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3.2. An Actor Prepares

Stanislavski wanted his system to be described in a single book, but in the end accepted to split it up (Johnson, 2019, p. 107). An Actor Prepares (initially named by Stanislavski as The Actor’s Work on Himself) was first published in 1936 in an English translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Hapgood and her husband, Norman Hapgood, edited the book and helped financially so that Stanislavski could publish it (Johnson, 2019, p. 106). There was, however, some controversy around cuts and edits of the text made by the Hapgoods (The New York Public Library, n.d.).

In addition to Hapgood’s translation, I used the 2018 Portuguese translation (directly from Russian), Preparação do Ator no Seu Processo Criador de Vivência das Emoções, so to have a recent version which follows closely the original Stanislavski’s text.

An Actor Prepares traces the tenets of the ‘system’, focusing mainly on the psychological aspects of preparing a role. Aiming at a realistic acting, in the sense of believable and truthful, Stanislavski describes his ‘psycho-technique’, which addresses (among many topics) the use of the actor’s attention, the study of the play and the part, self-knowledge, imagination, emotions, communion, adaption and creativity.

The 'system' and possible connections with music

In the Preface of An Actor Prepares Stanislavski writes that the book is an attempt to communicate everything that the long experience as an actor, stage director and pedagogue has taught him.1 (Preparação do Ator, 2018, p. 19). His long experience taught him that the purpose of acting was to bring artistically the human spirit to life onstage. (1989, p. 15) For that, he developed something he called psycho-technique.

The psycho-technique responds to the fact that onstage our organic nature is disturbed:

(…) all of our acts, even the simplest, which are so familiar to us in everyday life, become strained when we appear behind the footlights before a public of a thousand people. That is why it is necessary to correct ourselves and learn again how to walk, move about, sit, or lie down. It is essential to re-educate ourselves to look and see, on the stage, to listen and to hear. (1989, p. 84)

Furthermore, it gives the actor the tools to work consciously in a way that can affect the subconscious (which means, to Stanislavski, a manifestation of nature):

To rouse your subconscious to creative work there is a special technique. We must leave all that is in the fullest sense subconscious to nature, and address ourselves to what is within our reach. When the subconscious, when intuition, enters into our work we must know how not to interfere. (…) Our art teaches us first of all to create consciously and rightly (…) The more you have of conscious creative moments in your role the more chance you will have of a flow of inspiration.(1989, pp. 15-16)

Psycho-technique → conscious

Nature (‘inspiration’) → subconscious 

Through conscious (…) we reach the subconscious (1989, p. 191)

Both for the use of the word ‘flow’ and for the similarity in significance, Stanislavski’s flow of inspiration immediately reminded me of something that guides what I aim at in my practice routine: the ‘flow state’ theory, by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.When one is in ‘flow’ one is completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. (Csikszentmihaly, 1996)I referred to this, because it builds a bridge between my musical background (although the flow theory did not appear in the music field, but it was adapted to it) and the ‘system’. The underlined passage is of the utmost importance for Stanislavski, since it represents the actor’s conscious work’s goal, but also the effect of subconscious, the nature’s role that should not be disturbed. Thus, we see that being in flow is experiencing ‘inspiration’. It has to do with focus and its repercussions. And the psycho-technique involves that focus in the sense that it consciously prepares the ground to artistically create in ‘flow’ and luckily arouse the subconscious.

So how does the system actually work?

A major concept in the system is ‘truth’. An actor must play truthfully, which implies being right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act in unison with your role. (1989, p. 15) And to be in unison with you role means that you take all these internal processes, and adapt them to the spiritual and physical life of the person you are representing (…); you must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it. (Stanislavski, 1989, pp. 15-16)

Living the part (1989, p. 15)

In the chapter about faith and sense of truth, in the Portuguese translation, we are introduced to the expression ego sum (unfortunately this is missing in Hapgood’s version). It refers to the state of actually living the part onstage. The chart explains what it implies (the arrows mean 'lead to'): 

