Dr. Jonah Salz
(Noho Theatre Group/Ryukoku University, Kyoto)

This event will take place on Tuesday 20th March, between 18.00 to 20.00 in Room C009

How can traditional performance styles be meaningfully employed by contemporary actors and directors? The short play by Beckett (Come & Go) will be used as the basis for exploring the use of time and space in noh, masks and mask-like expression, stylized form and repetition, stage presence (and absence), the pregnant pause. Through power-point slides and DVD the lecture-demonstration will begin with a 40-minute introduction:

• introduce some basic aesthetic principles of the Japanese masked dance-theatre noh and stylized comic cousin kyogen,
• demonstrate and teach some basic forms of noh and kyogen,
• show applications in translations and adaptations in other Beckett plays I have directed with noh and kyogen professionals in Japan (Noho)

Then groups of 3 participants will attempt to apply these principles to Beckett’s Come and Go. After a single read-through, the groups will work independently to find ways of maintaining the tension while exploring the meanings. The play can be rehearsed in its entirety, as a 123-word mini-drama of repetitive movement and gesture that, like noh, is both concrete in structure and form, and ambiguous in meaning.

Richard St. Peter is an award winning stage director, producer and educator with over 40 professional directing credits. From 2003-2009 he served as the Artistic Director of Kentucky’s Actors Guild of Lexington having prior served as the Associate Artistic Director of both Theatre Virginia (LORT) and Barksdale Theatre. He is a member of SDC (the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society), and the Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab. He has taught or guest lectured at the University of Kentucky, Centre College, Texas Tech University, Christopher Newport University and others. He received his MFA in Stage Directing from Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently pursuing his PhD at Texas Tech University where his research interest is focusing on the career and influence of Harley Granville-Barker. He recently presented a paper on Barker’s ideas of staging Shakespeare at the 2011 Blackfriar’s Conference at the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia and presented a lecture with Dr. Tony Haigh and Dr. Bill Gelber on the history and influence of the Royal Court Theatre at the 2012 Southeastern Theatre Conference in Chattanooga, TN.

Harley Granville Barker’s famous “Thousand Performance” years at the Royal Court Theatre (1904-1907) are notable for a number of reasons. Under Barker (and J.E. Vedrenne) the Court became a kind of proto-National Theatre and allowed for him to test out the ideas he helped articulate with William Archer in their manifesto Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre, privately published shortly before he embarked on his work at the Court and later publicly published in 1908. During his time at the Court, he produced 988 performances of 32 plays by 17 playwrights which finally introduced the so-called New Drama into England: Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck and others, firmly established the reputation of Shaw as England’s preeminent contemporary playwright, and presented the first professional productions in English of plays by Euripides. By 1907 it seemed as if a National Theatre was going to be foregone conclusion but tragically for Barker it was not to happen. Why?

The establishment in 1955/1956 of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre would have long lasting effects not only on theatre in England but in the United States as well. It is important to remember that when George Devine set up the ESC, theatre in England was, as Arthur Miller famously remarked, “…stuck somewhere in the late 20s and the Empire. To the foreign eye every play was more or less the same one, I suppose because the mannerisms were as fixed as Japanese Kabuki…” Neither the modern Royal Shakespeare Company nor the National Theatre had yet been established, Aunt Edna dominated the audience, and the West End plays of Coward, Rattigan, and Priestley were representative of Miller’s remark. Devine’s famous “Right to Fail” idea changed all of that. Not only did the Royal Court introduce the Angry Young Men, they provided a proving ground for directors, several of whom would move to Olivier’s National at the Old Vic in 1963 and also introduced Jocelyn Herbert, perhaps the most influential designer of the second half of the 20th century. Finally, the Royal Court would serve as an influence on the fledgling American regional theatre movement as 1st generation artistic director’s such as Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., Nina Vance at the Alley Theatre in Houston, TX and Margo Jones at what would become Dallas Theatre Center in Texas seized upon this notion. I actually first heard of the notion of the “Right to Fail” not from reading about Devine but from a conversation in 2000 with Bernard Gersten, Executive Director of Lincoln Center Theater in New York who claimed that was Joseph Papp’s motto when running the Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. All of this circles back to Sloane Square and 1956.

