Acting

Method Acting

So, to finish with the history lesson.

Eventually this guy in the good ole US of frikken A heard about it and went to visit this Stanislavsky guy. His name was Lee Strasburg. He came back to the States and founded this thing called method acting and soon everyone went crazy over it. Like there were films being made where people actually cried or laughed or got angry but it was real. It wasn't fake of someone like trying to cry.

So basically without being like real detailed. The strasberg method worked something like this and crying is a real easy example so here goes:

Let's pretend your playing a character and you have to cry. So to be able to cry under this method you would go back to something that happened personally to you in your past that made you cry. And it needs to be kinda big and important. So maybe something like if your mom or your dad died or someone else in your family. Or your pet. Or you found out someone got cancer and they only have a short amount of time to live. Like that sort of stuff. So you'd take that and relive it again in your imagination. Like how did you feel? What did the person say to you? Was it raining or sunny? Where were you? All of that and you'd relive it and then you'd usually get an emotion like crying come up.

So like that method works kinda good right? Go back into your past and think of times where you felt like complete shit and relive them again or times when you were happy or angry or whatever the emotion was.

But eventually, some other teachers that taught this method started to disagree with the Strasberg guy. Like who wants to relive their past shitty history? If you're in a play and you're on a 50 run show do you really wanna every night for 50 nights in a row go back to maybe the time and relive when you pulled your friends dead body from a car accident just so you can cry about it again. So the two main teachers that broke away were a lady called Stella Adler and a guy called Sanford Meisner. They started their own techniques. The meisner technique and the adler technique. They're all dead now. All of this stuff happened between 1930-1990. But their techniques are still taught and now when you hear an actor say they're a method actor it means that they trained under some form of technique or method like this. There's loads of them. The ones mentioned above plus the Chekhov technique, the Hagen technique, there's actually a lot.

So I really like this guy called meisner. And his technique is different but works kinda like this.

So like in the thing above someone had to cry so they relived something that actually happened in real life to them to get them to the point or crying but with the meisner technique this is what you'd do:

Think of someone that's extremely important to you. And I mean like really, really important. Not like your maybe friend but instead it would be your bestest friend ever in the world, or maybe it would be one of your parents or both or a grandparent or a pet. Basically someone that's extremely important to you. And then put them in an imaginary extreme circumstance. And it's important to remember that not everyone will work but it doesn't mean you don't love them anymore or less. Like for me it's my mom. I can put my mom in any imaginary circumstance and it gets me every time. But my dad for some reason it doesn't work with. But it doesn't mean I don't love him. It's weird but it's just how it is. It's also important that like the extreme circumstance is like EXTREME!!! So like I'd take my mom and imagine that I just got called from the hospital and my mom was in an accident and she's about to die but she's asking for me she wants to hug me one last time and so I have to get there quickly before she dies and tell her how much i love her and to be there with her before she's gone forever. That's kinda extreme because there's no way out. Like the circumstance can't have a way out. It can't be like they called and your mom had an accident  and she COULD die because your imagination will have a hard time with the could part and make it hard to believe. So like anyways that extreme circumstance will make me cry. It makes me cry when I'm writing this  damn it!!

So that's a technique and how "method acting" started. And that's kinda not just acting because there's a lot more to it and eventually this thing above, during rehearsals and shit, kinda fades away and you no longer have to think about extreme circumstances all the time but it kinda gets you started.

So yeah. It's Saturday and I feel sick. So i'm gonna watch movies with tea, eat shitty food and waste my time on snap and insta while trying to breathe. Wtf are y'all doing?