Exercise “Mocking stress”

The purpose of this exercise is to develop an actor's attitude towards stress. If executed correctly, it can have amazing results.

So, the essence of the exercise is that you are trying to artificially put yourself in a stressful state. Play what is called a role. But play it not with your voice and movements, but with your soul. Play this role within yourself, but for real. Thanks to this, the opposite, anti-stress effect will occur, which, in fact, is what we are trying to achieve. Using every opportunity to survive stress, we seem to want it. As a result, when stress comes, we experience joy, because we have another opportunity to play, that is, to have an interesting time.

To make it clearer, let's imagine that stress is a certain personality that often pesters us, forcing itself on us as friends or trying to become one with us. But if we start mocking this person, she will eventually not be able to stand such an attitude and will leave us. After all, friendships, as a rule, are destroyed after ridicule and the manifestation of negative feelings. Playing with stress is nothing more than a mockery of him. This treatment should take the stress off guard. And then the opposite reaction will occur: it will appear within us in a completely different light, contradicting its essence. Our attitude to stress will become completely different, acting. And this is an automatic solution to the problem.

What is the mechanism of submission to stress? A person runs from experiences, but they overtake him. If this mechanism is changed (that is, not avoiding stress, but, on the contrary, turning towards it), then the entire device may collapse. Stress is like an animal when hunting: it chases the prey, which runs away. Always like this. What will happen if the prey stops running away and, on the contrary, chases after him? Imagine a lion chasing an antelope. And suddenly the opposite happens: the antelope turns sharply and rushes towards him. This will be so unexpected for the lion that he may run away, succumbing to the principle “if you are being chased, you must run away” (the law of the jungle). This is the opposite effect, that is, a change in the very essence, the very mechanism of any action.

In other words, the enemy wants to harm us, and we turn his harm into an interesting game for ourselves. It is clear that the enemy will not like this and will simply stop harming you. After all, if harm is no longer perceived as harm, then there is no point in dealing with it.

So, stress comes, and you rejoice. After all, you have a great opportunity, which you can’t miss, to play a role. Play masterfully, for real. Play the role of a person exposed to stress, and at the very moment when stress itself came to him. Act and be satisfied with your acting skills.

Thus, we regard every approach of stress as a long-awaited opportunity to play a role. Thus, the very essence of the nature of stress will be changed. And in this case, stress, if it were a person, would simply not be able to withstand such a frivolous attitude towards itself and, offended, would leave.

I tried to do the same with a common illness. One day I got sick and it was very hard for me. Then I just switched (think switch) to the role. I began to play this disease. I played it, I played it for real, because I was really sick. It was interesting, and as a result I felt a lot better.

Much depends on our attitude To one or another phenomenon.

It can even get to the point where a person wants to get sick (or be stressed) in order to try himself as an artist.

Exercise "Acting"

This exercise is very similar to the previous one. Just in in this case we apply it in a broader sense. How did it come about? One day I was forced to do hard physical work for a long time. It was very difficult for me, and I was very tired, but rest was impossible. Then I “turned on” acting, imagining myself as a slave who must work hard at the will of the master in order to save his life. And this game of mine (this mood of mine) restructured my consciousness, creating an additional incentive to work. Of course, you need to play such games within reason, so as not to overdo it and harm your health.

You can use “acting” in many cases: when preparing for and during an exam; undergoing an illness (I have already spoken about this) and always when you are afraid, worried, fail, are disappointed, lose, etc. When it is very difficult, you can play an exhausted sufferer. Just tune in to the fact that you are playing it. Transfer the problem from the category of life to the category of role and masterfully play this role.

There is a lot to be learned from the saying “life is a theater and the people in it are actors.” It has a very deep meaning.

Think about it, if you are under stress, then it’s hard for you, but if you started playing with this stress, then it’s a completely different matter. After all, you took this stress out of life (yours) and turned it into a role. And if it’s hard for you again, it will be as an actor, because the role is difficult. So, let (as far as possible) the heaviness be the actor's.

The more problems you can transfer from the life channel to the acting channel, the more vital energy you will save. And with more energy, you'll be able to tackle many of life's other tasks more productively.

Exercise “Creativity”

You can “give” your pain to paper, to creativity. My creativity, for example, began precisely with pain, and with the kind that I wouldn’t wish even on my enemy. It was hellish love pain. If everything I am writing about now had been understood by me then, then I could have avoided much torment. And yet, it was in the crucible of suffering that my creativity was born.

When we are hurt, we want to give away this pain, get rid of it. And if someone could take it away (without harming themselves), then we would probably give it away. Well, let's give it to creativity.

By coming into contact with creativity, heartache can give birth to beauty.

It would seem, how can this be? If pain is the mother, then how is beauty born? After all, the very essence of pain is damage. Heart damage. But beauty is truly born, because its father is creativity.

Pain plus creativity equals beauty. But where there is beauty, there is pleasure.

I have embodied (partially or completely) my pain in many of my works. I put so much suffering into one of my early stories that I wrote it with tears in my eyes.