What can Psychology learn from the arts?
Stanislavski and the relationship between practitioner and performance

“Psychology in the modern era has developed sophisticated models of analysis predicated on propositional knowledge. However, it has been less successful in dealing with narrative or implicational understanding.

Psychologists work with client stories so this is a significant gap. In recent collaborations between psychologists, authors, actors and directors, Stanislavski has provided a language to explore what we might learn from each other. This work is elaborated in this lecture with examples of how ‘An Actor Prepares’ has been used in different professional contexts.”

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After an early career spent in Banking and in legal and later forensic practice, Professor David Lane switched to education and academia, with periods as visiting Professor at Syracuse University and Middlesex University and honorary posts at University College London and City University London in addition. For some twenty years David has acted as a consultant on organisational development for major corporations, and provided research forum and benchmarking projects on an international basis.  He was Director of the Professional Development Foundation and acted as a professional coach for senior management.

As Founding Director of the International Centre for the Study of Coaching at Middlesex University David contributes to leading edge research in coaching as well as supervising leading coaches undertaking Doctoral research with the Centre.  He also developed a Masters programme in Executive Coaching, which is now available in the USA, South Africa and the UK and the first Professional Doctorate programme in coaching. 

As Chair of the British Psychological Society Register of Psychologists Specialising in Psychotherapy he convened the Psychotherapy Group of the European Federation of Psychologists Associations.  Contributions to counselling psychology led to the senior award of the BPS for “Outstanding Scientific Contribution” and in 2010 David received a Lifetime Award from the British Psychological Society for a distinguished contribution to Professional Psychology.

Professor Senelick’s previous books include The Changing Room, The Chekhov Theatre, and The Russian Theatre after Stalin, and he was recently named a Distinguished Scholar by the American Society of Theatre Research.

A Sanford Meisner study day 

Saturday 5th November 2011, 10.00 to 17.00

Event Programme 

Workshops

In the afternoon from 2.00 p.m., participants will be able to join one of two workshops (detailed below). The workshops will last for 2 and a half hours, with a short break for tea of coffee, mid-afternoon.

Grant Olson:

“The honest impulse.” 

The workshop practically explores some of Meisner’s foundation exercises, such as the repetition game and its variations, as a means of developing a sense of unforced impulse in the performer. Following the exploration of the groundwork exercises developed by Meisner, the workshop will then examine the practical application of theory and exercise in the rehearsal/training setting. This workshop is aimed at encouraging the actor’s instinct to (re)act impulsively in rehearsal and performance to encourage an intimate truthfulness in performance.

Julian Jones:

This workshop will explore, through practice, the Meisner dictum that ‘Acting is living truthfully under imaginary circumstances’ – focussing on key concepts such as ‘the reality of doing; ‘justification’; ‘working-off’ other actors on ‘impulse’ and ‘emotional preparation’. The workshop will explore these ideas through a combination of participation, demonstration and discursive analysis. I hope to end the session with a short exploration of where this work may be developed in the future with the help of a current research student.

Saturday 5th November 2011, 10.00 to 17.00 @ Rose Bruford College, Lamorbey Park, Sidcup DA15 9DF

A unique and exciting opportunity to explore the work of Sanford Meisner (1905-1997), one of the 20th century’s most intriguing and influential master acting teachers.

Keynote lecture by Richard Hornby, Professor of Theatre, University of California Riverside (author of The End of Acting), followed by a panel discussion on Meisner’s work and legacy, and practical workshops which introduce and explore the Meisner technique.

Panel participants will include Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei (UCLA)

This event is sponsored by The Stanislavski Centre.

