Active Analysis in the Beginning Acting Classroom

Michael Shipley, Caine College of the Arts, Utah State University

Abstract

Often, the exercises in the acting classroom can feel at odds with the processes used

in the rehearsal room. I believe Konstantin Stanislavsky’s rehearsal method of

Active Analysis provides tools and perspectives for dealing with these challenges.

At The S Word Symposium in November 2022, I outlined a process I developed

for teaching beginning acting using principles of Active Analysis as a tool to bridge

the gap between training and rehearsing. This article outlines the experiences and

thought processes that went into creating this class structure and reviews the

benefits for students. Applied in this way, Stanislavsky’s impulse to place

embodied action before intellectual analysis yields valuable results in the classroom

as well as the rehearsal hall.

Keywords: Stanislavsky; Active Analysis; acting; training; beginning actors.

Introduction

At the S Word Symposium in November 2022, I outlined the process I developed for

teaching beginning acting using principles of Active Analysis and focusing on iterative

improvisation of a scene’s sequence of events. In Active Analysis, Stanislavsky

reversed the standard rehearsal process to place embodying the action of the scene

before detailed analysis or learning the lines of the script. Based on this emphasis on

embodying, I designed a structure for scaffolding beginning acting skills from basic

improvisational situations to scripted scene work, with the goal of unifying the concepts

taught in the classroom with practices used in the rehearsal room. This essay expands on

the symposium presentation and clarifies the thought processes and experiences that

went into developing the pedagogical structure. It takes as its starting point my personal

experience as an acting student, actor, and teacher in the hope of providing useful

insights for other practitioners. Using my own range of experiences allows me to

empathize with the student actor and understand his struggle; to use my subsequent

training as a professional actor to clarify the problem; and to assimilate both points of

view as a teacher to synthesize a potential solution. The data may be personal and

anecdotal, but I believe it will have universal application.

Background

As a young actor in the Master of Fine Arts programme at the American Conservatory

Theatre in San Francisco in the 1990s, I was given a common definition of acting,

expressed as “living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.”

One professor defined it

as “the passionate pursuit of an objective.” While I understood the terminology in both

cases, I didn’t understand how these definitions applied to our work in the classroom.

We began our training with exercises intended to practice individual skills required for

acting, such as relaxation, concentration, and public solitude, and then progressed to

working on scripted material. The individual exercises did not seem to link directly to

work on scripted material, instead, we were simply given scenes, analysed their

circumstances, rehearsed them, and then presented them to the faculty for critique. For

me, this exercise was destined to fail – and it did many times – because I was unable to

bridge the gap between the exercises, the analytical work, and the stated goal of “living

truthfully” in the scene. Fundamentally, I was focused on the performance result, which

led to pre-planning the scene and anticipating responses before they happened. I didn’t

truly understand the concept of “living” in imaginary circumstances, so I attempted to

create the appearance of it. As Stanislavsky put it, “[b]ecause of their inability to

discover the conscious path to unconscious creation, actors […] are stuck in a kind of

superficial stock-in-trade […].”

I struggled with this until the concept of living in imaginary circumstances

finally became clear through the practice of improvisation a number of years later. For

many years I participated in an ongoing Master Class at the Seydways Acting Studios in

San Francisco. The class, taught by Executive Director Richard Seyd, focused on long-

form improvisation as a tool for actor development. The improv scenarios were

complex, detailed, and involved high stakes. Through these regular weekly sessions of

improvisation, I gained extensive experience in “living truthfully under imaginary

circumstances.” The class periodically worked on scripted material as well. While

successful at both, I began to realize that I felt a sense of freedom and connection in the

improv work – a sense of reality – that was somewhat missing in the scripted work.

Towards the end of my time in the class I began to work on consciously integrating

improvisational sensibilities into my work on scripted material. Before I completed this

integration, however, I left the class for my current academic appointment at Utah State

University.

When I realized that my new position would involve teaching a course titled

Introduction to Acting, I was determined to find a way to teach the course which

included improvisation as a part of the methodology. I also felt it was important that the

skills explored in the classroom be directly applicable to the rehearsal and performance

of scripted work. As I began to research textbooks for the class, I noticed that most of

the books recommended by colleagues followed the same structure: a version of the

initial “object exercises” developed by Uta Hagen, which focus on individual aspects of

the Stanislavsky “system” as expressed in An Actor Prepares, followed by work on

scripted material.

This structure seemed to mirror the one I felt was not successful in

my own training.

