by Sonia Moore
Believing ethics to be of great significance in the success of the theater, Stanislavski said that even very talented actors should be sacrificed if they could not contribute to the harmonious atmosphere of the group. Since the art of the theater is collective work, it is essential that everyone in the group work for the benefit of the whole performance and not solely for himself. Ethics, high morale, and stern discipline are indispensable in such a group. The reproduction of life on stage is, for actors, both a challenge and a responsibility toward the people who come to see it. An actor’s exciting profession is one of responsibility, because it is he who breathes life into a written play, he who makes the play tangible, alive, valid, and exciting. “The theater infects the audience with its noble ecstasy,” said Stanislavski.
Ethics impregnate all Stanislavski’s teachings and are indivisible from his technology. He believed that an actor without ethics is only a craftsman, and without professional technique he is a dilettante. Ethics, profound knowledge, and a highly artistic form of expression are the essence of the Stanislavski System.
It became Stanislavski’s goal to give an actor control over the phenomenon of inspiration. When an actor is inspired he is in the same natural and spontaneous state that is ours in life, and he lives the experiences and emotions of the character he portrays. In such a state, Stanislavski thought, an actor has the greatest power to affect the minds and feelings of his audience. Stanislavski’s aesthetic and ethical beliefs formed the point of departure in his work and the driving force in the creation of his System.
I was quite young when I won a highly competitive entrance examination to the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theater, which was guided and directed by Stanislavski’s most celebrated disciple, the brilliant Eugene B. Vakhtangov. Stanislavski said that Vakhtangov taught the technique better than he did himself; in fact, he was sometimes coached by Vakhtangov. To see such masters at work was truly thrilling. Each one’s inexhaustible creative source was miraculous; both were unconditionally and tirelessly demanding of themselves and of others in achieving truth on the stage and in creating real characters. Never satisfied, Stanislavski and Vakhtangov were continually striving for better results.
It was understood that everyone in the Moscow Art Theater and its Studios would be present at rehearsals, whether actually involved in them or not. Since Vakhtangov appeared every night in a performance, he came to our Studio after eleven p.m., and our rehearsals continued until eight in the morning. Even in my early years I was interested in directing, and during the years I was in the Studio I never missed one of those rehearsals. Blessed with the gifts of exceptional imagination and impetuous artistic temperament, Stanislavski and Vakhtangov often stimulated the actors by including themselves as characters in a rehearsal.
When our Studio played Turandot in the Moscow Art Theater itself, Stanislavski came backstage for the express purpose of encouraging the young actors and actresses. The excitement created by his majestic presence was tremendous.
Having first studied the System in the Studio and later having closely analyzed his teachings, I want to try to clarify what Stanislavski achieved with his indomitable logic, his sensitive observation, his serious attitude toward actors, and his love of the theater. Because his scientific and artistic teachings about the creative state on stage are vital for good theater, and because he wanted simple books on acting technique, I wish to bring the knowledge of his teachings up to date in the United States.
One cause of misunderstanding about the Stanislavski System is the fact that various disciples of Stanislavski were assimilating it during different stages of its formation; without realizing that the System underwent constant change in its development, they could not find a common language, and their disagreement provoked confusion among those who had not been in touch with Stanislavski. Another cause is the insufficiency of material in English about Stanislavski’s conclusions and deductions. The Stanislavski System is the science of theater art. As a science it does not stand still; being a science, it has unlimited possibilities for experiment and discoveries. Elements of the System have continually evolved and been tested, much as new chemicals are tested in a laboratory.
Before Stanislavski was born in 1863, Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863) had already fought against the artificial, declamatory style. This great actor of the Imperial Maly Theater was called “the father of realism” because he was the first to introduce truthful and realistic acting into the Russian theater. Stanislavski, impressed by Shchepkin’s teachings and by his brilliant disciple, the actress Glikeria Fedotova, began to work on a technique which would enable an actor to build a live human being on the stage. Stanislavski’s concepts were also greatly influenced by the plays of Anton Chekhov. The names of these two masters, along with that of the playwright and director Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, became inseparable from the Moscow Art Theater. Chekhov wrote truthfully about ordinary men and women; he searched for the inner beauty in people and exposed their triviality and vice. Under Shchepkin’s and Chekhov’s influence Stanislavski strove to create an artistically conceived image of life on the stage.
The System has been found vitally important not only for beginners but also for experienced actors. Stanislavski proved that an actor with great talent and subtle nuances needs more technique than others, and thus emphasized his rejection of the widespread layman’s opinion that a gifted actor does not need any technique at all.
Simplicity and scenic truth became important principles, and the Stanislavski System emerged as a vigorous weapon against overacting, clichés, and mannerisms. The System has become a creative technique for the truest portrayal of characters in any play, comedy or tragedy, whether by Chekhov or Ibsen, Shakespeare or O’Neill, Beckett or Genet. The System has been recognized as a revolutionary theatrical development and is used throughout Russia, even by actors of theaters with tendencies entirely different from those of the Moscow Art Theater.