A full programme will be published shortly.

Attendance Fees: £60.00 (full rate) / £30 (student rate) – which will include tea, coffee and a buffet lunch.

To register your interest, book your place for the day or request further information, please contact paul.fryer@bruford.ac.uk

On the first day of all his classes, he said, “The seed to the craft of acting is the reality of doing.” Meisner’s entire technique is based on those most crucial three words: “reality of doing.” (John Ruskin)

Announcing the world premiere of Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre, a documentary film written and directed by Michael Craig and produced by Copernicus Films in association with The Stanislavski Centre at Rose Bruford College.

The film will be screened at 8:30pm on the 14th of April 2011 in the College’s Barn Theatre in Sidcup, Kent, and will be followed by a platform with the director. The event is part of the College’s annual symposium: “Towards a Cultural Olympiad”.

The film draws on a range of material from cultural archives in Moscow, from the College’s unique collection of Stanislavski’s early 20th century production photos, and extensive interviews with Anatoly Smeliansky, Associate Director of the Moscow Art Theatre and Jean Benedetti, a world authority on Stanislavski and an Honorary Professor and Fellow of Rose Bruford College.

Stanislavsky and the Russian Theatre paints a memorable and informative picture of one of the world’s most influential dramatists and is an excellent resource for students, practitioners and scholars of theatre.

i) Strasberg and work with imaginary objects:

…The bigger point maintained here by Strasberg is that the type of concentration the actor needs is what we call ‘creative concentration’. The actor needs to create as he concentrates; create as he puts his attention somewhere. He needs the type of concentration that essentially brings alive for himself whatever fiction, whatever imaginative supposition, he is trying to believe in and live with. As we all know, and as Stanislavski made very clear to us, the actor is surrounded by false things on the stage – he’s looking at a backdrop and not a real sunset; he’s kissing another actor and not the real love of his life; he’s handling a prop cup and not really the finest china in the British Empire – but he must respond as if these things were true. The actor needs to develop this creative concentration combined with an actor’s faith so he can build for himself an imaginary world on the stage, believe in it, and begin to live within it with all the conviction as if it were really happening to him right there and then.

So, looking for specificity within this broad idea of ‘concentration’, Strasberg trained his actors’ concentration through imaginary objects: it’s not enough just to control your attention and put it on the literal things in front of you; you need a concentration that not only controls attention but also simultaneously brings alive for you whatever imaginative value you need according to the play. Work with imaginary objects, then, is intended to train this creative concentration – often called simply ‘imagination’ – and faith in the actor. This is Strasberg in Dream of Passion:

“The kind of concentration necessary for acting demands the ability to recreate something which is not there. It leads not only to the workings of the imagination, but also to the presence of that kind of belief or faith which has often been characterised as the essential element in acting…

The purpose of these acting exercises is to train the actor’s sensitivity to respond as fully and vividly to imaginary objects on stage as he is already capable of doing to real objects in life. He will, therefore, have the belief, faith and imagination to create on the stage the ‘living through’ that is demanded of the performer.”

Let’s take a moment there. In just that simple exercise I mentioned at the beginning [relaxation followed by ‘drinking’ an imaginary breakfast drink - SP], we’ve now discovered that through it the actor has been given a lesson in relaxation, concentration, imagination, faith, deliberate engagement of sensory receptors, and sensitivity towards detailed and sequentially-logical behaviour [I handle the sense/affective memory aspect of the exercise elsewhere – SP]. That’s quite amazing, I think. The actor is developing himself in numerous ways and ways which absolutely penetrate into the heart of the actor’s reality – into the sorts of things an actor actually needs to be able to do on the stage. It is far from a loosely conceived thing. Its precision is remarkable and Strasberg has put unmistakably into ‘exercisable’ form those things Stanislavski identified as being essential faculties to develop in the actor. Take these words of Stanislavski from Stanislavski’s Heritage:

“There are no formulas in it [Stanislavski’s ‘method’] on how to become a great actor, or how to play this or that part. The ‘method’ is made up of steps towards the true creative state of an actor on stage. When it is true it is the usual, normal state of a person in real life.

