Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting

Jonathan Pitches

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134332328
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The Russian tradition is a major area of theatre studies

Uses a range of historical and archival material, including previously unpublished material from the Michael Chekov archives

International market - UK, America. Potential interest in Russia and France

Part I
The roots of the tradition

1
A System for the world?
Newtonianism in Stanislavsky’s science of acting

As if to stress his wavering attitude towards science, Stanislavsky concludes the second part of an Actor’s Work on Himself (in English, Building a Character) by taking a different stance from the one he had adopted in the preface. Searching for a definition of what he calls ‘the majesty of the searchings of science’, he makes the following assertion: ‘To me it is the urge to attain, with the help of a sensitive heart, the unattained. And it will be attained in time’ (1979:297). He goes on to define his own role in this process:

In the expectation of these new triumphs of science I have felt there was nothing for me to do except to devote my labours and energy almost exclusively to the study of Creative Nature—not to learn to create in her stead, but to seek oblique, roundabout ways to approach her, not to study inspiration as such but only to find some paths leading to it. I have discovered only a few of them, I know that there are a great many more and that they will eventually be discovered by others. Nevertheless I have acquired a sum of experience in the course of long years of work and this is what I have sought to share with you.

(Ibid.)

Here, in the chapter ‘Some Conclusions on Acting’, Stanislavsky casts himself in the role of scientist, planting in the mind of his reader a set of persuasive relationships between his System and the discipline of science. In doing so he is mining the conventional associations of science—rigour, clarity, objectivity, experimentation—and allying them with his own project.

He parallels the pursuit of science—‘the urge to attain…the unattained’—with his own quest: the search for ‘roundabout ways’ to the source of inspiration. He characterises his own practice in populist scientific terms, as a’study of Creative Nature’ and he himself as a ‘discoverer’, passing on the results of his ‘deep study’ to the next generation of experimenters. Above all, he allies the ‘majesty’ of the scientific method—the ability of science to proceed from premises without direct knowledge of the object in question— with his own approach. He may be focusing on other areas of enquiry, on ‘genius, talent [and] the unconscious’ (1979:297), but he is nonetheless engaged in the same overarching search for truth.

In effect, Stanislavsky is revisiting the project he had begun at the Moscow Art Theatre three decades earlier. In a letter to the St Petersburg Imperial Theatre actress Vera Kotlyarevskaya, dated 5 May 1908, he explained the purpose of his System as he then saw it: ‘I conduct experiments every day on myself and on others and often achieve highly interesting results. I am mostly busy with the rhythm of feelings, the discovery of affective memory and the psychophysiology of the creative process’ (in Benedetti 1991:265).

By the time he was writing the second part of An Actor’s Work on Himself, thirty years later, he was able to look back at the intervening years and reflect upon his findings. By then, he was no longer interested in affective memory (although I will trace his early research into Ribot in Chapter 3). But he continued to be committed to the ‘psychophysiology’ of acting, right up until his death in 1938, constantly shifting the balance of the psychological and the physical within his System whilst remaining convinced of their interdependence.

In the passage above, from Building a Character, Stanislavsky is too self-effacing to claim any definitive discoveries on psycho-physical acting but he does intimate that one day this will happen—‘they will eventually be discovered by others’, he argues. In other outlets he was less equivocal about the significance of his own findings and, specifically at the end of his career, began to view the System in curiously similar terms to his political leader, Joseph Stalin—as the orthodox acting approach for all the Soviet Union, if not the world. Anatoly Smeliansky, now Rector of the Moscow Art Theatre, sees this development as part of a religious mission for Stanislavsky: The theme of an endless coming to knowledge…is perhaps the most fundamental theme in his artistic biography. Quite soon he began to feel he was the bearer of some sort of higher power, like a transformer, a medium’ (Smeliansky 1991:10).

