Stanislavski System

The Stanislavski System is an approach to acting developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor, director, and theatre administrator. The System is the result of Stanislavski's many years of efforts to determine how a human being can control, in performance, the most intangible and uncontrollable aspects of human behavior: things such as emotions, and artistic inspiration.

The Method of Physical Action

Training was highly physical and demanding, and it is this never-failing respect which Stanislavski ever harbored for physical action that brought his system to a point of apotheosis, as it were, a way of reaching the gods of emotional truth and physicological realism while having a grip on control of the physical, and further, freeing oneself up for performing anything, be it Modern theatre or the Greeks.

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Late in his life Stanislavski began putting much faith in an approach he called the Method of Physical Action. (The use of the word Method, again, induces confusion with Strasberg's Method.) This approach, Stanislavski surmised, finally brought him to a complete dealing with the instrument of the actor, and further with a universality of performance.

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It is difficult to describe the Method of Physical Action (here, MPA for short) in few words because it requires an understanding of the significance of physical action, or more specifically, in the performance of physical action. The idea behind the MPA is fairly simple per se, but its implications are profound. It is easy to oversimplify. It is based on an idea that always fascinated Stanislavski, that emotional life is a kind of two-way street; further, that the only thing an actor will ever have control of in his life as regards himself is his body, nothing more. There is never a direct line to emotions in performance, only to the body. Emotions may be remembered and brought up via emotional memory, but Stanislavski generally considered this if anything a rehearsal tool or technique of research, at best. There is, in the end, only the body.

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Therefore the actor and the director must work hard using the body, that is, the body's performance of physical action, as the primary material of creation. That is the subject of rehearsal, how to come to physical actions that affect the actor and bring the scene to life at the same time. So in one pass both emotional and aesthetic considerations are dealt with, and a way of working is given while the enormity (indeed, infinity) of options, the entire landscape of possibilities of performance, are sensed.

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The MPA is such a simple idea it comes very close to the default, to a kind of techniqueless technique. Figure out what to do: where is the technique in that? Two points must be made: first, that thorough physical training is always required, and second, an understanding of what a truly good physical action is, is also required. Both can take years of experience and reflection for an actor to be fully equipped in handling a role. The art of performance cannot be learned from literature but instead from action: from performance, and observation, thought Stanislavski late in life.

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This late stage unfortunately receives little notice or appreciation in most summations of Stanislavski's life and technique. Most authors are satisfied with identifying Stanislavski with his System and with the contributions that such an approach has made towards the film and theatre in the 20th Century. This is certainly due in part to little writing on the subject; and many of the authors (author-actors and author-directors) that have come since Stanislavski in Russia remain untranslated, despite the value of their work. Some books are available, such as Vasilii Toporkov's Stanislavski in Rehearsal, and Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski and the Actor.

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