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https://www.theatrefolk.com/blog/the-eight-efforts-laban-movement/

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Rudolph Laban a movement theorist and choreographer. Laban Efforts is used to help an actor physically and emotionally identify and play characters successfully that are different from them. It helps actors to learn their character’s instincts and fully body them to produce clean and precise movements.

Categorised the human movements into four and then added two elements to each

Direction – direct or indirect

Weight – heavy or light

Speed – quick or sustained

Flow - bound or free

He than combined these parts into eight efforts

Wring

Press

Flick

Dab

Glide

Float

Punch

Slash

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His technique is based on Stanislavski where the actors rely on their emotional memory for a good performance. However, Strasberg’s method takes it a step further by fully connecting the actors to their characters background and circumstances. Strasberg's method requires to develop emotional memory by using the technique “substitution” where the actor becomes the character they are portraying for a limited time. The actors use their imaginations, emotions and senses to create their character with their own version of physicality and behaviour. This is to help achieve a realistic authentic realism character rather than the classic acting style of exaggerated emotions.

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https://www.onlocationeducation.com/blog/2018/01/04/acting-styles-strasberg

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Stanislavski method is a series of techniques to help an actor portray their emotions by putting themselves in their character’s place. Asking yourself the basic questions about your character

1. Who Am I?

2. Where Am I?

3. When Is It?

4. What Do I Want?

5. Why Do I Want It?

6. How Will I Get It?

7. What Do I Need To Overcome?

Then adding in the “magic if”, you create a circumstance for your character to be in that isn’t in your script and see how you think your character would react and act.

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https://www.dramaclasses.biz/the-stanislavski-system

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(Question) Do you; have you ever actually felt any – guilt? (Shock) Because it’s come as a bit of a surprise that um, that – you, one, I don’t, can’t actually feel it. (Sadden) Like I can’t get my body to do it, on its own, it’s not something I can generate somehow, like, I – I find myself having to actually summon it, trying to encourage myself, to summon it and even then I can’t do it, really, I can’t feel it. (Entrust) I thought it might be shock at first and then – grief or but I think I might not feel it. (Confuse) I can’t. (Refuse) I don’t. (Puzzle) All I can feel is total joy, total – peace. (Baffle) I look at you and I sometimes actually make myself think of him, I force him into my head and I don’t feel guilty. (Ask) What does that mean? (Challenge) What kind of person does that make me? (Encourage) Hm? (Humour) Sometimes I think it’s because – what we have is love, meant to be. (Amuse) That we love each other, yes, Mack, that is what I sometimes think. Is that ridiculous? (Burden) And sometimes I even think that that love is so important that it is bigger, or equal to – what he did. (Convince) That they are just two feelings, one is love and the other is despair and both just have an action. (Analyze) And that those actions are different but that somehow they are equal – does that make me a monster (Blame) I sat at his funeral looking at his parents and Benny but all I could think of, all I could feel – was you. (Bash) But then I look at you and I wonder if it’s actually there. (Attack) I wonder if I added up the amount of minutes, hours, fucking days I have spent thinking about you, the amount of fucking longing I have done – if I added that up and weighed it against anything you have ever actually said… and – . (Persuade) But then you do the smallest thing you make me a cup of tea when I don’t ask, or you touch my hand really lightly in a room full of people and I think no, Sophie, don’t laugh – don’t laugh because it’s real and it’s so much more real because it’s unsaid and unspoken and un – un – un – it’s so much more real because I can’t touch it, because we can’t say it and I can’t see it, it’s so much more real because I don’t know if it’s there. (Beg) Please say something. (Plead) Please. (Urge) Please tell me if…

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Character - Sophie
Setting - University student at Edinburgh

6 main characters, 2 girls 4 boys. Set at a Edinburgh university flat of the boys. The whole play is set over 2 days. Sophie’s boyfriend killed himself because she told him she had an affair with Mac (ex boyfriends best friend/ flat mate) and is leaving him for Mac. Mac and Sophie keep their feelings quite from the rest of the group because of the suicide. In the monologue Sophie is talking to Mac about her lack of quilt towards the death and spirals into speaking about her feeling towards Mac and justifying her lack of grief.

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Actioning is an exercise to help actors create an accurate portrayal of their character. It forces actors to be more spontaneous by “exploring different ways of creating their character”. It helps actors from sounded monotones and allows actors that have been doing the same role for a long time to keep their performance fresh.

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Actions: The Actor’s Thesaurus by Caldarone M

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- sitting on the chair the whole performance limited me. It made me look like I was at the hospital waiting room. Next time I need to use the char in my advantage, as a prop to walk around and interpret it more in my piece
- I lost the first line of the monologue due to lack of pronounciation
- Not enough pasues with in the monologue. It sounded too rehearsed, needed to make it sound more like a thought process.

