The art of acting is a beautiful, passionate and enriching process that many seem to over-state and make arbitrary assumptions about. Taking the Russian School of Acting through Konstantin Stanislavski as the origin of a ‘system’ or a constructed technique for actors to follow, we understand that the actor will benefit of having a structure and knowledge. This will allow him to grow and be able to do his job properly, just like any other profession, like the painter that needs to learn colour technique or the lawyer that needs to learn the judiciary system. It is the focus on emotions that we consider in this paper, the proposal of Stanislavski of the use of ‘Emotion Memory’ in his book ‘An Actor Prepares’ as one of the basic principles of acting, and a controversial topic that many authors have contradicted and revoked throughout the years. David Mamet’s critique of Stanislavski’s system offers us a complete different view in his book ‘True or False’, a complete discard of the ‘emotion’ world and a simpler vision supported by the actual text, however having antagonistic similarities. Finally, the works of Carnicke in her book ‘Stanislavki in Focus’, a Stanislavki defender and reviewer, offers us a description of the evolution of the Russian ‘system’ into the American ‘Method’ by Lee Strasberg in the 50’s in USA. Analyzing the different approaches both schools adopted towards emotion technique, we manage to understand the complexity of this particular art, as well as its authentic beauty.
Stanislavski’s book ‘An Actor Prepares’ (1936) (In ‘An Actor’s Work’s’ 2008) is a compilation of chapters that deepen into his ‘system’ of acting, through exercises and particular situations that a group of actors adopt during a school year. The book itself takes the form of a journal written by Kostya, a student, while Stanislavski himself becomes Torstov, the teacher, through which the reader can understand via questions and answers, the author’s vision and technique proposal. As the book progresses, we hear Stanislavski’s voice through Torstov, as he offers more exercises and experiments with the young actors, constantly re-capping on the theory and instructing on how the art of acting should be approached. It is in the preface, that we already encounter his emphasize on emotions and feeling, ‘In the theatre, knowing means feeling. The essence of my book is to access to the subconscious through the conscious’, allowing us to enter the world of emotion, belief, feeling, concentration and inspiration that he proposes.
The purpose of Stanislavsky’s system is ‘to access the performer's inspiration’, and to use that inspiration to create truthful performances. In Chapter 8 ‘Belief and the Sense of Truth’ Stanislavski believes that the way to breathe life into a performance is to engage the performer's subconscious mind. Since the subconscious is responsible for the details of our actions in our real lives, the actions of the ‘inspired’ performer will also be realistic and believable, resulting in the ultimate goal - a truthful performance. It is through this truthful performance that the actors are capable of touching an audience deeply, therefore allowing empathy to arise amongst the audience. Stanislavski’s constant fighting against various forms of untruthful acting included forced acting, mechanical acting and over-acting amongst others. In a particular moment, Kostya decides to play Shakespeare's ‘Othello’, and without understanding the play itself, the character, or anything accurate about how a coloured person might behave, he paints himself brown and behaves like a savage, flashing his teeth and rolling his eyes. This is the first lesson that we encounter, which helps us start to understand what actors supposedly should not do onstage.
After some introduction on the basics of Stanislavki’s system, let us focus on Chapter 9, ‘Emotion Memory’ as the core of our analysis. ‘Everybody inevitably feels and experiences something at every moment of his life’ is the starting point of the chapter. Torstov tells us that ‘it is your individual experiences, which you bring to the role from the real world that give it life’. In other words, we learn that in order to deepen into the building of the character, actors should trust and rely on their past experiences and emotions to help them build up the inner life of the characters. It is the personal emotions and feelings that as human beings we are shaped, that can shape the emotions and feelings of a character. Stanislavski constantly refers to ‘real life’ and to a simple and truthful performance. Only through our real life experiences will we be able to really understand and create. Emotion Memory is the kind of memory which helps you relive all the feelings you experienced earlier, ‘when you recall something that happened to you, you achieve memory of feelings or Emotion Memory’.
We are also encountered with the world of Sensory Memory, which is the type of memory that pays attention to our five senses, thus being a type of emotional memory very important for the creating process. Torstov asks his students if they like the scent of the lilies in the valley, or the taste of mustard, or the sound of a good melody. Through these sensorial emotions we perceive our natural surroundings. Stansilavki proposes that actors should recall these feelings, re-create them on stage, so that the actor seems like he is really smelling the lilies in the valley, or tasting real mustard, or listening to a beautiful piece of Tchaikovsky. Actors must develop their sense of touch, ear, sight, smell and taste to be able to create. Torstov tells his students that ‘theatre artists, like painters and musicians, possess virtual and auditory recall which enables them to imprint and revive visual and aural images’. Therefore we can observe the ‘tight relationship and interaction of our five senses and their influence on the things which Emotion Memory recalls. The actor needs not only Emotion Memory but sensory memory too’.
