My Intial Response to Bella Merlin's Konstantin Stanislavski

I must admit in the lead-up to reading the book on Stanislavsky I thought I would be very bored and would find it far too dull for my liking, but whilst reading about his methods on training actors I found myself totally enthralled. I found the systems of muscle relaxation most fascinating especially the exercise where you adopt a variety of poses and then relax the muscles not needed for that specific stance. I found this so clever because I had never thought of this as a way of exploring muscle control, which can be transferred into physical theatre. I also adore his thoughts on characters being psycho-physical as this opens a whole new avenue of character exploration and adds such a depth to the character and makes the whole portrayal more realistic and relatable. I also found it really interesting when I read the section of given circumstances, as Mr Renasson went through this so in-depth last year especially during our performance of Decade, where I was first sceptical of the method, but later grew to appreciate its necessity to our performance. Probably my favourite exercise in the book was exercise 4.7 (page 124). The idea of senses pulling up certain feelings and thoughts was just totally ingenious, as it is such an everyday thing but I never thought of using it as an acting exercise, I found this particularly profound as this is so relevant to my life and the way I like look at things especially when it comes to auditory stimulation e.g. music or familiar voices. All-in-all I felt this method was so useful and I would use it, I also love the merging of practical and experimental methods.