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The Actor Studio Years
On Acting
The Texas Quarterly, III, No.2, Summer 1960, pg. 83-85.
Article about the Actor Studio Years by Lee Strasberg.
It seems to me that, in common with many of the other areas of knowledge which have been explored in the twentieth century, it is important to stress that one of the basic emphases in the knowledge about theatre today is the idea that the theatre is essentially a creative art. The fact that it uses the script as a basic item should not be interpreted as making it only an interpretive art. An interpretive art is an art in which one uses material in the same art to imitate. And in this sense, we should recognize the theatre as today being a creative art.
I would say that the most characteristic part of the theatre is unquestionably the actor. The theatre can do without scenery; it can do without the director; it can often do without words. But it cannot do without the living actor. When you have no actor, you have no theatre. Once you have an actor, you have theatre.
When you compare the various versions, let's say of a performance of Hamlet, by different actors, you will find that they bear very little relation to the original, whatever the original may be. In fact, we hardly know what the original is intended to be or is intended to mean. Each time we see an actor in that part we are really seeing an actor creating a new character. He may get his ideas obviously from the author, in the same way that a painter who paints a certain object in nature is receiving his ideas and impressions from that object, but what he does is dependent intrinsically on his own creative capacity, on his own imagination, on his own understanding, and on his own skill.
With every art we argue very much as to which is really creative and which is only imitative. On the whole we tend to think that the creative thing, the creative approach, the creative method, if you wish, demands a fresh, original and spontaneous experience of whatever it is that is being dealt with. Wherever that experience is only derived as an imitation of someone else's experience, it therefore, even when very good, tends only to be skillful, rather than to be creative. However, on almost any definite given object in any field, there is a wide area of difference of opinion as to what people will call it. We are up against the certain difficulty that exists in separating "creative" from "noncreative" in any area.
The creative process tries to stimulate the entire human being who is involved in the craft-that is, who is to act. Not only the external means of the actor, not only the voice, the speech, the gesture, but essentially the thinking, the thought, the sensitivity, the sensation, the emotion of the actor, the experience of the actor, so that he fuses completely with the kind of life that will have to be created on the stage. When we say "fuse completely," we don't mean that he experiences literally what the character is to experience. That would mean that an actor who had to kill would have to really want to kill. That's not at all the idea of experiencing. What it does mean is that whenever something is happening to the character, something real is happening to the actor. What is happening may be totally different, may come from a totally different source. But something is happening which, for the audience, must have the same validity, the same intensity, or the same sense of aliveness, of truthfulness, which the other kind of thing might ordinarily create for us. Every act of creation is in that sense collaboration, if only between the artist and his material. Obviously in an art like the theatre, which is essentially a collective art, it is not dependent on any one individual. All the elements in it must be unified and related. And by the way, it is equally important that the audience should share that experience in the theatre. When it doesn't, the performance on the stage remains cold and almost nonexistent.
As for the actor's training, I would say that the essential element is to train the inner faculties of the artist. Not at the expense of, or to the exclusion of, the external elements which are obviously important, but placing the emphasis on what we might ordinarily call the imagination of the actor, the ability of the actor to relive the experiences that have to be created on the stage.
We don't, I think, really know today what we are born with. Our present knowledge assumes that the possibilities of a human being are vast, that they somehow do reside at birth in the human being. But obviously without making an effort to discover them, they never appear. We only know that they are there when we work to create them. In other arts we can leave this creative process to happen spontaneously and intuitively, because most of the other arts are individual. A painter, composer, writer can sit in the privacy of his own room. They try to create whatever it is that they have decided to create. Sometimes suddenly something happens, and they create it. When it happens, we simply say that they were "inspired." However, when it doesn't happen, there's nothing lost. The composer simply says, "Well, it isn't going so well; I'll do it tomorrow. I don't feel so well today," or something like that. If in the middle of the night he suddenly wakes up with a creative idea, he can work at that particular time. In other words, the creative process can take place intuitively and unconsciously. It doesn't need to be put into technical terms.
