Stanislavsky's excellent classical education included singing, ballet, and acting lessons as well as regular visits to the opera and theater. By the age of 14 he was acting in performances at the family estate, where his father had built a theater.
After completing his formal education, Stanislavsky entered the family business, enthusiastically devoting himself at the same time to a career in semiprofessional theater. Beginning in he directed and acted in performances for the Society of Art and Literature, which he had founded, and he continued these productions until under the sponsorship of the Hunting Club.
On June 22, , Stanislavsky met Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a successful playwright and teacher in the Moscow Philharmonic Society School, at a Moscow restaurant in order to discuss the reform of the Russian stage. Out of their hour meeting came the establishment of the Moscow Art Theater as a protest against the artificial theatrical conventions of the late 19th century.
Although the opening production in October of Alexey Tolstoy's Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich was a tremendous popular success because of its realism, it was with Anton Chekhov's The Seagull in December that Stanislavsky discovered a play ideally suited to his artistic aspirations and naturalistic methods.
During this period Stanislavsky worked out his theories by exploring the most difficult problems of acting with his company. An indication of the success of his system was the emergence from his training methods of all the best Russian actors of the early 20th century. Their sense of poise greatly inspired him. He traveled back to his motherland where he opened his First Studio in As an artist, K onstantin Stanislavski saw a lot of deficiency that he defined as artificial.
As previously mentioned, he wanted actors to let their inner feelings perform first instead of their outer theory character. In other words, Stanislavski system entails sketching the player's life on the inside hence portraying more memories. Human emotions such as Inner thoughts, beliefs and stories should be reflected by the character.
Note that the actor and character are two different features. For instance; the character should always speak in the first person when asked a question by the actor-I want, and I am. Three prominent questions must also be followed; first-What do I do? Why do I do character it? And lastly How do I the character do it? The whole process helped the character to explore in-depth performance and paying extra attention to the instructions given.
Several criticisms followed him after maintaining his artistic method of acting. He was pronounced dead on August 7, Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the 'system' with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised. 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 s, he hoped to secure his final legacy by opening another studio in , in which the Method of Physical Action would be taught.
The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals. Meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West. Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseievs. He was born Konstantin Sergeievich Alexeiev—he adopted the stage name "Stanislavski" in to keep his performance activities secret from his parents.
Up until the communist revolution in , Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his experiments in acting and directing. His family's discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur until he was thirty three. As a child, Stanislavski was interested in the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. Later, his family's two private theatres provided a forum for his theatrical impulses. After his debut performance at one in , he started what would become a lifelong series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems—it was from this habit of self-analysis and critique that Stanislavski's 'system' later emerged.
Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business. Increasingly interested in "experiencing the role", Stanislavski experimented with maintaining a characterisation in real life. In , he began vocal training under Fyodor Komissarzhevsky , with whom he also explored the coordination of body and voice. A year later, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School but, disappointed with its approach, he left after little more than two weeks.
Instead, he devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of Russian psychological realism as developed in the 19th century by Alexander Pushkin , Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin.
Shchepkin's legacy included a disciplined, ensemble approach, extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination, and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft.
Stanislavski called the Maly his 'university'. One of Shchepkin's students, Glikeriya Fedotova , taught Stanislavski; she instilled in him the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, stressed the importance of training and discipline, and encouraged the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication". As well as the artists of the Maly, performances given by foreign stars influenced Stanislavski. The effortless, emotive, and clear playing of the Italian Ernesto Rossi , who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in , particularly impressed him.
So too did Tommaso Salvini 's performance of Othello. By now well known as an amateur actor, at the age of twenty-five Stanslavski co-founded a Society of Art and Literature.
He became interested in the aesthetic theories of Vissarion Belinsky , from whom he took his conception of the role of the artist. On 5 July [O. Their first child, Xenia, died of pneumonia in May less than two months after she was born. Their second daughter, Kira, was born on 2 August [O.
In January , Stanislavski's father died. Their son Igor was born on 26 September [O. In February , Stanislavski directed Leo Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment for the Society of Art and Literature, in what he later described as his first fully independent directorial work. But it was not until he first met the great realist novelist and playwright that became another important influence on him.
Five years later the MAT would be his response to Tolstoy's demand for simplicity, directness, and accessibility in art. Stanislavski's directorial methods at this time were closely modelled on the disciplined, autocratic approach of Ludwig Chronegk , the director of the Meiningen Ensemble. In My Life in Art , Stanislavski described this approach as one in which the director is "forced to work without the help of the actor".
From onwards, Stanislavski began to assemble detailed prompt-books that included a directorial commentary on the entire play and from which not even the smallest detail was allowed to deviate. By means of his rigid and detailed control of all theatrical elements, including the strict choreography of the actors' every gesture, in Stanislavski's words "the inner kernel of the play was revealed by itself".
