1

The S Word:

Stanislavsky in Context

An International Symposium 5, 6, 7 April 2019

2

3

The Stanislavsky Research Centre Advisory Board Honorary Patron: Anatoly Smeliansky, President, Moscow Art Theatre School Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu, CNRS, Paris Andrei Malaev Babel, FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training, USA Sharon Marie Carnicke, University of Southern California, USA Kathy Dacre, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance Jan Hancil, Akademie múzických umění, Prague Bella Merlin, University of California, Riverside, USA Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds Laurence Senelick, Tufts University, USA David Shirley, Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts/Edith Cowan University Prof. Sergei Tcherkasski, Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Director: Paul Fryer, University of Leeds/London South Bank University Deputy Director: Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds

Stanislavski Studies (Taylor and Francis) Editor in Chief: Paul Fryer, University of Leeds/London South Bank University Editors Julia Listengarten, University of Central Florida, USA Sergei Tcherkasski, Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Luis Campos, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, UK Reviews Editor: David Matthews, Kings College London Social Media Editor: Michelle LoRicco, Mill Mountain Theatre, USA Consultant Translator: Anna Shulgat, Writers Union of St Petersburg, Russia Editorial Advisory Board Stefan Aquilina, University of Malta, Malta David Chambers, Yale School of Drama, USA Alexander Chepurov, St Petersburg State Theater Arts Academy, Russia Carol Fisher, Sorgenfrei, UCLA, USA Adrian Giurgea, Colgate University, USA Jan Hyvnar, DAMU Prague, Czech Republic Nesta Jones, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK David Krasner, Five Towns College, USA Tomasz Kubikowski, Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland Bella Merlin, University of California, Riverside, USA Vladimir Mirodan, University of the Arts, UK. Maria Pia Pagani, University of Pavia, Italy Nikolai Pesochinsky, St Petersburg State Theater Arts Academy, Russia Dassia Posner, Northwestern University, USA Maria Shevtsova, Goldsmiths College, UK Peta Tait, Latrobe University, Australia Simon Trussler, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK Ian Watson, Rutgers University, USA Andrew White, Valparaiso University, USA Rose Whyman, University of Birmingham, UK

4

Welcome to

The S Word: Stanislavsky in Context

How time flies! It’s been three years since the first edition of The S Word. And here we are, opening the fourth meeting in Malta. For The S Word to have made it this far, we have of course to thank Prof. Paul Fryer and Prof. Bella Merlin for their hard work and leadership. It was indeed a pleasure for me to convene this fourth edition with Prof. Fryer. For this edition we have opted to use as a framing theme the idea of ‘Stanislavski in Context’. We hoped for proposals to reflect on Stanislavsky’s work within the social, cultural, and political milieus in which it developed, without however forgetting the ways in which this work was transmitted, adapted, and appropriated within recent and current theatre contexts. We looked forward to receive papers and workshop proposals that were both historical as well as contemporary, and for participants to think of Stanislavsky as an instigator of modern theatre and a paradigm for performance practices within twenty-first-century training and performance scenarios. I am happy to say that the symposium’s call for proposals received a very positive response, and today we can look forward to a full programme that explores Stanislavsky’s work in its endless variety. On behalf of my colleagues within the Department of Theatre Studies I would like to welcome you all to Malta and to this wonderful building of the UM Valletta Campus. The Campus serves as a setting for the hosting of international conferences, seminars, short courses, and summer schools. It also incorporates the Valletta Campus Theatre, which is home to a lot of the Department’s practical work, training, and performances. The Department itself is this year celebrating, with Music Studies, its thirty years anniversary. Throughout these three decades it has developed into an international institution with strong links in Europe and outside the continent. It is a partner of The S Word, and its staff are members on, amongst others, the IFTR Executive, the Editorial Board of the Stanislavski Studies journal, and the Medinea Network. It hosts yearly workshops and seminars by visiting practitioners and academies from abroad, and has recently produced book publications on performer training in the twenty-first century, the relationship between carnival and power, theatre communities, and interdisciplinary performance. May I take this opportunity to invite you to have a look at the Department’s website (https://www.um.edu.mt/performingarts/theatre) and to get in touch with us to discuss possible collaborations. Today, however, it is our mutual interest in Stanislavsky that has brought us together. His work remains engaging in its complexity, fascinating in its applicability, and captivating in the questions that it raises. Certainly, the Symposium will raise several such questions and engage us all in possible answers. The Symposium is supported by the School of Performing Arts of the University of Malta and Teatru Malta, Malta’s National Theatre. Prof. Sergei Tcherkasski’s visit is supported by the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Malta. Dr Stefan Aquilina Director of Research, School of Performing Arts Senior Lecturer, Theatre Studies Conference Co-convener

5

The Stanislavsky Research Centre and The S Word

The Stanislavsky Research Centre was launched at The University of Leeds, UK, in January 2019. Following on from the work that originated at The Stanislavski Centre (Rose Bruford College), this new centre is a unique international initiative to support and develop both academic and practice-based research centered upon the work and legacy of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Inspired by the work of the late Professor Jean Benedetti, an internationally renowned authority and author of several major books on Stanislavsky’s work, the Centre hosts and promotes a series of lectures, workshops, study days, short courses, exhibitions and other events throughout the year, and offers support to researchers and research students. The S Word: Stanislavski and the Contemporary Theatre is a major collaborative international research project which, from Spring 2019, has been based at London South Bank University. Created by Bella Merlin and Paul Fryer, it was launched with a symposium on Stanislavski and the Future of Acting, in Spring 2016. A collaboration with The University of California Riverside, over 100 scholars and practitioners attended the event which was held at Rose Bruford College, UK. The second symposium, The S Word: Merging Methodologies, a collaboration with DAMU Theatre Academy, was held in Prague in March 2017. In April 2018, the third symposium, A Practical Acting Laboratory, was hosted by The University of California, Riverside. The S Word is a collaboration between a number of institutions. Each partner supports and promotes the project’s work and hosts symposia and other related events. The partners are London South Bank University, The University of California Riverside, DAMU Theatre Academy Prague, The University of Malta, Macunaima Theatre School (Sao Paulo, Brazil), The University of Leeds and The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

This year we are delighted to be the guests of the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta and I would like to particularly thank our colleagues here in the beautiful historic city of Valletta for hosting this event, and for the tremendous support that they have given us. In particular, my co-convener Dr Stefan Aquilina, without whose tireless efforts, this event could not have taken place. Details of our next symposium can be found in the back of this programme, and we are currently planning future events in the UK, USA and Australia. For further information about The Stanislavsky Research Centre, please visit our website: https://stanislavski-research.leeds.ac.uk Paul Fryer Director of The Stanislavsky Research Centre Co-convener of The S Word

6

Programme

FRIDAY 5 APRIL

17:00 Registration (Venue: Aula Prima, Second Floor)

18:30 Symposium Welcome (Venue: Aula Prima)

19:00 Keynote (Venue: Aula Prima)

Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University, USA

The Ever-Widening Contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky

20:30 Wine Reception (Venue: Bar Area, First Floor)

21:30 End

SATURDAY 6 APRIL

8:00 Registration desk open

9:00 Keynote (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre)

Vicki Ann Cremona, Associate Professor of Theatre, Department of Theatre Studies,

Head of Dance Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of Malta

Stanislavsky’s System: Mimesis, Truth, and Verisimilitude

10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

Meeting Room 6 Ground Floor

Meeting Room 5 Ground Floor

Valletta Campus Theatre

10:30- 12:00

Chair: Frank Camilleri (University of Malta) Kathy Dacre (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) Stanislavsky and The Context in Which He Wrote Sergey Panov (National University of Technology, Moscow)

Chair: Lucía Piquero (University of Malta) Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham (University of Georgia, USA) Stanislavsky’s Imagination and Experiencing: The Cognitive Link Gabriela Curpan (Goldsmith, University of London) Stanislavsky’s Creative State on the Stage: A Quasi-spiritual

10:30 Deepak Verma (University of East London, UK) The Yoga of Acting – Building the Charismatic Body: ‘The Actor and Prana’: A Dynamic, Working Confluence of Stanislavsky’s System and the Yogic Chakra System

7

The Stanislavsky Method and the Artistic Culture of Modernity Dassia N. Posner (Northwestern University, USA) From Blue Bird to Seagull: The Theatrical Truth of Alisa Koonen

Approach to the ‘System’ Through Practice as Research Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK) Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis as Seen Through the Lens of Contemporary Research in Emotion, Memory, Embodied Cognition, and Social Neuroscience

11:15 Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, USA) Standing on Shoulders: Stanislavsky and Barba