However, the theatre is different in this sense; the performance must take place at a very definite stated time, and all the people participating in that performance must be ready to create. It therefore poses before us this problem: of making conscious something which exists in the other arts but does not need to be made conscious, but which if it is not made deliberate and conscious in our art, is left so much to accident that the art itself becomes almost nonexistent. We cannot depend on it; and the performances vary so much from one time to another that people have been forced to question whether the art can rightly be called art. That was the great contribution of Stanislavsky: to discover whether means could be found for consciously stimulating the creative process, which usually takes place unconsciously.
Anything we may say about the actor's technical preparation, therefore, should be considered, as Stanislavsky put it, only as notes at the time of difficulty. When you're unsure, when you don't quite know what to do, then it's wise to look at the compass and find out what might be done. I would say that in working with the actor two essential stages can be differentiated. One is the stage of training. If the actor is not sufficiently trained to do the kind of work that is demanded in production, then obviously the production work is very difficult to do. Often today you'll have to spend time to do work which in the other arts is done by the individual himself for many years long before he has come to this moment of creation. The essential areas of training are concerned with the awakening of belief in the actor; the training of the actor's concentration; the training of the actor's ability to respond to imaginary stimuli; the training of the actor's ability to experience and to re-experience emotions which have occurred to him, or which occur freshly and newly, so to say, which he may never have previously had, but which, once he has gone through he learns to be able to repeat. This is all, in other words, the training in control of his inner instrument.
When he then arrives at the rehearsal trained, the question is then only of the steps that he then goes through. And the steps are different for different people. Some people will go almost what seems coldly through the rehearsal period learning the mechanical steps, where they should be, and more or less the outline of the business and so on, and with nothing more taking place. Then suddenly sometimes when they get before the public, something happens. Something is turned on like a light is turned on. Sometimes when they sit in the privacy of their own room, when they start to put on the make-up, something happens. Sometimes they will go through, in the process of rehearsal, a great bewilderment. I've seen actors, and those are among the best, often go through with almost real labor pangs, in the process of rehearsal. Literally you question whether they are able to read, you see. I have seen some wonderful actors in my time who, in the first readings or in the first few weeks of rehearsal are hesitant, literally stumble over words-that's actually because they are good actors, because they cannot simply "read" fluently and easily. The words must come out of the penetration of the character, out of being the character. And it takes them time before they come to it. The character must grow.
Now in this growing process there is no one step. This is where the role of the director or teacher is therefore very, very important. Because the teacher on the one hand, or the director, must perceive where the actual difficulty is. And sometimes not supply the answer, but simply open the door. Because the answer, the individual must supply. Otherwise usually you will supply an answer that is right for you but is not right for the individual whom you are dealing with. And there is too much, by the way, of that in the theatre. We sometimes have the tendency to think that if I explain the part correctly, then the actor should be able to play it correctly. That would mean that the critic, or a psychologist who could understand and explain the part, would therefore be the best actor. We know that that's not so. The actor works with much deeper layers of awareness of experience, of consciousness and unconsciousness. The basic problem is to awaken these deeper areas by appealing to the actor's conscious knowledge and conscious experience about the things that are being dealt with; by presenting to the actor's imagination experience that will excite him, that will help him to understand what he is dealing with. But essentially to find the kind of experience that will explode within the actor himself-burst the flame of imagination. And sometimes that doesn't arrive from anything that is very important. It may sometimes come from a little remark that is made-from a color, from a sound, from a smell, from a sight, a word that is thrown in and suddenly makes sense to an actor. He says, "Don't tell me any more. Don't tell me any more. I know what you mean." Because sometimes in explaining, we present such a clear picture to the actor of what we intend that he therefore becomes very tied up in knowing what to do about it.
I think the important thing for the young person to realize is that all of himself is used on the stage. And therefore, whatever he experiences in life will in some way come out on the stage at some time or other. The most important advice, if you wish to call it advice, to give anyone, is to keep his imagination alive and open. To keep himself open to the impressions of life, to the things that are around him. To become aware of both his and other people's responses and reactions, so that he learns the nature of true behavior. Because otherwise, without that, most of the acting on our stage, both today and in past times, tends to take on a very conventional kind of aura. And that is not what we would call the creative approach or the creative method.
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