STANISLAVSKI

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STANISLAVSKI

• The System

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• I know you dont want to
• but you should probably take some notes now.

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• Just a few notes. No big deal. Youll be glad you
  did.
• Trust mewould I lie to you?

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• Take notes anyway.

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Constantin Stanislavski
(1863 1938)
Whatever thread one takes up in the history of
twentieth-century drama leads back to
Stanislavsky
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Constantin Stanislavski

• Creator of The System basis for modern-day
  method acting
• "An Actor Prepares", "Building a Character" and
  "Creating a Role
• Cofounder of the Moscow Art Theater (MAT) with
  Vladimir Danchenko (1897)
• Actor, Director, Playwright, Teacher
• Created phrases such as stage direction

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Constantin Stanislavski

• All of our acts, even the simplest, which are so
  familiar to us in everyday life, become strained
  when we appear behind the footlights before a
  public of a thousand people. That is why it is
  necessary to correct ourselves and learn again
  how to walk, sit, or lie down. It is essential to
  re-educate ourselves to look and see, on the
  stage, to listen and to hear.

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Stanislavskis Visualization of hisSystem
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English Recreation of hisDrawing
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RELAXATION

• Learning to relax the muscles and eliminate
  physical tension while performing.

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CONCENTRATION

• Learning to think like an actor and to respond to
  ones own imagination.

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WORK WITH SENSES

• Discovering the sensory base of the work
  learning to memorize and recall sensations, often
  called sense memory and /or affective memory
  learning to work from a small sensation and
  expand it, a technique Stanislavski called
  spheres of attention.

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SENSE OF TRUTH

• Learning to tell the difference between the
  organic and the artificial. Stanislavski believed
  that there were natural laws of acting, which
  were to be obeyed.

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GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES

• Developing the ability to use previous four
  skills to create the world of the play (the
  circumstances given in the text) through true and
  organic means

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CONTACT COMMUNICATION

• Developing the ability to interact with other
  performers spontaneously, and with an audience,
  without violating the world of the play.

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UNITS OBJECTIVE

• Learning to divide the role into sensible units
  that can be worked on individually, and
  developing the ability to define each unit of the
  role by an active goal desired by the character
  rather than as an entirely literary idea.

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LOGIC BELIEVABILITY

• Discovering how to be certain that the sum of the
  combined objectives are consistent and coherent
  and that they are in line with the play as a
  whole.

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WORK WITH TEXT

• Developing the ability to uncover the social,
  political, and artistic meaning of the text, and
  seeing that these ideas are contained within the
  performance.

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CREATIVE STATE

• An automatic culmination of all the previous
  steps.