The Stanislavski System

by Sonia Moore

  The choice of actions, then, is the foundation on which a character is built. Executing certain actions, the actor builds one character; executing others, he builds another character. The value of an action lies in the inner content that it expresses. An actor becomes an actor when he masters the process of choosing actions to build a definite character, said Stanislavski.

  An action on stage, if it has no purpose, merely diverts the audience’s attention from the essence of the play. The purpose is what determines the action, and that purpose is to express individual life. In order that an action should be truthful, an actor must be able to answer several questions: “Who am I?” “Where is the action taking place?” “With whom?” “What for?” He must know all the details of the given circumstances. The role is ready when an actor knows concretely what the character does each moment on the stage and why he does it. The actions concretize the life of a human spirit, and give the audience an idea of the character’s habits, moods, tastes.

  An actor must create an individual logic of actions, unique for each character. In every action there is something objective, common to all, but at the same time each person’s logic of action is individual and right only for him. For instance, if we want fresh air, we may open a window. But, because the background and the interests of people differ, different people will open a window in different ways. Each movement of a person’s inner life, each reaction to what happens around him, is unique. The correct definition of actions for each character will be determined not by the intuition of an actor but by his deep analysis of the intention of the author and by his own ability to choose that which is most characteristic and typical in the character. As we have seen, Stanislavski attributed enormous importance to the verbal determination of actions, because such definition forces an actor to think and to study the role and the whole play. “The art of an actor,” said Stanislavski, “is the knowledge of the logic of actions in a play and the ability to put them all on one thread in a consecutive order.” All the actions must lead to the fulfillment of the main idea of the play and the role.

  The continuous line of the character’s actions, leading to the solution of the super-objective, builds perspective in a role. Attention to such perspective is obligatory in scenic work because it will help the harmonious relationship and distribution of everything an actor does in his role. (An actor must clearly divide the perspective in the life of his character from that of his own.) When an actor has perspective he adds variety, contrast, coloring, and shading to his role’s various moments. He distributes all the elements of his role in a harmonious way in the interests of the play, and his role grows logically.

  The behavior of a character must be composed of small, logical, concrete actions. Every action must be consecutive, as in life, in life’s tempo-rhythm, and must have as much concentration as it requires in real life. Spectators are interested only in concrete actions; the greatest impression on them is made by a simple, correctly, and truthfully executed physical action. The importance that Stanislavski attached to an actor’s ability to fulfill the action cannot be overemphasized. The actions lead him into the inner world of the character. To perform an action truthfully means to live on stage.

  Stanislavski called a word the physical side of the psychophysical action. Images in our mind and the “subtext”—the meaning behind the words which make us say them—are the psychological side of the action. According to Stanislavski, the subtext is the inward “life of a human spirit” that constantly flows under the words of a role. It has the same function in speech that the through line of actions has in the field of action. Words are only a part of a given moment on stage and are born of thoughts, images, and bodily expressions of these inner processes.

  It is important to understand the attitudes of the character. In life our intonations disclose our attitudes; to act through words, an actor must speak “to the eye,” not to the ear, of his fellow actor. He must see images and transmit them to his partner in pauses with the gestures of his body. He must prepare this at home, and check it during a rehearsal. If he ignores these images, an actor makes the same mistake as when he uses movements only. If he transmits images and fulfills his actions, he is active and his emotions are stirred. Images must grow in detail and become richer. If an actor wants the words to be his own, he must understand the reason for which the author gave them to the character. A character’s lines will be alive if he needs them—i.e., if he has a purpose in saying them and makes others see his purpose. If he strives honestly and energetically to fulfill his actions, his words are “active” and the audience understands what he wants to say. Intonations will become colorful through the images in an actor’s mind, expressed in silences with his body, through his enunciation, through his projecting the objective, through the use of the active word. Mechanical memorizing kills the imagination.

  “A word with a crumpled beginning is like a man with a squashed head,” said Stanislavski. “A word without an end reminds me of a man with amputated legs. Careless pronunciation of sounds and syllables is the same as having a broken tooth, a damaged eye, or a cut ear.”

  “Treasure the spoken word,” said Stanislavski. The energetic word is the most powerful means of stirring emotions, the most expressive and most valuable of physical actions in the process of building a character. The word is the result of thoughts, feelings, and images expressed by the body. For an actor the word is a verbal action, which means that when he speaks he is in a process of action through words. Verbal action is determined by its purpose. The word influences another person’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. An actor must know which of these three he wants to influence in another actor. His own speech will have to be logical and convincing. He will have to analyze the text of each event in his role, know his action (for instance, to convince, to console, to reproach); he must know which thought is the most important, and with which arguments he can prove it, which word in each phrase is the most important for expression of the thought, and so on. If an actor knows what he wants from his partner, his words will become verbal actions and will involve his emotions. “To speak means to act,” said Stanislavski. And when we listen to others we first hear and then see images of what we have heard, and then our body expresses these inner processes. Trying to influence his fellow actor with his words, an actor makes known the character he portrays. If the audience does not understand what an actor is saying, the fault lies not alone in defective enunciation. The verbal action depends on the physical action, on the body expressing mental processes before and after the words. The body must be almost static while the actor is speaking.

