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.

It is organised into three sections: Actor-Training, Rehearsal Processes and Performance Practices. Key terms are explained and defined as they naturally occur in this process. They are illustrated with examples from both his own work and that of other practitioners. Stanislavsky, K. S. (2000), Creating A Role, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, London: Methuen. (Original year of English publication 1961) At the side of each actor sits a dropper-in, who prompts the actors with words from the text. All each actor has to do is literally and metaphorically allow a particular word to ‘drop in’: that means ‘drop into their imagination’, and ‘drop into their bodies on the breath’. So, the dropper-in takes the opening lines of the dialogue and ‘drops in’ (i.e. speaks aloud) the first impactful word (e.g. ‘Mother’). The actor repeats that word. The dropper-in then says the word again, followed by a free-associating question, and ends by repeating the word. As the actor breathes in, they allow the word to drop into their bodies (imaginatively and breath-wise). And on the outbreath they utter the word, infused with whatever resonances are provoked for them by the dropper-in’s question. Here’s an example, drawn from Shakespeare & Company’s ‘Guidelines to Dropping In’: [18] Gomez, M. (2018), ‘Giuliani says “Truth Isn’t Truth” in Defense of Trump’s Legal Strategy’, New York Times, 19 August, 2018. To apply please send a current CV and a brief description of what you hope to gain from the workshop. There are a limited number of spaces for actors and writers. We will notify you in due course once we have decided.How the actor says ‘Mother’ will be informed by whatever thoughts arise in spontaneous response to the question ‘Do you love your mother?’ These thoughts can come from anywhere: there’s no need to censor anything, as there’s no right or wrong response. So the thoughts might be related to Hamlet and Gertrude; or they might be related to the actor himself and his relationship with his own mother; to some residue of an image seen on the news that morning of an immigrant child reunited with his mother; to a memory of himself as a three-year-old child with his mother; to a fleeting thought of what it will be like at his mother’s funeral; to a imagined glimpse of what it was like at Gertrude’s wedding to his uncle; to a sudden quizzical possibility that the actress sitting in front of him playing Gertrude might actually be his mother. Whatever. It really doesn’t matter. The point is to stir deep, atavistic resonances, to forge actual in-the-moment connections, to inspire potential directions in which the scene might go. In other words, to incarnate a whole heap of possibilities that a head-led, round-the-table analysis or a solitary navigation of the text might not have thrown up. Stanislavsky cited in On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, Maria Knebel, in unpublished translation by Mike Pushkin with Bella Merlin, 2002, p. 7. This led to the second phase of Stanislavsky’s research, which followed a period of study and deep contemplation in 1906. He truly wanted to recruit the actors’ creative input, so now in rehearsal, he assembled all the actors together around a table for lengthy periods of shared text analysis and discussion. Thereafter, he would encourage them to get up on their feet and put all this research into their performances. It was impossible: their heads were like stuffed potatoes. They were no more ‘creating the living word’ than they had with the determined production plans. Stanislavsky could see the gaping chasm between his actors’ intellectual understanding of a role and their psychophysical embodiment of that understanding. The actual act of sitting at a table with their pencils in their hands and their scripts in front of them was a comparatively calm procedure. Yet the characters they were playing might be involved in physically vigorous or psychologically febrile circumstances. Stanislavsky was aware that ‘A calmly seated figure will get in the way of us finding out how [the character] really feels […] and, without this knowledge, the text will have a dead sound.’ [8] He was right: the text was far from living. Because of this gap between psychology and physicality – between dead sound and living word – Stanislavsky came to realize that you can’t entirely trust the psychological suggestions you come up with when you’re sitting round a table. Your understanding of a situation (and the character within that situation) will only be complete once you’ve explored the dramatic actions physically. As Stanislavsky put it: ‘the separation of the mental life from the physical life does not give the actor the possibility to sense the life of the character’s body, and therefore he impoverishes himself.’ [9] Yet again, he had bypassed the living word – and this time by deadening the body.

This is a different worldview from the one into which I was born. Let alone the worlds into which were born those who have inspired my practice-based research. We’re then given a very precise score of physical actions in the film directions (reminiscent of Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions). On the one hand as the actor, I feel it’s part of my job to have a sense in my body of this specific score of actions (almost like a choreography): after all, the writer wouldn’t have written these physical moves if they weren’t meant to be embodied in some way. At the same time, I know that the art of film acting is all about spontaneity, catching impulses as they happen, being prepared to live in the moment so that the camera can capture those moments of truth. So in my preparation I write out the score of actions like a piece of dance, and at the same time I’m prepared to ditch the specific sequence on the day of filming and go with the flow if the director wants me to. But to be that free, I need to uncover the psychophysical information contained in that score. Heritage: How did Stanislavsky’s practice-based research bring him to ‘the creation of the living word’? 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. In and of itself, acting provides the physically safest place for us as human beings: we more or less know what we’re going to say and we more or less know the circumstances of the situation. It also asks us to be our most psychophysically fragile: it demands we allow the spectator into our soul and use our language to affect our listeners. Ambitious as it may sound and in a world of alternatives facts – where ‘Truth isn’t truth’ any more apparently [40]– it seems as though acting may be the last bastion of ‘the creation of the living word’. As we train our students and we practice our art, I believe it’s an ambition worth pursuing.This rehearsal process – that shifted from discussion to immediate, active embodiment – became known as the Method of Physical Actions, and at its heart lay improvisation. Stanislavsky had come to realize in his practice-based research that to ‘create the living word’:

The basis of the Method of Physical Actions is that one simple action leads to the next action, which leads to the next action, which leads to the next, and so on. By following simple actions, we can achieve complex psychological objectives. So: ‘I open the door, I switch on the light, I walk to the refrigerator, I take out a bottle of wine, I uncork the bottle, I turn on some music – so that when my husband gets home from work the atmosphere will be relaxing and we’ll have a lovely evening.’ Simple achievable actions to attain my psychological goal. The so-called iGeneration (a term coined by sociologist Jean Twenge) is uniquely placed in the history of civilization, in that they’ve been born into technology. The most intimate relationship they often have is with their electronic devices, and their world can shrink to the size of a cellphone. While there’s no denying that cellphone leads them to a wealth of information, they might not raise their heads and see the real clouds rather than the iClouds. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit collects together for the first time the terms and ideas developed by Stanislavsky throughout his career. If, therefore, there is a reluctance – even a resistance – in young students to experience narratives that may unsettle them, maybe we can help them as actor trainers to reset the start button. What if they came to celebrate the role they can play as social storytellers? What if they found that enacting unsettling situations – within the safe structure of a script – enables them to become richer contributors to their broader society? And maybe even heal others by taking them on cathartic, therapeutic journeys?

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. And in the work on the role, we can provide scripts such as those by Shakespeare and Chekhov, writers who worked intensively with actors; who had a passion and curiosity for human behavior, and a real love for love; and whose work has endured because of their immense insights. Chekhov was a doctor: therefore, he knew he was dying of tuberculosis. He was a surgeon of the soul as much as the body, and his plays reflect his poignant understanding of humanity. Shakespeare paints on a vast canvas including jealousy, rage, vengeance, violence as well as profound and tender love. It behooves us not be put off by the fact that both Shakespeare and Chekhov are dead European males, as they both offer the actor complicated scenarios and violent disagreements (ergo, important training material). I’d argue that it’s vitally important for young actors to experience the articulacy of these extraordinary writers, especially for what Twenge calls ‘a generation that believes someone disagreeing with you constitutes emotional injury.’ [34] While of course we also want to use contemporary texts by writers of all ethnicity, cultures, races and gender identifications, we wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. In rebellion against the old ‘star system’ of acting – whereby any authentic storytelling was subordinated to the flashy performances of celebrity actors – Stanislavsky foregrounded ensemble interaction. However, he was only a young director in the late 1800s (first at the Society of Art and Literature and then at the Moscow Art Theatre): he had few tools in his kit. So the best he could do was to dictatorially determine all the actors’ moves by writing them down in detailed production plans. These moves were then rehearsed onto the actors almost as if they were marionettes. Thus it was that his acclaimed production of Chekhov’s The Seagull was staged in 1898: a huge success for the audience but a trial for the actors, who were robbed of their own input. The last thing they were able to do was ‘create the living words’. California, Riverside, and in theaters, studios, and institutions across the globe, and has written urn:lcp:completestanisla0000merl:epub:9cc1d9fa-4195-4029-b0cd-8ac2326d445b Foldoutcount 0 Identifier completestanisla0000merl Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0mt6jp8c Invoice 1652 Isbn 0896762599