12:00 Lunch Break

13:30-15:00

Chair: Jan Hančil (AMU Prague) Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London) The First Class: On the Contribution Made to UK Drama Training by the Actor Harold Lang, Arguably the First to Teach a Stanislavskian Acting Class in a British conservatoire Michaela Antoniou (National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece) Notes on a Part. Stanislavsky’s Influences as Detected on Dimitris Kataleifos’s Theatrical Notebooks/diaries on David Mamet’s Plays Nesta Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) Brian Friel: Ireland’s Chekhov

Chair: Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta) Dan Barnard (London South Bank University) Events and Bits/Beats/Units/Episodes in the British Professional and Pedagogical Context Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK) (Re)Animating Stanislavsky Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK) Emotion Memory: ‘A Dangerous Reputation’

13:30 Karen Benjamin (University of Gloucestershire, UK) Stanislavsky Backwards 14:15 Stéphane Poliakov (University of Paris 8) The ‘Perspective’ in Practice: from Plato to Chekhov

8

15:00 Coffee Break

15:30-17:00

Chair: Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, US) Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (Birkbeck, University of London) The System of Service: Stanislavsky and Emotional Labour Today Vasilios N. Arabos (ΙΜΑΛΙΣ: Research Initiative for Ancient Drama, Athens, Greece) Wine, Tea, and Sympathy: for an Orphic Stanislavsky at the Turn of Three Centuries Tomasz Kubikowski (Akademia Teatralna, Warsaw, Poland) The Vaudevillean Universe: Creating Worlds in Stanislavsky

Chair: Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US ) Margot Wood (Anex Theatre Productions, South Africa) Devising Theatre for Traumatized Participants using Action-based Direction James Palm (Bird College, UK) ALICE: ‘Ben’s going in from a really horrible angle. It’s almost as painful as a smear test’ – DUST by Milly Thomas Should I (a middle-aged man) Teach Students the Theory and Practice of Stanislavskian Good Faith Using the Play DUST by Milly Thomas? Cymon Allen (Performers College, UK) With the Function and Requirement of the Actor Constantly Changing, How Can a System Written Almost 100 years ago Train the Modern Theatre Practitioner?

15:30 Julian Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) The Application of Stanislavsky to Theatre of the Absurd Texts 16:15 Edward Caruana Galizia (Freelance Actor, Malta) The Art of Actioning

19:00 Special Presentation (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre) Sergei Tcherkasski (Russian State Institute of Performing Arts, St Petersburg)

Method of Action Analysis: from Stanislavsky to Today – A Practical Session on the

Director’s Craft of Play Analysis

20.30 End

SUNDAY 7 APRIL

09.00 The S Word in Prague (Venue: Meeting Room 6)

Paul Fryer, The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds.

Jan Hančil, AMU Prague

9

Meeting Room 6 Ground Floor

Meeting Room 5 Ground Floor

Valletta Campus Theatre

9:15-10:30/ 10:45

Chair: Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK) Inga Romantsova (Australian Institute of Music/University of Newcastle, Australia) Stanislavsky versus Evreinov on Stage Realism and Theatricality Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta) Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques: A Research Project Martina Musilová (Department of Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) „Я есмь“– Stanislavsky and Solovyov

Chair: Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)

Robin Levenson (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York, USA) The Notion of Action Jiang (Harry) Hanyang (University of British Columbia, Canada) By Means of Études: Boris Kulnev in an Advanced Actor Training Class in Beijing, 1955-56 Ewa Danuta Godziszewska (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland) Inside the American Laboratory Theatre. Richard Boleslavsky’s Work with his Students

9:15 Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK) A Practical Exploration of Active Analysis Through a Synthesis of Viewpoints and Quilting the Text 10:00 Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US) The Acorn and the Grain of Sand

10:30 Coffee Break

11:00 Plenary Panel ~ Final Discussion (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre)

Stanislavsky in Context: Why Is It Still Important?

Chair: Paul Fryer (The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK)

Panel members: Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London, UK)

Tomasz Kubikowski (Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland)

Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague, Czech Republic)

Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)

12:30 End

10

Biographies and Abstracts

Friday 5th April

Aula Prima ~ 19:00

Keynote: The Ever-Widening Contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky

Laurence Senelick (Tufts University, USA)

Adopting and adapting Giorgio Strehler’s notion of treating a great play as a series of nesting boxes,

I intend to examine the contexts of Stanislavsky’s life and work as Matryoshka dolls, ever-widening

in significance. The first, most compact box is the biographical: the influence of family, education,

theatrical experience, and social status on his artistic programme. It is set within the second: the

historical, tracking his responses to the broader political and socio-economic events that bore in

upon him. The third is the ideological: siting his ideas within the intellectual and aesthetic trends

of his time. Finally, I hope to demonstrate how, in becoming an institution in modern theatrical

thought and practice, he has generated an all-encompassing context of his own.

Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a

fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of over

twenty-five books, the most recent being Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern

Culture. Those on Russian theatre include Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet, Serf Actor: The Life

and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, Soviet

Theatre: A Documentary History, The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance,

Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters, and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre . His translations of

Chekhov, Gogol, Shvarts and others have been widely performed. He is the recipient of the St

George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian art and theatre.

Saturday 6th April

Valletta Campus Theatre ~ 9:00

Stanislavsky’s System: Mimesis, Truth, and Verisimilitude

Vicki Ann Cremona (Department of Theatre Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of

Malta)

Aristotle sees art as ‘Techne’, a productive skill or activity that engages knowledge as well as

rational processes. In his treatise on the Poetics, he links this productivity to mimesis which, he

claims, is an innately human factor that distinguishes man from all other creatures. Consequently, if

tragedy is the mimesis of action, then the function of actors is that of ‘including the characters for

the sake of their actions’ (Janko 1987: 9). From this, it can be derived that in embodying agency, the

actor takes up a double mimetic role: that of the mover of the action, and of the agent generating it.

Through this work, s/he delivers truths about universal actions (Daniels 2001: 49). In their effort to

interpret Aristotle’s work, Renaissance theorists see the poet’s function as keeping as close to the

truth as possible (Scaliger); it follows that the actor’s function is extended to that of faithfully

representing this representation of true facts. Stanislavsky’s lifelong elaboration of the system may

11

be seen as a quest to develop the actor’s ‘techne’ or craftsmanship, through knowledge and thinking

of his skill. His search for the ‘inner truth of sensible behaviour on stage’ (Stanislavski 1928: 16)

requires truthfulness to life (Gorchakov 1994: 232). This paper will examine Stanislavsky’s system

in light of the concepts of truth and verisimilitude, and draw parallels between this methodology

and modern approaches to other artistic fields, to see whether Stanislavsky’s system may be

considered as applicable to areas both within and beyond theatre.

Vicki Ann Cremona is Chair of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta. She

graduated from the Université de Provence, France and was a Visiting Scholar at Lucy Cavendish

College, University of Cambridge. She was appointed Ambassador of Malta to France between 2005-

2009, and to Tunisia between 2009-2013. She is an executive member of the International

Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) and has contributed towards founding Icarus Publishing

Enterprise, a joint initiative between TARF, Odin Teatret (Denmark) and The Grotowski Institute

(Poland). She has various international publications, mainly about theatrical events and public

celebration, particularly Carnival, Commedia dell’Arte, theatre anthropology, Maltese Theatre and

costume. Her most recent publication is entitled: Carnival and Power. Play and Politics in a Crown

Colony (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).

Session One: 10.30 – 12.00

Panel 1 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Frank Camilleri (University of Malta)

Stanislavsky and The Context in Which He Wrote

Kathy Dacre (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)

In 2007 Jean Benedetti was working on his new translations of Stanislavsky’s work. He liked a good

mystery and was keen to stress how interesting it might be to explore Stanislavsky’s publishing

arrangements, government censorship, and the questions that these might pose. This paper takes

up his challenge. Benedetti was particularly interested in how the American Hapgood translations

of An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and the later compilation, Creating a Role came about and

how a copyright agreement with the Hapgood’s controlled all English translations and all Western

European translations from these versions until 1992. The publication of Stanislavsky’s My Life in

Art in English, as Laurence Senelick points out, was part of a publicity campaign accompanying the

visit by the Moscow Art Theatre to the USA in 1923. The Russian born impresario Morris Gest,

‘created an aura of aesthetic sanctity around the players even as he noisily promoted them.’

Stanislavsky approached the Boston publisher Little Brown, with a proposal for a book about his

‘philosophy of creative performance’ but, with the atmosphere of celebrity surrounding the tour he

was persuaded to write a ‘colourful biography full of anecdotes and profiles’ that was called My Life

in Art and published in 1924. On his return to Moscow Stanislavsky began work on a Russian

version which he was much happier with and which became the basis for all subsequent non-

English translations. Stanislavsky, back in Russia, was however now writing texts in a Stalinist

Soviet Russia. His Russian version of My Life in Art was changed in order to conform to Soviet

Communist ideology and his subsequent writings develop what Anatoly Smeliansky calls ‘the

12

limiting framework of life-like theatre that was imposed on him by the Soviet understanding of

theatre.’ Stanislavsky was, with Gorky, among Stalin’s favourite artists and, although Stalin’s worst

purges of intellectuals and artists took place after their deaths, state control was absolute in the

early thirties when Stanislavsky was writing. By 1934 all writing had to pass three levels of

censorship.