The Stanislavski System, destined to play an outstanding role in the development of twentieth-century theater, came to birth through Stanislavski’s dedicated search over forty years for the answers to problems of actors and directors and for laws of creativeness. Nowhere in the world of theater can directorial or acting problems be solved without taking Stanislavski’s teachings into consideration. With the System’s terminology—super-objective, logic of actions, given circumstances, communion, subtext, images, tempo-rhythm, and so on—a common language has been created.
Stanislavski discovered and formulated laws but did not have time to develop them fully. Though the System’s scientific, aesthetic, and ethical foundation cannot be changed, it can be further developed.
Since Stanislavski’s death his teachings have been subject to analysis and study by important actors, directors, scholars, and scientists. Through the efforts of these experts to preserve the Stanislavski teachings for world theater, the System became more concrete and some of its more complicated demands easier to realize. Their deductions are important not only for actors and directors—for whom Stanislavski was creating his System—but also for dramatists, theater scholars, critics, and even scientists. “Theater and dramaturgy are one whole,” said Stanislavski. “Only as a result of two arts—that of the dramatist and that of the theatrical group—will the new value, the performance, be born.”
Before Stanislavski, drama schools everywhere in the world taught only the physical elements of an actor’s training: ballet, fencing, voice, speech, diction, the importance of which we shall discuss further. There was no inner acting technique. The historical significance of Stanislavski lies in his discovery of laws for an actor’s creativeness and his development of the first method of theater art.
Theater experts throughout the world agree that it is the actors capable of discovering the inner life of the man they portray, actors capable of building “the life of the human spirit,” as Stanislavski called it, who will lead the theater to progress. Not through specially built stages and a
uditoriums, not even through directors’ inventions, but through actors capable of creating ever-new human beings, with their own unique inner worlds, will theater advance. Facing again and again a new personality, participating in all that happens around it, presents inexhaustible possibilities for an actor.
“Artists of colors, sounds, chisels, and words choose their art in order to communicate through their works with other people,” wrote Stanislavski. Therefore the goal of art is spiritual communication with people. The inner creative process must be conveyed to the audience. “The most important thing is to build the life of the human spirit,” Stanislavski said, and he developed a technique with the help of which actors can build the soul of a role and incarnate the inner world of the person created on the stage.
Stanislavski’s teachings are not the result of personal guesswork: they form a science based on human functioning according to laws of nature. These laws are obligatory for all people. The title that Stanislavski gave to his System—“The Elementary Grammar of Dramatic Art”—emphasizes the universality of the laws for any actor building any character in any play. “What I write does not refer to one epoch and its people, but to the organic nature of artists of all nationalities and of all epochs,” he said. The System therefore cannot be called a Russian phenomenon, and does not have to be “adapted” to American actors or to actors of any nationality. Through the System, actors learn natural laws and how to use them consciously in re-creating human behavior on stage.
Although there is no proof of his contact with the great scientist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), whose teachings about conditioned reflexes became important in the same era as Stanislavski’s own teachings, the reformer of the theater had an opportunity to study neurophysiology and to give scientific foundation to his System. Even scientists were astounded by his discoveries.
Stanislavski saw that on stage an actor’s senses are often prone to paralysis because of the break in natural psychophysical behavior. The actor then loses the feeling of real life and forgets how to do the simplest things that he does naturally and spontaneously in life. Stanislavski realized that an actor has to learn anew to see and not just to pretend to see, to hear and not just to pretend to listen, that he has to talk to his fellow actors and not just to read lines, that he has to think and to feel.
Stanislavski knew that an actor’s mind, will, and emotions—the three forces responsible for our psychological life—must participate in the creation of a live human being on stage. In the evocation of emotions Stanislavski faced a difficult problem. He discovered that there are mechanisms in human beings which are not ordinarily subordinate to our control. For instance, we cannot at will slow our heart’s palpitation or dilate blood vessels as easily as we can close our eyes or raise a hand, nor can an actor who comes on stage with no personal reason for experiencing emotions of fear, compassion, joy, or grief command them, because emotional reactions also belong to such uncontrolled mechanisms.
To these inner mechanisms Stanislavski gave the name subconscious. The problem seemed to him insoluble until, while watching great actors, he became aware that an actor, although he has no real reason to suffer or to rejoice on stage, begins to have true emotions when he is inspired. This fact brought Stanislavski to the idea that the subconscious—the uncontrolled complex of emotions—is not altogether unapproachable, and that there must be a kind of key which would intentionally “turn on” this inner mechanism. He began studying the possibility of deliberately arousing emotions, of indirectly influencing the psychological mechanism responsible for the emotional state of a human being.
During his many years of searching, Stanislavski experimented with various “conscious means to the subconscious.” Each of these—including the forcing of emotions, so popular among American actors—though progressive at the time, brought Stanislavski disappointment until he developed his “method of physical actions,” which he called the key to the emotional reactions of an actor, the basis of an actor’s creativity, solution of spontaneity on stage, the essence of the whole System, and his creative heritage of the theater. “The method of physical actions,” said Stanislavski, “is the result of my whole life’s work.”
