Method Acting - Technique

Technique

"The Method" usually refers to the teachings of Lee Strasberg, but the term "method acting" is also sometimes applied to the teachings of his Group Theatre colleagues, including Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, and Sanford Meisner, and to other schools of acting derived from Stanislavski's system, each of which takes a slightly different approach. Stanislavski himself has been noted saying that certain techniques that are considered to be "method" are not true to his original system, with an undue emphasis on the exercises of affective memory. However there is no one correct way of method acting, for each different method technique is simply a different teachers' understanding of the Stanislavski System.

Generally, Method acting combines the actor's careful consideration of the character's psychological motives and personal identification with the character, possibly including a reproduction of the character's emotional state by recalling emotions or sensations from the actor's own life. It is often contrasted with acting in which thoughts and emotions are indicated, or presented in a clichéd, unrealistic way. Among the concepts and techniques of Method acting are substitution, "as if," sense memory, affective memory, animal work, and archetype work. Strasberg uses the question, "What would motivate me, the actor, to behave in the way the character does?" Strasberg asks the actor to replace the play's circumstances with his or her own, the substitution. sense memory Sanford Meisner, another Group Theatre pioneer, championed a closely related version of the Method, which came to be called the Meisner technique. Meisner broke from Strasberg on the subjects of sense memory and affective memory, basic techniques espoused by Strasberg through which actors access their own personal experiences in order to identify with and portray the emotional lives of their characters. Meisner believed that this approach caused actors to focus on themselves and not fully tell the story. He advocated fully immersing oneself "in the moment" and concentrating on one's partner. Meisner taught actors to achieve spontaneity by understanding the given circumstances of the scene (as did Strasberg) and through interpersonal exercises he designed to help actors invest emotionally in the scene, freeing them to react "honestly" as the character. Meisner described acting as "living truthfully under imaginary circumstances."

Robert Lewis also broke with Strasberg. In his books Method—or Madness? and the more autobiographical Slings and Arrows, Lewis disagreed with the idea that vocal training should be separated from pure emotional training. Lewis felt that more emphasis should be placed on formal voice and body training, such as teaching actors how to speak verse and enunciate clearly, rather than on pure raw emotion, which he felt was the focus of Method training.

Stella Adler, an actress and acting teacher whose fame was cemented by the success of her students Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro, also broke with Strasberg after she studied with Stanislavski himself, the only Group Theatre teacher to do so, after he had modified many of his early ideas about acting. Her version of the Method is based on the idea that actors should conjure up emotion not by using their own personal memories, but by using the scene's given circumstances. Like Strasberg's, Adler's technique relies on carrying through tasks, wants, needs, and objectives. It also seeks to stimulate the actor's imagination through the use of "as ifs." Adler often taught that "drawing on personal experience alone was too limited." Therefore, she urged performers to draw on their imaginations and utilize "emotional memory" to the fullest.