As I looked closer, it became clear my challenges with this approach were

related to three main issues: (i) dividing the acting process into discrete skills for

practice, (ii) scoring a scene for rehearsal and performance, and (iii) a focus on

“objective.” I believe all of these issues stem from the historical development of acting

pedagogy in America. As readers of this journal will know, the roots of American

acting pedagogy lie primarily in the publication of An Actor Prepares and the rise of the

Group Theatre in the 1930s. An Actor Prepares was an incomplete elucidation of

Stanislavsky’s ideas about acting and actor training. These incomplete ideas were

popularized by members of the Group Theatre who became seminal acting teachers in

America – Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner – and who had a lasting

impact on acting pedagogy.

Their teachings, rooted in questionable translations of

Stanislavsky’s incomplete writings, resemble the period of Stanislavsky’s work known

as “cognitive analysis,” involving extensive table work in advance of the actors’ work

on their feet, and which formed the basis of much of the acting methodology that is

currently taught in academic circles in America.

Stanislavsky’s lifelong goal was to find a process that would help an actor to

“live” on stage. To describe this sense of living on stage, he used the Russian word

perezhivanie – which roughly translates to “experience” in English – and he sought a

process for acting that would lead to “experiencing” the role. In my view, however, an

approach to training actors which involves breaking the acting process into individual

skills for practice, scoring scenes in advance of rehearsal, and focusing on objectives,

creates unnecessary challenges for the beginning actor in their attempt to “experience” a

role.

The first challenge arises from attempting to break acting into its component

parts and train them individually. In practice, the individual parts do not effectively add

up to the whole. As Sharon M. Carnicke expressed it:

Familiar preparatory exercises that derive from the System usually serve as the

foundation for most acting classes. However, exercises deconstruct the various

elements in acting (relaxation, concentration, observation and the like) and, in so

doing, inadvertently create an artificial gap between acting skills and acting as

performance. I have met too many students, who become expert in exercises

without being able to transfer their skills to the rehearsal of texts.

The analogy I use with students draws a parallel to driving a car. If one wants to drive a

car, studying how the internal combustion engine or the power steering system works

will be of little use in understanding the experience of driving. Driving is a complex

action that puts the whole machine to use for a specific purpose. Without an associated

experience of driving a car for reference, an analysis of how the engine works becomes

a purely intellectual exercise. The same is true for acting. Acting incorporates all the

individual skills that Stanislavsky delineated in An Actor Prepares – Action,

Imagination, Concentration of Attention, Relaxation of Muscles, etc. – but practicing

the skills separately seems to contribute little to an experience of the whole event. In my

view, an exploration of the individual parts can be useful only after one has experienced

the whole.

The second challenge involves the analysis of a scene or play for performance,

often referred to as scoring the scene (“scoring” in the sense of a musical score that lays

out a plan for the scene).

The fundamental concept is that a play (or a scene) needs to

be broken down into smaller sections to facilitate easier analysis, understanding, and

rehearsal of the story – an outline of the play or scene, if you will. In An Actor

Prepares, Stanislavsky described this process of dividing of the play into “units” as a

tool for understanding the structure of the play as well as for finding the “creative

objective” of each unit (generally stated in terms of a verb).

Further, the series of

objectives of the play should create an “unbroken chain” or “line” and provide a

“channel” to guide the actor through the play.

Stanislavsky also recommended naming

each unit with a title that captured the fundamental objective of that unit.

This style of

script analysis, or scoring a scene by breaking a play into units and identifying each

unit’s objective in advance of rehearsal, is a common enough practice, but I feel it can

burden the beginning actor’s imagination with too many extraneous details, creating a

sense of obligation to include all of the results of the analysis in performance – a need to

“show your homework.” Stanislavsky maintained that:

[…] this method leads to major errors since the actor, by examining the role at the

table, separates the psychological from the physical and, with no opportunity of

experiencing the actual life of their character’s body, are at a loss. This inevitably

leads to a purely cerebral analysis of the role.

Another challenge stems from the concept of the “objective,” as, for example,

expressed by Hagen in her book Respect for Acting: “What do I want?”

The phrase

“what do I want?” is often considered interchangeable with the term “objective,” but,

while it may be relatively easy for actors to intellectually decide what their characters

want, actually wanting to pursue that objective is a different thing altogether. In my

experience, picking an objective for a unit of a scene was often an intellectual exercise

that did not serve me in rehearsal. Without knowing how to create a sense of wanting

what my character wanted, I was left mimicking what I thought “wanting” would look

like in that situation. In teaching I have found that this is frequently true for beginning

actors – performing an idea of what one thinks pursuing the objective should look and

sound like rather than actively pursuing it in the moment of the scene.

An example of this isolated focus on objective often occurs during a common

beginning acting exercise. In this exercise, actors choose a verb from a list and use it as

their objective. Verbs are a customary focus in acting classes because Stanislavsky said

that objectives should be phrased as a verb and not as a state of being (an action that can

be taken rather than an emotional result to be achieved).

