Jurij Alschitz

The Vertical of the Role

a method for the actor’s

self - preparation

translated by Natalia Isaeva

editing and the chapter on actors’ training

contributed by Christine Schmalor

translated by Hugh Rorrison

ars incognita

Berlin 2003

Part I The actor’s self - preparation

“It is pleasant, my friends, to sit and listen to you here,

but … to sit alone in a hotel room learning a role

… how much more exciting !”

Arkadina, The Seagull by A. Chekhov

1. Changing territory – leaving the theatre

Each and every profession has its own secrets – and there are enough of those secrets in actor’s work. My own mother was an actress and I often watched her on the sly while she was preparing her roles – wherever it might be – in a hotel room, on a garden bench, or in a train carriage. I always considered that process to be far more interesting than any of her real rehearsals in the theatre or even the theatre performances themselves. That is why, even now, it is with special awe and trepidation that I wait for that magical hour when intimate contact is finally established between an actor and the persona he is about to play, when one is about to witness the beginning of the role’s new life, when the actor enters into close artistic contact with his “personnage”. It is truly a magical, secretive moment. Normally, in artistic circles one prefers not to talk too much about it. It remains something exceedingly private. During that time the actor usually tries to stay alone. One assumes that no-one should bother him and that no-one can help. It is his secret. The secret belongs to him and to him alone, and no-one has any right to intrude here. This, however, is a myth – albeit a beautiful one.

Every profession has its own special secrets but also its own corpus of definite knowledge. Every kind of work is better left in the hands of a master. And whatever the cloud of mystery enveloping the actor’s profession, whatever the legends associated with it, ultimately it is only professional mastership that determines whether an actor really belongs there. It is this aspect that should ultimately interest those of us who professionally study theatre, especially its less known areas. One of those “mysterious“ areas of the actor’s profession is when the actor works on his role by himself.

My experience of working in theatre and teaching theatre has led me to a very simple conclusion: the actor only becomes the master and the real author of the role if he is able to work on it by himself, independently of any other mediation or intrusion. When he becomes a real author he assumes responsibility for the life of his work; no-one else is accountable for it. It is from this standpoint that I construct my relations when working with actors; it is this attitude that I regard as true and genuinely promising. Unfortunately, even today there are still unwritten laws on how to conduct rehearsals, demanding that the director depict in detail the outline of the actor’s role, the way it is constructed, and how it is to be lived through on the stage. From an artistic point of view this situation corrupts actors, destroys their creativity, and transforms the acting profession into a purely instrumental one.

Every actor and every director knows how often in theatre precious time is squandered unnecessarily. Some rehearsals boil down either to learning the text by heart or to some futile exchange of fleeting impressions brought about by the memories of someone’s personal life. At this kind of rehearsals an actor may arrive totally unprepared, totally empty, – and for the most part that is the state he leaves in after the rehearsal is over; and nobody is going to notice anyway. This passive squandering of time destroys creative energy and brings about sterility of thought. It is humiliating enough to be forced to attend rehearsals – but it is even more offending when only one of the partners working together actually prepares himself for the meeting while the other is content to arrive there empty and boring. In a situation like that I always have a feeling of smelling stale mothballs, I literally feel that I am getting older by the hour, being dragged down together with this dead theatre. I am really afraid of this kind of work and from time to time feel nothing but sincere revulsion for it. If, by way of contrast, both the actor and the theatre director bring along a whole inventory of ideas and suggestions, if they try to realise their dreams and fantasies, if they resolve their doubts together – then the rehearsal becomes an important event, a crucial point eagerly awaited and diligently prepared.

Recently in the theatre I have noticed an alarming development. The time allocated for rehearsals is gradually being reduced. One has to fight for every additional day: one has to explain that the limited rehearsal period also limits the creative search both by the actor and by the director, that it is forcing them to concentrate not on the process itself but on the result. Everybody agrees that this development cannot be good for the theatre but the situation only gets worse. Indeed, it has become fairly obvious that to withstand this pressure one has to change the very method and technology of one’s work on a role and on a theatre production as a whole. The winner will be the director who is first able to change the emphasis of his work with the actor.