Analysing the Society's production of Othello , Jean Benedetti observes that:. Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right. The dramatic meaning is in the staging itself. His account flowed uninterruptedly from moment to moment. Benedetti argues that Stanislavski's task at this stage was to unite the realistic tradition of the creative actor inherited from Shchepkin and Gogol with the director-centred, organically unified Naturalistic aesthetic of the Meiningen approach.
That synthesis would emerge eventually, but only in the wake of Stanislavski's directorial struggles with Symbolist theatre and an artistic crisis in his work as an actor. Their eighteen-hour-long discussion has acquired a legendary status in the history of theatre. Nemirovich was a successful playwright, critic, theatre director, and acting teacher at the Philharmonic school who, like Stanislavski, was committed to the idea of a popular theatre. Their abilities complemented one another: Stanislavski brought his directorial talent for creating vivid stage images and selecting significant details; Nemirovich, his talent for dramatic and literary analysis, his professional expertise, and his ability to manage a theatre.
Stanislavski later compared their discussions to the Treaty of Versailles, their scope was so wide-ranging; they agreed on the conventional practices they wished to abandon and, on the basis of the working method they found they had in common, defined the policy of their new theatre.
Nemirovich assumed that Stanislavski would fund the theatre as a privately owned business, but Stanislavski insisted on a limited, joint stock company. Viktor Simov , whom Stanislavski had met in , was engaged as the company's principal designer. In his opening speech on the first day of rehearsals, 26 June [O. In an atmosphere more like a university than a theatre, as Stanislavski described it, the company was introduced to his working method of extensive reading and research and detailed rehearsals in which the action was defined at the table before being explored physically.
Stanislavski's lifelong relationship with Vsevolod Meyerhold began during these rehearsals; by the end of June, Meyerhold was so impressed with Stanislavski's directorial skills that he declared him a genius. The lasting significance of Stanislavski's early work at the MAT lies in its development of a Naturalistic performance mode.
In , Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov. The MAT production of The Seagull was a crucial milestone for the fledgling company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama.
The production's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time. Stanislavski's encounter with Chekhov's drama proved crucial to the creative development of both men.
His ensemble approach and attention to the psychological realities of its characters revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage, while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the text forced Stanislavski to dig beneath its surface in ways that were new in theatre. As part of the rehearsal preparations for the latter, Stanislavski took the company to visit Khitrov Market, where they talked to its down-and-outs and soaked up its atmosphere of destitution. Stanislavski based his characterisation of Satin on an ex-officer he met there, who had fallen into poverty through gambling.
The Lower Depths was a triumph that matched the production of The Seagull four years earlier, though Stanislavski regarded his own performance as external and mechanical. Along with Chekhov and Gorky, the drama of Henrik Ibsen formed an important part of Stanislavski's work at this time—in its first two decades, the MAT staged more plays by Ibsen than any other playwright. In , Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by Maurice Maeterlinck , the Belgian Symbolist.
Despite his enthusiasm, however, Stanislavski struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static , lyrical dramas. Meyerhold , prompted by Stanislavski's positive response to his new ideas about Symbolist theatre, proposed that they form a "theatre studio" a term which he invented that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors. Central to Meyerhold's approach was the use of improvisation to develop the performances.
When the studio presented a work-in-progress, Stanislavski was encouraged; when performed in a fully equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded. Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him", he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion.
Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor and Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant. This was the year of the abortive revolution in Russia. Stanislavski signed a protest against the violence of the secret police, Cossack troops, and the right-wing extremist paramilitary "Black Hundreds", which was submitted to the Duma on the 3 November [O. Rehearsals for the MAT's production of Aleksandr Griboyedov 's classic verse comedy Woe from Wit were interrupted by gun-battles on the streets outside.
Stanislavski and Nemirovich closed the theatre and embarked on the company's first tour outside of Russia. The success of the tour provided financial security for the company, garnered an international reputation for their work, and made a significant impact on European theatre. The tour also provoked a major artistic crisis for Stanislavski that had a significant impact on his future direction.
From his attempts to resolve this crisis, his 'system' would eventually emerge. Sometime in March —Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during An Enemy of the People —Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical. He spent June and July in Finland on holiday, where he studied, wrote, and reflected.
With his notebooks on his own experience from onwards, he attempted to analyse "the foundation stones of our art" and the actor's creative process in particular.
He began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art. Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his 'system'.
On his return to Moscow, he explored his new psychological approach in his production of Knut Hamsun 's Symbolist play The Drama of Life. Nemirovich was particularly hostile to his new methods and their relationship continued to deteriorate in this period. In a statement made on 9 February [O. The director is no longer king, as before, when the actor possessed no clear individuality. Stanislavski's preparations for Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird which was to become his most famous production to-date included improvisations and other exercises to stimulate the actors' imaginations; Nemirovich described one in which the cast imitated various animals.
In rehearsals he sought ways to encourage his actors' will to create afresh in every performance. He focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment what he would come to call their "task".
This use of the actor's conscious thought and will was designed to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly.
