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Stanislavski Through Practice

Stanislavski is rightly called the 'father of modern theatre', his System of acting became the backbone of twentieth century theatre craft. Nearly all other practitioners use him as a starting point, either to build from or to react against. He cannot be ignored.

So much has already been written about Stanislavski, the brief of the book is not to go over that ground again. Rather it covers the salient points Stanislavski made in his many books and studio experiments, to order them into a logical form so that they can be easily followed and understood by students and to translate them into purely practical terms so that each theory can be tested through practice. Students may thus pick up the points made and turn them easily into essays backed up with practical knowledge.

Jeni roughly divides her practical teaching of Stanislavski into two areas:

  1. the general training of the actor which prepares the student in the main principles of the System
  2. the preparation of a role showing how the System is useful in building towards a characterisation. This study programme follows the same format.

Every effort has been made to demystify the theory and to show the interdependency of all the different elements of the system.

Whether you are studying Stanislavski per se or have chosen the topic of 'naturalism' from your syllabus you will find this study programme useful and easy to follow.


Contents:

General Introduction; First Lessons;

Part One: The General training of an Actor:

  1. Imagination
  2. Belief
  3. Concentration
  4. Relaxation
  5. Physical Control
  6. Speech Versatility & Control
  7. Communication
  8. Vocal Communication - Subtext
  9. Tempo-Rhythm

Part Two: The Actor's approach to a Role:

  1. Research
  2. Subtext - Units and Objectives
  3. Subtext - Emotion Memory
  4. Tempo-Rhythm - Another Useful Tool
  5. Fine Tuning - Speech
  6. Fine-Tuning - Group Sensitivity, Teamwork
  7. The Actor in Performance

Conclusion


Sample Pages from Stanislavski Through Practice:

Belief

1. The teacher could begin the work on belief with an exercise in which the students do not even realise they are participating! Come into the studio in a real flap and tell the students you've lost your wallet, car keys, glasses, register, notes on Stanislavski, whatever you like! Make sure it is something really important - without the lost item, you, or they, will be in real trouble - so that they are really looking everywhere. You think it may have fallen behind something, have been picked up by mistake and be in someone's bag, etc. It's up to you to keep the urgency going in any way you can. Keep it going as long as you can, constantly whipping up their concern and commitment to the task. Eventually you disclose that this is all an exercise and that you want them to repeat their search from the beginning, trying to remember how they felt, behaved, etc. Observe them carefully. How convincing are they? Do they believe in what they are doing? How can you tell? Comment on their 'performance' as fully as you can. [ Another way of doing this is to let one or two students in on the secret at the beginning, giving them instructions to observe closely the differences in feeling, commitment and sincerity between the two searches.] Either way of approaching the exercise is a useful starting point and will fuel an animated discussion, which should be fully explored, explained and written up by the students. The realisation they should come to, hopefully of their own accord, is that doing something for real is one thing, imitating that activity in such a way as to convince an audience that it is real is an altogether different thing and infinitely harder to pull off.

Central to Stanislavski's System is believing in what you are doing. Only if the actor believes will the audience believe. They are drawn in by the sincerity of what the actor is doing. Basically the whole System is the set of aids by which the actor is helped to believe he is the role he is creating.
Despite the fact the whole System is working towards belief, I find it helpful to do some 'belief exercises with students early on, which can prove a number of important things, starting with the realisation that belief 'in limbo' is well-nigh impossible.


Practical Work

2. Sit in a circle. Teacher leads by passing a scrumpled up piece of paper around the circle and telling them it is a bird that has fallen out of its nest, fully feathered but not yet able to fly. The students must be very gentle. Keep talking about the bird, its colour, size, the brightness of its eyes, ' Look at its beak opening, perhaps it's hungry'; 'How its claws grip, don't they?' - you are trying to build up belief by building up visual facts to hang onto.
When the bird returns to you, you can do a number of things.
You can mash it in your hands - this cruelly tests belief - those who have begun to believe will be horrified. You could gently place it in a box, or take it outside. It is up to you. The seriousness with which you, the teacher, approach this gives the students a clue as to how seriously these actors' exercises should be taken.

