ABSTRACT
The publication of Michael Chekhov's To the Actor on the Technique of Acting in 1953 was a landmark event in actor training. Chekhov felt that his written English was to blame and translated the work into Russian, publishing it privately in 1946 and sending copies to the libraries of American universities with Russian departments. A major danger for the actor, as Chekhov saw it, was an over- emphasis on the purely physical which would lead to shallow and mechanical acting and a loss of the difference between life and art. In the 1991 edition, there is more explicit emphasis given to the Chekhov's threefold model of the human body drawn from the work of Rudolf Steiner. Chekhov, however, is going a little further than this and drawing attention to the idea that all living things possess an energy body, or a radiant energy field which is interwoven with the physical body.