This paper will consider questions posed by the political context in which Stanislavsky wrote.

Kathy Dacre is a Professor of Theatre Studies at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance,

UK. She has taught drama in colleges and universities including Royal Central School of Speech and

Drama and London University in the UK and Vassar College and New York University in the USA.

She has written and been involved in the development of over twenty five undergraduate and

postgraduate degree programmes in the Performing Arts. With Paul Fryer she co-edited

Stanislavski on Stage to accompany the National Theatre exhibition and has written on

Stanislavski’s production of Lonely Lives and his rehearsal room approaches in Stanislavski Studies.

In 2008 she led the Teaching Stanislavski research project funded by the UK Standing Committee of

Drama Departments and The Higher Education Academy. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education

Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee and Chair of the Development Board

for Shakespeare North.

The Stanislavsky Method and the Artistic Culture of Modernity

Sergey Panov (National University of Technology, Moscow)

Previously, we tried to show that Stanislavsky’s method exceeds strict borders of social and

psychological typology by transforming the human duration in an evolutional movement towards a

sublime purpose of the historical process of all humanity. The new theatre poetics becomes an

intuitive form conditioning the transformation of the effects of emotional discharges in reflexes of

conscience and of the subconscious orientations of understanding and of will which are transferred

in reflective judgements and regulative ideas of human existence. That’s how it is possible to reflect,

to cope and to attribute to any reactive conscience a conviction objectified inside the mind, based

on the complete experimentation of impulsive and reflexive human nature, which is displayed in

this poetics. The artistic time by Stanislavsky establishes itself as a form of the unconscious

becoming of conscious orientations, so the transcendental form of self-sensation as a symbol of

infinite.

But after the apocalypse of the First World War, where humanity left itself guided by more archaic

forms of resolution of conflicts, all optimistic perspectives of the development of the world towards

the unit of good, of beauty and truth is devalued because they become convertable directly in

natural ontologies and ideological projections which are by definition inadequate to the initial

sense of our lived existence. That’s how we see being born the phenomenological theatre, drama

and novel (Proust, Kafka, Gorki, Pirandello) as a research of ‘lost time’, that is to say an infinite

reduction of natural attitudes as reflector and mimetic modes of reactive thought and behavior the

omnipresent thoughtless violence of which had pervaded all the human reality. In this perspective

phenomenological theatre (A.Efros, P.Fomenko, A.Vasiliev) is a form of infinite individualization

and of internalization of the intellectual and critical conscience which tends to reduce its own

intentional acts, that is to say effects of productive reflexes towards a simple contemplation of the

13

temporal changeability of the things of the world. The phenomenological position transfers the

character of unforeseen suppleness of the states of the vital, sensory, reflexive and cultural world

by transforming the thoughtful and imagined product of this abstraction in the one and only object

of spiritual authorial pleasure.

Sergei Panov is associate professor at the National University of Technologies MISIS of Moscow (Russia). His main area of research is the philosophical anthropology of artistic culture and pragmatical deconstruction of the Russian and global theatre aesthetics, especially Stanislavsky and his heritage in the context of Russian and European cultural paradigm. Panov’s publications include Writing, semiosis and discource (Moscow, 2010), Replies of literature (Moscow, 2010), Stanislavsky languge into the theatre of Fomenko (Stanislavski Studies, 2018). He is a member of the International Association of Literary Criticism (France) and of the Centre for Superior Studies in Literature (France). From Blue Bird to Seagull: The Theatrical Truth of Alisa Koonen

Dassia N. Posner (Northwestern University, USA)

In 1906, Alisa Koonen began her acting career at the Moscow Art Theatre. She went on to become

one of the greatest actresses of the century: during her life she was often compared to Bernhardt,

Rachel, and Ermolova. Her first major role was that of Mytyl in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1908), a

production that remains in the repertoire of the MAT today. Koonen did not achieve her fame at the

MAT, however. In 1913, she signed a contract with Mardzhanov’s Free Theatre, where she met a

young director, Alexander Tairov, with whom she founded the Moscow Kamerny Theatre the

following year. Over the next thirty-five years, Koonen played many of the stage’s greatest

heroines—Sakuntala, Salomé, Phaedra, Antigone, Cleopatra—until the Kamerny was liquidated

during Stalin’s post-World War II pogroms. Koonen became renowned for her rich emotional

saturation, plasticity, musicality, and truthfulness—not to everyday reality, but to the heightened

creative worlds she first encountered in the MAT’s experiments with symbolism. Throughout her

life, she acknowledged Stanislavsky for her artistic upbringing, for introducing her to the art of

Isadora Duncan, and for instilling in her a deep commitment to the highest ideals of art. As a young

actress, though, she was frustrated by Stanislavsky’s early ‘system’ experiments during rehearsals

and felt constrained by the character type in which she was most often cast: the naïve young girl.

Stanislavsky refused to speak to Koonen for many years following her MAT departure. Although

they eventually reconciled, he never entirely forgave his protégé and never fully acknowledged her

success. Together with Tairov, her lifelong collaborator, she developed a new form of theatre that

expanded the inner emotional truth of the virtuosic actor into the full physical environment of the

stage. In her theatrical world, emotion was expressed through the actor’s voice and plasticity and

further amplified in the music and vivid scenic environment. This paper will illuminate the

significance of Koonen’s acting innovations in the context of her MAT roots and her subsequent

creative career at the Kamerny Theatre.

Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at

Northwestern University. Her books include The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material

Performance (2014), co-edited with Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, and The Director’s Prism: E. T.

A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde (2016), in which she analyses the vivid

directorial and design innovations of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein.

Her companion website to The Director’s Prism, which features over a hundred archival Russian

14

theatre sources, can be accessed at: www.fulcrum.org/northwestern. Recent dramaturgy projects

include Grand Concourse, Russian Transport, and Three Sisters at Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Posner is currently an ACLS Fellow.

Panel 2 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Lucía Piquero (University of Malta)

Stanislavsky’s Imagination and Experiencing: The Cognitive Link

Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham (University of Georgia, USA)

In Rhoda Blair’s The Actor, Image, And Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience, ‘Imagination is a, if

not the, key term that provides a link between acting and cognitive neuroscience.’ Sharon

Carnicke’s influential Stanislavsky in Focus asserts that Stanislavsky’s most important ‘lost term’

perezhivat (to experience), equates to his idea of ‘living the part’. This paper argues that

imagination is the key to Stanislavsky’s idea of ‘experiencing a role’, and current understandings of

cognitive science help us understand not only the link between the two, but also how we can better

use imagination to enhance the ability of an actor to live the part during performance. The first part

of this paper examines the social, cultural, and political contexts and influences of Stanislavsky’s

understanding of imagination and experiencing. The second part uses several recent influential

cognitive science theories of mind, imagination, and simulations to glean additional context and

focus for these ideas. Imagination occurs in networks across the brain, allowing actors to

experience anew in each performance as they adjust to incoming stimuli and play actions as they

‘experience’ the performance in the complex manner Stanislavsky suggested.

Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham is a director, actor, scholar, media designer, and educator in both theatre

and film. Her primary interests include how the cognitive sciences may lead to new pedagogical

strategies in directing and acting and the effect they may have on the respective theoretical discourses. She is currently the Producing Artistic Director of the professional non-profit Circle

Ensemble Theatre Company. Arp-Dunham received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Media with a Directing

Emphasis from the University of Georgia, where she is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance

Studies. She also holds a B.F.A. in Acting from The Ohio State University.

Stanislavsky’s Creative State on the Stage: A Quasi-spiritual Approach to the ‘System’ Through Practice as Research Gabriela Curpan (Goldsmith, University of London)

This paper presents research which aims to rediscover and test a more spiritually orientated way of

preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable type of artistic creativity defined by

Stanislavsky as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox

background, as well as his yogic/Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the

actor, from being oneself towards becoming the character. But how can such process of becoming

be delineated? Where does it start, and what are the possible paths to be followed? To answer such

questions, cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches were called for in order to

understand and follow an appropriate and clear direction. Therefore, the research considered all

the possible and probable avenues of influence for Stanislavsky’s theatrical legacy, including his

Orthodox faith. The practice was structured in three major stages and was developed on another

15

three highly interconnected levels. By using various meditation techniques (as an underlying

principle of breath), and by observing certain spiritual ways of behaving, the practice began with

the creation and constant maintenance of a virtually sacralised atmosphere. Later on, during

training (the first stage), when rehearsing (the second stage), or while performing an adaptation of

Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (the third stage), the work evolved into testing all the elements of

the ‘system’, with a particular focus given to seven of them that might hold both technical and

spiritual values or usability. The procedures, through which these elements can be addressed in

practice, were translated into specific acting exercises and études, designed to elucidate such

possibly religiously-originated Stanislavskian principles as ‘morality’, ‘nature’,

‘love’/’beauty’/’truth’, ‘experiencing’, ‘incarnation’, ‘spiritual action’, ‘the supertask’ or the

‘superconscious’.

