The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit

The main purpose of our art [is] to create the life of a human soul and render it in artistic form.

he challenge is to try and create a sense that every day’s training or rehearsal or performance could be a ‘holiday’. Or, to pick up a term from Peter Brook – a ‘holy’ day.

The more effortless you can be in your actor-training, the more pleasure you’ll take in your creative process.

Remember to devote the greatest possible attention to the slightest sign of depression in yourself!

The ability to concentrate flows naturally from the ability to choose something interesting. Choose something legitimately interesting to do and concentration is not a problem. Choose something less than interesting and concentration is impossible.

He believed that if you could free your body of every sort of tension, your inner life would respond accordingly, and then you could more readily and accurately ‘reflect the life of the play in which [you’re] appearing’

The struggle for priority among actors, directors, jealousy of each other’s success, divisions caused by differences in salaries and types of parts – all this is strongly developed in our line of work and constitutes its greatest evil. We cloak our ambition, jealousy, intrigues, with all kinds of fine-sounding phrases such as ‘enlightened competition’, but all the time the atmosphere is filled with the poison gases of backstage backbiting.17

And many never even go near Building a Character (the published English-language name of the second volume), which includes many of the physical perspectives.
Curiously, the third book in what might be called Stanislavsky’s English-language ‘trilogy’ – Creating a Role – contains some of his most revealing ideas, and yet it remains elusive. Maybe because it’s an amalgam of various writings, rather than a complete book in its own right. As a result, few readers fully fathom its practicability – which is a shame, because it’s gold-dust.

gentle cats among some gentle pigeons

the GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES is not about acquiring a whole list of facts and figures; it’s about appealing to your IMAGINATION, to your ‘personal creative feelings’ and then stimulating your desire to get up and act out the script’s drama.
What you’re doing is seeking physical ACTIONS and feeling their impact on your inner landscape. Which gives us another equation: Given Circumstances + Actions = Powerful Emotions. Stanislavsky himself is keen to emphasise this.
We artists must realise the truth that even small physical movements, when injected into given circumstances, acquire great significance through their influence on emotion.62