The idea of aliveness is closely aligned with animation, both literally and conceptually. One of the most widely used and complete works exploring the art and craft of animation is Frank Thomas’ and Ollie Johnston’s 1981 magnum opus Illusion of Life (1981). The title alone reminds us what animation actually achieves, and that the nature of aliveness is not merely movement, but something more. The key realisation here is that only when (and if) we can believably ascribe motivation, conscious objectives, and feelings to the apparently spontaneous actions and responses of the characters or creatures portrayed on screen or stage, can we confidently attribute them with aliveness. Furthermore, ‘motivation’, ‘conscious objectives’ and ‘feelings’ are symptomatic of something more fundamental: emotion.
To know how to act, therefore, is to know the means and methods through which to believably portray aliveness; not only to the audience, but also to fellow performers. And this is only achievable, for our (realist[1]) purposes, when the actor delivers believably spontaneous portrayals of emotion in-the-moment. We can therefore evolve the question of ‘how do actors act?’ into ‘how do actors learn to convince audiences and even fellow performers that the characters they portray are spontaneously experiencing whatever emotions are appropriate to the given circumstances[2] at the very instance of performance?’
These ideas were central to Konstantin Stanislavsky’s thinking. Stanislavsky spent his life exploring and attempting to master the means and methods through which actors – and arguably directors – could create ‘Life in Art’, or ‘aliveness’[3] in my preferred terminology. He was unwaveringly interested in how all the outward semblances of appropriate emotion could be portrayed so that the actor’s performance of the character comes across as alive and spontaneous – to the audience, fellow players, and even to the actor himself. Crucial to this is Stanislavsky’s concept of переживание (perezhivanie), a Russian linguistic polyseme roughly translated as ‘experiencing’ or ‘living through’, to which we will return later.
[1] It is clear that theatre, film, animation and other art forms are broad churches which can accommodate all sorts of experimental, modernist, post-modernist and post-dramatic incarnations. But for my own purposes, and for the purposes of my current research, I am interested in those forms of art which primarily function to convey emotion – as Leo Tolstoy conceptualised in his 1897 essay What Is Art? (Tolstoy, 1995 [1897])
[2] Using Stanislavsky’s own terminology: предлагаемые обстоятельства.
[3] Stanislavsky’s used жизни человеческого духа or “inner life of the human spirit” in An Actor’s Work on Himself (Stanislavski, 2009).