I found a use for my pain. An application that brought me a state of happiness. Now I feel happy when I write. But I'm grateful for the pain. I am ready to shake her hand and thank her for making a significant contribution to my creative development. However, not to shake, but to kiss Mrs. Pain’s hand. She and I became one, and beauty was born. The beauty of my words, my style, poetry, my songs, drawings, my music. The beauty of myself. Whether anyone will see this beauty or not is another question.

You can play off stress, anxiety, and fear. And failure, and rejection, and unhappy love. But not the loss loved one(I am writing this because I am afraid that someone will misinterpret my words). When grief happens to a person (he loses a loved one or loved one), then you need to try to survive this pain. Time heals wounds. At first it can be unbearably difficult, but life is so arranged that you need to live on, even if it seems that all meaning has been lost. Like it or not, you have to. There's nowhere to go. We need to live.

Exercise "Adrenaline"

The listed problems (except for grief) can be translated into the channel of obtaining adrenaline. Notice the two people who are afraid in different ways. One’s knees are shaking from fear, while the other enjoys this state, perceiving it as a kind of mental extreme, drive. It's all about attitude.

Consider, for example, anxiety. There are different means to combat it. One of them is the elimination of the enemy with his own weapons. That is, not to be afraid of jitters, but, on the contrary, to desire it. After all, excitement can turn into a kind of adrenaline for your body. For example, if you are standing in front of a thousand people and your heart is pounding as if in a fit, isn’t that adrenaline? And you may love this serious extreme situation so much that you will wait for it again and again.

Of course, not everyone is an extreme person, but in light of the solution to the previously raised problem, you can try to become one at least a little.

Every year on March 27, International Theater Day is celebrated all over the world - a holiday of great stage masters and all those who love, appreciate and honor the theater.

Officially, this holiday was established in 1961 by the IX Congress of the International Theater Institute (MIT) under the motto “Theater as a means of mutual understanding and strengthening peace between peoples.”

But it first originated in Ancient Greece. Its very name comes from the ancient Greek word theatron (θέατρον), which means “place where they look.”

“The theater is already full, the boxes are shining”

In March 534 BC. Dramatic competitions were held for the first time in Athens. It was then that the poet Thespis used another participant in the performance - the reciter, with whom he entered into dialogue. The beginning of these competitions is considered to be the year of the birth of world theater. The ghost of Thespis does not leave the theater today. Behind the scenes there is still a belief that the spirit of Thespis is present at every performance of a theatrical play and can interfere with its progress, promoting or hindering its success.

Traditionally, the two most popular genres played in the theater were comedy and tragedy. These genres were embodied in the symbol of theatrical art - a laughing and crying mask. The mask also has its own story. Modern masks have historically emerged from the ritual and exist both in the form of a face covering (theater of Ancient Greece, Buddhist mystery theater) and in the form of a make-up mask (Japanese Noo and Kabuki theater).

We can talk endlessly about the theater, but we will give only a few of the most interesting and amusing facts:

2. The ancient Roman public loved bloody spectacles not only at gladiatorial fights, but also at ordinary theatrical performances. If during the course of the action the actor had to die, he could be replaced at the last moment with a criminal sentenced to execution and kill right on stage.

3. In the nineteenth century, some actresses refused to portray Sophia, the heroine of the play “Woe from Wit” by Griboyedov. They considered the scene of Sophia’s night conversation with Molchalin, who was not her husband, very indecent.

4. The expression “Finita la comedy” dates back to ancient Rome. Then with this phrase the actors completed all performances

5. In one of the theaters of Ionia there was a special row for one-armed warriors. Bald slaves were planted in front of them, striking whose bald heads the first could applaud.

6. The great Greek playwright Aeschylus died when his bald head fell from the sky the turtle fell. The playwright's bald head was mistaken for a rock by an eagle flying across the sky, which released a turtle to break its shell and feast on its meat.

We sincerely congratulate you on the upcoming Theater Day, we wish you inspiration, an undying sense of beauty and the best experiences!

The whole world is a theater.
There are women, men, all actors.
They have their own exits, departures,
And everyone plays more than one role.
Seven acts in that play. First the baby
Roaring loudly in his mother's arms...
Then a whiny schoolboy with a book in his bag,
With a ruddy face, reluctantly, like a snail
Crawling to school. And then a lover
Sighing like a furnace with a sad ballad
In honor of the cute eyebrow. And then the soldier
Whose speech is always full of curses,
Overgrown with a beard like a leopard,
Jealous of honor, a bully in a quarrel,
Ready to seek mortal glory
At least in a cannon muzzle. Then the judge
With a round belly, where the capon is hidden,
With a stern look, a trimmed beard,
A treasure trove of template rules and maxims,—
So he plays a role. The sixth age is
It will be skinny Pantalone,
With glasses, shoes, a wallet at his belt,
In pants that have been on the shore since youth, wide
For parched feet; courageous voice
Changes again to a children's treble:
It squeaks like a flute... And the last act,
The end of this whole strange, complex play -
Second childhood, half-forgotten:
Without eyes, without feelings, without taste, without everything.

W.Shakespeare
Monologue of Jacques from the comedy "As You Like It"

Theater

Shakespeare said: “The whole world is a stage, and the people in it are actors!”
Who is a rogue, who is a buffoon, and who is a simpleton, a sage or a hero."
And therefore, and therefore, leave your disputes -
Look for your role in life, sculpt your image.