But this ‘endless coming to knowledge’ may be viewed from another perspective, not as evidence of his religiosity but as a sign of his commitment to an altogether more material universalism. By focusing on his later work, specifically the period of the Method of Physical Actions (Metod fizicheskikh deistvii) and Active Analysis (Deistvennyi analiz), it is intended here to align Stanislavsky’s discoveries not with an undisclosed higher power but with the definitive scientific paradigm begun by Isaac Newton.

In doing so, the aim is to reveal a consistency in Stanislavsky’s approach that runs counter to the popular sense of him as ‘shifting thinker’. There are, of course, tensions in his acting theory and a definite change of emphasis as he grew to mistrust the capricious nature of the emotions. But a scrutiny of the language he uses to describe the acting process betrays a sub-textual scientific bias, both historical (in the case of Newton and René Descartes) and contemporary (in the case of Frederick Winslow Taylor), which remains constant, underpinning both sides of his psycho-physical acting System.

In order to explain fully this kinship, some background will be needed of the Newtonian tradition, but before we can do this a reassessment of Stanislavsky’s philosophical roots is required.

Stanislavsky and Aristotle

For a period of almost fifty years, many critics have been united on the issue of Stanislavsky’s affinity with Aristotle (384–322 BC). Francis Fergusson, although lacking the evidence for a definitive view, suggests that Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko ‘rediscovered’ (1949:239) Aristotle’s concept of action and Sharon Carnicke ‘confirms’ his suspicion with reference to the Russian edition of An Actor Prepares, citing a passage in which Stanislavsky traces the root of drama back to the Greek dran, ‘to do’ (1998:201). The same point is made by Stanislavsky himself in Creating a Role: ‘Life is action; that is why our lively art, which stems from life, is preponderantly active. It is not without reason that our word “drama” is derived from the Greek word which means “I do”’ (Stanislavsky 1981:48).

There is clearly some justification for a connection to be made between the two men for Stanislavsky’s System does share significant common ground with Aristotle’s thinking, specifically with The Poetics (c.330 BC). Both men, for example, stress the importance of logic in their work. For Aristotle this is to do with the organisation of the plot (muthos): ‘Only by imagining events as clearly as if they were present in person can [the playwright] follow the logic of what is happening and avoid incongruity’ (1999:24). For Stanislavsky, the actor’s organisation of the character’s actions within the play (the Through Action or skvosnoe deistvie) must follow the laws of logic, ensuring that the development of the role is believable for an audience: ‘all action in the theatre must have an inner justification’, Tortsov tells his students early on in An Actor Prepares; it must ‘be logical, coherent and real’ (Stanislavsky 1980a:46).

Both men, in their analysis of drama, seek a sense of order in the play itself. For Aristotle, this is articulated in famously clear terms: a muthos must have a beginning, middle and end and ‘should not begin at random or end at random’ (Aristotle 1999:12). For Stanislavsky, order is to be found by a process of deep textual investigation, ensuring that the larger picture of the play can be organised into comprehensible parts.

Both men also advocate a theatre of feelings. For Aristotle, this was a direct rebuttal of the philosophy of his teacher, Plato (428–347 BC), whose utter rejection of emotion in the theatre (indeed of the theatre itself) will be fully investigated in relation to Anatoly Vasiliev in Chapter 5. ‘The best kinds of muthos for tragedy’, Aristotle states in The Poetics, ‘are devised to represent incidents which arouse pity and terror’ (1999:17).

Stanislavsky is less emotionally prescriptive, but he still views the stimulation of feelings in the spectator as imperative, alongside the arousal of thought (dianoia). What does the spectator come for? ‘To sense the emotions and discover the thoughts of the people participating in the play’ (Stanislavsky 1980a:197).

In Actors and Onlookers, Natalie Crohn-Schmitt goes further in uniting Aristotle and Stanislavsky. Focusing on the two men’s attitude to Nature, Crohn-Schmitt identifies six areas of correlation between philosopher and director:

1. their view that nature is governed by universal laws and principles;
2. their view of nature as linear and orderly;
3. their belief that action is a series of obstacles to be overcome;
4. their view of the determinate human being [Stanislavsky’s superobjective and Aristotle’s ‘final cause’];
5. their view of nature as an ordered hierarchy from parts to wholes;
6. their view that nature achieves the maximum with the minimum amount of effort.

