Konstantin Stanislavsky Research Articles

Stanislavsky, Portraiture, and Theatrical Photography

ABSTRACT In an age when Russian artists painted flamboyant portraits of leading actors in their roles, Konstantin Stanislavsky chose to be portrayed mostly in street clothes and by drawing and photography. This was in keeping with his theatrical aesthetic, playing down the actor’s personality and avoiding declamatory histrionics. Photography had recorded Russian theatre from the late nineteenth century and a thriving market for actor portraits flourished in big cities. The Moscow Art Theatre was dedicated to preserving its productions via photography, even as Stanislavsky noted the medium’s inability to capture the life of a performance.

The Stanislavsky System of Actor Training and Piano Performance: The Need for Interdisciplinary Applications

ABSTRACT This article presents the need to address common performance challenges faced by university-level piano performance majors by adapting techniques from the acting System of Konstantin Stanislavsky, a Russian actor, director, writer, and founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) who lived from 1863 to 1938. The common performance challenges addressed in this study are performance anxiety, physical tension in performance, interpretation challenges, and stage presence – the “visual rhetoric” of piano playing. Because the impact of Stanislavsky’s methods on piano pedagogy and performance is not widely understood, this study also gives background and context for the influence of Stanislavsky on a generation of Russian-born and other influential pianists and teachers who became part of the American system of piano pedagogy in the first half of the twentieth century. The article provides support and context for i) the four performance challenges addressed in the study from writings in the field of piano performance and pedagogy, and ii) provides an overview of the Stanislavsky’s acting System, outlining what Stanislavsky described as a lifelong process of learning and implementing his theory of performance. Finally, this article explores iii) the relationship between acting (particularly the methods of Stanislavsky) and piano performance through statements and writings by pianists and pedagogues including Theodore Leschetizky, Heinrich Neuhaus, George Kochevitsky, Rosina Lhévinne, Sviatoslav Richter, and Arthur Rubinstein.

It is No Coincidence: HAMLET – An Actor Prepares (Three Hundred Years Before Stanislavsky?)

ABSTRACT The essay views William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet as a kind of London double-decker tourist bus. Visible on the open top level is the revenge tragedy. On the lower level, hidden in typical Elizabethan cryptic fashion, is an illustration of the internal journey an actor must take in order to be able to portray, “to be,” the character of Hamlet. This makes Hamlet two plays in one, both a revenge tragedy and an actor’s guidebook. When corroborated alongside the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the advice on acting outlined in Hamlet proves to be surprisingly sophisticated and contemporary. Is it a coincidence that the central question of the play is “To be or not to be” and the goal of Stanislavsky’s teachings is to achieve the “I am being” state while acting?

Stanislavsky’s Legacy: From Vasily Toporkov to Oleg Yefremov and Oleg Tabakov

This article discusses the continuity of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s pedagogy directly to his disciple Vasily Toporkov, and from him to his students Oleg Yefremov and Oleg Tabakov. Toporkov joined the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) as an actor eleven years before Stanislavsky’s death, which allowed him to participate in the final phase of Stanislavsky’s life’s work and his development of the method of psychophysical actions. Struck by Stanislavsky’s authority, scrutiny, and caring attitude towards all actors, as well as other co-workers of the theatre, Toporkov transmitted this legacy, together with the practical knowledge that he had gained, to Yefremov and Tabakov, recounting vivid stories and anecdotes about Stanislavsky. The article traces the professional development of both men: each founded his own theatre, Yefremov the Sovremennik, and Tabakov the Tabakerka. Thus, whether or not they set out to do so, both Yefremov and Tabakov followed Stanislavsky’s life example, when he founded the MAT. Their decision to follow Stanislavsky’s example was a logical consequence of this great teacher’s life-affirmative, spiritual, material, and intellectual legacy, which is on a par with the most significant humanistic writings. The key spiritual-physical aspects of Stanislavsky’s legacy have been passed down in a straight line from Stanislavsky to his students, from them to their students, and so on, from one generation of the Moscow Art Theatre to the next, until the present day.

