Houston Day 559 - your afternoon Stanislavski

What Stanislavski & Meisner are teaching me about life

I'm in the middle of preparing a scene for class tonight with Kim Tobin.  I recently moved up into her advanced class and I'm a little out of my depth.  We'll save the psychoanalysis as to why that scares me so much for another day.
The scene I'm working on is quite a challenge (which is good - I think I feel like anything that's not a challenge is just bad writing, which is a whole other challenge in itself).  I've been struggling to articulate my character's objective so I reached for my Stanislavski book for some help.  Before I found any tips on articulating objectives, but I found this quote:

An actor must work all his life, cultivate his mind, train his talents systematically, develop his character; he may never despair and never relinquish this main purpose - to love his art with all his strength and love it unselfishly.

To be honest, I struggle with that last bit.  I just realised today how many harsh and bitter things about other actors I let slip out of my mouth.  That's also a personality trait of mine - I have managed "cut people off at the knees" as my mum says, to friends who aren't actors just as well as to people who are - but I think it's time to recalibrate the balance between honest and kind.  I am becoming ungenerous.  My selfish love of the theatre, as if it's some kind of finite resource I need to keep to myself, of course comes from my own insecurities.  But as I'm learning in Kim's Meisner work, things are just a whole bunch better when you take your eyes off yourself and get invested in what someone else is doing.

You must leave all of that alone and put your energy into one thing, doing the work.  (Larry Silverberg - The Sanford Meisner Approach.)

Not only in this circle, but also in life.  (Gayla Miller - see Lessons in Theater and Life on the Hope Stone blog.)