But to achieve that normal living state on stage is very difficult for an actor. In order to do it:

1.         He has to be physically free, in control of free muscles
2.         His attention must be infinitely alert
3.         He must be able to listen and observe on stage as he would in real life
4.         He must believe in everything that is happening on the stage that is related to the play 

To accomplish this, I shall propose a number of exercises…They train these absolutely necessary qualities in actors. They shall be done every day the way a singer vocalises or a pianist does his finger exercises.”

So, we have Strasberg offering one such exercise that can be done on a daily basis and that targets those four apparently ‘absolutely necessary qualities in actors’.

But, if you notice, as valuable as it is to train the actor’s faculties of relaxation, concentration, imagination, faith and so on, if you notice, not one of those things relies on the type of imaginary object that is being worked on. As long as you relaxed beforehand, you could work with an imaginary coffee cup, waterfall, gun, three-legged cat – it doesn’t matter. You would still be developing those core abilities.

This now raises a question. Assuming those are the sorts of things we would like to continue to foster in the actor at this early stage – i.e. we think it’s beneficial to develop further his powers of relaxation, concentration, imagination and faith – which imaginary object should we work with tomorrow? If we’ve done our breakfast drink today, what should we do next? Is there any logic of sequence we can conceive of within that framework of relaxation and work with imaginary objects? Why, actually, did we even start with a breakfast drink in the first place?

Now this is where Strasberg makes something of a contribution of his own. What we’ve discussed so far really owe their initial formalising to Stanislavski. But here Strasberg goes a step further. He designed a sequence to his training. It wasn’t a case that you turn up on day one, leave after three years, and during that time eventually get round to working on everything. He thought up a sequence of imaginary objects for the actor to work on so that there was a sense of continuity and progression to the process of training. The training process acquires an inner consistency. The actor is taken on a journey as he trains, being systematically challenged and shown things as he proceeds. So let’s go into some depth about this sequence…

ii) Strasberg and Vakhtangov

…Strasberg believed Vakhtangov’s way of working with actors solved this question of how to achieve a sense of form that was also infused with inner conviction and life. Although this isn’t strictly true – if you dig around you find Stanislavski employing the exact same tactic in his work as director, too – theoretically speaking we can say that Stanislavski ran into barriers with his reliance on the ‘Magic If’: asking actors ‘What would you do if x was the case?’ inherently contains within it a limitation to the actor’s own personal and natural response to a situation/adjustment. As such, it is difficult to lever the resultant quality of behaviour out of a rather ‘everyday’, true-to-life plane. Theatricality, then, is hard to come by if you only have this as a device by which to appeal to your actors. Vakhtangov had up his sleeve an alternative device. This often gets phrased in a variety of ways. One example comes from Strasberg at the Actors Studio:

“Vakhtangov rephrased the approach. He didn’t say ‘If I was so-and-so, what would I do?’ He said ‘If I’m playing Juliet, and I have to fall in love overnight, what would I, the actor, have to do to create for myself belief in this kind of event?’.”

Or from Working with Live Material Strasberg describes it as:

“What kind of logic can I, the actor, get which will help me to give the author’s or director’s logic? My logic must fuse with the logic of the play. It must not simply be my logic.”

In its simplest form, this gets condensed to ‘What would motivate me, the actor, to do what the character does?’ versus the more (what we’re calling, at least) ‘Stanislavskian’ ‘What would I do in x situation?’. In other words, you set a behavioural goal – presumably aligned with the artistic purposes of the piece – and find whatever you need to justify or motivate that behaviour with a given actor. It works backwards from the Magic If. Instead of discovering what the actor would do under certain circumstances, you set the result first – and appeal to the actor in whatever way you need to get that result.