Choosing a verb from a list

leads to examples such as “I want to tease you into giving in” or “I want to lure you to

support me.” While these examples might be appropriate to the scene, I often see actors

choosing what they think are more dynamic or dramatic verbs such as “slap” or “stab” –

“I want to slap some sense into you” or “I want to stab you with my anger.” Simply

focusing on what seem like strong, active verbs without considering what is happening

in the scene can lead the actor to vocally indicate the idea of “slapping” or “stabbing”

when there’s no actual slapping or stabbing happening in the scene. This is just one

example of how putting analysis before experience can lead to intellectual choices

resulting in a misguided imitation of life on stage.

Our concept of “objective” stems from Elizabeth Hapgood’s translation of An

Actor Prepares. In it, Hapgood translated the Russian word zadacha as the English

word “objective,” and this term became deeply ingrained in American actor training.

There has been much discussion about the meaning of zadacha, but contemporary

scholars, like Sharon Marie Carnicke, often lean towards “problem” as a closer English

alternative.

Jean Benedetti, for his part, used the word “task” when creating a new

translation of Stanislavsky’s writings; with Maria Shevtsova similarly emphasising

“task” as the correct translation.

In the case of either “problem” or “task,”

Stanislavsky’s intent seems to be for the actor to identify the character’s motivated

action rather than a final goal the character wishes to achieve. Semantically, identifying

a problem your character is trying to solve may seem very similar to choosing an

objective that your character wants to accomplish, but, in my view, an actor can carry

out a task or solve a problem on stage whether they want to or not; whereas pursuing an

objective seems to be predicated on wanting to pursue it. Thinking in terms of a task or

a problem focuses the process of acting on action rather than on the actor achieving a

specific emotional state of wanting. A well-chosen task or problem should spur the

actor to take action. Stanislavsky expressed this idea as follows: “the actor uses a

compelling task to draw unconscious creative feeling out of the depths of his being,”

and this task “[…] brings all [his] psychological drives, will, intelligence and emotion

into action.”

All of these versions of the terminology are useful and can reveal

different aspects of the character and the situation as long as we remember that we are

describing the complex inner life of a human being. The problem arises in actor training

when the simplified idea of “objective” loses its connection to the human being and

becomes an isolated intellectual concept used for analysis.

With these issues in mind, I delved into Stanislavsky’s work on improvisation

(beyond the short etudes in An Actor Prepares, such as “searching for a brooch”),

including sources like Carnicke’s Stanislavsky in Focus, Bella Merlin’s Acting: The

Basics and The Stanislavsky Toolkit, and, finally, James Thomas’s The Director’s Guide

to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis. In Benedetti’s 2010 translation of An Actor’s Work, I

found a quote that eloquently described my experience of frustration during my early

training:

[After a long process of analysis, study, and discussion] the actor’s heart and mind

are filled with a mass of details, some useful, some not, like a chicken that has been

fattened up by being stuffed with nuts […] And then they tell him, “Get up on

stage, play your part and apply everything you have learned in the recent months of

group study.” With a stuffed head and empty heart the actor goes out on stage and

simply can’t do anything.

This quote, which wasn’t included in Elizabeth Hapgood’s 1961 version of the same

material (Creating a Role), vividly expressed my experience as a young actor with a

“stuffed head and empty heart.” In Carnicke’s Stanislavsky in Focus, I found a quote

that pointed to a possible solution. In a December 1935 letter to his son, Stanislavsky

wrote:

I am setting a new device (priem) in motion now, a new approach to the role. It

involves reading the play today, and tomorrow rehearsing it on stage. What can we

rehearse? A great deal. A character comes in, greets everybody, sits down, tells of

events that have just taken place, expresses a series of thoughts. Everyone can act

this, guided by their own life experience. So, let them act. And so, we break the

whole play, episode by episode, into physical actions. When this is done exactly,

correctly, so that it feels true and it inspires our belief in what is happening on

stage, then we can say that the line of the life of the human body has been created.

This is no small thing, but half the role.

These two quotations confirmed that late in his career Stanislavsky’s dissatisfaction

with analysis and objectives had led him to focus on the events of the play rather than

the objectives, placing experience before analysis and creating an improvisation-based

process which came to be known as Active Analysis.

In every book or article I read about Stanislavsky’s later work, I found

confirmation of what I’d experienced in the acting class at Seydways Acting Studios,

namely that improvisation is the touchstone for “living truthfully under imaginary

circumstances.” Indeed, at its core, improvisation is living truthfully under imaginary

circumstances. Stanislavsky seemed to know this and used improvisation (or etudes) to

work out challenges in both the classroom and the rehearsal room.

