The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

In order to encourage the imagination, actors would bring in songs, or short stories, or images, and create whole performance pieces out of them, called études. At other times, the actors would work on finding inner truth using improvisation. Suler would make up scenarios and the actors would all have to behave as if that scenario were true without overdoing it, concentrating on the simple tasks that lay before them. They might repeat a scenario many times over the course of days or even weeks, adding new circumstances, or new problems for the actors to solve. These improvisations could grow quite elaborate. In one, the studytsi all played workers in a tailor’s shop, with their specific jobs assigned to them by Suler. At first they focused on accurately portraying their various jobs, but soon little scenes began to grow out of the busy fifteen-person scrum.