ABSTRACT
Stanislavsky spoke of the actor’s task as being “the creation of [the] inner life of a human spirit,” “reaching the subconscious by conscious means,” “the artistic embodiment of inner emotional experience,” and “living [experiencing through] the part.” In the final incarnations of his work, informed by his research in Ribot and James-Lange, Stanislavsky’s goal was to guide the actor to create an embodied, coherently articulated, expressive being, through a close engagement with the given circumstances of the script and the production (i.e., the “who,” “where,” “when,” “what,” and the specific language) and the manipulation of attention, imagination, memory, and behavior. This meticulous work was in the service of helping the actor more consistently tap into what Stanislavsky called “inspiration” and “creativity,” and what we might
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111 11 2 3222 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
also call “flow” or “presence”—the sense of the actor fully inhabiting the role and the moment. The actor’s work is akin to that of the dancer’s or the musician’s, for each memorizes a score, whether it is textual, choreographic, or musical, that engages and interacts with the body. The same text or score may be memorized word for word, step for step, or note for note by different artists, but the way in which the score is executed will vary greatly from individual to individual; both Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma play Bach’s cello suites beautifully, but they also play them differently, because there are two different consciousnesses and bodies informing the performances. At the heart of every performance is a complex consciousness that inhabits the entire body, in which voluntary processes are inseparable from involuntary ones and in which genetic predisposition is inseparable from personal history.