I was astounded

and excited by this and began to search for more information about Active Analysis,

including Maria Knebel’s On Active Analysis of the Play and the Role.

The concepts

made perfect sense to me, merging effortlessly with my previous work in the studio and

giving me theoretical foundations to support my work in the classroom. In this manner,

I developed my own understanding of the theory and practice of Active Analysis

without the benefit of any explicit first-hand training in it. I felt my past experience had

provided the perfect prerequisites for me to engage with and implement the underlying

approach, or at least my version of it.

With ample citations for supporting theory, I began to focus on how to apply the

ideas in the classroom. In considering this, it struck me that in his letter to his son

Stanislavsky had originally referred to the method of Active Analysis as a rehearsal

process. Similarly, Merlin also observed that “Active Analysis is a rehearsal approach.

Although it’s grounded in psychophysical actor training, it’s not the actor training

itself.”

Given these references to rehearsal, I wondered if it was possible to use the

concepts of Active Analysis as the foundation of a beginning acting class.

The process of Active Analysis, or “analysis though action,” involves

exploration of the play with the actors “on their feet” rather than “around a table.”

Actors refer to the script periodically, but do not hold it in their hands as they rehearse

with scene partners. Instead, they begin with improvisations based on the

circumstances, relationships, and, most importantly, events of the play. It is a process of

embodying the role from the outset. I found Merlin’s summary of Knebel’s description

of Active Analysis to be simple and clear:

The basic steps are remarkably simple:

(1) read the scene;

(2) discuss the scene;

(3) improvise the scene; and

(4) discuss the improvisation.

The repetition of these four steps guides the actor through the whole process of

Active Analysis, from first read-through to dead-letter-perfect production.

It is important to note that the improvisations used in Active Analysis aren’t random or

separate from the story of the play. As Stanislavsky wrote in his letter, “we break the

whole play, episode by episode, into physical actions,” and these “episodes” provide the

basis for the improvisations. The improvisations are repeatedly compared to the script in

order to guide the actors’ work towards a realization of what the playwright has written.

Through this strategy, Stanislavsky modified his rehearsal process to place action – or

the embodying of the events of the play – at the forefront, with subsequent research and

analysis used as needed to support the actors’ specific, detailed understanding of the

enacted events.

This description of Active Analysis resonated with the process used for scripted

work taught by Richard Seyd in his improv-based Master Class. In that class, we used

an iterative process of expressing the thoughts of the character and comparing our in-

the-moment expression with the scripted dialogue. This iterative process guided us from

an instinctive expression to a specific understanding of the script and the ideas being

expressed by the characters. That experience made Active Analysis a natural

progression for me as an actor and confirmed its usefulness in the classroom.

The Classes

At the institution where I work, Introduction to Acting (THEA 1033) is a general

elective (Breadth Creative Arts) course and open to all students. In addition, it is a

required course for any theatre major who is not in the BFA Acting Program (technical

theatre, theatre education, costume design, etc.). I have taught the course six times in the

past five years (the duration of the course is fifteen weeks), with every class enrolling

18 students with a wide range of interests and degrees of experience. Students from

outside the Department of Theatre Arts, for example, may have more acting experience

from high school even though they are currently pursuing another field. Technical

Theatre and Costume Design students, who are required to take the course, may

themselves have high school theatre experience but opted for a career path off stage.

Finally, students of any major may enrol out of curiosity, or in pursuit of a fun arts

elective. For the purposes of the course, all of these students are considered

“beginners,” and the course assumes little knowledge of acting technique on their part.

It aims to give students an active experience of the processes and terminology used by

actors. Regardless of their background, my primary goal in teaching the course is to

give the students experiences in listening and responding in the moment; engaging with

imaginary relationships and circumstances; and understanding the concept of action.

In creating the structure of the class, I felt it was important that we start by

agreeing on a definition of acting. I tell each class: “If we are going to study acting, we

should agree on a definition that we will stick with and use as our guiding principle in

our work.” Invariably, the discussions result in identifying two primary schools of

acting: “indicating” what is happening, or “experiencing” what is happening. These two

descriptions of acting are referred to as representational acting and organic acting in the

text I ultimately selected for the course, Acting Stanislavski: A Practical Guide to

Stanislavski’s Approach and Legacy by John Gillett.

(In addition to other useful

information for beginning actors, Gillett’s text includes information on Active

Analysis.) At the end of the discussion, students generally agree that they prefer to

watch an actor who is experiencing what is happening (perezhivanie) over one who is

indicating or representing it. Through further discussion and guidance, students come to

a definition of acting that echoes Stanislavsky’s and Meisner’s idea of “living

truthfully.” Often, we focus on the definition articulated in Gillett’s book, which refers

to organic acting as “believing in and living through the circumstances and actions of

performance as if they are real; living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.”

