Preface to New Edition
2013 marked one hundred and fifty years since Konstantin Stanislavsky was born. Across the theatre world, there were celebrations and salutations for the man who catapulted acting from stereotypes to subtleties, from imitation to embodiment, and from stock theatricality to the ‘inner life’ that resonates on stage and screen today.
This book – The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit – was first published in 2007 by Nick Hern Books. Nick had also published my first book, Beyond Stanislavsky, and in subsequent conversations I’d frequently talked about ‘tools’ and ‘toolkit’ – terms that I’d coined from my Russian Scenic Movement director, Vladimir Ananyev. I didn’t really like ‘system’ or ‘method’ to describe Stanislavsky’s work, and I was excited when Nick gave me the charge to write a ‘toolkit’, a book that made readily accessible an array of Stanislavsky’s acting strategies. Little did we realise, as we sat in our favourite Italian haunt near Shepherd’s Bush Underground, what an egg we were hatching – and my gratitude to Nick is immense.
One of my main resources for The Toolkit was Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood’s 1936 translation of An Actor Prepares. Although this is a seminal text for actors and directors across the English-speaking world, it’s actually a highly abridged version of Stanislavsky’s original tome. So I was very intrigued when, in 2008, Jean Benedetti’s translation of the full version, An Actor’s Work, appeared in print. Here, Benedetti introduced new translations of the Hapgood terms, and these translations were closer to the Russian originals and often more actor-friendly. Although The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit had already been on the market for a year, Benedetti’s changes set me thinking about the ways in which actors and directors use terminology. What works for an actor? What alienates an actor? Which word is best – ‘objective’, ‘task’, ‘desire’ or ‘need’? Is ‘unit’ a useful name for a chunk of text, or is ‘bit’ more appropriate (especially as it’s closer to the original Russian word, kusok)? Does it even matter what terms you use as long as you get the results?
In April 2012, I was invited to give the Annual Stanislavski Centre/Routledge Lecture at the Stanislavski Centre, UK, so I set some gentle cats among some gentle pigeons by posing these questions. I began to wonder if there was a gap between theatre scholars (who advocate absolute fidelity to Stanislavsky’s originals) and practitioners like myself (who aspire to acting excellence whatever the specifics of terminology). Given this fascination with acting vocab, I was delighted when Nick Hern agreed to publish a revised edition of The Toolkit. Here was an opportunity to update the first edition, in light of both Benedetti’s 2008 translation and my own experimentations as an actor and a trainer.
The main terms that I’ve adopted from Benedetti’s An Actor’s Work are: ‘inner psychological drives’ (rather than Hapgood’s ‘inner motive forces’) and ‘logic and sequence’ (rather than ‘logic and coherence’). The reason I’ve chosen ‘inner psychological drives’ is essentially instinctive. As an actor, I find the focus on ‘drives’ more helpful than ‘forces’: ‘What is driving my character to do this?’ yields me more imaginative fruit than ‘What is forcing my character to do this?’ Although personally I’d rather they were called ‘psycho-physical drives’, ‘psychological’ is arguably a more accessible adjective than ‘motive’ in this particular context.
My choice for ‘logic and sequence’ over ‘logic and coherence’ is quite simple. I’ve found that the more we understand as actors the ways in which one action leads to the next action, to the next, to the next, to the next – in a logical sequence – the more precise our process becomes. (I learned this very much from working with my own acting coach, Katya Kamotskaya, when she directed me in The Seagull in 2010.) I write in The Toolkit about the ‘Action-Reaction-Decision’ sequence that underpins all human discourse. If you can genuinely open yourself up to all the nuances of this sequence and if you listen to your onstage partner, something really dynamic can happen between you. You no longer have to fake it and force it: instead, you can feel the electric way in which you’re dependent on each other’s actions, reactions and decisions. And this process can occur regardless of genre or style – be it vampires and wolves, or doctors and nurses. Each character in each context will have a particular logic underpinning their choices, and that logic moves them sequentially from one action to the next to the next.
