"When we are on stage, we are in the here and now."Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay “What is important to me is not the truth outside me, but the truth within me. » – Constantin StanislavskyThe systemIt all started a century ago with a man named Constantin Stanislavsky. Considered the father of modern acting, he would revolutionize acting with the creation of his system, a grammar of acting that he began developing in 1906. The system is based on the fact that the actor is as fully “in the moment” as possible, while still remaining one. move away from total belief. In its overall approach to conveying truthful performance, the system exhibits techniques and training deeply rooted in the practice of mindfulness. Used correctly, the effect was a deeply moving performance, the likes of which have rarely been seen before. Actors began to draw on their own emotional experiences in order to fully inhabit their characters and solidify their stage presence. These fascinating and, more recently, controversial methods used naturally raise existentialist questions about compartmentalization, distinction, and the recreation of identity in life and art. Before the widespread use of Stanislavski's system, the predominant mode of action in the 19th century was highly theatrical and unrealistic. melodramatic (i.e. in opera mode, without music). These performances relied on large gesticulations and articulation that could impress audiences with the display of their talent (e.g. Sarah Bernhardt's stylized performances), but were very different from real-life manners. At the same time, there were a handful of actors (e.g. Eleonora Duse) who aimed for a more naturalistic and realistic style of character acting, which somehow hypnotized their audience into making them feel rather than to see it. These actors fascinated Stanislavski. They blur the distinction between play and life – that is, they don't seem to be “playing” – they seem to actually embody their characters. He would often approach them after their surprisingly poor performances and ask, “How are you doing?” Their answers would shed light on the creation of Stanislavski's system of play, which has since developed into several schools of thought, including the American outgrowth of the more well-known method of acting. The affected imitations of life seen in the earlier, more classical form of play were based on actors "simulating thoughts and emotions through external means, such as vocal intonation or facial expression" (i.e. emphasis added). However, in the new system, actors were trained to create their characters' thoughts and emotions within themselves, with the aim of developing realistic performances. Therefore, sensitive actors were more successful and more convincing in this style than their flamboyant counterparts. Stanislovsky had often noticed how great actors could, on certain evenings, completely inhabit their character, that is to say, fully “become a role”. He then attributed these flashes of inspiration to the result of several factors coming together perfectly. The actor must achieve emotional truth and psychological realism within their character while maintaining control of the physical, a combination that requires complete presence or awareness, both on stage and during the rehearsal process. This naturalism was so simple that, in many ways,it's almost a default technique, or a technique without technique. And yet, reducing performance to the naïve essentials required an awareness and sensitivity that many had to relearn. Stanislavsky would essentially systematize this preparation process, providing actors with a codified way to recreate the magic of presence. acting style, while applying it to life situations. In the chapter titled "Dealing with Feelings," she explains how we all do a certain amount of action in life, although she differentiates the two types with the more general terms, "surface acting" and "deep acting." ". In surface play, as in the classic form of play, we are simply trying to change the way we appear outwardly. “...The action is in the body language, the sneer, the composed shrug, the controlled sigh.” This is a type of outside-in process or technique. With deep action, the external display is the natural result of working on feeling – a reverse process. "The actor does not try to appear happy or sad but rather spontaneously expresses... a real feeling that he himself provoked." In deep play, one “creates the inner form of a feeling” rather than “shaping its outer appearance.” The main distinction between deep acting in real life and that of theater (or film) is, in the latter, the clear delineation of where illusion ends and reality begins. With acting deep in everyday life, there is no curtain drop or end credits to signal the return of reality. Hochschild recounts the memories of a star high school halfback, who, by his senior year, had begun to struggle with a pervasive apathy that permeated both his play and his schoolwork. Anxious to rediscover his former intensity and passion on the field and to maintain his image as a motivated player in the eyes of coaches, he tried different ways to arouse emotions in order to get his adrenaline pumping again. “I did everything I could to get back up. I tried to be outwardly rah-rah, I tried to be afraid of my opponents... I tried to look nervous and intense before the matches, so that at least the coaches wouldn't understand not... when in fact I was mostly bored... Before a game I remember wishing I was in the stands watching my cousin play for his school. What he experienced as a slippery feeling of reality; he felt he had to be driven to win and believed he wanted to feel that