Stanislavski. A method, a system… or more?
Image from our Actor in Time of Plague IGTV series.
The more I work in the East and the West of Europe, the more apparent it becomes to me: whether it’s lost in translation or by lack of awareness, or because of some other reason, people outside of the former Soviet Union misunderstand, and what’s worse, misjudge the tremendous effect that Constantin Stanislavski had on revolutionising acting.
When I ask a drama school educated actor what they know about Stanislavski system, they tell me “It’s about creating a character biography, isn’t it?” I mean, sure, yeah, it is. It’s like 5 percent of it, though mate.
Not a lot of people outside of the acting profession – and even some within it – know that acting is not something that is only ever given by gods to the chosen ones, which those chosen ones immediately know how to use perfectly. In fact, almost any person, given the right instruction, can learn to act. You just need a system by which you can trick your mind into imagining yourself as this different person in some wild given circumstances. We’ve all played pretend when we were kids, right?
Stanislavski was the first to come up with such a system. He saw that most people around the world were acting either by some instinct, or they were giving horribly false performances, that were not at all reflective of the Truth. It was an important issue for him, to reflect the Truth. He didn’t mean simply an objective truth of what’s going on, how it’s going on, but rather the Truth of human nature. And one of the ways to reflect it was to express what you are experiencing emotionally on stage. Express it – not simply show a representation of it.
So he, through trial and error, created a system, and wrote a book that is in its form written like his system: we are following a drama student learning how to act through his own fictional diary. That way, Stanislavski simply and easily explains what issues you come up with, what you can do to overcome them, through letting us see it from inside an actor’s head. And that’s exactly the simple trick of his whole system: to find a way to trick yourself into experiencing your character’s thoughts, feelings, and desires, and then to express them through your action.
Everything he says is indisputable: it’s based in a deep understanding of human psychology. In fact, if examined closely, absolutely no other system/method/etc ever contradicts anything at all that Stanislavski states. It either builds on it, or, in many cases, is a poor imitation of it. At the end of the day, a century later, Stanislavski still serves as the foundation, on which every modern actor, knowingly or unknowingly builds their whole mastery.
Stanislavski’s system is far more than simply just another acting method. It is the basic laws of physics of acting!
A few months ago, my coaching team, Artem and Masha, and I, did a bunch of livestreams about the Stanislavski system and its fundamental algorithm. If you want to dip your toe into understanding Stanislavski but not ready to commit to his book, or if you’re reading his book, but find some bits and pieces difficult to understand, check out our IGTV series, Actor In Time of Plague, where we give a thorough examination of what an actor can practice, and how they can better themselves, when on their own, with the help of the Stanislavski system and choreography.