Given Circumstance

Today we learnt about Given Circumstance. Given Circumstance is a principle created by theatre practitioner Stanislavski.

Actors would have to think about the environment and situations around them. This influence's how the character would act. For example, if the play was set around Christmas, the actor would have to think about how he would use his body language to show the audience what time of year it is.

What We Did

We were put into groups and had to keep the piece naturalistic. At random we were giving a location to set our piece, we were given a bus station. At the start we had a couple that had fallen out, however to keep it natural, rather than raising our voice's we changed our tone to portray anger.This kept the scene naturalistic because the couple would not want to cause a scene.

We were then given a time and date that our scene would be set. We were given '10 Minutes before Christmas' this changed our scene because we had to think about why our characters would be out late on Christmas Eve. We started the scene the same as before. However I suggested that to give the audience an indication about the environment and the climate, we did this by using our body language.