Astrov reminds us the ‘basic principle of our school of acting: the subconscious through the conscious’. This is the core idea of his text. The form and setting will vary according to the play, but the actor’s human emotions, which run parallel to the feelings of the role, must remain alive. They must not be faked or replaced. A student formulates the following question: ‘You mean in all roles - Hamlet, Arkashka or Nestchastlichev, do you really mean that we should make use of our personal feelings?’. Astrov replies very sincerely that an actor can only experience his own emotions to create a character. ‘Or do you want the actor to get a new set of feelings, a new heart and mind for every role he plays? How many hearts is he supposed to have room for? You can’t pluck your own heart and rent another more suitable for the role. The role is waiting for you to give it a heart’. Astrov continues to say that one’s feelings are an inseparable part of oneself. These feelings belong not to the character the author has written, but to the actor himself, and it is through this way that the actor will create, with the growth of his emotional capacity reflected upon the role.
Sometimes, the actor must employ a decoy or a stimuli in order to achieve this, since his Emotion Memory might be different for certain experiences. Recurrent experiences can be stronger than first-time experiences since they continue to develop in our subconscious. Some emotion memories are weak, others are strong. That is why actors must deal with all aspects of their emotional material, adapt it and reshape it to meet the demands of the role. Astrov also adds the ‘fellow-feeling’, using life experiences that we recognize in other people that can be used to create a character. This is quite interesting since it not only pays attention to observation, but also to the capacity of empathizing with others, another aspect very recurrent in Stanislavski’s work. Thus, actors must make use of their past emotional experiences but shape them in order to create fiction and tell the story. It is not only personal emotion spurted on stage, it requires technique and an objective with the audience and the story (the text).
David Mamet’s ‘True or False’ (1997) book is a sharp and to the point analysis of acting gathered in twenty-nine short chapters, showing right from the start a strong disagreement with Stanislavsky’s Method. Already in one of the opening chapters, ‘Ancestor Worship’ we are told that ‘the actor does not need to become the character’. For Mamet, there is no actual character, ‘they are only lines upon a page’ that the actor must learn and say out loud. The actor is free of necessity of feeling – he/she must simply stand up and recite their text. They must limit their job to the text and the demands of the author.
Mamet follows his theory by criticizing the ‘system’ directly. He believes that the performer performs exclusively for the pay. Their job is to play the piece so that the audience can understand it, ‘the self-respecting person keeps their thoughts and emotions to themselves’ and does not bring them up onstage. For him, it is the audience that goes to the theatre to exercise its emotion, not the actor. That is why actors must not go on stage to show their personal emotions. For the author, the finding of emotions leads the actor to act falsely without truth, which is the direct opposite of what Stanislavski proposes with his System. For Mamet we are alive and emotion and feeling flow through us constantly, ‘they are not susceptible of our conscious mind but they are there’. We mustn’t ignore our emotions; we must be aware that they are there and use them. We do not have anything we don’t feel anything about. Through various examples, such as our feelings towards ice-cream or religion, Mamet tells us that we don’t have to add these feelings to the play because they are already there, in the actual writing. So, for Mamet, ‘the investment in emotion makes the play not a moment – to – moment flow of the real life of the actor, but instead and arid desert of falsehoods enlivened periodically by a signpost of fake emotions’.
Regarding the writing, and considering the fact that Mamet is a writer, he tells us that it is the writer’s job to make the play interesting and the actor’s job to make the play truthful. The text already reunites a group of actions which have been elaborated in the text by the author. If the actor re-elaborates and re-does these actions, then he will be re-elaborating a work that has already been done by the writer. Mamet suggests that the emotional responses are essentially created by the author of the play, and that the actor needs only ‘a clear voice, a supple body, and a rudimentary understanding of the play’ in order to do their job.