Noting the importance to great actors' performances of their ability to remain relaxed, he discovered that he could abolish physical tension by focusing his attention on the specific action that the play demanded; when his concentration wavered, his tension returned.
His "affective memory" contributed to the technique that Stanislavski would come to call "emotion memory". Together these elements formed a new vocabulary with which he explored a "return to realism" in a production of Gogol's The Government Inspector as soon as The Blue Bird had opened. At a theatre conference on 21 March [O. He developed his ideas about three trends in the history of acting, which were to appear eventually in the opening chapters of An Actor's Work : "stock-in-trade" acting, the art of representation, and the art of experiencing his own approach.
Stanislavski's production of A Month in the Country was a watershed in his artistic development. Breaking the MAT's tradition of open rehearsals, he prepared Turgenev's play in private. They began with a discussion of what he would come to call the "through-line" for the characters their emotional development and the way they change over the course of the play.
This production is the earliest recorded instance of his practice of analysing the action of the script into discrete "bits". At this stage in the development of his approach, Stanislavski's technique was to identify the emotional state contained in the psychological experience of the character during each bit and, through the use of the actor's emotion memory, to forge a subjective connection to it.
Only after two months of rehearsals were the actors permitted to physicalise the text. Stanislavski insisted that they should play the actions that their discussions around the table had identified.
Having realised a particular emotional state in a physical action, he assumed at this point in his experiments, the actor's repetition of that action would evoke the desired emotion.
The production's success when it opened in December seemed to prove the validity of his new methodology. Late in , Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed actor training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar". Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that employed the techniques of the commedia dell'arte , Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation.
Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio. In his treatment of the classics, Stanislavski believed that it was legitimate for actors and directors to ignore the playwright's intentions for a play's staging. One of his most important—a collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on a production of Hamlet—became a landmark of 20th-century theatrical modernism. Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently developed 'system' for creating internally justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play.
Craig envisioned a Symbolist monodrama in which every aspect of production would be subjugated to the protagonist: it would present a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes. Despite these contrasting approaches, the two practitioners did share some artistic assumptions; the 'system' had developed out of Stanislavski's experiments with Symbolist drama, which had shifted his attention from a Naturalistic external surface to the characters' subtextual, inner world.
Both had stressed the importance of achieving a unity of all theatrical elements in their work. Their production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, placing it "on the cultural map for Western Europe", and it has come to be regarded as a seminal event that revolutionised the staging of Shakespeare's plays.
It became "one of the most famous and passionately discussed productions in the history of the modern stage. As with his production of Hamlet and his next, Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn , he was keen to assay his 'system' in the crucible of a classical text. He began to inflect his technique of dividing the action of the play into bits with an emphasis on improvisation; he would progress from analysis, through free improvisation, to the language of the text:.
I divide the work into large bits clarifying the nature of each bit. Then, immediately, in my own words, I play each bit, observing all the curves. Then I go through the experiences of each bit ten times or so with its curves not in a fixed way, not being consistent. Then I follow the successive bits in the book. And finally, I make the transition, imperceptibly, to the experiences as expressed in the actual words of the part.
This impacted particularly on the actors' ability to serve the plays' genre, because an unsatisfactory definition produced tragic rather than comic performances. Following the success of his production of A Month in the Country , Stanislavski made repeated requests to the board of the MAT for proper facilities to pursue his pedagogical work with young actors.
Gorky encouraged him not to found a drama school to teach inexperienced beginners, but rather—following the example of the Theatre-Studio of —to create a studio for research and experiment that would train young professionals. Stanislavski created the First Studio on 14 September [O.
Its founding members included Yevgeny Vakhtangov , Michael Chekhov , Richard Boleslavsky , and Maria Ouspenskaya , all of whom would exert a considerable influence on the subsequent history of theatre. Stanislavski selected Suler as Gorky had nicknamed Sulerzhitsky to lead the studio.
In a focused, intense atmosphere, their work emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery. Following Gorky's suggestions about devising new plays through improvisation, they searched for "the creative process common to authors, actors and directors".
With a greater focus on pedagogical work than the First Studio, the Second Studio provided the environment in which Stanislavski developed the training techniques that would form the basis for his manual An Actor's Work A significant influence on the development of the 'system' came from Stanislavski's experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio, which was founded in He hoped that the successful application of his 'system' to opera, with its inescapable conventionality and artifice, would demonstrate the universality of his approach to performance and unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin.
From this experience Stanislavski's notion of "tempo-rhythm" emerged. He invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin to teach expressive movement and dance and attended both of their classes as a student.
Stanislavski spent the summer of in Marienbad where, as he had in , he researched the history of theatre and theories of acting in order to clarify the discoveries that his practical experiments had produced. The train was stopped at Immenstadt, where German soldiers denounced him as a Russian spy. Held in a room at the station with a large crowd with "the faces of wild beasts" baying at its windows, Stanislavski believed he was to be executed.
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