And ‘whatever way you need’ is really the key to all this. What is often required is a willingness and imagination to conceive of a way of working with an actor in rehearsal that might take you away from, or beyond, the circumstances of the play. This device is sometimes called ‘substitution’ – it’s substituting one or a set of circumstances from the play with a different set in order to draw out the desired behaviour from the actor.

Let me give you an example from Vakhtangov’s production of The Dybbuk again. This comes from Yosef Yzraely’s PhD thesis Vakhtangov directing the Dybbuk, looking specifically at how Vakhtangov worked with actors:

“The Idlers in the play [young men who sit and chat in the synagogue - SP] spend their time telling Hassidic tales. So the actors in the play had to familiarise themselves with Hassidic literature. But Vakhtangov stopped the improvisational storytelling because the actors told the tales in an empty imitation of a stereotyped idler.

In search for authentic feeling, Vakhtangov suggested the actors imagine they were telling the stories while enjoying the physical relaxation of a bathhouse. An improvisation such as this is an example of gathering material for the actor from any stimulating source – regardless of its realistic connection to the final product.”

So, as we can see, Vakhtangov in rehearsal substituted one circumstance – the cold, dark synagogue – for another – a warm bathhouse – in order to elicit the required behavioural response. He obviously had some image in his mind – presumably something to do with this ‘physical relaxation’ – which his actors weren’t giving him by simply putting themselves in the situation. He obviously wanted something a little ‘theatrical’ as opposed to how one actually sits in a cold, dark synagogue – or at least something more than the ‘stereotyped’ image of that. As such, he was required to think up some way – some substitute reality – through which he could appeal to his actors to reach this goal.

Now this is where some people claim to have a problem. Being ‘taken out of the play’ is one of those clichéd, deadly sins of acting. God forbid that that should happen! But it doesn’t actually mean anything. Not only does that reveal a misunderstanding of the actor’s reality on stage, but such people are often insufficiently aware of what exactly they are even in disagreement about! ‘I don’t think theatre should be made that way’, I’ve heard in reference to this Vakhtangov formulation. And while I disagree with the sentiment, I appreciate at least that that recognises where our differences lie. This is to do with the very personal area of aesthetics concerning theatre-making and theatre-processes. People have strong feelings about how something should or shouldn’t come into being.

The problem, I would suggest, with disagreeing with the principle of this formulation concerns artistic conviction and need. There are far, far too many people these days who cling religiously to some intellectually-conceived ‘process’ that generates their work. They put strict adherence to the process ahead of everything else, and indulge themselves like a child with a toy they won’t give up. That it is made in a certain way is more important than what it makes. I take pride in saying that I don’t really have a ‘process’. Whatever we have to do – within the boundaries of decency and humanity – to get a certain thing done, we will do. The expression of the artistic soul of the collective is of uncompromising, paramount importance. Whatever we have to do to express as best we can, and share with an audience, those things that are dearest to our hearts, and those things we think we have to share with people, we will do no matter what. Those who love themselves and their processes more than their art and their audiences don’t prioritise highly enough the act of sharing and expressing, which is the very purpose of theatre I would have thought.

Considered another way, it also seems a bit strange that people would have such strong opinions about the ways in which theatre is made. As long as it gets the job done and doesn’t injure anyone, I really don’t know why people are so worried. No one really cares in, say, photography. They care only when the boundaries of morality are challenged. For instance, there was a series of portraits recently done of children’s reactions after having a lollypop, which they were initially given, suddenly snatched away from them. Lots of tears and bewildered reactions. Now this raises certain ethical issues in the making of art. But in much the same way, I would suggest, when children are ‘tricked’ on film sets in order that they cry or whatever. I think I’ve heard stories like that from Charlie Chaplin’s work with children and maybe some others…

