Lesson One

Our first Acting Technique class was focused on the theatre practitioner Mike Alfred's.

Mike Alfred's is an English Theatre Director, born in London in 1934. We were particularly focusing on him in our first lesson as we wanted to experiment with Improvisation Acting Techniques. 

He once wrote a book called 'Different Every Night', which implies the theory that a production running for a sustained amount of time should be slightly different every night, with the Actor reacting naturally and instinctively to what was happening on stage rather than consciously and planned. He also believed that each performance should provoke a different type of response, emotionally from the Actor and the audience. He thought that if the Actor got used to the same sort of audience response, he would get lazy, habitual and less instinctive on stage, creating some sort of routine. 

All of Alfred's improvisational beliefs fall under the genre of Naturalism, which is what he was most known to direct.

In our class, we tried a short improvisation technique exercise in pairs to experiment with his ways of acting and directing. What happened was we were given a scenario by our own director to start off with, and then every time she called out we had to change the improvisation. This was very hard - as I found it hard to generate scenarios on the spot, as once you have just settled into an improvisation you are instructed to completely switch - which was a little unsettling. However the purpose of the exercise was to be 'freeing', giving the actor freedom to experiment. I guess this is what Alfred's was trying to draw out the actor - good instinctive improv skills so that they could use them effectively within performances.

We also had to evaluate afterwards whether we thought our improvisations were truthful, and if not, what we could do to improve that.

Another purpose of the improvisation was to reinforce the theory that 'acting is reacting'. We were being pushed to fully listen and respond instinctively to our partners - making us think more relevantly about relationships to others on stage. We also briefly touched upon Given Circumstances - adding more and more detail to our improvisation sketches so that it abled us to get fully emerged in them and really start experimenting.

I really enjoyed my first lesson of Acting Technique and it was very interesting exploring Mike Alfred's methods.