Circles of attention

A lot of good acting comes from internalised thoughts or action being brought outside the mind for the audience to see. This is very hard to do successfully because as actors we can't just open our heads and pour it's contents out onto the stage. A way in which Stanislavsky proposed actors communicate their characters inner states of mind was through circles of attention. Stanislavsky believed that the actor needed a sense of isolation on stage. This first circle of attention was called solitude in public. This the total awareness of oneself and oneself only. The next circle is of the room one is in and it's surroundings and qualities. The next is the immediate outside world. The last circles if the greater world that we live in. Depending on what circle you're in this will change the tone of your performance and what you are trying to portray. If you are constantly in the outer most circle your focus is always somewhere else, maybe a lover in another country, maybe it's in the future but it's never quite within oneself.  If your circle of attention is small then nothing else matters to your character, everything is internalized. If you are waiting for a bus to arrive then that's all you are concentrating on.

Bus Stop Exercise

This exercise used 3 actors with 3 different circles of attention. The first had a small circle of attention and was only focused on the bus and what time it was going to arrive etc. The second person entered with a wider circle of attention which was concerned with the first person. They were trying to figure out if they knew them. The final person had the biggest circle of attention; they were focused on the future and the destination they needed to get to. The first person completely blocked out all the other actors on stage and remained focus on their own action EXCEPT when it became necessary for the scene to advance. The second person concentrated wholly on that person mostly forgetting about the task of waiting for the bus. The third person however had an all encompassing circle that I feel surrounded the entire stage space. They communicated with the other actors, moved erratically around the room, physically showed their frustration. I would have thought this as un-naturalistic decision however you do find people like that in the real world moreover those people do have big circles of attention. This exercise also gave me insights into how varying circles of attention creates interesting action and changes the dynamics of a scene. If they were all purely focused on getting on the bus then that would be super boring to watch, however since they all had different things they were trying to achieve in the improvisation the action had places to go.

Another variation of this exercise was all giving a large number of us different scenarios along with a circle. These scenarios were things like "It's the anniversary of your lovers death". This was paired along with us simply waiting at a bus stop. All we really had to do was wait at a bus stop but there was so much bubbling under the service that eventually manifested into physical actions.