The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit

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Until we’ve made a deep organic connection to the script – until those words actually cost us something emotionally, physically, spiritually – they’re nothing but the two-dimensional blueprint of feelings we may possibly experience at some point in the future. You can test this out for yourself right now. Take Hamlet’s words, ‘To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub’… How much imaginative and psychological focus does it take to really consider the words ‘die’, ‘sleep’, ‘dream’, ‘rub’? ‘Sleep’ and ‘dream’ might be reasonably easy as most of us do them on a nightly basis. ‘Rub’ becomes harder, as we might not know exactly what it means? In this context, it could mean ‘issue’, ‘challenge’, ‘nub of the matter’, or ‘friction’. (After all, when we rub something, we create friction.) When it comes to the word ‘die’, that’s even harder. Death is the eternal mystery that few can fathom. So for us to ‘create the living word’ of ‘die’, we have to invest some serious time, imagination and openhearted vulnerability. In Part II, we move into a more subjective realm, as I continue pulling into focus my Anglo-Russian-American perspective on psychophysical acting and ‘the creation of the living word’. This led to the second phase of Stanislavsky’s research, which followed a period of study and deep contemplation in 1906. He truly wanted to recruit the actors’ creative input, so now in rehearsal, he assembled all the actors together around a table for lengthy periods of shared text analysis and discussion. Thereafter, he would encourage them to get up on their feet and put all this research into their performances. It was impossible: their heads were like stuffed potatoes. They were no more ‘creating the living word’ than they had with the determined production plans. Stanislavsky could see the gaping chasm between his actors’ intellectual understanding of a role and their psychophysical embodiment of that understanding. The actual act of sitting at a table with their pencils in their hands and their scripts in front of them was a comparatively calm procedure. Yet the characters they were playing might be involved in physically vigorous or psychologically febrile circumstances. Stanislavsky was aware that ‘A calmly seated figure will get in the way of us finding out how [the character] really feels […] and, without this knowledge, the text will have a dead sound.’ [8] He was right: the text was far from living. Because of this gap between psychology and physicality – between dead sound and living word – Stanislavsky came to realize that you can’t entirely trust the psychological suggestions you come up with when you’re sitting round a table. Your understanding of a situation (and the character within that situation) will only be complete once you’ve explored the dramatic actions physically. As Stanislavsky put it: ‘the separation of the mental life from the physical life does not give the actor the possibility to sense the life of the character’s body, and therefore he impoverishes himself.’ [9] Yet again, he had bypassed the living word – and this time by deadening the body.

This is a different worldview from the one into which I was born. Let alone the worlds into which were born those who have inspired my practice-based research. The basis of the Method of Physical Actions is that one simple action leads to the next action, which leads to the next action, which leads to the next, and so on. By following simple actions, we can achieve complex psychological objectives. So: ‘I open the door, I switch on the light, I walk to the refrigerator, I take out a bottle of wine, I uncork the bottle, I turn on some music – so that when my husband gets home from work the atmosphere will be relaxing and we’ll have a lovely evening.’ Simple achievable actions to attain my psychological goal. So the perennial challenge for us as actors is how to take our audience on a credible journey whereby they might actually believe in the possibility of what they’re watching. This is particularly the challenge with the psychological realism that tends to dominate western theatre and film, whether we’re talking superintendents or superheroes. How can we convince our audience that what we’re saying as actor/characters is the spontaneous expression of feelings provoked by the chain of fictional events? To do that, we have to ‘own’ the words and Stanislavsky called this process ‘the creation of the living word’. He likens the process to the organic growth of a plant. The living word is ‘one in which the roots run down deep into one’s soul. They feed on one’s feeling; but the stem reaches into the consciousness where it puts forth luxuriant foliage of eloquent verbal forms, conveying all the deep emotions from which they draw their vitality.’ [5]Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris, p. 4. (My emphasis.) What do we even mean by truth? In this session, we’ll explore how we define and experience a ‘believable’ performance, and what might that mean beyond psychological realism. We’ll also look at the role of the imagination for actors and how to develop imagination through observation and even daydreaming. In many ways, Section 3 is a whole 8-week course in its own right. However…by way of a taster, we take a look at Stanislavsky’s legacies of the Method of Physical Actions and Active Analysis. In Tray 13 are all manner of useful tools including ‘Events’, ‘Grasp’, ‘Here, Today, Now’, and ‘moments of orientation’. We will see what we can unfurl in our time together… Bella Merlin magically converts her extensive knowledge into real-world practice and on-the-floor technique. This new edition is a necessary and lively resource for any theatre practitioner' David Chambers, Professor of Directing, Yale School of Drama Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of English publication 1961)

