Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art
Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a Russian actor, theatre director and theorist. His system of acting, which is the first of it’s kind, was built on the naturalistic movement and emotional memory and was inspired by the Meiningen Ensemble of Germany. His work is studied the world over, especially by actors and drama students.
The beginnings
He was born Constantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev in 1863. ‘Stanislavski’ was a stage name that he adopted in 1884 in order to keep his performance activities secret from his parents. The prospect of becoming a professional actor was such a taboo for someone of his social class. At that time actors had an even lower social status in Russia than in the rest of Europe, having only recently been serfs and the property of the nobility. Until the Russian revolution in 1917, Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his theatrical experiments in acting and directing. His family’s discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur actor onstage and as a director until he was thirty-three years of age.
As a child, Stanislavski was exposed to the rich cultural life of his family. His interests growing up included the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. His father, Sergei Vladimirovich Alekseyev, was elected head of the merchant class in Moscow in 1877, at in the same year he had a fully equipped theatre built on his estate at Liubimovka, which providied a great forum for Stanislavski’s adolescent theatrical ideas.
The origins of his system
Stanislavski now started what would become a lifelong series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems. It was from this habit of self analysis and series of writings that his actoing theaory and system emerged. The family’s second theatre was added in 1881 to their mansion at Red Gates, on Sadovaya Street in Moscow, making their house a focus for the artistic and cultural life of the Moscow.
In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.
Interested in ‘living the part,’ Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterization in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting popular places like the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy. He then extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning ‘in character’.
In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Petrovich Komissarzhevsky, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and leading tenor of the Bolshoi, with whom he also explored the co-ordination of voice and body. Together they devised valuable exercises in moving and sitting stationary ‘rhythmically’, which anticipated Stanislavski’s later use of physical rhythm when teaching his ‘system’ to opera singers.
A year later, in 1885, Stanislavski very briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School, where the students were encouraged to mimic the theatrical tricks and conventions of their tutors. Disappointed by this approach, he left after little more than two weeks. This obviously clashed with his own way of thinking.
What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.
Instead, Stanislavski devoted his attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of psychological realism in Russia. Psychological realism had been developed there by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin. In 1823, Pushkin had concluded that what united the diverse classical authors like Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille and Calderón, was their common concern for ‘truth of character’ and the situation rather than the overblown, exaggerated, effect seeking acting style that was apparent at the time.
Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring a great deal of dedication, discipline and integrity. Throughout his life, Stanislavski subjected his own acting to a process of rigorous artistic self-analysis and reflection. His development of a theory – in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development which identified him as the first great theatre practitioner of this kind.
The Stanislavski System
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Stanislavski’s ‘system’ is a systematic approach to training actors. Stanislavski’s system is a progression of techniques used to train actors to draw believable emotions to their performances. Areas of study include voice, physical skills, concentration, emotion memory, observation, and dramatic analysis. His goal was to find a universally applicable approach that could be of service to all actors. But he advised actors to “Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.”
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Emotion memoryStanislavski’s ‘system’ focused on the development of artistic truth onstage by teaching actors to ‘experience the part’ during a performance. Stanislavski hoped that the ‘system’ could be applied to all forms of drama, including melodrama, vaudeville, and opera. He organised a series of theatre studios in which young actors were trained in his ‘system.’ At the First Studio, actors were instructed to use their own memories in order to express emotion.
Stanislavski soon observed that some of the actors using or abusing this technique were given to hysteria. He began to search for more reliable means to access emotion, eventually emphasizing the actor’s use of imagination and belief in the given circumstances of the text rather than thier private and often painful memories. -
The Method of Physical ActionsIn the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means. While in its very earliest stages his ‘system’ focused on creating truthful emotions and embodying them, he later worked on the Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 1930s. Its focus was on physical actions as a means to access truthful emotion, and involved improvisation. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious.
