In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian and Soviet theater actor was looking to create a sense of realism in performances. Generally, acting at the time was mostly just taking on poses and saying the words. He wanted to create a way for actors to seem “real” rather than “presentational” in their performances. To that end he began to develop his “System” of acting methods.

Using Personal Emotional Pain

One of his major solutions to getting more realistic performances was to get the actor to use their own past, traumas, life and internal existence while playing a different character in a play.

This caused the actor to relive or revivify their own emotional past while trying to play the part. This obviously leads to being constantly reminded of and upset by past moments of traumatic pain in order to “act”.

Imagining Yourself In the Scene

In addition to the personal

emotional memory approach mentioned above, he also promoted the idea of using your imagination, which, in itself, is a necessary part of any art form. But his use of it was to have  you imagine yourself in the circumstances or emotional turmoil of the play. This led the actor to believe they were supposed to “be themselves” and, at the same time, “be the character” in the piece.

This led to confusion and internal second-guessing among actors, because they were trying to live in the present as the character while also looking inward, trying to imagine themselves in it, and judging the “correctness” or “appropriateness” of their own ideas, feelings, and reactions.

The Legacy of Confusion in Acting Training Today

While these techniques did sometimes lead to more “realistic looking” performances, the performances still lacked real authenticity and intensity because the actor was primarily focused inwardly and constantly“in and out” of character – often struggling through the experience. These approaches also led to actors being personally damaged as they were continually living in and stirring up their own painful or traumatic past moments.

Stanislavski’s techniques (with further alterations and the inclusion of psychoanalysis, relaxation techniques, repetition exercises, dream techniques, etc.) were adopted or partly borrowed by Lee Strasberg, Sandy Meisner, Stella Adler, and many others. Over time, more and more actors were taught these techniques, which was mixed and quilted in with other ideas and approaches as it was passed down from one teacher to the next.

Most of the actors who survived this kind of training eventually dropped using these techniques in their work (even if they still occasionally touted it publicly). The few actors who became fully devoted to it were often so damaged that many became personal or professional wrecks.

The Problem with Stanislavski’s System (and it’s Descendants)

Stanislavski’s technique (and its later iterations) failed to create real performances of a real person living a real life. Instead, it ended up creating a “half a character,” “half a person,” and an introverted performance. Whilethis was an advancement from presentational acting into realism, it was still quite a distance from the kind of free, unpredictable, and great performances possible without its pitfalls.

Additionally, in these classes, which tools worked, or what actors should do for a particular part was based on guesswork. And the only way an actor felt like they did well is whether the teacher liked a performance. Thus, this approach also failed to give an actor real tools of their job they could rely on and use competently without needing approval from some outside eye.

By the early 1930’s, Stanislavski began to see the pitfalls and failings of this approach. He told teacher Stella Adler he now believed the actor should not use their emotional or sensory memory to create. And by 1936, Stanislavski asked his friend, actor Vladimir Sokoloff, to tell others to stop using his technique altogether, saying, “Forget all this theory. Don’t apply this. Don’t pay any attention to this… If they try to use it, they will end up spying on themselves, asking, ‘Do I feel it or not?'” But by that point, it was already in use in its various forms or offshoots. And still is by nearly every university, class, and acting teacher in the world today.

It is no wonder that a recent UK study found that 98% of actors quit the profession because they cannot make it, despite the growing number of channels, films, and actors needed every day in the expanding world of online entertainment. What do the working 2% do, that schools and classes aren’t teaching?

Beyond the introverting, self-reflexive flaws of these earlier techniques, the goal of being an actor that can inhabit another character (being a real person, having a real experience in an artistic story) is still a valid fundamental to all great acting.

Committing to a Character is not “The Method”

The ill-informed refer to this skill of inhabiting another character as “Method” acting, despite the fact that most modern actors don’t use the techniques Strasberg experimented with on actors, and that his actual “Method” is not used by most actors today.

This misconception that actors who commit to their characters are all “method” is so rampant that you’ll often see actors trying to avoid journalists’ questions about it, simply because it is so off the mark. Or, in some rare cases, the actor will agree they are “method” just to get through the interview, despite knowing the interviewer really means “committed to the life and experience of the character,” but the actor is clearly not a devotee of Lee Strasberg or his methods. Instead, these actors simply focus on what they need to do to convincingly dive into the life they are going to portray and allow it to sweep them and audiences into the experience of the world of the story they are in.

A New Evolution in Professional Acting Training

In the work here at The Acting Center, there was (and is) no desire to invalidate other specific techniques. These earlier efforts were attempted in the direction of creating more realistic, believable and authentic portrayals. The blind alleys they explored were part of the evolution of the art form. Just because there are large parts of their work that were not ultimately successful, does not make them without any value in the development of a real acting technique –even if just to point out what doesn’t work and where the pitfalls are.

All fields of knowledge evolve and grow if not held back by authoritarianism and personal gain. The guru-based approach to training actors kept acting from evolving quickly.

In the individual actor, when you remove the guru-authority hold on their opinions as fact, the actor’s own work is freed to evolve, grow, and expand uniquely in their own style.

These older methods and techniques may be outdated and provenly unsustainable, but the basic ability to immerse oneself in the life of another human being is still the ultimate expression of empathy, and the heart of what acting is all about.

In fact, the desire to see and experience the world through new eyes is often the reason people become actors in the first place. This ability is not tied to a single technique or style. It is the core skill of acting itself—diving heart-first into another life and living it.

20 Years of Research, Development and Testing Into What Actually Works for Actors

There are definite, proven, and simple ways to approach and do this kind of authentic and transformative work without the failures and pitfalls of these older, less workable efforts at technique.

Our work has been an inclusive analysis, testing and evolution of acting techniques from the last 100 years. And in truth, most acting techniques have been stalled for the last 80 years.* There have been a few modern advancements in simplifying and clarifying a genuine process mostly from actors attempting to delineate their personal process.

But our focus here was to evolve the practicality and freedom in acting as a whole art form by researching, developing, testing and including anything that universally works, while leaving behind the unhealthy, unworkable, or restricting techniques of the past.

What remains is a clear understanding of what underlies all great acting regardless of approach, and purely functional series of potential techniques that give direct paths to artistic freedom and unrestricted creativity for each actor on their own terms.

A Direct Alternative: The Acting Center’s Approach

We teach actors to be creative partners and artistic leaders simultaneously. This evolution of acting technique is clear, direct, and simple to understand, and yet opens a dynamic, magical, and deep creative well for each actor to bring to every performance.

The Acting Center has identified the fundamental laws, natural patterns, and proven techniques that makeup the art of acting, without the dead ends and pitfalls of earlier techniques. Every actor is different and every project is different. By learning the fundamentals that underly all techniques and the available patterns of work you can choose from, actors consistently deliver great performances, experience greater artistic fulfillment, and enjoy increased professional success.

(Footnote)*Acting technique made a huge leap forward around 80 years ago through the work of performers like Eleanor Duse, Laurette Taylor, and other working actors of the period. Unfortunately, this new realistic and alive approach was then co-opted, complicated, and misinterpreted first by Stanislavski and later by Strasberg and others from the Group Theater. These more complex and less effective extrapolations were then sold to actors as the way to achieve the kind of work Duse and Taylor were famous for. This, despite the fact that these masters of this new approach did not actually use these “techniques.” This still goes on with modern actors today—being named “method” or a devotee of this or that technique simply because they understand the fundamentals of acting and are committed to the work in a meaningful way.