It is in the chapter ‘Emotions’ that Mamet gives us an example of the falsehood that can appear if actors don’t do their job as expected. If in a restaurant, the waiter is constantly asking the customer ‘Is everything okay?’ with a big smile on his face and thus demanding the same politeness and falsehood from the customer, then the client will get fed up and want to leave, since he will feel imposed to act in a particular way. The same thing will happen with actors on stage. The audience is not interested in the emotions that exist in the person that plays the character; they just come to see the play, and do not wish to be manipulated. ‘The addition of supposed emotion to a performance is an attempt to buy off the audience’, (just like the waiter at the restaurant). ‘The addition of emotion to a situation which does not organically create it is a lie’ and thus ‘the attempt to manipulate another’s feelings is blackmail’.
Contradicting the ‘system’ and the importance of belief, imagination and emotion that the Russian School predicted, Mamet proposes acceptance, rather than belief in his chapter ‘Acceptance’. There should be a capacity to accept amongst actors. For example, one man will not believe his father has died if he has never experienced this in his life, and thus will not succeed in playing it. Instead one can strive to accept these facts, for example when playing Hamlet. Shakespeare already wrote what had to be told in the play, the actor should just limit to accept and play the role of a man that lost his father. This acceptance, for Mamet, induces truthful consideration: ‘deny nothing, invent nothing – accept everything’.
While reading Mamet’s book we know from the first moment that he is against the ‘system’ that Stanislavski proposes. Mamet’s critique of Stanislavsky, however, is mostly based on an uncharitable, oversimplified reading of the director’s prolific work: ‘Stanislavsky’s famed system, then, was and is the dissection of the motives and emotions of the character’. The constant attack: ‘the Stanislavski ‘Method’ and the technique of the schools deprived from it, is nonsense’, ‘Stanislavsky was essentially an amateur’, and ‘his contribution has been a loadstone for the theoretical, anti practical soul’ makes his critique quite harsh and violent. Mamet has an unfortunate tendency to make overstated claims without enough substantive proof or analysis, since he doesn’t give sources from Stanislavski’s actual masterpiece. To dismiss Stanislavski’s entire body of work in a few paragraphs or pages without even quoting him is not very constructive. It creates a tone of self-importance and leaves many questions unanswered.
Once again, Mamet suggests that a performer needs to simply follow the script, and act each scene with an appropriate objective in order to be believable and convincing. The performer may feel emotions as a result of acting the scene, but it is a result of the acting, not a precondition to it. He suggests that Stanislavski's Method is completely backward, arrogant, causes insecurities and simply does not work, ‘his theories cannot be put into practice’. However, Stanislavski says: ‘You can understand a part, sympathize with the person portrayed, and put yourself in his place, so that you will act as he would. That will arouse feelings in the actor that are analogues to those required for the part. But those feelings will belong, not to the person created by the author of the play, but to the actor himself’. It seems quite clear that Mamet and Stanislavski could be saying the same thing in some way. Then why the conflict? Isn’t Mamet saying similar things to Stanislavski? Isn’t part of his theory based on the original and earlier theories of the Russian School of Acting?
Mamet says that people don’t pay attention to their own emotional state but rather to the person that we are demanding from. We are not interested in pursuing our own personal emotions but rather paying attention to the other. This has a clear rapprochement with Stanislavski’s system and the capacity of empathy actors must achieve in order to succeed in their representation of their role. Stanislavki tells us in his masterpiece that apart from Emotion Memory (Chapter 9), the actor must have sensitivity with the other, and act always to create an emotion on the audience. This is clearly a similarity with Mamet only that Mamet dismisses that they could be saying the same thing with his peculiar attitude. If acting ‘is a physical skill, not a mental exercise’ like Mamet would state, and ‘not for intellectuals, but for artists’, then there is a difference and at the same time a similarity between the two.
The psychology of Mehod acting’s psychological realism was a contentious issue from the earliest stages of theatre. Though heavily based on Stanislavski, Method acting has a unique genealogy in the United States and owes its success to its resonance with American concerns. The fact that psychology and psychoanalysis came into vogue in the United States in the 1920’s, is a key piece in this context. Richard Bolelavsky, a director and member of Stanislavski‘s Moscow Art Theatre, came to New York and began teaching Stanislavski’s system, and shifted its terms to appeal to an American audience saturated with ‘the new psychology and psycho-analysis’. He founded the American Laboratory Theatre, where he emphasized the inner psychological work of the actor and encouraged emotional and psychological identification with the role. In the 1950’s Lee Strasberg would incorporate many of Stanislavski’s exercises based on emotional-memory, where actors were asked to recall and thus re-experience a memory with strong emotional content.
