An early observation was the fluid movement of great actors; they were always in a state of complete freedom and relaxation when they performed, letting the behavior of the character come through effortlessly. Stanislavski deduced that unwanted tension should be eliminated from a good performance, and that the performer should at all times attain a state of physical and vocal relaxation.
He also noticed that gifted performers would always appear fully concentrated on an object, person or event whilst onstage. Stanislavski called the range of an actor’s concentration the ‘circle of attention’. The performer should accept and notice their surroundings gradually… beginning only by acknowledging themselves and a few props nearby, and then ‘expanding’ the circle to include the entire set and other thespians. This is a successful technique for focusing concentration and eliminating self-consciousness, as the circle is never widened to include the audience.
Stanislavski believed passionately in attention to detail. He recognised that emotions are complicated, and that a good actor should portray feeling such as love, grief and hate with specific nuances… physically expressing emotional stress or elation in a focused way. An angry character, for instance, could throw down a newspaper or scrunch a piece of paper into a ball in his fist, or a nervous character could tap frantically on a table. This should be part of the actor’s search for ‘inner truth’: an absolute conviction in the world his character inhabits and a credible projection of their internal thoughts and emotions onstage.
The system calls for an actor to determine a single, overall purpose for his character. This is commonly referred to as the ‘super-objective’. All of the smaller, incidental objectives that the character develops throughout the play are governed by, and will eventually lead to, the super-objective. Through the use of the super-objective, an actor can develop a ‘through line’ – a metaphorical towline that can be grasped when an actor is unsure of their motivation. Put simply, it gives an overriding driving force to a character’s behavior.
To help bridge the divide between actor and character, a performer could make use of his ‘affective memory’ in scenes that required high drama – by recalling the sensory details of an emotional experience, he could entice the emotion from his subconscious and re-experience it. This would require a connection between the content of the scene and the actor’s own experiences, so as the teacher himself put it -
‘The more an actor has observed and known, the greater his experience…
… the clearer his perception of the inner and outer circumstances of the
life in his play and in his part’.
Stanislavski detailed his ideas in three books; ‘An Actor Prepares’, ‘Building a Character’ and ‘Creating a Role’. In his later years he abandoned the emotional memory techniques, deciding they were psychologically unhealthy, and created a new theory known as the ‘Method of Physical Actions’. This is a total reversal of his previous work with a psychophysical basis.
Today, a variant of the system is still followed by method actors. Their technique is based on Lee Strasberg’s interpretation (or, perhaps, misinterpretation) of Stanislavski’s original theories of sense-memory recall. The method is revered and followed by Hollywood actor Dustin Hoffman, among others.