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ABSTRACT
In November 2022, The S Word symposium was hosted at DAMU, Prague, under the title 'Stanislavsky's Last Words'. Bella Merlin conducted a practical workshop on the 'constant state of inner improvisation' that underpins Stanislavsky's final rehearsal practice, Active Analysis, along with the vital role of 'dynamic listening' between actors. This paper is an account of that workshop, writing in an autoethnographic style and taking the reader through the improvisations and exercises as if present at the workshop. Merlin notes her training in Active Analysis at the State Institute of Cinematography, Moscow, in the early 1990s and her book Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Acting (NHB 2001) as arguably the first hands-on account of Active Analysis in the UK. The 'line of thought' (discovered through textual analysis) and the 'line of action' (discovered through improvisations) link together to create a production through the process of Active Analysis. Stanislavsky's tools of the 'six fundamental questions', 'grasp', 'objectives' (or problems and tasks), and the essential feeling of 'now, today, here' as the raw material for creating roles are explored, along with identifying the scene's main 'event' and uncovering a simple 'score of physical actions'. The dramatic dialogue used is an open scene from Dave Kost's Books of Sides II (Routledge 2017). The overarching tool for the workshop is obshcheniye: community or 'communion'.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Knebel, Active Analysis, 42.
2. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 107.
3. Ibid., 114–5.
4. Knebel, Active Analysis, 177.
6. Embedded in Active Analysis is creating an organic score of physical actions. While this is somewhat different from the Method of Physical Actions (the precursor to Active Analysis), the line of actions – or finding a score of physical actions – is really what the improvisational steps of Active Analysis are all about. See Merlin, Konstantin Stanislavsky, 29–38 for a succinct differentiation of these two rehearsal methods.
7. While this very simple exercise is focused on tuning your psychophysical instrument (by giving your body a simple task and then noting how the imagination riffs off that physical task), it also encapsulates the action/counteraction tension at the heart of Active Analysis. As Carnicke writes, “First, a scene starts with an impelling action – a force, a desire that is described by an active verb. […] Second, the scene develops, because the action meets resistance from a counteraction – a force, a drive, a desire that is also described by an active verb. Third, the counteraction operates simultaneously with the action and continuously resists the forward motion of the scene until such time as one force overcomes the other. When that happens, an event occurs that contributes to the development of the story.” In Carnicke, Dynamic Acting through Active Analysis, 74.
8. Kost, Book of Sides II, 108–9.
9. Here I’m following the basic inroad into Active Analysis that I learned at VGIK and how I’ve subsequently implemented it as a director and teacher. The first step really is very loose: we’re really just listening to the intuitive connections we make as actors to the scene. The aim is merge actors with characters from the very first moment so that they can “assess the facts through their own feelings rooted in their personal, direct relationship with the facts.” (Knebel, Active Analysis, 44) Only once those first threads of connection and merger have been threaded might we move on to the “action, counteraction, event” threads so clearly articulated by Sharon Carnicke (though that terminology wasn’t expressly used by Filozov and Kamotskaya in our training).
10. Knebel, Active Analysis, 109.
11. Details can be found in Merlin, Beyond Stanislavsky, 120–5; and Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 313–6.
12. Stanislavsky in Knebel, Active Analysis, 111, original emphasis.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bella Merlin
Bella Merlin (Ph.D., University of Birmingham) is an actor, writer, and senior professor of acting and directing at the University of California, Riverside. Trained at Moscow's State Institute of Cinematography, she has been acting on stage and screen for nearly 30 years, including seasons at the National Theatre/Out of Joint (UK), Shakespeare & Company (USA), the award-winning Mente Revolver with Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Ramirez, and numerous roles on television, theatre and BBC Radio. Widely published in several languages, her books include Shakespeare & Company: When Action is Eloquence (Routledge, 2020); Acting: The Basics (third edition: Routledge, forthcoming 2024), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit (Nick Hern Books, Revised Edition, 2014) and Facing the Fear: An Actor's Guide to Overcoming Stage Fright (Nick Hern Books, 2016). She has led masterclasses across the globe from Australia to Zimbabwe. And with Prof. Paul Fryer (co-director of the Stanislavsky Research Centre), she co-founded the international series of symposia, The S Word, examining contemporary takes on Stanislavsky's system and legacy. Her fact-based solo play, Tilly No-Body: Catastrophes of Love – directed by Miles Anderson – manifests her practice-as-research in performance, through the lens of Tilly Wedekind, wife-muse to German theatre icon, Frank Wedekind. http://www.bellamerlin.com