Constantin Stanislavski, the famous Russian theatre director, introduced a set of actor preparation methodologies in early 20th century where he proposed that actor preparation should be revolved around psychological experiences along with physical and vocal exercises. Emotional experiences and subconscious behavior must be the main driving force in order to be a great actor. An actor must train her subconscious so well that any emotion related to any circumstances, incidents or activities can be reproduced on stage.Emotion memory and Inner Realism is the most intriguing concept among all the theorems in Stanislavski’s System perhaps. He said that actors must collect and store all the memories related to various emotional encounters inside individual subconscious and later those are vented out on stage. Visual and sensual memory must be powerful enough that can be reconstructed later and some extended activities can be derived upon that.Sometime these emotions are stronger, sometimes weaker, those may not be in same intensity, but should be felt later on. Those collective experiences must create a vast reservoir of expressions and visual memories. An actor must have a supreme command on her subconscious and she must be agile enough for quick transformations between few discrete points. It is very difficult for any human being to keep all the memories for longer period of time. The sense of smell, touch and taste play an important role here.
The experiment has been done on few theatre actors and collaborated with them for a period of five years. Most of the actors continue theatre along with other jobs to earn a living in India. Theatre is a burning passion where they do not expect any monetary gain and this structure has been in place for many years. Most of the theatre groups run on meagre monthly subscription from the actors themselves. Ticket sales are mostly eaten up by the huge production cost. Few groups still hang on with huge debt of loans. Government grants are very limited and confined within the reach of few influential people only. After the IPTA (Indian People's Theatre Association) movement in 1940s, the overall aesthetics and form of Indian theatre got completely changed. Theatre became a weapon for protest and social reformer with superior content. Since then it was hardly tried to make it as a publicly consumable art with a significant commercial angle like cinema. But there is no complaint as this has been proven to be the perfect structure to establish the larger theatrical purpose.
So, it is interesting to see how these people juggle between different segments of their lives where in one part they run around to earn money and in other, they just feed their hunger of passion where they try to be someone else on stage. Most of them are not so lucky that they can spend their entire day into theatre. A corporate employee quickly becomes a shop keeper or a school teacher becomes a queen in a Greek tragedy. All these characters often confronted each other in their daily lives and create a huge behavioral and psychological conflicts and it is very difficult to handle sometime when they are not on stage. Daily hustles often enter into the theatrical spaces without any intimation. People around them, mainly the family members often get confused when they talk, sleep and eat with these dualities.
All the patterns have been tried to re-stage outside of their theatrical spaces and studied the behavioral and environmental conflicts where they are currently in and how the external factors stimulate the internal psych and emotion of individual when they are not on stage. It is very difficult to maintain Stanislavski in reality, especially in such a structure where an actor hardly get adequate chance and time to imbibe and get into the characters she is playing or continuously practicing to improve her emotion memory. Daily struggle with surroundings and quest to earn little extra money for family push back every other thing to oblivion. The artistic expressions often get extended to a mundane, non-artistic, trivial activities where it is very difficult to manage in conventional way. It is important that an actor must search within the inner soul to get into the core of the characters. An artist always looks with different set of eyes with emotion and imagination. This often leads to a pathetic, horrific past with unforgettable memories. In this way sometime the original self is lost forever and the eternal fight between the self and the multiple fictional selves goes on for indefinite period of time. Some survive, some do not. But the search goes on and the theatre.
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