Stanislavski and his Approach to Acting (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 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).
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.
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