ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEATRE AND

PERFORMANCE
Konstantin Stanislavsky
Rose Whyman
University of Birmingham

INTRODUCTION
Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev, who took the stage name
‘Stanislavsky’, was a Russian actor and director who lived from 1863-
1938. He is famous throughout the world today for the development of
a method of training actors called the ‘System’ and because of the
standards of performance established at the theatre he founded in 1897
with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858-1943), which became
known as the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). His work remains of great
significance for the contemporary actor: the System is widely used, and
continues to provoke debate and explorations in contemporary practice.



HISTORY
Stanislavsky was the first person to explore acting in a methodical and
scientific way. He also redefined theatre’s place in Russian society. Before,
Russian theatre consisted largely of European classics in translation, plays
by great Russian writers Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) and Nikolai Gogol
(1809-1852), romantic and historical drama, melodrama, operettas and
comedy. As a child of a wealthy merchant family, he was brought up visiting
ballet, opera and the theatre. Moscow’s Imperial Maly theatre influenced
him most: the ‘natural’ acting of Mikhail Shchepkin and other outstanding
actors whom he saw there. His family formed an amateur theatre company,
the Alekseyev Circle, with their own theatre and he had the desire to
become a great actor himself.

In 1888, Stanislavsky and others founded The Moscow Society of Art and
Literature. He married a co-actor, Maria Perevoshchikova (1866-1943), who
took the stage name ‘Lilina’. His new approaches to direction and his own
performances gained much critical comment. In his experiments, he
learned from productions of the theatre company of the Duke of Saxe-
Meiningen, which toured classical plays with striking crowd scenes and
meticulous historical accuracy in set, costume and properties, as opposed
to the stock sets and costume normally used.

In the formation of the MAT, Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko

engaged with the traditional aesthetic of the Russian intelligentsia, seeing
the importance of art in bringing about social and spiritual change in
Russia’s corrupt, feudalistic society. They wanted it to be an affordable,
popular theatre which educated audiences. Stanislavsky also encountered
new ideas emerging in the period from the 1890s to the Russian revolution
in 1917, when Russian performing arts, literature, and fine art were
celebrated in Europe and America and when scientific and psychological
ideas influenced emerging ideas of realism and naturalism in theatre. In
his explorations, the plays of the great writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
were important. The Seagull (1898), Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters
(1901), The Cherry Orchard (1904), were all produced at MAT, the last three
as premières, making Stanislavsky’s name as an actor and director. Other
founder members of the MAT included Olga Knipper (1868-1959) who
married Anton Chekhov in 1901, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, who was to
become the leading avant-garde director of the revolutionary period in
Russia after leaving the MAT in 1902. Contemporary plays by writers such

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as Henrik Ibsen, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Russian writers such as Alexei
Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky as well as Shakespeare and Molière, Gogol and
Pushkin, were also the main repertoire over MAT’s first period of existence.
Despite the existing censorship, many of these plays had a resonance for
the times, depicting the stagnancy of Russian society.

In 1905, there was an abortive attempt at political revolution while

naturalism was being challenged by avant-garde movements such as
symbolism and Stanislavsky began to work on plays such as those by
Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck.

Stanislavsky began to formulate the System from 1906. It met resistance

from MAT actors and his relationship with Nemirovich-Danchenko had
deteriorated as they had artistic differences, so in 1912, Stanislavsky and
his trusted assistant Leopold Sulerzhitsky (1872-1916) opened the First
Studio, (first of several) where artists Evgenii Vakhtangov (1883-1922) and
Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) gained valuable experience as actors and
directors.

After the major 1917 revolution, Stanislavsky, like others, was stripped of
his fortune. In 1922-24, MAT toured in Europe and the USA, making a great
impression and inspiring many, including Lee Strasberg, who was to
develop ‘Method acting’. Back in Russia, Stanislavsky worked on new
Soviet plays and operas, also working at the Bolshoi Opera Studio. Mikhail
Bulgakov’s The Days of the Turbins, about a liberal family in the Civil War
was a huge success, but Stanislavsky’s work was under attack. The
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers found that Stanislavski’s System
was not materialist enough for Soviet times, in its emphases on spirituality
and emotion.