Thus Stanislavski found the “conscious means to the subconscious,” which he had been seeking for over forty years. (A detailed explanation of the method of physical actions is given in the chapter that follows.) Though it was at the end of his career that Stanislavski gave the name to this key to the subconscious, it was not a late addition to his System. His teachings on action impregnate the whole technique from beginning to end; it is the leitmotiv of the whole System. The more fully Stanislavski understood human behavior, which he called “action,” the more the System progressed. Since science has confirmed that the method of physical actions is based on physiological law, an actor’s creative state (when his whole psycho-physical apparatus is involved) depends on it and cannot be neglected. With it, Stanislavski reversed the use of means by which he tried to bring an actor into a creative state. He realized that an experience before the actor’s entrance could occur only by accident. Now the actor goes on stage to fulfill simple physical actions without forcing an experience beforehand. In fulfilling the unique physical action, the actor involves the psychological side of the action by reflex; this includes emotions.
The Stanislavski terms “conscious” and “subconscious” are really “controlled” and “uncontrolled.” The actor’s work is not a subconscious process. The Stanislavski System does not allow an actor to be subject to accidental intuition. In fact, conscious activity has the leading role in the System. But after an actor has consciously prepared the pattern of his role and approaches the play’s events as if they were happening for the first time (following Stanislavski’s formula, “today, here, now,” which makes every performance different), his contact with the audience may give birth to true, spontaneous actions that are unexpected even by the actor himself. These are moments of “subconscious” creativity when an actor improvises although his text and the pattern of his role are firmly fixed. Such creativity or inspirational improvisation is the goal and essence of the Stanislavski school of acting. All Stanislavski’s searchings were directed to finding means to “harness” this phenomenon and to subordinate it to an actor’s conscious control. Actors are rarely aware of these moments of subconscious creativity and have difficulty in keeping them; the moments die if an actor tries to repeat them mechanically. Theater, being an artistic re-creation of life, according to Stanislavski, shares one of life’s great problems: the moments passed on the stage cannot be repeated, as spent moments in real life cannot be brought back. When actors try to repeat what they did the night before, the theater stops being art because it stops being alive. Every performance in a living theater is as different as each day is different, and in order that the theater should be alive, there must be living people on the stage.
Stanislavski determined the favorable conditions for subconscious activity, or improvisation due to inspiration, which is the goal of an actor’s art. We find that it is born through the conscious effort of the actor who has mastered his technique. Inspiration is the result of conscious hard work; it is not a power that stimulates work. As Stanislavski said, “There are no accidents in art—only the fruits of long labor.”
The first scientific book to make an analysis of the Stanislavski System from the point of view of neurophysiology is entitled The Method of K. S. Stanislavski and the Physiology of Emotions by P. V. Simonov, prominent physiologist and member of the Academy of Science of the USSR. Simonov does not believe that an actor must study physiology in order to act convincingly; the important fact is that physiology has scientifically proved the correctness of the Stanislavski System. Not to study the Stanislavski System, says Simonov, is as dangerous for actors as it is dangerous for writers not to study the rules of language. Simonov, however, warns that he is attempting not to teach actors but to learn from Stanislavski for his own field.
R
ussian scientists, helped by important theater experts, have found in the Stanislavski System an invaluable source of observation concerning physiology and the problems of controlled and uncontrolled reactions. They realize that the Stanislavski motto “Subconscious through conscious means” has a direct connection with actual problems of human neurophysiology. Simonov says, “Modern rational psychotherapy does not have at its disposal the concrete means of conscious influence on neuroses which cannot be influenced by direct effort of will…. The more is our loss, because a system of such means exists; it has been thoroughly developed and checked a thousand times in practice. The system we have in mind is Stanislavski’s ’method of physical actions.”’ In his analysis, Simonov concludes that it is indisputable that the rules formulated by Stanislavski are the laws for an actor’s creativity. And Simonov confirms the Stanislavski rule, “Emotions cannot be stirred directly.”
Believing firmly that to build the life of a human spirit is most important in an actor’s art, Stanislavski never tired of repeating that an actor must incarnate the behavior of the character to make it seen and heard—to be clear to the audience in every way. An actor with deficient speech or an untrained voice and body will not be able to convey the subtle nuances of inner life and will bore his audience. Stanislavski insisted on the continual polishing of an actor’s physical apparatus. Stanislavski’s belief about the incarnation of the inner life is in accord with what Leonardo da Vinci said to his disciples: “The soul does not like to be without its body because without the body it cannot feel or do anything; therefore build a figure in such a way that its pose tells what is in the soul of it.” And Feodor Chaliapin, the great singer and actor, said, “A gesture is a movement not of a body but of a soul.” Before Stanislavski, an actor’s training consisted mainly of learning intonations and gestures. This resulted in artificial poses and flat declamations. But correcting this does not mean neglecting vividness of speech. “Every punctuation mark has its own intonation,” Stanislavski said. “Treasure the spoken word.” Through the Stanislavski technique actors learn to “enrich the ground,” which makes their intonations expressive.