An Actor Prepares

by Constantin Stanislavski

To arouse a desire to create is difficult; to kill that desire is extremely easy.

If I interfere with my own work, it is my own affair, but what right have I to hold up the work of a whole group?

Moor.

yikes

‘Above all look for what is fine in art and try to understand it.

you who were playing, and we who were watching, gave ourselves up completely to what was happening on the stage. Such successful moments, by themselves, we can recognize as belonging to the art of living a part.

“The great actor should be full of feeling, and especially he should feel the thing he is portraying. He must feel an emotion not only once or twice while he is studying his part, but to a greater or lesser degree every time he plays it, no matter whether it is the first or the thousandth time.” Unfortunately this is not within our control. Our subconscious is inaccessible to our consciousness. We cannot enter into that realm. If for any reason we do penetrate into it, then the subconscious becomes conscious and dies.

it.

100%

We find the solution in an oblique instead of a direct approach.

‘One cannot always create subconsciously and with inspiration. No such genius exists in the world.

The more you have of conscious creative moments in your role the more chance you will have of a flow of inspiration.

“You may play well or you may play badly; the important thing is that you should play truly,

‘To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act ...

His job is not to present merely the external life of his character. He must fit his own human qualities to the life of this other person, and pour into it all of his own soul. The fundamental aim of our art is the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form.

‘That is why we begin by thinking about the inner side of a role, and how to create its spiritual life through the help of the internal process of living the part. You must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.

‘But if you break the laws of normal organic life, and cease to function rightly, then this highly sensitive subconscious becomes alarmed, and withdraws.

causes your subconscious to work and induces outbursts of inspiration.

our main object, which is to create the life of a human spirit,

‘Our aim is not only to create the life of a human spirit, but also to “express it in a beautiful, artistic form.

I ask you to note especially that the dependence of the body on the soul is particularly important in our school of art.

That is why an actor of our type is obliged to work so much more than others, both on his inner equipment, which creates the life of the part, and also on his outer physical apparatus, which should reproduce the results of the creative work of his emotions with precision.

no artificial, theatrical technique can even compare with the marvels that nature brings forth.

why alexander is so important

Our experience has led to a firm belief that only our kind of art, soaked as it is in the living experiences of human beings, can artistically reproduce the impalpable shadings and depths of life. Only such art can completely absorb the spectator and make both understand and also inwardly experience the happenings on the stage, enriching his inner life, and leaving impressions which will not fade with time.

In the vast majority of theatres the actors and producers are constantly violating nature in the most shameless manner.

‘For our purposes you must have, in addition to the help of nature, a well worked-out psychological technique, an enormous talent, and great physical and nervous reserves.

They, as you did, rely entirely on inspiration. If this inspiration does not turn up then neither you nor they have anything with which to fill in the blank spaces.

At such times your playing is lifeless, stilted. Consequently high moments alternate with overacting.

‘You must be very careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part.’

but when once they have done so they do not go on feeling it anew, they merely remember and repeat the external movements, intonations, and expressions they worked on at first, making this repetition without emotion.

‘You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations. All this work on your material will help you to permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.

The actor creates his model in his imagination, and then, just as does the painter, he takes every feature of it and transfers it, not on to canvas, but on to himself.

he must make this person he has put together move, walk, gesticulate, listen and think like Tartuffe, in other words, hand over his soul to him. The portrait ready, it needs only to be framed; that is, put on the stage, and then the public will say either, “That is Tartuffe,” or, “The actor has not done a good job.” . . .’

“The actor does not live, he plays.

“art is not real life, not is it even its reflection. Art is in itself a creator, it creates its own life, beautiful in its abstraction, beyond the limits of time, and space.

‘With the aid of his face, mimicry, voice and gestures, the mechanical actor offers the public nothing but the dead mask of non-existent feeling.

plastic motion.

‘The very worst fact is that clichés will fill up every empty spot in a role, which is not already solid with living feeling.

because of their inherent mechanical quality he cannot move the spectators by them. He must have some supplementary means of arousing them, so he takes refuge in what we call theatrical emotions. These are a sort of artificial imitation of the periphery of physical feelings.

this produces theatrical hysteria, an unhealthy ecstasy, which is usually just as lacking in inner content as is the artificial physical excitement.’

‘Beginners like you, if you have talent, can accidentally, and for a short space of time, fill a role very well, but you cannot reproduce it in a sustained artistic form, and therefore you always have recourse to exhibitionism.

you approached your role from the point of view of impressing the spectators.

And they are used without any relation to the why, wherefore or circumstances in which a person has experienced them.

‘Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human conventions that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage.

amateurish over-acting grows into the worst kind of mechanical acting.

never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you.

A role which is built of truth will grow, whereas one built on stereotype will shrivel.

These professional stimuli very often take hold of an actor even when he is playing a well established role. They do not improve the quality of his acting, but on the contrary their influence is toward exhibitionism and the strengthening of stereotyped methods.

‘What the others did was even worse.

‘The exploitation of art.’

‘You showed us your little hands, your little feet, your whole person, because it could be seen better on the stage,

Shakespeare had a different end in view, one which remained foreign to you, and therefore unknown to us.