Basic of Stanislavski Method of Acting
Basic of Stanislavski Method of Acting
Table of
Contents
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Action
Stanislavski acting techniques are the most popular acting techniques.
In fact, almost all types of acting approaches that actors use in the present
era has been derived from Stanislavski’s techniques. It is more popularly known
as “the method”.
You take any acting guru, be it Uta Hagen,
Sandford Meisner, Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler, each takes one or two or more
pages out of Stanislavski’s book of acting.
I won’t be explaining how or what is the history of Stanislavski’s
approach to method acting is. You can read the history on Wikipedia.
By the way, when I was first introduced to method acting, I was asked to
read about the history of method acting. Yes, history is boring but it was
interesting to know how Stanislavski’s own struggle to approach acting helped
him shape “the method” we know.
You Can Learn About His Method in Detail from His three books (I
consider them as the tri- bible for actors):
1.
An Actor Prepares (Get it from Amazon)
2.
Building A Character (Get it from Amazon)
3.
Creating A Role (Get it from Amazon)
In order to understand this Stanislavski’s approach to acting, you must
know what it consists of. The way I see it, it has 7 basic techniques or pillar
that makes the base of the whole Stanislavski approach. Those are like the
alphabets that you must master in order to form a meaningful word.
So, what are the 7 pillars
of Stanislavski acting techniques?
Action
Action simply means doing something. It is easier said than done when it
comes to acting. Just try to sit for one second doing nothing in front an audience,
you will realize there is so much tension in every part of your body: both
physically and psychologically. You won’t be able to move your hand from hips
to your head without feeling the tension. Mentally, you might be thinking, what
am I doing here? Should I go? , should I stay? So many questions will pop into
your mind.
You might think, this is because there is nothing to do here as an
actor. Audience will think you are a fool sitting on a chair. Well, you are
wrong, if you were really sitting on chair like you do at home or class or
restaurant, audience won’t think you are fool, they will be curious why you are
sitting on a chair alone.
Even in the simplest act of sitting, there is so much to do for an
actor. Everything you do must have a purpose. Having a purpose is good way to
stay in the moment while playing a character. Purpose of your action will bring
out the right emotions in you.
Best exercise is to make your action believable is to do simple tasks
and creating some story attached to it. Let me give the example from the Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares.
Imagine you are trying to burn wood in a fire place. Do everything you do to
build a fire. Make sure you have arranged enough dry woods, you have something
that would help you burn the woods like paper, or fuel and check if you have
match box or lighter on you. And Create a simple story, like its cold night,
your heater is dead and you need to get a good night sleep in order to wake up
early for an audition. This story offers simple motive to your action and
makes it truthful.
Action is always a part of a scene. Mastering this Stanislavski acting
technique, would give you an ability to make any scene truthful.
Imagination
Imagination is like fuel for an artist. I said artist not actor because
any kind of art it is painting, writing, acting, dancing, or anything, it
thrives on imagination. The story, characters, place, props, everything on
stage or set is imaginary or make believe. Actor has to imagine that whatever
circumstance the writer has offered are true.
Stanislavski offers you a great tool to imagine anything. The tool is
called “if”. Imagine you have to storm out of a room and slam the door behind
because your are angry with your wife or husband. You have to imagine
relationship with other actor because the other actor is not your real wife or
husband or the so called room is just a wall and the door in the middle and
open on other three sides.
Stanislavski acting techniques teaches how to have good imagination. To
be a have good imagination, you must be a good observer. Observe everything
that surrounds. Try to remember each and every detail about it. Be it a person
or a thing, just imprint its image on your mind. Create a bank of it. And when
you imagine, make sure you provide some motive to it. Imaginations are like
inward actions, hence they are must have a motive. First be a spectator to it,
when you are familiar with it, be a part of it.
Attention
A major problem actor face is where to look, or where to focus. To
address this issue Stanislavski’s method acting offers several tools to
the actor. He describes in his book, An Actor Prepares, that an actor must have
point of attention. This will not only help actor to stay in the scene but also
takes actor’s attention away from the audience or camera or the crew.
An effective technique is to create a circle of attention. This
attention can be created by using the objects in the room or the light. During
the scene, try to restrict the circle only to the necessary area. Whenever
circle gets out of control, bring it back to the objects or focused light that
you had marked as your circle of attention. Even while moving, carry this
circle of attention with you.
Another major issue that freaks out actor is audience or the camera.
Creating an invisible wall, which in acting terms is called fourth wall, using
your attention will help you stay focused on the action that you are have to
do. Read the scenes carefully, they always offer good insight on where actor is
looking, using that you can create your point of attention or circle of
attention.
If you want scenes or material for practice or even for audition, I
recommend you to visit a very useful website called stageplay.com.