Gabriela Curpan is a PhD Candidate at Goldsmith, University of London, with a research interest in

applied Stanislavsky and Nicolai Demidov’s technique. She is a Romanian professional actress,

trained both in her country and in the UK, with over twenty years of stage experience, currently

teaching acting at University of Wolverhampton, as well as Staffordshire University.

Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis as Seen through the Lens of Contemporary Research in Emotion,

Memory, Embodied Cognition, and Social Neuroscience

Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK)

Contemporary theories of emotion, memory, embodied and situated cognition, and social

neuroscience afford a lens through which to derive a better understanding of the human processes

implicit in Stanislavsky’s method of Active Analysis, as developed by Maria Knebel. Insights derived

from such an understanding afford the facilitator of learning (i.e. the trainer), or the director

possibilities for a more finely nuanced and intentional approach to the invocation of Active Analysis

during the learning and rehearsal processes. Contemporary theories see emotions as functional,

pre-conscious precursors to discursive thought that directly inform an actor’s intentions and

process of decision-making. Fallacies of memory, while primarily adaptive in nature, also result in

an actor’s capacity to remember, with absolute conviction, that which did not happen. Research in

neuroscience also suggests that there is significant overlap in the brain systems utilized in the

processes of imagining the past, imagining the future, and imagining fictional circumstances. The

emotional resonance model of creative thought suggests that a global wave of remote associations

spread through an actor’s memory system, activating disparate, emotion laden, unconscious

memory fragments and the concepts or images to which they are attached. Theories of embodied

and situated cognition reject notions of cognition as an embrained process and foreground the

centrality of phenomenological experience and the affordances of the environment in the processes

of cognition (i.e. understanding) and creativity. Social neuroscience suggests the key role played by

the human mirror mechanism (systems of mirror neurons) in facilitating social cognition and co-

regulated behaviour between actors and between characters and audience. An improvisatory

approach to text allows an actor to fuse her psychophysical experience of environment, movement

and language through a synthesis of Active Analysis, Viewpoints and a technique I term Quilting the

Text, derived from the Lacanian notion of floating signifiers.

Roger Smart comes originally from the UK, but has worked for the past 30 years as a director and

trainer of actors, primarily in the USA. A teacher and director of collegiate and professional actors,

16

he has an MFA in Directing from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD from Goldsmiths

College, University of London. In addition to university appointments, he served as Director of

Education and Training at Court Theatre, Chicago and Artistic Director of Shattered Globe Theatre,

Chicago. He currently works as a freelance director and trainer in the UK and as a visiting lecturer

and guest director at the University of Northampton (UK).

Workshop 1 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

10:30 – 11:15

The Yoga of Acting – Building the Charismatic Body: ‘The Actor and Prana’:

A Dynamic, Working Confluence of Stanislavsky’s System and the Yogic Chakra System

Deepak Verma (University of East London, UK)

The Yoga of acting aims to give actors the tools to deeper connect with themselves in order to reach

the character/performance. This workshop will consist of simple yoga exercises and breathwork.

No previous experience is required. The Yoga of acting allows the actor to acquire and explore tools

to experience the Charismatic body to expand radiance and Prana (lifeforce energy) within the

body and in connection with the people, places, and things around you in your space (in life and on

stage). Through Chakric Analysis the actor can have a deeper connection with the character they

are embodying.

Deepak Verma trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He is a television and

stage actor, a playwright, screenwriter and currently completing his P.H.D. at Rose Bruford College

and University of East London – the Yoga of Acting- a methodology which explores the confluence

of Yoga and Stanislavsky’s system. Deepak is a Kundalini Yoga level 2 Teacher- trained in Los

Angeles.

Workshop 2 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

11:15-12:00

Standing on Shoulders: Stanislavsky and Barba

Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, USA)

Eugenio Barba claims that he stands on the shoulders of giants and that there is no taller giant for him than Stanislavsky. Barba’s metaphor suggests something less than blood but more than shared

interests passing in the wings of history’s theatre. It is true that both Stanislavsky and Barba

embrace performer-centred theatre; however, they appear to do so in very different ways.

Stanislavsky’s approach to theatre is grounded in a learned heritage technique in which the actor’s

creativity is guided by an author’s script and a learned process that transforms inspiration into

embodied action. Barba’s theatre, on the other hand, rejects a codified technique that can be passed

down from teacher to pupil in favour of a personal training regimen grounded in the devised and

physical. So, in talking of giants and shoulders, is Barba speaking solely in terms of a shared

obsession with the actor’s craft, which he and Stanislavsky clearly share; or is he alluding to a more

familial linkage to his predecessor – one in which there are connections between Stanislavsky’s

17

codified acting technique and his own autodidactic approach to harnessing the actor’s creativity? I

would offer that it is the latter.

This workshop will briefly examine what I regard as some of the relationships between

Stanislavsky’s and Barba’s approaches to acting and how those relationships can be harnessed to an

actor’s benefit. Potential areas to be addressed include:

The role of improvisation in creating a scene Playing an action The ‘Inside-out’ versus the ‘Outside-in’ The As If The given circumstances.

Ian Watson teaches at Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N) where he is Professor of Theatre as well

as the Director of the Theatre Program. He is also the founder and current Director of the Urban

Civic Initiative at RU-N, which combines arts practice with educational strategies as tools of

community engagement in a social justice context. He is the author of Towards a Third Theatre:

Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1995, 1993) and Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio

Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer

Training Across Cultures (Harwood/Routledge, 2001). He has contributed chapters to over a dozen

books, including Creation in Modern Performance (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2013), Twentieth Century

Actor Training, (Routledge, (2010, 2000), Scholarly Acts: A Practical Guide to Performance Research

(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Acting [Re]Considered (Routledge, 2002, 1995), Performer Training:

Developments Across Cultures (Harwood/Routledge, 2001), and is a contributor to the Oxford

Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. He has also published numerous articles in journals such

as New Theatre Quarterly; About Performance; The Drama Review; Theatre, Dance and Performer

Training; Issues in Integrative Studies; The Latin American Theatre Review; Asian Theatre Journal;

Latin American Theatre Review; and Gestos. He is an Advisory Editor for New Theatre Quarterly;

Theatre, Dance and Performer Training; About Performance; Stanislavski Studies; and Kultura I

Społeczeńśtwo (Culture and Society).

Session Two: 13:30 – 15.00

Panel 3 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague)

The First Class: On the Contribution Made to UK Drama Training by the Actor Harold Lang,

Arguably the First to Teach a Stanislavskian Acting Class in a British Conservatoire

Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London)

This paper examines the original contribution to UK actor training made by the flamboyant,

Stanislavskian actor Harold Lang (1922-1970) and explores his ‘psychological’ approach to the

rehearsal of Shakespearean drama. Trained at RADA in the early forties alongside other figures

influential in actor training such as John Blatchley and Colin Chandler, Lang taught acting at Central

between 1960 and 1963. Unusually for those times, he promoted a Russian, not an American, view

of Stanislavsky. His teaching was considered innovative enough for him to be the subject of a 1961

18

BBC Monitor programme directed by John Schlesinger. Throughout the sixties, Lang toured

productions internationally and in 1964 presented his play Macbeth in Camera as part of The

Adelaide Festival of Arts. This didactic piece, which forms part of the Lang archive, dramatizes an

encounter between Lang’s actors and a local festival organiser and academic, who disrupts their

rehearsals to insist that a psychological approach to Shakespeare is an affront to the writer’s genius.

The ensuing argument reveals much about Lang’s efforts to align Stanislavskian techniques with a

literary appreciation of Shakespearean text.

This account of Lang’s work provides a ‘missing link’ in the record of the Stanislavskian legacy in

Britain: it places Lang between the Komisarjevsky and the Method generations of acting teachers

and anticipates the efforts of later directors to ‘marry the two traditions’ (Barton 1984) of

Stanislavsky’s system and ‘text-based’ approaches to Shakespeare’s plays.

Vladimir Mirodan is Emeritus Professor of Theatre, University of the Arts London. Trained on the

Directors Course at Drama Centre London, he has directed over 50 productions in the UK as well as

internationally and has taught and directed in most leading drama schools in the UK. He was

Director of the School of Performance at Rose Bruford College, Vice-Principal and Director of Drama

at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Principal of Drama Centre London and Director of

Development and Research Leader, Drama and Performance, Central Saint Martins.

