Chekhov Notes

. Michael Chekhov is the nephew of playwright Anton Checkov.
. He is an actor, director and practitioner.
. Establish the differences between an actor and their character and this will help to work out the main physical and psychological differences between the actor and their character.
. The next exercise we did was to lie down and ask our characters questions i.e. what are you wearing
. Chekhov believed that you should re-imagine things and be constantly reviewing your character choices, so we explored this by re-imagining our entire character.
. Chekhov also believes that every actor is part of a whole and that they need to understand that part of a whole, and so we were told to analyse the job of our character in the play.
. Another thing that he believed in was psychological gestures, that each line in the play should start by having a gesture, before it becomes more natural. We were asked to take a section from our CG audition speech and perform it using psychological gestures, whilst repeating it over and over to cement the movement in our mind.