18.12.2013

   Following with Stanislavski, the next area we explored during our classes would be objective. Objective, simply put, is a goal that a character wants to achieve, giving the characters every action purpose. Different objectives are divided with units, one unit containing one objective for the character. As the goal changes, so does the unit. There is also the super objective, which is the basically what the play is about, you might also be talking about themes with the super objective. It is about what we want communicate with the play and is the main driving force.

   We started to explore objectives during class by doing this exercise, where we had to stop our pair from leaving the room. The trick was, that we weren't allowed to touch our pairs, but we had to convince them by making excuses why the other one should stay, or in case you were on the counter side, why they should let you leave. This was really to let us dabble with objective, and how we used it to get what we wanted. It was quite common for people to make up the most exaggerated excuses, like I was dying or having a baby at one point, to get what we wanted. 
    In the second exercise, two people were picked at a time to improvise a simple scene on stage, with both been given a secret objective. Both of the people were supposed to try and get what they wanted, without showing their objective to their counter partner. For example, when I was doing my scene with Yunusa, our scene was about a couple who were about to go to dinner party with my friends. Both of our characters did not want to go to that dinner, so we shared the same objective, but for different reasons.  It was interesting to try to do this in a way that it wouldn't show, with staying true to our theme of naturalism. You couldn't just go and say "I don't want to go" because that would have been against the whole idea of the exercise, and so I tried to make up excuses for my character, why they shouldn't go. 
   Both of these exercises were really discovering how to use objective, and how to get something you sometimes need to take a little detour, or settle on the next best thing. 

   This little picture gives an example, how objectives work and how to use it. A verb is always used to talk about an objective. Then comes the obstacle to get over, which leads to amendment, which is the result we get, perhaps with minor changes to what we were first wanting.