WARNING: This post is quite tangential, very vaguely connected to the string's subject matter.

> Checkov came up with a theory (quite opposed to his teacher, who said that the key was to find emotional experiances in your own life that parallel the situation your character is going through and use that durring rehearsals to feel the emotion, and by the time you are in preformance it should come automaticlay with the situation on stage) that basicaly, if you can physicaly mimic certian aspects of the emotion you wish to portray it will help you to feel that emotion. Such as clenched fists when angry, scrunching your face up for crying, etc.

That really is a funny story, Checkov making up the death of his grandmother. The one thing i hated about that part of Theater Appreciation (communication minors don't get to take the real acting classes like you guys)is that the teacher (Tim, FYI) didn't finish the story of Stanislavski and Chekov. That was an early theory of Stanislavski's, the one about using painful experiences from personal past to wring tears on stage, and Checkov helped him in changing his mind about it. So, while 80 or more years later, theater practitioners are still saying Stanislavski was stupid for thinking that self-exploitation (e.g., devaluing past experiences like the grief of a passed loved one) was a good idea for actors, Stanislavski himself had written against it and moved on to other things within 10-12 years of having first written about that. Did that get mentioned, perchance, in class? IMO, it seems like a pretty substantial omission.

Mi "giving up recreational internet use for Lent--see ya'll in 40 days. E-mail me if there's an emergency." ke