Ivana Chubbuck

Sep 7

Give the feeling somewhere to go.

With Ivana Chubbuck, you connect emotional life to the pursuit of an objective. You ask what your character wants and how the available feeling can give that pursuit urgency. You still need the other person, the circumstances, and the actions that carry the scene forward.

Life and work

Ivana Chubbuck is an acting teacher, studio founder, and author of The Power of the Actor. Her approach uses a twelve-step framework for preparing a script and role. The studio’s historical archive includes a biography and records that techniques from her book were taught at The Jason Bennett Actors Studio.

Approach and technique

You distinguish an overall objective from the immediate scene objective, identify obstacles, and explore the personal meaning of the circumstances. The emotional material is directed toward action. Chubbuck describes overcoming and winning as engines of the work; in a scene, you make that language specific to what your character needs from someone.

The publisher’s account of the revised Power of the Actor places feeling in the service of pursuit. You can test this distinction without treating intensity as proof of good acting.

Books and further study

Read The Power of the Actor, Revised and Updated, published in 2025. If you work from the earlier edition, keep that distinction in your notes. Chubbuck’s studio FAQ recommends learning the twelve steps before entering its advanced work.

Your objective needs an answer from someone

What do you mean when you say your character wants love, respect, freedom, or safety? Those broad desires can help you understand the role, but you still need a specific pursuit in the scene. You might need your partner to remain, admit something, give permission, or accept your account of an event. The distinction between an overall objective and a scene objective connects the scale of the whole story to the immediate exchange.

In Chubbuck’s framework, emotional life contributes to that pursuit. The feeling gives the need weight; the objective gives it direction. You can therefore ask what the emotion makes you try. Grief might intensify an attempt to keep someone close. Shame might make you work harder to secure their respect. These are interpretive examples of the relationship between feeling and action, not descriptions of a documented Chubbuck class.

Winning has a dramatic meaning

Chubbuck’s language of overcoming and winning asks you to find the character’s active effort. You need to understand what would count as success from inside the character’s circumstances. A victory could be a confession, a moment of forgiveness, a reprieve, or the courage to leave. The word becomes useful when you make it specific enough to affect your behavior.

The play may deny your character the desired result. Your pursuit can remain wholehearted even when you know the story ends in loss. As a performer, you hold knowledge of the ending. Within the scene, you need to discover the possibilities that still appear open. That separation between your knowledge and your character’s immediate hope gives the attempt its dramatic life.

Your obstacle changes how you act

An obstacle is whatever stands between you and the objective. It might involve your partner’s decision, the time available, a social rule, or a conflicting need within your character. The important question is what the obstacle makes you do next. If your first approach fails, you need another tactic that belongs to the circumstances. The conflict develops through the encounter.

This gives you a more precise way to understand intensity. Repeating the same demand more loudly may be right for a particular moment, but it is one possible response. You might bargain, charm, expose a fact, or retreat temporarily to preserve the relationship. Your acting becomes richer when the stakes affect your inventiveness. You need your partner to matter enough for a change in their behavior to change yours.

Your personal resources serve a fictional role

The Power of the Actor places personal experience within a structured process of preparation. Your connection to the material must eventually meet the actual script. A private association can give a relationship urgency, but the character still has a particular history, situation, and purpose. You need to carry the usable connection into that fictional world.

The distinction also preserves your choice as an actor. You can take the work seriously without making public disclosure part of your performance. What matters to the scene is the behavior and relationship that become available. Your audience receives the play; the private route you used in preparing it does not have to become part of the event.

The revised 2025 edition adds material to Chubbuck’s twelve-step approach. Across editions, the central practical question remains clear: how does what you feel help you pursue what you need? That question moves your preparation toward an active exchange, where another person has the power to resist, answer, surprise, and change you.