Internal Technique

Emotion memory

If you have some experience of method acting by some workshop or class or even book, you might have come across emotional memory. Some method acting coaches do not advocate and some just go gaga overusing emotion memory.
What emotion memory does to you? It gives a trigger or we can say it act as a springboard for you that brings the right emotion out of you. Emotion memory is all about recalling a past event that is similar to the given circumstances. Frankly speaking, not all understand how emotional memory must be used. Most of the actors think it is about reliving the episode from the past for the purpose of the scene. But it is not what Stanislavski techniques teach.
Stanislavski’s acting technique is all about recalling the past event to the point, that it moves you. Or sometimes it is even creating a new one just to bring out the emotion that you might have never experienced. The purpose of this technique is not to lose yourself in the scene (which an actor must never do). The moment you lose yourself, you move away from your part which is not asked of you as an actor.
Emotion memory is a whole wider subject that cannot be summed in one or two paragraphs, but for the purpose of information, it is only about arousing new feelings using your past experience or even creating new ones if required.
One important point, it is completely different from sense memory. Sense memory deals with the five senses not with emotions.

Truthfulness

If you master all the above techniques, you will automatically on the path of giving a truthful performance. However, the only thing that would hold you back would be faith. Faith always hampers our sense of truth.
If you have no faith that you are holding a cardboard sword, the audience wouldn’t believe you are holding a real sword.
“As an actor, you have to put life into all the imagined circumstances and action until your sense of truth is satisfied and create faith in what you are doing.”- Stanislavski.
If do the action with full conviction, you justify the part. However, do not go overboard, try to do it just to an extent that you can believe.
To create faith, you have to proceed with the action bit by bit with all the actual details taken from reality. It is important you create a logical sequence for action. This is just like units. Break parts that you cannot believe into smaller believable parts. Always and always use “as if” to create multiple units.

•