Throughout his career, Professor Mirodan took a keen interest in director training and formulated a

significant number of formal and informal training frameworks. He served for many years as Vice

Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, on the Drama Committee of the Scottish Arts Council

and on the Board of the Citizens’ Theatre. He is a former Chairman of the Conference of Drama

Schools and a Deputy Chair of the National Council for Drama Training. He is currently the Chair of

the Directors Guild of Great Britain Trust and of the Directors Charitable Foundation.

Professor Mirodan’s research interests revolve around issues of acting psychology, in particular as

this relates to the neuropsychology of gesture and posture. He is also interested in the history and

evolution of actor and director training as well as in defining the ways in which the dramatization

and staging of non-dramatic texts may reveal meanings alongside textual and contextual analyses.

He has published on these topics and The Actor and the Character, his book on the psychology of

transformation in acting, was published by Routledge in November 2018. Together with

neuroscientists from University College London, Professor Mirodan is engaged in a research project

on emotional contagion in acting funded by the Leverhulme Foundation. He is a member of the

Editorial Board of the journal Stanislavski Studies and Review Editor of the journal Frontiers in

Performance Science.

Notes on a Part. Stanislavsky’s Influences as Detected on Dimitris Kataleifos’s Theatrical

Notebooks/diaries on David Mamet’s Plays

Michaela Antoniou (National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece)

The important Greek actor Dimitris Kataleifos has been consistently appearing on the Greek stage,

playing leading and important parts, since the 1980s. A member of significant theatre groups, such

as Morfes in the 1990s, whose primary aim was the creation of ensemble companies, he has been

seeking for a system that would help him construct the roles that he performed. His notebooks

19

concentrate the way in which he analyses, synthesises, and approaches each character. They

comprise notes on the role’s history, its background, habits, and so on. They follow Stanislavsky’s

key concepts, such as, ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘for what reason’, and notions, such as, ‘phantasy’ and

‘imagination’. This paper will review the notebooks on the five David Mamet plays in which

Kataleifos has appeared: American Buffalo (1992), The Cryptogram (1996), A Life in the Theatre

(1999), Glengarry Glen Ross (2001), and Oleanna (2013). It will illuminate Stanislavsky’s impact on

Kataleifos and delineate conscious and subconscious choices related to Stanislavsky’s system. It will

also delimit the links of Stanislavsky with Mamet, and the impact of Mamet on the Greek stage.

Michaela Antoniou is Special Teaching Staff in Acting at the Theatre Studies Department at the

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She was born in Piraeus and grew up in Athens and

Thessaloniki. She received her diploma at the National Theatre of Greece Drama School and her BA

Degree at the Theatre Studies Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

She completed her MA (‘Performance and Culture’) and PhD (on Acting and Directing) with

Professor Maria Shevtsova at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has taught at the Theatre

Studies Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her articles have been published in Greek

and international journals, such as New Theatre Quarterly, Stanislavski Studies, and Parabasis. She

has performed on the stage under the guidance of directors, such as Spyros Evangelatos, Yiorgos

Michailidis, and Antonis Antoniou. Her translations for the theatre include Death and the Maiden by

Ariel Dorfman and Home by David Storey. Her play Untitled due to Amnesia was performed in Athens and Patras, 2009-2010. She has written two novels Daisy and the Sunflowers and Daisy and

the Sea.

Brian Friel: Ireland’s Chekhov

Nesta Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)

Aristocrats (1979) was the first of Brien Friel’s original plays to be described as ‘Chekovian’, not

only for its echoes of The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, but also its subtlety in characterization

and clear-eyed observation of human frailty expressed ironically in a form of poetic realism.

Several others have Chekovian resonances such as his last play The Home Place (2005). Friel

considered Chekhov to be ‘the man who reshaped twentieth-century theatre’, and ‘translated’ Three

Sisters (1981) and Uncle Vanya (1998) into Hiberno-English, followed by The Yalta Game based on

the short story ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ (2001) and The Bear (2002), specifically for

performance by Irish actors. This last was produced in a double-bill with Afterplay, an original piece

that ‘revisits the lives of two people, Andrey Prozorov and Sonya Serebriakova, who had a previous

existence in two separate plays’, in a ‘run-down café in Moscow in the early 1920s’. The paper

considers the validity of this soubriquet.

Nesta Jones was formerly Professor and Director of Research at Rose Bruford College of

Theatre and Performance; and Reader in Theatre Arts and Head of Drama for many years at

Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published on Brian Friel (Faber & Faber and Oxford

University Press), Tanika Gupta (Oberon Books), David Mamet (Methuen), Sean O'Casey

(Methuen and Chadwyck-Healey), and J.M. Synge (Methuen) amongst others. She was a

founder member and project co-ordinator of CONCEPTS (Consortium for the Co-ordination of

European Performance and Theatre), a member of the Council of Europe's Network Forum

that initiated pan-European projects including conferences and expert seminars with funding

20

from the European Commission, the European Cultural Foundation, the Foreign and

Commonwealth Office, and Arts Council England. She has organised projects for the British

Council in eastern Europe; directed productions, conducted workshops, and given papers,

many with live performance elements, at international conferences in continental Europe, the

Middle East, North America, and the UK. She has taught at and researched with Trinity College

Dublin and was involved in the founding and development of The Lir, Ireland ’s National

Academy of Dramatic Art. Currently, she lectures in Modern Drama & Performance for New

York University at its base in London; is involved in research projects with the Royal

Shakespeare Company and the Abbey Theatre Dublin; is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre

Quarterly and on the Advisory Editorial Board of Stanislavski Studies; and is a Fellow of the

Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Panel 4 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)

Events and Bits/Beats/Units/Episodes in the British Professional and Pedagogical Context

Dan Barnard (London South Bank University)

Katie Mitchell places great emphasis on Events in her adaptation of Stanislavsky’s process. This is

evidenced in her professional directing practice, in her book A Director’s Craft and her teaching of

other directors. Events are the moments where a Task/Intention/Objective changes. By

highlighting them, the actor or director can bring out the story, meaning, or rhythm of a scene and

reveal the moments where characters undergo change. I will outline Mitchell’s approach to Events

and an adaptation of it that I have developed through my professional directing and teaching in the

UK. We will explore the relationship between Mitchell’s Events and Stanislavsky’s writings on

Tasks/Objectives and on Bits/Units. We will look at how I work with students to identify Events,

the approach that I have developed towards giving them names and how I invite actors and

students to use elements of stagecraft to bring them out. I will share how Events fit into the wider

approach to scene analysis that I have adapted from Drama Centre London’s pedagogy and from

Stanislavsky’s, Mitchell’s, and Hagen’s writings. The paper will end with some reflections on the

strengths and weaknesses of how Stanislavsky’s approach has been adapted in the British context.

Dan Barnard is Artistic Director of fanSHEN Theatre Company and Senior Lecturer in Drama and

Performance at London South Bank University. For fanSHEN he has co-directed 10 professional

productions. At LSBU he leads the acting strand and teaches the Stanislavsky-based modules Acting

a Role and Text and Performance. His training includes extensive workshops with Katie Mitchell,

Bella Merlin, and Elen Bowman. He led a week-long Stanislavsky Laboratory at the Young Vic. He

was Assistant Director to Ian Rickson on Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre.

(Re)Animating Stanislavsky

Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK)

My ongoing research is concerned with whether through the combination of computer graphics

technologies and automated/behavioural character animation we can create convincing, believable

portrayals of human emotion. Ultimately it asks if an android or avatar can create the procedural

movements, gestures, and/or facial expressions in response to live, real-time ‘given circumstances’

21

that enable an audience to be emotionally moved. Or put simply, ‘can an avatar act?’. These two

arenas rapidly collide. Automating the acting process inevitably involves attempting to systematise

it, which is essentially what Stanislavsky spent his life working towards. Psychologists and

neuroscientists have long observed and modelled the outward expression of inner emotion; such

that it is argued that there may be a palette of poses, gestures, and facial expressions which connote

and portray arrays of emotional states, albeit complicated, context-dependent and variable

according to the dramatic situation. To experiment and explore this, it seems fittingly ironic to

create a digitally animated likeness of Stanislavsky himself – an iconic figure every sense – to model

various expressions, gestures, and other modes of portrayal, and measure their efficacy as a set of

convincing performances. Eighty years after the great man’s death, it’s time to see if we can bring

Stanislavsky back to life.