Josef Stalin eventually gained power, turning the ideals of the early
communists into the harsh reality of a dictatorship where millions of people
were put to death, but in 1932, it was revealed that Stalin’s favourite play
was The Days of the Turbins. Stanislavsky was invited to work with the
Soviet government and his concepts of truth and realism in art became
equated with Socialist Realism, the doctrine that defined the official form
for Soviet art, though this involved distorting aspects of what Stanislavsky
actually taught. This promoted socialism and aimed to communicate with
the uneducated masses.

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In 1935, after various crises at the MAT, Stanislavsky began a new Opera-
Dramatic studio, with his sister Zinaida. In 1938, he invited Meyerhold to
work at the Stanislavski Opera Theatre. Stanislavsky died acclaimed as a
leading figure in the Soviet Union, and the System became the official
training method for actors. The Soviet interpretation of it was to cause
confusion in understanding the System at first in the west, but much has
become clearer in recent years.

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AIMS
As a young actor, Stanislavsky had studied great actors and what it was
that made their acting stand out. He refused to believe that this was simply
talent and thought that artistic creativity could be developed in acting: his
quest was therefore was to discover practical methods to train himself and
others to act at the highest standard possible. He aimed to establish a
company that worked as an ensemble, rather than one based on a star
system.

He attempted to solve problems of acting: how the actor can overcome

stage fright and tension. In his experiments in the psychology and
physiology of acting he drew from observations of himself and others,
taking examples from real life, as Shchepkin had taught. He drew from
Associationist Psychology, which helped him see how memories of
emotions were interlinked with memories of sensory experiences,
important in his ideas of how actors experience the emotions of a role. He
experimented with forms of relaxation, exercise and movement training
including dance, gymnastics, Jaques-Dalcroze eurhythmics, and various
ways of training the singing and speaking voice. He made use of aspects
of yoga which helped the actor develop skills in paying attention and
communication. His aim was to discover a way for the actor to learn to truly
experience and embody a role, and to control performance so that there
was no aspect of the actor pretending or repeating clichés.

The approach he took was based in his beliefs about particular relationship
between artist and society in Russia, in which he relied on the aesthetic
theory of great writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Stanislavsky believed that
art is about communication between people and that this is of spiritual
importance in helping people to develop themselves, to become better
people. Art should enable understanding of and sympathy with other
people. Actors must gain understanding of life and what makes human
beings behave as they do. He believed that art does not represent or
imitate nature, theatre should create human life experience, natural truth
on stage. The actor invests his or her experience from life in order to create
this truth, “the life of the human spirit of the role”, as he put it. He rooted
his work, he said, in observations of the realities of human nature. One of
Stanislavsky’s maxims, adopted early on in his career was “When you play
a bad man, look for the good in him”, that is, characters should be fully

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rounded, even possessing contradictory characteristics as human beings
do.

This humanist view, that as human beings we share experience, and this is
all-important in art, means that truthful characters are based in the actor’s
actual experience. The actor has a mission as an artist, rather than a skill.
Stanislavsky drew a distinction between the actor’s art of ‘experiencing’
and ‘representation’, where the actor has skills in representing a role, but
this is done with external mannerisms of movement and voice, without true
inner experience. He also rejected ‘stock-in-trade’ acting, where the actor
reproduces clichés or tricks, focussing on external expression.

Stanislavsky performed as an actor until 1928, developed the System

throughout his life, and was one of the main initiators of the development
of role of the director, as we know it today. His early productions,
influenced by Kronegk, the director of the Saxe-Meiningen Court theatre,
prioritized historical accuracy. The system began to develop as a way of
teaching actors, rather than instructing them how to achieve what the
director, wanted, in a dictatorial way. When he began to develop the
system from 1906, he focussed more on the individual actor’s process.

The beginning of rehearsals for many years focussed on round-the-table

work, where in-depth analysis of the play took place through discussion,
with the company seated around a table, before beginning practical work.
The problem with this was that the actor’s process could become overly
intellectual and the work that had been done was of little use practically,
when the actors began to rehearse. He developed ways of encouraging
the actor to work on his feet, using improvisation as a way into a text,
methods called ‘Active Analysis’. In 1936, he wrote about a rehearsal
method which has been termed ‘The Method of Physical Actions’. There
are varying accounts from the oral tradition of Stanislavsky’s work of the
differences between the two terms but essentially both methods enable
the actor to get to know and analyse the role practically, improvising a
scene based on a basic knowledge of the plot, finding the situations,
events or experiences, playing the actions of the scene and using his or
her own words. The director then gives some input and the scene may be
repeated, deepening the understanding and clarifying the tasks and
actions.

