Teaching Stanislavski

Notes on "Stanislavsky's System: Pathways for the Actor"

The actor develops a theatrical sense of self by learning to control the skills of concentration, imagination and communication.

Psychophysical concentration begins with sharpening the senses through observation.

Further training of concentration through circles of attention that can be small, medium or large. Points of focus on stage (whether animate or inanimate, visible or imagined) are objects of attention. Actors learn to limit their focus to only those objects within defined circles.

Training the imagination begins by strengthening inner vision.

Imagination trained further by invoking the magic if.

To control non-verbal expression, actors taught to recognise and manipulate the rays of energy that carry communication.

Non-verbal communication refined by improvising situations that involve naturally-silent moments.

Actors incorporate words as elements of communication only after a firm grounding in non-verbal means. Actors asked to improvise familiar situations using their own words.

The System offers a variety of ways to work on roles. Some begin with imagination and intellect: affective cognition and the scoring of actions. Others rely on physicalisation: the method of physical actions and active analysis. All assume that careful reading of the play precedes rehearsal.

The process of affective cognition (or cognitive analysis) involves cast discussing each element in play and all the historical details of its world in extended sessions at the table. Actors work individually by visualising distinct moments from their characters’ lives, thus imaginatively empathising with them. (Visualisations trigger emotional, hence ‘affective’ responses.) Such fantasy incorporates the elements and details discovered by the cast as a whole. The actor creates a personal vision–a filmstrip–of themselves in the role.

For the scoring of actions, actors begin by distinguishing between actions and activities and learning to execute them. Action denotes what the actor does to solve the problem, set before the character by the given circumstances of the play and production. Thus, action seeks to accomplish something. Expressed as an active verb, action is both ‘mental/inner’ and ‘physical/outer’; it must be ‘apt’ in relationship to the circumstances. While actions are the means through which the events of the play unfold, activities create contexts for scenes (e.g., Lady Macbeth hosts her husband’s banquet while covering up for his crazed reaction to Banquo’s ghost). As actors rehearse, they write down the sequence of their actions, creating personal scores of actions, which guide them during performance. Each action follows ‘logically’ and ‘consecutively’ from what precedes it. Each actor searches for a uniting thread that links together all the characters’ actions to produce an overall sense of what the play conveys to the audience. This unifying force is the through-action.

Identifying actions involves breaking the play into segments (bits or beats). Each bit embodies a single action and begins when the action of the scene shifts (not the playwright’s divisions). For each bit, the actor examines the given circumstances and describes the character’s situation in an adjective. Given circumstances include historical and social research, director’s and designer’s decisions, and all the details in the play. The character’s situation, thus described, poses a problem (task or objective), which must be solved by means of action. The actor decides what the character needs to do to solve the defined problem, thus leading naturally to the specific action for that segment of the play. Actors may use the magic if to help identify action. "What would I do if I found myself in the circumstances of the scene?" The answer, expressed as a verb, suggests the action. During performance, the actor places full attention on carrying out the required action, with the character’s emotions arising as a natural result. Actors learn to trust that their emotional life flows as a result of their absorption in their action and not vice-versa.

The method of physical actions assumes that emotional life may sometimes be more easily aroused and fixed for performance through work on the physical life of the role, rather than through inner work. The actor discovers then performs the logical sequence of physical actions necessary to carry out the inner, purposeful actions of the scene (as identified above). Such physical actions are best suggested by the text. The sequence of physical actions forms a score (not to be confused with score of actions). The score of physical actions includes the many external moves and strategies that the actor needs to carry out the overarching purposeful action, that has been identified as necessary to the scene. (The larger score of actions gives all the inner and purposeful actions that the character carries out from the beginning to the end of the play). The actor tests the physical score by executing it silently–the silent étude. Actors improvise the segment of the scene completely: they establish circumstances and activities, carry out the sequence of physical actions, and accomplish the overarching action, but without using words. Such non-verbal acting helps physicalise the scene. Actors avoid pantomime, however, using credible gestures and blocking that could be transferred to a spoken performance. If they communicate successfully the key elements of a scene in a silent étude, they have created useful scores for performance.

In active analysis, actors grasp a play’s anatomy before memorising lines. They read the play as if it were a system of clues that imply potential performance (just as musicians read musical scores). These clues are the facts, to which actors accommodate performance. They may entail sophisticated literary observations (e.g., rhythm of lines suggesting a physical circumstance). The actor learns to read each line not only for semantic meaning, but also for style, literary images and rhythms, which betray the action of the scene and the personality of the character.

The facts of each scene encode an event that occurs between the characters before the scene concludes. For each individual event, actors discover the action (that incites or moves the scene forward) and the counteraction (that resists the scene’s forward momentum). When action meets counteraction, conflict results. Consequently, actors must identify situations and problems that are contradictory (action conflicts with counteraction, producing a reversal point). A play reveals its anatomy through the chain of events, which tells the story. Each event carries different weight according to its sequence and function within the play. The event that begins the play is the inciting event; the one that resolves the through-action is climatic. Others may be main or incidental, depending on their relative importance to the story or to subplots within it. Actors are asked to discover the play’s anatomy not through discussion but on their feet. Actors test their understanding of how characters relate to and confront each other through improvisations of scenes in the play. These études serve as successive ‘drafts’ for future performance, each actualising the text better than the last. The best way to analyse the play is to take action in the given circumstances.

Bibliography

Carnicke, Sharon Marie. (2000). "Stanislavsky’s System: Pathways for the Actor." Twentieth-Century Actor Training, ed. Alison Hodge. London: Routledge. 11-36.