The History of our Technique
Our technique has its origins in the work of Constantin Stanislavski, the much-maligned Russian actor, director and theatrical innovator, who offered the world a systematised approach to acting, which has become known as his ‘system’. We tip our cap to the development of a technique based on psychological action and then we part company.
The next development of our technique comes when Stanislavski’s system had been adopted in the United States and turned into the Method. Under Lee Strasberg’s reign, the system took on a uniquely American flavour and focused on the psychoanalytical elements that were all but dormant in Stanislavski’s system of acting. Sanford Meisner, one of Lee’s contemporaries and one of his students disagreed with his focus on the emotional truth of the actor, and instead focused on truthful behaviour. It focused on ‘doing’ and Meisner believed that the ‘foundation of acting is the reality of doing.‘ There are many elements of Meisner’s philosophy that chime with us, but we are less interested in the application of his technique.
Playwright David Mamet thought he wanted to be an actor, so he took classes with Meisner. He wasn’t particularly good, and wasn’t asked back into second year. But Mamet has an exceptional mind and through his own research and practice, he began to devise a way of working that took some elements of Meisner’s technique and stripped away much of what he found was unnecessary in that approach.
I learned Mamet’s technique of Practical Aesthetics at the Atlantic Theater Company in New York, taught by some of Mamet’s original students. Over the years, we have evolved the technique in our Glasgow acting studio to suit our needs. A technique should be fluid and not rigid, it should suit its practitioners needs and not restrain them. But the technique is very unlike the Stanislavski system, Strasberg’s Method, the Meisner technique or Practical Aesthetics itself. The aim of our technique is for it to simply dissolve into you.
There are only a few elements:
Understand the actable parts of the script
Work off the other person
Always have an achievable task to do in the scene
Sooner or later, this just evaporates into common sense.
A technique should be simple and learnable and your place in the development of that technique should be measurable.
It should equip you with a language to articulate your art, it should offer you tools that could be used the day after on a film set, it should make sense without requiring faith. It should be free of mysticism. The number of actors I hear say that their training was never used again – no wonder they are suspicious of techniques, if they learned in school and never applied again – I would suspect them too!
It shouldn’t require other practitioners of the same technique to make good art with, nor should it demand that the director works your way.
Our technique has now evolved considerably and a name change from Practical Aesthetics is definitely in our future. Like Bruce Lee when he named Jeet Kune Do, I’m afraid of the limiting effect of giving something fluid a name. But ultimately, if people are to differentiate it from other approaches, and we are talk about it to actors, it needs a name, we can’t just keep calling it ‘common sense’.
If you’d like to find out more about the difference betweenStanislavski and Mamet’s ideas, or the difference betweenMamet and the Method, here are a few blogs.