The actor as a tourist in a new city

ABSTRACT

This essay is a series of wistful musings born from provocations, new translations and exciting discoveries made whilst attending The S Word Symposium in Prague in November 2022. This autoethnographic essay compares the discoveries made by a tourist exploring a new city, to that of an actor as they begin their process of discovering a new role through the lens of Stanislavsky’s, and those that followed, thoughts.

KEYWORDS:

• Autoethnography
• Active Analysis
• Stanislavsky
• actor
• tourist

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 67; emphasis in the original.

2. Ibid., 67.

3. Knebel quoted in Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 96.

4. Stanislavski and Rumyantsev, Stanislavski on Opera, 10.

5. Ibid., 10.

6. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 175.

7. Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 112.

8. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 176.

9. Ibid., 177.

10. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 17.

11. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 314.

12. Ibid., 28; emphasis in the original.

13. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 175.

14. Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 116.

15. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 176.

16. Carnicke, Dynamic Acting Through Active Analysis, 112.

17. Ibid., 116.

18. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 8.

19. Ibid., 8.

20. Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 209.

21. Ibid., 209.

22. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 10.

23. Ibid.,10; Emphasis in the original.

24. Ibid.,10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Holdsworth

Michael Holdsworth is a lecturer, researcher, performer, and producer based in Lancashire, United Kingdom. For the last fifteen years he has worked as Programme Leader for the BA(hons) Acting and Musical Theatre programmes at the Blackpool School of Arts. Michael is currently undertaking a PhD at Lincoln University exploring the intersection between the Musical Theatre Chorus and the Crowd Phenomenon, Mob Mentality and Group Behaviour in the development of a new pedagogy. This journal essay marks his first publication.