Sharon Chatten Actors Studio
The Method
Method acting is often misunderstood. For Sharon and Micki, the work is not about choosing between personal experience and imagination. It is about developing a craft that allows an actor to use both.
What Method Means Here
Life Experience and Imagination Are Not Opposites
Some approaches to acting are described as relying only on personal experience, while others are described as relying only on imagination. Sharon and Micki do not see the actor that way.
Human beings naturally bring both experience and imagination to everything they do. Acting is no different. The work is about learning how to use those resources consciously, specifically and creatively in service of the character and the material.
Rather than reducing acting to one technique or one source of inspiration, the Method provides actors with tools they can use as part of a much larger creative process.
A Common Misconception
You Do Not Have to Stay in Character
Method acting does not require an actor to live as the character around the clock.
Sharon studied for many years with Lee Strasberg and has been a member of The Actors Studio since 1975. In that experience, she never heard a Method teacher tell an actor to exhaust themselves because a character is tired, take drugs because a character is an addict, or behave destructively because a character does.
Instead, actors learn to work sensorially and to craft the physical and emotional conditions the material requires. The actor does the work, uses the craft, and then lets it go.
The Actor's Craft
Acting Is More Than One Technique
Great acting can draw on a wide range of skills, instincts, choices and personal resources.
Human Understanding
Bringing empathy, observation, life experience and an understanding of human behavior to the work.
Imagination
Creating circumstances beyond personal experience and allowing the imagined world of the script to become specific and alive.
Character
Crafting the who of the character, including history, circumstances, physical behavior and point of view.
Script Analysis
Understanding the writer, the material, genre, circumstances and the choices available inside the text.
Objectives & Intentions
Knowing what the character needs, where they are going and what they are doing to affect the other person.
The Moment Before
Understanding prior circumstances, history and what has happened immediately before the scene begins.
Voice & Body
Developing the physical and vocal freedom necessary to express the life of the character fully.
Listening & Responding
Being genuinely present with the other actor rather than anticipating or demonstrating a predetermined result.
Your Individuality
Bringing your own intelligence, humor, instincts and unique humanity to the work rather than trying to erase them.
Generations of Actor Training
Different Teachers. The Same Search for Truth.
Sharon and Micki reject the idea that the major acting teachers were simply teaching opposing systems.
Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Arthur Penn, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman and Robert Redford all explored the craft from different perspectives, but they were working toward the same larger goal: helping actors create truthful, specific and fully realized behavior.
At the Center of the Work
Relaxation & Sensory Work
Relaxation and sensory work have been a central source of inspiration in Sharon and Micki's approach for decades.
Sensory work gives actors practical tools for creating and sustaining circumstances that may not be literally present. Relaxation helps remove unnecessary physical and mental tension so the actor can respond more freely.
These tools do not replace imagination, script analysis, character work, listening, objectives or any of the other demands of acting. They support them.
The goal is not to force an emotional result. It is to develop enough craft that the actor has somewhere truthful and specific to work from.
Sharon & Micki
Craft the Work.
Then Let It Go.
Some actors work intuitively. Some study. Some do both. The purpose of training is to give the actor more freedom, more specificity and more choices when the work demands them.
