Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing" (with which he contrasts the "art of representation").Benedetti (1999a, 201), Carnicke (2000, 17), and Stanislavski (1938, 16—36 "art of representation" corresponds to Mikhail Shchepkin's "actor of reason" and his "art of experiencing" corresponds to Shchepkin's "actor of feeling"; see Benedetti (1999a, 202). It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly.Benedetti (1999a, 170). In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment (a "task").Benedetti (1999a, 182—183).
Later, Stanislavski further elaborated what he called 'the System' with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active representative", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised.Benedetti (1999a, 355—256), Carnicke (2000, 32—33), Leach (2004, 29), Magarshack (1950, 373—375), and Whyman (2008, 242). "The best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances."Quoted by Carnicke (1998, 156).
Thanks to its promotion and development by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of Stanislavski's theoretical writings, his system acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed a reach, dominating debates about acting in the West.Carnicke (1998, 1, 167), Counsell (1996, 24), and Milling and Ley (2001, 1). According to one writer on twentieth-century theatre in London and New York, Stanislavski's ideas have become accepted as common sense so that actors may use them even without knowing.Counsell (1996, 25).
Stanislavski before his system Having worked as an amateur actor and director until the age of 33, in 1898 Stanislavski co-founded with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and began his professional career. The two of them were resolved to institute a revolution in the staging practices of the time. Benedetti offers a vivid portrait of the poor quality of mainstream theatrical practice in Russia before the MAT:The script meant less than nothing. Sometimes the cast did not even bother to learn their lines. Leading actors would simply plant themselves downstage centre, by the prompter's box, wait to be fed the lines then deliver them straight at the audience in a ringing voice, giving a fine display of passion and "temperament." Everyone, in fact, spoke their lines out front. Direct communication with the other actors was minimal. Furniture was so arranged as to allow the actors to face front.Benedetti (1989, 5).
Stanislavski's early productions were created without the use of his system. His first international successes were staged using an external, director-centred technique that strove for an organic unity of all its elements—in each production he planned the interpretation of every role, blocking, and the mise en scène in detail in advance.Benedetti (1989, 18, 22—23), (1999a, 42), and (1999b, 257), Carnicke (2000, 29), Gordon (2006, 40—42), Leach (2004, 14), and Magarshack (1950, 73—74). As Carnicke emphasises, Stanislavski's early prompt-books, such as that for the production of The Seagull in 1898, "describe movements, gestures, mise en scène, not inner action and subtext" (2000, 29). The principle of a unity of all elements (or what Richard Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk) survived into Stanislavski's system, while the exclusively external technique did not; although his work shifted from a director-centred to an actor-centred approach, his system nonetheless valorises the absolute authority of the director. He also introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast.Milling and Ley (2001, 5). Stanislavski and Nemirovich found they had this practice in common during their legendary 18-hour conversation that led to the establishment of the MAT. Despite the success that this approach brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, Stanislavski remained dissatisfied.Bablet (1962, 134), Benedetti (1989, 23—26) and (1999a, 130), and Gordon (2006, 37—42). Carnicke emphasises the fact that Stanislavski's great productions of Chekhov's plays were staged without the use of his system (2000, 29).
Both his struggles with Chekhov's drama (out of which his notion of subtext emerged) and his experiments with Symbolism encouraged a greater attention to "inner action" and a more intensive investigation of the actor's process.Benedetti (1989, 25—39) and (1999a, part two), Braun (1982, 62—63), Carnicke (1998, 29) and (2000, 21—22, 29—30, 33), and Gordon (2006, 41—45). For an explanation of "inner action", see Stanislavski (1957, 136); for subtext, see Stanislavski (1938, 402—413). He began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy.Benedetti (1989, 30) and (1999a, 181, 185—187), Counsell (1996, 24—27), Gordon (2006, 37—38), Magarshack (1950, 294, 305), and Milling and Ley (2001, 2). He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre.Carnicke (2000, 13), Gauss (1999, 3), Gordon (2006, 45—46), Milling and Ley (2001, 6), and Rudnitsky (1981, 56).
Throughout his career, Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection.Benedetti (1989, 1) and (2005, 109), Gordon (2006, 40—41), and Milling and Ley (2001, 3—5). His system of acting developed out of his persistent efforts to remove the blocks that he encountered in his performances, beginning with a major crisis in 1906.Benedetti (1989, 1), Gordon (2006, 42—43), and Roach (1985, 204).