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Magic IfStanislavski believed that the truth that occurred onstage was different than that of real life, but that a ‘scenic truth’ could be achieved onstage. A performance should be believable for an audience so that they may appear to the audience as truth. One of Stanislavski’s methods for achieving the truthful pursuit of a character’s emotion was his ‘magic if.’ Actors were required to ask many questions of their characters and themselves. Through the ‘magic if,’ actors were able to satisfy themselves and their characters’ positions of the plot. One of the first questions they had to ask was, “What if I were in the same situation as my character?” Another variation on this is “What would I do if I found myself in this, the character’s circumstance?” The “magic if” allowed actors to transcend the confinements of realism by asking them what would occur “if” circumstances were different, or “if” the circumstances were to happen to them. By answering these questions as the character, the theatrical actions of the actors would be believable and therefore appear ‘truthful.’
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MotivationThrough the use of system, an actor is required to analyze his or her character’s motivations. Stanislavski believed that an actor was influenced by either their mind or their emotion to stimulate their actions and the actor’s motivation was their subconscious will to perform those actions. Therefore, motivation has been described as looking to the past actions of the character to determine why they completed physical actions in a script.
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ObjectivesThe objective is a goal that a character wants to achieve. This is often worded in a question form as “What do I want?” An objective should be action-oriented, as opposed to an internal goal, in order to encourage character interaction onstage. The objective does not necessarily have to be achieved by the character and can be as simple as the script permits. For example, an objective for a particular character may simply be ‘to pour a cup of tea.’ For each scene, the actor must discover the character’s objective. Every objective is different for each actor involved because they are based on the characters of the script.
Units, bits, and beats are the division of the script into smaller objectives. For example, the entire section of a scene during which the character searches for a tea bag would be a unit. When he decides to call on a neighbour is called a bit. The purpose of units is that they are used as reference points for the actor because every individual unit should contain a specific motive for the character.
A super-objective, in contrast, focuses on the entire play as a whole. A super-objective can direct and connect an actor’s choice of objectives from scene to scene. The super-objective serves as the final goal that a character wishes to achieve within the script.
Obstacles are the aspects that will stop or hinder a character from achieving his or her individual objective. For example, while the character searches for tea bags to make the mug of tea, they find that there are no teabags in the tin.
Tools or methods are the different techniques that a character uses to surpass obstacles and achieve their objective. For example, the character searches around the kitchen, they walk to the shops, or they call on the neighbour to be able to make the tea to pour. -
ActionsActions are referred to as how the character is going to say or do something. More specifically, it as an objective for each line. Actions are how a character is going to achieve their objective. For example, a line in the script may read, ‘(whilst on the phone) “Hello, Sally. It’s Bill from next door. You wouldn’t happen to have any spare tea bags, would you? I know how well-organized you are.” The objective for this line may be ‘to flatter’ in order to collect the tea bags. Actions will be different for every single actor based on their character choices. [/fcsp]
Using the system for the modern actor
Stanislavski’s now famous book is a contribution to the Theatre and its students all over the world.
Many actors routinely identify his system with the American Method, although the latter’s exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski’s multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the ‘inside out’ and the ‘outside in’.
Stanislavski’s work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the Soviet Union as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States. It draws on a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism, symbolism and Meyerhold’s constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behavioural psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiology and the aesthetics of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He described his approach as ‘Spiritual Realism’.
Remember: there are no small parts, only small actors.
Stanislavski wrote several works, including An Actor Prepares, An Actor’s Work on a Role, and his autobiography, My Life in Art. These books have been valuable reading for nearly every drama student and many great actors of our time. Lord Laurence Olivier wrote that Stanislavski’s My Life in Art was a source of great enlightenment” when he was a young actor.
Sir John Gielgud said, “This director found time to explain a thousand things that have always troubled actors and fascinated students.” Gielgud is also quoted as saying, “Stanislavski’s now famous book is a contribution to the Theatre and its students all over the world.”