  Stanislavski demanded that actors thoroughly study the play and the author’s mentality. An actor must understand the main idea of the play; he must see himself as a part of the whole. Work on the role means study of the spiritual content of the play and understanding of the “kernel” from which it came to birth. It is this kernel that determines the essence of the play. Only after understanding the main idea of the author will the actors and the director begin to feel and to see the characters of future performances. The main idea is the spine and pulse of the play, of which the character is a single element; the actor must know his mission in the chain of events of the play, his responsibility to make the main idea live. In the theme of his role, which he must see clearly, every detail, every thought and gesture must be imbued with the light of the main idea of the play. He should not make hasty decisions about the character.

  The few moments seen on stage are closely connected with the whole life of the character and even with his future. An actor must go through much the same creative process the playwright went through. He must complete the life of his character in his imagination and see a continuous, logical, unbroken chain of events. Nemirovich-Danchenko called this whole life of the character, which is unseen but must be sensed on the stage, the “second plan.” All the experiences that have influenced the character throughout his life will help an actor build his rol
e with justification. Stanislavski believed what great dramatists believe: that if you treat the character as a live human being, he functions naturally and in a way that even the author might not expect.

  A character, according to Stanislavski, is the flesh and the soul of the actor and is born of the union of all spiritual and physical elements of the role and the actor. Only such a new being can exist, can be. In building a character, an actor should be influenced by the playwright, by the director, by contact with the other performers, and by all the hints about the character that are found in the script. A character is a human being with his own thoughts, actions, appearance, mannerisms, experiences, habits, and so on. Though conceived by the author, the character must express the actor’s individual ideas, his emotions, his intuitions—analogous, of course, to those of the character. Only when the actor’s personality fuses with that of the character will he live the role. Facing a new personality in every new play, an actor has the possibility of endless discovery. It is the inner world that must attract the attention of the audience.

  If an actor wants to impress the audience with the “truth of passions,” as Pushkin called it, he must follow the Stanislavski formula, “Go from yourself.” An actor cannot and should not reject his own “I,” if the character is to be alive. He must become another person while remaining himself, using his own organic nature, his personality, as material in the creation of a character. But “Go from yourself” does not mean playing oneself, as dilettantes think. It does not mean going on stage without having analyzed and chosen the character’s thoughts, physical actions, and feelings. “It is a disaster if every role, every playwright, is adapted to oneself. It means death to the art,” said Stanislavski. “There are actors and especially actresses who are not interested in characterization or ’reincarnation’ because they adjust every role to themselves and depend only on their own charm. On this they build their success. Without it they are as helpless as Samson without his hair. We know many cases where an actor’s personal charm was the cause of his ruin because his only preoccupation was to demonstrate himself. Naturalness for the sake of naturalness is worse than robbery. An actor must adjust himself to the role, not the role to himself.” With his “Go from yourself,” Stanislavski meant that in building the logic of a character’s actions the actor must first search for what is general, shared with his own logic of actions. An actor who tries to be always naïvely natural and cute does not contribute to the art of the theater. To be natural himself is not the same as being natural as the character. Actors must learn the goal of their art: reincarnation. They must learn to build a variety of unusual characters and to discover their essence but to remain themselves, true and sincere on the stage.

  There is nothing mystical, no mysterious transformation, in the Stanislavski reincarnation. An actor achieves reincarnation when he achieves the truthful behavior of the character, when his actions are interwoven with words and thoughts, when he has searched for all the necessary traits of a given character, when he surrounds himself with its given circumstances and becomes so accustomed to them that he does not know where his own personality leaves off and that of the character begins. Stanislavski considered reincarnation the height of the actor’s art. Creating the character is the essence of the theater, for it is through characters that a dramatist unfolds the theme for his play.