To my mind, the matter of concern should be shifted towards the actor’s individual preparation. The actor’s “homework“ should take up the greater part of the whole period of preparation but at the same time it should be organised more methodologically, more saturated with special exercises. This guidance should become really professional, it should no longer be like looking for a black cat in a black room. Theatre rehearsals should take at most a third of the time given over to the preparation of the role and of the production itself. And their quality should not be judged by the amount of time spent; rather, everything should be defined by the content of these rehearsals. Let them be short and sporadic – the important thing is that they should be well prepared and fruitful. The actor’s independent preparation on a higher level will transform a rehearsal into a genuinely creative process, will make it an artistic event – of which all actors and theatre directors simply dream.

Most textbooks on acting I see try to avoid the problem of this work beyond theatre and, even if they do mention something of the kind, they usually repeat things propounded by Konstantin Stanislavsky a long time ago. Stanislavsky was actually the first theatre director who drew serious attention to the problem of the actor’s home preparation. He used to say: “The actor, more than any other artist, is in dire need of home preparation“1 Stanislavsky himself tried to shift the emphasis of the actor’s work, transferring most of it from the stage to the area of self-preparation: “The majority of actors are sure they are only supposed to work during rehearsals, while at home they can allow themselves to relax. However, it is directly the opposite that proves right. During rehearsals we try merely to clarify what has already been done at home. That is why I do not believe actors who chatter away during rehearsals instead of taking down and composing the plan for their homework.”2

Judging by this last phrase, Stanislavsky regarded theatre rehearsals by actors as to some extent simply a preparation for the main work to be done on their own. He felt it was necessary to get actors acquainted with minute and diligent work not only during rehearsals but also at home. Rehearsals on stage and rehearsals in a theatre school constitute a relatively small part of the actor’s preparation: “It is not enough to study … only during acting classes, where you get to know what should be done. You must prepare yourselves when you are on your own, you must correct the mistakes pointed out by the teacher.”3

Stanislavsky was the first theatre director to give actors specific tasks for their homework while he was working on a theatre production – and he also demanded that those tasks were carried out thoroughly. Whereas in the earlier stages of his theatre career he would mainly confine himself to suggesting that the actor should work out the imaginary biography of the personnage, later he expanded and deepened the inherent possibilities of this kind of self-preparation. “During rehearsals we should concentrate mainly on sorting out the sensations stored in our affective memory. In order to be able to understand, comprehend, and recollect them, we must find a suitable word, an expression, a descriptive example – in short a sort of bait to make the necessary sensation surface so that later on it can be fixed. This implies a tremendous amount of work demanding great concentration on the part of the artist.”4

Several years later Stanislavsky to some extent changes his whole approach to the work of the actor. In his attempts to implement the method of physical actions during theatre rehearsals, he recommends that actors make use of it not only in theatre but also at home: “Even at home you can still go through your part, starting from physical actions. You must follow the line of the simple and elementary physical actions. You must acquire that life of a human body at home; that is something not only possible but highly desirable.”5

Unfortunately, real theatre practice did not give Stanislavsky a chance to develop his method for the actor’s self-preparation as exhaustively as his training exercises or stage rehearsals. Even the actors in his own theatre were still content to place the main burden of work on the shoulders of their master. His prolonged fight against this kind of parasitic dependence on the part of his actors brought only minimal results.

However, the great merit of Stanislavsky’s approach lies in the fact that he was the first theatre director to suggest that it is only through well-organised homework that the actor can really hope to fully unlock the tremendous potential inside his own nature. Later generations of theatre directors and teachers have gradually evolved a lot of brilliant methods for stage rehearsals but the actor’s self-preparation is still regarded as his own personal responsibility with which no-one should interfere. By now it has become increasingly clear that this attitude is a mistake. The age of “natural-born actor” has long passed. Nowadays one feels a real and urgent need for professional research into the problem of organising the actor’s self-preparation, research into the ways and means of developing this little-known area of the acting profession.

2. A different pattern of acting

To be an artist means first and foremost the ability to discern divine nature and to realise this divine nature through your own personality. These are probably the two most essential pre-conditions for the artist. And the latter is closely linked with the actor’s ability to be attuned to his own person. Unfortunately, this gift is often left unexplored and is sometimes even consciously destroyed. The more the director trusts his actor, I have noticed, and the more the actor trusts himself, the higher the actor’s ability to organise the process of preparation for his role and the stronger his artistic nature becomes. And, vice versa, the more the director fusses over his actor, the weaker the actor becomes as an artist and the more boring to work with.

