An Actor Prepares : Chapter Two

The director says the following for acting.
"Side by side we see moments of living a part, representing the part, mechanical acting and exploitation."

"Living a part" are moments when we are creating according to our inspiration, improvising, as it were. Technique is important, because with no technique, if this inspiration does not turn up then neither you nor they have anything with which to fill in the blank spaces.

We need to think about the inner side of a role, and how to create its spiritual life through the help of the internal process of living the part. You must live it by actually experiencing feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it.

Our aim is not only to create the life of a human spirit, but also to express it in a beautiful, artistic form. An actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to give to his experience an external embodiment. The body depend on the soul. In order to express a most delicate and largely subconscious life it is necessary to have control of an unusually responsive, excellently prepared vocal and physical apparatus. This apparatus must be ready instantly and exactly to reproduce most delicate and all but intangible feelings with great sensitiveness and directness.

Tortsov commented on Paul's acting to explain "representing the part".
"In our art you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every time. Each time it is recreated it must be lived afresh and incarnated afresh. This describes the few successful moments in Kostya's acting. For Paul, I was astonished in a number of places by the accuracy and artistic finish of a form and method of acting which is permanently fixed, and which is produced with a certain inner coldness. However I did feel in those moments that the original, of which this was only the artificial copy, had been good and true. This echo of a former process of living the part made his acting, in certain moments, a true example of the art of representation.

"You must be careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part."

"Mechanical acting" is having rather elaborately worked out methods of presenting the role with conventional illustrations. The origins and methods of mechanical acting is characterize as "rubber stamps". To reproduce feelings you must be able to identify them out of your own experience. But as mechanical actors do not experience feelings they cannot reproduce their external results. With the aid of his face, mimicry, voice and gestures, the mechanical actor offers the public nothing but the dead mask of non-existent feeling.

Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human convention that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage.

The theatre, on account of its publicity and spectacular side, attracts many people who merely wants to capitalize their beauty or make careers. This is exploitation of art.