n truth, this conundrum goes all the way back to Stanislavsky. Reacting against the generally accepted acting style of his day, which tended to be artificial and presentational, the early-20th-century Russian director experimented with his actors at the Moscow Art Theatre, seeking reliable techniques for creative inspiration and for bringing a sense of stageworthy reality to acting.
Initially in formulating what became known as his "system," Stanislavsky addressed the actor's inner state, looking for ways to access true emotions. In An Actor Prepares and other writings, he counsels actors to never go directly for results but rather to investigate their character's circumstances (physical environment, social conditions, backstory); to find a specific objective or intention as well as psychological and physical "actions" to aid in pursuing it; to discover the overall vision of the play, which will necessarily shape the character's ongoing "super-objective" (or through-line); to tap into their own experiences to bring emotional truth to the role; and to use their five senses to enrich their work with texture, depth, resonance, and specificity.
Stanislavsky also invented the "magic if": If I were in my character's circumstances, how would I behave? And he created the concept of affective or "emotion memory"—a sensorial way to conjure emotions from past personal experiences, to be used as needed. It is important when preparing to act, he taught, to explore what you must do but not determine how you must feel.
As Bella Merlin notes in her fascinating new book, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (Drama Publishers, 2007), "The Soviet regime of the early 20th century rejected personal emotion," so Stanislavsky formulated the use of movement and physical gestures—"psycho-physical actions"—to trigger the same authentic, spontaneous results he'd been seeking. Movement and thought are inseparable, he concluded. Yet when we learn Stanislavsky's system today, we're most often learning only his early, inside-out approach. By the early 1920s, however, he'd moved on.
everal of Stanislavsky's colleagues put new spins on his theories. Yevgeny Vakhtangov, for example, suggested that actors could justify specific aspects of their character's behavior in secret, personal ways unrelated to the script—a sort of "whatever works" approach. In The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods (Smith & Kraus, 1995), Brestoff offers an example of what Vakhtangov meant by justification: If an actor is directed to pace, he can justify it in any way that works for the material—say, by pretending he's looking for a weak floorboard in hopes of falling through and then suing the theatre's management.
Vsevolod Meyerhold, another Moscow Art Theatre actor, looked to physical forms for inspiration, especially commedia, pantomime, circus arts, and Japanese Noh and Kabuki. As Brestoff writes, Meyerhold worked "from the surface to the core" in approaching characterization, creating a series of "biomechanical" exercises for physical strength and flexibility. His methods show up today in the commedia style used by the San Francisco Mime Troupe in its political satires and in the work of Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart, who direct from a physical starting point. And biomechanics workshops are still taught.
hen Stanislavsky died in 1938, his immediate disciples were left to variously carry forth, rebel against, and tweak his system. One disciple was Moscow Art Theatre actor Michael Chekhov. As Mel Gordon writes in the introduction to Chekhov's On the Technique of Acting (HarperCollins, 1991), Chekhov emphasized the use of imagination rather than recapturing the emotion of a past experience. He was also drawn to certain spiritual belief systems—specifically Hinduism and Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner's mystical "eurythmy," which involves representing sound and color through prescribed gestures. Rather than personal memories, Chekhov advocated the "psychological gesture" as preparation for developing a character: a specific physical movement that viscerally encapsulates the character's essence.
For Chekhov, writes disciple Mala Powers in the preface to On the Technique of Acting, "The physical body of the actor (and character) must always be allowed to influence the psychology and vice versa." He believed "the stimulus should always begin outside the private and internalized world of the performer."
Before he died in 1955, Chekhov was training actors in Hollywood, including Anthony Quinn, Jack Palance, and Yul Brynner. Powers is among the few teaching Chekhov's particular approach today, at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles.
nside/outside, physical/psychological: Like Chekhov, different followers of Stanislavsky focused on their own preferred aspects of his system. In 1923 the Moscow Art Theatre toured to New York, after which two of its actors, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, opened a school there.
