Acting and Feeling/Emotion

Abstract

A human being has a feeling or an emotion when he or she is put in certain circumstances and decides what to do, judging the value of his or her responding physical actions. But what is the relation between the inner feeling and the outer action in the fictitious character of a play when an actor actualizes it on the stage? An actor cannot have a real feeling or emotion on the stage and yet paradoxically has to act in the given circumstances as if he were really having a feeling. Stanislavski describes this relationship in his Creating a Role. He says that if an actor analyzes and shows exact physical actions of the character in the cirsumstances indicated in the play, examining the lines of the character, a real feeling emerges in himself. Stanislavski is reversing the process from feeling to action in real life, and if the emergence of a feeling is not always assured for an actor, the audience will assume from the exact imitation of physical actions that the character is having a real feeling, and can have an empathy with the character. This theory reminds us of the famous paradox of acting that Diderot advocated more than 100 years before Stanislavski.