Week 1: Yuri Yeremin

Time for an update on the events of my first week at the Stanislavski Summer School. This first week has been an incredible experience. Already I've learned a lot and had a lot of what I've already learned re-enforced. I'm very excited for the next four weeks! It's going to be awesome! So, let me tell you a bit about the four different classes that I had last week. First reference this site to get a feel for the credits each of my teachers has.

I mentioned a little already my acting lectures with Yuri Yeremin. Yuri is one of the top directors and acting teachers in all of Russia and has international acclaim for his work. He doesn't always teach at the summer school so we're lucky to have him this year. I performed my observations of the lady eating the ice cream cone and it went well. The ice cream cone I bought for the scene melted a lot more than I thought it would and so I ended up with ice cream all over me, but I kept in character and it ended up going really well. I felt great about it. For our next assignment we were put into groups of three and we were to create a scenario based around a love triangle. I ended up playing the boyfriend who unknowingly slept with his girl-friend's best friend and then met her "for the first time" the next day. The scene we played out was the three of us getting together and the two us realizing what had happened while trying to keep the info from our mutual friend. It was an awkward situation and was very fun to play. It also went well. The two girls I was working with are quite talented and fun to work with. In fact, everyone here is very talented. I'm excited to work with them.

I needed a paragraph change. I'm still writing about Yuri's class though. I'll try to wrap it up. The main focus of his classes has been "given circumstances". Using action as the basis for everything that takes place on stage you then have to contextualize the action down to the smallest details. He broke this down into the "where", "when", "what", "who" and "why" of the scene. Remember you have to be specific. For "where" and "when" he said to start big and go small (i.e. United States -> Massachusetts -> Cambridge -> Lesley University -> Mellen St. -> Doble Bldg. -> Second floor classroom and so forth). The same holds for time. Start with the century or even millennium and work your way down to the exact time. Don't forget the weather either. The more details the better. Use the script for clues and fill in what you don't know. Also, make sure you write all of this down. The "what" is the events that occur to influence action. These are the most important part. You have to know what events have occurred to cause your character to act the way that he is acting. Something happens and your character responds to it in a given way. Events and action become the primary aspects of acting. Then you have "who", which is just understanding your character. Go deep and find everything said about your character in the script. Make a list of characteristics similar to yourself and different from yourself. Those are the ones that you as the actor will have to pay particular attention to become your character. The "why" then of course is "why am I doing the things I'm doing?" I thought he would spend more time on this talking about objectives, but he didn't. He just left it at that. I guess his discussion of action covered objectives. So, that about wraps up Yuri's class. We will continue having a group discussion about acting, but from now on it's going to be led by Oleg Topoliansky who just arrived from Moscow.

So, that's Yuri. He's a great guy. He's very strict and direct, but you can tell that he has a very compassionate heart. His eye for detail is incredible too. I'm amazed at how much he can notice in a performance, and how much he knows what a performance needs. Sadly, I won't get to work with him as much anymore since we've been divided into different groups and I'm in Mikhail Lobanov's group. As disappointed as I am to not get to work with Yuri too much anymore, I am very excited to work with Misha.