Event – Lee Strasberg – In his own words.

Studio One, Rose Bruford College, Wednesday 29th October at 7.00 p.m.

Lee Strasberg – in his own words
Notes on a lecture by Suresh Patel

Suresh Patel trained for two years at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York where he worked as assistant director to Robert Ellermann on a production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. He has trained actors in New York, London and Ireland and now works as Associate Artist with Real Circumstance [http://www.realcircumstance.com/home/index.php], where his main responsibilities include teaching and actor training and development.

In the first part of his lecture, Suresh took the audience through the principal stages of actor training as taught by Strasberg in 1950’s New York. Using frequent textual references to writings by Strasberg and Stanislavski, he demonstrated the intrinsic relationship between Stanislavski’s ‘System’ and Strasberg’s ‘Method’ of acting, positioning the latter as an invaluable proponent in the continuation and elaboration of Stanislavski’s work; rather than a misguided deviation as some have been led to believe.

In the second part, he discussed elements of Vakhtangov’s contribution to Stanislavski’s system, such as Vakhtangov’s ideas on defining artistic ‘attitude’ prior to approaching a role and ‘thinking outside the box’ (Suresh’s term) with regard to emotion memory. Vakhtangov is known for having trained actors to overcome their inability to emotionally identify with particular character traits or situations by approaching them through alternative emotional memories.

In the last section, Suresh addressed Strasberg’s use of emotion memory’ He took made a short aside to cover Stella Adler’s meeting with Stanislvaski which lead to the famous discord between Adler and Strasberg over the purpose and practice of emotion memory. The lecture ended with a round of succinct and engaged questions from students on various aspects of actor training.