Stanislavski's system
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"'Stanislavski's system'" or ‘system’ is an approach to acting developed by Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor, director, and theatre administrator at the Moscow Art Theatre (founded 1897). The system is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how a human being can control in performance the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior, such as emotions and artistic inspiration.
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[edit] Description
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The system is based around an actor "living the part" but always staying one step away from complete belief. He felt that it is important that, whilst the actor should experience and show the emotions of the character, it is very important the actor still stay detached. The system was made as a flexible structure, a thing that actors may use as much or as little as they please in their rehearsals, and was intended to be modified for the individual.
Techniques involve a "Round the table analysis" - a process in which the actor/s and director literally sit around a table and put forward their thoughts on the script and the characters until a clear understanding is formed. His "homework" involved breaking the script into sections of different "objectives." This would be different for each actor involved. The structure of the entire script would be roughly as follows:
Objective - The final goal a character wants to achieve. (Often worded as "What do I want?" Note: Does not have to be achieved and can be as simple as you wish. E.g To pour a mug of tea.
Obstacle: Aspects that will stop or hinder that character achieving his or her objective. E.g There are no teabags in the tin.
Tools/Method (has many different names) - The different techniques that a character is going to use to achieve his objective. E.g Search around the kitchen, walk to the shops, call on the neighbor.
Units/bits - The division of the script into smaller objectives or methods. E.g The entire section during which the character searches for a tea bag would be a unit. When he decides to call on a neighbor is called a bit.
Actions - How he is going to say or do something. Think of it as an objective for each line. Normally used with a verb. E.g The line may be (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." This will be different for every single actor.
Stanislavski believed that if one completes this homework, the desired emotion should be created and experienced.
Stanislavski began developing a grammar of acting in 1906; his initial choice to call it his System struck him as too dogmatic, so he preferred to write it as his ‘system’ (without the capital letter and in quotation marks), in order to indicate the provisional nature of the results of his investigations.[1] The system arose as a result of the questions Stanislavski had in regards to great actors he admired, such as the tragedians Maria Yermolova and Tommaso Salvini. These actors seemed to operate under different rules than other actors, but their performances were still susceptible on some nights to flashes of inspiration, of completely 'being a role,' while on some nights their performances were good or merely accurate.
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.
[edit] Approaching acting
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Constantin Stanislavski had a dictum that he probably believed throughout his life: that one should always approach a role as directly as possible, and then see if it "lives." If the actor and the role connect, and the role comes to life, why apply a technique, a system? Such a success may only happen once or twice in one's life -- or never -- so the remainder of one's performances require technique.
However, each individual actor must decide whether or not an approach 'works' for him.
While Stanislavski was not the first to codify some system of acting (see, for instance, any number of Victorian gesture-books for actors) he was the first to take questions and problems of psychological significance directly. In fact, Stanislavski started attempting to create a system before psychology was widely understood and formalized as a discipline. When it finally was formalized, psychology influenced Stanislavski's system tremendously. Though his approach changed greatly throughout his life, he never lost sight of his ideals: truth in performance and love of art.
Stanislavski's system is a complex method for producing realistic characters; most of today's actors on stage, television, and film owe much to it. Using system, an actor is required to deeply analyze his or her character's motivations. The actor must discover the character's objective in each scene, and a 'super-objective' for the entire play, which can direct and connect an actor's choice of objectives from scene to scene.
One of Stanislavski's methods for achieving the truthful pursuit of a character's objective was his 'magic if.' Actors were required to ask many questions of their characters and themselves. One of the first questions they had to ask was, "What if I were in the same situation as my character?" The "magic if" allowed actors to transcend the confines of realism by asking them what would occur "if" circumstances were different, or "if" the circumstances were to happen to them.
[edit] The system versus the Method
Stanislavski and menners and his system are frequently misunderstood. For example, often the system is confused with the Method. The latter is an outgrowth of the American (mainly New York) theatre scene in the 1930s and 40s, when actors and directors like Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Lee Strasberg, etc., first in the Group Theatre and later in the Actors Studio, discovered Stanislavski's system. 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, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, 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. Method places a heavy emphasis on Emotion Memory, that is, recalling experienced emotions for use in performance (which Stanislavski found to be a "less" effective means of accessing emotion than other techniques he evolved in his later years).
The 'system' is often confused with the Method because of its close ties to the New York theaters, and again because of American figures like Stella Adler -- who visited and was taught by Stanislavski himself. Also, perceptions of the 'system' are frequently confused, because Stanislavski had, throughout his life, no single focused project.
