Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (Russian: Константин Сергеевич Станиславский ) (17 January 1863 – 7 August, 1938), was a Russian actor and theatre director. His innovative contribution to modern European and American realistic acting has remained at the core of mainstream western performance training for much of the last century. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic techniques into a coherent and usable 'system'. Thanks to its promotion and development by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of his theoretical writings, Stanislavski's system acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed an international reach, dominating debates about acting in the West. That many of the precepts of his 'system' seem to be common sense and self-evident testifies to its hegemonic success. Actors frequently employ his basic concepts without knowing they do so.
Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring dedication, discipline and integrity, and the work of the actor as an artistic undertaking. Throughout his life, he subjected his own acting to a process of rigorous artistic self-analysis and reflection. His 'system' resulted from a persistent struggle to remove the blocks he encountered. His development of a theorized praxis—in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development—identifies him as the first great theatre practitioner.
Stanislavski's work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the USSR as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States. Many actors routinely identify his 'system' with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski's multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in'. Stanislavski's work draws on a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism, symbolism and Meyerhold's constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behaviourist psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiology and the aesthetics of Pushkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy. He described his approach as 'spiritual Realism'.
Biography
Family background
Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseievs; he was born Constantin Sergeievich Alexeiev—"Stanislavski" was a stage name that he adopted in 1884 in order to keep his performance activities secret from his parents. The prospect of becoming a professional actor was taboo for someone of his social class; actors had an even lower social status in Russia than in the rest of Europe, having only recently been serfs and the property of the nobility. The Alexeievs were a prosperous, bourgeois family, whose factories manufactured gold and silver braiding for military decorations and uniforms. Up until the communist revolution in 1917, Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his theatrical experiments in acting and directing. His family's discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur onstage and as a director until he was thirty three.
As a child, Stanislavski was exposed to the rich cultural life of his family; his interests included the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. His father, Sergei Vladimirovich Alekseiev, was elected head of the merchant class in Moscow (one of the most important and influential positions in the city) in 1877; that same year, he had a fully-equipped theatre on his estate at Liubimovka built for the entertainment of his family and friends, providing a forum for Stanislavski's adolescent theatrical impulses. Stanislavski started, after his début performance there, what would become a life-long series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems. It was from this habit of self-analysis and critique that Stanislavski's 'system' later emerged. The family's second theatre was added in 1881 to their mansion at Red Gates, on Sadovaia Street in Moscow (where Stanislavski lived from 1863 to 1903); their house became a focus for the artistic and cultural life of the city. Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business.
Early influences
Increasingly interested in "living the part," Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterization in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy; he extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning "in character". In 1884, he began vocal training under Fiodor Komissarzhevski, a professor at the Conservatoire and leading tenor of the Bolshoi (and father of the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya), with whom he also explored the co-ordination of voice and body. Together they devised exercises in moving and sitting stationary "rhythmically", which anticipated Stanislavski's later use of physical rhythm when teaching his system to opera singers. Komissarzhevski provided one of the models (the other was Stanislavski himself) for the character of Tortsov in his actor's manual An Actor's Work (1938). A year later, in 1885, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School, where students were encouraged to mimic the theatrical tricks and conventions of their tutors. Disappointed by this approach, he left after little more than two weeks.
Instead, Stanislavski devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of psychological realism in Russia. Psychological realism had been developed here by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin. In 1823, Pushkin had concluded that what united the diverse classical authors—Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille and Calderón—was their common concern for truth of character and situation, understood as credible behaviour in believable circumstances:
Gogol, meanwhile, campaigned against overblown, effect-seeking acting. In an article of 1846, he advises a modest, dignified mode of comic performance in which the actor seeks to grasp "what is dominant in the role" and considers "the character's main concern, which consumes his life, the constant object of his thought, the 'bee in his bonnet'." This inner desire forms the "heart of the role," to which the "tiny quirks and tiny external details" are added as embellishment. The Maly soon became known as the House of Shchepkin, the father of Russian realistic acting who, in 1848, promoted the idea of an "actor of feeling." This actor would "become the character" and identify with their thoughts and feelings: he would "walk, talk, think, feel, cry, laugh as the author wants him to." A copy of Shchepkin's Memoirs of a Serf-Actor , in which the actor describes his struggle to achieve a naturalness of style, was heavily-annotated by Stanislavski. Shchepkin's student, Glikeriya Fedotova, was Stanislavski's teacher (she was responsible for instilling the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, along with the stress on the importance of training and discipline, and the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication"). Shchepkin's legacy included the emphasis on a disciplined, ensemble approach, the importance of extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft.
As well as the artists of the Maly company, performances given by foreign star actors—who would often come to Moscow during Lent (when Russian actors were prohibited from appearing)—also influenced Stanislavski. The effortless, emotive and clear playing of the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi, who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in 1877, particularly impressed Stanislavski. So too did Tommaso Salvini's 1882 performance of Othello. Years later, Stanislavski wrote that Salvini was the "finest representative" of the art of experiencing approach to acting.
The Society of Art and Literature
By the age of twenty-five, Stanislavski was well-known as an amateur actor. He made a proposal to Fyodor Sollogub and Aleksandr Fedotov (a theatre director and estranged husband of Glikeriya Fedotova) to establish a society that would unite amateur and professional actors and artists. The profits from his family's factory were particularly high in 1887-1888; Stanislavski decided to use the surplus 25,000-30,000 roubles to form the Society of Art and Literature, for which he had the Ginzburg House on Tverskaia Street converted into a luxurious clubhouse with its own large stage and exhibition rooms. Fedotov became head of the dramatic section, Komissarzhevski was the head of the operatic and musical section, while Sollogub was appointed h
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