Constantin Stanislavski Stanislavski Although Stanislavski died in 1938, his theories of "method acting" which are explained in his three books "An Actor Prepares", "Building a Character" and "Creating a Role", are still one of the greatest influences in the world of performance today. The most fundamental principle of Stanislavski's teaching is that the actor must live the life of the character that he is portraying, he must learn to think like the character and behave as the character would, therefore the portrayal is not confined to the performance but will, to some degree, begin to overlap into the actor's own life. This, he asserts, is the only way to achieve total realism and, to reinforce this, the actor must also extend this exercise of imagination to encompass the costumes that he wears, the articles that comprise the set and the props that are used. If there is a mirror on the wall, he must invent a history of where it was bought, by whom and how it has come to be in this particular location, thus completing the elaborate imaginary world which will lend conviction to his performance. It is therefore necessary for the actor to approach the role from two levels, the external level being the more obvious. The way in which the character moves, speaks and behaves must be studied and practised, but this performance will become mechanical unless it is guided by the inner belief in the characterâââ¤s&Mac255;‰â¤z&Mac255;¢s feelings and emotions which, although unseen by the audience, is the added factor which will ultimately lend conviction to the part that is being played. The actor should draw on his own experiences, wherever possible, to understand and interpret the emotions and events that the character will experience, and the wider the actor's experience of life then the greater his insight and comprehension will be. However, although drawing on personal experiences is often the only way to achieve complete empathy with the role, it is essential that these emotions and reactions become absorbed in the fictitious world of the character itself, and are not just reproduced mechanically, otherwise the illusion of reality will be lost. Stanislavski's teachings are best defined in the following quotes: The more an actor has observed and known, the greater his experience the clearer his perception of the inner and outer circumstances of the life in his play and in his part This work is not done by the intellect alone but by all your creative forces, all the elements of your inner creative state on the stage together with your real life in the sense of the play Therefore, to follow the teachings of Stanislavski it is necessary for the actor to totally immerse himself, body, soul and mind, in the part that he is playing. Before the realistic drama of the late 1800s, no one had devised a method for achieving this kind of believability. Through their own talent and genius, individual actresses and actors had achieved it, but no one had developed a system whereby it could be taught and passed on to future generations. The person who did this the most successfully was the Russian actor and director Constanin Stanislavski. A cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater in Russia and the director of Anton Chekhov's most important plays, Stanislavski was also an actor. He was involved in both traditional theater (using stylized, nonrealistic techniques) and the emergence of the modern realistic approach. By closely observing the work of great performers of his day, and by drawing on his on acting experience, Stanislavski identified and described what these gifted performers did naturally and intuitively. From his observations he compiled a series of principles and techniques which today are regarded as fundamental to both the training and the performance of actors and actresses who want to create believable characters onstage. We might assume that believable acting is simply a matter of being natural; but Stanislavski discovered first of all that acting realistically onstage is extremely artificial and difficult. He wrote: All of our acts, even the simplest, which are so familiar to us in everyday life, become strained when we appear behind the footlights before a public of a thousand people. That is why it is necessary to correct ourselves and learn again how to walk, sit, or lie down. It is essential to re-educate ourselves to look and see, on the stage, to listen and to hear. To achieve this "reeducation", Stanislavski said, "the actor must first of all believe in everything that takes place onstage, and most all, he must believe what he himself is doing. And one can only believe in the truth." To give substance to his ideas, Stanislavski studied how people act in everyday life and how they communicated feelings and emotions; and then he found a way to accomplish the same things onstage. He developed a series of exercises and techniques for the performer which had the following broad aims: 1. To make the outward behavior of the performer - gestures, voice, and the rhythm of movements- natural and convincing. 2. To have the actor or actress convey the goals and objectives-the inner needs of a character. Even if all the visible manifestations of a character are mastered, a performance will appear superficial and mechanical without a deep sense of conviction and belief. 3. To make the life of the character onstage not only dynamic but continuous. Some performers tend to emphasize only the high points of a part; in between, the life of the character stops. In real life, however, people do not stop living. 4. To develop a strong sense of ensemble playing with other performers in a scene. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let us now take a look at Stanislavski's techniques. Relaxation When he observed the great actors and actresses of his day, Stanislavski noticed how fluid and lifelike their movements were. They seemed to be in a state of complete freedom and relaxation, letting the behavior of the character come through effortlessly. He concluded that unwanted tension has to be eliminated and that the performer at all times attain a state of physical and vocal relaxation. Concentration and Observation Stanislavski also discovered that gifted performers always appear fully concentrated on some object, person, or event while onstage. Stanislavski referred to the extent or range of concentration as a circle of attention. This circle of attention can be compared to a circle of light on a darkened stage. the performer should begin with the idea that it is a small, tight, circle including only himself or herself and perhaps one other person or one piece of furniture. When the performer has established a strong circle of attention, he or she can enlarge the circle outward to include the entire stage area. In this way performers will stop worrying about the audience and lose their self-consciousness. Importance of Specifics One of Stanislavski's techniques was an emphasis on concrete details. A performer should never try to act in general, he said, and should never try to convey a feeling such as fear or love in some vague, amorphous way. In life, Stanislavski said, we express emotions in terms of specifics: an anxious woman twists a handkerchief, an angry boy throws a rock at a trash can, a nervous businessman jangles his keys. Performers must find similar activities. The performer must also conceive of the situation in which a character exists (which Stanislavski referred to as the given circumstances ) in term of specifics. In what kind of space does an event take place: formal, informal, public, domestic? How does it feel? What is the temperature? The lighting? What has gone on just before? What is expected in the moments ahead? Again, those questions must be answered in concrete terms. Inner Truth An innovative aspect of Stanislavski's work has to do with inner truth, which deals with the internal or subjective world of characters - that is, their thoughts and emotions. The early phases of Stanislavski's research took place while he was also directing the major dramas of Anton Chekhov. Plays like The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard have less to do with external action or what the characters say than what the characters are feeling and thinking but often do not verbalize. It becomes apparent that Stanislavski's approach would be very beneficial in realizing the inner life of such characters. Stanislavski had several ideas about how to achieve a sense of inner truth. one being the magic if. If is a word which can transform our thoughts; through it we can imagine ourselves in virtually any situation. "If I suddenly became wealthy..." "If I were vacationing on the Caribbean Island..." "If I had great talent..." "If that person who insulted me comes near me again..." The word if becomes a powerful lever for the mind; it can lift us out of ourselves a give us a sense of absolute certainty about imaginary circumstances. Action Onstage What? Why? How? An important principle of Stanislavski's system is that all action onstage must have a purpose. This means that the performer's attention must always be focused on a series of physical actions linked together by the circumstances of the play. Stanislavski determined these actions by asking three essential questions: What? Why? How? An action is performed, such as opening a letter (the what). The letter is opened because someone has said that it contains extremely damaging information about the character (the why). The letter is opened anxiously, fearfully (the how), because of the calamitous effect it might have on the character. These physical actions, which occur from moment to moment in a performance, are in turn governed by the character's overall objective in the play. Through Line of a Role According to Sstanislavski, in order to develop continuity in a part, the actor or actress should find the superobjective of a character. What is it, above all else, that the character wants during the course of a play? What is the character's driving force? If a goal can be established toward which the character strives, it will give the performer an overall objective. From this objective can be developed a through line which can be grasped, as a skier on a ski lift grabs a towline and is carried to the top. Another term for through line is spine. To help develop the through line, Stanislavski urged performers to divide scenes into unit (sometimes called beats). In each unit there is an objective, and the intermediate objectives running through a play lead ultimately to the overall objective. Ensemble Playing Except in one-person shows, performers do not act alone; they interact with other people. Stanislavski was aware that many performers tend to "stop acting," or lose their concentration, when they are not the main characters in a scene or when someone else is talking. Such performers make a great effort when they are speaking but not when they are listening. This tendency destroys the through line and causes the performer to move into and out of a role. That, in turn, weakens the sense of the ensemble - the playing together of all the performers. Stanislavski and Psychophysical Action A character's actions will lead to his / her emotions. (This is a tough one.) Stanislavski