[edit] Progression of the system
There is a story that an actress who had once been in a play directed by Stanislavski came to him years later and informed him that she had taken very copious notes on him and on his technical approach during rehearsals; she wanted to know what to do with these notes. He replied, 'Burn them all.'
The anecdote, whether true or not, is illustrative of Stanislavski and his approach. The Stanislavski of later life is not the same as the Stanislavski who championed emotion and sense memory. 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, is very complicated, listing all aspects of the actor and of performance that Stanislavski thought pertinent at the time. His dedication to completeness and accuracy often contended with his goal to create a workable system that actors would actually use.
See also his description of the correct way of walking on stage, in his book translated into English as "Building a Character." His interest in deeply analyzing the qualities of a given phenomenon were meant to give the actor an awareness of the complexities of human behavior, and how easily falsehoods -- aspects of behaviour that an audience can detect without knowing it -- are assumed by an untrained or inexperienced actor in performance. All actions that a person must enact -- walk, talk, even sit on stage -- must be broken down and re-learned, Stanislavski once insisted.
Such rigors of re-learning were probably constant throughout his life. 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.
[edit] The Method of Physical Action
Training was highly physical and demanding, and it is Stanislavski's never-failing respect for physical action that brought his system to a point of apotheosis, a way of reaching emotional truth and psychological realism while maintaining a grip on control of the physical. Further: freeing oneself up for performing anything, be it Modern theater or Greek.
Late in his life Stanislavski put much faith in an approach he called the Method of Physical Action. (The use of the word Method, again, causes confusion with Strasberg's Method.) This approach, Stanislavski surmised, finally dealt completely with the instrument of the actor and with a universality of performance.
The Method of Physical Action (hereafter, MPA) is complex. It requires an understanding of the significance of physical action, and in the performance of physical action. The idea behind the MPA is fairly simple, but its implications are profound. It is based on the idea that the only thing an actor will ever have control of in his life is "his body." There is never a direct line to emotions in performance, only to the body. Emotions may be remembered and brought up via emotional memory, but Stanislavski generally considered this a rehearsal tool or technique of research, at best. There is, in the end, only the body.
Therefore the actor and the director must work hard to use the body, that is, the body's performance of physical action, as the primary material of creation. That is the subject of the rehearsal process: how to come to physical actions that affect the actor and bring the scene to life at the same time. So in one pass both emotional and aesthetic considerations of a scene are dealt with. The actor can work with an enormity (indeed, infinity) of options; he senses the entire landscape of possibilities of performance.
The MPA is so simple that it is almost a default technique, to a kind of techniqueless technique. Two necessities are required: first, that thorough physical training is always required; and second, an understanding of what a truly good physical action comprises. Both can take years of experience and reflection until an actor is fully equipped to handle a role. Stanislavski thought late in life that the art of performance cannot be learned from literature, only from action, performance, and observation.
This late stage unfortunately receives little notice or appreciation in most summations of Stanislavski's life and technique. Most authors are satisfied to identify Stanislavski with his 'system' and with the contributions that such an approach has made towards the film and theatre in the 20th century. This is due in part to the limited literature on the subject and the fact that the works of many of the authors (author-actors and author-directors) that have come from Russia since Stanislavski's era remain untranslated, despite the value of their work. Some books are available, such as Vasiliy Toporkov's "Stanislavski in Rehearsal" and Jean Benedetti's "Stanislavski and the Actor."
[edit] Notes
- ^ See Benedetti (1999, 169).
[edit] Bibliography
- Benedetti, Jean. 1998. Stanislavski and the Actor. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413711609.
- ---. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413525201.
- Carnicke, Sharon M. 1998. Stanislavsky in Focus. Russian Theatre Archive Ser. London: Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 9057550709.
- Hagen, Uta. 1973. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0025473905.
- Innes, Christopher, ed. 2000. A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415152291.
- Merlin, Bella. 2007. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit. London: Nick Hern. ISBN 9781854597939.
- Roach, Joseph R. 1985. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Theater:Theory/Text/Performance Ser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0472082442.
- Stanislavski, Constantin. 1936. An Actor Prepares. London: Methuen, 1988. ISBN 0413461904.
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| Active Analysis • Action • Adaptation • Affective Memory • Bit | |||
| Cognitive Analysis • Communication • Concentration of Attention • Etude | |||
| Experiencing • Given Circumstances • Imagination • Indicating • Inner Contact | |||
| Inner Monologue • Intention • Justification • Lure • Method of Physical Actions | |||
| Motivation • Objective • Super Objective • The Questions • Relaxation • Representation | |||
| Sense Memory • Subtext • Substitution • Through-line of Action • Turning Point | |||
| An Actor Prepares • My Life in Art • Method Acting • Meisner Technique | |||
