ABSTRACT
PART I: YOUR PSYCHOPHYSICAL INSTRUMENT Of all the acting tools you can learn to employ, the most amazing are your own mind and body. To refer to the continual communication between mind and body, Stanislavsky used the term psychophysical. Psychophysical is a compound wordpsycho is short for psychological and means “relating to the mind or emotions,” and physical pertains to the body. The biological aspects of the brain also fall under physical whereas the attributes of emotion, will, memory, imagination, and consciousness are referred to as mind. The mind and body are inseparable, and with training you can learn to create better communication and more responsiveness between them. Like any tool, this can yield poor results and even be dangerous if used incorrectly, but with proper training, you can develop your mind and body and become an artisan in their use on the stage. As an actor, you will need to harness the possibilities of your entire psychophysical instrument. An athlete must initially train in coordination, stamina, and specific skills associated with his sport until they become second nature. Even after that, in order to stay competitive, he must keep up his fitness and continually work on honing his technique. It is very similar for the actor. The Stanislavsky System involves conditioning exercises that develop your psychophysical instrument for the purpose of acting. Conditioning exercises prepare you for the complex synthesis of tasks required in the later technique of Active Analysis of a play, as outlined in chapters 13-16. Active Analysis, in turn, leads you to fully inhabit the life of your character in front of an audience, the goal of the System, which Stanislavsky called experiencing.
