Method acting

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As Method Acting ( English , an artificial word formed from acting method , ' acting method ' by interchanging) Lee Strasberg called his method based on the teachings of Konstantin Stanislawski to learn to act. It is an American variant of naturalism in acting. The actor works with memories of his own experiences and with relaxation techniques.

prehistory

Since Stanislawski's guest performance in New York with his Moscow Art Theater in January 1923, his method has been considered forward-looking for many of the stage actors there. His student Richard Boleslawski , who emigrated to the USA, succeeded in founding the Lab Theater in June 1923, which became the basis for a new art of acting for young actors in New York City such as Lee Strasberg or Stella Adler . His teacher was the actress Maria Ouspenskaya , who had come to New York with Stanislavski and had used the opportunity to emigrate.

Strasberg, Adler, Sanford Meisner , Cheryl Crawford and other followers of the Stanislawski system worked in the Group Theater since 1931 . Stella Adler briefly traveled to Paris to take personal lessons from Stanislawski and returned to New York in 1934. She also worked as an acting teacher, which led to rivalries with Strasberg, who had never been taught by Stanislavski.

In 1947 Strasberg founded the Actors Studio drama workshop with Crawford, Robert Lewis and Elia Kazan , which became an important attraction for aspiring stage and film actors as well as for playwrights. The method acting approach became famous around the world in the early 1950s with Marlon Brando's first successes in Endstation Sehnsucht and Der Wilde .

Method acting according to Strasberg

Strasberg published several texts on his teaching method, which he never passed off as his own invention, but always traced it back to Stanislavski. Until the 1950s, due to the reluctance of the Soviet rulers, only a few written certificates were available from Stanislavski himself.

In contrast to Stanislawski's texts, Strasberg's writings appear more concise, methodical and more targeted. He did not define acting as a talent for “imitation” or “exhibitionism”, but as “the ability to respond to imaginary stimuli”. Therefore, he divided acting classes into relaxation and memory exercises. The actor should ask himself four questions about his character and their current situation.

  1. Who she is.
  2. Where is she.
  3. What she does there (action and intention).
  4. What happened before she got there (given circumstances).

According to Strasberg, the ability to concentrate can be increased through relaxation techniques. In order to come to an inner experience of the played situations, memories of one's own experiences that come close to the played situation are central. The emotions must not remain fleeting, but must be controlled and made repeatable. This happens in the interplay between conscious preparation and unconscious spontaneity. Strasberg distinguished three types of memory:

  1. Affective memory is the reliving of a past experience, triggered by a stimulus (the discovery of which heattributed tothe psychologist Théodule Ribot and associated with Iwan Petrovich Pavlov and Sigmund Freud ). The actor trains this type of memory to make situations repeatable (see conditioned reflex ).
  2. Sense memory is the memory of a situation through accompanying sensory impressions, such as the sound of rain or smells.
  3. Emotional memory is the memory of complex feelings and thus the highest level of acting memory, while sense memory relates more to simple perceptions such as warmth or physical pain.

Affective memory is often used synonymously with emotional memory , although Strasberg makes a difference and refers the latter term to Stanislawski's late work. For Strasberg, the term often stands for a technique of remembering that iscloseto behaviorism , but also has an original moment of artistic inspiration . Strasberg also emphasized that the acting technique in theater and film is fundamentally the same, referring appreciatively to Charlie Chaplin or Laurence Olivier .

Private moment

Strasberg viewed the actor's awareness of standing in front of an audience and having to or wanting to behave (socially) as an obstacle. In his view, emotions lose their freshness and credibility. Therefore, he invented exercises that should help the actor forget about the audience and focus more on himself. He called one of them Private Moment . Private behavior (which for Strasberg was not synonymous with being alone) is recalled and publicly repeated. - Strasberg often had to defend himself against allegations that in this way the voyeurism of the audience would be served.

Song-and-dance exercise

During the heyday of musical play in the 1940s, Strasberg often taught musical performers who were supposed to combine song and dance with authentic acting. In order to prevent singing and dancing from becoming outwardly routine acts, he chopped up the musical and dancing processes until the actor was completely thrown back on himself. He called this a song-and-dance exercise .

The conscious, unconscious and subconscious

Lee Strasberg writes in his essay The Actor and Himself (1965) that reality is the material of the acting craft. Exploring the conscious and unconscious processes is a central part of Strasberg's approach, because the actor finds himself in this area of ​​tension and has to find a way to free expression:

"The actor's working conditions require that he know in advance what he is going to do, while the actor's art requires that it appear as if he does not know."

