The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit

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Stanislavsky, K. S. (1980), An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of publication 1937) 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.

Heritage: How did Stanislavsky’s practice-based research bring him to ‘the creation of the living word’? I’ve come to realize these questions are both a technological issue and a generational issue and, therefore, warrant some serious consideration. The impact of a first reading is surprising intuitive and creatively lucrative. We will look at a handful of scenes to discover and discuss the impact of the first reading, the text, the seven planes of a text and the given circumstances.To help actors ‘create the living word’ Stanislavsky went through four major stages on his life’s journey as a practical researcher. [7] Those four stages were as follows: 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. PC: In your own personal experiences in Russia, how did Michael Chekhov develop Stanislavski’s ideas? Stanislavsky cited in Stanislavsky Directs (1994), Gorchakov, N. M., trans. Miriam Goldina, New York: Limelights, p.94. As we train young actors, we can mindfully use specific methods to bring structure to the inner and outer chaos that is the world of the iGeneration. As Twenge concludes in her book, ‘iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified. Growing up slowly, raised to value safety, and frightened by the implications of income inequality, they have come to adolescence in a time when their primary social activity is staring at a small rectangular screen that can like them or reject them. The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction […] they are both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile.’ [39] And these are the students in our midst. And we are their teachers. We’re experiencing these seismic shifts together. And the emergency kit at hand is the art of acting.

As I’ve said, we have to be prepared with film and television to throw out all our preparatory work once we’re on the set. After all, acting for the camera includes following impulses in response to what actually happens there and then. This in itself can make screen acting both incredibly liberating and incredibly scary: we have to walk the knife-edge of the moment. To which end, I found myself with Revolver Mind heavily drawing on Stanislavsky’s four pillars of relaxation, concentration, imagination and observation on the film set. I’ll give you another example. (It should be noted that I had just completed Shakespeare & Company’s exceptional Month-Long Intensive training for mid-career professionals, so I was already feeling like a fine-tuned Formula One racing car!) 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…

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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.

I’ve been teaching actors now for twenty years during which time my methodology has galvanized into four guiding principles: (1) ‘dynamic listening’; (2) ‘willing vulnerability’; (3) ‘playfulness’; and (4) ‘psychophysical coordination’. I’ll just focus on one of those principles here: psychophysical coordination. Psychophysical coordination is the natural and intimate dialogue between whatever we’re feeling inside and our outer expression of that feeling. And vice versa: the information coming at us from the outside world affects how we’re feeling within. 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.

Over this 8-week course primarily for directors (though actors and writers are also very welcome), we begin an introductory dive into The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. The aim is to deepen our understanding of the contemporary relevance of Stanislavsky’s processes in an inclusive, culturally diverse, and playful rehearsal environment. When I was an acting student both in the U.K. and Russia, we almost craved emotional discomfort. We loved rolling around in Grotowskian anguish and weeping in Artaudian despair. Throughout my career, there has been a certain cathartic pleasure in expressing through acting humanity’s emotionally discomforting experiences – within the safety of a defined script, a determined outcome and a person who says ‘cut’ or ‘curtain’ when we’re done. These tools add layers and textures to the creation and playing of a character. Some of the specifics will come from the text, and some will come from the collective imagination of actors, directors and creative team. And then… given all these tools, how can we begin to collective step over ‘the threshold of the subconscious’, the final chapter in An Actor Prepares, yet in many ways Stanislavsky’s predominant preoccupation. We have to provide safe spaces in our classrooms where our students can (a) express their own emotions; (b) consider other perspectives through scripts and dramas that may bring out challenging emotions for them; and (c) handle, within the safe structures of a dramatic text and an actor-training environment, issues of conflict, risk and emotional discomfort.