Method acting
[7] It mobilizes the actor's conscious thought and will, in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes, like emotional experience and subconscious behavior, both sympathetically and indirectly.
[8] In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment (a "task").
"[12] As well as Stanislavski's early work, the ideas and techniques of Yevgeny Vakhtangov (a Russian-Armenian student who had died in 1922 at age 39) were also an important influence on the development of the Method.
"[13] In the United States, the transmission of the earliest phase of Stanislavski's work via the students of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) revolutionized acting in the West.
[14] When the MAT toured the US in the early 1920s, Richard Boleslawski, one of Stanislavski's students from the First Studio, presented a series of lectures on the "system" that were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933).
The interest generated led to a decision by Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya (another student at the First Studio who later became an acting teacher)[15] to emigrate to the US and to establish the American Laboratory Theatre.
[18] The approaches to acting subsequently developed by their students—including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner—are often confused with Stanislavski's "system".
Stella Adler, an actress and acting teacher whose students included Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro, also broke with Strasberg after she studied with Stanislavski.
Kumar inspired many future Indian actors, including Amitabh Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Irrfan Khan and many more.
The increasing viewership of these platforms has given space to the next generation of method actors in India,[29] including Rajkumar Rao, Amit Sadh, Pawan Kalyan, Ali Fazal and Vicky Kaushal.
The techniques used by the English actor Henry Irving, who died in 1905, are a precursor to the established ideas about method acting.
[30] These were described by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, in two chapters of his book Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, published in 1907.
Some quotes from Stoker’s book:[31]Irving and I were alone together one hot afternoon in August 1889, crossing in the steamer from Southsea to the Isle of Wight, and were talking of that phase of Stage Art which deals with the conception and development of character.
It is necessary to this art that the mind should have, as it were, a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full swing, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method...
The actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art, must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he never experiences.’ p.256 ‘For the purely monkey arts of life there is no future they stand only in the crude glare of the present, and there is no softness for them, in the twilight of either hope or memory.
With himself then, and his self-knowledge as a foothold, he may begin to understand others.’ p.258It has been suggested that Bram Stoker used Irving's techniques to help him capture authenticity of tone while writing Dracula.
[37] This can be seen in Stanislavki's notes for Leonidov in the production plan for Othello and in Benedetti's discussion of his training of actors at home and later abroad.
[38] In his book A Dream of Passion, Strasberg wrote that Stanislavski, early in his directing career, "require[d] his actors to live 'in character' off stage", but that "the results were never fully satisfactory".
[39] Stanislavski did experiment with this approach in his own acting before he became a professional actor and founded the Moscow Art Theatre, though he soon abandoned it.
[41] While Strasberg focused on the memory-recall aspect of the method, Adler's approach centered on the idea that actors should find truth in the script, inner emotions, experiences, and circumstances of the character.
Moss is the author of the acting textbook The Intent to Live, in which he maintains the basic training of Adler's techniques.
Moss advocates the position that if an actor understands these facts about their character, they will be able to find truth in their performance, creating a realistic presentation.