Stanislavski eventually came to organise his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology, which built on three major strands of influence: (1) the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; (2) the actor-centred realism of the Maly; and (3) the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement.Benedetti (1989, 5—11, 15, 18) and (1999b, 254), Braun (1982, 59), Carnicke (2000, 13, 16, 29), Counsell (1996, 24), Gordon (2006, 38, 40—41), and Innes (2000, 53—54). Stanislavski's earliest reference to his system appears in 1909, the same year that he first incorporated it into his rehearsal process.Carnicke (1998, 72) and Whyman (2008, 262). Olga Knipper and many of the other MAT actors in that production—Ivan Turgenev's comedy A Month in the Country—resented Stanislavski's use of it as a laboratory in which to conduct his experiments.Worrall (1996, 185). At Stanislavski's insistence, the MAT went on to adopt his system as its official rehearsal method in 1911.Milling and Ley (2001, 6).
Experiencing the role
This system is based on "experiencing a role."Milling and Ley (2001, 7) and Stanislavski (1938, 16–36). This principle demands that as an actor, you should "experience feelings analogous" to those that the character experiences "each and every time you do it."Stanislavski (1938, 19) Stanislavski approvingly quotes Tommaso Salvini when he insists that actors should really feel what they portray "at every performance, be it the first or the thousandth."
Not all emotional experiences are appropriate, therefore, since the actor's feelings must be relevant and parallel to the character's experience.Stanslavski (1938, 27). Stanislavski identified Salvini, whose performance of Othello he had admired in 1882, as the finest representative of the art of experiencing approach.Stanislavski (1938, 19) and Benedetti (1999a, 18). Salvini had disagreed with the French actor Cocquelin over the role emotion ought to play—whether it should be experienced only in rehearsals when preparing the role (Cocquelin's position) or whether it ought to be felt in performance (Salvini's position).
On this basis, Stanislavski contrasts his own "art of experiencing" approach with what he calls the "art of representation" practised by Cocquelin (in which experiencing forms one of the preparatory stages only) and "hack" acting (in which experiencing plays no part).Counsell (1996, 25–26). Despite this distinction, however, Stanislavskian theatre, in which actors "experience" their roles, remains "representational" in the broader critical sense; see Stanislavski (1938, 22–27) and the article Presentational acting and Representational acting for a fuller discussion of the different uses of these terms. In addition, for Stanislavski's conception of "experiencing the role" see Carnicke (1998), especially chapter five. While Stanislavski recognises the art of representation as being capable of the creation of genuine works of art, he rejects its technique as "either too showy or too superficial" to be capable of the "expression of deep passions" and the "subtlety and depth of human feelings"; see Stanislavski (1938, 26–27). Stanislavski defines the actor's "experiencing" as playing "credibly", by which he means "thinking, wanting, striving, behaving truthfully, in logical sequence in a human way, within the character, and in complete parallel to it", such that the actor begins to feel "as one with" the role.
Stanislavski's approach seeks to stimulate the will to create afresh and to activate subconscious processes sympathetically and indirectly by means of conscious techniques.Benedetti (1999a, 169) and Counsell (1996, 27). Many scholars of Stanislavski's work stress that his conception of the "unconscious" (or "subconscious", "superconscious") is pre-Freudian; Benedetti, for example, explains that "Stanislavski merely meant those regions of the mind which are not accessible to conscious recall or the will. It had nothing to do with notions of latent content advanced by Freud, whose works he did not know" (1999a, 169). In this way, it attempts to recreate in the actor the inner, psychological causes of behaviour, rather than to present a simulacrum of their effects.Benedetti (2005, 124) and Counsell (1996, 27). Stanislavski recognised that in practice a performance is usually a mixture of the three trends (experiencing, representation, hack) but felt that experiencing should predominate.Benedetti (1999a, 202, 342).
The range of training exercises and rehearsal practices that are designed to encourage and support "experiencing the role" resulted from many years of sustained inquiry and experiment. Many may be discerned as early as 1905 in Stanislavski's letter of advice to Vera Kotlyarevskaya on how to approach the role of Charlotta in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard: