Vocalist.org archive


From:  Karen Mercedes <dalila@R...>
Date:  Tue Apr 16, 2002  6:22 pm
Subject:  Re: Stanislavsky

Interesting coincidence that this topic has come up. I just sent the
following email to a friend of mine who is studying acting in the UK, and
asked me what I knew about Stanislavsky and "Method" acting. Thought the
info might be of interest to others, too.


On Mon, 15 Apr 2002, Karen Mercedes wrote:

> "Method" really refers to the Lee Strasberg/Actor's Studio "practical
> application" (one of several) of Stanislavsky's approach. What
> Stanislavsky himself described and promoted - without the "filter" of
> Strasberg - is more accurately referred to as the "Stanislavsky
> Technique". Konstantin Stanislavsky allegedly rejected the traditional
> techniques of stagecraft - i.e., those techniques current when he was
> active in theatre as an actor and director - in favor of an emotional
> expressiveness. IMO, Stanislavsky did not - nor ever intended to - invent
> an entirely new acting technique. Instead, he attempted to describe the
> methods good actors had always used. At the same time, Stanislavsky was
> active at the same time the theories of Pavlov and Freud were being
> formulated, and he tried to apply them to how actors approach understand
> the personalities of their characters.
>
> Konstantin Stanislavsky, who died in Moscow on Aug. 7, 1938, believed that
> actors in realistic plays should "incarnate their roles". He decided that
> a "system" was needed that would guide the actor and create a "favorable
> condition for the appearance of inspiration".
>
> Stanislavsky's technique - as expressed in his books AN ACTOR PREPARES,
> BUILDING A CHARACTERS, and CREATING A ROLE - does not consist of a fixed
> set of rules, but of practical approaches to the physical and mental
> preparation of the actor and to the creation of the character. His
> technique includes helping the actor learn to relax and avoid distraction
> and develop his or her imagination to memorize sensory details of past
> emotions and recreate those emotions on stage. His system also emphasizes
> the development of a naivete, as well as a belief in the imagined truth of
> the stage. Stanislavsky believed in that to be a good actor, one must be
> a good human being. The aim of his techniques was to give developing
> actors the needed skills of creativity, control and self discipline.
>
> One of his techniques is the use of "Emotion memory". Emotion memory
> enables an actor to experience feelings in a character that as a person
> they may not have experienced. For example, a character's mother has just
> died and the actor may not have been through this. By using Stanislavsky's
> technique, the actor can recall feelings of having sorrow and grief, and
> use those feelings to express his character's bereavement. Another technique
> developed by Stanislavsky was the "Magic If", designed to make actors
> think "What if I were in this situation? How would I handle it?".
> Stanislavsky aimed his technique at making the performer's outward
> activities natural and convincing. The actor must convey the inner truth
> of the part, make the life of the character on-stage dynamic and develop a
> strong sense of the ensemble.
>
> The main hallmarks of Stanislavky's technique are:
>
> Total actor identification with character/role - As expressed by Russian
> teachers of Stanislavsky Technique today, "the core of Stanislavky's
> technique is to create a single person in the actor and the character, to
> make the audience believe in the actor's performance".
>
> Emphasis on ensemble acting - According to American actors who have
> studied in Russia, the Russians emphasize ensemble-based acting, with a
> distinct emphasis and concentration on achieving a profound spiritual,
> intellectual, and emotional connection between cast members in Russia. The
> American actors also observe that Russian actors are far more uninhibited
> in physically manifesting their emotions and relationships onstage.
> Emotion is conveyed in the actor's every movement. If the script says to
> embrace or to kiss, the meaning and emotion behind that embrace or kiss is
> absolutely evident.
>
> The Stanislavsky technique emphasizes six specific areas of an actor's
> training: (1) cultural development, (2) internal training, (3) external
> training, (4) interpretive training, (5) rehearsal techniques, (6)
> performance skills.
>
>
> STANISLAVSKY'S AMERICAN (AND UK) LEGACY
>
> Some actors take the "total identification with character" concept to
> something of an extreme. Instead of relying on their imaginations - i.e.,
> to *imagine* what a particular character's experiences might have felt
> like - they feel compelled to live through those (or very similar)
> experiences. You hear about the actor like Daniel Day Lewis who, to play a
> boxer felt compelled not just to learn how to box, but to actually go into
> the ring against professional boxers, so he could experience what it felt
> like to be beaten to a pulp - or Sean Penn, who in preparing for the film
> DEAD MAN WALKING felt the need to spend many months living in a prison, to
> be able to really feel he had experienced prison life.
>
> The extremes to which some Method actors go to achieve verisimilitude in
> their portrayals is brilliantly sent-up in the (possibly apocryphal) story
> about Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman during the making of the
> film MARATHON MAN in 1976. Dustin Hoffman was immersing himself in his
> Method Acting preparation - depending on the version of the story you hear
> - by going without sleep for days to achieve the necessary frazzled state
> of his character or by running around the block just before filming
> the scene in which he was supposed to be exhausted from running. Whichever
> it was, Olivier, who came from an entirely different "school", was
> distinctly unimpressed with Hoffman's "Method" approach, and asked the
> young actor why he was indulging in sucy peculiar behaviour. Hoffman asked
> how else he could possibly convey the exhaustion he was supposed to
> portray. Olivier's now-classic reply was "Try acting, dear boy."
>
> (Feted as the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation, Olivier used
> to claim that he never understood a character until he found the right
> hat. Indeed, many actors - if they're honest - will admit that they feel
> more comfortable in a role once they have their costume and/or props.
> Olivier's approach to acting often consisted of finding the external look,
> walk, speech of the character and then progressing from there to the inner
> thoughts and feelings. Famous for his make-up - especially for putty
> noses, as exemplified in Richard III and as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth
> Night - he was not averse to travelling the Circle Line on the London
> Underground, on which he claimed he could always find someone who looked
> or moved like the character he was playing. One day, having no idea
> about a particular role, he went for a walk until he saw a green umbrella
> in a shop window. Certain that his character would have exactly that type
> of umbrella, he bought it, and began his character development from there.
> From then on, he referred to his use of props to give him clues to roles
> as "the green umbrella method". On another occasion, when asked by a
> fellow actor for advice on playing a particular role, he replied, "All I
> can tell you is, he wears glasses." A far cry from Stanislavsky!)
>
> Frankly, I'm sceptical that the dangerous extremes some Method actors go
> to in hopes of achieving versimilitude in their portrayal actually do much
> to improve an actor's performance. An actor who has too little imagination
> to empathise with a character's experiences without having to literally go
> through them himself doesn't, IMO, have enough imagination to act, period.
> An actor with the requisite amount of imagination and intelligence should
> be able to read memoirs and interviews of boxers or prisoners, watch films
> of television interviews, and watch them in action in the ring, and
> extrapolate from those readings and observations the feelings necessary to
> portray a boxer or a prisoner. Method actors who indulge in the antics
> I've described obviously wouldn't agree.
>
> Another danger is that Method actors, lacking the imagination necessary to
> imagine and then "inhabit" a fully-featured personality that is not their
> own, often inject a too many characteristics and traits of their own
> personalities into the "framework" of the character they're creating. This
> seems to be particularly true of Stanislavskian acting as interpreted
> through the Actors Studio lens. At its best, the Method approach results
> in very realistic performances. At its worst, it results in actors who
> don't actually portray different characters, but instead portray different
> versions of themselves - and as a result, are unable to persuasively
> portray characters that are very different from themselves. Such actors
> are generally hopeless in "period" dramas that require them to portray
> characters whose experiences and ethics would be far removed from their
> own. Take a look at the Al Pacino REVOLUTION sometime, to see what I mean
> - Pacino, who was very good at portraying a "period" character a
> generation removed from himself, with the same Italian-American ethnic and
> New York geographic background, in THE GODFATHER, was utterly hopeless
> portraying a late 18th century Anglo-American from Philadelphia.
>
> Though not as egregiously "a fish out of water" in THE CRUCIBLE and THE
> LAST OF THE MOHICANS, I don't think anyone would argue that Daniel Day
> Lewis' performances in those films are as believable or
> affecting as his portrayals in MY LEFT FOOT, MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE, and
> even the period (but early 20th Century - rather than 18th or 17th
> century) piece A ROOM WITH A VIEW. Interestingly, Day Lewis' Hamlet was
> similarly "not quite on" - possibly because he shares that common
> Method actor shortcoming when it comes to dealing with historically
> distant characters (who are a different nationality, besides).
>
> Lee Strasberg taught that there are three components to acting: (1)
> carrying out of tasks, (2) interpersonal relationships between the actors
> (characters?) onstage, and (3) creation of sensory objects to ground an
> actor in a reality. While he claimed to focus equally on those components,
> the detractors from Strasberg's Method tend to criticise his overemphasis
> on the Sensory Exercises intended to help in achieving the third of these
> components. Strasberg's defenders argue that his detractors' claims that
> Strasberg's focus was primarily on the sensory and emotional were
> erroneous, and that the point of the Sensory Exercises was not to give the
> actors' emotional and psychic breakthroughs.
>
> Stella Adler was the most famous Strasberg detractor. A Stanislavskian
> actress and pedagogue, Adler made a significant contribution to the
> Western (at least, the American) understanding of Stanislavky's technique.
> She studied at the American Laboratory Theatre School founded in New York
> in 1925 by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, former members of
> the famed Moscow Art Theatre with which Stanislavsky was closely
> associated (Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya also taught at The Actor's Lab,
> where Strasberg studied with them). Adler joined the experimental Group
> Theatre in 1931, and played leading roles in several of their productions.
> The Group Theatre wholeheartedly adopted Stanislavsky's technique,
> initially Lee Strasberg's idiosyncratic interpretation of the so-called
> "Method." Adler, however, objected to Strasberg's relentless emphasis on
> affective memory exercises - exercises that were increasingly painful for
> her. "The emphasis was a sick one," she recalled later. "You couldn't be
> on the stage thinking of your own personal life. It was just
> schizophrenic." (Tellingly, a recent conference of psychiatrists and
> psychologists featured a paper entitled "Mental Health Effects of the
> Stanislavsky Technique in Actors' Education".)
>
> Adler took time off from acting in 1934, going to Paris, where she met
> Stanislavsky himself. He invited her to study daily for several months
> with him, and taught her that "the source of acting is IMAGINATION [my
> emphasis] and that the key to its problems is truth, truth in the
> circumstances of the play." When Adler returned to New York, she made a
> formal report to The Group Theatre on what she had learned from
> Stanislavsky. The response of her fellow actors was that Stanislavsky's
> "corrections" to their understanding (which had been so strongly
> influenced by Strasberg) had "an enormous salutary effect". From then on,
> the Group Theatre's directors placed much less emphasis on resurrecting
> the actor's personal emotional experiences, and concentrated instead on
> helping actors discover the emotional experiences of their characters.
>
> Soon afterwards, Adler herself began giving acting classes, to convey to
> an even wider audience of actors an alternative to the Strasberg
> interpretation of Stanislavsky's technique. She established her own Stella
> Adler Theatre School in 1949 (the school is now known as the Stella Adler
> Academy). This is not to say that Adler hasn't had her own passoinate
> detractors, or that her approach didn't have some incomprehensible
> peculiarities. One of her ex-students describes being asked by Adler to
> "become an orange" in class one day. His response was (understandably,
> IMO) to quit her school.
>
> Another famous American exponent of the Stanislavsky technique was Sandy
> Meisner, who also disagreed - like Adler - with Strasberg's emphases on
> Sensory Exercises and emotional expression. According to Meisner,
> Stanislavsky's focus was on the interpersonal relationships between the
> actors on the stage. Meisner's "reading" of Stanislavsky reflected the
> teachings of Stanislavsky's protege Vakhtangov. Meisner was one of the
> actors associated with the Second Avenue Yiddish Theatre, and the actors
