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It’s been a while since I’ve been on this tumblr, but I’m bringing it back.

I ask you to note especially that the dependence of the body on the soul is particularly important in our school of art. In order to express a most delicate and largely subconscious life it is necessary to have control of an unusually responsive, excellently prepared vocal and physical apparatus. This apparatus must be ready instantly and exactly to reproduce most delicate and all but intangible feelings with great sensitiveness and directness. That is why an actor of our type is obliged to work so much more than others, both on his inner equipment, which creates the life of the part, and also on his outer physical apparatus, which should reproduce the results of the creative work of his emotions with precision.

To play truly means to be right, logical, coherent, to think, strive, feel and act in unison with your role. If you take all these internal processes, and adapt them to the spiritual and physical life of the person you are representing, we call that living the part.

Norris Houghton...listed the principles of MXAT as: (1) Physical development; (2) work with the actor's personal psychology involving self-control of the nervous system; (3) development of imagination and fantasy; (4) "offered circumstances" -- learning to communicate the specific situations presented by an author; (5) naiveté -- the actor "must believe in what he does and says"; (6) contact between the actors; (7) memorizing emotions; (8) rhythm; (9) developing the internal qualities of a character as well as its external form; (10) defining aim, or motivation. "The exercises bases on this system of Stanislavski's are practiced constantly" [Moscow Rehearsals, 1937)

The future is with naturalism. The formula will be found; it will be proved that there is more poetry in the little apartment of a bourgeois than in all the empty, worm-eaten palaces of history; in the end we will see that everything meets in the real: lovely fantasies that are free of capriciousness and whimsy, and idylls, and comedies, and dramas...First, the romantic drama must be abandoned. It would be disastrous for us to take over its outrageous acting, its rhetoric, its inherent thesis of action at the expense of character analysis. The finest models of the genre are, as has been said, mere operas with big effects. I believe, then, that we must go back to tragedy...to its simplicity of action and its unique psychological and physiological study of characters.

Theatrical performance, in which the basis of representation is the human body, has always been to a large degree mimetic. Yet it is still highly conventionalized. At its most fundamental level performance relies on an unstated contract, where the flat and strictly limited area of the stage (with or without visual aids such as scenic backdrops and furnishings) is accepted as an expandable imaginative space standing for a variety of physical locations, and the actors are credited as being people other than themselves.

The furniture...was worn with use and solid. This became a guiding principle for his subsequent productions: to transport real-life surroundings onto the stage that would create a recognizable and accurately reproduced environment, as a literal embodiment for the deterministic effect of environment on character.

For Ibsen's naturalistic plays to achieve their full dimension on stage, a new form of acting war required, as well as the integration of all these technical elements into a unified aesthetic. For most of the nineteenth century -- particularly in continental Europe -- the standard style of acting was histrionic, using codified gestures to display heightened emotion; and the naturalistic rejection of this traditional stage-expression is well-represented by Stanislavski: "Some of these established cliches have become traditional, and are passed down from generation to generation; as for instance spreading your hand over your heart to express love, or opening your mouth wide to give the idea of death... There are special ways of reciting a role, methods of diction and speech."

Once, the theatre could begin as magic: magic at the sacred festival, or magic as the footlights came up. Today, it is the other way round. The theatre is hardly wanted and its workers are hardly trusted. So we cannot assume that the audience will assemble devoutly and attentively. It is up to us to capture its attention and compel its belief. To do so we must prove that there will be no trickery, nothing hidden. We must open our empty hands and show that really there is nothing up our sleeves. Only then can we begin.

Grotowski, like a monk who finds a universe in a grain of sand, calls his holy theatre a theatre of poverty. The Elizabethan theatre that encompassed all of life including the dirt and the wretchedness of poverty is a rough theatre of great richness. The two are not nearly as far apart as they might seem.

When I once staged [Measure] I asked Isabella, before kneeling for Angelo's life, to pause each night until she felt the audience could take it no longer -- and this used to leave to a two-minute stopping of the play. The device became a voodoo pole -- a silence in which all the invisible elements of the evening came together, a silence in which the abstract notion of mercy became concrete for that moment to those present.

The power of Shakespeare's plays is that they present man simultaneously in all his aspects: touch for touch, we can identify and withdraw. A primitive situation disturbs us in our subconscious; our intelligence watches, comments, philosophizes. Brecht and Beckett are both contained in Shakespeare unreconciled. We identify emotionally, subjectively -- and yet at one and the same time we evaluate politically, objectively in relation to society. Because the profound reaches past the everyday, a heightened language and a ritualistic use of rhythm brings us to those very aspects of life which the surface hides: and yet because the poet and the visionary do not seem like ordinary people, because the epic state is not one on which we normally dwell, it is equally possible for Shakespeare with a break in his rhythm, a twist in to prose, a shift into slangy conversation or else a direct word from the audience to remind us -- in plain common-sense -- of where we are and to return us to the familiar rough world of spades as spades. So it is that Shakespeare succeeded where no one has succeeded before or since in writing plays that pass through many stages of consciousness. What enabled him technically to do so, the essence, in fact, of his style is a roughness of texture and a conscious mingling of opposites which in other terms could be called an absence of style. Voltaire could not bring himself to understand it, and could only label it 'barbaric'

Our need in the post-Brecht theatre is to find a way forwards, back to Shakespeare. In Shakespeare the introspection and the metaphysics soften nothing. Quite the reverse. It is through the unreconciled opposition of Rough and Holy, through an atonal screech of absolutely unsympathetic keys that we get the disturbing and the unforgettable impressions of his players. It is because the contradictions are so strong that they burn on us so deeply.