An Actor Prepares

by Constantin Stanislavsky

  8

  The Director began, today, by saying:

  ‘The broader your emotion memory, the richer your material for inner creativeness. That, I think, requires no further elaboration. It is, however, necessary, in addition to the richness of the emotion memory, to distinguish certain other characteristics; namely, its power, its firmness, the quality of the material it retains, to the extent that these affect our practical work in the theatre.

  ‘Our whole creative experiences are vivid and full in direct proportion to the power, keenness and exactness of our memory. If it is weak the feelings it arouses are pale, intangible and transparent. They are of no value on the stage because they will not carry across the footlights.’

  From his further remarks it appears that there are many degrees of power in emotion memory and both its effects and combinations are varied. On this point he said:

  ‘Imagine that you have received some insult in public, perhaps a slap in the face, that makes your cheek burn whenever you think of it. The inner shock was so great that it blotted out all the details of this harsh incident. But some insignificant thing will instantly revive the memory of the insult, and the emotion will recur with redoubled violence. Your cheek will grow red or you will turn pale and your heart will pound.

  ‘If you possess such sharp and easily aroused emotional material you will find it easy to transfer it to the stage and play a scene analogous to the experience you had in real life which left such a shocking impression on you. To do this you will not need any technique. It will play itself because nature will help you.

  ‘Here is another example: I have a friend who is extraordinarily absent-minded. He dined once with some friends he had not seen for a year. In the course of the dinner he made a reference to the health of his host’s adorable little boy.

  ‘His words were greeted with a stony silence, and his hostess fainted dead away. The poor man had completely forgotten that the boy had died since he last saw his friends. He says that he will never forget as long as he lives what he felt on that occasion.

  ‘However, the sensations which my friend felt were different from those experienced by a person who had had his face slapped because in this case they did not obliterate all the details attendant on the incident. My friend retained a very accurate memory not only of his feelings, but of the happening itself and of the attending circumstances in which it occurred. He definitely remembers the frightened expression on the face of a man across the table, the glazed eyes of the woman next to him, and the cry that broke from the other end of the table.

  ‘In the case of a really weak emotion memory the psycho-technical work is both extensive and complicated.

  ‘There is one other of the many-sided aspects of this form of memory that we actors do well to take cognizance of, and I shall speak of it in detail.

  ‘Theoretically you might suppose that the ideal type of emotion memory would be one that could retain and reproduce impressions in all the exact details of their first occurrence, that they would be revived just as they really were experienced. Yet if that were the case what would become of our nervous systems? How would they stand the repetition of horrors with all the original painfully realistic details? Human nature could not stand it.

  ‘Fortunately things actually happen in a different way. Our emotion memories are not exact copies of reality—occasionally some are more vivid, but usually they are less so, than the original. Sometimes impressions once received continue to live in us, grow and become deeper. They even stimulate new processes and either fill out unfinished details or else suggest altogether new ones.

  ‘In a case of this kind a person can be perfectly calm in a dangerous situation and then faint away when he remembers it later. That is an example of the increased power of the memory over the original happening and of the continuing growth of an impression once had.

  ‘There remains now—in addition to the power and intensity of these memories—their quality. Suppose that instead of being the person to whom something happened, you are merely an onlooker. It is one thing to receive an insult in public yourself and to experience a keen sense of embarrassment on your own account, and it is quite another thing to see this happen to someone else, to be upset by it, to be in a position to side freely with the aggressor or his victim.

  ‘There is, of course, no reason why the onlooker should not experience very strong emotions. He may even feel the incident more keenly than the participating parties. But that is not what I am interested in at present. All I want to point out now is that their feelings are different.

  ‘There is another possibility—a person might not participate in an incident either as a principal or an onlooker. He might only hear or read about it. Even that would not prevent his receiving deep and powerful impressions. It would all depend on the strength of the imagination of the person who wrote the description or told about it, and also on that of the person reading or hearing the story.

  ‘Again, the emotions of a reader or hearer differ in quality from those of an onlooker or principal in such an event.

  ‘An actor has to deal with all these types of emotional material. He works it over and adjusts it to the needs of the person whom he portrays.

  ‘Now let us suppose that you were a witness when that man was slapped in public, and that the incident left strong traces in your memory. It would be easier for you to reproduce those feelings if on the stage you played the part of a witness. But imagine that, instead, you were called upon to play the man who was slapped. How would you adapt the emotion you experienced as a witness to the role of the man insulted?’

  ‘The principal feels the insult; the witness can share only sympathetic feelings. But sympathy then might be transformed into direct reaction. That is exactly what happens to us when we are working on a role. From the very moment when the actor feels that change take place in him he becomes an active principal in the life of the play—real human feelings are born in him—often this transformation from human sympathy into the real feelings of the person in the part occurs spontaneously.

