Active Analysis - Reflect

Active Analysis.....Enough Said!!!!

28th November - 2nd December

The past week we have been studying and putting into practise Stanislavski's method of Active Analysis. I'm going to say now, it definitely was not my favourite thing we've done in Theatre Arts this year. It involves the actor putting down the script and improvising a certain "bit" of the script, letting the actor discover, given circumstances, objectives, actions, super objectives and is supposed to help with line learning.

I found it hard to put into practise this could be for a majority of reasons. Me and Maria did Round-table analysis (as well as a role in the wall for our characters) of the whole script and we felt it was very thorough. Meaning that active analysis helped much less than it would have been on a script we had never seen or studied before. But also something that I think that could have been a contributing factor to why I found this difficult was because I have done Panto for some 6-7 years now and the way we go about learning lines and "finding" out character is through round-table analysis and re-reading the script over and over again, 'formatting' me (as Mr. F says). One last thing that I felt that made it difficult was working off-script (improvising a scene). To me I felt why should we improvise a scene that we already have on script (and previously practised and studied) and are just beginning to get used to it. I mean I can see Active Analysis' benefits to certain actors (as well as certain scripts) but not a script that we have been practising from previously. If you were to give me 'A Doll's House' script (when I have never read or studied it) and tell me to do an Active Analysis of Torvald, I think this would have been much easier that doing this after Round-table analysis and role in the wall of this character.

However, when we started to do The Method of Physical Action (with the script being read to us and we have to show and do actions of our character) this felt soooooooooo such easier and much quicker to acquire your characters actions and objectives or lines. I had no problem with this and would be happy to use The Method of Physical Action again for another script. 

On a side note, when we all sat down to discuss how we felt about Active Analysis and highlighted certain problems, I felt as if I could understand it better (just ironic it was through a round-table analysis) but by the end I felt slightly more comfortable about it. Lets just see what happens in the future and see whether I can try to use it to a greater extent on another script.

Richard #1