Creating a Role

After finishing some leftover exercises from yesterday's Stanislavski, we moved on to Stanislavski's Creating a Role, the third novel in his trilogy. This particular novel focused especially on the process involved in forming an acquaintance with a character, building a background, and experiencing the emotions connected with that character. In preparation for a role, Stanislavski provides five parts of analysis which include studying other works of the playwright, preparing an actor's soul for creative emotions, and finding stimuli that will aid in bringing the script to life. With this, Stanislavski reiterates as well his method of emotional memory. This novel especially emphasized the importance of first impressions, as they tend to leave a lasting perspective on whoever. This notion seems quite contradictory to me personally because the book I have been reading, Harold Clurman's On Directing, de-emphasizes the importance of first impressions as they are misleading. I believe Stanislavski and Clurman find common ground on the idea of first impressions in that they offer valuable information to the actor that are initially left untainted by other people's interpretations. The important thing is just to approach this use of first impressions with caution.