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Doing the day in the life excercise made me be more aware of Norma's body language and physicality. It made me experiment the way she would carry herself as an 8 months pregnant women doing basic mundane things like walking, sitting down, getting up and doing the laundry whic is what our scene is set in.

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Feedback On Our First Rehearsal With Staging

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Feedback On Our First Rehearsal With Staging

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- The lines where I'm recalling a memory needsd to be more reminising.
- My pronounciation of the words from the biology book is too accurate, need to mispronounce it more, make the struggle of reading the words clear.

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How We Ended Up Having To Stage It Due To Lockdown

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How We Ended Up Having To Stage It Due To Lockdown

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Due to the lockdown we had to do our performance recorder over teams. This meant when our character's interacted with each other r, we had to keep in mind the original staging and look at the direction they are supposed to be in. We were told to use the camera as the audience. However we couldn't pass the biology book around between my character and Millie's so we decided on just pretending that she could read my book from the other side of the stage just by me showing it to her direction.

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Be My Baby Past Productions Pictures Inspo 

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Be My Baby Past Productions Pictures Inspo 

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2:55

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Be My Baby | Panic In The Streets | Edinburgh Festival Promo | HD

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Sophie's Monologue - Boys - Ella Hickson

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Sophie's monologue from Boys by Ella Hickson

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I recently watched the newest version of Little Women made in 2019. Having such a hype around this film due to its classic story and past films as well as this version being directed by Greta Gerwig, I decided to give it a try. as someone that has the attention span of a 2 years old and normally can't get through a tv ad I was pleasantly surprised by how captivating the film was. The acting of Timothy Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh (basically anyone that wasn't Emma Watson) did an incredible job at portraying such 3-dimensional characters over a long period of time. Although the age range they were supposed to be at parts weren't too believable the overall characterization was brilliant. The relationships between the characters were well established and it made me be truly invested in them. The sisterhood that carried the story helped me build my relationship as Norma in Be My Baby since both Be My Baby and Little women have strong female leads all supporting each other. Speaking as someone who has an undying love for Timothy Chalamet him being heartbroken even just in screen took it out fo me which reiterates my point about the greatness of this cast. Having Meryl Streep play alongside of this new generation of to be Oscar winners gave quite a wholesome approval of their talents.

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- Turning our heads and having the staging in our minds work well
- The pronunciation and of the reading lines work well
- Need better view of us, right now its the waist and above need to see our whole body
- Hold the book towards Millie with my full body rather than half effort
- Play my lines to do with the co-worker more to the stage, need it to be more of a distant memory being recalled

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- Try to make me, Live and Millie be the same distance from the camera.
- My lines spoken to the audience worked better, improved.

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Anna hasn't left her apartment for almost two years. She is the most mentally fragile character out of the three. This was all due to her missing the bus one day and making that the tipping point to her spiralling. She spends her time tearing her flat apart to make 'projects' that keep her occupied and distracted. She starves herself to keep her mind pure and focused. She has very child like habits and mannerism that could originate from unresolved past trauma.

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- Mental and emotional distress, like past trauma and or mental illness.
- Can't exist around people without being triggered due to those trauma's or mental illness.

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- Loosing your sanity, struggling to think straight.
- Difficulty with retaining information.
- Obsessive thinking and over thinking.
- Hallucination.
- Psychotic breakdown and behaviour.
- Suicidal tendencies.

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- Reckless
- Impulsive
- Careless
- Childish
- Emotionally Damaged
- Self-destructive
- Impulsive
- Compulsive
- Irrational

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- Keep reading each others emotions but ensure you keep your own, don't match each other's tones and emotions for the sake of it. All three characters are on complete different journeys.
- When delivering lines keep in mind Anna is very physical through out the whole play, she is smashing things, ripping them apart, exhausted, sweaty and out of breath the whole time.
- I need to keep a good rhythm, Anna's opening the whole scene, I need to set the scene on the right note.

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Three women all going through very different struggles. Anna locking herself in her house and starving herself. Rebecca trying to get over her break up and Sam newly trans man dealing with his new life.

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YouTube Rewind: Now Watch Me 2015 | #YouTubeRewind

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The Best in Culture 2015

Clockwise from top left: Lin-Manuel Miranda in "Hamilton"; Emily Skeggs in "Fun Home"; Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope in "An American in Paris"; Lupita Nyong'o in "Eclipsed"; Kristine Nielsen, left, and Daniel Oreskes in "Hir"; and Tim Pigott-Smith in "King Charles III." Credit... Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The theater critics of The New York Times - Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood - share their picks for the best shows of the year.
Astonish me, rattle me, change the way I see.