Strasberg believes that the actor does not need to imitate a person because he can be creative on his own. It is material and reality at the same time. From this connection Strasberg derives a psychology of imagination and concentration.

Strasberg's approach is based on Sigmund Freud's concept of psychoanalysis . Analogous to Freud's method of letting people report about their suffering and the experiences associated with them, Strasberg encourages speaking about the self, introspection and making unconscious or preconscious content accessible.

"To stimulate the imagination, the unconscious and the subconscious, is the strongest means of artistic work."

Strasberg's other Freud-oriented terms are fantasy, desire, affect , drive or sexuality. Strasberg thinks that the actor is essentially playing something invented, i.e. a dream: a term that can also be associated with Freud ( Die Traumdeutung , 1899). In contrast to reality, the actor has to react again and again to imaginary stimuli , and this even more expressively than in reality. It is the apparently pointless, forgotten things that can lead him to come up with something that already exists unconsciously or subconsciously and is conducive to the game.

"The actor has to believe fully in what he thinks and says on stage."

While the alienation effect in the sense of Bertolt Brecht is supposed to show that the actor does not stand behind conflicting characters that he has to play, Strasberg demands a radical belief in his own performance. This does not have to contradict each other because Strasberg is interested in identifying with the author's text, not identifying with dubious characters. Using the example of the premiere of Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), he explains that as a director, Brecht was not concerned with the distance between the actor and his character, but rather with a credible representation of the conflicting.

Aftermath

From 1951 to 1982 Strasberg remained the artistic director of the Actors Studios . He was the most influential, but not the only one who built on Stanislawski's teaching. Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro , who are often associated with method acting , also had acting classes at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting .

Strasberg's former companion Sanford Meisner also developed his own school. Adler and Meisner accused Strasberg of not having noticed Stanislawski's later development because at the time he only came into contact with drama teachers of the older generation.

The reduced interaction with the audience and the emphasis on the fourth wall made method acting a suitable basis for film acting , but also led to violent counter-reactions in the theater of the 1960s, such as the performance concepts by Richard Schechner . A further development of Method Acting especially for film actors since the 1970s comes from Eric Morris.

Under Method Acting the environmental studies Robert de Niro's preparation for his roles (and, more often, its weight increases and -Decrease for certain figures) are often understood. In a narrower sense, this has nothing to do with method acting (but rather corresponds to a further development of delartism , as it came to the USA mainly through Steele MacKaye ). Strasberg emphasized that an actor often has to have years of distance from memories in order to be able to use them in a controlled manner.

literature

  • Richard Boleslavsky: Acting. The First Six Lessons . Taylor & Francis, New York 1987, ISBN 978-0-87830-000-6 (German translation: Acting: the first six steps . Verlag Eigenwerte , Wanna 2001, ISBN 3-934080-00-6 ).
  • Lee Strasberg : A Dream of Passion. The Development of the Method . Penguin, New York 1988, ISBN 978-0-452-26198-3 .
  • Lee Strasberg: Acting and Acting Training. Contributions to the "Method" , ed. Wolfgang Wermelskirch, Alexander, Berlin, 5th edition 2001.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lee Strasberg : "Definition of Acting". [Extract from Encyclopedia Britannica ]. New York: The Lee Strasberg Creative Center n.d., p. 1.
  2. ↑ Lee Strasberg: "Definition of Acting". [Extract from Encyclopedia Britannica ]. New York: The Lee Strasberg Creative Center n.d., p. 14.
  3. ↑ Lee Strasberg: "Definition of Acting". [Extract from Encyclopedia Britannica ]. New York: The Lee Strasberg Creative Center n.d., pp. 7-8.
  4. ^ Lee Strasberg: A Dream of Passion . New York: Penguin 1988, p. 111.
  5. ↑ Lee Strasberg: "Definition of Acting". [Extract from Encyclopedia Britannica ]. New York: The Lee Strasberg Creative Center n.d., p. 17.
  6. ^ Lee Strasberg: A Dream of Passion . New York: Penguin 1988, p. 144.
  7. ^ Lee Strasberg: A Dream of Passion . New York: Penguin 1988, p. 152 f.
  8. ^ Lee Strasberg: A Dream of Passion. , New York: Penguin 1988, p. 192.