Stanislavski and his Approach to Acting (original) (raw)

Forward -to early Stanislavsky! or Reconstruction of Actor Training at the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre

Stanislavski Studies Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater, 2017

This article highlights Stanislavsky’s discoveries of 1910s in actor training. It analyses the unique project that took place at St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy in 2012–2016. For four years, students and teachers of Prof Tcherkasski’s Acting Studio followed the initial steps of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre founded in 1912. The aim was to get a better understanding of the methodology of actor training under Stanislavsky and Sulerzhitsky’s guidance in the early (to be more precise – basic) period of the Stanislavsky System. The multidisciplinary project resulted in both theoretical discoveries revealed in the article, as well as intimate insights into the artistic work of the founding members of the First Studio who subsequently became the influential masters of the Russian and international stage – Evgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, among them. It had culminated in today’s productions of the once famous plays from the repertoire of the First Studio and the Moscow Art Theatre – The Good Hope by Heijermans, The Cricket on the Hearth by Dickens and A Month in the Country by Turgenev.

Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman Acting habits beyond the neutral

Performance Research, 2024

In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.

Stanislavsky Inspired Acting Lessons for Life and Leadership

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 2018

An artist’s creative work can become the primary lens through which he or she sees the world; it is a fundamental tool for interpreting life. But artistry can also teach a great deal about effective leadership. Based on the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the father of modern acting, this essay reflects on five important lessons for life and leadership: The Power of Purpose, The Power of Context, The Power of Listening, The Power of Partnerships, and The Power of Community. After a year of studying Russian culture, history, and foreign policy, I believe these lessons can be applied on the international level as well as the personal. How might a Russian actor advise our leaders in Moscow and Washington? Read and find out. A Brief History of the Stanislavsky System European and American culture of the late 19th century touted science as a social panacea. As early 19th century Romanticism gave way to modern science, overblown, melodramatic acting began to fade, and a new dramati...

The art of acting and the actor's work from Stanislavsky to Grotowski and beyond.

Great progress was made in the art of acting during the 20th century thanks above all to the endeavours of practitioners like Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999), who were able to combine practical experimentation with theoretical reflection. It cannot be said, however, that we now possess a scientific system for acting, nor indeed that we should be satisfied with the knowledge gained. The actor's art remains to a large extent a mystery which cannot be investigated merely with theoretical tools. Scholars and students of drama can only really arrive at an understanding through first-hand experience; just as every actor, while benefiting from a common stock of knowledge, has constantly to start over from scratch and adapt the basics of the performing art to the specific historical and cultural circumstances in which they find themselves operating. Stanislavsky approached the question of acting and the actor's work in a new light. Whereas previously the emphasis had been mainly on expressive codes, on the profession and its secrets (one only has to think of the great volume of theoretical elaborations produced in the Enlightenment and thereafter) in the context of the primacy of texts and content, Stanislavsky set out to convert the secrets of the great actors into scientific truths, into method, highlighting the inner processes, whether psychological, physiological or spiritual. He made this attempt starting from strictly subjective premises. This is what Grotowski had to say on the subject: Stanislavsky was looking for the possibility of creating the character starting from his inner life. However, one has to be careful with the word " inner ". The term " inner " might mean all of the psychological and mental processes that to some extent exist for both archangels and cows. And there is a different notion of " inner " that concerns the inner life of the great mystics. It's not the same thing, it's a different field. The first kind of " inner " life relates to psychology, to the soul, while the second one relates to the spirit. And one should not mix up those two spheres. So, when I say that Stanislavsky tried to search for his character starting from the side of his inner structure, his way of thinking, his way of reacting to the stimuli received, his way of feeling, reacting to the others, his psychological rhythms, the colour of his energy, etc., it's clear that he decided to start not from the exterior character traits, but rather from the character itself regarded as inner structure. But, you know, Stanislavsky was not extremely gifted as an actor, his body, when he was young, was quite handsome but somewhat wooden. The most simple things other actors were capable of doing quite spontaneously for him meant a hell of technical mastery. He was really not gifted as an actor, or, one would say, gifted on a rather primitive level. It's precisely because of this that he invented his method. The whole of Stanislavsky's method, as well as all his research in this field, was nothing else but his desperate struggle with the lack of talent. Nothing was given to him lightly; nothing could be solved by itself, through divine inspiration. He had to understand everything himself, he had to arrange everything, he had to spend a lot of time gradually approaching the essence, finally acquiring a clear understanding of everything he was doing.

Stanislavski’s influences on Dimitris Kataleifos’s theatrical notebooks on David Mamet’s plays Stanislavski Studies Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater

Stanislavski Studies, 2020

This article presents the acting method that the important Greek actor Dimitris Kataleifos uses when approaching a role by presenting and analysing his work process as it is presented in the theatrical notebooks that he keeps. These notebooks concentrate the way that he analyses, synthesises and approaches each character. They comprise notes on the role’s history, his background, his habits and so on. They follow Stanislavski’s key concepts, such as, ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘for what reason’, and notions, such as, ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’. The notebooks will be reviewed in relation to the five David Mamet plays in which Kataleifos has appeared, namely, American Buffalo (1992), The Cryptogram (1996), A Life in the Theatre (1999), Glengarry Glen Ross (2001) and Oleanna (2013).