Those are imperatives that many of us secretly harbor when we walk into a theater, but we don't really expect them to be fulfilled. Theater, especially in its expensive incarnations on Broadway, too often feels shackled by fears that to risk the unfamiliar is to court failure.

Yet 2015 was a year of astonishments, of productions that bent and sometimes shattered the rules that govern traditional stage genres. In the past four months alone, Broadway has seen the openings of not one but three extraordinary works, in three different categories, that might be described as (to use the mot du jour) game-changers: Lin-Manuel Miranda's hip-hop musical "Hamilton"; Mike Bartlett's oxymoronically but accurately described "future history" play, "King Charles III"; and Ivo van Hove's stripped-naked revival of Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge."

Even the Tony Awards, usually an index of Broadway's safety-minded status quo, stepped over to the wild side. The top trophies this year went to the senses-scrambling "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" (for best play) and the self-splintering autobiographical family portrait "Fun Home" (for best musical).

Since both of these shows have figured on best lists from me in the past ("Curious Incident" last year, and "Fun Home" in 2013, when it was staged Off Broadway at the Public Theater), I have not included them on this one. But their multiple victories on Tony night blaze like a beacon for a year of living daringly in the theater.

Though this list is limited to 10 - by the usual inane arbitrariness demanded by our love of quantification - there were many other shows that, excepting the top three, could just as easily have appeared here. Among them are two Off Broadway productions that were close to perfect embodiments of the classic comedy (Mark Gerrard's "Steve") and domestic drama (Stephen Karam's "The Humans"); "Western Society," a video- (and smartphone-) driven, perspective-altering performance work from the British-German arts collective Gob Squad; Jennifer Haley's "The Nether," a compellingly creepy evocation of virtual reality in a joyless tomorrow land; and the Roundabout Theater Company's deliciously over-the-top revival of the 1978 musical "On the Twentieth Century."

So feel free to substitute any of those for Nos. 4 through 10 on the following list. And be grateful (and incredulous), as I am, that there is such an abundance to choose from.

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Daveed Diggs, left, and Lin-Manuel Miranda in "Hamilton." Credit... Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

1. "Hamilton" Written by, composed by and starring the ridiculously talented Lin-Manuel Miranda, this vivid story of the birth of a nation (that would be the United States) recreates a distant yesterday in the immediate voice of today. In its casting, staging (by the director Thomas Kail and the choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler) and eclectic musical language, this show is a defiant juggernaut of chutzpah, energy and inventiveness that charges right through - and soars over - the avalanche of hype now surrounding it. (Read the review.)

2. "King Charles III" Though it speaks with a posher-than-thou English accent, Mike Bartlett's speculative drama about the future life of the current Prince of Wales is in its way as audacious as "Hamilton." Directed by Rupert Goold, with a commandingly uncertain Tim Pigott-Smith as the wavering title character, this modern masterpiece from London's Almeida Theater dares to enter the hearts and minds of living, notoriously private public figures through the form - and poetic speech - of the Shakespearean history play. (Read the review.)

3. "A View From the Bridge" Ivo van Hove's merciless, stark revival finds the primal intensity of an Arthur Miller classic that we thought we didn't need to see any time soon after Gregory Mosher's first-rate naturalistic revival of five years ago. Boy, were we wrong. Starring the viscerally raw Mark Strong as a doomed Brooklyn dock worker, this London import - which places its barefoot cast in what feels like a gladiator pit - beats with the thundering pulse of classic Greek tragedy. (Read the review.)

4. "Gloria" The young dramatist Branden Jacobs-Jenkins ("An Octoroon," "Appropriate") seems to reinvent himself with each new play. This all-too-topical drama (seen at the Vineyard Theater, in a production directed by Evan Cabnet), in which violence erupts in the rivalry-ridden offices of a glossy New York magazine, reaches what would seem to be its final climax at the end of its first act. But it dares to keep going, in ways that ruthlessly demonstrate just how good (or bad) the culture we inhabit is at trivializing and commodifying tragedy. (Read the review.)

5. "Constellations" The British playwright Nick Payne finds extra mileage - to put it mildly, since this road stretches into infinity - in the most overworked of all theatrical setups: Boy meets girl. In his emotionally eviscerating, two-character play - starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, directed by Michael Longhurst - would-be lovers follow a dizzying assortment of what-if, could-be and never-will-be trajectories into a future of endless variables. (Read the review.)

6. "Fool for Love" Boy meets (or remeets) girl yet again in Daniel Aukin's flawless interpretation of Sam Shepard's 1983 play about the cruel cycle of endless love. Starring Nina Arianda and Sam Rockwell as bruisingly codependent sweethearts, this is one of those rare revivals that discovers the enduring, undeniable vitality in what might have registered as a quaint period piece. (Read the review.)