  Although intuition plays an important part in it, the building of a character—with its variety of thoughts, physical actions, and feelings—cannot be mastered through that faculty alone. In the process of building a character, an actor must collect all the possible details and characteristic traits. Sometimes he can find them in the reserve of his memories and impress them on the concrete character. But he should learn to take them from the infinite source which is life around him. He must know how to choose typical material for different characters and use it. Stanislavski insisted that an actor should learn to take material for his creations from the life around him, from people he knows, or even from those he sees in the street and who leave an impression on him. In life’s continual change, in its innumerable faces, types, costumes, and so on, such source for material is unlimited. “Take examples from life and nature,” said Mikhail Shchepkin. “A vivid feeling of reality and the ability to express it creates the poet,” said Goethe. “Genius,” said Stanislavski, “is an actor who sees life and is able to re-create it on the stage.”

  An actor must gradually discard the superfluous, because only what is necessary lives on the stage. An actor should use only the details that help to individualize a particular personality. A single characteristic external detail can emphasize a thought and sometimes be more expressive than a whole monologue.

  A role must be connected with everyone and everything around it. An actor must establish relationships with other characters. He must know how he feels about everything in the play and must have active, sharp reactions to everybody and to everything. He must know the environment he is to reflect with his portrayal. He must study the behavior of the character. Whatever an actor does in his role, his clothes, his speech, and his movements must be characteristic of the person he portrays.

  The Stanislavski rule, “When you play a nasty man, search for what is good in him,” contributes to the creation of different facets of a character and thus makes the man’s nastiness appear sharper. Trying to project only evil makes the performance heavy and dull.

  Between two sentences in a dialogue there is an inner monologue—a direct connection which is hidden. Before an actor can answer his fellow actor, he must evaluate in his thoughts the other’s behavior. His body must express the evaluation in his mind. The lines, thoughts, and physical actions of the partner are material for thinking over the answer. When an actor reflects, evaluates, controls his own desires, tries to understand, analyzes, and judges, he executes an inner action. In real life one takes a decision before executing a certain external action. Thoughts must be significant to deserve an actor’s concentration. Today’s actor must be capable of thinking as the character would, seriously and deeply. Unfortunately, actors often believe that to listen is just to look at the fellow actor and not to think at all. Many actors rest while others are speaking lines and come to life only when they have to speak their own. In order that his character may live a continuous life on stage, an actor must have inner monologues, expressed by his body, when another character speaks, for he must react inwardly and outwardly to everything that takes place on stage. There are silences and pauses on stage; these, too, an actor must fill with active thoughts to make the life on stage continuous.

  A monologue—thinking aloud—expresses the thoughts, feelings, and mood of the character. In a monologue, an actor must complete the text with the inner thoughts required by pauses.

  Stanislavski said that because life is a continuous struggle, on stage as in life there are counteractions of other persons, facts, circumstances, events, opposing a logic of actions. Conflicts and struggles create interesting collisions. A valuable dramatic work is always based on struggles between different persons. Spectators are carried away by the process of a struggle. A person is pushed to act, to express his own interests, when these interests clash with the environment. An actor must find the obstacles in the way of his character and try to overcome them. For instance, if he has a secret to tell another person and he thinks that people may hear him, or that somebody may come in and he will not have time to tell it, such imaginary but logical obstacles will force him to fulfill his objective more vividly. Each character has its own main object of struggle.

  Musical comedy, which requires great skill, needs actors who sing well, dance well, speak well, and can build a character in the same way as dramatic actors. The lighter the style of the show, the quicker should be the changes in the character’s inner experience, and therefore they should be more intense. Transitions from words to singing and dancing are difficult and must be mastered. Actors in musical comedy, besides being musical, rhythmical, and knowing
how to move lightly and to control their bodies, must be able to justify each event, even the most improbable situation, and know how to change easily from one state to another. There is no difference between the truth of existence in dramatic scenes and in dancing or vocal scenes. An actor must behave as if it were indispensable to sing or to dance through the logic of his character. Vocal and dance training should include definite actions. In a chorus, as in crowd scenes in a dramatic play, each performer must determine his behavior and know his attitude toward other characters and the events in the play.

  Many great men of the theater have thought that a movement of the actor’s highly trained body would stir his emotions. Meyerhold’s “biomechanics,” with the help of which he expected to achieve the actor’s emotional involvement, eventually disappointed him, although it remains a valid physical exercise for making the actor’s body responsive to inner processes and is used as such today in Russian drama schools. Another system, “expressive movement,” promulgated by Delsarte, as we have seen, has been superseded by the Stanislavski System.

  A poem must be recited so that its musical and rhythmic beauties are revealed. An actor must know to whom he is speaking it and what his objective is in saying it. Just as when he works on a role, he must know the “second plan,” have a continuous film of images, an inner monologue, and an expressive body which will justify his saying the poem in the elevated mood that it requires.

  An actor must continually control his behavior on stage. He must learn to see the behavior of the character he portrays and correct it if necessary. The method of physical actions gives an actor an exceptional opportunity to unite the functioning subconscious with conscious control.