Stanislavski An Actor Prepares Quotes

You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.

In the circle of light on the state in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone... This is called solitude in public... During a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell... You can carry it wherever you go.

Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations.

The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.

On the stage do not run for the sake of running, or suffer for the sake of suffering. Don’t act “in general”, for the sake of action; always act with a purpose.

All action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real.

If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.

don’t spend your time chasing after an inspiration that once chanced your way. It is as unrecoverable as yesterday, as the joys of childhood, as first love. Bend your efforts to creating a new and fresh inspiration for today. There is no reason to suppose that it will be less good than yesterday’s. It may not be as brilliant. But you have the advantage of possessing it today.

At the bottom of every process of obtaining creative material for our work is emotion. Feeling, however, does not replace an immense amount of work on the part of our intellects. Perhaps you are afraid that the little touches which your mind may add on its own account will spoil your material drawn from life? Never fear that. Often these original additions enhance it greatly if your belief in them is sincere.

Today the Director opened his remarks by telling us what we must always do when the author, the director, and the others who are working on a production, leave out things we need to know. We must have, first of all, an unbroken series of supposed circumstances in the midst of which our exercise is played. Secondly we must have a solid line of inner visions bound up with those circumstances, so that they will be illustrated for us. During every moment we are on the stage, during every moment of the development of the action of the play, we must be aware either of the external circumstances which surround us (the whole material setting of the production), or of an inner chain of circumstances which we ourselves have imagined in order to illustrate our parts. Out of these moments will be formed an unbroken series of images, something like a moving picture. As long as we are acting creatively, this film will unroll and be thrown on the screen of our inner vision, making vivid the circumstances among which we are moving. Moreover, these inner images create a corresponding mood, and arouse emotions, while holding us within the limits of the play.

To avoid such mistakes, remember, for all time, that when you begin to study each role you should first gather all the materials that have any bearing on it, and supplement them with more and more imagination, until you have achieved such a similarity to life that it is easy to believe in what you are doing. in the beginning forget about your feelings. When the inner conditions are prepared, and right, feelings will come to the surface of their own accord.

You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations, All this work on your material will help you permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.

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. ‘If is the starting point, the given circumstances, the development. The one cannot exist without the other, if it is to possess a necessary stimulating quality. However, their functions differ somewhat: if gives the push to dormant imagination, whereas the given circumstances build the basis for if itself. And they both, together and separately, help to create an inner stimulus.

When you point out to him the palpable absurdity of some false action he has taken he is more than willing to cut it. But what can he do if his own feelings are not able to convince him? Who will guarantee that, having rid himself of one lie, another will not immediately take its place? A grain of truth must be planted under the falsehood, eventually to supplant it, as a child's second set of teeth pushes out the first.

Look,’ he said to us, ‘all these are the work of a favourite artist of mine, now dead. He was a strange person,

If [...] inspiration does not turn up then neither you nor they have anything with which to fill in the blank spaces. You have long stretches of nervous let-down [...], complete artistic impotence, and naïve amateurish sort of acting.

Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human conventions that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage. What happened to you is understandable and excusable in a beginner. But be careful in the future, because amateurish over-acting grows into the worst kind of mechanical acting.

To tell the truth, I was simply going to take on the external mannerisms of my acquaintance," admitted Paul frankly. "That was a great mistake," Tortsov replied. "At that point you went over to sheer imitation, which has nothing to do with creativeness

If the man who plays the [...] has talent, he will prove to you by his acting that he is unconscious of any guilt.

You know now that our work on a play begins with the use of _if_ as a lever to lift us out of everyday life on to the plane of imagination.

The bad part was that you flirted with the audience and did not play [...]. You see Shakespeare did not write [...] in order that a student by the name of [...] could show the audience her little foot from the stage or could flirt with her admirers. Shakespeare had a different end in view, one which remained foreign to you, and therefore unknown to us. Unfortunately, our art is frequently exploited for personal ends. You do it to show your beauty. Others do it to gain popularity or external success or to make a career. In our profession these are common phenomena and I hasten to restrain you from them.