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In Performance | Ruthie Ann Miles

Ms. Miles, who won a Tony Award for her performance in the revival of "The King and I," sings "Something Wonderful," a ballad from the musical. The show is on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

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Ms. Miles, who won a Tony Award for her performance in the revival of "The King and I," sings "Something Wonderful," a ballad from the musical. The show is on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater.

7. "The King and I" Another show for which the word revival seems far too musty. Bartlett Sher's ravishing production of a Rodgers and Hammerstein war horse moves with the hot-blooded friskiness of a thoroughbred foal. And it confirms the status of Kelli O'Hara, its Tony-winning leading lady, as one of our most incisive and translucent interpreters of the great Broadway songbook. (Read the review.)

8. "Skylight" Two of the most impeccable performances ever committed to a Broadway stage, courtesy of Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan as a pair of terminally mismatched lovers in David Hare's 1995 portrait of a broken Britain. Like Mr. Aukin's "Fool for Love," Stephen Daldry's revival makes a definitive case for this drama as being among its author's best. (Read the review.)

9. "The Color Purple" A makeover made in heaven. The director John Doyle has slimmed down, toned up and retailored a show that seemed leaden and garish in its original Broadway incarnation 10 years ago. This musical version of Alice Walker's celebrated novel now blazes as a triumph of elemental, emotional storytelling, with the bonus of a star-making performance from Cynthia Erivo and blissful support from Jennifer Hudson and Danielle Brooks. (Runner-up for best reinvention of a musical: the Fiasco Theater's spectacularly imaginative "Into the Woods.") (Read the review.)

10. "Wolf Hall" The season's theatrical equivalent of a really good read, which perhaps shouldn't be surprising, given that it was based on two best-selling Hilary Mantel novels about life in the court of Henry VIII. What did startle, and enchant, was how this Royal Shakespeare Company production, adapted by Mike Poulton and directed by Jeremy Herrin, found a stage-worthy momentum in Ms. Mantel's literary pages that made six hours at the theater pass in a time-defying trance of enthrallment. (Read the review.)

I will confess that during my more than 10 years compiling 10-best lists, I have sometimes approached the task with trepidation, if not dismay. Reaching the magic number felt like a particularly challenging rock climb, and tallying the list felt more like a charitable act than a celebratory one. Some seasons are arid, others rich.

This year, happily, I found myself scratching my head as I tried to winnow the list. In a thinner year, I would have included a couple of shows I loved that returned in glowing form: Annie Baker's "The Flick," Robert Askins's "Hand to God" and the New York premiere of Robert Falls's majestic production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh."

But instead I chose to concentrate on new productions. (And if you need further proof that this was a year requiring hard choices, note the absence of "Hamilton" from my selection; that fine show has been hosanna-ed so thoroughly that it hardly needs more recognition, at least until the inevitable Pulitzer and Tony Awards add to its luster.)

Perhaps most gratifying was the discovery that more than half of the shows that made the cut were from playwrights I've singled out before at year's end. Arbitrarily starting with those, herewith my favorite shows of 2015.

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In Performance | 'Spring Awakening'

Katie Boeck, left, and Sandra Mae Frank perform "Mama Who Bore Me" from Deaf West Theater's Broadway production of "Spring Awakening."

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Katie Boeck, left, and Sandra Mae Frank perform "Mama Who Bore Me" from Deaf West Theater's Broadway production of "Spring Awakening."

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The Best Theater of 2015 (Published 2015)

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The Best in Culture 2015 The theater critics of The New York Times - Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood - share their picks for the best shows of the year. Astonish me, rattle me, change the way I see.

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we staged the first 2 pages of the piece. I found that I needed to choregraph being out of breath with my lines so the audience can see that I'm out of breath but I wont loose my words because of it. I also needed to play around with the hammer so I can get my physicality of it right.

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- a day in the life made me realise Anna's main Laban efforts which were flick, slash and float.
- her day in the life made me realise how addictive her little projects and movements are like when I was taking out the floorboards. I knew it was wrong but there wasn't anyone to tell me off, and the more I did it the more invested I was and harder it was to stop.

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- it was interesting to perform it in the space with the mirrors and boxes since we never had the chance to do that before.
- I found that it was a lot easier to slide on and off the box since the height of it was better than the chairs we rehearsed with.
- Kath's notes was mainly on my volume and some parts of my performance that were behind the box but in front of the mirror. this was due to the lack of visibility for the audience.
- Izzie's feedback was to work on those moments where I'm trapped between the box and mirror and re stage it.

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- Through out rehearsals what i notices was the level of trust we built for each other. due to our script having little interaction with each other we really had to trust each other that we know our ques. this was quickly developed.
- i found that the more we rehearsed the more it became like second nature for me to be out of breath and quite childish. I picked up Anna's physicality quite easily since she was very floor bound.