Anyway, the Vakhtangov reformulation is a far cry from that! It’s hardly an act of cruelty! And in other arts, who the hell cares how you get there as long as you do get there and no one is hurt in the process? Imagine I’m a painter. I try to paint a tree as it appears to me. But I realise that in doing that I fail to express whatever I set out to express. However, I discover that instead of trying to paint the bark as I see it, if I try to paint worms on my canvas, my act of expression is more successful. I find that if I genuinely try to paint worms rather than bark, the painting becomes ‘better’ given my personal artistic purposes. But I can’t believe anyone would see that painting and say, ‘Well, it’s very good. But I hope he tried to paint that bark as he saw it. He had better not have tried to paint something else instead. I don’t think paintings should be made that way’.   

Back to acting, if that means the actors have to create things other than the circumstances of the play in order to realise and maximise through human behaviour the expression of something that is deemed important, so be it. Remember what Vakhtangov said about art and ‘the spirit of the people’? Well, something of that is at work here, too. It’s somehow tied up with one’s artistic urgency – that you would be willing to try anything in order to express on stage as effectively as you can. That type of spirit can certainly be detected in Strasberg, too. From Strasberg at the Actors Studio:

“We are willing to be influenced by anything, to try anything. We have no fear of giving up anything here. Here there is nothing holy. Anything that can help us to become better, to fulfil better the actor’s task, to contribute to a more alive and dynamic theatre is certainly worth trying and working on.”

Still, that is the solution to the problem of combining inner truth with a sense of form. Once you are willing to ‘think outside the box’ of the given circumstances, you can set the actors various tasks that will in turn motivate various qualities of behaviour. The range is literally limitless. And it’s also important to point out the role of the audience in all this. They will do a lot of the work for you. Both Vakhtangov and Strasberg would say that it doesn’t matter what the actor thinks about, as long as he really does think of something real. The audience will piece it together and contextualise what they see in front of them in view of what they understand to be happening in the scene….

iii) A question from an RBC acting student: Strasberg, Meisner, Training

Student: What about working with other people? That’s the most interesting, exciting and variable element in the theatre. Therefore, the ability to respond off the other person is the most important thing. Where is that in Strasberg’s training? It seems to be ‘introverted’ by comparison?

SP: OK. That raises a number of things at once. The first is just to remember that I did mention – but admittedly relatively quickly – the point in Strasberg’s training when actors begin to work with each other, respond off each other, take each other in, understand and relate to each other. It does come but later on – once they’ve had a decent amount of training in concentration. So there is a definite point at which work with other actors is deliberately introduced.

Also, maybe I wasn’t clear, but I think it’s a mistake to consider work with imaginary objects ‘introverted’. It is individually done at first, yes, but it seeks to recreate an object outside of yourself, three-dimensionally around you, right there and then. It’s neither ‘inside’ you nor something in the past. The ultimate goal of such training is to be able to construct around you an entire and ‘present-tense’ imaginary world in amongst which you can live on stage.

But given the emphasis of these comments, I’m going to take a gamble here and ask whether you guys train in (God, I hate these stupid labels), for a lack of a better term, the ‘Meisner Technique’ or something?

Student: Yes

SP: Ok. I think the thing to be clear about is your definition of acting and how you understand any act of training’s relationship to that. Both Meisner and Strasberg see acting as life on stage. It is living truthfully within whatever fiction the play creates for you. It is the art form of human behaviour. Training is a way of heightening your ability to do that. Through training you are hopefully better prepared to live on stage under imaginary circumstances than you would be without that training.

But it is still living, human nature or behaviour that you are after. The problem you encounter is if you then use the precise ways in which you were trained too directly as a ‘blueprint’ for what you do on stage. Meisner trains you an awful lot to respond off another person. And there’s a good reason for that, which I’ll talk about. But if you go into the scene and only respond off the other person – you are literally waiting for the other person to provide all your stimulation and propulsion into action – then you distort life somewhat. The same applies if Strasberg-trained actors walked onto stage and, directly trying to apply their training, only investigated the sensory realities of the room as opposed to lived in action! Yes, you have to respond off the other person – but only to the extent to which you need to.

