هندبوک میخائیل چخوف برای بازیگر

If I could have, I would have asked Michael Chekhov: What do
you believe is the most important factor in your method? Instead,
I asked my teacher, Deirdre Hurst du Prey, Chekhov’s student
and secretary for 20 years. ‘That would be Truth’, she answered.
This is a big idea, but simple enough. The difficulty is in keeping
it simple. Once it gets complicated the truth becomes more and
more elusive. I want to speak from this place of simplicity, where
I found my own truth, because useful acting techniques can only
be about one’s own truth, the truth one is experiencing in the
moment.
The Michael Chekhov technique is a very free way to work
as an actor. The material we encounter is immediately provocative
and rewarding. I have been a practitioner of this approach for
30 years. I have been a teacher for nearly 20 years. I know most
of the Chekhov teachers professing this work throughout the
world today. It is not such a large community, and I am very happy to be a part of it. One striking thing about this group of
teachers is that we are individual in how we see things and how
we do things, yet the essence of the work shines in all of us.
We stress the elements of the technique in different ways. We
have all found what we believe to be the essential elements for
our own work. We each go our own way in the technique.
Chekhov’s methods are actually limited in scope. His intention
is to lead the actor to an inspired performance. The ways in which
we can bring ourselves to inspiration are limited. This is actually
a good thing because we can choose exactly how we will work
and in what manner we will approach the role; and we will expect
not to flounder. I am now presenting an approach to this method, and I want
to make it clear from the start that what you will find here is
how the technique has come to me, how it speaks to me, and
how I have made it my own. I quote Chekhov in these pages,
but I choose the words that have caused a stirring in me. I do
not believe there is one orthodox way of teaching or using this
technique. I have seen some extraordinary teaching and it was
new to me, things I had never seen nor considered before, but
I recognized how ‘Chekhov’ these new things were. It is easy to
know when it is Chekhov, and also easy to know when it is not.
The purpose of the technique is to inspire, to find a creative state
that is both pleasing to be in, and also full of the power of
expressing oneself. Through the principles he offered to us,
Chekhov expected each actor to find his own technique, his own
way of working