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He attempted to explain his work in publications in America and Russia in
his lifetime. New translations have been published recently: My Life in Art
(2008), An Actor’s Work (2008) and An Actor’s Work on a Role (2010),
which explain what he wanted to achieve and form a manual for the
System.

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PRACTICE
Stanislavsky’s System combines basic training in voice, movement and
other skills with training in how to undergo the processes of research,
analysis, rehearsal and performance of a role in a way that is true to life.
He held that it was based on laws of nature, which apply to everyone. Great
artists might work intuitively, without the need for such a system, but in fact
go through the same processes according to both laws of physiology, how
the human body works, to move and vocalise and laws of creativity, the
processes of imagination and expression.

The ‘Three Bases of the System’, which underpin these laws are ‘action’,
‘emotion’ and the ‘subconscious’. In performance, the actor should be
involved in internal and external action, which means that all action must
be purposeful and committed; the actor is paying full attention to what he
or she is doing. Everything the actor does on stage is meaningful and there
must be nothing superfluous.

If the actor is ‘active’ in this way, truthful emotional expression is possible.

This may be achieved indirectly, by memory of experiences involving
emotions, where the actor recalls a situation from life where he or she
experienced the desire for revenge, for example, and uses this to inform a
role such as that of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This may be difficult to achieve
and instead, playing the actions truthfully, as he or she would if they were
in the circumstances of the play will bring about the required emotion. The
main point is that the actor should not attempt to act an emotional state
directly, trying to “be vengeful”, for example. This is called ‘acting in
general’. Instead, the actor should “play the action” where the desire for
revenge is apparent because it is clear from what they do and say that they
want to see justice done, to expose the actions of Claudius, who has killed
Hamlet’s father, and see him punished. The term for what the characters
wants or wants to do in the circumstances of the scene or part of the scene
is ‘task’ or ‘objective’. What the character wants to achieve as a whole is
called the ‘supertask’ or ‘superobjective’.

The third base is the subconscious. When the actor applies the system, the
subconscious will produce material for the role from memory of emotions
and sensory experiences without having to try, to make an effort, which
results in muscular tension.

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The System includes exercises aiming to develop the ability to pay
attention and to be fully alive on stage. By focussing on the task he or she
has on stage, the actor develops and practises the sense of truthful action.
He or she works at freeing the muscles, which enables him or her not to
react to the audience not to stiffen in fear or to play to the audience. Using
the techniques of ‘the magic if’, where the actor asks as a starting point
“what would I do if I were in the circumstances my character is in?” all
actions are internally justified, believable, not carried out externally, going
through the motions. Crucial to this is the task: the right task will evoke the
right inner experience. This is the path to the unconscious through the
conscious, to experiencing. Working on tasks for sections (bits or units) of
the play eventually builds up so that the actor establishes the through-line
of their character for the play.

This is most important lesson an actor can learn, the difference between
mechanical acting and inner experiencing. Working at approaching each
performance afresh, with truth and belief in the tasks and actions, ensures
that acting can always seem spontaneous. The actor who can control their
performance so that their bodily apparatus remains free and there is no
excess muscular tension even at moments of highest emotional intensity
(Stanislavsky, 2008, p.79) will embody the role expressively. Stanislavsky
noted in great actors this quality of “bodily relaxation, the absence of
muscular tension and the total obedience of the physical apparatus” (2008,
pp.257-8), a sense of ease on stage and the aim of the System remains to
enable the beginning actor to learn to achieve this.

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FURTHER READING
Art.theatre.ru. (2017). History. [online] Available at:
http://art.theatre.ru/english/history/ [Accessed 16 Jun. 2017].

Benedetti, J. (1999). Stanislavski- His Life and Art. London: Methuen Drama.

En.wikipedia.org. (2017). Konstantin Stanislavski. [online] Available at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Stanislavsky [Accessed 16 Jun.
2017].

Stanislavsky, K. (2008). An Actor's Work. Translated by J. Benedetti.

London: Routledge.

Whyman, R. (2013). Stanislavski – The Basics. London: Routledge.

YouTube (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eheDFPvUhjs. [video].

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