  ‘The actor may feel the situation of the person in the part so keenly, and respond to it so actively, that he actually puts himself in the place of that person. From that point of view he then sees the occurrence through the eyes of the person who was slapped. He wants to act, to participate in the situation, to resent the insult, just as though it were a matter of personal honour with him. In that case the transformation of the emotions of the witness to those of the principal takes place so completely that the strength and quality of the feelings involved are not diminished.

  ‘You can see from this that we use not only our own past emotions as creative material but we use feelings that we have had in sympathizing with the emotions of others. It is easy to state a priori that it is utterly impossible that we should have sufficient emotional material of our own to supply the needs of all the parts we shall be called upon to play in a whole lifetime on the stage. No one person can be the universal soul in Chekhov’s Sea Gull, which has had all human experiences, including murder and one’s own death. Yet we have to live all these things on the stage. So we must study other people, and get as close to them emotionally as we can, until sympathy for them is transformed into feelings of our own.

  ‘Isn’t that what happens to us every time we begin the study of a new role?’

  9

  ‘(1) If you remember the exercise with the madman,’ said the Director, ‘you will recall all the imaginative suggestions. Each contained a stimulus for your emotion memory. They gave you an inner impetus through things that had never happened to you in real life. You also felt the effect of the external stimuli.

  ‘(2) Do you remember how we broke up that scene from Brand into units and objectives, and how the men and women in the class divided into furious opposition on it? That was another type of inner stimulus.

  ‘(3) If you remember our demonstration of objects of attention, on the stage and in the audience, you will r
ealize now that living objects can be a real stimulus.

  ‘(4) Another important source of stimulation of emotion is true physical action and your belief in it.

  ‘(5) As time goes on you will become acquainted with many new inner sources of stimulation. The most powerful of them lies in the text of the play, the implications of thought and feeling that underlie it and affect the inter-relationship of the actors.

  ‘(6) You are now aware too of all the external stimuli that surround us on the stage, in the form of settings, arrangement of furniture, lighting, sound and other effects, which are calculated to create an illusion of real life and its living moods.

  ‘If you total up all these and add to them those that you are still to learn about, you will find that you have many. They represent your psycho-technical store of riches, which you must learn how to use.’

  When I told the Director that I was most anxious to do that very thing but did not know how to go about it, his advice was:

  ‘Do as a hunter does in stalking game. If a bird does not rise of its own accord you could never find it among all the leaves of the forest. You have to coax it out, whistle to it, use various lures.

  ‘Our artistic emotions are, at first, as shy as wild animals and they hide in the depths of our souls. If they do not come to the surface spontaneously you cannot go after them and find them. All you can do is to concentrate your attention on the most effective kind of lure for them. The very things for your purpose are those stimuli to your emotion memory we have just been discussing.

  ‘The bond between the lure and the feeling is natural and normal and one that should be extensively employed. The more you test its effect and analyse its results in emotions aroused, the better you will be able to judge what your sensation memory retains, and you will be in a stronger position to develop it.

  ‘At the same time we must not overlook the question of the quantity of your reserves in this respect. You should remember that you must constantly be adding to your store. For this purpose you draw, of course, principally upon your own impressions, feelings and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings.

  ‘Do you realize, now that you know what is required of an actor, why a real artist must lead a full, interesting, beautiful, varied, exacting and inspiring life? He should know, not only what is going on in the big cities, but in the provincial towns, far-away villages, factories, and the big cultural centres of the world as well. He should study the life and psychology of the people who surround him, of various other parts of the population, both at home and abroad.

  ‘We need a broad point of view to act the plays of our times and of many peoples. We are asked to interpret the life of human souls from all over the world. An actor creates not only the life of his times but that of the past and future as well. That is why he needs to observe, to conjecture, to experience, to be carried away with emotion. In some cases his problem is even more complex. If his creation is to interpret current life he can observe his surroundings. But if he has to interpret the past, the future, or an imaginary epoch, he has either to reconstruct or to recreate something out of his imagination—a complicated process.

  ‘Our ideal should always be to strive for what is eternal in art. that which will never die, which will always remain young and close to human hearts.

  ‘Our goal should be the heights of accomplishment built by the great classics. Study them and learn to use living emotional material for their rendering.

  ‘I have told you all that I can at present about emotion memory. You will learn more and more about it as we pursue our programme of work.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  COMMUNION

  1

  When the Director came in he turned to Vassili and asked:

  ‘With whom or with what are you in communion at this moment?’

  Vassili was so absorbed in his own thoughts that he did not immediately recognize the purport of the question.

  ‘I?’ he replied, almost mechanically. ‘Why, not with anyone or anything.’