Jon Weinbren is head of Digital Media Arts (DMA) at the University of Surrey. DMA at Surrey is a

multi-disciplinary programme which develops creative practice and research in the swathe of

contemporary and emerging moving image media forms, including film, television, visual effects,

animation, performance capture, games, immersive media, interactive, digital theatre, motion

graphics, and computational arts. His areas of research interest include digital actor performance,

emotion synthesis in animated characters, virtual cinematography, interactive narrative, and digital

theatre. His focus is on these and other spaces where the culture, practice, and theory of film,

animation, television, theatre, games, and other artistic arenas collide and coalesce. Coming into the profession initially as a scriptwriter for film, television, and games, Jon is also a practical film-

maker, digital animator, previsualisation artist, and game designer. Prior to joining Surrey, he set

up and ran the Games Department at the National Film and Television School having spent many

years in both industry and academia as a maker and producer in emerging media forms. Jon has

developed particular expertise on the nature of mediated emotion portrayal in acting and

performance, particularly within performance capture, animation and the digital avatar. Jon’s unit

is currently working with leading motion capture outfit Centroid to set up an upgraded in-house

performance capture studio within the department, to complement other advanced production

facilities already in-place.

Emotion Memory: ‘A Dangerous Reputation’

Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)

In October of 2018, Backstage published an article by Alex Yates called ‘The Definitive Guide to the

Stanislavski Acting Technique’. This was a very cursory and superficial description of his life and

some of his ideas. It was certainly in no way ‘definitive’. In fact, it perpetuated some common

misconceptions about his work. For instance, it says he merely ‘dabbled in the performing arts as

an amateur actor, opera singer, producer, and director’, with no mention of the Moscow Art

Theatre and the years he spent there. However, as the author talks of the merging of the System

of Stanislavsky with the Method of Strasberg, he makes a comment I hadn’t heard since I was

an undergraduate – that Emotion Memory has a ‘dangerous reputation’ and that ‘[s]ome high-

profile actors have merged their personal lives with that of their characters’ lives in

psychologically unhealthy ways’. It reminded me of my own early training where we were told

specifically not to read An Actor Prepares because this kind of work had driven actors to

suicide. There was no evidence for this assertion and in all of the years I have been studying

his work, I have not encountered any. But the sternness of the warnings meant I di dn’t study

22

his work until more than a decade later. In my doctoral research, I surveyed more than 300

actors, many who had trained in System/Method-based programs, and none of them

mentioned any emotional distress. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who said that they ‘merged

with their character’ and then ‘took their character home with them’. So where did these

notions come from and why do they persist? In this paper, I aim to trace the lineage of this

notion of the danger inherent in studying Stanislavsky and attempt to find actual evidence.

Eric Hetzler is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of

Huddersfield. His ‘Survey of the Actor’s Experience’ led to several publications examining how

actors describe emotion in performance and the importance of awareness on stage. In his

continuing exploration of emotion and acting he has been studying the Alba Method of Emotion and

is a certified level 3 Teacher.

Workshop 3 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

13.30 – 14.15

Stanislavsky Backwards

Karen Benjamin (University of Gloucestershire, UK)

Comedy improvisers work instantaneously to create relationships, characters, and situations from

suggestions offered by an audience. Therefore, how much is the comedy improviser using the

method as their approach to create work and how are they applying this process? Offers from the

audience come in the form of suggestions for characters, relationships, specific places, problems the

improvisers have to solve on stage, or simply just an object. Whatever the offer the players respond

quickly in order to create a scene or play the game. This may mean that they work backwards

through the method responding to ‘where’ first, as in place, and then creating a character, often also

in response to offers from their partner on stage. Johnstone (1981) writes ‘the improviser has to be

like a man walking backwards’, taking the offers and making sense of the world in which they play

and using the approach of who, what, where, and why are essential elements in creating this world.

A world of ‘why not-ness’ as defined by Angelo De Castro in which anything can happen as long as

the player is committed to that world.

Karen Benjamin has a background in performing having initially worked professionally in TV and

theatre after graduating with a Drama & Dance degree. She was Director of her own Community

Theatre Company for seven years and has experience of working with a wide range of children and

young people through many years in Theatre in Education and through delivery of workshops and

running youth theatres. At the University of Gloucestershire she delivers Modules in Acting,

Devising, Laban Movement for Actors and Theatre in Education, as well as being involved in

European Projects promoting transfer of knowledge. Most recently working on ARTPAD (Achieving

Resilience Through Play & Drama) an Erasmus + research project culminating in a training course

for teachers and educators on how to use drama techniques and approaches within the classroom.

Karen continues to direct shows outside of the University and performs with Box of Frogs, a

Comedy Improv company in Birmingham and Off Broad Street, a Musical Improv group.

23

Workshop 4 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

14.15-15:00

The ‘Perspective’ in Practice: from Plato to Chekhov

Stéphane Poliakov (University of Paris 8)

Stanislavsky teaches about two perspectives: a perspective of the role and a perspective of the

actor. Perspective is an important tool for playing scenes in Chekhov and generally speaking in

drama from the circumstances through the conflict and the continuity of action. Vasiliev proposes a

‘reverse perspective’ theorized from P. Florensky, B. Uspensky, and, of course, Stanislavsky. It is

supposed to build the material for acting from the end and not only from the situation. If this

structure is particularly clear on conceptual texts (Plato, Shakespeare, Molière) it is also possible to

apply these principles in Chekhov, Pirandello… In this workshop, we will try to experiment with

this approach in Chekhovian texts (The Cherry Orchard) and possibly on conceptual texts.

Stéphane Poliakov is a director, actor, and theatre pedagogue. He teaches at the University of Paris

8 as Associate Professor. He translates Stanislavsky into French and wrote his PhD on the

Stanislavsky system. He studied for many years with Anatoly Vasiliev both in Russia and France. His

current work is linked with Stanislavsky and the practice of Plato’s dialogue. He published

Constantin Stanislavski (2015), a translation of Maria Knebel’s books on active analysis (L’Analyse-

Action, 2006), and a book on Vasiliev: L’art de la composition (2006). He has led many workshops

and staged work by Plato, Chekhov, Diderot, and Orwell.

Session Three: 15:30 – 17.00

Panel 5 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, US)

The System of Service: Stanislavsky and Emotional Labour Today

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (Birkbeck, University of London)

This paper will examine the ways in which elements of Stanislavskian actor training are finding

new iterations in the recruitment and training of employees in the contemporary service sector.

Specifically, this paper will focus on the demand for ‘emotional labour’ in customer facing service

work, considering the ways in which Stanislavsky’s work has already been drawn upon in the

analysis of such jobs, and how this analysis can be further extended and developed by paying closer

attention to the trajectory of his thought and teaching. In her seminal work The Managed Heart,

sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild defines emotional labour as ‘work which involves the

management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’. Building on this

definition, I argue for an understanding of emotional labour as work which requires certain

characteristics or traits to be performed before an audience, and that focusing on the performative

element of emotional labour is a fruitful avenue of study.

24

Hochschild herself uses Stanislavsky to bolster her claim that emotional labour can be best

understood through a dichotomy of deep or surface acting, corresponding to performances

involving either ‘natural’ and ‘spontaneous’ feeling, or those which are ‘put on’ and based only on

outwardly appearance. Drawing on my own data from two workplaces in London, including

participant observation and interviews with employees, I will offer a departure from this model of

deep/surface acting in emotional labour, which is heavily reliant on the use of affective memory

and the influence of the American ‘method’ approach. I will argue instead that by turning to other,

later, elements of Stanislavsky’s teaching, such as the method of physical action, we can develop a

stronger analysis of emotional labour using the lens of performance.

Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal is a doctoral candidate in Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is interdisciplinary, combining insights from theatre and performance studies with methods from the social sciences to examine the rise of 'emotional labour' in the service sector, and its similarities with the work of professional actors. She is interested in the development of performance studies as methodological framework and its application to the study of economic and industrial changes. Jaswinder received her BA in English and Drama from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Text and Performance from Birkbeck and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She is also a playwright whose work has been performed at the Old Vic, Old Red Lion, and Rosemary Branch theatres in London, as well as the Brighton Fringe, RADA and VAULT festivals. Wine, Tea, and Sympathy: for an Orphic Stanislavsky at the Turn of Three Centuries

Vasilios N. Arabos (ΙΜΑΛΙΣ: Research Initiative for Ancient Drama, Athens, Greece)

The influence of (neo)Platonic thought on Stanislavsky in his construction of the System has

been covered in the academic literature in terms of the larger Russian Symbolist and neo -

Idealist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relationship,

however, of this theoretical substrate of Ancient Greek thought to the art of acting and the

application of its principles to the staging of Greek plays in particular —by Stanislavsky

himself or his scions— has not been rigorously investigated, nor indeed has their correlation

with the practice or theory of theatre of the Greeks been revisited on the terms of their own

philosophical or performance tradition. Conducted in situ in Epidauros since 2011, my

research originates in the lyrical prosodic drama and amphitheatric performance topologies of

Ancient Greek theatre, which I treat as the interface of χώρος/λόγος/σώμα, or

space/verb/body, in both physical and abstract terms based on this correlation; this paper will

share the results of that research as a performance and training dimension strongly implicated

by the context and core of Stanislavsky’s approach to acting, but largely unexploited on the

contemporary stage. The application of Greek philosophical principles by other significant

figures (Craig, Laban) will also be considered, and the demonstration of specific techniques

based on the correspondence of practices culled from the primary Greek dramatic texts will be

presented as an illustration of the potential these principles hold for us today.

