Method Acting

Inspiration Rather Than Imitation

The Method arose to resolve an age old issue for the actor – how to become inspired on cue. As an actor, you have to be able to summon inspiration when the curtain rises or when “Action” is called. This can be a hit or miss experience for many actors. If inspiration does not occur, you are forced to imitate or ‘fake’ the experiences of the character - rather than actually experience them. This can leave you feeling unfulfilled and the audience unmoved.

The Method is a technique allowing you to inspire yourself at will, in part, by reliving your own life experiences and channelling them through the character. This produces real experiences on stage, bringing a high level of depth, believability and spontaneity to your work.

Acting a role is not just learning lines, stage business, set responses and imitating what you did before - it is creating the inner life of the character; including the character’s ongoing thoughts, sensations, perceptions and emotions.

Training The Instrument

In order to do this, you must first master your instrument – Yourself. Unlike a painter who has a paint brush, or a violinist who has a violin, you, the actor, only have yourself - the instrument.

Your instrument is capable of a huge range of emotions, sensations and experiences, and you also bring your own unique personal make-up; mental, physical and emotional to acting.

In order to sensitise you and allow you to use what is available within your instrument, we begin by training the senses. We all experience the world through our senses - we see, we hear, we touch, we smell and we taste. When you train and use your senses in conjunction your memories, it can have a powerful effect on you. This is called Sense and Affective Memory - see Al Pacino’s quote (above, right).
You then fuse your own personal emotion with that of the character and event you are portraying. This allows you to go beyond the conventional and effective way to act, and makes your work more human, more alive, more exciting, more amused and entertained - not on a light level - but on the utmost level which acting is capable of.

History

The development of the Method arose from the workings of Konstantin Stanislavsky in the early 1900’s, who formulated one of the first concise actors approach to training called ‘The System’. Following Stanislavsky’s death, Lee Strasberg continued along the same train of thought in his approach to acting, which led to ‘The Method’.

Strasberg’s aim was to develop the actor’s creative expressiveness, in part, by increasing his awareness and concentration both on a physical and emotional level, enabling the actor to ‘live through’ the moment.

Here are some other traits of this leading edge approach.

The Method allows you to:

• Create real, in-depth, believable characters.
• Eradicate stage fright and nerves using a relaxation process for mind and body.
• Create emotion on-demand.
• Stimulate your belief in where the action takes place.
• Create the illusion of a close relationship with an actor you’ve just met.
• Create exciting and organic acting using unique Method improvisation techniques.
• Say your lines as if it were the first and last time you were ever saying them.
• Create a unique and distinct character physicality.
• Use the given circumstances as a force within the scene.
• Fulfil the writer’s and director’s vision with ease.

As a result of adopting the technique, over 100 Method Actors have won Oscars. Last year, the award for Best Actor went to Forest Whitaker and the year before, Daniel Day-Lewis - both Method Actors.