The main (somewhat radical) adaptation that I’ve made concerns ‘communication’, which is the title of Chapter 10 in An Actor’s Work. This is Jean Benedetti’s translation of Elizabeth Hapgood’s ‘communion’. For many years I used the term ‘communion’, fully aware that it had an esoteric, almost religious overtone. Yet I enjoyed the unseen qualities implicit in the idea of ‘communing’ with something – be it God or Man or Nature. After all, Stanislavsky was very intrigued by yoga and prana energy, and certainly the word ‘communion’ implies some silent connection, in which the tiny nuances of energetic changes, facial expressions and body positions give as much information as any spoken word. That said, I can’t deny that on a couple of occasions I’ve had workshop participants show a little resistance to the term ‘communion’. So I was more than happy to look for an alternative. However, Benedetti’s ‘communication’ didn’t work for me either. In our technological age, the word ‘communication’ comes with a heap of digital and electronic overtones, and seems to reduce the intangible, intuitive aspects of human intercourse. Since neither term seems to be entirely serviceable, I’ve adapted them in my own practice to the word ‘connection’, since ‘connection’ allows for both physical and energetic contact. And that’s the term that I’ve used here in The Toolkit.
There are a handful of terms that I’ve left in The Toolkit, although I don’t really use them any more: they include ‘mental reconnaissance’ and ‘concentration of attention’. ‘Mental reconnaissance’ no longer resonates for me. As an actor-trainer, I tend to avoid any direct reference to ‘mental’ processes or anything that separates the actor’s thinking mind from their imaginative body. Since writing The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, I’ve come to understand much more fully the term ‘bodymind’ (a concept that I didn’t wholly embrace five years ago: see pp. 255–6). The whole idea of psycho-physicality means that it’s almost impossible to separate your brain from your body. And neuroscience categorically endorses that fact. So I now refer to detailed text analysis or ‘mental reconnaissance’ as ‘forensic detective work’. To me, that sounds less cerebral and more imaginative. As someone hooked on the television documentary Forensic Files and real-life crime, it feeds my imagination to think about scraping away at the skeleton of the black-and-white text to trace back to the flesh-and-blood character. ‘Text analysis’ sounds a bit dull. ‘Mental reconnaissance’ sounds like a general poring over battle plans. ‘Forensic detective work’ brings with it the excitement of uncovering something that may never have been discovered before. Therefore, it gives space for the actor’s imagination and unique interpretation. So, although I’ve kept ‘mental reconnaissance’ in this book, I frequently use an alternative.
One of the nitty-gritty terms with which Benedetti and his Russian-language consultant, Katya Kamotskaya, wrestled in An Actor’s Work was ‘concentration and attention’. Hapgood uses ‘concentration of attention’. Benedetti wanted to use ‘concentration’. At last he and Kamotskaya settled on ‘concentration and attention’. I write in The Toolkit about the difficulties surrounding the word ‘concentration’, and in recent years I’ve found myself adopting the word ‘focus’. To focus on something has a clarity, an uncomplicatedness – like a camera lens focusing on an object. The process is direct and doesn’t require unnecessary brain power, just as our eyes usually focus without us thinking about it too much. I do still use the term ‘attention’ (particularly with exercises like the one described in this book: ‘Circles of attention’). However, I rarely use ‘concentration’ and almost always use ‘focus’. That said, I’ve adopted ‘concentration and attention’ in this second edition of The Toolkit to remain connected to both the Hapgood and Benedetti translations.
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Since the first publication of The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, I’ve significantly streamlined my own use of Stanislavsky’s ideas, and I offer in this Preface a kind of road-map for how you can concisely integrate his principles into your own acting practices.
