More acting techniques..

Mike Alfred's line ties in with the 'Different Every Night' theory that he created, saying "The actor is not just the director's puppet.They are the artists." This meaning that the actor doesn't have to always take aboard what the director tells them, they can instead be their own person and make decisions themselves making different movements on stage at the appropriate time.

Exercises we did came from another improvisation game in order to teach us to always say yes on stage, not literally saying yes but as in yes to what's happening on stage. Making offers is one of the crucial things while acting on stage, in order to keep a scene alive you need to always make offers, not only for yourself but for other actors on stage. I found that these exercises were quite mundane, repetitive but in a way it gave me an idea of my character in The Frontline. In order for that to be a successful exercise I didn't use any props and more point of concentration was getting smaller and smaller until it was concentrated on one person and one thing they did to affect me.

Declan Donnellan another practitioner founded a company called 'Cheek by Jowl' in 1981. The title was a line from Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare. Declan has been an associate director for the National Theatre as well as:
ENO - Opera
RSC - Theatre
Bolshoy - Theatre

The company usually do Classical plays but push the boundaries to make most of it contemporary to try and show the difference of Shakespeare then and how Shakespeare would've been now.

He believed that the things that are in anyone's way for acting is:
Finding out the character's lifestyle
Lines
Character's physical attributes
Vocal attributes - accent, pitch, etc
What they would wear on a day to day basis

He also wants actors to ask themselves these questions:
I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know what I want, I don't know who I am, I don't know what I am, I don't know where I am, I don't know I should move, I don't know how I should feel, I don't know what I'm saying, I don't know what I'm playing.

The clearest common theme in all of those statements is they all begin with 'I don't' indicating that the actor is somewhat lost before they can decide anything.