This

definition specifically introduces the additional ideas of “belief” and “actions”

(concepts missing from the definition of acting as “living truthfully under imaginary

circumstances”) which we use as a metric for the exercises going forward.

Once we agree on a definition of acting that incorporates the idea of “imaginary

circumstances,” we face the task of addressing “imagination.” As a first step, I generally

ask the students to imagine an elephant. Without fail, they all can. The results vary

widely because each individual’s experience of imagination is different – for example,

some students are more visually-oriented than others – but every student can create an

imaginary elephant or have an imaginative sense of one. We then discuss how they were

able to imagine their elephants. Many of the students can describe where their ideas for

their elephant came from, and many can talk about the feelings they had or the things

they saw or felt, but none of them can describe exactly how they imagined their

elephant. In general, we can talk about the things that we do to prepare to imagine an

elephant (for example, thinking of other elephants we’ve experienced previously) or the

results of our imagining (such as specific details of our experience of our elephant), but

it’s not possible to talk about how the “imagination switch” is actually flipped. It’s

something we do. In Building a Character, Stanislavsky writes, “We are born with it

inside of us, with an innate capacity for creativeness.”

Because of this, we collectively

agree that imagination is an action or event – a complex process that we do naturally as

human beings, but which we can’t delineate in specific detail. We can talk around it, but

we can’t describe it directly…we must do it.

One can argue that, if this is true – that we can’t talk about imagining directly –

then it is also true that we can’t teach a student how to imagine. Everyone can already

do it, and we can only help them practice it and give them tools to get better at it.

Further, if acting is based on using imagination, then the same argument can be made

about acting, at least in part. We can’t teach a student the part of acting related to

imagining (believing in imaginary circumstances), but we can help them develop and

refine their inherent ability. With the understanding that we all already have the innate

ability to engage our imaginations, we begin to apply it to acting methodology and our

practice of “believing in and living through imaginary circumstances and actions.”

In class, we begin this practice by creating a set of imaginary circumstances and

“believing in and living through” them – otherwise known as improvisation. Often

students carry a negative association with improvisation from high school. As students

have repeatedly expressed in class, improvisation in high school often focuses on

humour and quick wit and, as a result, students fear they aren’t “funny” enough or fast

enough. Beginning the course with improvisation requires reassuring them that we are

truly focusing on our definition of “believing in and living through” the experience.

Once they accept that there is no right or wrong way to live through the situation and

that they will not be judged on their dexterity as a playwright, they are more willing to

engage.

In pairs, students create their own imaginary circumstances. It doesn’t matter

what the imaginary circumstances are as long as their goal is to believe in and live

through them (though circumstances closer to their personal experience are often more

effective earlier in the process). At this point, I believe it’s important to focus on

engagement and enjoyment and leave judgement to the side. The students are learning

to listen and respond and to connect with imaginary circumstances in front of their

peers. Accomplishing this without pre-planning or a sense of “performing” is new for

most of them. I want to encourage them to play honestly from their own experience – a

key element of Active Analysis – and to follow Stanislavsky’s advice which asks,

“What would I do today, here, now in these given circumstances?”

This process also

fosters a sense that it is possible to trust that the relationship dynamic with their scene

partner will provide everything they need for a successful scene. To this end, I generally

ask that the improvisation last for at least five continuous minutes, which is initially

very intimidating to them. This time limit ensures that they don’t give up on the

exercise too soon, or, if they’ve pre-planned the exercise to some extent, it ensures that

the scene will last longer than their plan, leaving them with no alternative but to engage

with their scene partner.

In the initial rounds of improvisations, students often create scenarios close to

their own experience – roommate conflicts, student/teacher conflicts, or other

relationship issues. In an unconscious attempt to avoid conflict, the students often

default to scenes in which they are deciding something or teaching something – “where

should we go to dinner?” or “let me show you how to bake a cake.” Based on my

improv experience at Seydways Studios, I usually end up asking the students to avoid

scenes about deciding or teaching, and to avoid the use of too many imaginary props

(one pair of students wanted to work with a litter of imaginary puppies) in order to

foster direct interaction between the students. Students can also be quite creative. One

pair chose to be the right and left sides of a student’s brain – one being logical and the

other being emotional. Almost any scenarios is useful as long as the students truly

engage their belief in the situation and relate to their partner, and, in subsequent

improvisations, I encourage them to create situations with higher stakes and deeper

relationships.

