The Stanislavski System

by Sonia Moore

  A re-created emotion is different from the “primary” emotion also because it does not absorb the actor entirely. Reliving a real-life experience, the person also lives the present time, and this influences the experience. When a tragedy occurs, we are completely absorbed in the moment, but when we remember this tragedy later, other interests penetrate the experience. Though our grief is sincere, it acquires a different quality. Such is the actor’s state on stage. The actor who sincerely lives the life of the character never forgets that he is the actor who performs.

  Stanislavski believed in two sources of material for an actor’s creative work: the inner life of an actor himself and his observations of the outside world—an inexhaustible source. The material an actor finds in the life around him he must make his own. To enrich the emotional memory, the actor must observe what is happening around him; he must read, listen to music, go to museums, watch people. Well-developed emotional memory is the most important requirement for the actor’s work in the theater of living experience. It is the storage of past experiences and the only source for emotions on stage.

  In the early stages of the System, actors tried to bring themselves into the creative state when their emotions were stirred, with the help of its separate elements. But that state would not always come, and they were “acting” their emotions. Moreover, Stanislavski felt that forcing emotions from the emotional memory brought actors to inner hysteria. Stanislavski feared that such a tendency could ruin the actor’s mental health and art. Experience also showed that isolated study and use of the elements of the System dismembered the System into separate parts which were later difficult to reassemble into one whole. Students may be virtuosos on exercises in “concentration,” “relaxation,” or “without objects” but remain unable to fulfill an action that includes these organic elements. Thus the principal objective of the System—involvement of the psycho-physical apparatus of the actor when his emotions are stirred—is not achieved.

  With his method of physical actions Stanislavski revolutionized the use of means by which an actor achieves the creative state. Emotional memory stores our past experiences; to relive them, actors must execute indispensable, logical physical actions in the given circumstances. There are as many different nuances of emotions as there are different physical actions.

  A few years before his death Stanislavski organized a group of young actors and asked them to stage Molière’s Tartuffe, experimenting with the method of physical actions. Stanislavski said to the members of the Moscow Art Theater, “I am not going to live long. It is my duty to transmit to actors my experience and my knowledge. Learn to carry out correctly and organically the simplest physical actions. The logic and consecutiveness of these actions will evoke in you the entire complicated, subtle scale of inner experiences. Carrying out the logic of a physical action will bring you to the logic of emotions, and this is everything for an actor.”

  * In 1931 Charlie Chaplin wrote in an article that he was using the “magic if” for all his creative work.

  * Some distort public solitude into “private moments,” which would have shocked Stanislavski.

  ANALYSIS THROUGH

  EVENTS AND ACTIONS

  Actors must project the main idea of the play. Since it is much easier to understand an immediate purpose than a distant one, the long-range aim will be discovered through important events, the consecutive actions revealing each event. By determining the actions, the actor is able to build a logical, consecutive performance and to assimilate his role—and this practice will also be exceptionally helpful to him in memorizing the part.

  Every human action has a definite aim, and answers the question, “What do I do?” “Why do I do it?” and “How do I do it?” An actor must remember that his reason for being on stage is to convey what he does and why he does it at a given moment.

  Stanislavski recommended beginning the analysis of a play with the determination of events, or, as he said, the “active facts,” which dictate the actions. It is essential to understand the important events and not to dwell on secondary ones. Important events lie at the root of a good play and move its action as well as that of each character. Determination of those events involves the circumstances and is the shortest way to the understanding of the play.

  Each event has a main action; for example, a friend comes to help a married couple to settle a difference. His main action is to help. In trying to help he may want to persuade the husband to pay more attention to his wife, he may reproach the woman for not being serious enough about her duties, and so on. By striving energetically to carry out these actions, which are really adaptations or means to achieve the aim, the actor reveals the event on stage.

  While searching for a method of analysis which would fully disclose the essence of a play, Stanislavski for many years taught and applied the process of breaking up the play into its various episodes, analyzing and discovering the actions by having the director and the actors sit around a table with their scripts and pencils. He loved this preparatory period, which preceded rehearsals and which lasted a long time. In the last years of his directorial and pedagogical career, Stanislavski changed this practice. He said that these long sessions around the table led to serious errors because they divided spiritual and physical behavior. So Stanislavski started rehearsals almost immediately after discussing the main idea. Actors analyzed the events and investigated the psychophysical behavior of the characters on stage, in action.

  In order to understand what his action is at a given moment, an actor must analyze the essence of an event. Actions must be strongly related to the idea of the play. Everything an actor does on stage must contribute to this. If the actor fulfills his action, he will convey it to his audience; by being truly active in a psychophysical way he will involve his entire apparatus and his emotions will be stirred.

