Strasberg Excerpts

I have included some great anecdotes from this book.  Read them several times. The guts and wisdom transfer wonderfully for musicians. Strasberg often refers to musicians in his sessions with actors and I feel the opposite could benefit us.  

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"he assumes that he is doing on the stage everything that he understands, when obviously he is not.  That is the technical problem in any art: that an individual's understanding does not coincide with his capacity.  The understanding reaches out, but the capacity makes for what he actually does.  The capacity is established by the technical training to which we have dedicated ourselves."

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"Art grows more rich with age, not less.  The inner craft, the inner vision, the emotions of the actor can continue to develop because they are not subject to any aging process entailed in the  very life experience that enriches them.  In every art, even in those arts where physical toil takes a toll and the person becomes unable to do it, the capacity, the will, the imagination to do it grow and increase.  By the time his voice is gone, a singer sings more artistically, more brilliantly, because he sings not just with is voice."

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"Every artist requires a place, a "studio", where he can practice his scales, try new colors, botch, invent, test himself."  Once of Strasberg's guiding ideas is summed up in a favorite saying from Goethe: "The [artist's] career develops in public, but his art develops in private."

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"It's a curious philosophic point that frequently the most talented people are those most aware of their deficiencies and most willing to work hard to overcome them."

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(referring to Chekhov) "He was searching all his life for the sense of reaching out and capturing life but holding it like a bird.   When you hold a bird , you have to be careful.  You hold it, and you feel the strange trembling.  The bird is there, and you can almost feel its fear, yet it stands there.  As long as your hand is confident, the bird will remain. But as soon as your hand twitches even slightly, the bird flies away.  Chekhov was getting at that sense of reality."

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"...human nature not only makes possible [one's] greatness, but also is the source of [one's] problems. ...... an individual can possess the technical ability to do certain things and yet may have difficulty in expressing them because of his emotional life, because of the problems of his human existence."

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"Children at play have a wonderful naive quality which lasts till they're about eight or nine.  They play, and they don't care.  When you come into the room, they say, "Hold the baby," and "Here is the tub, " and your presence doesn't matter.  They take you into their belief.  About the age of nine you see them start to close the door.  They say, "Let's go and play," and they go into another room and close the door.   And when you open the door, they say, "No, no, no, get out." Their faith is beginning to be broken.  This process continues, so that by the time the human being decides to be an actor he has inculcated in himself many habits that are wrong for acting.  the naive faith of going with the imagination which is so wonderful in the child has been knocked out of him.  the relation between " what I think" and "what I say" has been inhibited. ........ You take a child to a teacher to learn to dance when he is five or six.  the the child begins to dance at home all the time, and you say, "Don't behave that way." But when company comes, you say, "Dance for the people."  However, when the child then wants to act for them as well, you say, "Please, don't do that.  Please go to your room."

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"Nine-tenths of every profession is very, very boring.  Unless someone wishes to go through that boredom, he will never become a professional.  To achieve the skill that makes for a Heifitz, you stand for four hours each day, very bored, but you keep going up and down that fiddle, up and down that fiddle, doing a lot of boring things.  The moment you perform is based on these seemingly endless boring hours that you spend every day.  Geniuses keep working even though everybody says, "Well, why are you spending your time doing all this for nothing?"  They plug away and keep going up and down, up and down, this way, that way, the other way, until suddenly somebody says, "You know, he's a genius."