3. Still in the circle, pass round an envelope containing a blank piece of paper.

It must be used as:

4. Pass an object around and each person must use it in a different way convincingly. The object could just be a stick, or the biro you have in your pocket. It could be used as a comb, a dagger, a mobile phone, etc.
Variation: scatter and use any object in the room as something it is not; retain the same object and change what you use it as at least twice more.

After this series of exercises discuss the difficulties. Some will have the quality of 'naivety' that allows them to lose themselves in the imagination quickly and easily. Whether they could sustain that quality with a number of distractions is another matter. Others will have found it difficult to do these exercises. These students may well be those who are most honest about 'feeling' and 'believing' themselves. Encourage this honesty. Encourage them to see the difference between 'pretending' and 'believing'. How many, when challenged, honestly believed in what they were doing?

Belief is helped by facts. Remind them how many found it easier to believe in the bird the more detail about the bird was added.

This is the same relationship that 'magic if and 'given circumstances' have to one another. 'If is the plunge that the imagination is taking - 'if this piece of paper were a bird that had fallen from its nest ' - the imagination then asks questions - what? why? how? etc., it needs more detail, more facts, more 'given circumstances' - beak, bright eyes, colour, etc. Each new fact acts as an aid, a kind of fixative, to the imagination.

5. Use a stick, a strip of stiff cardboard or similar. The stick is a knife. It is used in an exercise that in some way involves life and death: you are contemplating killing a rival, or freeing a condemned captive, or performing an operation under difficult circumstances in which the patient may die.

You will need to build up a whole scenario answering the questions who? why? when? where? how? etc. Each one of these invented facts, or circumstances, will help the process of belief and make it easier.

It will be helpful to build up belief in the 'knife' by starting with a kind of meditation on the object. Concentrate totally on it till you see its shape, size, feel its weight, test its sharpness and so on. Only when you really believe in the knife should you complete the exercise and perform the scene.

After the exercise is finished, jot down how many elements of the System are used and interrelated here. Magic if, given circumstances, concentration, imagination. All the elements feed into one another.

6. Test the inter-relationship of imagination/magic if with given circumstances to aid belief in another series of exercises:
Find your own space. You are cooking. There is your stove in front of you, saucepans and so on. Now begin.

For a moment they will look flummoxed; this is because they have so little to go on. Then they'll begin. Let them all carry on in their own space for a little, then stop them and ask a few questions: who are they? where? etc. By the readiness of their answers you will know if they have already felt the need to do this process for themselves. Hopefully, some of them will have found it impossible to proceed without inventing circumstances.

Now start the exercise again, but this time give them more specific scenarios with more detail:

They should see at the end of this:

Explain how this exercise needs to be used when studying a playtext for such directions as 'Enter George'. The details of: from where? to where? what time of day? what state of mind is George in? and so on, will all affect the way George enters.

7. Try some enter/exit exercises. Treat it as a game with volunteers performing from the following categories in turn. Others must guess, for instance, where they are coming from.

a] a series of entrances showing -

b] a series of exits showing -

Finish this section by setting a number of tasks for which the individual students must invent their own 'if and 'circumstances'. Remember that the 'if is 'magic' because it gives the imagination that stimulatory nudge which will excite the actor into action. The 'circumstances' which he will 'give' or invent for himself are the facts needed to give substance to that imagined person and situation. Take them through the process first by sending one student up on the stage. Tell him to sit and wait. Then tell him to invent a reason for sitting there. Next he must add as many details as he needs - who is he? where is he? why is he there? what is he feeling about it? [How does this feeling make him sit?] This latter question is verging on the over-analytical at this stage. Analysis is useful but after the event. At this analytical stage discuss, too, a] how much of the feeling was stimulated by the invention of detailed information and b] how much the expression of that feeling, i.e. body language, facial expression, came naturally out of the inner state. Were any of these physical signs consciously imposed?

8. Try inventing an 'if' and 'given circumstances' for the following:

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