way. When we look back at our own internal conflicting events, we understand them in two ways: as an authentic, spontaneous feeling of the times, as well as an authentic, spontaneous feeling of the times. feeling secretly managed. This causes us to question the sincerity and truth of our current feelings: “Do I act now? How do I know? This is a more complex variation of the fundamental existentialist question that all actors must confront when constructing a character: "Who am I?" " While the latter question applies to most people, regardless of their profession, the former: "Am I taking action now?" the difference is that they are always answered for us in the theater; We are told from the start who is acting. There are various parallels between deep action techniques and mindfulness techniques for managing emotions and thoughts. Mindfulness practice cultivates a distinction between a person's essence, or pure being, and the life roles in which they play and identify. In other words, I am not my job; I am not mypast (or, in Sartre's terms, I am not my facticity). In life, viewed through the lens of mindfulness-based philosophy, I am analogous to an actor, taking on imaginary roles and circumstances that are ultimately not real. As an actor, I am not my character role, just as I, as a pure being, am not my life situation. Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up visually echoes this sentiment in the final mimed tennis scene organized around an invisible ball. The protagonist knowingly participates in the illusory game, before walking away and disappearing himself. Life, Antonioni seems to say, is a game organized around an invisible ball in which we participate voluntarily. Mindfulness practice also cultivates this distinction between truth and illusion in the mind: I am not my thoughts, but rather the awareness in the background, which can observe those thoughts. The first is to note the mind's ongoing comments without attaching to them or experiencing the chatter with aversion or judgment. Thoughts are just thoughts, and those who practice mindfulness are free to "release" a thought, that is, let it go, when they realize that the thoughts are not an accurate reflection of concrete reality or absolute truth. Likewise, in a performance, both professional and everyday, an actor distances himself from his thoughts. and emotions, treating them as malleable variables to be controlled internally in order to obtain an external and visible result. Essentially, we do not identify with our emotions, but rather view them as mental tools with which to guide our external performance. Of course, this objective understanding of emotions in deep action differs from mindfulness in that it is a means to an end: it is used with the overarching goal of achieving a convincing performance (although some might argue that mindfulness meditation is used by many with the goal of achieving relaxation, achieving enlightenment, or some other end result). Nonetheless, the hyper-observant nature of almost all types of creators, whether writers, musicians, etc., inherently approaches these connected experiences with a more commercial intention of using them as inspiration later. Stanislavsky trained the actors to be completely in the present moment, and but emphasized that they always stand one step away from complete belief, for the obvious need to maintain the distinction between reality and illusion (we all know the controversy surrounding the method acting when poorly practiced). Hochschild writes: “In surface acting, my facial expression or body posture seems “staged.” It’s not “part of me.” In deep acting, my conscious mental work—the effort to imagine a great surgeon towering over me, for example—prevents the feeling I evoke from being part of "me- even ". Thus, whatever the method, an actor can separate what it takes to act from the idea of ​​a central self” (emphasis added). In other words, the actor must live and show the emotions of his character, while remaining detached, maintaining control of his own identity as a performer. Particularly in deep acting, balancing this total character immersion with a latent awareness of the overall illusion is a precarious act. An actor must remain completely present in his character and in an imagined set of circumstances, while not forgetting to play with his audience, or with camera angles and lighting. If he steps outside of himself for too long, that is to say, out of his character, the quality of thegame becomes more artificial, less convincing. The brief loss of true internal motivation and focus creates a palpable change in external performance. Realistic acting requires an extraordinary level of unwavering focus to remain truly present on stage or in front of the camera. Stanislavsky denigrated the results of surface acting in 19th-century plays. He saw actors who didn't really connect with their character's experience because they would be more concerned with the reaction of the audience they were performing in front of, and he mockingly described them as watching from the corner of the eye to gauge the audience's reaction after each line. . It could be said that such actors did not authentically coexist with the gaze of the other, but rather allowed the knowledge of surveillance to dictate their performance, which consequently became fallacious. In Sartre's philosophy, these actors literally act in bad faith. The self-consciousness of these actors is a prison; self-awareness for an actor is freedom. Stanislavski criticized these past performances for "[indicating] the outward form of a scene without any attempt to put life or depth into it." In the surface game, or classic game, the form is