Lee Strasberg was one of a group of theatre artists to form the legendary Group Theatre, which brought Stanislavsky's system to our shores. As a director and teacher, Strasberg developed various ways to evoke actors' true emotions, and his Stanislavsky-based techniques became known as the Method. In the same way that Stanislavsky influenced Western acting, Strasberg influenced American acting; because of the success of many of his students (Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Shelley Winters, and many others), he gained a reputation as the guru of film actors. Strasberg's son David Lee Strasberg has said that anyone who teaches about inner life (creating a deep, fully personalized, emotionally connected internal reality for the character), intentions (objectives), or subtext (what the character is thinking and feeling underneath and between the lines of the text) is under his father's influence.
Fixating on several of Stanislavsky's techniques, Strasberg believed, for example, that the muscles must be completely relaxed for the actor to access the full realm of emotional expression, and he formulated a series of relaxation exercises as a starting point in actor training. He also emphasized affective-memory exercises, in which his students re-created all the sensorial details of a past personal event that elicited strong emotions when it originally occurred. In this way, actors would have a reliable stockpile for stimulating authentic rage, sadness, joy, or whatever was needed. (One criticism of the technique is that, when misapplied, it tempts actors to wallow in their emotions or to disengage from the here and now rather than play the scene.) Strasberg also created many improvisational exercises for use in rehearsal and amended Stanislavsky's "magic if" by asking, "If you had to do what your character has to do, what would motivate you to do it?"
Strasberg died in 1982, but the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, both with branches in New York and Los Angeles, live on. Many independent teachers also specialize in the Method.
embers of the Group Theatre eventually split off, many of them rather acrimoniously, to teach their own interpretations of Stanislavsky's system. One was Stella Adler, who spent five weeks with Stanislavsky in Paris in 1934 and returned to report that he'd revised his early theories and was now concentrating on physical actions and given circumstances. This suited Adler perfectly: Unlike the brainy Strasberg, she'd always had easy access to her emotions as an actor and hated affective-memory exercises. So, following Stanislavsky, she taught objectives, actions, and given circumstances but also emphasized the actor's imagination.
In The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, Merlin describes the importance of a well-developed imagination: "It enables you to make physical adaptations to whatever given circumstances arise, it helps you to find psychological justifications for any directions you're given." How do you develop your imagination? By observing life around you and your own behavior and by constantly stimulating your five senses. As Merlin writes, you must keep your imagination fully operational "so you can remember a time in your life when you drowned a spider in the bath...and you restack those memories to get inside the psyche of Lady Macbeth." It's your imagination that allows you to make that quantum leap from casual insect-killer to murderous queen wannabe.
Adler, who died in 1992, also emphasized script analysis. This was perhaps her greatest contribution to the field, though many found her teaching methods rigid and, ironically, overly intellectual. Her goal, Brestoff writes, was to "unite the actor and his part within the boundaries of the text," and she influenced many famous actors, such as Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, Harvey Keitel, and Elaine Stritch. There are Stella Adler training centers in New York and Los Angeles.
nother Group Theatre veteran to reshape Stanislavsky's teachings was Sanford Meisner, who taught at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse. Like Adler, Meisner eschewed Strasberg's affective-memory approach to accessing emotion and credited Michael Chekhov with helping him to understand that "naturalism" was "far from the whole truth"—that acting could be both theatrically exciting and truthful.
Meisner wanted to elicit the deepest possible listening while acting, within the circumstances of the script. In his popular repetition exercise, two actors repeat simple phrases back and forth and may alter the dialogue only if something occurs between them that compels them to do so. The idea is for two humans to literally and personally affect each other in the here and now; behavior results from true impulse, and need springs from doing, not decision making.
