Sense Memory: Why We Can’t Agree

I give Method Acting a hard time. As the dominant ideology in Western acting, it deserved to be questioned, critiqued, interrogated and perhaps even ridiculed a wee bit. Any technique whose practitioners feel religiously offended when the technique is criticised shouldn’t need defending in the first place.

Because I don’t think much of Method acting technique, I receive two lots of complaints: you don’t understand it, and if you understood it, you would appreciate it a lot more. Thusly, I am ignorant of the Method and ignorant of its potential.

Next the complainants protest that I do not represent Method acting as they have experienced it, thus again, I am wrong and ignorant.

Further still, it appears that if I am not a world-class director who has trained in every form of acting, I am not qualified to critique.

Actually I think the problem is a much simpler one than any of these complaints reveal.

To explain, let’s use an example. In both Method acting and the Stanislavski system there are exercises called Sense Memory.

Depending upon the particular style of acting, this exercise is either used to help the actor to accept the imaginary circumstances or as preparation for Emotion/Affective/Emotional/Memory/Recall.

The exercises are simple things. By using the memory stored in you through your 5 senses and your imagination, you develop faith in theatrical truth, in other words, you create a belief in fictional things, you imagine things that aren’t before you are before you, primarily by recalling the modal sensations.

When you can treat imaginary things like they are real to you, you can believe in the imaginary circumstances of a scene, couple this with a thorough knowledge of your character and you can act with faith out of any imagined scenario, treating it like it is real.

In preparation for the Affective Memory exercise, you use sense memory to help you attune your senses to your memories so they can easily be recalled and experienced again.

But the thing is, I can’t agree with these exercises at all. So when I see Method acting, I don’t just disagree with it as an idea, I disagree with some of its fundamental building blocks.

I don’t believe you have to pretend anything to be an actor. To me, it is a moment to moment real-world interaction with another person. I believe the audience pretend, that’s their end of the deal. Actors on the other end of the deal, know how the trick is done, so do those things that most help convince the audience if their own willing delusions.

So if you don’t believe in entering the fictional world or you don’t believe that you can act as the character, or you don’t think you need to pretend anything, or express your emotions, if the very building blocks on which the Method stands do not make sense to your model of acting, then to you, these children’s games are utter flap doodle, an unnecessary waste of time.

It is not a misunderstanding of technique or value, it is a belief that the things involved are surplus to requirement.

Oh but if only I saw how useful it really was, I would learn to love the Method and use it successful too.

Your self delusional model of acting doesn’t interest me. I am for the truthful and the real. A real human transaction that has little to do with the script itself because the script was written to be heard and is not a blueprint for performance.

Acting to me is an improvised human transaction, a real set of actions and reactions.

And as so, I see Sense Memory as a way to fill up time in acting class. I’m not sure it even works, personally I am not fond of self delusion, it’s unnecessary.