Vasilios N. Arabos is Artistic Director of the Imalis Center for Ancient Hellenic Theatre of

Epidauros (2011-2016). He is an independent director, dramatist, researcher, and educator,

holding advanced degrees from the Actors Studio School of Dramatic Arts (MFA Directing), the

University of Paris VIII, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (DEA+3, Texte Imaginaire Société),

Harvard University (MTS, World Religions), and the University of Rochester (BS/BA in

25

Maths/Optics). His work for film and television has earned several international awards and he has

created and staged international theatre productions, most recently in London, that have gone on to

tour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and currently in Germany. His research and work-

demonstrations in Ancient Greek Theatre have been presented at academic and research

conferences internationally.

The Vaudevillean Universe: Creating Worlds in Stanislavsky

Tomasz Kubikowski (Akademia Teatralna, Warsaw, Poland)

In this paper, I consider Stanislavsky’s intuitions in the context of the parallelly emerging

phenomenological tradition. ‘You don’t yet know what world of feelings you must live in while

performing this type of play. I intentionally use the word “world”, because vaudeville is a world of

its own, inhabited by creatures whom one does not meet in comedy, drama or tragedy…’. This

instruction given by Stanislavsky while directing vaudeville and reported by Gorchakov lets us

clearly see into the way Stanislavsky regards the creation of a theatre performance as a creation of

a complete alternative world; it is always realistic, but its reality diverges from our own: e.g. ‘The

Vaudevillians’ may share most of the human traits, but nevertheless, they are ‘creatures’ of some

distinct, different characteristics, which we must reconstruct through our actions. This seems to

coincide with the insights and techniques developed by Edmund Husserl under the name of

‘phenomenology’. In his Ideas… Husserl describes the process of the mutual creation of the human personalities through the so-called Einfühlung and the subsequent process of creating the

‘communicative world’ which forms our social reality. Like Stanislavsky, Husserl refrains from

creating it ‘in general’, rather letting it focus on details (‘all evidence in seizing upon essences

requires a complete clarity of the single underlying particulars in their concreteness’). If we follow

Lubov Gurevitch’s testimony, they also share a similar, specific notion of the ‘essence’ itself. The

same can be traced through recent continuators of the phenomenological reflection, especially John

Searle, whose notions of ‘background’ or ‘social reality’ can be well use to describe Stanislavsky’s

techniques of a stage creation.

Tomasz Kubikowski is currently a professor at the Theatre Academy in Warsaw and the

literary manager of the National Theatre of Poland. He is a performance researcher, essayist,

dramaturge, translator and reviewer, author of numerous texts published in journals, and of

four books on theory, of which the most recent are: Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Experience

(2014), and Survive on stage (2015).

Panel 6 ~ Meeting Room 5

Chair: Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US)

Devising Theatre for Traumatized Participants using Action-based Direction

Margot Wood (Anex Theatre Productions, South Africa)

When dealing with personally traumatized participants, and devising theatre dealing with these

traumatic events, the emotions involved are real and often overwhelming for participants.

Emotional recall, in such circumstances, might trigger a reliving of the original traumatic event and

its accompanying emotions. Theatre practitioners, no matter how empathetic, are generally not

trained therapists and therefore not well equipped to deal with the possible after effects of such

26

experiences. Action-based instruction, that is instruction focusing on physical states of being and

physical action, can provide a framework within which emotionally charged issues can be revisited

and explored. This paper documents the use of embodied acting techniques and action-based

direction to devise a performance script and performance piece dealing with personal trauma.

Margot Wood is a theatre-maker and lecturer in Educational Drama and Theatre at the Cape

Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Her most recent area of research is

in devising theatre for participants with physical, neurological, and cognitive challenges. She is a

puppeteer and storyteller and has worked with the elderly and traumatized groups to create

meaningful theatrical experiences through Storytelling for Healing. She is the Artistic Director of

two theatre companies based in Cape Town. Her directing credits include People are Living there

(Best Production Fugard Festival 2010) and The Captain’s Tiger (Best Production Fugard Festival

2011) – realistic plays by South African playwright, Athol Fugard. As a director, she has

experimented with many approaches and influences ranging from Stanislavsky, Michael Chekov,

and Arthur Lessac to Commedia dell’Arte and clowning.

ALICE: ‘Ben’s going in from a really horrible angle. It’s almost as painful as a smear test’ –

DUST by Milly Thomas

Should I (a middle-aged man) Teach Students the Theory and Practice of Stanislavskian Good

Faith Using the Play DUST by Milly Thomas? James Palm (Bird College, UK)

I teach the theory and practice of Acting Towards Good Faith. This synthesises existential

philosophy and Stanislavskian principles of acting; the student is free to make any choice they wish

in the pursuit of a physically achievable objective. The goal of this methodology and method is to

free the student to become the physical embodiment of radical freedom through their actions; the

dramaturgy of acting towards good faith emerges through the student’s actions. Thus, my objective

is to free my students from the inchoate dramaturgical prerequisites of mimesis, representation,

naturalism, realism et al.

The problem: As a middle-aged man should I avoid using plays such as DUST due to their content?

DUST is a play in which the character of Alice describes sex, masturbation, menstruation, self-harm,

and suicide.

In the current political and social context, the middle-aged man has become a figure of distrust,

contempt, and ridicule. Many men who look like me have been exposed for wielding their privilege

with impunity; middle-aged male politicians, priests, directors, producers, and pedagogues have

exploited the silence of their victims and hidden behind their privilege. In the less dramatic day-to-

day narrative of conservatoire teaching, the patriarchal narrative of the male guru is perpetuated

and validated; I embody this privilege.

The Question: Is using DUST in conjunction with my methodology and method an exploitation of

my students?

James Palm trained as an actor at the East 15 School of Acting and the Royal Central School of

Speech and Drama (RCSSD), achieving an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice. He also has a PGCE in

27

Drama from the University of Reading. James was in receipt of the Elise Fogerty Studentship and

awarded a PhD in actor training by RCSSD examined by Bella Merlin and David Shirley. He

continues to lecture at RCSSD teaching, mentoring and assessing modules on the MA/MFA in Actor

Training and Coaching. James is the Head of Acting at Bird College. As a part of his research he

regularly visited New York to develop his own actor training methods; his research is based on

acting techniques taught at the Lee Strasberg Studio, Stella Adler Studio, Meisner Studio, Chekhov

Studio, Atlantic Theatre School, and The Classical Studio at New York University. As an actor James

has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Old Vic, Young Vic, BAC, The Gate, Channel 4, BBC, Thames

Television, ITV1, and Independent Radio. James has taught, lectured, and directed at: The Royal

Central School of Speech and Drama; Arts Ed’; GSA; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and

Dance, and The Urdang Academy.

With the Function and Requirement of the Actor Constantly Changing, How Can a System

Written Almost 100 years ago Train the Modern Theatre Practitioner?

Cymon Allen (Performers College, UK)

This paper will look at the adaptions that various practitioners have made to the System to

benefit the teaching of acting within a musical theatre teaching environment. I will explore

how to implement Stanislavsky’s work within tight teaching time frames, and how with the use

of Meisner, Chekov, active analysis and the work of both Sergei Tcherkasski’s Stanislavski and Yoga and Nikolai Demidov’s Becoming an Actor Creator, can allow multi-disciplinary students

to be able to fold a Stanislavskian approach into their work practice. The paper will also look

at how areas of dance and singing reinforce the ideas of Stanislavsky to allow students to

embrace the System across the entirety of their practice. The student should then always

create truthful characters that behave in the way the given circumstances of the work

demands.

Cymon Allen teaches acting at both Performers College and MEPA in the UK. He trained at

Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and worked as an actor for over 25 years until he

began teaching. As an actor he worked in plays, musicals, television, and as an actor musician.

He has worked in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Career highlights include Good at the Donmar

Warehouse, Burial at Thebes, with Nottingham Playhouse UK and USA tour, Sweeney Todd in

the West End, The Merchant Of Venice, at Greenwich Playhouse, Return to the Forbidden Planet,

My Fair Lady and Chess, UK tours as well as appearing on EastEnders and Holby City for the

BBC.

