STANISLAVSKI“The System”

I know you don’t want to…but you should probably take some notes now.

Just a few notes. No big deal. You’ll be glad you

did.Trust me…would I lie to

you?

Take notes anyway.

Constantin Stanislavski

(1863 – 1938)“Whatever thread one takes up in the history of

twentieth-century drama leads back to Stanislavsky”

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”

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.

Stanislavski’s

Visualization of his

System

English Recreation of hisDrawing

RELAXATION

Learning to relax the muscles and eliminate physical tension while

performing.

CONCENTRATION

Learning to think like an actor and to respond to one’s own imagination.

WORK WITH SENSESDiscovering 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”.

SENSE OF TRUTHLearning to tell the difference between the organic and the

artificial. Stanislavski believed that there were

natural laws of acting, which were to be obeyed.

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

CONTACT & COMMUNICATION

Developing the ability to interact with other

performers spontaneously, and with an audience, without violating the

world of the play.

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.

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.

WORK WITH TEXTDeveloping the ability to

uncover the social, political, and artistic

meaning of the text, and seeing that these ideas are contained within the

performance.

CREATIVE STATE

An automatic culmination of all the previous steps.