Our world is a hall! Our life is a stage
Where laughter and tears, grief and love mixed
But, live at least a hundred lives at the same time,
Be and remain yourself always.

Who is glorious, who is inglorious - we sometimes do not know,
We distribute honor and money more and more at random.
The hypocritical demon confuses us with a devilish game,
There is no hurry to change the picture and announce an intermission.

But sometimes, yes, sometimes - after all, everything happens in life! –
Someone will appropriate the stolen role for themselves.
The Lord, having found such people, brands them... Fate undresses them,
And the people are convinced that the king was naked.

And every day, and every day we put on masks,
And, looking in the mirror, sometimes we don’t recognize ourselves...
Only at home, alone, can we safely
Ask: “What in this life are we playing or living?”

Yuri Evseev

The whole world is a stage, and the people in it are actors:
- So said William Shakespeare,
There are honest people, but there are also thieves,
Everyone has their own idol.
Many roles, parts, intermissions,
Lots of different scenes
Many discoveries, many facts,
Lots of love, murders, betrayals.
All this exists both in the theater and in life,
One soul is more capricious than another,
But they all play and live,
They drink water from one bowl.
Only one thought disturbs,
Nobody writes us a script
Maybe this will help us
And we will write it ourselves.
We'll write it the way we want
As soon as our heart tells us,
And of course we will win,
Our heart will show us the right path.
We will all die someday
Everything always comes to an end,
Well, for now we are still living,
While we are wandering through the wonder of the world.
Let's love, create, play.
We will leave a memory of ourselves,
People will remember us
They will write poems about us!

I talked with one young graduate of PIK (now it is the Perm State Institute of Art and Culture, oh how!), a nervous, tremulous and very exalted girl.
This victim of the current “Ministry of Culture” spent half an hour “with bated breath” talking to me about her admiration for the actors, and when I asked: “Do you adore your grandfather?”, she faltered, and almost without thinking, blurted out: “Why?” bow down? and continued.
- All life is a theater, and the people in it are actors, so we are all actors, some are greater, some are less...

I didn’t let her finish – I took her by the shoulders, turned her one hundred and eighty degrees and sent her on her way. Only a little later he regretted that he had not thought to give her a kick. Something light, purely symbolic, so that she wouldn’t bury her nose in a snowdrift, but would fly out of the gate, and not fly out. Maybe at least then something would have come through?
A woman must try very hard to make a man want to touch her tailbone (concerned erotomaniacs, I ask you not to react - I said absolutely not what you are thinking about now).

Well, firstly, I was simply “killed” by the illiteracy of the girl who plans to soon “enlighten” those interested as an art critic (!).
She does not know (thanks to the same Ministry of Education or?) that this phrase “all life is a theater, and the people in it are actors”, either intentionally or out of stupidity, was simply distorted by someone by replacing one word with another.
In reality it goes like this (Shakespeare, As You Like It):

"The whole world is a theater.
There are women, men - all actors.
They have exits and exits.
And everyone plays more than one role.
Seven acts in that play.
Baby, schoolboy, youth, lover,
Soldier, judge, old man."

The world is, yes, a kind of theater. But life is not.
There may be different sequential roles in it, from a baby to an old man, but you physically cannot live at least 5-7 roles within a year - from a milling machine operator to a physicist, sorry. After all, you need to study, young lady, and master, and not imitate, as actors do.

At Sovdepia, my teachers forced me to think in analogies, so that it would be easier to understand things that you hear about for the first time or are simply unable to comprehend due to a certain “blindness”, “littered with stereotypes” inherent in every person.
That is why it is much easier for me to “split” some things than for some representatives of modern youth, who are not accustomed to using analogies, and do not even quite understand what it is.
Well, in general, that’s not what we’re talking about here, it’s just a remark.

And that’s what we’re talking about, actually.
The “young lady-future art critic” stated casually that she admired the actors, but there seemed to be nothing to bow to her grandfather for. This is really the end of the line.

I knew her grandfather well; he died at the age of 87, being, among other awards, a holder of two orders of the Red Star and the Red Banner of Labor, that is, he was a hero of both the war and post-war peaceful labor.
And she doesn’t consider it necessary to be proud of him?
Yes, even if your grandfather were even an ordinary comfrey and an “unrewarded” hard worker, is he not worthy of you bowing your “proud” knees to him?
I don't understand this.
For the life of me.
Where does this substituted consciousness come from in human growth, in which the scale of values ​​is deliberately distorted?
Why do some people just don't want to think?
Why is the work of an actor valued by today's society more than the work of the same milling machine operator?
Is he wiser than your grandfather? Or smarter than you? Or is his conscience, thrown on the scales of time, simply going off scale?
Have you ever noticed that you are all wonderful actors who can play any role?
What does it mean to “play like a true professional”?
To be believed, like Stanislavsky?
So in my life I have met a lot of all kinds of scammers and swindlers, whom I believed at first sight.
And Stanislavsky would have believed it, having “lost a couple of pounds” after such a meeting.