Ego sum

Then, another very important aspect for Stanislavski is that, to make your acting believable and realistic, you must avoid acting feelings in general – that creates a general representation made of conventions and external characterizations unrelated to the character’s spiritual life. (1989, pp. 30-31) Instead, you should study the play and your character’s inner life, understand it and fill it in with your analogous feelings and emotions (because you can only be you and not anyone else) and your imagination, so that your actions are truthful. (1989) Furthermore, to help conveying authentic feelings, Stanislavski suggests that you act what triggers the feelings (and not the feelings themselves):

When you are choosing some bit of action leave feeling and spiritual content alone. Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer, for its own sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. Of the thing that goes before you should think as hard as you can. As for the result, it will produce itself. (1989, p. 43)

On the other hand, Stanislavski also highlights the importance of physical actions. He created several exercises for the creation of a correct physical life of the part. To the question “Why (…) putting so much time on physical objectives?” he responds:

Because at first you planted the seeds of your imagination in barren ground. External contortions, physical tenseness and incorrect physical life are bad soil in which to grow truth and feeling. Now you have a correct physical life. Your belief in it is based on the feelings of your own nature. You no longer do your imagining in the air or in space, or in general. It is no longer abstract. We gladly turn to real physical actions and our belief in them because they are within reach of our call. “We use the conscious technique of creating the physical body of a role and by its aid achieve the creation of the subconscious life of the spirit of a role. (1989, pp. 159,160)

Later, complementing this last sentence, he adds: the significance of physical acts in highly tragic or dramatic moments is emphasized by the fact that the simpler they are, the easier it is to grasp them, the easier to allow them to lead you to your true objective, away from the temptation of mechanical acting. (p. 164)

Stanislavski’s exercises for the creation of a correct physical life of the part employed, to great extent, imagination, and do not employ something that we now know by the name of ‘internal focus’: the actors had to perform with imaginary objects instead of real ones, so to be aware of all the necessary movements that an action requires in order to be believable. He explicitly rejects the usefulness of internal focus when he writes: in checking up on the work of my muscles I found that the more conscious I was in my attitude toward them the more extra tenseness was introduced and the more difficult it became to disentangle the superfluous from the necessary use of them. (…) And it is only nature itself that can fully control our muscles, tense them properly or relax them. (p. 115)

So, what is internal and external focus? These terms come from sports psychology, but they were already applied to music. The internal focus refers to focusing on how to make the [body] movement, while the external focus means focusing on the result of the body’s movements (…) The external focus for a musician is the imagination of the desired sound and phrase, or even, the meaning and expression behind the music. (Williams, n.d.)

Thus, it is curious to notice that Stanislavski’s conclusion is the same as sports psychology’s almost a hundred years before, i.e. external focus is much more effective than internal focus. (Williams, n.d.)

Now, regarding the concept of ‘physical actions’, although it is not an obvious parallel (and probably neither perfect), I believe that we can understand them in music as the sound itself, its shapes and the movement it draws in space and time. In other words, they are the sound ‘materialized’. In return, the psychological actions exist in the performers and listeners’ perception: either by a sense of suspense or expectations, of agency and causality in the musical events, or emotional responses to the music. In all cases, they depend on the qualities that humans attribute to music based on their experiences.

This discussion brings us to an underlying concept that must be summoned up if we are to speak about acting, which is that of ‘action’. As a performative art, theatre, just as music, consists of action. The actor is the agent and he must necessarily act, either outwardly or inwardly. (1989, p. 39) More concretely: the external immobility of a person sitting on the stage does not imply passiveness. You may sit without a motion and at the same time be in full action. Nor is that all. Frequently physical immobility is the direct result of inner intensity, and it is these inner activities that are far more important artistically. (p. 39)

However, contrary to theatre, in music the action’s agent is more difficult to define.