So how can I share my recent practice-based research – garnered from combining Stanislavsky and Shakespeare and contemporary film acting – with my students?BM: It is murky terrain. Historically Stanislavski was evolving the method of physical actions around about the same time that he was exploring and experimenting with what then became known as active analysis. The method of physical actions is a bit like how a conductor may go through a music score: here’s the crescendo, then there is pause. Instead of notes you are looking at actions. These are very physical, tangible, simple things that activate my bigger psychological intention. (For example, my intention is to impress you so I keep looking at the notes that I have surrounded myself with, I show you my book, I sip my coffee.) It didn’t have anything to do with emotions, it wasn’t emotion led; there was a sequence of actions that revealed my intention. This led the Soviet regime to fixate on the method of physical actions because it was a manageable utopia that fit the Marxist dialectic. The Soviet regime loved the idea of the method of physical actions to the extent that every drama school in Russia had to teach it. This connection with the Soviet regime appalled Stanislavski and was never what he wanted. I don’t fixate too much on stage directions, though I do consider their content and meaning. George Bernard Shaw writes short essays for his stage directions, which can give us some useful insights into both character and milieu. Chekhov provides a few select stage directions, particular ‘pauses’, which are always worth noting as pauses hold a lot of inner information. Shakespeare writes very few explicit stage directions though lots of implicit ones. And most contemporary playwrights give minimal stage directions, assuming the director and the actors will work out the visuals in rehearsal.

urn:lcp:completestanisla0000merl:epub:9cc1d9fa-4195-4029-b0cd-8ac2326d445b Foldoutcount 0 Identifier completestanisla0000merl Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0mt6jp8c Invoice 1652 Isbn 0896762599 Knebel, M. (2002), On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin. If the actors know their lines, that’s great. If they’d rather have their scripts in their hands, that’s fine. It’s even possible to request that an assistant director feeds them the lines from the side. It’s not about memory-test or performance. It’s all about immediate, embodied connection with the other actors, as well as with the circle of audience. This playful and daring first pass through a play has many psychophysical resonances with Stanislavsky’s final practices, not least in terms of discussions. We start to get to the nub of psychophysicality, wherein our bodies feed our imaginations and feelings, and vice versa. We’ll look at the impact of tempo-rhythm on both our physical experience and emotional state, as well as how we might use contrapuntal rhythms to tell stories.In and of itself, acting provides the physically safest place for us as human beings: we more or less know what we’re going to say and we more or less know the circumstances of the situation. It also asks us to be our most psychophysically fragile: it demands we allow the spectator into our soul and use our language to affect our listeners. Ambitious as it may sound and in a world of alternatives facts – where ‘Truth isn’t truth’ any more apparently [40]– it seems as though acting may be the last bastion of ‘the creation of the living word’. As we train our students and we practice our art, I believe it’s an ambition worth pursuing. By doing this sort of analysis of the script directions, I now have some basic inroads to the three ‘inner psychological drives’ of thoughts, feelings and actions for Jenny. So I can start to feel where she might live in my own psychophysical instrument. of Acting and the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, and went on to teach at institutions including the Twenge, J. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria. BM: Yes, I was there when Russia was just coming out from under the iron curtain and my tutors welcomed the spiritual, energetic and emotional qualities of active analysis. The method of physical actions was action, action, action, action. Whereas active analysis was much more holistic, “impure” if you like. The murkiness of human mess becomes a tool with which you can create something. So they were very clear: the distinction is that the method of physical action was pragmatic, whilst active analysis much more unexpected, more human. The mechanics of each are very close: read the scene, discuss the scene, improvise the scene, discuss the improvisation. What’s the event? What’s the action? What’s the counteraction? How do the action and the counteraction rub against each other to create the dramatic event? But my tutors, who were as steeped in Michael Chekhov, Jerzy Grotowski and Maria Knebel as they were in Stanislavski, they were much more into the spiritual – that was compatible with active analysis. Spirituality was no longer something that was going to be squashed by the regime.

To apply please send a current CV and a brief description of what you hope to gain from the workshop. There are a limited number of spaces for actors and writers. We will notify you in due course once we have decided. The second half is more subjective, as I focus on my experiences of film acting and teaching. This two-part structure actually reflects the process of practice-based research: i.e. we take established methodologies; we pass them through our individual acting instruments (our selves); and we see how that might create new knowledge and perspectives.

The third phase of Stanislavsky’s practice-based research came towards the end of his life. By now he understood that we can only ‘create the living word’ when we’re navigating the plays’ given circumstances through our bodies and with our partners. This caused him to analyze deeply his whole rehearsal process. With his newly grasped insight, he disbanded the long discussions and instead he directed his actors like so: Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-11-08 20:08:56 Boxid IA40281422 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Barrett, E. & Bolt, B. (eds.) (2010), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, New York: I. B. Tauris. Merlin, B. (2018), Konstantin Stanislavsky: Routledge Performance Practitioners, revised edition, Abingdon & New York. Stanislavsky cited in Stanislavsky Directs (1994), Gorchakov, N. M., trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights, p.94.