(1990:95–101) commitment to

Underpinning these six areas is one central point: that in their mutual commitment to action, Stanislavsky and Aristotle are philosophically united. Clearly, there is scope for developing such a thesis. Action (or praxis) for Aristotle is the primary constituent of tragedy through the active realisation of the muthos: Tragedy is the imitation of an action which is serious, complete and substantial… It is drama [that is, it shows people performing actions] and not narration’ (Aristotle 1999:9; McLeish’s text in square brackets).

And, likewise for Stanislavsky, action is at the core of the creative act. As he argues in An Actor Prepares: ‘action, motion, is the basis of the art followed by the actor’ (1980a: 36).

But to base the connections between Stanislavsky and Aristotle on the idea of action also has its problems, not least in the complex area of translation. Recent research has shown that Elizabeth Hapgood’s English translations truncate Stanislavsky’s methodical arguments and illustrations in the interest of brevity but at the expense of consistency and precision. Bella Merlin makes the point in Konstantin Stanislavsky:

Although the cuts may seem simple, some of them are particularly unhelpful. One crucial example concerns the Russian text of An Actor Prepares, which lists six important questions that all actors must ask of themselves…who, when, where, why, for what reason and how. In the English translation, these six questions are given far less attention, with only four of them being summarised.

(2003:40)

Elsewhere, the word ‘object’ is substituted for the more complex term ‘objective’ and the overall effect, Merlin argues, is that ‘Stanislavsky’s original intentions have become muddied’ (2003:41).¹ The terminology used by Stanislavsky, in the much fuller Russian versions of An Actor’s Work on Himself I and II, is, by contrast, precise, consistent and, above all, simple.

Not only does this ‘new’ terminology resolve some of the confusions in Stanislavskian practice, particularly to do with the relationship of motivation to action, but it also reveals an alternative discourse to that associated with Aristotelianism, one which sits more comfortably with the cultural conditions of Stanislavsky’s time. By considering each of the six proposed meeting points in turn it will be argued in this chapter that the ‘natural’ system of Stanislavsky is, in fact, far removed from the metaphysics of the fourth century BC. When focusing on the specific terminology for action in the Russian editions—in this case the relationship between the task (zadacha) and the action taken to realise that task (deistvie)—a particular discourse is revealed but it is not a discourse which owes any consistent debt to Aristotle. Instead, it is one bound up in the mechanistic thinking which grew out of Newton’s Principia and which characterised much of the Western intellectual tradition, proving particularly popular in post-revolutionary Russia. To keep the scope of this chapter manageable Newton and Descartes will be used here as markers of the beginning of this tradition, Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford and Alexei Gastev as emblems of its final paradigmatic assertion.

The Newtonian paradigm: the seventeenth-century perspective

Newton

Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) talent lay as much in his ability to amalgamate the work of others as it did in his own scientific discoveries. Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and Descartes all figure strongly in the thinking that gave birth to the Principia (1687) and the Opticks (1704), the two publications for which Newton is most celebrated and which contain his entire scientific methodology. His is the figure most prominent in the Scientific Revolution (begun by Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism) and the mechanistic worldview that developed from his theories has been widely influential both inside and outside scientific circles. Not only did he achieve a great synthesis of ideas but also a fundamental synthesis of approach, unifying the methods of induction and deduction, in what he called the method of ‘analysis and synthesis’. In doing so Newton established what is still commonly known as the ‘scientific method’: theories are first derived from empirical observation (induction) and then used to predict other phenomena (deduction). He outlines the process in the Opti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Science and Stanislavsky—The Evolution of a Tradition
• Part I: The Roots of the Tradition
• Part II: The Newtonian Branch
• Part III: The Romantic Branch
• Epilogue: Genetic Modification and the Backbone of Tradition
• Notes
• Bibliography