Constantin Stanislavski Methods

Constantin Stanislavski 

Synopsis

He was a Russian actor and theatre director. Born in Moscow in 1863, died in 1938. He is known as naturalistic acting practitioner. He founded The Moscow Art Theater, and established his own system of acting. His techniques are used by many people thanks to his students that spread his methods over the world. Stanislavski`s system is a progression of techniques used to train actors and actresses to draw believable emotions to their performances by using their own memories. According to Stanislavski the actor shouldn't only know what lines he needs to say but also every detail of that character’s life off-stage as well as on-stage. Here are a few examples of what we talked about on Monday. 

Given circumstances - are what help you answer the six fundamental questions (who, when, where, why, for what reason and how). He environmental and situational conditions will influence your performance.
Stanislavski lists the circumstances as:
• The story of the play
• Its facts, events, epoch, time and place of action
• Conditions of life
• The actor’s and director’s interpretation
• The production, the sets, the costumes, the props
• Lighting and sound effects.

Objectives - What are we trying to achieve? And what constantly put up barriers in our way in order to stop us achieving this? What you could do with that sentence without restricting my thoughts on the character.

Actions - verbal actions helping achieve our goal (objective). For example, I go, I wish, I angry, I engage.

Circle Of Attention - Being aware of the life around me, starting with me on stage and building outwards. It`s technically defined as the circle within which the actor creates the illusion of solitude, can better be understood as the outer limit of the audience.

Subtext - Would be spoken, could be interpreted by the actor through intonation, gesture, body posture, pauses or choices in action. The meaning and motivation behind the lines.

Emotional Memory - It`s an actor`s duty to stimulate his own emotional memory from which to build playing role`s character. Use memories to recall feelings and emotion felt at particular moment.

Magic If -  "What would I do if I was in this situation?" and the "If I were my character, what would I be thinking?". This makes character more realistic. 

Through Line - The logical coherence of a characters role, including their off stage life. 

Understanding the Here, Today, Now of the character
• Where have I just come from?
• Where am I?
• What am I doing?
• Why am I doing it?
• When is this happening? What time of day, month, year? In which
period?

• Where am I going to now?

There are many more methods but these are the most common ones.