When I mention this process of self-preparation, I mean primarily the development of the actor’s independent artistic thinking. In other words, self-

education on the part of the actor is not sufficient. It goes without saying of course that a present-day actor has to be an educated and intelligent human being (this is a platitude hardly worth repeating – though even this is sometimes sadly missing) – but the actor of the new generation must also become an artist, a poet, i.e. a master in his own right. He has to be able to make his own choices, to create his role and embody it on the stage. No-one else can assume responsibility for your own work, for your own life, indeed for your happiness than you yourself. After all, this constitutes the main stimulus and even the main meaning of our profession – the ability to feel happy and joyful.

Self-preparation should not be considered the mere transfer of the rehearsal process from a theatre stage to the actor’s home. Rather, it presents a totally different concept for organising the very personality of the actor, the formation of his own attitude towards his role – both in his life and on stage. It means creating the role not at someone else’s prompting but according to the actor’s own artistic principles and views. It means creating a theatre model, I would even say, a universe – where everything is based not on various systems aimed at giving satisfaction to many different people but on a single and focused artistic personality creating a unified and coherent system in accordance with the level of talent, mastership, and spiritual development.

Self-preparation demands from the actor the ability to work in solitude – because a real artist should be able to work on his role irrespective of potential reactions from friend or foe, irrespective of any extraneous circumstances. Simultaneously it demands a certain openness, an ability to communicate with his partners. It presupposes a constant growth of the actor’s spiritual, intellectual, and artistic potential.

Self-preparation gives birth to an incomparable sensation that the role itself constitutes a complete and fulfilled life that is eventually entrusted into the hands of the actor, thus transforming him into a real author. This generates the attitude of a real master – when the actor assumes full responsibility for his role and takes the initiative for any further development. (Later on it will prove much harder to take this initiative because it will have been taken by the text, by the personnage, by the situations in the play, by the imagination of the theatre director. The initiative will no longer be on the side of the actor; and an actor devoid of initiative cannot be anything more than a better or worse attuned instrument. He will never be capable of ascending to the position of a true artist.)

The role that has been constructed by the actor freely and independently belongs to him and to him alone. He is the real creator. It is he who reveals its inner light, who comprehends its essence, who breaks into its genetic code. Then the actor is no longer afraid of anything. He already “is”, he already exists. And when he arrives for rehearsals, he approaches the theatre director with a suggestion coming from a fellow artist and not with the servility of a footman. He is ready for collective work, for discussion, to search for possible solutions that will guarantee the fruitfulness of this collaboration.

It is in this ability of the actor to prepare the role on his own that I see a guarantee for the very survival of the acting profession and for the survival of the spiritual life of the theatre in general. This is why I consider it timely and appropriate to suggest a certain methodology for this self-preparation to teachers, theatre students, actors and theatre directors. I call this methodology the “Vertical of the Role” because that is what it aims to construct – the vertical dimension of the role.

Part II The Vertical of the Role

1. Meeting in private

The first meeting with the role is a quite crucial moment to which, usually, actors and directors do not pay too much attention. However, it is here that the road to understanding the essence of the play really starts – and the beginning of any path is always important. I often see how actors read the play in the underground or on the bus, occasionally distracted by a friendly chat or a tasty sandwich. I used to do the same myself. But now I understand that if the first meeting with a role happens in this way, then, right from the outset, the actor inevitably acquires a somewhat consumerist attitude towards it. He mainly thinks about the ways of “getting“ the role, of “using“ or “swallowing“ it, of “eating it up“. Or, to quote Stanislavsky “… the process of tasting a role is definitely worth much more attention than it is usually paid. Unfortunately most artists are unaware of this gospel-truth …”.6