Theory of Gesture in the 1920s Russian Avant-Garde: Affect and Embodiment in Stanislavsky's Philosophy.pdf

In performance, it naturally occurs to the actor to become aware of her emotions, inner spirit, and physical agility, and Stanislavski established exercises to hone the understanding of these three realms. He found that there is an indissoluble link between internal sensation and physical expression, and he studied this phenomenon as the crux of his research. By the 1910s and 1920sa culture replete with an interest in spiritualism -Stanislavski began to ground his physical training exercises in modernist theories that examined the spirit within the material body. The main goal of this essay is to analyse innovations in movement training, as I hope that this information offers insights to the field of Stanislavski research by positing that his system initiated an original language of gesture in dramatic art by which actors trained to use the body as their main source of scenic expression.

Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky’s System and the Moscow Art Theatre

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, 2019

This chapter considers the artistic and cultural contribution of the 'second wave' actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) who worked at the MAT itself and at the MAT Studios in the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s-1920s) and who went on to have distinguished careers as performers, teachers and directors in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s-1970s). The MAT had been founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and soon became famous throughout Russia, Europe and America for its staging of the new drama of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and others and for innovative stagings of the classics. The leading actresses of the original MAT included Stanislavsky's wife Lilina, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, Maria Andreyeva and Olga Gzovskaya. Stanislavsky himself was a true patriarch, who expected obedience, submission and unquestioning trust from the actresses he trained early in his career, but, at the same time, an idealized view of the female performer as muse was an essential element of his artistic vision (Ignatieva 2008). Examination of the work of the first generation of actresses at the

Boleslavsky – Stanislavsky: who was first? The development of the Stanislavsky System in the American lessons of Richard Boleslavsky

Stanislavski Studies Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater Volume 6, 2018 - Issue 1

One of the events of The S Word: Merging Methodologies International Symposium held in Prague, 2017 was the presentation of Sergei Tcherkasski’s expansive book, "Acting: Stanislavsky – Boleslavsky – Strasberg: History, Theory and Practice" (St. Petersburg: RGISI, 2016). With its 816 pages, clear logic, accessible language and 403 rare archival photos from Russian, Polish, American and French archives, this book has become a milestone in today’s discussion of the contemporary state of the Stanislavsky System. It creates a map of the current development of Stanislavsky-based actor training and explains connections and divergences among many contemporary pedagogical approaches to acting both in Russia and internationally. The book received many enthusiastic reviews in Russian theatre publications and was awarded the National Prize for the Best Theatre Book’2016 «Театральный роман» (this title means both Theatrical Novel and Romance with Theatre, and is also the title of Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel about the Moscow Art Theatre), and the International Stanislavsky Prize’2017 (awarded alongside with Tcherkasski to Valery Gergiev of Mariinsky Theatre, Kirill Krock of Vakhtangov Theatre, English actors Jude Law and Anthony Cher, and Dutch director Ivo van Hove). Among the book’s many merits, reviewers emphasized that Tcherkasski reintroduced the figure of Richard Boleslavsky, an important if not fundamental link between Russian and American theatre, and a key figure in the international dissemination of the Stanislavsky System. A large section of Tcherkasski’s book presentation at The S Word Symposium was devoted to Boleslavsky. This article provides a brief analysis of the development of Boleslavsky’s acting pedagogy.

Paradoxes of Acting: Bakhtin and Stanislavsky

New Theatre Quarterly, 2014

While much has been written about Bakhtin's later writings, most notably Rabelais and his World, little attention has been paid to his early manuscripts written in the mid-1920s. In this article Dick McCaw compares Bakhtin's early philosophical ideas about authorship and Stanislavsky's theory about how an actor creates a character. Bakhtin argues that actors can only be authors when they remain outside the character. He agrees that there is a need for empathy, but that this moment of co-experiencing with the character is followed by a return to oneself. Although this would seem to fly in the face of Stanislavsky's demand for the actor's empathetic identification with their role, McCaw concludes that both writers agreed that there was a necessary doubleness in the consciousness of the actor. This article develops ideas first considered in McCaw's PhD, Bakhtin's Other Theatre (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004) and now being worked on again for a book on Bakhtin and the theatre of his time. Dick McCaw is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, and has written With an Eye for Movement (2006) and edited the Laban Sourcebook (2011).

K. S. Stanislavski and the physical action

Timisoara Physical Education and Rehabilitation Journal, 2017

We note that the physical action in the K. Stanislavski's system expresses the same meaning as the motor action in the field of Physic Education, consisting in accomplishing a task with the help of the skeletal muscles, mainly, of the physical exercise. We sense here, the link between the Stanislavski's system and the Physical Education, link that is achieved, mainly through physical exercise. And this is how, to the question “What is the first thing in the actor's work of preparing for a role?”, K. Stanislavski is in his right to assert, after a long experience of artist-researcher, that “the most appropriate and efficient procedure for preparing a role is the approach to the role with the help of physical exercise”.