> who started that Theatre were all originally taught by Vakhtangov.
>
> Jerzy Grotowski (founder of the Poor Theatre) expanded on Stanislavsky's
> Technique to create a method that came to be known as Self Knowledge,
> which was based on Grotowski's belief that actors should open up and not
> close themselves off from the feelings and emotions that come through
> performing. Through the application of this method, an actor was supposed
> to gain the potential to "fulfil his true potential as a human being". To
> achieve this, Grotowski took his performers away from the traditional
> theatre structure and began to stage his plays in run down buildings and
> simple rooms. This spatial arrangement changed the relationship between
> the actors and the audience, allegedly giving the performance a new depth.
>
>
> STANISLAVSKY'S SEVEN QUESTIONS
>
> According to Stanislavsky Technique, the key to total identification
> with character lies in the actor's answers
> to the following questions as they relate to every scene the actor plays:
>
> 1. Who am I? - includes the character's "backstory" (personal history
> before the action of the play), age, physical characteristics, class,
> race, ethnicity, personality traits, etc. - particularly those
> characteristics that will influence how the character deals with questions
> 4-7.
>
> 2. Where am I? - location of the actions/events, including the physical
> characteristics of the place, the character's history with regard to the
> place, and his/her memories and emotions associated with it.
>
> 3. When is it? - time of day, time of year, time of life for the
> character, events leading up to/influencing the present situation, and
> sense of why the current situation and events are occurring at this
> particular time.
>
> 4. What do I want? - the character's immediate (tactical) objectives and
> long-term (strategic) goals - material, emotional, and spiritual
>
> 5. Why do I want it? - inspiration, justification, explanation, etc. for
> those objectives and goals.
>
> 6. How will I get it? - plan of action, particularly as regards how the
> character will interact with other characters to achieve his/her
> objectives and goals.
>
> 7. What must I overcome? - the obstacles that, if not overcome, will
> prevent the character from achieving his/her objectives and goals -
> including internal obstacles (emotional issues, moral issues, etc.) and
> external obstacles (other characters with conflicting objectives/goals,
> conficts with other characters (that must be resolved before the
> objective/goal can be attained), physical obstacles (external - as in
> walls, fences, distances, etc. - and internal - as in diseases or other
> physical shortcomings of the character's own body), "the system" - i.e.,
> bureaucracy, laws, rules, etc., that might inhibit a character from
> pursuing his goal, and more importantly the people that embody
> (impose/enforce) those "system" obstacles. In some cases, the same
> obstacle can be expressed both internally and externally. For example - if
> the character's pursuit of his goal would cause him to do something
> illegal, he may be inhibited by two obstacles: (1) the internal obstacle
> of his own knowledge of the law, fear of being arrested, or moral/ethical
> conflict between wanting his goal and not wanting to do wrong; (2) the
> physical manifestation of the law, in the form of the policeman who might
> catch the character "in flagrante delicto" performing an illegal act in
> pursuit of his goal.
>
> Clearly, for the purposes of theatre, external obstacles are virtually
> always more interesting than internal conflicts. A monologue, soliloquy,
> or dialogue in which the character talks about being afraid of being
> arrested won't be nearly as compelling as the scene in which the character
> attempts to perform an illegal act without being detected by the policeman
> onstage, or in which the character has to confront the policeman who is
> arresting him. Unfortunately, the actor is at the mercy of the
> playwright when it comes to how obstacles are presented and dealt with by
> characters. One only hopes the playwright will *show* (through action and
> interaction) rather than simply *tell* (through dialogue) at least some of
> the obstacles - indeed, the same is true of all the other aspects of the
> character that are defined by the answers to Stanislavsky's seven
> questions.
>
> There are alternatives to the Stanislavsky Technique, though none of them
> are as universally accepted.
>
> These include:
>
> Berthold Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt (Alienation) technique. At no time is
> the audience to empathise with the actor. The actor's job is to be a
> detached observer of the action, not an involved participant in it.