As we practice the skills of belief through a series of student-created

improvisations, we discuss what makes it easier to believe in the situation and to

maintain that belief. Students usually instinctively know that specific details help with

belief – specifics of the characters’ relationships, specifics of the environment, specifics

of each character’s goal, specifics of the relationship history, etc. For example, one

student who played a doctor commented after her improvisation, “I guess I need to find

out more about how a doctor actually does things.” In this way, the students’ experience

of the events helps them to understand the usefulness of further research – the exact

opposite of the process of “cognitive analysis,” which places analysis first. This

intuitive sense of the usefulness of specific details leads us to analyse the imaginary

circumstances more deeply, and it is here that we use the set of questions laid out by

Stanislavsky and popularized by Hagen (Who am I?, Where am I?, What surrounds

me?, etc.).

What I would like to emphasise here is that these questions are not

introduced while scoring the scene as part of an initial analysis of a script. Rather, in our

class, the students are already actively exploring circumstances and therefore use the

questions as tools for gaining a more specific understanding of them. In this way, the

process of “action analysis” highlights the usefulness of the questions in a way that the

process of “cognitive analysis” often misses.

Once we’ve laid a foundation based on “belief” and a deeper understanding of

the circumstances, we develop the process further by factoring in that we will need to

apply our work to scripted material. The primary difference between an improvisation

and scripted material is that a script contains a structured set of predetermined events

which may be repeated multiple times in performance. As Gillett describes it, “an

unpremeditated, spontaneous interaction, albeit within a planned production […] is

precisely what Stanislavski searched for.”

To introduce this idea of structure into our process of “living truthfully,” we

create new sets of circumstances for improvisation. After an initial improvisation, we

choose three major episodes which must happen during the scene and then improvise

the scene again. While the scenario will still be freely improvised (based on the

students’ knowledge of the specific, detailed circumstances), the three chosen major

episodes become predetermined elements that must occur during the next iteration of

the improvisation. By this point in the class we have spent several weeks working with

improvised scenes, and we can easily add an element of structure without greatly

undermining the students’ sense of belief. It also offers the students a chance to

experience simultaneously managing the scene from both the character’s and the actor’s

point of view.

As actors we must always negotiate two worlds – the world of the play or

character and the world of the performance. To forget that one is an actor playing a role

is dangerous and comes close to hallucination or insanity. Imagine if an actor came to

believe a sword fight was a real life-or-death event! Perezhivanie does not mean one

must forget oneself. On the contrary, an actor must be able to experience as the

character through belief in imaginary circumstances while simultaneously navigating

the requirements of performance (blocking, projection, choreography, audience, etc.).

Stanislavsky “describes the actor’s ‘sense of self’ (samochuvstvie) as comprising two

equally important perspectives – being on stage and being within the role.”

The

gradual addition of structure to the improvisations allows the beginning actors to

acclimate to this necessity.

After improvising the scene with three pre-planned episodes, we further scaffold

the process towards scripted material by adding another level of predetermination to the

improvisation. Each of the three previous predetermined major episodes is further sub-

divided into three “sub-events” that must occur in order for each episode to take place in

the next iteration. At this point, the students have a structure which includes detailed

circumstances and three episodes composed of three events each – basically, a 9-point

plan through the scene. The goal is to freely improvise the scene while following the

predetermined plan. In this set of improvisations, the students are balancing the

concepts of listening and responding to their partner in the moment with the

requirement that the scene happen in a loosely structured sequence.

By this point in the iterative process, the students have improvised these

structured scenarios several times and have developed a somewhat regular pattern for

the scene that takes their plan into account. As the final step on our path towards

scripted material, the students take their structured improvisation and the pattern

they’ve developed through repetition and turn it into a script of the scene. Now they will

work with an actual script – albeit a script based on their own repeated, structured

improvisations – but a script nonetheless. Students tend to find this scripted version of

the scene straightforward and easy to accomplish because they have become so familiar

with the circumstances and the plan of events. The lines come easily because the

students created them through repeatedly embodying the situation. After having worked

on scripted material created via this improvisational process, the students are ready to

attempt a scripted scene from a published play using a more standard Active Analysis

rehearsal process as delineated previously in Merlin’s summary.

Scripted Scenes

The process from basic improvisation at the beginning of the class to the work on their

scripted/improvised scene generally takes about half the semester, or 7 weeks (classes

generally meet for 2 hours, twice a week). Through this progression, the students

experience a process rooted in improvisation and become familiar with looking at a

scene as a sequence of events. We now spend the second half of the semester reversing

the process by starting with scripted scenes and breaking them into sequences of

episodes which may be improvised. To facilitate this process, we pick a scene that we

work on together as a class – I often use the scene from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town

where George and Emily walk home from school and talk about their relationship. In

preparing to improvise the events of the scene, we discuss the circumstances and

relationships and flesh out the world of the play. Then, as Stanislavsky described, we

divide the scene into episodes – at this point the episodes are larger “chunks” of the

scene which contain enough action to be the basis for an improvised scenario. These

“chunks” have no specified length, but students can usually agree where one major

episode ends and another starts, with a simple scene containing a handful of primary

episodes. I tend to refrain from rigid definitions of what constitutes a “chunk” so that

students don’t become mired in dogmatic adherence to perceived rules. Rather, I

encourage them to trust their own sense of what feels like an event or a section of text

that may be improvised.

