Michael Chekhov

Sep 7

Let imagination move through your body.

With Michael Chekhov, you investigate the conversation between physical movement and inner life. An image can alter how you move. A movement can suggest an intention, a feeling, or an unexpected character possibility. You have more to work with than an explanation of who the character is.

Life and work

Michael Chekhov (1891–1955) was an actor, director, and teacher, and the nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov. His teaching grew from the Moscow Art Theatre lineage and continued in the training studio he established at Dartington Hall in England in 1936. His subsequent teaching helped carry his approach into the United States. The studio archive preserves this history alongside an account of his interest in imagination and physical life.

Approach and technique

You will encounter the word psychophysical: your physical action and your inner experience are treated as connected. In Chekhov’s approach, you work with movement, images, atmosphere, and gesture. You can explore an atmosphere as the quality of a shared space, and a psychological gesture as a physical route into a character’s impulse.

The Michael Chekhov Association describes the relationship between imagination, movement, and inner life. In To the Actor, you can study imagination, atmosphere, psychological gesture, characterization, and ensemble as connected subjects.

Books and further study

Start with To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting. The expanded second edition associated with Mala Powers includes additional material on psychological gesture. The MICHA Workbook, by Jessica Cerullo and Fern Sloan, offers terminology and questions to accompany study. Record which edition you use.

Gesture makes an impulse tangible

What do you discover when a desire has a physical shape? In psychological gesture, you explore an encompassing movement that expresses an inner tendency: to reach, gather, push away, rise, or hold. You attend to its direction and quality. The gesture gives your imagination something active to work with. You then investigate what remains inwardly when you no longer make the large rehearsal movement.

You can see the principle at work in Chekhov’s preserved March 15, 1938 teaching notes. In a mother-and-son scene, the teacher distinguishes two kinds of seeking: a mother reaching toward a particular person and a son searching without the same definite aim. The notes connect gesture with dramatic relationship and the form of the play. You are looking at a role-specific distinction, not a dictionary in which every emotion receives a fixed pose.

Your atmosphere and your feeling can differ

An atmosphere is a quality you imagine in the shared space. An individual feeling belongs to your particular response within it. This distinction gives you more dramatic possibilities than asking the entire company to manufacture the same mood. In an atmosphere of celebration, you might be the person who needs to conceal bad news. In a threatening room, you might be the person determined to make everyone laugh. These examples are interpretive applications of the distinction, not Chekhov’s recorded exercises.

The atmosphere gives resistance and invitation to your behavior. You need to perceive enough of the common world for your opposition to it to become legible. If you simply decide to be the cheerful character, the audience may see a mannerism. If your cheerfulness is an attempt to alter what is happening around you, the same quality acquires purpose. Inner life and the event outside you keep exchanging information.

Your image can change your physical possibilities

In To the Actor, imagination and the incorporation of images belong beside characterization. Incorporation means allowing an imagined quality to enter your physical experience. You might discover a different sense of weight, space, tempo, or direction through an image. The acting value lies in the change it makes available. A description in your notebook has a different function from an image that affects how you receive a room.

You remain responsible to the text. Your imaginative discovery must fit the character’s actions and relationships, or expose a useful question about them. An attractive movement quality can become a decoration if it has no consequence. Chekhov’s range of subjects helps you keep the work integrated: imagination, atmosphere, gesture, character, improvisation, and ensemble all contribute to the performance.

Your role has a shape within the whole

The book also addresses composition, the arrangement and relationship of a performance’s parts. You need more than a collection of inspired moments. A beginning prepares what follows; a change acquires force through what came before it. Your rhythm participates in the rhythm of the scene, and your scene participates in the play. The imaginative technique therefore reaches beyond private preparation into the shared form an audience encounters.

For your acting, the invitation is expansive and exacting. You can develop possibilities beyond your everyday personality, yet you must make them specific enough to repeat and flexible enough to remain alive with a partner. Your body becomes a thinking part of the work. Your imagination gains action, space, and form.