Stanislavski's system is a progression of techniques used to train actors and
actresses to create believable characterizations for their
performances. The method that was originally created and used by
Constantin Stanislavski from 1911 to 1916 was based on the concept of
emotional memory for which an actor focuses internally to portray a
character's emotions onstage. Later, between 1934 and 1938, this technique
evolved to a method of physical actions in which emotions are produced through
the use of these actions. The latter technique is referred to as
Stanislavski's system. This approach was developed by Constantin Stanislavski, a
Russian actor, director, and theatre administrator at the Moscow Art Theatre.
The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to
determine how someone can control in performance the intangible and
uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions and art
inspiration. Influential acting teachers, including Richard Boleslavsky,
Vsevolod Meyerhold, Michael Chekhov, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman,
Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen, Ion Cojar, Andrey Vasilyev, Ivana
Chubbuck and Christine Anketell all traced their pedigrees to Stanislavski,
his theories and/or his disciples. Stanislavski's system is not method
acting, it is a classical acting philosophy. Method acting is its own
technique with only superficial commonality with Stanislavski's system.
Background Stanislavski's initial choice to call
his acting idea his system struck him as dogmatic, so he preferred to write it
without the capital letters and in quotation marks in order to indicate the
provisional nature of the results of his investigations.
The system arose as a result of questions that Stanislavski had in
regard to great actors he admired, such as the tragedians Maria Yermolova and
Tommaso Salvini. 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 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 an 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 Stanislavski. 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 and wanted to know what to do
with them. 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 no technique or
system is 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 was a great believer in
formal 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, describes the correct way of walking on stage. He wanted actors to
concentrate more on such rigours of re-learning.
Progression of the system Stanislavski's system is a method that
actors use 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 Chekhov 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 as
well as the external. 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 stationaries, but their character
performances were lacking physical and emotional believability.
The method of physical action 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 do 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.
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. = The "Magic If"=
Stanislavski believed that the truth that occurred onstage was different from
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 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 must
analyze their 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, to
encourage character interaction onstage. The character doesn't necessarily have
to achieve the objective, and the objective 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 and bits 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/scene 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 stop, hinder or pause a character from
achieving an individual objective. For example, while the character searches
for tea bags to make the mug of tea, they find there are no teabags in the
tin. Tools or methods are the different
techniques a character uses to surpass obstacles and achieve an objective. For
example, the character searches around the kitchen, they walk to the shops, or
they call on the neighbour so they can make the tea.
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 Billy from next
door. You wouldn't happen to have any spare tea bags, would you? I know how
well-organized you are." The Action for this line may be 'to flatter' in order
to achieve the Objective of collecting the tea bags. Actions are different for
every actor, based on their character choices.
The system versus the method Often, Stanislavski's system is
associated with method acting. 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 including Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Lee
Strasberg, first in the Group Theatre and later in the Actors Studio, 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 who visited and was taught by Stanislavski himself.
The 'system' and the method are often confused because one technique of the
method is similar to and uses Stanislavski's 1911 concept of emotional
memory in acting. One controversial technique of the method teaches drawing
emotions for a character from experiences and remembrances of the
actor. This was criticized on several grounds. Many saw it as simply
reinventing an already established and innate practice, others saw it as an
impediment to "true" acting, ie complete assumption of a role. 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 arose as Stanislavski's ideas changed over his life, and Strasberg
didn't necessarily incorporate these changes. 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 actors to replace the play's circumstances with their 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 can 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 Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, the
method was eventually applied to older works including 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.
See also References
Bibliography Stanislavski, Constantin. 1936. An Actor
Prepares. London: Methuen, 1988. ISBN 0-413-46190-4
O'Brien, Nick. 2010. Stanislavski In Practise. London: Routledge. ISBN
978-0415568432. ---. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and
Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN
0-413-52520-1. Carnicke, Sharon M. 1998. Stanislavsky
in Focus. Russian Theatre Archive Ser. London: Harwood Academic Publishers.
ISBN 90-5755-070-9. Meisner, Sanford. 1987. On Acting. New
York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-394-75059-4. Hagen, Uta. 1973. Respect for Acting.
New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-02-547390-5. Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A
Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN
0-415-15229-1. Merlin, Bella. 2007. The Complete
Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern. ISBN 978-1-85459-793-9.
Roach, Joseph R. 1985. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of
Acting. Theater:TheoryPerformance Ser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
ISBN 0-472-08244-2. Benedetti, Jean. 1998. Stanislavski and
the Actor. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-71160-9.
Farber, Vreneli, Stanislavsky in Practice: Actor Training in Post-Soviet
Russia(New York: Peter Lang, 2008)