1. Guiding principles
First of all, I have Four Principles that underpin my work as an actor and a teacher:
2. Preparing for creative work
Then there are the Four Pillars on which Stanislavsky built his ‘system’ and which help me as an actor to prepare an appropriate INNER CREATIVE STATE before I start work:
| i. | RELAXATION (and for me, this means psycho-physical relaxation, not just bodily relaxation. It’s like Michael Chekhov’s ‘quality of ease’: relaxation is imaginative playfulness, as much as physical release); |
| ii. | FOCUS (or ‘concentration of attention’: i.e. the ability to home in on a task, a person, an object, and to let the imagination connect with it playfully); |
| iii. | OBSERVATION (i.e. curiosity about the world, not seeking all our imaginative stimuli from our smartphones, but returning to such old-fashioned pastimes as people-watching and live engagement with the world around us); |
| iv. | IMAGINATION (and knowing that we are bound by nothing but our own imaginations, in terms of the world views that we can adopt and the realms that we can inhabit). |
3. Specific work on building a character
As I begin work on a character, I allow Stanislavsky’s Three Levels of Research to guide me:
| a. | Detailed work on the text (this will unlock the specifics of language, syntax, POV, etc. and ties in with the first four FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS below); |
| b. | Research on the realm of the play and the playwright (this will reveal some useful historical, cultural, social details to inform my choices as I build the character); |
| c. | Research on the self (this will help me find the LURE or bait to connect my own imagination, body, emotional repertoire and creative juices with the world opened up to me by the playwright). |
Working with these three levels of research, I rely heavily on the SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS:
The first three (Who? Where? When?) relate to Level [a] of research, and they bed me in my thorough, forensic detective work on the text. This text analysis helps me define the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES; locate the BITS of action; and unlock the atmosphere and TEMPO-RHYTHM of the playwright’s style and world;
The fourth question (Why?) reveals my OBJECTIVES and my SUPEROBJECTIVES, and why the playwright wrote each scene. (This links Levels [a] and [b] of the research);
The fifth question (For What Reason?) stimulates my imagination, as I combine Level [b] with Level [c] to make a lively connection with the play, a connection that ignites my desire to embody the character;
And the sixth question, ‘How?’, will access my ACTIONS and my constant state of inner improvisation (see above), as I adapt to my partner’s moves, intonations and gestures.
These main strategies form the bedrock of my work on a role. All the other wonderful tools, such as INNER PSYCHOLOGICAL DRIVES, MOMENTS OF ORIENTATION and HEROIC TENSION are applied within this main structure as appropriate.
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So Stanislavsky was born over one hundred and fifty years ago, and his ideas about acting endure from generation to generation. Every time I return to his toolkit and ‘system’, a new idea leaps off the page, a new tool presents itself as invaluable, or a particular acting challenge is resolved by applying an obvious tool that I’d forgotten all about.
Stanislavsky receives some bad press from those who are determined to lock him in the closets of realism/emotion memory/dry-and-boring. I would urge them to look at the playfulness, the anarchy, the endless curiosity that he brought to the world of acting. The fact that he ended his life creating an opera studio goes to prove just how little he confined himself to realism! As part of the centenary celebrations, I was invited in October 2012 to the Moscow Art Theatre’s ‘Open Class: Stanislavsky Continues: An International Festival of Acting Schools’. It was my first return to Russia after nearly twenty years, and I took myself back to Stanislavsky’s House Museum. When I’d been there two decades ago, I was a very young and inexperienced actor. I’d written nothing about Stanislavsky. I had no ambitions to be an acolyte of his practices or a torch-bearer for his toolkit. Nonetheless, that first visit to his house was still very moving.
Returning twenty years later, I found myself endlessly smiling. Playfulness hung in the air. Strange furniture from motley productions. Set models and stained glass. Photographs of Stanislavsky in various costumes and productions – including some in which he looked decidedly ham! One of the little curator ladies told me an amusing tale: one day, some visitors had called upon Stanislavsky to find him (tall, aristocratic, shock of grey hair) crouching beneath the piano. ‘What are you doing?’ they asked. ‘Finding out what it’s like to be a mouse,’ he replied (no doubt those bright eyes twinkling from beneath his heavy brows). This was a man who knew that being an actor was to be a perpetual child, always playing, always curious, always allowing the body and the imagination to guide the heart. And in this book are some of the tools he offered to help us all achieve that state.
Bella Merlin
Los Angeles, 2014