Bella Merlin quotes Stanislavski (cited by Popov in Reminiscences, p.86) thus:
‘In my involvement with the new methods of inner technique, I sincerely believed that to express the experience [i.e. what the character goes through in the course of the play], the actor need only master the creative state, and that all the rest will follow.’ (Merlin, 2007, p.49, her emphasis).
The essence of the System lies in the prioritising of the personal experience of the actor in the approach to the role, both in terms of drawing upon past experience and the actor’s experience in the moment of performing. This quality of ‘experiencing’ in the moment of performance – perezhivanie in Russian - is the entire aim and raison d’etre of Stanislavski’s System. It…show more content… The ‘flow’ which Carnicke refers to encompasses both the actor’s immersion in the life of the role and, simultaneously, the ability to stand outside of, monitor and control his or her performance. Stanislavski notes that
‘A juggler on horseback in a circus... has to balance his legs and body on the back of a horse, keep an eye on the stick placed on his forehead with a large rotating plate on top of it and, apart from that, he has to juggle with three or four balls. He has many objects at the same time. But he also finds it possible to call out jauntily to the horse.
The juggler can do all this because human beings possess multi-level concentration and one level does not interfere with another.’ (Stanislavski, 2008: 111-2).
This human capacity to be able to concentrate on different things simultaneously he views as entirely positive, with one focus of concentration potentially aiding the others:
In a passage from ‘An Actor’s Work’ Stanislavski notes that the actor ‘has no difficulty in splitting himself in two, i.e. on the one hand he corrects something which is wrong, and, on the other, continues to live his role.The actor lives, weeps, laughs onstage but weeping or laughing he observes his laughter and tears. And it is that double life, that balance between life and the role that art lies.’