While pointing out some corresponding features between drama and music Jerrold Levinson acknowledges that the agents, objects, and motivations of musically embodied actions remain much more indeterminate. (Levinson, 2004, p. 433)

In Music as Drama, Fred Everett Maus presents two examples of determinacy of the musical agent: in Harmonielehre, Schoenberg construes pitches and harmonies as agents, struggling for supremacy; similarly Schenker's early work depends on (…) dramatization of pitch relations (…) (Maus, Music as Drama, 1988, p. 73) Furthermore, in Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative, Maus recounts Marion A. Guck’s creation of a determinate protagonist for her narrative by personifying a recurring pitch. (2005, p. 470) These three perspectives converge with the first of the two hypothesis that Levinson putted forward about whether musical narratives narrate musical or non-musical events. In other words, one possibility is that music somehow tells a tale of musical events, such as the inversion of a motive, or the arrival of a cadence, or a modulation from B-flat to E-flat. Another is that music somehow tells a tale of non-musical events. (Levinson, 2004, p. 429) But this topic is a bit more complex since music can be experienced either as narrative or as a drama.

In the first case, Levinson suggests that the actions that we hear in music (…) are not directly present, but [they are] instead represented in a narrative conveyed to us by a narrating agency, whether the composer, the performer, or a narrator internal to the music (Levinson, 2004, p. 435), whereas in the second case music presents a series of actions (…) of fictional characters or personae, which (…) are experienced as occurring as they are perceived, and which form a plot, or at least, make some kind of sense as a whole. (p. 433) In short, the more the agents imagined in connection with expressive music seem autonomous or self-directed, the more apt is a dramatic construal of the music; and conversely, the more the agents imagined seem framed or subject to outside control, the more a narrative construal of the music recommends itself. (p. 436)

Moreover, something that must be mentioned is that our work as instrumentalists resembles not only that of an actor, but also the director’s.

I dedicated a lot of attention to this connections so to trace specific parallels between the two fields and to highlight that this can be a helpful tool for the performers to understand and relate with the works that they are playing. I believe that by also approaching the works this way there are practical implications in terms of mindset, knowledge and understanding of the piece, and concerning imagination, and that such a construal enriches the performers’ lexicon and consequently widens their musical universe.

So far, I have addressed the importance of logic, imagination, own feelings and emotions, truth and faith in it.

I did not explain, however, what is meant by ‘creating artistically’. Stanislavski considers that there are two kinds of truth and sense of belief in what you are doing. First, there is the one that is created automatically and on the plane of actual fact (…), and second, there is the scenic type, which is equally truthful but which originates on the plane of imaginative and artistic fiction. (1989, p. 140) He further elaborates: you must use a lever to lift you on to the plane of imaginary life (…) Consequently, in ordinary life, truth is what really exists, what a person really knows. Whereas on the stage it consists of something that is not actually in existence but which could happen.” (p. 140)

At last, I should make explicit which tools he provides to study the play. One of the techniques, which I will try out in the interventions, is called ‘given circumstances’.

It means the story of the play, its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action, conditions of life, the actors’ and regisseur’s interpretation, the mise-en-scene, the production, the sets, the costumes, properties, lighting and sound effects,—all the circumstances that are given to an actor to take into account as he creates his role. (p. 54)

An actor must ask several questions (who, what, where, when, why, how, etc.) and to those the ‘given circumstances’ do not provide an answer, the actor must respond with the imagination, i.e. the ‘supposed circumstances’. Moreover, they should divide their actions in units and corresponding objectives. Large units and objectives can be subdivided, in order to better prepare a role. Conversely, the actor must realize the wider objectives of the play and ultimately deduce what is the play’s objective – which is called ‘super-objective’. I will not make use of this technique, no matter how promising it may seem if applied to music.

Nevertheless, I will apply the ‘given circumstances’, as well as imagination-related techniques and emotion-related, whose definitions will be given in the next chapter.

Why these thechniques and not others?

Mainly, the choice had to do with following Stanislavski’s ‘system’ structure, while touching constituents of diverse nature: analysis, imagination and emotions. Since I was not going to test them out in a whole work, it did not make much sense to use the ‘objectives’ technique because I would not be taking advantage of their full potential. The other reasons were simply my capacity to translate them into music and my personal preference.

To summarize this whole section, the graphic below relates the system’s concepts from An Actor Prepares that I will use:

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