Stanislavski System
Encyclopedia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
, director, and theatre administrator at the Moscow Art Theatre
Moscow Art Theatre
The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow that the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Constantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, founded in 1898. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas...
(founded 1897). The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how someone can control in performance the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions and art inspiration. The most influential acting teachers, including Richard Boleslavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a great Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.-Early...
, Michael Chekhov
Michael Chekhov
Michael Chekhov was a Russian-American actor, director, author, and theatre practitioner. His acting technique has been used by actors such as Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, and Robert Stack. Constantin Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student...
, Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...
, Stella Adler
Stella Adler
Stella Adler was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City and the The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles with long-time protege Joanne Linville, who continues to teach and furthers Adler's legacy...
, Harold Clurman
Harold Clurman
Harold Edgar Clurman was a visionary American theatre director and drama critic, "one of the most influential in the United States". He was most notable as one of the three founders of the New York City's Group Theatre...
, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner
Sanford Meisner
Sanford Meisner , also known as Sandy, was an American actor and acting teacher who developed a form of Method acting that is now known as the Meisner technique....
, Uta Hagen
Uta Hagen
Uta Thyra Hagen was a German-born American actress and drama teacher. She originated the role of Martha in the 1963 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee...
, Ion Cojar
Ion Cojar
Ion Cojar was a Romanian theatre director and method acting professor at UNATC. He is the pioneer of the Romanian method acting school.-See also:* Ion Cojar * Stanislavski's system* Method acting...
and Ivana Chubbuck
Ivana Chubbuck
Ivana Chubbuck is an acting coach and author and is the founder and director of the Ivana Chubbuck Studio. Her students included Brad Pitt, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Shue, Catherine Keener, Djimon Honsou, America Ferrera, Eva Mendes, Kate Bosworth, Ian Somerhalder, April Bowlby and...
all traced their pedigrees to Stanislavski, his theories and/or his disciples.
Background
The system arose as a result of questions that Stanislavski had in regard to great actors that he admired, such as the tragedians Maria Yermolova
Maria Yermolova
Maria Nikolayevna Yermolova was said to be the greatest actress in the history of the Maly Theatre in Moscow and the first person to be proclaimed the "People's Artist of the Republic" ....
and Tommaso Salvini
Tommaso Salvini
Tommaso Salvini was an Italian actor. His father and mother were both actors, and Tommaso first appeared when he was barely fourteen as Pasquino in Goldoni's Donne curiose. In 1847 he joined the company of Adelaide Ristori, who was then at the beginning of her brilliant career...
. To him, these actors seemed to operate under different rules from other actors of the time, but their performances were still susceptible on some nights to flashes of inspiration, or completely 'being a role,' while on some nights their performances were good or merely accurate.
Although Stanislavski was not the first to codify a system of acting, he was the first to take questions and problems of psychological significance and directly link them to acting practices. When psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
was formalized, it influenced Stanislavski's system. Stanislavski attempted to create a system before psychology was widely understood and formalized as a discipline.
As a result, Stanislavski began developing a grammar of acting in 1906. In 1909, he began creating his first draft of the system. This draft was based on his personal experiences onstage as well as his observations of other actors in the Moscow Art Theatre. By finding similarities among the talented actors and their performances, Stanislavski began to create techniques that could be applied to the training of other actors to develop similar stage performances. By 1911, he was able to experiment with his new methods. He trained willing actors using his new techniques as he continued to work and alter his techniques as he saw fit in order to develop the most effective technique for actors. Though his approach changed throughout his life, he never lost sight of his ideals of truth in performance and love of art.
At times, Stanislavski's methodological rigor bordered on opacity: see, for instance, the chart of the Stanislavski 'system' included as a fold-out in editions of Robert Lewis' book "Method or Madness," a series of lectures. The chart, made by Adler, lists all aspects of the actor and of performance that Stanislavski thought pertinent at the time. His dedication to completeness and accuracy often conflicted with his goal of creating a workable system that actors would actually like to use. Most of today's actors on stage, television, and film owe much to Stanislavski's system.
Approach to acting
There is a story of an actress who had once been in a play directed by Stanislavskis. She came to him years after the performances and informed him that she had taken very copious notes on him and his technical approach during rehearsals. She wanted to know what to do with these notes and he replied, 'Burn them all.' The anecdote, whether true or not, is illustrative of Stanislavski and his approach.Stanislavski believed throughout his life the dictum that an actor should approach a role as directly as possible and then see if it "lives." If the actor connects with the role and the role is brought to life, then a technique or a system is not necessary. In this sense, the actor does not so much become someone else as he becomes himself. This achievement in acting may only happen once or twice in one's life, so the remainder of one's performances require technique. Each individual actor, however, must decide whether or not an approach or technique to their acting 'works' for them in their performance. In essence, his constant goal in life was to formulate some codified, systematic approach that might impart to any given actor with some grip on his 'instrument', that is, himself.
Stanislavski, a man of institution, his own Moscow Art Theatre and its associated studios, was a great believer in formal (and rigorous) training for the actor. His interest in deeply analyzing the qualities of human behavior were meant to give the actor an awareness of such human behavior and how easily falsehoods, or aspects of behaviour that an audience can detect, are assumed by an untrained or inexperienced actor in performance. Stanislavski once insisted that all actions that a person must enact, such as walking, talking, even sitting on stage, must be broken down and re-learned. For example, his book, translated into English as "Building a Character," gives a description of the correct way of walking on stage. Such rigors of re-learning were probably constant throughout his life.
