Video transcript
@The Arts Unit Art Bites – Characterisation – 11. Konstantin Stanislavski's system of acting to create believable characters

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JANE SIMMONS: Hi, everyone. I'm Jane Simmons from The Arts Unit, the Drama Performance Officer for the Department of Education. And we are at the penultimate episode of Characterisation. Penultimate means second last. Always thinking about increasing your literacy as we go, so you can be insightful and a master of vocabulary as well as an expert on characterisation when we're finished. I'm doing it for you.

Today, we're going to continue our journey into the Stanislavski system of acting to create believable characters. Our focus today is on the magic if, muscle and emotional memory. So, let's go into the world of memory and imagination for a moment. Our life is made up of things we've experienced and the possibilities of things yet to be. So, essentially, we're a combination of instinct, imagination, experience, and memory.

So, when we act in the dramatic form of realism, it has to look as natural as possible so our audience believe us. I mean, think about movies and TV shows with far-fetched plots, like 'Star Trek.' And I'm not dissing 'Star Trek.' I'm actually a big fan. But that is fair to say that no one has experienced the events explored in their narratives.

We have not been to other planets. We have not travelled across the universe. We have not met and interacted, knowingly, with aliens. We can't travel at warp speed or live in a galaxy class starship.

We are also aware that none of that will ever realistically be possible. But, we understand the human experience. So, when the characters respond with a truthful, natural, and believable way to their extraordinary circumstances, we suspend our disbelief.

So, how do we convince an audience that our acting is natural and believable? Well, once we've read the script, worked out all the information we can garner from the playwright, it's time for the actor to bring their skill and experience to the character, which brings us back to the magic if, emotional and muscle memory. So, let's start with memory.

Remember we did our unit on Jacques Lecoq and referred to his idea of the body remembers? Well, that's the essence of muscle and emotional memory, also known as sense memory. Our body remembers sensations such as heat and cold, pain and pleasure, illness, exhilaration. You get the idea.

Smells can conjure up memories, as can songs or images. A photo can transport me back into the place and time of where it was taken. The smell of a roast lamb cooking takes me back to Sunday family dinners. Everything we perceive, interpret, and feel in life is filtered through our five senses and stored in our subconscious.

Locked in the cells of our body is a memory of those things. And as humans, we have the ability to recall those sensations. As actors, then, it's an important tool to be able to have sense recall. Because if I'm playing a scene during a summer season for a scene set in the dead of winter, I can't play the circumstances of now but have to recall what it was like to be freezing and convince the audience of the character's reality.

Also, I don't want to have to spend a scene thinking about what the body has to do. I need to rely on the muscle memory to do it, so I can get on to responding to the stimulus of the scene. Or the acting part, sometimes, and I don't know if I should admit this, but when I'm driving, the body can go into autopilot and seems to know how to get to places without me having to think about it. Or if you play a musical instrument, you will know that the body remembers how to play and adapt.

Same with gaming and exercise. You may have not ridden a bike for decades, but the body remembers what to do and starts to respond quickly to using those muscles again, after a few days of walking like an old person. When I tell you I can still pull out 'Nutbush City Limits' every time I hear that song, it's my age-dilapidated old muscles for real.

So, think of the other things the body knows. Tension, grief, happiness, freedom, fitness, exhaustion, fear, the body has an impulse for all of these. And that needs to be shown physically in performance. Sometimes it's very subtle, but it has to be believable.

Acting is like being an athlete. So, you might want to stand comfortably and close your eyes as we start this one. If it feels like an exercise in meditation, don't fight it.

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All right. Activity 1. Close your eyes. Start with a few deep breaths. Let's get the body calm and centred.

Try breathing through your nose and pushing the air all the way into your belly. And when you exhale, open your mouth and push all the air out, contracting your abdominal muscles until the last of the air is gone. And then repeat that for three breaths while we get ourselves centred.

Sometimes it helps to breathe in for a count of three, hold for a count of three, and exhale for a count of three. I'll do one with you. So, breathing in, two, three. Hold, two, three. Exhale, two, three. And then repeat.

Sometimes, if you ever feel anxious, this is a really good way to find your centre and to feel a sense of calm. It's also a good exercise to do if you're struggling to sleep at night. It's a way of relaxing the body and letting it know you're OK. And it's really good just before you enter a stage that you just get your breath centred.

OK. So, now you're hopefully a little more relaxed than before. So, let's see how responsive your body is to memory.

Think of something you love to eat. Picture it in your mind's eye. Can you recall its smell? Take it in. Does it have layers of smell?

Is your body already starting to respond to it? Maybe saliva or joy creeping in. Think about how it feels to touch that food and how it makes you feel when you eat it. Just take a moment with it, and visualise it. Use your senses.

Now think of a food you hate, and do the same thing. The smell, the texture, the sight, your body has an innate response to that, too.

Think about, now, the hottest place you've ever been, like uncomfortable hot. Think of a time where you were so hot that it was hard to move or relax. It might be one of those summer's days of 45 degrees plus, where perhaps you were trapped in a classroom without air conditioning, or a steam room or sauna. Let your body start to respond to how it felt and how oppressive, perhaps, that heat felt. What does it do to your breathing?

