Creating A Role

Constantin Stanislavski, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780878309818
  9780878300242
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136555350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Creating a Roleis the culmination of Stanislavski's masterful trilogy on the art of acting. An Actor Preparesfocused on the inner training of an actor's imagination. Building a Characterdetailed how the actor's body and voice could be tuned for the great roles he might fill.
This third volume examines the development of a character from the viewpoint of three widely contrasting plays: Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Shakespeare's Othello, and Gogol's The Inspector General. Building on the first two books, Stanislavski demonstrates how a fully realized character is born in three stages: "studying it; establishing the life of the role; putting it into physical form."
Tracing the actor's process from the first reading to production, he explores how to approach roles from inside and outside simultaneously. He shows how to recount the story in actor's terms, how to create an inner life that will give substance to the author's words, and how to search into one's own experiences to connect with the character's situation. Finally, he speaks of the physical expression of the character in gestures, sounds, intonation, and speech. Throughout, a picture of a real artist at work emerges, sometimes failing, but always seeking truthful answers.

Part IGriboyedov's Woe from Wit

The following study in the preparation of a role, with a focus on Griboyedov’s comic classic, Woe from Wit, was written between 1916 and 1920. It is thus Stanislavski’s earliest known exploration of a theme that was to preoccupy him in its various aspects for the rest of his life. Although he had not yet settled on the semi-fictional form of An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, the student of those later works will find here the original statement of many ideas already familiar to him. In some cases, those ideas remained stable in subsequent years; in others, they underwent a subtle sea-change as Stanislavski continued to throw the light of his free and restless creative imagination on the actor’s problem.

—EDITOR

Chapter One The Period of Study

DOI: 10.4324/9780203056561-2

THE PREPARATORY WORK on a role can be divided into three great periods: studying it; establishing the life of the role; putting it into physical form.

First Acquaintance with a Part

Becoming acquainted with a part is a preparatory period in itself. It begins with one’s very first impressions from the first reading of the play. This all-important moment can be likened to the first meeting between a man and a woman, the first acquaintanceship between two people who are destined to be sweethearts, lovers, or mates.

First impressions have a virginal freshness about them. They are the best possible stimuli to artistic enthusiasm and fervor, states which are of great significance in the creative process.

These first impressions are unexpected and direct. They often leave a permanent mark on the work of the actor. They are unpremeditated and unprejudiced. Unfiltered by any criticism, they pass freely into the depths of an actor’s soul, into the wellsprings of his nature, and often leave ineradicable traces which will remain as a basis of a part, the embryo of an image to be formed.

First impressions are—seeds. Whatever variations and alterations an actor may make as he proceeds with his work, he often is so attracted by the deep effect of his first impressions that he yearns to hold on to them even when he finds he cannot apply them to his part as it develops. The power, depth, and permanence of these impressions is such that the actor must be particularly careful about his first acquaintance with a play.

In order to register these first impressions actors must be in a receptive frame of mind, a proper inner state. They must have the emotional concentration without which no creative process is possible. An actor must know how to prepare a mood to incite his artistic feelings, to open his soul. Moreover, the external circumstances for the first reading of a play should be properly set. One must know how to choose the time and place. The occasion should be accompanied with a certain ceremoniousness; if one is to invite one’s soul to buoyancy, one must be spiritually and physically buoyant.

One of the most dangerous obstacles to the receiving of pure and fresh impressions is any kind of prejudice. Prejudices block up the soul like a cork in the neck of a bottle. Prejudice is created by the opinions that others foist upon us. In the beginning and until such time as the actor’s own relationship to the play and his part is defined and set in concrete emotions or ideas, he is in danger of being influenced by the opinions of others, especially if they are false. Another’s opinion can distort a naturally established relationship of an actor’s emotions toward his new part. Therefore during his first acquaintance with a play, an actor should try not to come under outside influences that might create a prejudice and throw his own first impressions, as well as his will, his mind, and his imagination out of line.

If an actor is impelled to seek help to clarify the external and internal circumstances and conditions of life of the characters in the play, let him, to begin with, try to answer his questions himself; because only then can he sense what questions he can put to others without doing violence to his individual relation to his own part. Let the actor for the time being keep to himself, store up his emotions, his spiritual materials, his reflections about his part, until his feelings and a definite, concrete, creative sense of the image of his part have become crystallized. It is only with time, when an actor’s own attitude toward his part has become established, has matured, that he can make wide use of outside advice and opinions without running the risk of infringing on his own artistic independence. Let an actor remember that his own opinion is better than that of an outsider, better even than an excellent one, if only because another’s opinion can only add to his thoughts without appealing to his emotions.