Through Carnicke in her book ‘Stanislavski in Focus’ (2009) we understand the evolution of Stanislavki´s system to the so-called ‘Method’. One major obstacle to the proper understanding of Stanislavki´s teaching has been the widespread confusion between the ‘System’ and the ‘Method’ as defined by Lee Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio. In the ‘system’ the primary forces were on action, interaction and the dramatic situation which result in feeling with Emotion Memory. In the ‘Method’, Emotion Memory is placed at the very centre; the actor consciously evokes personal feelings that correspond to the character, a technique that Stanislavski thoroughly rejected. Whereas in the ‘system’ each section of the play contains something that an actor has to do, in the Method it contains something that it has to feel. Carnicke tells us the difference between ‘emotion’ ‘as the unconscious biological and chemical response in the body’ and ‘feeling’ ‘as our subjective awareness of devotion’. A big debate was generated over the name since Strasberg would refer to it as Affective Memory (which included ‘sense’ and ‘emotional’ memory) and Stanislavksi would refer to it as Emotion Memory exclusively. Carnicke decides to use the term ‘memory of Emotion’ and ‘Affective Memory’ interchangeably to discuss the psychophysical continuum that links subjective mind to objective body, ‘because in practice, Stanislavki did the same’. She states that ‘all aspects of successful acting radiate out from a central core of emotion, which Stanislavksi sees as the essence of all art, it’s very content’.
A number of rules developed in the Method to recall this technique. By offering to go to the most traumatic events from your past to evoke sadness, or only going to personal experiences that were not more than seven years old, Strasberg assured that Affective Memory would work. However, Carnicke states that ‘Stanislavski would probably find such rules blatantly absurd’ and strongly offers an explanation for the evolution of such practice. Moreover, despite Stanislavki’s view that acting expresses emotion, Stanislavki’s writing does not really support the Method’s technical orientation. He refused to offer security through rules and reiterated that everything in the study of acting would be brought to bear upon the question and the cultivation of oneself through art and knowledge. While Strasberg proposed rules, Stanislavski preferred to avoid them and leave room for personal discovery. Stanislavski did not lay out a single way to act, ‘there is nothing absolute about his compendium of theory and techniques for the ephemeral art of acting that he so loved’, the author tells us. He saw his system as offering advice to actors of different temperaments who wished to speak through different aesthetic styles.
Moreover, we encounter Carnicke’s attitude towards Mamet’s work. She tells us that Mamet criticizes Stanislavski’s method, but informs us that what he actually rejects is Stanislavski’s constructed image, rather that his fundamental intuitions about acting. She cites various examples that determine that Mamet would be agreeing on Stanislavski’s work, for example, when saying that ‘The actor does not need to ‘become’ the character [...] There is no character; they are just lines upon a page’. Carnicke states: ‘Stanislavski agrees with this. In fact, he rarely uses the word character in Russian, preferring either ‘image’ or ‘role’. For Carnicke, Mamet is not arguing with Stanislavski, but with his statue.
In conclusion, I believe theatre is an art that expresses feeling and emotion of the human being portrayed through different characters and stories. In reality, we go the theatre to find our desires and wishes, to find identities and answers for the things that surround us. Theatre is a way of expressing emotion through different characters. The main objective is to create an experience for the audience which is communicated directly through the actors. In regard to creating ‘art’, the objective of theatre is to not make an actor delight himself in his own emotion, but to make the audience feel what is supposed to be communicated. It is not necessarily persuasive to watch an actor cry, but the communication of emotion to an audience which creates an emotional response, is compelling. In my opinion and this being said, the objective of the actor is to be able to feel whatever their character may be feeling, but to make the audience feel empathy for their character is the actual aim. Stanislavki was the founder of one of the most influential acting schools in the world, and his technique is effectively used. I find it very easy to criticize eminences and build theories or systems for one, like Mamet would, however I don’t blame him and I understand the fact that evolution (Stanislavki writes in 1936 and Mamet in 1997) is of extreme relevance. Moreover, I believe that having different schools and thoughts makes the field of study broader, and gives it a wide perspective which is always very enriching. Theatre is one of the oldest types of portrayal of human emotion in art. We can find answers to our doubts and fears, through our agonies and our desires through art, but theatre will always relate it to your own experience no matter what. Theatre enriches the soul, the heart and the mind and we shall therefore have open minds and be open to different perspectives.
