Emotional Recall/Memory

Emotional recall was a very profound and unique technique developed by Stanislavski to allow you to create a genuine, relatable character. To do this exercise we lay on the floor in semi-supine and started to imagine a happy place. We started to imagine the smell of that place, the taste in the air of that place, we started to imagine the sounds we could hear, what we can touch, all the intricate details that we could see, and how we could explore this space in our imagination. what made us happy? How did it make us happy? When I imagined my happy place, I found an in voluntary smile coming to my face and my mood being brightened and whole world felt lifted. My happy place was my church. I could smell the musky church-like scent, I could taste the coffee being brewed in front of me, I could hear the sound of people singing my favourite worship song and I could see all my friends sitting around me talking over biscuits and tea. As I did this I felt a warmth coming from my stomach going out into my fingertips all the way down to my toes, and I started to believe in emotional memory, which I hadn't really previously. When Tim said he would like us to share our happy place to the class, I became a little bit apprehensive because I felt that mine was private and personal and allowing others to enter would seem almost sacrilegious, though luckily I wasn't chosen. In this lesson was also the first time ever tried the ending scene of play and I tried using emotional recall for that though I've found the emotion very overpowering and extremely quickly felt awfully nauseous and therefore decided against using such strong emotion onstage and drawing the line between reality and fiction.