ABSTRACT
Imagination is the oil of the system; without our imaginations, everything would soon grind to a halt. This chapter takes one through a series of exercises to help them train their imagination, starting on the path of using one's imagination freely and actively. Active imagination is where we see things through our character's eyes, using the senses. Passive imagination is where we imagine what the audience thinks about what we are doing on stage. The Stanislavski system was always an experimentation, Stanislavski as he went through his life experimented with different ideas and practices as his system evolved. In the early days he used emotion memory, but as he experimented more, he realized it was far more effective to use your imagination, within a circumstance, with an action and a character's before time. Imagination is the actor's ability to treat fictional circumstances as if they were real.