Brestoff writes that Meisner, who died in 1997, focused on an oft-overlooked tenet of Stanislavsky: that it's the authentic, real-time communion between actors that the audience craves. Put another way, the foundation of Meisner's system is "the reality of doing." His approach is probably taught by more American teachers today than any other. Among the many who studied with Meisner are Jeff Goldblum, Mary Steenburgen, and Robert Duvall. His protégé Jim Jarrett not only teaches Meisner's methods but occasionally tours with a solo show that re-creates his mentor's classroom persona.
heories about how best to approach the craft can boggle the mind of the emerging actor. Most university drama departments and conservatories teach a combination of exercises and techniques drawn from all the great Stanislavsky-based teachers. Many contemporary teachers have discovered other tools: using nighttime dreams in role preparation (Janet Sonenberg); performing without consciously memorizing lines (Richard Seyd's "trigger" method); applying theories of human psychology to creating characters (Robert Blumenfeld); and so on.
Uta Hagen, a Tony-winning actor and legendary teacher (mostly at New York's HB Studio), was less of a theoretician in that her primary goal was to help actors observe the minutest details of human behavior—in themselves and in others—and use that material, plus profound self-knowledge, in their acting. In her classes and books, including her final one, A Challenge for the Actor (Scribner, 1991), she shared solutions to common acting problems that she had learned through trial and error as a performer.
Hagen developed a series of basic "object exercises" to help actors experience and recognize natural behavior in various circumstances. In these exercises, actors perform a simple scene of personal behavior using Stanislavsky tools, such as given circumstances, objectives, actions, and obstacles (everything that threatens to prevent you from achieving your objective), and learn to solve eternal acting problems. For example, to avoid anticipation (the performer's unavoidable knowledge of what's about to happen), the actor improvises searching for a "lost" object. To create an imaginary world, the actor visualizes a "fourth wall" (as suggested by Stanislavsky, who wanted actors to interact as an ensemble, not play to the audience, as was the custom of his day). To stimulate the imagination, the actor endows objects with specific physical properties.
Hagen's legion of loyal friends and students include David Hyde Pierce, Jill Clayburgh, Jerry Stiller, and Cynthia Nixon. And HB Studio continues to carry on her legacy.
ne of the most enjoyable ways to approach acting is through improvisation. Many actors consider improvising in rehearsal (for example, paraphrasing the dialogue to fully understand and personalize it) a waste of time. But most acting classes involve a certain amount of improv as a way to sharpen your senses and stimulate your imagination.
It was Viola Spolin who invented theatre games, which actors could play to reclaim what she considered a lost element in Stanislavskian approaches: a sense of fun. The actors she worked with eventually formed the Compass Players, which evolved into Chicago's famed Second City troupe, turning improvisation into the performance art we know today.
Some actors think the skills required for improv are disconnected from "straight" acting. But those skills are particularly useful in experiencing what it's like to be utterly spontaneous and in the moment—not anticipating, but listening as if your life depends on it, accepting the given circumstances, pursuing your objective, and playing your actions. In fact, as a rehearsal tool, just about the only thing missing from theatre games is scripted dialogue (plus the fact that improv is all about building on what just happened—saying "Yes, and..."—while written texts focus on conflict). Spolin died in 1994, but her son, Paul Sills, and her many acolytes still teach theatre games around the country.
tanislavsky's ideas have held sway for almost a century, but some acting theorists have branched off more radically than others, seeking a more political, Eastern-influenced, or purely physical way of presenting characters. In 1999, German playwright Bertolt Brecht's troupe, the Berliner Ensemble, toured the United States before disbanding forever and impressively demonstrated the power of his acting style. Unlike Stanislavsky and his disciples, Brecht had a vision of nonrealistic "epic theatre" and developed a philosophy of dramaturgy called Verfremdungseffekt, roughly translated as "alienation effect," in pursuit of that vision.
In essence, Brecht didn't want the viewer to become emotionally involved with the characters, because he felt that doing so would cloud the viewer's intellect. Rather, he wanted the audience to see the larger picture and to understand his political and social messages. He wanted his actors to find their characters through theatricalized gesture and movement, not by probing their own psyche and that of their character. Brechtian actors comment on their characters from the outside even while performing—a concept anathema to Stanislavskian actors, who empathize with their characters, whether villainous or heroic.
