed in space. I’ve probably failed my main mission, but then, I still have my life.

On a lighter note, out of EVE character, I’d been planning on spending a single month with the game, seeing as you have to pay for it per month. Not something I’d want to keep up. After completing a 14 day trial, I was tempted into giving it a month test, just to see what the rest of the online game is like. It’s impressive, I’ll give it that. But it poses as a major distraction from my study and spare life from work. Quite often I find myself staying up extremely late, just to play the online game, going to bed at 4am or later. Not exactly healthy. Perhaps it is time that I stopped.

Still, it is an amazing game.