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1 Emotion Memory Emotion Memory: “A Dangerous Reputation” Eric Hetzler Abstract: In October of 2018, Backstage published an article by Alex Yates called “The Definitive Guide to the Stanislavski Acting Technique”. This was a very cursory and superficial description of his life and some of his ideas. It was certainly in no way “definitive”. In fact, it perpetuated some common misconceptions about his work. For instance, it says he merely “dabbled in the performing arts as an amateur actor, opera singer, producer, and director”, with no mention of the Moscow Art Theatre and the years he spent there. However, as the author talks of the merging of the System of Stanislavski with the Method of Strasberg, he notes that emotion memory has a “dangerous reputation” and that “Some high-profile actors have merged their personal lives with that of their characters’ lives in psychologically unhealthy ways”. In this paper, I aim to trace the lineage of this notion of the danger inherent in studying Stanislavski and attempt to find actual evidence. Key Words: Stanislavski, Emotion Memory, Affective Memory, Danger of Emotion Memory, Stella Adler Eric Hetzler is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of Huddersfield (U.K.). His “Survey of the Actor’s Experience” led to several publications examining how actors describe emotion in performance and the importance of awareness on stage. In his continuing exploration of emotion and acting he has been studying the Alba Method of Emotion and is a certified level 3 Teacher. 1 Introduction In October of 2018, Backstage published an article by Alex Yates called “The Definitive Guide to the Stanislavski Acting Technique”. This was a very cursory and superficial description of his life and some of his ideas. It was certainly in no way “definitive”. In fact, it perpetuated some common misconceptions about his work. For instance, the author notes that Stanislavski merely “dabbled in the performing arts as an amateur actor, opera singer, producer, and director”, with no mention of the Moscow Art Theatre and the years he spent there. However, as the writer talks of the merging of the System of Stanislavski with the Method of Strasberg, he makes a comment I hadn’t heard since I was an undergraduate – that emotion memory has a “dangerous reputation” and that “Some high-profile actors have merged their personal lives with that of their characters’ lives in psychologically unhealthy ways”.1 It reminded me of my own early training where we were told specifically not to read An Actor Prepares because this kind of work had very bad psychological effects and had even driven actors to suicide. There was no evidence for this assertion and in all of the years I have been studying his work, I have not encountered any. But the sternness of the warnings meant I didn’t study his work until more than a decade later. In my doctoral research, I surveyed more than 350 actors, many who had trained in System/Method-based programs, and none of them mentioned any emotional distress. At the same time, it should be noted that in spite of the belief noted in Backstage, many acting teachers still make emotion memory exercises part of their training methods. Hollywood acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, in her book The Power of the Actor, uses terms like Substitution and Inner Objects when discussing character development, but close examination of her method shows that she is asking actors to draw on their emotional memories and past traumas and use 2 them in their work. She notes that substitutions need to be made from “an emotional point of view”2 and that the function of Inner Objects is emotional. Numerous training programs use An Actor Prepares as their primary text where the use of emotion memory often stands front and centre. And, of course, the descendants of Lee Strasberg continue to teach his method, which includes the use of affective memory exercises. Thus, there is a strange relationship in the acting world where, in the public mind, actors are endangering themselves by using a potentially dangerous technique, while the people training these actors seem to be ignoring this perceived danger. Perhaps, in order to better understand this complex relationship, the origin of this idea of danger could be found which might go some way to explaining why it persists. In this paper, I aim to trace the lineage of this notion of the danger inherent in studying Stanislavski’s work on emotion memory and attempt to discover where it came from. The Perceived Danger To begin, emotion memory or affective memory is usually described as the actor using their own memories of emotional incidents that are analogous to a character they are playing and using those memories to induce the needed emotional state. The term is mostly associated with Stanislavski and his text An Actor Prepares. However, later acting teacher Lee Strasberg used the idea in much the same way, calling it affective memory, which means the two teaching approaches often get conflated and used to mean the same thing. When attempting to trace the idea of the danger of actors using emotion memory, simple on-line searches find a plethora of material. Many begin with a picture of Heath Ledger as the Joker in the film The Dark Knight, as is the case in this 2016 blog post on The Odyssey Online with the title “The Emotional Dangers of Method Acting”. The author of this page, Sarah Adriance, notes: 3 You have to be careful when using your own emotional memories to access levels for these scenes. There is such thing as going too far…There is a reason that many people believe that Heath Ledger's method acting for the Joker greatly contributed to his death. Is it worth your mental health to stir up terrible memories so that you can play the character with greater verisimilitude? Others, like acting teacher Brian Timoney, in his 2018 blog post entitled “The Dangers of Affective Memory”, states: You might use affective memory while playing the role of Ophelia in Hamlet, for example. She has a suicidal fate, and connecting to that level of depression means delving into memories that could trigger a very real depression in you. He further states that dangerous effects of affective memory can include: Hyperventilation Anxiety attacks Panic attacks Depression Substance abuse And then there is this from a 2014 on-line article from Newsweek entitled “Method Acting: 'Faking It' Is So Last Year - Commitment Is Everything” notes that: There are inherent dangers in this approach if taken too far, resulting in potential distortion of the persona and – in extreme cases – schizophrenia and total detachment from reality.3 With the exception of Heath Ledger, none of these blog posts or articles offer any evidence for any of their claims about the danger of using emotion memory in acting. And, of course, the problem with using Heath Ledger is that he didn’t die because he had somehow 4 merged himself with the character of the Joker. He died of a drug overdose while working on his next project, Terry Gilliam’s film The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, where he was playing a very cheerful character that was in no way similar to the Joker. What we see, in looking at the general idea, is that a lot of people outside of the world of acting and actor training, believe emotion memory is dangerous. Here begins a journey of digging into the past, attempting to find early mentions of this supposedly dangerous technique and who said what and how it got out into the mainstream. The biggest problem encountered in this research is that the notion of emotion memory being dangerous seems to be based more in the popular consciousness than in the academic world. All of the above quotes come from popular media sources, which means this idea is out in the wild rather than confined to the journals of the academy. This makes tracking it a bit harder because where do you look? How do you find the origin? Ideally it would come from a specific academic source that was picked up and spread by journalists into the mainstream. But that does not seem to be what happened. When I began the research, I thought it would be quite easy to find, but that has not been the case. Who Said What The simplest explanation would be that it comes from Stanislavski himself. As is well known, he shifted his attentions away from emotion memory in his early work and towards the new method of physical actions. As noted by Benedetti, “Emotion Memory had too often produced hysterics or self-indulgence”.4 Is it possible the idea stems from this concern? Probably not as Stanislavski never published these thoughts himself – they appeared in letters and personal 5 journals. They don’t really appear publicly until writers like Benedetti start mentioning his personal thinking about it well into the latter stages of the 20th century. Perhaps it comes from Moscow Art Theatre actor and teacher Michael Chekhov’s assessment of the work? It is certainly quoted in many sources that he had such a significant mental breakdown in 1918 that he was “unable to act and on one occasion, left the stage in the middle of a performance”.5 Some have intimated that this was caused by his work with emotion memory. Carnicke, in Stanislavski in Focus, leaves the door open for readers to think this about Chekhov, relating that “cautious experiments with personal feelings triggered a nervous breakdown in his talented protégé”.6 The problem is that his breakdown seems more to have resulted from a close succession of misfortunes that included the deaths of his parents, his wife leaving him, and a close friend killing himself with Chekhov’s own gun.7 Chekhov, himself, in any of his published work about acting, doesn’t appear to have ever said anything about emotion memory being dangerous.
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