Creating a Role for Light: A Lighting Design Teaching Method Based on Stanislavsky

ABSTRACT The creative role of stage lighting is increasingly appreciated in contemporary theatre practice. However, aesthetic sensibility seems harder to teach than technology. This essay focuses on lighting design students and a learning journey inspired by Konstantin Stanislavsky. According to Scott Palmer, “[Stanislavsky’s] use of light at the Moscow Art Theatre made a fundamental contribution to the evolution of his acting method.” The connection between Stanislavsky’s work with light and the methods used by pioneers in the field of lighting design including Adolphe Appia, Edward Gordon Craig, Stanley McCandless, and Jean Rosenthal is examined. Beyond purely practical considerations, such as visibility and smooth transitions between the scenes, this essay sheds light on how Stanislavsky’s method can be used to help young aspiring lighting designers conceive the dramaturgical role of light. A proposal for a teaching approach is presented, using Stanislavsky’s basic techniques as an example. From the analysis of the text and the given circumstances to the magic “if,” which takes the actor into the world of the play, Stanislavsky’s approach can easily be applied to the creative process of a contemporary lighting designer. The interpretation of Stanislavsky’s work from a lighting designer’s perspective also leads to useful conclusions about the art of collaboration in the performing arts.

The Studio on Povarskaia 1905: “Young Theatre of Searching”

ABSTRACT The emergence of Symbolism in Russian theatre was a turning point for both Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, prompting the former to set up a studio in 1905 to experiment with the new drama. Accounts in English of the Studio on Povarskaia, as it was to be called, have tended to view it largely as a failure. On the contrary, the Studio process was important not only as an experiment with Russian Symbolist theatre but as a catalyst for both Stanislavsky in the development of the System and for Meyerhold in the development of his method, eventually to be termed Biomechanics. This essay makes use of Russian sources and archival materials to examine comprehensively, for the first time, the Studio’s importance as the starting point for both Stanislavsky’s and Meyerhold’s methods of actor education. The discussion also clarifies widespread misunderstandings of the work of both directors, which continues to be highly significant today.

From the proscenium: The influence of Konstantin Stanislavski and the psychology of acting in Vygotsky’s work

The Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky was immersed in theater and the arts through much of his life, collaborating with scholars of the psychology of acting, including Konstantin Stanislavski’s close confidante and long-time editor Liubov Gurevich, on terms and theories expressed in his historically defining text, An Actor’s Work. This article connects linguistic, theoretical, and methodological aspects of Stanislavski’s work with Vygotsky’s quest to develop a new psychology, finding its apogee in the works of his final years, especially after he gained access to an extended draft of Stanislavski’s chapters. As Vygotsky’s theories continue to influence the field of psychology, this article looks to provide a guidepost for refining understanding of Vygotsky’s theories based on archival evidence and a close reading of contemporary translations of Vygotsky’s major works.

Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman

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’s Failed Bildungsroman

Disabled for the last nine years of his life, Konstantin Stanislavsky struggled to verbalize his artistic experience and record it in writing. This experience mostly concerned acting, itself extremely hard to conceptualize and explain, and, to his mind, the core of human existence. Stanislavsky looked for the proper literary vehicle to contain this abundance. Initially, he hoped he had found adequate means in the form of the educational novel – the Bildungsroman. However, in the course of his writing, he gradually abandoned this form, as well as any literary aspirations he may have had. What we can find in An Actor’s Work are only remnants of the original concept. Nevertheless, they are still present. Looking closer at these ruins can bring interesting insights into the aura and mood of Stanislavsky’s theorizing about art.

Active Analysis in the beginning acting classroom

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.

The Stanislavsky–Grotowski lineage: Part II

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.