For me the real moment should be more hidden and magical; it is both lighter and more ritualistic because ultimately it will give birth to a new life. An attitude that is too prosaic or pragmatic, carelessness, prejudice, or too much juvenile passion during this moment of the first meeting with the role usually lead to very poor results. Later on the actor will find it extremely difficult to change his first opinion concerning the role, to change that fixed and rigid knowledge about it. It is much better to start with a light and rather vague sensation, even if this proves subsequently to be imprecise; this sensation is still capable of setting the actor free. Every experienced actor knows that a good part might never reveal itself immediately. On the contrary, it almost plays hide-and-seek with the actor; it suggests some powerful and brilliant possibilities, phrases, and passages where the actor can demonstrate his gift, his inner charm and temperament, where he can make use of funny or tragic situations. It is a game like any other but being a game it demands from the player the ability to be light, sincere, open and free; at the same time, the player should be attentive enough not to fall into the traps presented by the text. Everything should start with these first sensations, with a little game. If you are able to start playing with your role right from the very first meeting, you will find it much easier to go deeper into its meaning afterwards and you will find it easier to start looking for its spirit, for its inner fire, and the source of its energy.

Where and how should an actor get acquainted with his role? I think that the so-called “readings“ of the play in the theatre, usually organised for the whole team of actors, are quite futile because they lead actors away from their personal perceptions of the material. This inevitably happens even if the “readings“ are quite “artistic“ – even if, for example, they are arranged in a quite spectacular and theatrical way, accompanied by music, poems, and paintings. And even if the “reading“ is quite neutral, if it resembles the minutes of a meeting, if it is aimed only at transmitting the author’s text, then still to some extent it burdens actors with the inner position, ideas, and attitudes of whoever does the reading and with the intonations and colouring of his voice. I could go even further: to my mind, the actor is better off without even listening to the voice of the author because that very voice might prevent him from hearing something of the utmost importance. What exactly? We’ll come back to that issue later.

Sometimes in the theatre “readings“ take place after casting has been completed; and the actors, even though they listen to the whole of the play, actually hear only the texts of their respective roles being articulated by someone else. This is probably the worst way of getting acquainted with your role. For quite some time after I started working as a theatre director I made it a point never to cast my actors in advance. I thought that during that kind of “secretive reading“ the actor might stand a better chance of feeling the play as a whole. However, later on, I realised that the actor is then more concerned about trying to guess which role he is about to land and which one would go to his partner, which role is worth fighting for – and which one should better be left alone; basically, he gives them all a try in his mind, more or less going through the lot as if they were clothes in a shop. This does not happen because actors are so hard, selfish, and calculating – anyway, creativity is always highly self-centred; it happens almost involuntarily, at a subconscious level, and no-one is capable of changing the nature of actors. I came to the conclusion that whatever the version of that collective “reading“ in the theatre, the actor is unable to retain any special magical sensation from his first meeting with the role.

Indeed I became convinced that the actor must invariably meet the role and the play on his own, in the solitude of his home, or wherever he wants; the main thing is to do it himself, without any intermediaries involved. It is quite an intimate moment that does not belong to the rest of the world. Later on, as soon as the actor has worked out his own attitude towards his part, one can organise any amount of discussions – but in the beginning it should be a strictly one-to-one meeting. I would like to quote another remark of K. Stanislavsky: “… I count upon the situation when an artist will feel, even guess a play according to his own taste, according to his own personality. I count upon the natural, unaffected but necessarily independent, intuitional perception.”7

Personally I prefer reading the play either early in the morning, while the mind is still fresh and free from everyday cares, then switching off my phone and asking not to be disturbed. Or I read it late at night when my family is already asleep; then, having read it, I set it aside, shelving it away in my subconscious mind, in order to go on analysing it in my sleep; in the morning it seems to be completely different, and so I have to start anew.

Judging by my own mistakes, I can assure you that it is not worth your time rushing to the library for the relevant references; you do not really need all those lengthy discussions and lectures from specialists on literature, history, and social customs of the time. Before the actor determines his own attitude towards his part, he is unable to critically evaluate the opinions of the theatre director, of experienced partners, or renowned specialists. He will certainly need all that later on in the process of his work but at the beginning there is no room for anyone else; there should be only the actor and his role present. It is their affair, their shared secret, their own secretive dialogue. Whatever one might have heard before about the play and about the role in the form of opinions or discussions is of no importance now; one should invariably start with a blank page.