But Strasberg himself writes in A Dream of Passion (Plume, 1987), "Although Brecht's work is often thought of as countering Stanislavsky and the Method, he applied many of the same principles of truth and believability." Brecht, he adds, did want three-dimensional human beings on his stage, full of passions and contradictions, but he disagreed with Stanislavsky's idea that actors should ask, "How would I behave if this happened to me?" (Brecht called it "the crudest form of empathy.") Instead actors should ask, "Have I ever heard of somebody saying this and doing that?" Strasberg writes, "What Brecht meant by distancing was a way of communicating a feeling to the audience without necessarily indulging in the same intensity of experience demanded in plays with a psychological emphasis." According to Strasberg, Brecht's alienation effect was never meant to deny reality.
Companies like Vermont's Bread & Puppet Theater and New York's Irondale Ensemble Project continue the tradition of Brechtian epic theatre. But Irondale artistic director Jim Niesen points out that Brechtian acting really can't be separated from the Brechtian approach to directing. "Unless a company strongly embodies Marxist political ideals, it's difficult to make the style work no matter how it's performed," he says.
n the 1960s and '70s, eccentric Polish director Jerzy Grotowski took the outside-in approach to acting to a new level. He was concerned only with creating the deepest, riskiest, rawest interaction between actor and audience. To him, theatre was meant to be stripped-down or "poor," and the true calling of actors was to create a starkly transformative encounter between themselves and the spectators, rejecting the idea of a fourth wall.
"As the actor's material is his own body, it should be trained to obey, to be pliable, to respond passively to psychic impulses," Grotowski wrote in Towards a Poor Theatre (Routledge, 2002). "Spontaneity and discipline are the basic aspects of an actor's work and they require a methodical key." That key was Grotowski's rigorous physical training plan, designed "to take away that to which [the actor] is usually very attached: his resistance, reticence, his inclination to hide behind masks, his half-heartedness, the obstacles his body places in the way of his creative act, his habits and even his usual 'good manners.' " The goal was utter spontaneity and a gut-wrenching physical expression of the actor's deepest human feelings.
Grotowski's sources for actor training were Stanislavsky's "method of physical actions" and French director Antonin Artaud's "theatre of cruelty"—including, Brestoff writes, Artaud's interest in mythology as the root of theatre. Ever the experimentalist, Grotowski also looked to tribal dance, chants, linguistics, and religious rituals in creating his approach. His exercises were aimed at helping actors eradicate their own unconscious resistance to complete psychic exposure and strengthening them physically and vocally.
In Grotowski's "plastiques," for example, actors listen to their body and move accordingly, one body part after another, responding to their innermost impulses. The idea is for them to find their own points of resistance and thereby strengthen themselves physically. His more intense and acrobatic "corporels," based on yoga poses, help actors connect to the lower body, but they're so rigorous that one actor reportedly fractured her neck during an exercise. Grotowski also emphasized proper breathing and resonant vocalizing. But all these lessons, writes Stephen Wangh in An Acrobat of the Heart (Vintage, 2000), "were never meant to be a universal map...but simply a starting point from which an actor might begin to explore his or her personal unknown territory." Key word: personal. Grotowski believed "the actor must use himself—his own feelings, thoughts, and opinions—in the work," writes Wangh.
British director Peter Brook is a well-known proponent of the ideas of Grotowski, who also influenced many American theatre innovators, such as Julian Beck, André Gregory, and Joseph Chaikin. Bemoans Gregory in the afterword to An Acrobat of the Heart, "We no longer value art that makes us see the truth.... We have mutated into something that seems human.... In the face of this situation, Grotowski's exercises are not just an artistic method, they are also a spiritual practice." Grotowski, who taught for a while at U.C. Irvine, died in 1999.
nother radical theatre director famous for the physical rigor of his methods is Japan's Tadashi Suzuki. As seen in his postmodern version of King Lear, called The Tale of Lear, Suzuki is all about the actor's instrument, the expressiveness of body and voice. His influences range from existentialism to ballet, from classical Japanese to Greek drama, from Indian Kathakali dance to Shintoism and martial arts.