Relaxation
Earlier we talked about how you feel when you are put in front of a room
full of audience or a camera. Your muscles tighten up, you feel your legs are
cramping or your throat is choking. All these are signs that you are not
relaxed. Every new actor has struggle to stay relaxed.
Hence, most of the Stanislavski acting techniques are designed to help
an actor stay relaxed. Stanislavski believed that in order to stay relaxed
actor must direct their attention completely on the task in the given scene.
Because it is impossible to completely remove the muscular tension. If you try
to relax your legs, tension moves to your shoulders, and you shake it off your
shoulders, it might go to your back. There will always be a struggle. But it is
actors job to keep it under control and not allow it show it in his or her
performance.
Most popular of the Stanislavski acting techniques is making student
hold different positions like sitting on chair or hanging from the tree or
simply just lie on the floor. During this you have to note which muscles
tense up and try to relax them. Through his techniques and regular practice
actor can make the process of relaxing muscles, a subconscious process. Thus,
during a scene actor won’t even notice which part of his or body has spasm, it
all will become a subconscious thing for him, just like a real human.
Units and objectives
As a method actor, this is absolute favorite of mine. Because, most of
my struggle is to stay in the moment, even if on the exterior it doesn’t appear
so. Inwardly, I know I went out of my character, or I noticed something that
was not part of a scene. I like to be in part during the scene, and I hope
others actor like to do the same.
Stanislavski’s method acting addressed this issue by creating series of
small units of objectives which in a whole would make a scene. It is like
reverse engineering an action or task or objective into small units. For
instance, your task is to go to a nearby bakery and buy a bread. You can divide
these task in small several units:
1.
Getting your coat may be because its chilly
outside.
2.
Then checking if you got the essentials like money,
keys etc.
3.
then walking or driving to a bakery
4.
buying a good piece of bread.
However, this technique is must be limited only for preparation purpose.
While, performing, it must be performed as a whole scene while keeping the
objectives in mind. Its not objective, its objectives because as whole it might
look there is one objective in given scene, if we take the above example, its
buying a bread. Beyond that there may be a psychological objective that drives
the scene. For our example of buying a bread, it might be; say, a friend of
yours or a family member is coming to visit you and you might want to impress
him or her by serving something with a bread.
Remember there will always be a psychological reason behind the actions.
So, every time you divide the objective into unit, find the right psychological
reason that drives the scene.
Emotion memory
If you have some experience of method acting by some workshop or class
or even book, you might have come across emotion memory. Some method acting
coaches do not advocate and some just go gaga over using emotion memory.
What emotion memory does to you? It gives a trigger or we can say it act
as spring board for you that brings out the right emotion out of you. Emotion
memory is all about recalling the past event that is similar to the given
circumstances. Frankly speaking, not all understand how emotion memory must be
used. Most of the actor think, it is about reliving the episode from the past for
the purpose of the scene. But it is not what Stanislavski techniques teaches.
Stanislavski acting technique is all about recalling the past event to
the point, that it moves you. Or sometimes it is even creating a new one just
to bring out the emotion that you might have never experienced. The purpose of
this technique is not to lose yourself in the scene (which an actor must never
do). The moment you lose yourself, you move away from your part which is not
asked of you as an actor.
Emotion memory is whole wider subject that cannot be summed in one or
two paragraphs, but for the purpose of information, it is only about arousing
new feelings using your past experience or even creating new ones if required.
One important point, it is completely different from sense memory. Sense
memory deals with the five senses not with emotions.
Truthfulness
If you master all the above techniques, you will automatically on the
path of giving a truthful performance. However, the only thing that would hold
you back would be the faith. Faith always hampers our sense of truth.
If you have no faith that you are holding a cardboard sword, audience
wouldn’t believe you are holding a real sword.
“As an actor you have to put life into all the imagined circumstances
and action until your sense of truth is satisfied and create faith in what you
are doing.”- Stanislavski.
If do the action with full conviction, you justify the part. However, do
not do it overly, try to do it just to an extent that you can believe.
To create faith, you have to proceed the action bit by bit with all the
actual details taken from the reality. It is important you create logical
sequence for action. This is just like units. Break parts which you cannot
believe into smaller believable parts. Always and always use “as if” to create
the multiple units.
Summary of Stanislavski acting techniques
I recommend you to read Stanislavski’s
An Actor Prepares. The book deals with all the above mention
techniques in detail. There are whole chapters dedicated on each of them.
You must remember Stanislavski’s method acting is a psycho-technique, it
will demand exploration of yourself, so when starting out do not worry about
mechanical actions ( that you consider look funny) that arise out of your
psychological approach. Sole focus must be on being truthful and bringing out
the real emotions using all the techniques.
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