Sharapova is seeded No. 1, but her seven-week reign atop the rankings ended this week when she was overtaken by Justine Henin.
Seeking her first Key Biscayne title, Sharapova faces a difficult draw. She could face Venus and Serena Williams - each a three-time champion - in her next two matches.
``If you want to win a big tournament like this, you've got to play against good players,'' Sharapova said.
Women's Professional Tennis
On a windy afternoon, Sharapova double-faulted eight times against Chan and faced six break points but saved them all.
``I felt like I was in control,'' Sharapova said. ``With the break points she had, I was able to come up with good defensive play. She had me on the run on some of those break points, and I was able to come up with good shots. But it's the first match. It's never completely there. I'm sure I'll get better.''
The 17-year-old Chan fell to 0-5 this year.:w
Although most filmgoers readily form opinions about
acting, the subject of performance is one of the least
analyzed aspects of film aesthetics. What exactly do
actors contribute to film artistry, and how do they do it?
Lee Strasberg (1899-1982), a teacher and theorist of
acting and a leader of the Actors Studio, suggested that
the most effective film performers were those who did not
act. “They try not to act but to be themselves, to respond
or react,” he said. This may be a debatable proposition in
the sense that performers' images and roles are invariably
constructed by such factors as studio publicity and genre
codes, but it does relate to a central tenet of the
Stanislavski Method: actors were not to emote in the
traditional manner of stage conventions, but to speak and
gesture in a manner one would use in private life.
Konstantin Stanislavski, who was, director at the
Moscow
Art
Theater,
wrote a number of books on acting, the first of which,
An Actor Prepares, was published in English
translation in 1936. Before then, however, one of his
students, Richard Boleslawsky (1889-1937), opened an
acting school in New York and began teaching
Stanislavskian principles (Boleslavsky went on to
Hollywood and directed a number of films in the 1930s)”
The
first significant performance work drawing on
Stanislavski's ideas was carried Out by the Group Theater,
formed in
New York
in 1931. The Group's most famous Production was a play
expressing the militant radical spirit of the 1930s,
“Waiting for Lefty” (1935), by Clifford Odets (1903-1963),
who became a Hollywood scriptwriter and occasional
director. The Group did not last beyond the 1930s, but its
influence continued in Hollywood and through the formation
of the Actors Studio.
After World War II, in the context of the Actors Studio,
the Stanislavski Method was shorn of its radical Political
connotations (the Group Theater became a particular target
of
anticommunist investigators) and emphasized an
individualized, psychological approach to acting- The
“Method” required a performer to draw on his or her own
self, on experiences, memories, and emotions that could
inform a characterization and shape how a character might
speak or move. Characters were thus shown to have an
interior life; rather than being stereotyped figures
representing a single concept (the villain, the heroine),
they could become complex human beings with multiple and
contradictory feelings and desires. it was the ability to
convey the complexity-indeed the confusion of inner
feelings that made the Actors Studio-trained Marlon Brando,
Montgomery Clift, and James Dean such emblematic figures
for the Pos
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