Imagine this scene. I come home to my place where my girlfriend is sat. Now I come in and smell bacon – she has cooked bacon again. However, we had a fight yesterday precisely over how much I hate bacon and thought we shouldn’t cook it anymore. And yet she’s cooked it today. What’s that about? So I smell it, remember the fight, and check her reaction to see what on earth she thinks she’s doing. I do need to relate to her and respond off her. I see she’s sat with her back to me – oh, it’s passive aggressive time! But I’m also juggling the other circumstances – the sensory smell of the bacon – what do I want to do with that? Throw it out? Eat it just to prove a point? – and the imaginary fact of yesterday’s fight. My attention is flitting across all those things and they’re all inter-related: I can only make sense of one in view of the others. But if I only concentrate on, and respond to, her, I’m not quite living truthfully under those imaginary circumstances. I need to take it off her behaviour to the extent that is in tune with nature.

So I don’t think Meisner is training you to enter a scene and think ‘I have only to react to what she’s doing’. He is actually training you in something far broader and more widely applicable to acting. If you take the repetition exercise, what that is really teaching you to do is to express those impulses that arise from a given source of stimulation. You put your attention on the other person, and express the impulses that the other person’s behaviour generates in you. Now that is a massively useful quality in an actor. Actors who can do that are, I would say, better actors than those who can’t. Thus they are better prepared to pick up a role and to act – to live on stage.

But it’s important to note that Strasberg, too, is training that ability – to respond to sources of stimuli, to express impulses that arise when you put your attention somewhere. Admittedly these responses may not be hugely noticeable when you’re drinking imaginary coffee, but by the time you’re eating imaginary lemons or taking imaginary cold showers, you do see then more obvious types of responses.

The major difference, however, is not whether this is trained by oneself as opposed to with another actor. The major difference is that the source of stimulation for these impulses that you seek to express is created by the actor. The actor is not trained to do this with a literal stimulus – as Meisner implements early on by getting actors to respond off each other – but with a stimulus the actor has supplied himself. The reason for that, as I’ve said, is because this more precisely replicates the actor’s reality on stage. Everything is fictitious up there on stage. Nothing is literally happening to you. You have to create all those things yourself. Even the other actor, when you act, does not have the value for you that he or she literally does in life – whatever relationship or moment you’re having in the scene is one you have to create and supply yourself.

Forgive the brutality of this example, but imagine I got each of you, one by one, to come up here and let me hit you with a broom. And I said, ‘Respond to this. Express that pain that I’m causing you’. Well, there would be little acting in that. You would already be experiencing and probably expressing that pain because it had been literally caused to you. On stage, however, we would avoid this. You wouldn’t really be hit (thank god!). You would rather have to express a pain that you had created. Strasberg always relates it back to the sorts of things the actor actually has to do. As such, he does train you to respond, but he is mindful of the fact that the things to which you do respond are of your own creating – hence the work with imaginary objects as opposed to the more literal quality that something like the repetition exercise has.

The first annual Routledge/Stanislavski Centre Lecture will take place at the Rose Theatre, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, on Tuesday 22nd March.
This major event which will form part of the College’s 60th anniversary celebrations, will be the first in a series of high-profile lectures presented by the College’s research centres in 2011.
We welcome the distinguished author, teacher and theatre-specialist, Anatoly Smeliansky who will deliver a lecture entitled Stanislavski and the Contemporary Theatre. Professor Smeliansky is Dean of the Moscow Art Theatre School, and Associate Director of the Moscow Art Theatre. He is a Visiting Professor of Rose Bruford College, and a member of the Stanislavski Centre Advisory Board.
Further details of this important event will be published shortly.
This is event is sponsored by Routledge.