Essai (French: ‘test’, ‘attempt’, ‘trial’, ‘tryout’)

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Notes

^1. See To the Actor (2002, p. 70): ‘the archetypal gesture, one which serves as an original model for all possible gestures of the same kind’.

^2. Drawings of expanding and contracting appear in To the Actor (Chekhov, 2002, pp. 74–75).

^3. From A Collection of Michael Chekhov's Unpublished Notes and Manuscripts on the Art of Acting and the Theatre, By Deirdre Hurst du Prey (1937). Copyright: Deirdre Hurst du Prey 1977.

^4. From A Collection of Michael Chekhov's Unpublished Notes and Manuscripts on the Art of Acting and the Theatre, By Deirdre Hurst du Prey (1940). Copyright: Deirdre Hurst du Prey 1977.

^5. From A Collection of Michael Chekhov's Unpublished Notes and Manuscripts on the Art of Acting and the Theatre, By Deirdre Hurst du Prey (1937). Copyright: Deirdre Hurst du Prey 1977.

^6. From A Collection of Michael Chekhov's Unpublished Notes and Manuscripts on the Art of Acting and the Theatre, By Deirdre Hurst du Prey (1937). Copyright: Deirdre Hurst du Prey 1977.

^7. The students combined some of their character's speeches, eliminating their partner's lines, to create a monologue. I have indicated the cuts with ellipses.

^8. Cf. ‘The Ghost Exercise’, Lesson 12 from MICHA (2007).

^9. In The Drama Review, Special Edition on Chekhov (1983) he says, ‘The Archetype: For instance, there are different lions running around … each is a lion, one bigger, one smaller, but there is a lion as an archetype. There is an idea of a lion which is the source of all lions… all the lion's qualities combined together in the purest way; all its roars, all its claws, all its movements combined in one lion, the lion’.

^10. Black is quoting here from Vakhtangov's Legacy (Kuhlke 1965).

^11. Chekhov himself relates how he would, to the utter exasperation of his colleagues onstage, change his performance in any given play in response to different audiences. The same play performed for children or for soldiers would elicit a completely different performance from him.

^12. The Four Brothers are: a feeling of ease, form, beauty and a feeling of the whole. Chekhov refers to these as feelings, sensations or psychological qualities to make the actor's body ‘more artistic, flexible and expressive on the stage’. He explains that ‘all of those Qualities can be found expressed in great pieces of art’ (Chekhov, 1991, p. 48).

^13. I am grateful to Sarah Kane for teaching me this helpful exercise.

^14. From the Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio Deirdre Hurst du Prey archive, Series I, The Actor is the Theatre: Condensed version (1 Vol.: 1936–1942), Dartington Hall Records, unpublished manuscript. In Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting, Jonathan Pitches (2006, p. 161) charts Chekhov's interest in colour and quotes from Goethe's Theory of Colours directly: ‘Blue seems to retire from us. But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue’.

^15. I am grateful to Fern Sloan who taught me this approach to archetypes.

^16. From the Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio Deirdre Hurst du Prey archive, Series I, The Actor is the Theatre: Condensed version (1 Vol.: 1936–1942), Dartington Hall Records, unpublished manuscript, 23 November 1936.

^17. I am grateful to Mel Shrawder for introducing me to this idea.

^18. In Chekhov's approach the direction of a gesture is important because he believes it has a particular psycho-physical resonance. For example, forward direction can have a focused, direct, clear quality, while the backward direction can have a sense of the past, history, or emotional weight.