A Case Study in the Classification of Cultural Performances: Liminality and a Liminoid Performance Genre in Modern Western Society – The Stanislavskian Acting System

Using theoretical perspectives of Victor Turner -- especially his metaphorical concept of the Social Drama -- this thesis identifies the focal criteria by which instances of cultural performance, broadly speaking, may be sub-classified as social, ritual, or theatrical. This classificatory framework is applied to a prominent modern acting method. The acting "System" of Konstantin Stanislavsky is evaluated first as presented in Stanislavsky's own instructional texts. The somewhat less idealized practices of many modern actors who subscribe to the System is then assessed similarly. This study concludes that these two approaches to the same acting method yield distinctly different performance experiences and that, in actuality, they represent separate categories of performance.

Theater and practices of the self: a perspective by Stanislavski. Teatro e trabalho sobre si: a perspectiva de Stanislavski

2021

The article addresses the idea of “the work of the actor on oneself ”, conceived by Konstantin Stanislavski as an operating principle which permeates the relationship between art and life by affirming the concrete aspects of the actor’s craft. It proposes the approach of a theatrical tradition which formulated a new ethical and poetic paradigm for the performer on stage from the urge to redesign the meaning of the artistic making within a context of dramatic political and societal shifts.

WHEN LIFE AND ART MEET: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN VYGOTSKY AND STANISLAVSKY

Psicol. estud., Maringá, v. 22, n. 3, p. 409-420, 2017

Vygotsky and Stanislavsky, besides sharing the same cultural origin and having the historical-dialectical materialism as their theoretical basis, addressed the theme of human experience in life and in art. The term perezhivanie (переживание) was widely discussed in the works of both authors; by Stanislavsky, to designate the actor's experience in the character construction; by Vygotsky, in his studies on human development, and to understand personality formation as drama. We started this work from a guiding question: What are the relationships between perezhivanie and the creative processes in art and in life? We intended to promote a dialogue between the works of Vygotsky and Stanislavsky, exploring the problem of perezhivanie and the creative processes in art and in life, from an interlocution between Psychology and Art. Just like actors on stage, we are always acting. In each scene that is structured in our life, we are compelled to incarnate the roles that constitute us, living the contradictions inherent to huma n experience. In this perspective, we can say that theater is a microcosm of life, where relations are stressed to the maximum level; from them we can analyze the intricate web of human determinations, transformed into poetic truth. The present work verified the need for a look at the perezhivanie in art from a dialectical perspective with the psychological studies on the perezhivanie in life, understanding the relations between Psychology and Art from the prism of complementarity, and not as separate field s of study.

(Re)discovering Stanislavsky for Actors and Screenwriters

Metro Magazine, 2006

Actors frequently misunderstand the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky. A rediscovery of the Russian master by Australian actors is made and a few ways are suggested that screenwriters can use his techniques to heighten the dramatic impact of their stories.

Stanislavsky revisited: the Meiningens

Artos Casopis Za Znanost Umjetnost I Kulturu, 2015

In My Life in Art, Stanislavsky wrote that the Meiningens created a new and very important period in his theatrical development. [2] He thanked the Meiningens for giving him the directorial lessons, such as the historically accurate atmosphere, the scenes with the crowd, and the severe discipline that Chronegk imposed on the company. After thanking them, Stanislavsky as if closed the page, removing any sense of continuity of their influence upon his life and creativity. Meiningen-ism was a period, with clearly marked borders. Partially, as it follows from Stanislavsky, the reason was that they did not have good actors, and thus they could not leave a long and meaningful trace in the Russian cultural memory. As Yuri Lotman wrote, the historian reconstructs the sender's code in order to explain the sender's attitude towards the facts being communicated and to re-establish the spectrum of possible interpretations. [3] This approach allows us to revisit the most "textbok" case of Stanislavsky's evaluation of the Meiningens' influence upon his life and art. Stanislavsky's chapter about the Meiningens is filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. In this paper, I would like to investigate two aspects of the "meiningenism": to reevaluate Stanislavsky's records of the Meiningens, whose performances he attended in 1890, and to examine what exactly the Duke's directing taught Stanislavsky, the director, besides the common knowledge about the historical atmosphere, the crowd scenes, and artistic discipline. One of the best historians of Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, Nikolai Efros, wrote that the Duke in fact taught Stanislavsky the language of how to express his theatrical fantasies. While the first aspect requires comparative analysis of the available historical and critical literature, the second one should be based on the studies of the specific directorial means that the Duke had taught Stanislavsky, which the latter creatively expanded. Stanislavsky, 27 at the time, attended the second tour of the Meiningens in 1890; there is no evidence of his seeing the first tour of the company. Before the Meiningens came, he re-read Shakespeare's plays. He recorded the shows in his notebook, and also did his sketches of the scenes, creating a detailed ground plan. Unknowingly, he was reversing the