As we divide the scene, we give each episode a name, as Stanislavsky

suggested.

In giving the episodes titles, the goal is to create an evocative phrase which

entices the students to act it out – something active and (hopefully) fun. For some

students these titles are very literal; for others, they are more metaphorical. The

important thing is that they are simple phrases that inspire the students to enact the

episode. As with every element of the process, I try to avoid dogma, instead

encouraging the students to use phrases that engage them rather than phrases they think

are “correct.” For the Our Town scene, one class came up with episode names like

“George tests the water,” “George leaps,” and “George and Emily swim” to indicate the

progression of their relationship. While these titles are metaphorical, the students felt

they were enticing titles and expressive of the action of the episodes. The same class

created a visual diagram of the relationship between the episodes instead of using a

more standard outline approach. In a similar way, as a group, each class creates a high-

level plan of the episodes of the scene, a map of the general forest rather than the

specific trees, so to speak.

The next step is for the students to improvise the action of the episodes, largely

in their own words. As before, I am not dogmatic about avoiding the playwright’s

words. If words or phrases from the script come to the students naturally during the

improvisation, they are free to use them. The main goal is to improvise the scene rather

than focusing on remembering the lines or getting them right. Afterwards, we compare

the results of the improvisation with the text of the scripted scene to see where the

action was the same and where it differed. The points of difference provide valuable

information regarding places where our understanding of the scene needs to be more

specific, so we discuss why the scripted scene was indeed different from the improvised

version. To further the search for specificity, we break the episodes down into a series

of smaller events that compose each episode. The smaller events that comprise each

episode contain more specific elements of action that add up to the overall action of the

episode. For example, the episode named “George tests the water” in Our Town may be

composed of events like “George asks a favour” and “Emily agrees to write.” Again,

these phrases are chosen collectively by the students to express their understanding of

the scene. In fact, the phrases tend to evolve as their understanding of the scene deepens

through the exploration.

To find similar specificity in the language, the students also compare the words

they used in the improvisation with the dialogue created by the playwright. As with the

events, the points of difference provide useful information about the ideas being

communicated and areas which may need additional clarification. To achieve this

clarity, we discuss why the characters’ ideas may have been phrased in the exact

manner used by the playwright rather than the phrasing used in the improv. The students

continue this iterative process of improvising the sequence of episodes/events and

comparing the result to the script until they are performing the scene with accuracy of

action and dialogue. With everyone working on the same scene, the students have a

chance to watch numerous improvised versions of the scene and to participate in

numerous discussions of the episodes, events, and points of difference. Because of the

high number of repetitions, the group tends to learn the scene rather quickly.

After a couple of weeks of working in this way as a group, the students are ready

to work on individual scenes to refine their personal process of identifying episodes,

improvising them, and comparing them to the script to find specificity. By working in

this way, they learn to recognize elements of action, describe them in evocative terms,

and work towards a specific embodiment of the scene which is based in a sense of

engagement, listening, and improvisational freedom.

Results and Conclusion

Basing actor training in improvisational practice and the use of Active Analysis yields

many benefits. At the start, without a script in hand or the responsibility of exact lines,

the actors find it easier to listen and respond to their scene partner and to focus on

what’s happening between them in the scene. One student observed in class: “We know

what we’re doing and what the character wanted and we could play with it in a way we

couldn’t if we had scripts in our hands.” In addition, framing the scenes as

“improvisations” lessens the pressure to get it “right” – there’s no such thing as a wrong

improvisation – so the actors are more physically relaxed and less self-conscious about

their work. These elements of relaxation and responsiveness are valuable for beginning

actors yet often hard to achieve when working in conventional ways.

Through their use of Active Analysis, the actors’ specific understanding of the

circumstances and the sequence of episodes/events in the scene gives them a clear map

to follow, which they find easier to remember. This makes them less worried about

forgetting their lines or not knowing what happens next. Merlin addresses this concept

in her book on stage fright:

When we break down a text into bits of action, what we’re basically doing is

‘bundling’ sections of text together […which] bundles information into meaningful

wholes. Rather than having a whole heap of individual items strung together on a

string of our short-term memory – or one big blob of text that we’re trying to line-

cram – we now have globules of connected ideas that we can pattern and link.