  ‘You must be a marvel’, was the Director’s joking remark, ‘if you are able to continue in that state for long.’

  Vassili excused himself by assuring Tortsov that since no one was either looking at or addressing him he could not be in contact with anyone.

  It was now Tortsov’s turn to be surprised. ‘Do you mean’, said he, ‘that someone must look at or talk with you to be in communication with you? Close your eyes and ears, be silent, and try to discover with whom you are in mental communication. Try to find one single second when you will not be in some contact with some object.’

  I tried that myself and noted what went on inside of me.

  I visualized the previous evening when I had heard a famous string quartet and I followed my movements step by step. I went into the foyer, greeted some friends, found my seat, and watched the musicians tune up. They began to play and I listened. But I could not put myself into a state of emotional relationship to them.

  That, I concluded, must have been a blank space in the flow of communion between me and my surroundings. But the Director was firm in his disagreement with that conclusion.

  ‘How can you’, said he, ‘look upon a time when you were absorbing music, as a blank space?’

  ‘Because although I listened,’ I insisted, ‘I really did not hear the music, and although I tried to penetrate its meaning I did not succeed. So I felt that no contact was established.’

  ‘Your association with and acceptance of the music had not yet begun because the preceding process had not yet been achieved and it distracted your attention. When that was done you would either give yourself up to the music or become interested in something else. But there was no break in the continuity of your relationship to something.’

  ‘Perhaps that was so,’ I admitted, and pursued my recollections. Absent-mindedly I made a movement which, it seemed to me, attracted the attention of the concert-goers near me. After that I sat very quiet and pretended to be listening to the music but as a matter of fact I really did not hear it because I was watching what was going on around me.

  My eye wandered over in the direction of Tortsov and I noticed that he had not been aware of my accidental movement. I looked around the hall for the elder Shustov, but neither he nor any of the other actors from our theatre was there. Then I tried to visualize all of the audience, but by this time my attention became so scattered that I was unable to control or direct it. The music was conducive to all sorts of imaginings. I thought about my neighbours, about my relatives, who live far away in other cities, and about my dead friend.

  The Director told me afterwards that all those things came into my head because I felt the need either of sharing my thoughts and feelings with the objects of my meditation or of absorbing them from these objects.

  Finally my attention was drawn to the lights on the chandelier overhead and I gave myself up to a lengthy contemplation of them. That, I was convinced, must have been a blank moment because, by no stretch of the imagination, could you call looking at those lights a form of intercourse.

  When I told Tortsov about it he explained my state of mind in this way:

  ‘You were trying to find out how and of what that object was made. You absorbed its form, its general aspect, and all sorts of details about it. You accepted these impressions, entered them in your memory, and proceeded to think about them. That means that you drew something from your object, and we actors look upon that as necessary. You are worried about the inanimate quality of your object. Any picture, statue, photograph of a friend, or object in a museum, is inanimate, yet it contains some part of the life of the artist who created it. Even a chandelier can, to a certain degree, become an object of lively interest, if only because of our absorption in it.’

  ‘In that case,’ I argued, ‘we can be in asso
ciation with any old thing that our eye happens to fall on?’

  ‘I doubt if you would have the time to absorb from or to give out even a particle of yourself to everything that flashes by you. Yet without absorbing from others or giving of yourself to others there can be no intercourse on the stage. To give to or to receive from an object something, even briefly, constitutes a moment of spiritual intercourse.

  ‘I have said more than once that it is both possible to look at and to see, and to look at and not to see. On the stage, you can look at, see and feel everything that is going on there. But it is also possible to look at what surrounds you on this side of the footlights, while your feelings and interest are centred in the auditorium, or in some place beyond the walls of the theatre.

  ‘There are mechanical tricks which actors use to cover up their inner lack but they only emphasize the blankness of their stare. I need not tell you that that is both useless and harmful. The eye is the mirror of the soul. The vacant eye is the mirror of the empty soul. It is important that an actor’s eyes, his look, reflect the deep inner content of his soul. So he must build up great inner resources to correspond to the life of a human soul in his part. All the time that he is on the stage he should be sharing these spiritual resources with the other actors in the play.

  ‘Yet an actor is only human. When he comes on the stage it is only natural that he should bring with him his everyday thoughts, personal feelings, reflections and realities. If he does this, the line of his own personal, humdrum life is not interrupted. He will not give himself up wholly to his part unless it carries him away. When it does so, he becomes completely identified with it and is transformed. But the moment he becomes distracted and falls under the sway of his own personal life, he will be transported across the footlights into the audience or beyond the walls of the theatre, wherever the object is that maintains a bond of relationship with him. Meanwhile he plays his part in a purely mechanical way. When those lapses are frequent, and subject to interpolations from the actor’s personal life, they ruin the continuity of the role because they have no relation to it.