Stanislavski Technique

The actor should be capable of identifying the tension in each one of the muscles and releasing this tension by an act of will.  

One of the exercises that help with relaxation is the one introduced by Lee Strassberg. When the actor needs to sit on a chair in a position where one could sleep. Then gradually releasing the tension in the body while still having control of every single muscle involved actor learns to reach new levels of relaxation.

An actor needs to be able to observe every single detail or object. 

Take a slice of lemon or other fruit, feel its texture, weight, and smell, then bite into it. Focus on the taste and the feeling inside your mouth. After some time, try to reproduce the sensation, without the fruit, and recall its texture, weight and smell. Try to bite into the imagined fruit. 

If you were fully concentrated when inspecting the fruit the first time, then you have just experienced sensory recall. 

Something that is trivial for a child, the older we get becomes more and more problematic is imagination. Remember when a stick was a lightsaber, or a machine gun, or when a heap of dirt behind your house turned into a mountain? Or when the dolls came to life or toy cars speeded up through streets at light speed? 

How this applies to acting? Let's say you have a scene in a restaurant, and you have to eat a huge yummy stake. The only problem is that the prop department prepared the dish out of paper mache. What a yummy piece of cardboard, Bon appetite. 

Substitution and Emotional Memory is a technique introduced by Constantin Stanislavski that uses real past internal experiences of the actor as a source of emotions for the external acting. According to Constantin Stanislavski, you have to go deep into your own real-life experiences and then, recall the feeling of the moment and reapply it through substitution on the scene to create a truth full performance that would be realistic. The internal feelings would trigger the required physical reaction.

This technique got later abandoned by Constantin Stanislawski as it was causing mental instability, and instead of using emotional memory from the actor's real life, Constantin Stanislawski opted to use the events from the character's storyline instead. 

According to Stanislavski, the actor should perform the role following the rule of "the magic if". In the simplest form the actor has to ask himself: "If I were in the specific situation and I wanted what the character wants, what would I do".  This technique is especially, important nowadays with the use of blue box and CGI where many things in a scene have to be imagined as they'll get added in post-production. 

Let's say you're a professional mighty ghost hunter in real life, but you are asked to play a young girl scared of darkness. Then even though you are in real life a fantastic superhero, you have to play the scene as if you were a young girl scared of darkness.

The actor has to be completely engrossed in the part. Public solitude means that the actor has to forget forget the fact of being watched. An Actor can achieve that by focusing on the specific action, dramatic task or simply the character's objective. 

Generally, public solitude is experiencing yourself as being in private while being in public.

According to Stanislavski's technique, there has to be a reason for everything happening on stage. The character needs to have the reason and motivation of performing specific actions. For example, in a scene, you might wish to get to the door on the other side of the stage. But why? You need to have a reason, maybe because there's a dead body in the room and you have to run? Maybe running away from the crime is your ultimate goal. In such cases getting out of the room is your objective but running away with the crime is your super objective. Your super objective is the reason for your character's existence in the play. 

The objective needs to be: Singular (one thing), Immediate (right now), and Personal (important to you)