  Every important event should be given a carefully selected name; it should not be a verb and should be so characteristic that the single term gives the actors the essence of the event. The name of the event is the same for all characters, but their reactions to it, and therefore their actions, will be different. As the actors and the director learn more about the play, they may change the names of some events.

  To define an action an active verb should be used; it should express precisely and logically the end an actor wants to achieve. If, in the process of his work on a role, an actor feels that he should change the action, he must do so and change its name.

  Determining the actions makes the character’s behavior justified and purposeful. And as a result of understanding the actions, an actor will come to understand the subtext. In order really to understand the actions, an actor will have to analyze the play, the character, the epoch in which the play takes place, and other given circumstances. Not intuition alone, but the actor’s penetration into the intention of the playwright, his ability to choose what is most typical for the character, will determine the correct definition of actions for the role. The necessity of verbally expressing the actions forces the actor to think and to study his role and the whole play.

  There is usually something that opposes the action. An actor must find these obstacles which the character must try to overcome. For instance, in the example of the friend who comes to settle the difference between a husband and wife, the “counteraction” may be the fact of the friend’s love for the young woman. Striving honestly to help the marriage, he must hide the fact of his love. There may be other obstacles, such as the husband, who might not want to listen to his well-meaning friend. Overcoming such obstacles keeps an actor from becoming careless and makes him carry out his action more vividly, with more energy and strength.

  Each character in a play always has his own main object of struggle.

  THE SUPER-OBJECTIVE

  AND THE THROUGH

  LINE OF ACTIONS

  Stanislavski stated over and over that without great playwrights there would not be theater, that the first duty of the theater is toward the play
wright, and is to project his idea dynamically. A written play is transformed into a performance by the actors and the director, who must transmit to the public the author’s main idea, his reason for having written the play. To carry across the main idea, or the super-objective, as Stanislavski called it, is the final goal of every performance and is the point of departure for the Stanislavski System.

  The super-objective, which is the essence of the play, must guide the director and the interpretation of characters and events. With the super-objective an actor weaves the idea of the author into the theatrical performance. The super-objective is the basic stimulus of a creative process; the theatrical form and the written play should unite through a continual fertilization of each other in the process of building a performance.

  The super-objective controls each character’s logic of actions, which makes the theme concrete. While an actor is preparing his role the super-objective must be clear in his mind from the beginning through its very end. To forget it, as Stanislavki said, is to break the line of life portrayed on stage. Every detail, every thought, every action, must be closely related to it.

  An actor should give a proper and expressive name to the super-objective, which should be an active verb. The interpretation of the play depends on it.

  For an actor’s performance to have logical order and perspective, he should mentally trace a line which will run through his role. Stanislavski called this the through line of actions. This is the active execution of the super-objective, the profound organic tie uniting the independent parts of the role. The through line of actions leads an actor to the main purpose of his activities and prevents him from being distracted by secondary events; it is the consecutive incarnation of the super-objective in scenic actions. It is the undercurrent of the play, the inner content of events expressed in action. The super-objective and the through line of actions are the aims to which the building of a role is subordinate. Every element of the Stanislavski System is subordinate to them.

  An actor must continually check his through line of actions to make sure that he has the right activity, order, logic, color, contrast, and that all these elements contribute to the projection of the super-objective.

  Determination of actions must be guided by the through line of actions. To be consecutive and logical, each action must depend on the previous one and on the following one. The through line of actions is all the character’s actions interwoven logically, having the same purpose of expressing the main idea.

  Every character has some basic, main purpose in the circumstances given by the playwright. Such a purpose could be called central action, and reflects the character’s most important strivings. This aim through the role is the character’s own super-objective and his through line of actions. It is the movement of the inner world of the character. The aim toward which a character is striving in an act, a scene, or an episode, is called the main action of these sections. To interpret his role, an actor must find its super-objective. Conflict in a play is developed by the through line of actions and the counteraction of the characters.

  The search for the super-objective, for the through line of actions, and for the theme of a role was called by Stanislavski “the reconnaissance of the mind.”

  Just as he has a super-objective and the through line of actions in a role, an actor must have them in every exercise or improvisation.

  THE ACTOR’S

  PHYSICAL APPARATUS

  An actor must make sure that in creating a character he does not lose a single nuance, or any physical or psychological means which would help to express his inner experience. A slight movement of the spine, a change in the direction of a look, can tell something about the inner life of the character and project his thoughts.