more important than the content. Interpreters seek to impress rather than truly communicate. It is “less profound than beautiful… It acts more on your sense of hearing and sight than on your soul. Therefore, it is more likely to delight you than to move you. You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is strong but not long-lasting. It is your astonishment that arouses rather than your faith. However, regarding deep acting, Stanislavski said: “…delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They appeal to natural emotions the very moment they appear before you in the flesh. They call upon the direct cooperation of nature itself. In her book Style: Acting in High Comedy, Maria Aitken corroborates this view, explaining that powerful performances require energy, which is not necessarily physical. Energy is all about immediacy. This is achieved “through concentration and, as in almost anything else, concentration proves to be its own reward: an actor's concentration attracts that of the audience. In great comedy, or any other type of play… there is only one moment and that moment is now. You need to engage with this moment, thinking in the middle of the thought as you say it. . His emphasis on direct experience also involved intense concentration and awareness of all the minute components of that very experience, with the aim of later recreating it as precisely and truthfully as possible in a performance. Like the mindfulness exercises of walking extremely slowly or eating a single raisin for an excessively long time, for example, a student actor within the system would imbibe every sensual, physical, and mental component of this seemingly mundane activity , as if he was learning and experimenting. this for the first time. Just as life is a reservoir of memories from which the actor can draw, he must experience life with the same heightened awareness with which he hopes to perform. The most compelling acting requires intense awareness of every aspect of one's performance: one's body, one's vocal inflections, one's emotions, etc. As with using body scan exercises through mindfulness meditation, an actor cultivates a connection with every part of his or herbody (many actors practice some variation of a body scan exercise during training), in order to be more physically effective. Aitken particularly emphasizes the importance of mindfulness in a double act, that is, a comedy duet. Actors must have an intense awareness of each other's physical presence and must listen to each other with their whole bodies in order to interact with the best chemistry and act out each other's lines. Their sense of comic timing in interaction is directly linked to their awareness of each other, to their degree of adaptation to each other's minute reactions. Aitken warns that familiarity with the text makes an actor "too fast" in delivering lines, that is, acting on autopilot and losing the natural sense of timing by not thinking not to the lines while he's saying them, even for the hundredth time. . “You can never abandon the thought process and you must receive or extend each [line] as if it were the first time, every time. It means listening. If you listen correctly, without letting your mind rush and without distractions, then you will always have good timing. Being attentive allows you to naturally pick up certain signals, from the actors and the audience. Increased focus leads to increased connections. A comedic performance, as Aitken describes it, will naturally match the audience's pace of understanding as long as the actor listens and does not anticipate his lines, rather "[allowing his] idea to form when [one has] heard enough given material." ." The idea of ​​anticipation destroys the initial illusion of the performance, while distancing the actor from the present moment. If one is active and present at every moment on stage, then everything will happen naturally. performance, and therefore its preparation, must fit perfectly and completely into the present. Stanislavski's insistence on an analysis of the qualities of a given phenomenon aimed to "make the actor aware of the complexities of human behavior and. of the ease with which lies – aspects of behavior that an audience can unknowingly detect – are assumed by an untrained or inexperienced actor in performance. even sitting on stage – must be broken down and relearned, Stanislavski once insisted. The housewife who mindfully washes the dishes to relax, paying attention to the cool sensation of the water running over her hands and noting her thoughts as they come and go, is practicing the same mindful preparation as the actress rehearsing for a scene in which she has to do the dishes in character. The actress notes every physical and mental sensation to prepare to recreate the scene as truthfully and convincingly as possible in performance. The details of this action are particularly important if the intended character is very different from the actress herself. General actions are broken down into their smallest elements, analyzed and practiced in extreme detail in the character's mannerisms, in order to be reconstructed and executed in real time. The actress is now aware and in control of even the smallest aspects of her performance, freeing herself to express the character more creatively and improvise or react more spontaneously in the safety and confidence of this now controlled environment. Emotional MemoryIn deep play, one can either directly urge feeling, or indirectly use trained imagination (the essence of method acting). The latter requires a more complex understanding of how feelings work. Stanislavski emphasized the causal relationship between feelings and: 2007.