> Alienation in Brecht's productions was achieved through the use of
> placards, signs, songs, and direct comments made to the audience by the
> actors. These theatrical devices were all used to comment on the action
> and pass judgement on the story - and to distance both actor and audience
> from the action onstage (so that it could never be mistaken for
> "reality"). Brecht's technique made sense in the context of his theatrical
> objectives. The theatre of Bertolt Brecht was aimed towards educating his
> audience on what was wrong with society and to try and inspire them to
> change it. This form of theatre was referred to as "Epic Theatre". Through
> the use of theatre, Brecht was able to make his political views public and
> use them as a form of propaganda.
>
> Some of his rules for actors to follow included: (1) While performing,
> always remember that you are being watched. (2) Detach yourself from the
> other actors. (3) Don't identify with, or try to become, that character
> you are portraying. (4) Speak your lines as if they were a speech. (5) Be
> critical of your character and the actions you make. (6) Swap roles with
> other actors, both in rehearsal and performance. (6) Use a style of acting
> that is the opposite of the style of the scene, e.g., perform a comic
> scene as if it were serious, a serious scene as if it were comic. The
> differences between Brecht and Stanislavsky can be summed up as follows:
>
> Stanislavsky: The actor creates the illusion that the actor is the
> character. Dramatic action arises entirely from the character(s).
>
> Brecht: The actor demonstrates the character in a social context, with the
> character demonstrated entirely through his action(s) (not vice versa).
>
> (For more on Brecht, look at -
> http://www.shunsley.eril.net/armoore/drama/brecht.htm and
> http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_influence.html and
> http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~jamesf/goodwoman/brecht_epic_theater.html)
>
> Aside from Brecht's own theatre, the "Alienation" Technique is most
> readily observed in the approach that is often taken to acting in Theatre
> of the Absurd (e.g., Pirandello) and other surrealistic avant-garde (e.g.,
> Dario Fo) and post-modernist drama. However, there's a very interesting
> essay on applying Brechtian (vs. Stanislavskian) technique to the acting
> of Shakespeare - take a look at
> http://www.holycross.edu/departments/theatre/eisser/BrechtianShakespeare.html
>
> Another Stanislavsky detractor was Brechtian Erwin Piscator, about whom
> you can read at -
> http://homepages.tesco.net/~theatre/tezzaland/webstuff/piscator.html and
> http://www.erwin-piscator.de/
>
> More recent detractor Joanne Akalaitis' controversial method emphasizes
> the visual, spatial and compositional aspects of theater (critics accuse
> her of devaluing the actor's inner processes). Akalaitis' approach differs
> greatly from that of Stanislavsky; she approaches theater as a painter
> would a canvas, starting with exercises that help actors get in touch with
> their own personal range of "emotional colors", then using those colors to
> paint her theatrical canvas, trusting herself in rehearsal to create
> instinctively.
>
> There's a good paper on Stanislavsky and his Technique at:
>
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:YPNY_R11mmYC:www.finearts.utah.edu/mfa/inte\
rnalMFA/richardson/commentary05/MGOODWc5.DOC6780+%22stanislavsky+technique%22&hl\
=en

> (The MS Word original no longer appears on the 'Net - this is an HTML
> version created by Google.) Also worth reading:
>
http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cache:IgBucFuZjFwC:www.finearts.utah.edu/mfa/inte\
rnalMFA/richardson/commentary05/mzettellc5.doc6780+%22stanislavsky+technique%22&\
hl=en

>
> A book you should read (in addition to Stanislavsky's own): Shomit
> Mitter: SYSTEMS OF REHEARSAL - discusses Stanislavsky, Brecht, and
> Grotowski in terms of the different aims they had for theatre, the
> problems these have caused actors, and the exercises they developed to
> combat these difficulties - and assesses the extent of to which Peter
> Brook and other modern directors are influenced by "the Big Three".

For singers - and particularly operatic performers - there is, of course,
Stanislavsky's book on opera. Stanislavsky, like other theatrical
directors, was also very involved in directing for the opera stage, and
his adaptation of his own Technique to suit the needs of opera is quite
intriguing.

Karen Mercedes
http://www.radix.net/~dalila/index.html
***************************************
In all thy ways acknowledge him,
and he shall direct thy paths.
- Proverbs 3:6




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