Creating a Role (Performance Books)

by Constantin Stanislavski (Author), Constantin Stanislavski (Author), Hermione L. Popper (Translator)

• Used

  Paperback
  1980

  $4.19

  No-one has had greater influence on acting as we know it than Stanislavski. His 'system' or interpretations of it - has become the central force determining almost every performance we see on stage or screen. His teaching is principally set out in three famous books: An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role. It is still the only comprehensive theory of acting we possess. In the first book, An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski dealt with the inner imaginative processes. In the second Building a Character, he concentrated on the body, the voice and other physical means of expression. In Creating a Role, the third book, he describes the elaborate preparation that precedes actual performance.Creating a Role describes the elaborate marination that precedes the acutal performance. The analyses of Othello and The Inspector General, which make up Parts Two and Three, show a mind cutting through text like an inspired psneumatic-drill...Altogether Creating a Role is a brilliant little treatise and a careful reading is worth several lessons in almost any English acting academy (Charles Marowitz, The Observer)

• New

  Paperback
  1989

  $37.64

  Creating a Roleis the culmination of Stanislavski's masterful trilogy on the art of acting. An Actor Prepares focused on the inner training of an actor's imagination. Building a Characterdetailed how the actor's body and voice could be tuned for the great roles he might fill.
  This third volume examines the development of a character from the viewpoint of three widely contrasting plays: Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Shakespeare's Othello, and Gogol's The Inspector General. Building on the first two books, Stanislavski demonstrates how a fully realized character is born in three stages: studying it; establishing the life of the role; putting it into physical form.
  Tracing the actor's process from the first reading to production, he explores how to approach roles from inside and outside simultaneously. He shows how to recount the story in actor's terms, how to create an inner life that will give substance to the author's words, and how to search into one's own experiences to connect with the character's situation. Finally, he speaks of the physical expression of the character in gestures, sounds, intonation, and speech. Throughout, a picture of a real artist at work emerges, sometimes failing, but always seeking truthful answers.