Since, in the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel, he should give free rein, at a first reading of a play, to his creative emotions. The more warmth of feeling and throbbing, living emotion he can put into a play at first acquaintance, the greater will be the appeal of the dry words of the text to his senses, his creative will, mind, emotion memory, the greater will be the suggestiveness of this first reading to the creative imagination of his visual, auditory, and other faculties, of images, pictures, sensation memories. The imagination of the actor adorns the text of the playwright with fanciful patterns and colors from his own invisible palette.

It is important for actors to find the angle of vision from which the playwright views his work. When this is achieved they are carried away by the reading. They cannot control the muscles of their faces, which oblige them to grimace or mime in accordance with what is being read. They cannot control their movements, which occur spontaneously. They cannot sit still, they push closer and closer to the person reading the play.

As for the reader who is presenting the play for the first time, there are a few practical suggestions which can be made to him.

In the first place he should avoid too illustrative a manner, which might force his personal interpretation of parts and images on the actors. Let him limit himself to a clear exposition of the basic idea of the play, the main line of the development of the inner action, with the help of such technical aids as are inherent in the play.

At the first reading the play should be presented simply, clearly, with understanding of its fundamentals, its essence, the main line of its development, and its literary merit. The reader should suggest the playwright’s point of departure, the thought, the feelings, or experiences for the sake of which he wrote the play. At this first presentation the reader should push or lead each actor along the main line of the unfolding life of a human spirit in the play.

Let the reader learn from experienced literary people how to pick out at once the heart of a work, the fundamental line of the emotions. A person trained in literature, who has studied the basic qualities of literary works, can instantly grasp the structure of a play, its point of departure, the feelings and thoughts which impelled the playwright to put pen to paper. This capacity is very helpful to an actor, so long as it does not interfere with his seeing for himself into the soul of the play.

It is a great piece of good fortune when an actor can instantly grasp the play with his whole being, his mind and his feelings. In such happy but rare circumstances it is better to forget about all laws and methods, and give himself up to the power of creative nature. But these instances are so rare that one cannot count on them. They are as rare as the moments when an actor immediately grasps an important line of direction, a basic section of the play, important elements out of which its fundamentals are woven or shaped. It is much more usual for a first reading to leave only individual moments fixed in an actor’s emotions while all the rest is vague, unclear, and extraneous. The snatches of impressions, bits of feelings, that do remain are like oases in a desert, or points of light in surrounding darkness.

Why is it that some parts of a play come to life, are warmed by our feelings, while others remain fixed only in our intellectual memory? Why is it that when we recall the former we have a sense of excitement, joy, tenderness, buoyancy, love, while the recollection of the latter leaves us without feeling, cold, and lacking in expression?

That happens because the places which are infused with immediate life are congenial to us, familiar to our emotions; whereas the dark places are alien to our natures.

Later on, as we become better acquainted with and feel closer to the play, which at first we accepted only in fragments, we shall find that the points of light grow and spread, coalescing with one another until finally they fill out our entire role. They are like the rays of the sun coming through a narrow chink in a blind, they throw only a few bright spots in the dark. But when the blinds are opened the whole room is flooded with light and the darkness is banished.

We seldom come to know a play from one reading. Often it has to be approached in different ways. There are plays whose spiritual essence is so deeply embedded that it takes great effort to dig it out. Perhaps its essential thought is so complex that it must be decoded. Or the structure is so confused and intangible that we only come to know it bit by bit, by studying its anatomy piecemeal. You approach such a play as you do a puzzle, and it does not offer much interest until it is solved. It must be read over and over, and with each additional reading we must guide ourselves by what was established the time before.

Unfortunately, many actors do not realize the importance of their first impressions. Many do not take them seriously enough. They approach this stage in their work carelessly and do not consider it part of the creative process. How many of us make serious preparation for the first reading of a play? We read it hurriedly, wherever we happen to be, in a railroad train, in a cab, during intermissions, and we do it not so much because we want to come to know the play but because we want to imagine ourselves in some fat part or other. Under such circumstances we lose an important creative occasion—an irreparable loss, because later readings are deprived of the element of surprise which is so essential to our creative intuition. You cannot erase a spoiled first impression any more than you can recover lost maidenhood.

Analysis

The second step in this great preparatory period is the process of analysis. Through analysis the actor becomes further acquainted with his role. Analysis is also a method of becoming familiar with the whole play through a study of its parts. Like a person engaged in restoration, analysis guesses at the whole by bringing various segments of it to life.

The word “analysis” usually connotes an intellectual process. It is used in literary, philosophical, historical, and other types of research. But in art any intellectual analysis, if undertaken by itself and for its own sake, is harmful because its mathematical, dry qualities tend to chill an impulse of artistic élan and creative enthusiasm.