In Toga, Japan, Suzuki trains his actors, who come from East and West, to relax the upper body and facial muscles while engaging the lower body. The actors in his productions are noted for their footwork—lots of intense stomping in the manner of Japanese peasants in the field—and breath control, their focus and concentration, and their ability to remain immobile for long periods of time. Suzuki has said it is the feet, the only part of the body constantly in touch with the earth, that support all human activity.
Jeffrey Bihr, who teaches at American Conservatory Theater and is a member of Suzuki's international company, has described the training as "like Marine boot camp, [it's] so fiendishly difficult." As the Fool in the touring company of The Tale of Lear, Bihr says, he started by playing the character as a clown, but that didn't work. "I had to stop doing everything I was used to doing. That was a real battle. Once I got there, another world opened up to me." He adds, "Here in the United States, actors are trying for gritty realism all the time. Suzuki says acting is lying, and that's so opposite to the way Western actors are taught. He says the audience knows you're playing someone you're not, saying lines you didn't write. The question becomes 'How effectively can you lie?' and if you follow that, you get to the same place, which is that acting is truth telling. But the tools are revelatory." Bihr says Suzuki's techniques, which he practices regularly, tune his body, voice, and psychology every day.
Actor Ellen Lauren, of the SITI Company in New York (founded by Suzuki and Anne Bogart), has said that Suzuki's poses, stretches, foot stomping, and other exercises are basically impossible to achieve, so some of the actor's accumulated energy remains internalized. Indeed, the training can be physically painful. Writes Jonathan Marshall in "Bodies Across the Pacific" on www.bodyweather.net, "Western performers tend to be stylistic dilettantes, and do not respond well to the pseudo-monastic discipline of Suzuki."
hile Suzuki looks toward Japanese traditions in his approach to the actor's craft, Anne Bogart came up with an Americanized process. "This business of contacting an emotional memory and using that in relationship to a text causes a sort of narcissism that I find unbearable," she said as part of a dialogue on actor training in American Theatre magazine in 2001. Bogart thinks emotional recall works well for film but not for stage, where performances are repeated night after night and emotions need to change continually and remain fresh. "The minute you pin down an emotion, you cheapen it," she said. So she has looked to the circus, vaudeville, expressionism, and Stanislavsky's late-period physical work for inspiration.
SITI Company actors have adopted some of Suzuki's practices, but the group is best known for Viewpoints, a system Bogart adapted from the work of postmodern choreographer Mary Overlie. Viewpoints is an improvisational technique in which actors explore physical space (shape, gesture, architecture, relationships, floor pattern) and time (tempo, duration, repetition, and more). The idea is for them to have full awareness of their environment and of the other actors in it. (Bogart says she leaves emotional life to the actors.) In the company's best work, the actors are as emotionally connected and spontaneous as one could hope—and seemingly as physically strong and flexible as athletes. Writes actor-director Kenn Watt in Theatre Bay Area magazine (March 2002), "Truths are physical manifestations of cognitive preparation, so they must be arrived at through the body. Thus, unlike ephemeral emotions, these corporeal truths are repeatable for the actor, performance after performance."
In a 2004 Back Stage interview, Bogart said, "I do the opposite of Strasberg's work. My work is about going outside in order to receive sensation instead of going inside to receive sensation." Before every rehearsal and every performance, SITI actors go through a 15-minute Suzuki training session (including stomping, slow-motion walking, and other techniques) and a 15-minute Viewpoints improvisation.
But Bogart notes that before Viewpoints training come text analysis, understanding the character, and other Stanislavsky principles. "It's only after you've had those basics that anything extended, what you might call abstract, makes any sense," she says. "Because at the base of anything is realism: the real event, the situation, where you're coming from, where you're going, what you're saying, what your relationships are.... At the base of all theatre is relationships." When it comes to acting training and theatre production, she says, "the more deconstructed something is, the more real it has to be."
Over the past century, it seems, theatre's experimentalists have swung more and more toward the outside-in approach to acting, as the stage seeks to differentiate itself stylistically from the screen. At the same time, classes in acting for the camera stress working from the inside out. For the individual actor, figuring out how to strike that fine balance can be a role-by-role challenge.