Minor Project- Stanislavski- Being a tree

Whilst reading up on Stanislavsky and his method of getting actors to build a character in their mind so that they have a persona to fill whilst they are acting, I happened upon a section where he describes it in a basic manner as being like a tree. Allow me to explain this, if you ask an actor to be a tree then the actor will immediately conjure up their idea of what their tree should be, what type of tree, the age, the time of year, whether it is alone. All of these questions are instantly answered subconsciously by the actor when they conjure up their 'character' and this is simply a tree. The point Stanislavsky is making is that we subconsciously create this depth with a simple tree, what kind of depth do they then instil into a human character without conscious thought if they take on the persona of a person they have made. The secondary idea Stanislavsky creates in this analogy is that actors will become a tree with ease based upon their previous emotions and experiences with trees, but when they come to acting as a human they struggle to let go of their current personality and assume another one which they have fabricated from their own experiences and memories.

So from this idea of actors assuming the role of the tree I have decided to actually put this into practice when it comes to working with my actual actors as I believe it will go a long ways towards them building their character mentally to take forward for the rest of the work we will be doing on their character's. My plan for this exercise is to sit the actors down and have them close their eyes and imagine being a tree, in fact this will go one step further, they are a tree. From here there will be a series of physical questions to do with the technicalities of their tree and how it exists physically, these will be the likes of: 'what kind of tree are you', 'what season are you in' and other such questions so that they can establish how they physically exist then I will ask if they are the only tree around, this is a physical question but it leads into a series of emotional questions which will really get them to think about the mental state of the character they have created, so the next logical question would be 'How does this make you feel' and then 'why do you feel this way' from here things like 'was there a time when you didn't feel like this' 'what does your tree dream of'.

This is not without fault however, one issue is that realistically trees don't have emotion so it may prove to be a sticking point for the actors, however, I don't believe this will be an issue because it is fairly easy to impose human emotion on to none human objects, whether it is then easy to assume that role for oneself remains to be seen. All that considered, I do think this will be a useful exercise, I say this because it in theory does a very good job of outlining to the actors what building their character entails and as such will give a strong platform to build off of. As an insight into whether this would be an easy task for actors, I performed the exercise on myself, well not as such, i performed a more basic form of the exercise whereby I constructed a tree character in my head and answered a series of preset questions about the character. The actual tree exercise will be a lot more effective as the actors will be questioned while they're imagining their life as a tree, I had to meditate on being a tree and then feedback to some questions I had already planned. it went as follows:

Now before I analyse what I said while I was a tree, I would like to point out the flaws in me doing this. Firstly, I was doing this for myself so I knew what kind of responses I wanted so this isn't a true representation of what an actor might say. Also, as previously stated, I didn't have anyone asking me the questions while I was imagining I was the tree, I had to leave that persona and answer the questions, again this is dissimilar to the way the actor will do it. However, all that being said, I found this useful all the same as it gives an insight into the process of character building which I was only speculating abut before now, I found it very useful in terms of getting the feeling of what it is like to become another character and to build that character from your own feelings.

(This is the closest image I could get to the tree I imagined)

My next step from here is to try this out on an actor or perhaps just a regular person to see how they respond, I think if we have enough time on Monday after practising the lighting for my piece, I may sit Liam down and see if he will undertake this to see how her responds to this exercise. I have learned however, that from doing this myself I am happy to do this with actors. I also believe this to be a useful ice breaker that will make the actors and myself more comfortable.