This is an exercise in personalisation we were asked to do at The Stella Adler Studio of Acting, that you can also find in her book: By doing so, you keep yourself in the present your ego lives in the past and the future, and an actor needs to stay in the present! The result is that you bring yourself, and your past experiences, to a role, rather than putting yourself in the past in order to relive old memories. Instead, the “system” asks actors to look at their past with awareness (and not judgement) and at somewhat of a distance. Of course you have to bring your own experience to bear on the characters you play, but you have to realize right from the outset that Hamlet was not “a guy like you.”
“Nowadays a lot of what passes for acting is nothing more than finding yourself in some character. Importantly, this is distinct from the “emotional memory” work employed by some of Adler’s contemporaries, which involves substituting your own experiences for those of a character. This is why it is crucial that you personalise the role you are playing. Characters will lack details that exist in your own life. Personalisation is about how you interact with your own past, and how you work off the past to bring to life a character in the present. Awareness is about seeing something for what it is, and not how you feel about it, and it allows an actor to work from a place of understanding, and not from feeling. Stella Adler’s “system” encourages actors to have size and a depth of understanding, and judgement prevents size. This sounds simple, but you quickly find that you navigate the world clouded by judgement.
#Stella adler studio of acting directing free#
But what actually is awareness work? At the beginning of each Adler Technique class, our teacher asked us the seemingly simple question: “what have you learned?” In response, we told our peers something we had learned since the previous class in a simple statement: a statement free of judgement or preconceived assumptions. But we can only learn from life, if we work on our awareness of it.Īwareness work keeps you present in the world and asks you not to make assumptions or judgements, but rather to observe the world around you. Your work as an actor comes from your relationship to life - your contact to humanity and nature, your relationship to yourself, and your relationships with others. Essentially, this principle is a reminder that acting training does not exist in a vacuum alongside your life, but that it is your life. The Stella Adler Acting Method AwarenessĪ core tenet of Stella Adler’s “system” is that “growth as an actor and growth as a human being are synonymous”. I hope that this will spark your interest, and begin you on an incredibly rewarding journey into growing as an actor, and indeed, as a human being. This is a quick overview of some of the core terms and tenets you will encounter when doing your own research into Stella Adler and her acting “system”, and is by no means an extensive assessment of everything this wonderful woman, and the current Studio in her name, has to offer. Below are some of the fundamental principles I learned in the precious few months I was there, along with a smattering of some of my favourite quotes from Stella Adler: The Art of Acting. This was a life-changing experience for me, and it forever shaped the way I approached acting. When I was a budding young actor, I took myself over to New York City for the summer to attend the Stella Adler Studio of Acting Summer Conservatory. The “system” taught at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting aims to provide actors with the tools, training, and discipline to cultivate a craft, and a life, that allows you to harness the limitless potential of your imagination when approaching a script. The first thing you need to know about Stella Adler, is that she was never dogmatic about a singular method or approach to acting.
0 kommentar(er)
