The Actor and the Absence – Imagination or Memory
The Actor and the Absence – Imagination or Memory

Summary/Abstract: Sense memory, emotional memory or “affective memory” as Konstantin Sergheievici Stanislavski calls it, is a term often used in the context of the stage course. The actor / student is often asked to recall an event, a situation, or find an analogy in his past with the various scenic situations and bring them into the present. The possibility of doing so is often under the dome of accident and chance. And even if this would be a success for the actor / student with the load of that past thing, the meaning of the object in his mind and soul will crumble, disperse and eventually disappear. The actor / student will be in the face of a strange and impersonal fact, of an unimportant and meaningless event, of an absent object, absent. Why? Because remembering a memory does not only involve passing or recapitalizing an already memorized event, but also activating images, similar correspondences with it, new images, accompanied by its sensory qualities, past representations with current projective elements. Thus, the actor / student can recall images of how they show an absent object, but may, in some cases, retain “linking information” , an indirect causal link between his previous encounter / encounters with his object and his current thoughts about it. Therefore, if in the first case we are dealing with a memory representation by memory, in the second case we can speak of a rebuilt representation and transformed by reproductive imagination, due to its causal relationship with a certain presence of the subject. Thus, the affective, emotional memory that Stanislavski speaks of does not refer to an accurate rehearsal or reheat of the actor /student's external and internal actions, to an imitation, but to their refurbish with new elements, such abstraction and symbolism.

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