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The biography of Konstantin Stanislavski, the seminal Russian theatre practitioner, straddles two centuries, a world war, and political and artistic revolutions.[1] During his life, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin and was one of the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.[2] He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading directors of his generation.[3] His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.[4] Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion.[5] Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923-4) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911-12) established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre.[6] By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays.[7] He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov. In 1928, at the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations, a massive heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking medical assistance).[8] He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An Actor's Work (1938).[9]
- Sandbox for the article Biography of Konstantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Stanislavski | |
---|---|
Occupation | Actor Theatre director Theatre theorist |
Literary movement | Naturalism Symbolism Psychological realism Socialist realism |
Notable works | Founder of the MAT Stanislavski's 'system' An Actor's Work An Actor's Work on a Role My Life in Art |
Spouse | Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova (stage name: Maria Liliana) |
Throughout his life, Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a process of rigorous artistic self-analysis and reflection.[10] 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.[11] He produced his early work 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.[12] He also introduced a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast into the production process.[13] Despite the success that this approach brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Chekhov and Gorky, Stanislavski remained dissatisfied.[14] 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.[15] He began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy.[16] He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre.[17] Building on the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company, the actor-centred realism of the Maly, and the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organised his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology.[18]
The 'system' cultivates what Stanislavski calls the "art of experiencing" (to which he contrasts the "art of representation").[19] 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.[20] 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").[21] Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the 'system' with a more physically orientated rehearsal process known as the "Method of Physical Action".[22] Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis," in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised.[23] "The best analysis of a play," Stanislavski argued, "is to act it in the given circumstances".[24] Just as the First Studio, led by his assistant and close friend Leopold Sulerzhitsky, had provided the forum in which he developed his initial ideas for the 'system' during the 1910s, he hoped to secure his final legacy by opening another studio in 1935, in which the Method of Physical Action would be taught.[25] The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals.[26] Meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West.[27] With the arrival of Socialist realism in the USSR, the MAT and Stanislavski's 'system' were enthroned as exemplary models.[28]
Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors should be banned from talking about themselves".[29] At the request of a US publisher, however, he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art (first published in English in 1924 and in a revised, Russian-language edition in 1926), though its account of his artistic development is not always accurate.[30] Two English-language biographies have been published: David Magarshack's Stanislavsky: A Life (1950) and Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski: His Life and Art (1988, revised and expanded 1999).[31]