Obviously, it is pretty difficult to start with a blank page when you are dealing with a classical play. The actor must read it with his own eyes, liberating himself from the burden of someone else’s theatre clichés and traditions. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a very close collaborator of Stanislavsky, co-founder of Moscow Art Theatre, and an outstanding theatre director, used to say: “I have the text of the play right in front of me, I do not want to know anything about its previous history – whether a literary or a theatre one. I only know the author who wrote that play. I have absolutely no wish to find out what exactly they tell you about that author in world literature, and I have no wish either to go through layers of information concerning previous theatre productions of that play. (Later on I will try to find it out anyway, because I will have to correct my own work.) What is important for me now is the genuine text. Being a contemporary of some particular theatre aesthetics, the author belonged to the theatre culture of his epoch ( … ) with its specific stage demands, tasks and theatre effects, with this or that specific design, with this or that predominant feeling or passion, with specific ways of translating the actors’ charm to the audience, etc.. I try to get rid of all that. ( … ) The theatre has changed; the theatricality itself is different now, as well as the emotional response of the public; therefore all the ways and means of affecting the audience are no longer the same … To approach the classical text without all these pre-conceived opinions; that task is truly difficult to accomplish, but it is the one that gives us most satisfaction.“8

Confronted by a classical play, the actor should ask himself where the source of all the power lies, all the energy that sustains its inner life right through to the present day. One must read it in such a way as if a present-day playwright were writing it for the present-day theatre, as if he were composing it especially for actors with their present-day mentality. Conversely, when you are working on a contemporary play, you should approach it in exactly the opposite way; in other words, you should be able to perceive it as a well-known classical work that has been alive for centuries, as a text that has been already turned into a myth, with words and sayings that have already become famous quotations and proverbs. One could conduct a kind of experiment: imagine how a particular contemporary play, its characters, its text might be perceived in a hundred or two hundred years. What will remain forever? What will be forgotten the next day? What will always be meaningful and what is nothing more than the reflection of a current fashion? The actor will then have to decide whether to drop the role altogether or try and find answers to all these questions. Each and every new role presents new challenges and no-one but the actor himself can ever respond to them. It is important to define these challenges; it is essential to determine where they all belong. This would eventually mean that we have managed to find the right way towards comprehending the role.

2. The invisible life of visible things

Interpreting the later works of Stanislavsky and in particular his method of physical actions in a somewhat bizarre way, many teachers and theatre directors often recommend that actors follow a certain order in their work on the role. In their opinion, the actor should start with mastering the life of a human body, only later gradually homing in on the life of the spirit. To my mind, this is hardly a correct interpretation of that particular method; moreover it is indicative of a purely materialistic approach towards creating something alive.

That is probably one of the reasons why this methodology, propounded by Lee Strasberg, became so popular in the United States. Actors would often opt for this approach, it being easy to understand, rather than for the somewhat vague suggestion that they should concentrate on the spirit and inner light of a role.

However, after studying the life of a human body, the actor would go no further, being satisfied with the external outline of the role, with the natural behaviour associated with it, and with the inner logic and purposefulness of his actions. It is essentially impossible and even absurd to try and fill up the role with its inner spirit afterwards. The spirit is always something that precedes matter; it is the spirit that is the real foundation of life. I cannot imagine starting my work on a role other than by searching for its inner spirit and trying to comprehend it. The “life of the body“ is certainly an important issue but it should be dealt with simultaneously with the primary one. To me it seems strange to investigate the movement of the body or the sound of the voice of the actor on separate lines from this spiritual foundation – let alone trying to fix it separately. As Anatoly Vasiliev, my teacher, repeatedly told us, one should concentrate rather on investigating the spiritual life of the role, while the body together with the voice should remain in a perpetual state of improvisation. That is the only way one can hope to bring together the structured thinking and unstructured playing. With any other approach one would have to be satisfied with the usual clichés and a more or less clever imitation of the living process.

Let us consider the life of a person as a kind of movement along the line of its major events: a person is born, then we can look at his school years, take a glimpse of his first love, learn something about his education, his family, his job, his children, and so on. Whatever the specific events and whatever the order they come in, they all lead to an end with which all of us mortals are well familiar. If we regard and investigate human life according to these events from beginning to end, we can only hope to understand its visible part. However, the invisible life also exists. The life of the human spirit follows different rules and is filled with different events. This kind of life is less known and we do not often draw much attention to it. Its events are less noticeable and the road itself is devoid of any end; here our journey is directed towards infinity.

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