ABSTRACT Maria Ouspenskaya’s (1876-1949) classwork on acting development and Richard Boleslavsky’s lectures and class demonstrations formed the pedagogical core of the American Laboratory Theatre. The training they provided paralleled very closely to their experience at the Moscow Art Theatre and laid the foundations for the systematic study of Stanislavsky’s approach in the United States. Although Boleslavsky was the main inspirational force for the young students, Ouspenskaya provided with her pedagogical work stable regularity necessary at the Lab and guided her students through rigorous training techniques and exercises. After the Lab closed, she opened her own acting studios (initially in New York, later in Los Angeles). All this time, she accepted acting engagements and soon became a Hollywood celebrity, recognized as “the living theatrical legend” and one of the finest and most respected American acting teachers that played a vital role in disseminating Stanislavsky’s ideas. The study analyzes Ouspenskaya’s teaching techniques, using the descriptions of her work abstracted from her students’ interviews or the notes they took during her class. It also investigates her on-screen appearances, providing lasting visual evidence of her performing skills and giving us a direct sense of the potential quality of early System inspired acting.

ABSTRACT Often, the exercises in the acting classroom can feel at odds with the processes used in the rehearsal room. I believe Konstantin Stanislavsky’s rehearsal method of Active Analysis provides tools and perspectives for dealing with these challenges. At The S Word Symposium in November 2022, I outlined a process I developed for teaching beginning acting using principles of Active Analysis as a tool to bridge the gap between training and rehearsing. This article expands on that presentation, including the experiences and thought processes that went into creating this class structure, and reviews the benefits for students. Applied in this way, Stanislavsky’s impulse to place embodied action before intellectual analysis yields valuable results in the classroom as well as the rehearsal hall.

ABSTRACT In this article, the author explores the direct links of the Russian acting and directing tradition to the Greek field as they were introduced through the Experimental Stage of the National Theatre of Greece (2001–07) and the Acting and Directing Workshop of the National Theatre (2001–2004). Both endeavours were under the auspices of the National Theatre, and were inspired, structured, and managed by Stathis Livathinos, who had studied at GITIS and aspired to create an ensemble that worked and experimented together. In this framework, Livathinos gathered a group of approximately 24 actors and 14 actors who aspired to become directors and introduced to them anew Stanislavsky’s ideas and teaching as well as to the recent developments of the Russian directing and acting tradition. The Experimental Stage, during those 3 years, produced more than 10 productions, including a production of Medea in the theatre of Epidaurus. From the Workshop, which was, essentially, an MA educational programme, graduated around 15 actors and six directors – three of whom were women. This Workshop was the preamble of the National Theatre School of Directing established in 2018 by Livathinos, when he was General and Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Greece.

ABSTRACT Radovan Lukavský (1919–2008) was an important representative of modern Czech acting, a long-time National Theatre drama ensemble member in Prague, and a teacher at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (AMU). As a teacher, he persistently espoused the legacy of Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky. Lukavský made considerable efforts to defend the latter’s ideas against the “vulgarization” that had infested Czech theatre and the Theatre faculty of AMU at the beginning of the 1950s, as a clash took place between the socialist-realist ideologisation and the creative interpretation of the Stanislavsky “System.” In this essay, the author draws attention to Lukavský’s approach to Stanislavsky’s methods and the basic principles Lukavský addressed in other professional publications and studies.

ABSTRACT This article approaches eyewitness accounts of Stanislavsky’s late practice through the lens of cognitive science. Findings from this field identify relevant and robust theoretical reasons for statements by Vasili Toporkov and Maria Knebel that describe mental and emotional phenomena arising from physical actions. Cognitive neuroscience provides us with theory that is both grounded in phenomenological experience and also moves beyond it to allow us to better understand how Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis stimulates these responses.

ABSTRACT The connection between Konstantin Stanislavsky and Jerzy Grotowski is often overlooked or underplayed because there are substantial distinctions between them in terms of practices and approaches. In Part I of this essay, I examine Grotowski’s reflections on Stanislavsky’s final experiments, which the Polish director considered to constitute the culmination of the System, as well as the starting point for his own work at the Laboratory Theatre. In Part II, I explore the implications of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage and its legacy for contemporary performance research by relating Stanislavsky’s idiosyncratic usage of the term perezhivanie, translated by Martin Kurten as “conscious experience,” to the neuroscientific investigation of embodied experience, discussed by Rhonda Blair, and to Grotowski’s own conception of consciousness as a form of embodied awareness. I then focus on a crucial point of convergence between the Russian and Polish directors’ respective approaches lying beyond the purview of neuroscience, namely, the correlation between the physical and the spiritual, prompting Sharon Carnicke to invent the neologism “physiospiritual.” I infer that the legacy of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage consists in an expanded notion of perezhivanie that I relate to philosopher Alva Noë’s phenomenological understanding of the interrelation of consciousness and experience.

ABSTRACT In November 2022, The S Word symposium was hosted at DAMU, Prague, under the title 'Stanislavsky's Last Words'. Bella Merlin conducted a practical workshop on the 'constant state of inner improvisation' that underpins Stanislavsky's final rehearsal practice, Active Analysis, along with the vital role of 'dynamic listening' between actors. This paper is an account of that workshop, writing in an autoethnographic style and taking the reader through the improvisations and exercises as if present at the workshop. Merlin notes her training in Active Analysis at the State Institute of Cinematography, Moscow, in the early 1990s and her book Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Acting (NHB 2001) as arguably the first hands-on account of Active Analysis in the UK. The 'line of thought' (discovered through textual analysis) and the 'line of action' (discovered through improvisations) link together to create a production through the process of Active Analysis. Stanislavsky's tools of the 'six fundamental questions', 'grasp', 'objectives' (or problems and tasks), and the essential feeling of 'now, today, here' as the raw material for creating roles are explored, along with identifying the scene's main 'event' and uncovering a simple 'score of physical actions'. The dramatic dialogue used is an open scene from Dave Kost's Books of Sides II (Routledge 2017). The overarching tool for the workshop is obshcheniye: community or 'communion'.

ABSTRACT Stanislavsky placed belief in imagined circumstances at the heart of his acting System. As he wrote, “Everything on stage must instill belief in the possibility that it could exist in life as actual feelings and sensations, analogous to those that the artist undergoes while creating.” However, leading proponents of Stanislavsky’s late work rarely mention belief when they write about his last rehearsal technique, named Active Analysis by Maria Knebel. My essay interrogates this puzzling absence through Knebel’s practice, which still positions belief as “the foundation of foundations” in acting, but also sees belief as originating from actors’ active exploration of their roles’ circumstances. For Knebel, there can be no belief in fictional possibilities without the visceral knowledge, acquired through the rehearsal process.