Progression of the system
Stanislavski's system is a method for actors to produce realistic characters on stage. His original studies of techniques led to the use of 'Emotional Memory' that required actors to trigger the emotions of their characters internally. This technique was based from a French psychologist Theodule Ribot's concept of 'Affective Memory'. Later in his life, Stanislavski realized that a shift in technique was needed for actors to produce more realistic emotions before audiences but he never discredited the use of emotional memory if used cautiously. This was underscored when his talented protégé Michael ChekhovMichael Chekhov
Michael Chekhov was a Russian-American actor, director, author, and theatre practitioner. His acting technique has been used by actors such as Clint Eastwood, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, and Robert Stack. Constantin Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student...
experimented with emotional memory and had a nervous breakdown. A few months before his death he told his assistants that the path to glory can be found by working from the internal (the inside out) as well as the external (the outside in). This led to the 'Method of Physical Action'. The shift between concepts was a result of various observations made by Stanislavski. He observed that actors' mental preparations for their roles did not coincide with their physical performances on stage. They had spent most of their time reviewing their scripts and rehearsing their characters through internal and mental preparations, but their character performances were lacking physical and emotional believability.
The Method of Physical Action
Stanislavski developed the "method of physical actions," to solve the dilemma of spontaneous emotion in a created environment. In this technique, the actor would perform a physical motion or a series of physical activities to create the desired emotional response for the character. Emotions were considered to be formed from the subconscious, so this technique allowed the actors to consciously target and control their subconscious emotions through movement. For instance, if an actor needed to weep, he could sigh and hold his head in his hands, a physical action that many who are crying instinctively do.On stage, if an actor experiences only internal feelings or only physical actions, then the performance is dead. The reasoning behind this goes back to the union of the psychological and physical. The two go hand-in-hand. If an actor attempts to portray a character by employing one aspect of the union without the other, then they are performing incompletely. Internal experiences and their physical expression are unbreakably united. Whether it is through a facial expression or the tapping of a foot, everything a human experiences psychologically is displayed through physical means. This is termed a psycho-physical union.
The correct physical action does not come automatically for every psychological response nor are they stimulate identical responses for every individual. Many times, actors need to experiment until they determine what best works for them and for the character they are trying to portray. The best way to experiment with this is through improvisation. The best improvisers are those who can intuitively act and behave onstage as though they are in a real situation.
Through his work, Stanislavski reversed the human reaction system in which an emotion allocates an action. Method actors use actions to control their emotions. This allows actors to "live" in silences or pauses in the dialogue of the script and not only in the words. They are able to remain in character. Reacting is essentially emoting and includes allowing the body to outwardly express what the mind is inwardly experiencing.
Sections of the system
Stanislavski believed that if an actor completes the system, the desired emotion should be created and experienced. One earlier technique used for the system involved a "round the table analysis," a process in which the actors and director literally sit around a table and put forward their thoughts on the script and the characters until a clear understanding is formed. This technique involved breaking the script into sections. For the system to work, the structure of the script should be analyzed and sectioned based on the different characters of the play. Later, this technique was changed to instead immediately begin rehearsals after the main idea of the play had been discussed, but the sections are still evolved even through this practice.Magic If
Stanislavski 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 place themselves in 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 'truthful.'Motivation
Through 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.Objectives
The 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 mug 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.
Actions 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.
The system versus the Method
Often Stanislavski's system is associated with Method actingMethod acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
. The latter is an outgrowth of the American theatre scene, particularly in New York, in the 1930s and 40s. Method acting appeared when actors and directors like Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
, Robert Lewis, Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg
Lee Strasberg was an American actor, director and acting teacher. He cofounded, with directors Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, the Group Theatre in 1931, which was hailed as "America's first true theatrical collective"...
, first in the Group Theatre and later in the Actors Studio
Actors Studio
The Actors Studio is a membership organization for professional actors, theatre directors and playwrights at 432 West 44th Street in the Clinton neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded October 5, 1947, by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis and Anna Sokolow who provided...
, applied the Emotional Memory technique from Stanislavski's system. This technique made its way in American theatres because it was taught to Strasberg at the American Laboratory Theatre in the 1920s to the particular psychological needs of the American actor of their time. It has been suggested that Strasberg had access at that time only to An Actor Prepares and that if he had perhaps waited until he had also read Building A Character, which was published much later, then he might not have developed such an extreme 'method'. Other American actors, however, did not follow Strasberg's Method, like Stella Adler
Stella Adler
Stella Adler was an American actress and an acclaimed acting teacher, who founded the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City and the The Stella Adler Academy of Acting in Los Angeles with long-time protege Joanne Linville, who continues to teach and furthers Adler's legacy...
who visited and was taught by Stanislavski himself.
The 'system' and the Method are often confused because the Method is similar to and uses Stanislavski's 1911 concept of Emotional Memory in acting. The Method teaches to draw emotions for a character from past experiences and remembrances of the actor. Strasberg renamed Stanislavski's earlier technique to 'Affective Memory' and continued to teach it as a proper acting method long after Stanislavki discredited it as a useful acting method. Possibly the main difference between the Method and the system was that ideas behind the Method did not change as flaws were discovered. To illustrate the difference between the two methods, Stanislavski has the actor ask himself, "What would I do if I were in this circumstance" while Strasberg adopted a modification, "What would motivate me, the actor, to behave in the way the character does?" Strasberg asks the actor to replace the play's circumstances with his/her own, called a "substitution." Stanislavski had, throughout his life, no single focused project. Instead, he thought of his system as a table of contents from which the working actor could constantly draw, depending on what problems might occur from play to play.
Stanislavski's emphasis on life within moments, on psychological realism, and on emotional authenticity, seemed to attract these actors and thinkers. While much work was done with the works of playwrights like Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.-Early life:Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York. He dropped out of high...
, Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
, and Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs...
, the Method was eventually applied to older works like those of William Shakespeare. Indeed, controversy remains contesting the appropriateness of a Method approach to pre-Modernist plays, for while the system and Method share many characteristics, they differ immensely.