began to develop his techniques in the early part of the twentieth century, and at first he emphasized the inner aspects of training: for example, various ways of getting in touch with the performer's unconscious. Beginning around 1917, however, he began to look more and more at purposeful action, or what he called pyshophysical action. (An action which has a purpose, and leads to feelings about the action taken.) A student at one of his lectures that year took a note and noticed the change: "Whereas action previously had been taught as the expression of a previously- established 'emotional state,' it is now action itself which predominates and is the key to the psychological." (Read this next line carefully) Rather than seeing emotions as leading to action, Stanislavski came to believe that it was the other way around: purposeful action undertaken to fulfill a character's goals was the most direct route to the emotions. Example 1: A character is sitting at a dinner table. All of a sudden the character quickly stands up and throws the plate at the wall, thus causing more anger in the character. Rather than just trying to be mad, the character made an angry motion, throwing a plate, that made the anger greater. Example 2: Character A gives Character B a hug. Character A may now feel closer to the other character, and happier, since giving a hug.) Example 3: If you have ever seen the football player before a game who shouts, lifts weights, yells, or gets angry to psyche himself up before a game, that is psychophysical action. The Stanislavski System Stanislavski System.American Method Acting originated in Russia with Konstantin Stanislavski, who opened the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. The Moscow Art Theatre is primarily associated with the productions of the plays of Anton Chekhov and the beginning of Russian dramatic realism. By observing himself as an actor as well as the other actors with whom he worked, and more especially by studying the great dramatic artists in Russia and abroad, Stanislavski developed an approach to the teaching of acting that became known as the Stanislavski system. The effects of his teaching were felt in America in the 1920 s when Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, both alumni of the Moscow Art Theatre school, emigrated to America and established The American Laboratory Theatre. Stanislavski investigated and charted the acting process that good actors used intuitively. He systematized that process so that it could be studied and developed consciously. He was interested in how to maintain a consistent performance and how to be a conscious human being on stage. The Method is a pragmatic way of working to create both the interior life and the logical behavior of a character, a way that can be taught, practiced, monitored, and corrected. According to Stanislavski, an important aspect of building a character pertains to the subtext. The subtext is the meaning behind the words of the text. For Stanislavski, the subtext is the inward life of a human spirit. . .that constantly flows under the words of a role. Words are only a part of a given moment on stage, and are related to thoughts, bodily expressions, and images. Actors need to see images and transmit those images to the acting partner. Images need to grow in detail and become richer. Questions are asked by the actor. Why did the playwright write these words at this time in the play? To make the playwrights words his own the actor needs to know why the author gave these lines to the character: what is my purpose in saying these lines? How do I make that purpose known? Under what conditions would I think, behave, do, and perceive as this character does? As the actor I must be willing to submerge myself in the life of the character. Some of the tenets of Method Acting are: verisimilitude, seeking logical character behavior, justification and super-objective, expression of true emotion, drawing on the self, ensemble acting, improvisation, and use of objects. A great deal has been said and written about what has come to be known as the Method. It is the preeminent acting style of American actors. It would be very difficult to improve on the following definition of the tenets of Method acting.1 1. The actors essential task is to reproduce a credible reality on stage or screen, founded on acute observations of the world. Method teachers do not hold that this restricts actors to any one style of production, but this task does closely link the Method with American naturalism, which has the same aim. 2. The Method justifies all stage behavior by establishing its psychological soundness. To provide a unifying motivation for this behavior, the actor determines a single overall purpose for the character. This is commonly known as a super-objective,throughline, or spine. This larger purpose is divided into smaller, actable units called objectives or actions. 3. Great value is placed on the expression of genuine emotion, which may be evoked through a technique called affective memory. (Affective memory has become an extremely controversial device that has, in its most popular version, emotional recall,split the community of Method teachers.) 