How Did Stanislavski React to All These New Ideas?
At first, a “war” broke out. It began when he was confronted with the idea that the real cause of failures in teaching at the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) studios and school was neither haste nor a lack of professionalism or talent among the students. When he was invited to experiment with a completely new […]
“Technique-unfaithful”
At S.A.M., we honor tradition. We respect all existing methods and techniques. However, we constantly challenge the rules to create new approaches. The idea that actors should be “technique-unfaithful,” exploring various disciplines and methods, is not groundbreaking, but it remains essential. Anyone who has set foot on stage or worked in diverse environments knows that […]
Actor’s imagination is PHYSICAL
The actor’s imagination is not intellectual, it is physical, the director can be intellectual, the writer can be intellectual, but the actor’s imagination is always physical. Actors are always trying to avoid the inevitable — getting up — so we talk…then the director talks…then the actors talk back and now we are all chatting about it. Don’t […]
ONE LINERS Part 3
“The capacity to take infinite pains is the most intelligent definition of genius.” This is not an easy job, actually let me rephrase that, this in not an easy art from and the environment sucks…most of the time the director is crazy, the partner is a narcissist or plain unprofessional, the director is a control […]
ONE LINERS Part 2
This time lets go back to even older times still ine the “modern acting” era but before the 1920’s, keep reminding yourself that one-liners hold in them a natural truth or better yet a true observation, but they are truisms, also some might repeat, this is because we might find them in different teachers, why […]
ONE LINERS Part 1
Wynn Handman, Meisner’s right hand (Hand-man — See what happened right there? ) and protégé for many years (if you want to learn more about this see the documentary “it takes a lunatic”) used to say in interviews that Meisner was pretty good at giving one-liners (our Greek: tsitata) to his students, you know the […]
The Usefulness of Mistakes
It is not a good sign when a student performs all exercises flawlessly and rarely makes mistakes. This means that they are not giving the green light to many things emerging within them—they are keeping themselves in a moderate, safe valley, where they can walk comfortably with their eyes closed, knowing there are no holes, […]
