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Method acting
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Method acting is a technique in which actors aim to engender in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to create a lifelike performance. It can be contrasted with more presentational forms of acting, in which the actor simulates and displays to the audience thoughts or emotions that he or she is not actually thinking or feeling. The "method" in Method acting usually refers to the practice of actors drawing upon their own emotions and memories in their portrayals.
Method actors are often characterized as immersing themselves so totally in their characters that they continue to portray them even offstage or off-camera for the duration of the project.
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Encyclopedia
Method acting is a technique in which actors aim to engender in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters in an effort to create a lifelike performance. It can be contrasted with more presentational forms of acting, in which the actor simulates and displays to the audience thoughts or emotions that he or she is not actually thinking or feeling. The "method" in Method acting usually refers to the practice of actors drawing upon their own emotions and memories in their portrayals.
Method actors are often characterized as immersing themselves so totally in their characters that they continue to portray them even offstage or off-camera for the duration of the project. However, this is a popular misconception. While some actors do employ this approach, it is generally not taught as part of the Method.
Method acting offered a systematized training that developed internal abilities (sensory, psychological, emotional); it revolutionized American theater.
Origins
"The Method" was first popularized by the Group Theatre in New York City in the 1930s, and subsequently advanced by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in the 1940s and 50s. It was derived from Stanislavski's 'system', created by Constantin Stanislavski, who pioneered similar ideas in his quest for "theatrical truth." This was done through friendships with Russia's leading actors, collaborations with playwright Anton Chekhov, as well as his teachings, writings, and acting at the Moscow Art Theater (founded in 1897).
Strasberg's students included many of America's most famous actors of the latter half of the 20th century, including Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Vic Morrow, Paul Newman, Robert Deniro, Al Pacino, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, and many others.
In Stanislavski's 'system' the actor analyzes deeply the motivations and emotions of the character in order to personify him or her with psychological realism and emotional authenticity. Using the Method, an actor recalls emotions or reactions from his or her own life and uses them to identify with the character being portrayed.
Technique
Method acting is frequently considered difficult to teach. This is partially because of a common misconception that there is a single "method." "The Method" (versus "the method" with a lowercase m) usually refers to Lee Strasberg's teachings, but really no one method has been laid down. Stanislavski himself changed his 'system' constantly and dramatically over the course of his career. This plurality and ambiguity can make it hard to teach a single method. It is also partially because sometimes method acting is characterized by outsiders as lacking in any specific or technical approach to acting, while the abundance of training schools, syllabi, and years spent learning contradict this. In general, however, method acting combines a careful consideration of the psychological motives of the character, and some sort of personal identification with, and possibly the reproduction of the character's emotional state in a realistic way. It usually forms an antithesis to clichéd, unrealistic, so-called "rubber stamp" or indicated acting. Mostly, however, the surmising done about the character and the elusive, capricious or sensitive nature of emotions combine to make method acting difficult to teach.
Depending on the exact version taught by the numerous directors and teachers who claim to propagate the fundamentals of this technique, the process can include various ideologies and practices such as "as if," "substitution," "emotional recall," and "preparation."
Sanford Meisner, another Group Theatre pioneer, championed a separate, though closely related school of acting, which came to be called the Meisner technique. Meisner broke from Strasberg on the subject of "sense memory" or "emotional memory," one of the basic tenets of the American Method at the time. Those trained by Strasberg often used personal experience on stage to identify with the emotional life of the character and portray it. Meisner found that too cerebral, and advocated fully immersing oneself in the moment of a character and gaining spontaneity through an understanding of the scene's circumstances, and through exercises he designed to help the actor gain emotional investment in the scene and then free him or her to react as the character.
Stella Adler, the coach whose fame was cemented by the success of her students Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro, as well as the only teacher from the Group Theatre to have studied Acting Technique with Stanislavski himself, also broke with Strasberg and developed yet another form of acting. Her technique is founded in the idea that actors must not use memories from their own pasts to conjure up emotion, but rather use the Given Circumstances. Stella Adler's technique relies on the carrying through of tasks, wants, needs, and objectives. It also seeks to stimulate the actor's imagination with the use of as-if's. As she often preached, "We are what we do, not what we say."
More information about the origins and history of The Method can be found in the book, "Strasberg's Method," by S. Loraine Hull available in libraries world-wide. Lorrie Hull, Ph.D. taught for Lee Strasberg for 12 years extensively researching and interviewing Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, Stanislavski's granddaughter, Cyrilla Falk, and members of the Moscow Art Theatre among others about The Method. Particularly helpful would be Part I: Background, and Appendix A, "Strasberg's Relationship to Stanislavski and Vakhtangov." Strasberg read the manuscript before his death labeling it, "historically correct."
James Cagney, not typically considered a method actor, was asked during the filming of Mister Roberts about his approach to acting. As Jack Lemmon related in the television special, "James Cagney: Top of the World", which aired on July 5, 1992, Cagney said that the secret to acting was simply this: "Learn your lines... plant your feet... look the other actor in the eye and tell the truth".
Teachers
Stanislavski's work, including the autobiography My Life in Art, and his trilogy of books set in a fictionalized acting-school as a pretense for his own teachings: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role, inspired many others who have followed the example of Stanislavski as prominent Method teachers. They include:
- Maria Ouspenskaya, actress. Taught at New York's American Laboratory Theatre. Students included John Garfield, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg.
- Herbert Berghof, founder of HB Studio in New York City.
- Richard Boleslawski, actor, film director, founder of American Laboratory Theatre.
- Michael Chekhov, actor, director, author. (His method, largely an outside-in approach and somewhat more "metaphysical," diverged from and converged back to Stanislavski's over the course of his career.)
- Uta Hagen, actress, the author of Respect for Acting and Challenge for the Actor. (She emphasized "identity" and "substitution.")
- Robert Lewis, cofounder of The Actors Studio and author of Method — or Madness?
- Lee Strasberg, director, actor, producer.
The technique continues to be taught at schools around the world, including the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles, the Actors Studio Drama School in New York, the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York and Los Angeles, HB Studio in New York, Le Studio Jack Garfein in Paris, France, Shelley Mitchell's Actors Center of San Francisco, Hull Actors Studio in Santa Monica and Santa Barbara, CA.
Major books on the Method
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