Dividing our lines into [these] ‘bundles’ (so to speak) makes them much easier to

remember.

Students regularly express their lack of fear of forgetting their lines because they know

deeply what happens in the scene, and they feel the lack of fear makes it easier to listen

and respond naturally to their partner. Additionally, as they gain experience in looking

at scenes as sequences of episodes/events, students find it easier to identify and play the

actions of any scene they work on because they are familiar with the sensation of

embodied action. It’s no longer an intellectual concept.

Finally, experience has shown that grounding the scene work in improvisation

leads actors to use their voices and bodies more naturally. Since they are embodying

action from the beginning of rehearsal rather than waiting until they’ve learned their

lines and blocking, they typically show more vocal variety and dynamics because the

words are being used to communicate and are in response to their scene partner rather

than simply being recited from rote memorization. A student commented, “you have to

listen and respond to what is actually happening rather than just going on with the

lines.” I also find that actors working with this process help create much of their

blocking because they have a clear relationship to the environment, to each other, and to

what is happening. The process of Active Analysis supports the actor in being as

vocally and physically vibrant in a scene as they are in daily life.

In conclusion, I would like to highlight the words of UK theatre teacher and

director Paul Christie about how, in life, experience precedes words:

We experience and then we speak. This is the way of things. Experience leads to

words. In the theatre, when rehearsing a play we have the words already, the

playwright has given them to us, but we do not have the experience that leads to

them yet. We have a wealth of words and a poverty of experience. This is our

starting point.

My goal in the THEA 1033 Beginning Acting class is to teach beginning acting in a

way that addresses this fundamental understanding about life and acting – experience

precedes words – and which scaffolds to Active Analysis as a rehearsal method.

Through improvisation, Stanislavsky’s process of Active Analysis provides a way to

focus on an experience of action first, with the playwright’s words coming later. It is

this experience of action that creates the need for the words, leading to a fuller

understanding of both action and words. In this way, I believe we can more effectively

teach clear concepts of acting which draw on the actor’s innate creativity and which

transfer directly into a rehearsal process.

Notes

1. The definition of acting as “living truthfully in imaginary circumstances” is generally

attributed to noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner.

2. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 346.

3. Hagen, Respect for Acting, 79. In addition to this text, other typical examples of introductory

texts might include Acting One by R. Cohen and Acting is Believing by K. Stilson.

4. The graduate acting programme at New York University – one of the top training programs in

the country – offers courses of study in the Lee Strasberg Institute, the Stella Adler School, and

the Meisner Studio.

5. Carnicke, “Stanislavsky’s System,” 23. For an in-depth analysis regarding actor training in

the US and Stanislavsky’s influence, see Zazzali, Acting in the Academy, including 27, 29, 41,

43, and 47.

6. Carnicke, “Belief through Knowledge,” 19–31.

7. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work on a Role, 149.

8. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 134.

9. Ibid., 126 and 277.

10. Ibid., 132.

11. Knebel, Active Analysis, 106.

12. Hagen, Respect for Acting, 82.

13. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 148.

14. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 226.

15. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 135 and Shevtsova, “Music, singing, word, action,” 16.

16. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work on a Role, 138.

17. Ibid., 45-46.

18. Quoted in Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 154.

19. Shevtsova, “Music, singing, word, action,” 8

20. In Thomas, A Director’s Guide, 83.

21. Merlin, “Stanislavski (1863-1938),” 27.

22. Merlin, “Here, Today, Now,” 325.

23. Gillett, Acting Stanislavski, xii-xiv.

24. Ibid., xv.

25. Stanislavski, Building a Character, 279.

26. Knebel, Active Analysis, 53.

27. See note 12 above.

28. Gillett, Acting Stanislavski,56.

29. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 142.

30. See note 10 above.

31. Merlin, “Facing the Fear,” 185.

32. Christie, “The What Happened of Experience,” 1.

Notes on Contributor

Michael Shipley is an Assistant Professor of Theatre who teaches acting, voice, speech,

and accents. His research focuses on the intersection between acting methodology and

vocal technique, with emphasis on voice and language in performance. Michael is also

an actor, director, and coach, who has performed and coached at regional theatres across

the US, including the Utah Shakespeare Festival, American Players Theatre, Great River

Shakespeare Festival, and the American Conservatory Theatre. His corporate coaching

clients have included Global 500 companies, healthcare networks, law firms, and police

departments. He is certified in both Fitzmaurice Voicework and Knight-Thompson

Speechwork, holds a BS in engineering from Texas A&M, an MS in engineering from

Stanford University, and an MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theatre.

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The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.