From Hellerau to Here: Tracing the Lineage and Influence of Dalcroze Eurhythmics on the Family Tree of Theatre Pedagogy

Actor training in Western culture evolved as an oral tradition. Formal education appeared in the late-nineteenth century with the work of Konstantin Stanislavski. Despite its relatively brief history, the family tree of theatre pedagogy now consists of many contrasting branches. Several branches contain the creative and educational DNA of an approach to Western music education known as Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss pianist and composer whose work at the Hellerau Institute near Dresden in Germany had a significant impact on the Modernist movements in theatre and dance, 1911–1914. Historical records show that this embodied method of music learning was disseminated by Hellerau graduates in drama schools and theatre companies around the world. This essay traces four branches on the family tree of theatre pedagogy that are directly influenced by Dalcroze Eurhythmics. These branches include the legacies of Stanislavski in Russia; Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing in France; Rudolph Laban and Yat Malmgren in Germany and England; and Sanford Meisner and Anne Bogart in the United States of America. This essay is written from the author’s perspective as an actor trainer and music educator in a higher education conservatoire. It offers historical contexts for contemporary pedagogies in actor training.

Theater between art and experiment

"These few pages want to shed some light on the differences that exist between theatrical performance and experimental creative act. The fundamental notions that define the human being, in general, and the artistic entity in particular, are debated and evidence is provided about the importance of man in time and space. At the same time, the focus falls on knowledge as an essential factor in the evolution of the individual, on his ability and desire to explore expression through his own body, on the complexity of theatrical art perceived as forming culture and on the path of trials that contemporary society is going through. The argumentation is based on reference studies and includes personalities such as Konstantin Stanislavski, Michael Chehov, Brook, Étienne Decroux, precisely to emphasize that not every experiment or form of artistic expression can become art and constitute a theatrical performance."

Reconsidering Stanislavski and Barba in the light of neuroscience: a comparative study of organic acting

This study, in consideration of contemporary scientific studies, re-examines the acting methods of Konstantin Stanislavski and Eugenio Barba, two directors who are generally considered to represent contrasting perspectives in terms of performers’ physical appearance on stage. The meeting point of these two theatre practitioners’ techniques is based on impulse and they both aim to realize an organic process in acting. The findings in contemporary studies in neuroscience which present to a large extent how the human organism functions, help us to reconsider the constitutive elements in the acting process. This article analyses the technical processes of creating impulse in both Barba and Stanislavski’s works with reference to several neuroscientific studies. Antonio Damasio’s Feeling of What Happens helps explain how motor functions in human organisms work when the senses are stimulated. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score highlights the function of scored sense impressions when an organism encounters stimuli that may re-activate them. Christian Keyser’s The Emphatic Brain mentions connections between intention and action. Furthermore, works by Damasio, Van Der Kolk and Keysers help us reconsider the crucial function of images in both Stanislavski’s and Barba’s techniques. The main goal of this article is to re-examine Stanislavski and Barba’s critical concepts in acting methods in the light of contemporary neuroscience and to highlight to what extent these impulse-based and organic techniques differ from each other in the training process and what remains common ground.

The Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage: part I

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 the significance of Stanislavsky’s final experiments for his own artistic research, I identify key points of connection between the Russian and Polish directors’ respective investigations of performance processes, and I foreground these convergences as particularly consequential in the context of the often-divergent genealogies of twentieth century theatre historiography. In Part II, I explore the implications of the Stanislavsky-Grotowski lineage for contemporary performance research in light of current explorations of embodied experience in neuroscience and phenomenology.

A screen actor prepares: Self-taping by reversing Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions

ABSTRACT The popularity of streaming services, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforced the understanding that screen acting skills should be prioritized, prompting a reimagining of Stanislavsky’s practices to address the needs of the contemporary actor and acting graduate. Screen actors are expected to self-tape using digital technologies to showcase their acting skills independently. This indicates a growing demand for self-reflective abilities on what works or doesn’t work in recorded performances. Aspiring to develop lifelong learning screen actors, this essay argues that Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions can be reversed for generating findings from acclaimed screen performances to use in self-taping. The reverse Method of Physical Actions proposes that physical scores are artefacts that can be objectively broken down into psycho-physical gestures and character behaviours that can be appropriated for self-taping etudes, and analysed when reflecting on self-tapes, fostering an ongoing embodied understanding of how acting choices work on screen. The breakdown and examination of two scenes portraying Helen Mirren in The Queen (2006) and Viola Davis in Fences (2016) illustrate how the Method of Physical Actions can be rediscovered for do-it-yourself screen acting. This essay helps actors, students and actor trainers to understand how acclaimed actors create outstanding screen performances.