Now think about a time when heat was like a hug from your mum, maybe a hot shower on a cold day or lying in the warm sand at the beach. Can you conjure the smells and feel of the heat of your skin or the sand under your body? Can you remember a time after you've come out of the ocean and the sun dries the water and salt onto your skin, the crisp and crackling noise of salt drying, and that stiff, salty feel on your skin?

What about sounds at the beach? The excited children running in and out of the water, the seagulls, the people running around you, the sound of the waves, people in the water, music coming from somewhere close but muffled in clarity as it travels through space and time, sort of those tinny speakers.

What can you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste? How does it make you feel thinking back to the beach and being on it? Open your eyes if you haven't already. Did you find it much easier to immerse yourself in the sense memory through visualising it?

You know there are life coaches who might get you to visualise success in order to manifest success, and it's the same principle here. You conjure the memory or image to give it life in your actions. We can do the same with emotions, but be careful with this. Don't focus on emotions that are raw or will affect your mental health, often dwelling on things where emotion oversteps and overrides the character.

The last thing we want is an actor who is not in control of their emotions. Plus, we want you to be living your best life. Your well-being is much more important than a scene or a performance.

The idea of sense memory, as we stated before, is that the body should be able to go into autopilot. All the things I used to have to do when I started driving, seat belt on, foot on the clutch. Put the car into gear. Switch on the ignition. Check the front and side mirrors, indicator on. I don't have to break that into separate movements to be executed, because they're now wired into my muscle memory, and I can do them without thinking.

And it's the same when we walk and move. I don't have to think about putting one foot in front of the other, but as a toddler, of course, I did. And it's why rehearsals are fundamental to preparing for performance. I need to go through my blocking and my timing and the rhythms of the scene, as well as the script and character analysis, so that when the performance time begins, I can focus on the scene in the most natural way. Preparation is the step where you learn everything, and execution is where you can let it go completely.

Allowing your body to remember what it learned during rehearsal is important. Your muscles will remember if you've done the preparation. A professional athlete trains every day in order to prepare for the big match. And once he's on the court, there is no more thinking about what he's going to do. He just does it.

And in acting the answer lies in making everything we can a conditioned reflex so we don't have to think about it. In other words, to make sure you don't look like a toddler learning to walk for the first time, spend time preparing your movement and sense memory so that it is second nature. It shouldn't be the focus of your scene but an organic part of making people believe you in action.

So, that's the emotional and physical sense memory in a very condensed form. Lee Strasberg, a practitioner who expanded on Stanislavski's system, has created some great sensory exercises. And I urge you to seek them out if you want to do any further research and activities in this area. He does a fabulous one with coffee.

Ah, coffee. It smells so good, tastes so bitter. Is that just me? Personally, nothing beats a freshly brewed pot of chai. [inhales deeply]

I digress. Moving on, so let's look at the magic if. Obviously, there are things beyond our experience. For instance, you might have to play a scene where you're a parent, a nuclear physicist. Perhaps your character has a medical condition that you don't have in real life, or your character his experience war, poverty, royalty, riches, loss. You get the idea.

There are many things in life that you could play in a scene that you have not yourself experienced. So, if it's not buried in your memories, what do you do? Two main things - research, imagination.

What we have is the ability to imagine what things would be like on the basis of our research and imagination. The fundamental questions really help in this regard, too. So, when we are outside of our own life experience, we ask the question, what if?

So, what would happen if I got drafted into the army and was heading off to war? What would happen if I found out I was pregnant? What would happen if I accidentally killed someone? What would happen if I found out my cat could talk? And she can. All cats can - fact.

What would happen if I woke up in a starship? What would happen if I woke up 20 years in the future, or went back in time to when my parents were my age, or back 100 years ago? Well, there's the whole 'Back to the Future' franchise right there.

Sometimes we can use similar experiences to help us imagine. I'm going to make a presumption you've never killed someone. But you may have felt uncontrollable rage or completely lost the plot. So, you could use some of that sense memory and leave the rest to the imagination.

Yes. In fact, please do that. Please do not go all method on me now and commit some terrible crime. No.

So, as an activity in the magic if, and you can do this with a partner at school or with a sibling, or set the activity for yourself, I want you to imagine something that is an experience no one has ever had, like a superpower or travelling to another universe, or time travel, or discovering your pet can talk. Now either give that activity to your partner or do it yourself. Plan it out and really immerse yourself with your imagination and your sense memory. And remember, the goal is that we need to believe it.

Then, once you have done your preparation, perform your scene. And if you're doing this as a class exercise, get feedback about what they believed and what they didn't. And use that to help you next time.

And here's a tip. Don't play it for the laugh. I mean, you can be funny. But use the fourth wall, and let the humour come because the situation you are in is outrageous. And remind yourself, if this were real, would I, as the character in this scene, find it funny?

Your audience can completely find it hilarious, but you are not playing it as a stand-up comedy routine. You must find the truth in the moment, wherever that takes you. And good luck.

In our last episode, coming up, we're going to do an overview of everything we've learned so far, as well as a little quiz on drama literacy and what we did over the 11 units. And you are going to smash it. See you then.

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