In art it is the feeling that creates, not the mind; the main role and the initiative in art belong to feeling. Here the role of the mind is purely auxilliary, subordinate. The analysis made by an artist is quite different from one made by a scholar or a critic. If the result of a scholarly analysis is thought, the result of an artistic analysis is feeling. An actor’s analysis is first of all an analysis of feeling, and it is carried out by feeling.

This role of knowledge through feeling, or analysis, is all the more important in the creative process because only with its aid can one penetrate the realm of the subconscious, which constitutes nine-tenths of the life of a person or a character, its most valuable part. In contrast with the nine-tenths that the actor uses through his creative intuition, his artistic instinct, his supersensory flair, only one-tenth remains for the mind.

The creative purposes of an analysis are:

1. The study of the playwright’s work.
2. The search for spiritual or other material for use in creative work, whatever the play and one’s own part in it contain.
3. The search for the same kind of material in the actor himself (self-analysis). The material considered here consists of living, personal memories related to the five senses, which have been stored up in an actor’s emotion memory, or acquired through study and preserved in his intellectual memory, and which are analogous to feelings in his role.
4. The preparation in an actor’s soul for the conception of creative emotions—both conscious and especially unconscious feelings.
5. The search for creative stimuli that will provide ever new impulses of excitement, ever new bits of live material for the spirit of a role in the places that did not immediately come to life in the first acquaintance with the play.

Pushkin asks of the dramatist, and we ask of the actor, that he possess “sincerity of emotions, feelings that seem true in given circumstances.” Therefore, the purpose of analysis should be to study in detail and prepare given circumstances for a play or part so that through them, later on in the creative process, the actor’s emotions will instinctively be sincere and his feelings true to life.

What is the point of departure for an analysis?

Let us make use of the one-tenth part of ourselves which in art as in life is attributed to the mind, so that with its aid we can appeal to the work of our feelings, and after that, when our feelings reach the point of expression, let us try to understand their direction and unobtrusively guide them along the true creative path. In other words, let our unconscious, intuitive creativeness be set into motion by the help of conscious, preparatory work. Through the conscious to the unconscious—that is the motto of our art and technique.

How do we use the mind in this creative process? We reason this way: The first friend and best stimulant for intuitive emotion is artistic enthusiasm, ardor. Let it then be the first means used in analysis. Ardor can penetrate to what is not accessible to sight, sound, consciousness, or even the most refined awareness of art. An analysis made by means of artistic enthusiasm and ardor acts as the best means to search out creative stimuli in a play, and they in turn provoke an actor’s creativeness. As an actor is enthused he comes to understand a part, as he understands it he is even more enthused; the one evokes and reinforces the other,

Artistic ardor is at its most expansive at the time of first acquaintance with a play. That is why an actor should repeatedly enjoy and relish the places in his role that aroused his enthusiasm at the first reading, the things that struck him and to which he felt his emotions respond from the outset. An actor’s nature is responsive to everything that possesses artistic beauty, elevation, emotion, interest, gaiety; he is instantly transported by the playwright’s flashes of talent, scattered either on the surface or in the depths of the play. All these places have the explosive quality that arouses artistic ardor.

But what is the actor to do about the portions of the play which did not evoke the miracle of instant intuitive comprehension? All such portions must then be studied to disclose what materials they possess to incite him to ardor. Now, since our emotions are silent, we have no recourse except to turn to the nearest aid and adviser of the emotions—the mind. Let it be a scout, to hunt through the play in all directions. Let it be a pioneer, cutting new paths for our principal creative forces, our intuitions and feelings. In their turn, let our feelings seek out fresh stimulants to enthusiasm, let them call on intuition to search out and find more and more new bits of live material, parts of the spiritual life of the role, things which are not reached by conscious means.

The more detailed, varied, and profound an actor makes this analysis by the mind, the greater his chances of finding stimulants for his enthusiasm and spiritual material for unconscious creativeness.

When you look for something you have lost, more often than not you find it in an unexpected place. The same is true with creativeness. You must send your scouting mind off in all directions. You must search everywhere for creative stimuli, leaving it to your feelings and their intuition to choose whatever is most appropriate for their enterprise.

In the process of analysis searches are made, as it were, in the width, length, and depth of a play and its roles, its separate portions, its component strata, all its planes beginning with the external, more obvious ones, and ending with the innermost, pro-foundest spiritual levels. For this purpose one must dissect a play and its roles. One must plumb its depths, layer by lay...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword by Robert Lewis
• Translator's Note
• Table of Contents
• Part I Griboyedov's Woe from Wit
• Part II Shakespeare's Othello
• Part III Gogol's The Inspector General
• Appendices