Голос Шаляпина как феномен в вокальном искусстве

February 13, 2023, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the phenomenal opera singer, worldfamous bass Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (1873-1938). Chaliapin’s voice is an undeniable phenomenon in the world vocal art. It was comparable to a Stradivarius violin in its uniqueness and flight. It is the art of intonational reincarnation, subtle work of conveying the psychological characters of heroes. His scale went beyond the scope of one vocal art, because he was also a brilliant actor, sculptor, painter and wrote superbly. The latter is evidenced by his correspondence and friendship with the writer Maxim Gorky. The genius of the performer was confirmed by the rave reviews of both his contemporaries: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Leonid Andreev, and an extensive list of research literature that problematized the phenomenon of Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin. This is a great art that we will have to study and learn from the great bass for a long time to come.

From Text to Scene: Modern Methods and Staging Strategies

This article examines the ideas and practices of directors and writers about the degree of fidelity and non-adherence to the text, reversal, and the use of the text as a preliminary text to present artists’ artistic concerns. The degree of fidelity of the theater play to the text and the author raises this question that whether the director will be accepted as the creator of the work or the person who performs it. This article shows that modern theater experts interpret the relationship between the written text and the staged play in different ways. While some directors see their play work as serving the writers and prioritizing their satisfaction, others see themselves as the creator of the work, sees text as one of the elements that can be removed from the theater. Konstantin Stanislavski, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Elia Kazan, and Wooster are some of the famous actors whose comments are briefly reviewed in this article. What will become clear in this work is the diminishing role of the author as the sole creator of the work and the progress of the theater towards innovation, diversity of forms, and group work. At the end of this article, the novelty in presenting the text is considered not the death of the author, but a kind of continuation of the text and a revitalization of its various dimensions.

Theater Games and Stanislavski's System: A Study on the Origins of Viola Spolin's Theatrical Education

This study investigates the relation between Viola Spolin's methodology of theatrical education and Konstantin Stanislavski's. It elucidates major similarities and differences between Spolin's theater games and Stanislavski's system in more detail than previous research. This investigation belongs to a research project on the origins of Spolin's games, which have been widely adopted in contemporary education. The present study reveals that Spolin shared several essential ideas with Stanislavski: the application of improvisation to theatrical training, the objection to director-centered production, the emphasis on intuition and spontaneity in the creative process, the evocative function of the theatrical situation/circumstances, the value of emotion and memory for creation, and the concept of energy exchange in theatrical communication. In addition, she introduced several games highly similar to the exercises in Stanislavski's system, for example, Exposure, Space Objects, Gibberish, and No Motion Warm-Up. Spolin presumably adopted, directly or indirectly, at least some of the key concepts and exercises from Stanislavski's theatrical works. However, she refused some aspects of Stanislavski's system: the teacher's privilege of approval/disapproval, the strong emphasis on imagination, the psychological view of emotion and memory, and the inhibition of direct communication between actors and the audience. Instead, Spolin developed several unique ideas for theatrical education, for instance, teachers as fellow players, contact as a way to get out into the theatrical environment, body memory as opposed to mental retention, and audience members as fellow players. The results of this study thus provide the insight that Stanislavski's system had a more profound influence, whether as a positive or negative model, on Spolin's theory and practice than as illustrated by previous studies. In this way, the present study casts light upon a significant phase of the history of theatrical methods in education and contributes to a better understanding of the characteristics and underlying philosophy of theater games.

A questão das emoções e da vivência estética: o diálogo entre Vigotski e Stanislávski em torno da psicologia do ator

Abstract The paper examines the occurrences of the perezhivanie concept in Vygotsky’s texts about art, particularly the essay on Hamlet, written in 1915, The Psychology of Art, written in 1925, and the book chapter Aesthetic Education, published in Educational Psychology in 1926. Then, the paper focuses on the text "On the problem of the psychology of the actor's creative work," aiming to understand how Vygotsky critically analyses the ideas of Denis Diderot and Konstantin Stanislavsky to propose his original outlook on the psychology of the actor's scenic perezhivanie. The paper seeks to contextualize the 1932 text in Vygotsky's framework of interests that articulate theatrical art and the study of emotions against the background of previous writings.