WHEN ACTING IS AN ART
The ultimate goal of theater is to be able to act with the unconscious; however, the subconscious and intuition can be fickle, which is why theater students train to get better at controlling and igniting them. In order to artistically create a role, you must actually experience feelings analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.
The best way to accomplish this is to plan your role consciously, then play it truthfully, each and every time.
Beginners, when they have talent, can accidentally (and for a short space of time) fill a role very well, but it can be difficult to reproduce it in a sustained artistic form and therefore will always be at risk of exhibitionism.
Stanislavksi felt that you should never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experienced and which is not even interesting to you. He focused on a number of qualities of “good actors” and sought to train his students to consistently embody those qualities in their work.
ACTION
Whatever happens on the stage must be for a purpose. An audience will stay at home if they want to sit around the living room while watching people live just another “normal day.” Thankfully, authors and directors guide actors towards their GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES, which an actor should supplement with more and more IMAGINATION so you can always have a strong MAGIC IF. You may sit without a motion and at the same time be in full action, as long as you believe in the imaginative fiction of your character and bring it to life. When these inner conditions are prepared and right, feelings should come to the surface of their own accord.
Imagination creates things that can be or can happen; fantasy invents things that are not in existence, which never have been or never will be. You’re probably not a Danish prince whose come home to find his father murdered and his mother remarried; therefore, if you are to play Hamlet, you must find some single new circumstance that will move you emotionally and incite you to action within the play. Adapt yourself to the new condition, listen to what it suggests to you, and – act!
In order to truthfully play a character in her circumstances, you must get yourself away from the auditorium, far away from the inherent falseness of the stage. Become interested in something the character would be interested in!
We can concentrate on THE NEAREST OBJECT when it is necessary to gather our whole attention away from distant things, or on the character’s GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES if we want to refresh our concentration into the character’s world. If we practice PUBLIC SOLITUDE, like a snail in its shell, we can train ourselves to live in these CIRCLES OF ATTENTION more easily. And, if your border begins to waver, you can always withdraw quickly to a “smaller circle.”
Only when you relax your muscles can you devote yourself to the operation of your five senses. Actors practice this skill over and over to find what works best for them.
UNITS
Once you’ve practiced the exercises and started to work on a role, you can define the units that will mark the “channel” of your role to keep you in the right creative line. The largest pieces you’ll reduce to medium, then to small, then to fine, only to reverse the process and reassemble the whole, because the larger and fewer the divisions, the less you have to deal with and the easier it is for you to handle the whole role.
OBJECTIVES
What does your character want? Remember, it must be on “our side of the footlights,” directed at the other actors, not at the spectators (it cannot be “he wants to make the audience laugh”). An objective should be real, live and human, moving, truthful, attractive and active. It can be External or Physical, Inner or Psychological or a Rudimentary Psychological type.
Rehearsals are the place to find the right objectives, gain control of them and start to live with them.
An actor is human; on stage he brings his everyday thoughts, personal feelings, reflections and realities. At any single point in time a human can be in COMMUNION in three different ways:
Direct communication with a physical object on the stage, human or inanimate
Self-communion: we talk to ourselves when we can’t contain it, when we’re wrestling with some difficult idea, when we try to impress an idea on ourselves, memorize it or relieve our feelings by voicing them
Communication with an absent or imaginary object, someone or something that isn’t really there.
Only when we’re absorbed in some real, interesting, creative problem on the stage can we achieve “true grasp.”
Stanislavski wrote about his trials and errors in finding a proven, consistent way of achieving honest, truthful moments on the stage in a SERIES OF BOOKS translated into English. As every individual actor is different from every other actor, what works for one may not work for some and vice versa. Ridgewood students continually strive to emulate Stansislavski, to find what works for them, find what doesn’t and to understand why.
The Theater Door 