3(a) The central purpose of the creative actors work is the cultivation of life of our inner feelings. According to Boleslavsky, this involves the development and use of the actors affective memory: the recalling and re-experiencing of previously felt emotions. ________Stanislavski developed exercises with which the actor, by recalling the sensory details that accompanied an emotional experience, could entice the emotion from his subconscious and re-experience it. Madame Ouspenskaya used to call the actors affective memories golden keys, which unlocked some of the greatest moments in acting. ________In the last four pages of the Overture, section of SWANNS WAY, Marcel Proust describes a perfect example of the affective-memory phenomenon and how it is linked to particular sensory keys that can unlock long-forgotten feelings.3 The novels narrator recalls how his mother served him some tea with those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines. He takes a sip of the tea into which he has dipped a piece of Madeleine and suddenly experiences an exquisite sense of joy. He tries another sip of the tea and cake and then another, but the sensation seems to diminish. He considers for a moment, then concentrates on the sense memory of the taste of the crumb of Madeleine soaked in a decoction of lime-flowers, and immediately a flood of reminiscences is released: he remembers the Sunday mornings at Combray, when as a child, his aunt Leonie gave him a piece of the Madeleine she had dipped in her own cup of lime-flower tea, the re-experiencing of which unfolds in the complex of recollections that becomes REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. ________There are many examples in theatre history of performers making unconscious use of their affective memories. For example, Edmund Kean was truly emotionally moved when he picked up the skull of Yorick in the gravediggers, scene in HAMLET. It seems each time he held Yoricks skull he would be reminded of a beloved uncle who had given him his first lessons in acting and who had introduced him to Shakespeare. By this example we see that the actor had a real emotional response that came from his connection with the play and the character. ________Specific acting exercises are used only as a last resort. The given circumstances of the play, character, and action are of primary importance. After the performer analyzes his part to see what feeling or emotion is necessary at a given moment in a scene, he searches his own life for a remembered feeling or emotion that parallels the former. Using sensory exercises the actor retrieves the parallel emotion from his affective memory. The actor is not to be concerned with how the emotion will manifest itself, only with finding it and creating the sensory realities that will unlock the memory. When the affective memory is tapped, the mental processes set in motion do cause psycho physical responses. They stimulate the players physical and mental being with remembered sensations and emotions that color his or her behavior and vocal expression in ways that both the actor and the audience experience as real and exciting. This is what gives fine acting its aliveness and verisimilitude. ________The Method teacher Robert Lewis has this definition of affective memory:4 ________The theory is that if, quietly relaxed, you think back over a certain incident in your life which moved you strongly at the time, and if you can remember and recreate in your mind the physical circumstances of that moment (where you were, who was there, what happened, the time of day, the place, surroundings) and start reliving it . . . it is possible that a feeling similar to what you felt at that time will recur. 4. Each actors own personality is not only the model for the creation of character, but the source from which all psychological truth must be distilled. Heres what Brando has to say about use of self ________People often say that an actor plays a character well but thats an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. Thats what actors used to do, and then called it characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are or some aspect of who you are. Everything is a part of your experience. We all have a spectrum of emotions in us. It is a broad one, and it is the actors job to reach into this assortment of emotions and experience for the ones that are appropriate for his character and the story. Through practice and experience, I learned how to put myself into different moods and states of mind by thinking about things that made me laugh or be angry, sad, or outraged; I developed a mental technique that allowed me to address certain parts of myself, select an emotion, and send something akin to an electrical impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience the emotion. If I had to feel worried, Id think about something that worried me; if I was supposed to laugh, I thought about something that was hilarious. 5. Improvisation is encouraged as a rehearsal aid, and even in some cases as part of performance, in an effort to keep the acting spontaneous, and thus lifelike. 6. The Method promotes intimate communication between actors in a scene, thus striving toward the performance ideal of true, unified ensemble acting. Some acting exercises developed for this purpose are: the mirror, group use of imaginary objects, group movement exercises, and improvisations. ________Ensemble acting does mean more than just consistently good acting by all cast members. It generally implies that everyone on stage is acting in exactly the same style, and it requires concentrated group scenes. Unfortunately, the history of American drama and film contains few examples of it. It may be the sad case that for American actors, who strive to create theater in a highly commercial context that supports the star system, moments of intimate connection between individuals are often the closest they come to ensemble acting.6 7. The use of objects is stressed both for their symbolic value and as reminders of the solid, material world.