  The quality of an actor’s performance depends not only upon the creation of the inner life of a role but also upon the physical embodiment of it. Stanislavski said that imperfection in the external expression of a role can disfigure a profound conception of the playwright. In order to embody the subtle inner life of a character, an actor must have at his command responsive and sensitive physical means. An actor’s own organism is his instrument. Actions are his material. In order to build favorable conditions for creativeness, the instrument of the actor’s organism must be prepared. Bad enunciation indicates a lack of elementary respect for the audience. It is tiresome for the spectator to listen to an actor whose speech is not precise and comprehensible. Defects in speech, of course, will distort a performance. To “paint a picture” with vivid colors, an actor must use the whole scale of his voice. An actor’s voice must be trained like that of a singer and be placed in the “masque,” the front of the face, where there are resonators. Speech on stage is as important an art as singing for a singer. When an actor has well-developed respiration, good clear diction, and a trained voice, he will not have to force, but instead will be able to speak naturally and softly, and even his whisper will be heard everywhere in the theater.

  Muscular tension, the reaction to an audience, interferes with the actor’s execution of natural physical actions and therefore with the correct inner state and the inner experience. To cope with muscular tension an actor needs a trained responsive body and control over his muscles. Even the slightest tension of muscles can paralyze an actor’s creative state. Through systematic work, an actor will develop an “observer” inside himself, who will watch and instantly find the spot of unnecessary tension and as instantly eliminate it. This will become a natural, automatic habit. Concentration on a specific thought and gesture of the body will eliminate tension.

  Stanislavski believed in training the body to improve posture and to make movements supple, graceful, and finished. An actor must, however, bear in mind that there is no place in the living theater for mannerisms or mechanical gestures. An actor should not use a gesture because it is graceful or plastic. A gesture must reflect an inner experience. It will then become a purposeful, logical, and truthful movement.

  “As a creative, artistic force, you do not differ from pianists and singers, and must practice every day,” Stanislavski said to his actors. The actor’s body and voice must be cultivated and trained to be able to express externally, instantly and precisely, the delicate inner experiences of the creative process. The inner and physical apparatus of an actor must be trained simultaneously. While the inner technique cultivates an actor’s ability to evoke the proper state without which creativity is impossible, and which depends on an action executed with the help of all the elements of Stanislavski’s inner technique, the physical technique will make an actor’s physical apparatus capable of expressing inner processes and of embodying the spiritual life of the character. “With an untrained body it is impossible to transmit the subconscious creativeness, just as it is impossible to play the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven on instruments out of tune,” said Stanislavski.

  The physical technique will train an actor’s feeling for truth and form. Stanislavski attributed a vital role to technical mastery. He demanded that actors work on rhythm, gesture, acrobatics, enunciation, voice, expressive speech, and historical ceremonies. He considered it elementary and obligatory for an actor to control his voice and body, to move well, to know how to wear a costume.

  An actor who searches not only for inner content but also for external form will understand the significance of every detail which has to do with the new being on the stage. The right costume for the role becomes part of it. The moment of putting on the costume has great psychological significance for an actor. He must learn to wear it, and to use a sword, a fan, a cape, or a shawl.

  An actor’s performance must have a clear and precise pattern of speech and movement. Every form of expression must be simple and clear. Every movement, gesture, intonation must be precise, expressive, finished from an artistic point of view. Only the mastery of physical technique will assure the necessary freedom to permit an actor to execute plastically a natural, truthful physical action and give himself to the experiences of
the character. Few know or remember that Stanislavski said that the art of the theater is based on the union of the deep substance of the inner life and a beautiful, light, expressive form of it. The expressiveness of the art, the entire performance, depends on this union. Theater art is subject to the same law that governs all the arts: the union of profound content and artistic form.

  WORK ON THE ROLE:

  BUILDING A

  CHARACTER

  There are no small roles—only small actors.

  MOTTO OF THE MOSCOW ART THEATER

  Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.

  STANISLAVSKI

  Every art has its own means of expression. Poets have words, musicians have sounds, painters have colors. An actor’s means of expression is the human action, which, as we have seen, is a psychophysical process. Spectators learn about the characters on stage the way we learn about people in life—through their physical actions, which are dictated by their aims. An action explains what a character does at a given moment and why he does it. Every aim (psychological) is expressed physically, and conversely every physical movement has its aim. Movements disclose a person’s interests, tastes, habits, moods. The complex of human psychological life is expressed through a simple physical action. The logic of a person’s physical actions, gestures of the body, gives us an understanding of his inner experiences. Without the union of the psychological and the physical a role cannot be built. Life will be created on the stage if an actor follows the laws of nature.

  It is important for an actor to see the character he builds in terms of actions. In two and a half hours on the stage, an actor must project “the life of a human spirit”; during every moment, therefore, he must use actions which will express that life. The creative process of an actor’s work is choice of actions, and the whole Stanislavski System is called upon to help that process. If an action helps to express the character, it is artistically right; if it does not, it is wrong. An action cannot be accidental or superfluous. The choice of actions must be guided by the main idea of the play and of the role.