Introducing… The Paris Manuscript
January 22, 2025
Acting, Articles, Book Extracts
In the early 1930s, during his first years of exile and 20 years before the publication of his seminal work To the Actor, Michael Chekhov made his first incursion into the challenging task of writing about an actor’s experience and his vision of the craft.
This important, though largely forgotten, work (the so-called ‘Paris Manuscript’) was handwritten in German and in it we find Chekhov laying the groundwork for the canon of exercises and practices that, nearly a century later, has widely become known as the Michael Chekhov Technique. Although never completed, the manuscript affords a privileged fly-on-the-wall glimpse of the dawning of an artistic genius’s creative vision.
Chekhov’s text has been translated, edited and abridged by Hugo Moss, co-founder and director of Michael Chekhov Brasil, who has written an introduction and a series of short essays, ‘Reflections From the Studio’, which build on a few key elements emerging from the manuscript and over a decade of exploring Chekhov’s artistic legacy in the studio environment and in performance.
This excerpt below gives a sneak peek into this manuscript.
______________________________________________________________________________
The ‘Paris Manuscript’
FIGURE 16 The first surviving page of the ‘Paris Manuscript’.
Attention
Actors have a twofold relationship with their body: Enemy – Friend. Exercises can turn the body’s hostile traits into allies. Heavy body mass is stimulated by all that is seelisch–geistig. So the exercises are seelisch-physical. They fall into three types:
- Physical
- Seelisch-geistig
- Geistig
Through such exercises the Seele can become free, but actors cannot escape their body and since both are needed, harmony must be created between the two. Actors often use exercises that stem from other professions, yet we also need exercises that derive from the idea of the actor’s art, in other words: the body’s permeability for all that is seelisch-geistig. This distinguishes the actor’s profession from all others that also employ the body. Actors’ bodies require not only a particular development through pure acting exercises, but speech must also be expressly trained and developed through special exercises, and our imaginational skills must also be developed and perfected.
These three fields of the acting technique, when properly developed, can be described as a general acting technique. We might illustrate the human body that isn’t yet developed as heavy and flat on the ground; similarly, if we were to present our weak, static ability to imagine and our inartistically formed use of human speech in a diagram, we might trace a horizontal line along the ground. Then everything that emerges as a new skill in the actor’s body, the speech and the activity of the imagination, these could be shown on our diagram as a vertical line. Certain physical and seelisch powers will be lifted from the earth, so to speak, and raised up. Actors can achieve this rising up with a general acting technique. (Figure I)
There is also a special technique that every actor must devise and create afresh for each role, based on the general technique. Now, before we come to the development of the general acting technique, we must speak of a particular trait. Actors must first develop this trait within themselves, because without it they cannot carry out the exercises correctly and productively. In fact, the entire creative process depends on this trait. Actors require a particular kind of attention. The development of this attention must be built upon our everyday ability to concentrate, so to begin with, a series of standard, well-known concentration exercises must be practiced.
The distinctive feature of this attention will be developed by gradually learning to connect and unify our Seele, our whole being, with an object; by trying to follow the life of the object not just with our eyes and ears, but with inner warm-heartedness. For instance, we concentrate on an object and then make an inner effort to, so to speak, penetrate the object with the full power of our Seele, as if sending part of our being to the object and allowing it to work on us. We offer up, as it were, our seelisch being to the object. Then, through a sort of love, we connect to the object.
Through this trait, this type of attention on the part of actors, all the exercises we undertake will always seem new, as if for the first time. The seelisch warmth that actors sustain throughout these exercises will gradually reveal all their secrets and they will be deepened, their effect become strong and successful. In order to attain this particular attention we must try and find this connection with every object.
There is another, second trait that actors must develop within themselves. It is a direct consequence of the first, is organically linked to it, and is gradually achieved by connecting to an object until we find ourselves loving the object, as described above. Then, once this state is reached, we try to develop an inner activity of considering the object’s properties, the forces working on it, the processes acting on it. This is a process of feeling for. We feel ourselves in the object and we feel for it with our seelisch powers. So this feeling for is to actually experience it.
Let us take an example. We immerse ourselves in a stone. We begin by thinking about its properties – in other words, we inwardly feel for these properties. We feel for the stone’s heaviness – so that we experience the stone’s heaviness. We feel for, therefore we experience, the stone’s opacity, etc. Or to take another example: before us is a human Gestalt that we’ve created in our imagination. We concentrate on this imaginary Gestalt just as we concentrated on the stone. We send out our seelisch powers to our Gestalt and penetrate it lovingly with these powers. And just as with the stone, we begin to get a seelisch feel for the Gestalt. We recognize in our experience its seelisch traits, its physical forms, its feelings etc.
And a further example, an abstract idea such as: ‘Every action has an effect.’ As an abstract idea we cannot get a feeling for it, so we need to turn it into an image, for instance we might imagine the ‘action’ as a power current, a streaming wave, a colourful ray, something like that. Then we might imagine the ‘effect’ as some form or colour gathering strength, or as an increasingly dense substance etc. The main point being that we have turned an abstract idea into an image, and once we have that before us, we can direct our attention towards this image in the described manner and connect to it with our seelisch powers, just as we did with the stone or the imaginary person. There is no object that cannot be observed in this way.
Actors should also practice these two important traits, this particular type of attention, together. This is most important. Through such exercises great seelisch forces will unfold within us, something we need for our work, which is always collective. These powers provide actors with the wonderful possibility of unifying inwardly within a truthful ensemble, in the highest and best sense of the word. The quality of the actor’s imagination will also be increased by training this ability to feel for something inwardly at will, and it will become more profound and precise. The images will no longer be experienced as something unclear or vague in the imagination, but rather they will become perfectly clear and absolutely concrete.
Whenever artists are seized by a creative idea, it can happen that they simply begin, through their increased life force, to inwardly start feeling for it. However, such happy moments in life and in an artist’s work are infrequent. This was more common in earlier times, but nowadays such fiery moments are rare and only arrive by chance. Today’s artists can no longer take the liberty of only waiting for moments of inspiration for our creative work. We must develop in ourselves that which artists frequently used to have as a gift. This is an important difference between the artists of yesterday and today. In previous times, inspiration was the outset of a creation; now it can be understood as the conclusion of our work.
In other words, artists today must develop their inspiration and then place their trust in the creative Geist. This is difficult, but it is beneficial. Why? Because for the artist of tomorrow, inspiration will be a free act of the will. Inspiration will be voluntarily called upon, but only if the artists of today apply their forces to this inner work. This attention and inner feeling for things are the powers that will lead to inspiration.
______________________________________________________________________________
The Paris Manuscript: The Early Draft Rediscovered by Hugo Moss is now available to buy at https://www.bloomsbury.com/paris-manuscript-9781350437371/