Shannon Mowat Konstantin Stanislavski

Performing Arts - Stacey

Konstantin Stanislavski was born in Moscow in the late 1800 and died in the early 1900. He was a business man turned actor, teacher and theatre director. His system of acting has developed an international reach. Stanislavski treated theatre-making as a serious endeavour, requiring dedication, discipline and integrity. Growing up he was fond of theatre and arts, studied piano and singing, and performed amateur plays at home with his elder brother and two sisters. He studied business and languages at Lasarevsky Institute, the most prestigious private school in Moscow. He did not graduate, instead he continued self-education while traveling in several European countries and studying at libraries and museums. Eventually Stanislavski joined his father's company, became a successful businessman, and the head of his father's business, the Alekseev's factory and other assets. During the 1880s Stanislavski made a fortune in international business and trade, he was awarded the Gold Medal at the World's Fair in Paris. At the same time, he was an active patron of arts and theatre in Russia. In 1885 he studied acting and directing at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, and took a stage name Stanislavski. In 1888 he founded the "Society for Arts and Literature" in Moscow. He invented what is now known as Method Acting or the Stanislavski System in which an actor attempts to identify emotionally with their character through their own personal experiences that may be similar to their role. This way of connecting with a character became very popular after his first production, The Fruits of Enlightenment in 1981, though it was taught in many different ways. In the beginning, Stanislavski proposed that actors study and experience subjective emotions and feelings and manifest them to audiences by physical and vocal means. While in its very earliest stages his 'system' focused on creating truthful emotions and embodying them, he later worked on the Method of Physical Actions. This was developed at the Opera Dramatic Studio from the early 1930s, before he passed away. Its focus was on physical actions as a means to access truthful emotion, and involved improvisation. The focus remained on reaching the subconscious through the conscious. Stanislavski had different pupils during each of the phases of discovering and experimenting with his 'system' of acting. Two of his former students, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1925. One of their students, Lee Strasberg, went on to co-found the Group Theatre (19311940) with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford, which was the first American acting company to put Stanislavski's initial discoveries into practice. Clurman and Strasberg had a profound influence on American acting, both on stage and film. Increasingly interested in "living the part," Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterization in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy; he extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning "in character". In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and leading tenor of the Bolshoi, with whom he also explored the co-ordination of voice and body. Together they devised exercises in moving and sitting stationary "rhythmically", which anticipated Stanislavski's later use of physical rhythm when teaching his 'system' to opera singers.

Shannon Mowat

Performing Arts - Stacey