61 pages • 2 hours read
Constantin StanislavskiAn Actor Prepares
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Stage Lights
Tortsov works with the class on focus and attention, and frequently uses lights as a method of delineating areas of focus or to represent more abstract concepts and elements. Kostya discovers that a small circle of light makes focusing on the proper object much easier in a theatre that is full of distractions. The light helps to create the world of the play and to feed the actors in their search for truthful performances by, in part, fabricating the atmosphere needed to make their given circumstances feel real. Tortsov frequently refers to the footlights as a line of demarcation that divides the audience from the actors and creates a no-man’s-land where the actors must avoid placing their focus and attention. The lights serve to emphasize an actor’s faults or lead an actor to overperform, and beyond their rudimentary purpose in illuminating the stage for the benefit of the audience, they are the primary element that distinguishes the experience of being onstage with the experience of living real life.
Additionally, Tortsov uses the lights metaphorically. In order to demonstrate that there are different types of actors, he uses the lights to show different levels of focus. Flashing lights represent the actor who is an attention-seeker, playing for the audience’s response. A dim light stands for an actor who does not focus on his scene partner. Scattered lights signify the unfocused actor, whose attention wanders all over. When teaching students to pay close attention to detail, Tortsov turns the lights off, in order to test their ability to focus and learn. In his exercise about creating an unbroken line, Tortsov uses lights to represent his thought process as an actor and how all of his individual thoughts–some dim and unimportant and some brighter and more prominent–must be continuous. This signifies the actor’s consciousness for the character, which is ineffective if fragmented. Lights symbolize revelation and understanding. They are the highly-varied levels of consciousness with which the actors process the method and the world of the play.
The Audience
Throughout the text, the student actors constantly negotiate their relationship with their imaginary audience. At first, Kostya and his classmates are hyper-concerned with audience response. Maria becomes so mortified in front of the audience that she runs offstage weeping. Tortsov criticizes Sonya in her initial test performance for emphasizing her attention on showing the audience how pretty she is. He critiques their moments of overacting, which are about attempting to show the audience that the actor is feeling something that he is only pretending to feel. As the class progresses, Tortsov teaches the students how to communicate with the audience when necessary without centering their performances on audience response. He realigns their focus to assert that they cannot solicit audience reaction, but only do the work of creating their character, and that the audience will respond accordingly. The audience, which is what the actor tends to fear the most, can help to feed the performance if the actor responds to their reactions without focusing on them.
During their classes, their audience is comprised of their fellow actors. Based on Kostya’s thoughts, which are the only ones that the reader can observe, the actors are largely a supportive audience, with the occasional envious or judgmental reaction thrown in. They also demonstrate that as actors, they are not much savvier than the typical audience in recognizing what is good and truthful acting, according to the method. Often, they applaud a performance that Tortsov then identifies as non-truthful or poorly-intentioned. Tortsov repeatedly teaches the actors that their focus must remain on the stage side of the footlights, as the audience can be a serious distraction. As audience members, they have the opportunity to experience perspectives from both sides of the footlights. However, the actors seem to continually find the empty auditorium to be distracting and intimidating.
The Body
Although much of Tortsov’s lessons focus on creating an inner life, he emphasizes over and over that the body is the actor’s tool and thus requires as much work and conditioning as the actor’s psychological training. First, Kostya discovers that lack of control over his body can have serious ramifications when he injures himself onstage, faints, and finds himself confined to bed and unable to continue with the class for several days. Tortsov identifies relaxation and loose musculature as the practice of control, as an actor with tense or strained muscles will have serious difficulty concentrating on his character. At the beginning, Sonya’s initial test performance, in which Tortsov accuses her of showing off her attractiveness rather than acting, depicts the need for an actor to be un-self-conscious in her body. While Kostya is recovering in bed, Leo demonstrates for him that all types of bodies can have control by showing him the exercises they learned in class.
Frequently, the actors find that manipulating their own bodies is what is standing in the way of a truthful performance. When attempting to communicate wordlessly, the actors are often chastised for straining their bodies as a substitute for the words they cannot say. When Kostya and Grisha practice arguing with each other, Tortsov takes away Kostya’s ability to move his body in order to show him how specific he must be with his faculties. And although Vanya fakes his injury as part of his demonstration of adaptation, the loss of his ankle’s functionality would require that he stop training and go home. In his discussion of self-communion, Tortsov identifies the heart and the brain as two physical locations within the body that he uses to communicate with himself. Tortsov emphasizes that the body is a tool. It is the actor’s instrument, just as a violinist has a violin and a painter has a paintbrush. Along with psychological work, the actor must do physical work to maintain his or her physicality through vocal and corporeal exercises. Equilibrium as an actor demands that he know his body and center of gravity extremely well. The craft also requires the actor to observe other people’s bodies and how they experience life.
