Acting and direction

In the last post I mentioned Meisner, Stanislavsky and method. I'm not wanting to seem to be trendy or throwing around names of acting schools without understanding them so just a little here on what I meant. I know only a little about Strasberg, Meisner, Stansilavsky, Adler and some of the 20th century approaches to acting. And, for example, I'm not keen on apparently repititious meaningless exchanges as a way of learning to react (Meisner is well known for these exercises). At the level of theatre I work at we haven't time for weeks of exploration.
What is clear to me today is that if you are aware of modern theatre you can't help but be influenced by these schools and theories. The alternative is what I grew up with - the first few rehearsals are blocking (Stand here, move there, sit down, stand) followed by rehearsals which are tweaks of the first (sit in the middle of the line, put the gun there, say it with more passion).
What I want to see is something approaching genuine characters with motivations you can understand who move around for convincing reasons.

So I do use the blocking direction I grew up with but I have rudimentary and superficial but useful interpretations of these schools which inform my directorial style. I am drawn to what I understand from Meisner as the idea of trying to get actors in the now (what the repetition exercises are supposed to create). So that there performances are genuine in that they build from the energy and actors around them, and may differ from night to night but are motivations and reactions to others motivations. I think Meisner called this Affective Memory.
In Stanislavskly I like the idea of using imagination to understand where your character is and go with that. I mean for example neither of my actors playing Macbeth or Lady M have murdered or conspired to murder anyone as far as I am aware, so they need to imagine what it is like and go with that. Strasberg on the other hand (again as I understand it) wanted actors to draw on their own souls and psyches and reproduce their reactions to earlier events in their lives, or their psyches (I believe this is called emotion memory).

What I would say is each approach is useful for different actors. In other words where I can't get something out of an actor I may change approach. Some actors need to go back to when their pet rabbit died when they were 8 and use that to power their performance about losing a parent, another actor in the same role might simply imagine having lost his father to an assassin while a third may instead just get in the now and take on the enormity of what is being said.

I'm no expert. But I do like having a range of tools. As I eluded to earlier - our other issue is not having the luxury of spending 8 hours a day, every day, on this and not having necessarily the best material to work with. So when all else fails clever work-arounds (cheats) are really useful, that is if the actor can't stand without waving his hands around - get him to lean on things in every scene.