As a teacher Cymon taught at GSA before undertaking an MA at Surrey University in Creative

Practices and Direction – Actor Training Pathway. He is hoping to undertake PhD study in the

integration of targeted actor training into a musical theatre training model , and is dedicated to

placing Stanislavsky’s System as a central foundation of the training of musical theatre

students.

Workshop 5 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 15.30 – 16.15

28

The Application of Stanislavsky to Theatre of the Absurd Texts Julian Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)

Building upon the practical research carried out during my last ERASMUS Teaching Mobility trip to

Malta (April 2018) I will further explore the application of Stanislavskian techniques to absurdist

plays. The workshops I ran last year explored the use of the magic if when working on a variety of

non-naturalistic texts. This workshop presents a piece of practice-as-research that tests the

applicability of a wider range of Stanislavskian ‘tools’, but with a narrower focus in relation to text. I

will look specifically at the plays of Harold Pinter. The historical/social/cultural context considered

will, as a consequence of the choice of material, include both the contemporary environment of

actor training in the academy and the period in which Pinter’s early plays were written and first

produced. Questions relating to the concerns of British playwrights in the mid-twentieth century

may be seen to intersect with, or stand in tension against, questions raised in relation to

contemporary actor training – the place of psychological realism both for the actor and the

playwright then and now, for instance. The presentation will comprise a short introduction relating

to context, and outlining the objectives of the research, followed by a 20 minute practical exercise.

Julian Jones trained at RADA and has worked as an actor in Theatre, Television, and Film for the

past thirty-three years. Recently: Prospero in The Tempest (2015); Dr Wilson in Human Emotional

Process (2016) and Marley in A Christmas Carol (2017). He is a Senior Lecturer in Acting at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance where he both teaches and directs. For several years

Jones has – with David Zoob – delivered a workshop on Brecht for the MA Directing course at

Birkbeck College and has also run workshops on Brecht and Shakespeare for the East 15 Director’s

Course. Jones is Artistic Director of his own company: Burning Oak, which in 2013 took their

production of Royal Court young writer Thomas Clancy’s new play, Novemberunderground, to The

Edinburgh Festival following London Performances at the Soho Theatre Upstairs and Theatre 503.

Their second production, Pussy, again by Clancy, was premiered at The Phoenix Artist Club in

London in July/August 2014. In 2011 Julian and a group of Rose Bruford graduates ran several

workshops at the Rose Theatre Kingston, with the aim of developing a series of exercises intended

to help the actor when approaching Brecht. These exercises constitute the final chapter of Stephen

Unwin’s The Complete Brecht Toolkit. Jones is currently working on a book based on his approach to

teaching Shakespeare. Since 2015 Jones has taught yearly workshops on Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ at

the University of Malta. His particular interest in Greek Theatre led to a BA in History and

Archaeology (First Class) from Birkbeck College; a Masters in Classical Studies (with Distinction)

from the Open University; and a diploma from the Epidauros Summer School run by the University

of Athens. He is a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy.

Workshop 6 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 16.15 – 17:00

The Art of Actioning Edward Caruana Galizia (Freelance Actor, Malta) Stanislavski’s method of acting is a common method used by theatre and film practitioners alike. An integral part of this method is the process of actioning. Actioning is the process whereby an actor

29

hones in on what their character ‘wants’ and then pinning down how they get it. The ‘how’ is the action. It needs to be a transitive verb, in other words a verb that needs both a subject and object (e.g. I invite you). Howe ver many actors seek to rush through this vital process, resulting in a weak or irrelevant actioning verbs, which then leads to the actor simply ‘guessing’ during the rehearsal period. Many actors find this stage boring and far to ‘academic’, and in doing so they miss out on a nurturing and creative part of their character formation.

In this short workshop we will look at ways of making actioning a more inspirational process rather

than an academic one. Using Stanislavski’s method of breaking a scene down into beats, we will

explore ways of finding inspiration from the character, script, and research, and how this can be

used to make an actor’s performance better.

Special Presentation ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 19.00 – 20.30

Method of Action Analysis: from Stanislavsky to Today – A Practical Session on the Director’s

Craft of Play Analysis

Sergei Tcherkasski (Russian State Institute of Performing Arts, St Petersburg)

This theoretical and practical session will expose fundamentals of Action Analysis (Analysis

through Actions) of the play – a tool of translating a play (dramaturgy) into a work of stage art

(production). The ideas of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and modern Russian directors’ school will be

revealed and discussed.

First approaches to play analysis were formulated by Stanislavsky in the 1910s (drafts on Woe from

Wit). They summarized his own director’s practice and were influenced by his dialogue with

Nemirovich-Danchenko, not only a cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre, but a professional

playwright. Shifts in Stanislavsky’s understanding of actor training in the 1930s also developed his views on analysis of a play (drafts on Othello and General Inspector). But he never wrote down the

fundamentals of his director’s practice. Even the term Action Analysis was coined not by

Stanislavsky, but by his protégé of the 1930s, Maria Knebel.

Russian theatre practitioners of the 1960s-1990s – the above-mentioned Knebel and Alexander

Polamishev in Moscow as well as Georgi Tovstonogov and Mar Sulimov in Leningrad–St. Petersburg

developed Stanislavsky’s approaches in different ways. Their writings and teaching of many years

in leading Russian theatre institutions had established a broad field of practical and methodological

understanding of Action Analysis. Further steps were proposed by Anatoliy Vasiliev, Knebel’s

student in GITIS, who modified Action Analysis for needs of his Ludo theatre, thus also opening

possibilities of its further dialogue with post-modern theatre.

This presentation will clarify the relationship between the Method of Action Analysis, Method of

Physical Actions, and Étude technique. It will also explore the vocabulary of Action Analysis: event,

given circumstances, through-line of action, objective and super-objective, etc.

The practical part of the session will deal with an analysis of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare,

General Inspector by Gogol, and The Seagull by Chekhov. We encourage future participants to reread

30

these plays to fully enjoy the session. If you’ll have these texts with you that will be appreciated. All

registered participants will receive soft copies of the plays to their emails.

Sergei Tcherkasski is Professor of Acting and Directing, Head of Acting Studio at the Russian State

Institute of Performing Arts (St Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy, est. 1779). He is a director,

teacher and theatre historian and holds Ph.D. and D.Sc. (Theatre Arts). He was formerly Artistic

Director of the Pushkin Drama Theatre in Krasnoyarsk and has taught and directed productions all

over the world, including the Komisarjevsky Drama Theatre, Liteinii Theatre (St Petersburg), and

RADA (London), NIDA (Sydney), and National Theatre (Bucharest). His books include Stanislavsky

and Yoga (Routledge, 2016, also in three other languages); Sulimov’s School of Directing (2013); and

the multi-awarded Acting: Stanislavsky – Boleslavsky – Strasberg (National Prize for Best Theatre

Book, 2016, International Stanislavsky Award, 2017).

Sunday 7th April

Session Four: 9:15-10:30/10:45

Panel 7 ~ Meeting Room 6

Chair: Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK)

Stanislavsky versus Evreinov on Stage Realism and Theatricality

Inga Romantsova (Australian Institute of Music/University of Newcastle, Australia)

The theatrical avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russian culture produced

many theories that influenced the development of world theatre for generations. Among them,

Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions is widely used, while Evreinov’s unique Monodrama is less

well known but no less influential. Evreinov’s theatrical career was overshadowed by Stanislavsky

as a result of social changes in Russia. This paper examines the differences and similarities between

Evreinov and Stanislavsky, specifically in their approach to Stage Realism and Theatricality.

Evreinov claimed through his theoretical work that life is full of theatrical conventions; theatre is an

organic urge as basic as hunger or sex. Referring to this urge as Theatricality or the Instinct of

Transformation, he brought the theatre into life and not the other way around. For Stanislavsky,

Theatricality was equated with exaggeration, and an intensification of behaviour that rang false when juxtaposed with what should be the ‘realistic truth’ of the stage. This paper reflects on

Stanislavsky’s and Evreinov’s theoretical work within the social and political context as well as

their influence on the contemporary theatre, also illuminating, as both practitioners have had a

direct influence on contemporaries such as Grotowski and Artaud. The author argues that

practitioners approached the Theatricality and Stage realism from different perspectives, but in fact

they are two sides of the contemporary theatrical tool.

Inga Romantsova is a Russian-born actress specialising in Russian acting techniques. Beginning

her career as an actor in theatre and film as a graduate with Bachelor (Hons) from St Petersburg

State Theatre Arts Academy, since the late-1990s she has acted extensively in Australia. She

received her Masters in theatre and film from UNSW and just completed her Thesis on Evreinov and

31

Questions of Theatricality at the University of Newcastle. She is currently a sessional academic at the

University of Newcastle. Inga has presented her research at conferences including the Annual

Conference of Australasian Association of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies conference at

Sydney University in 2016, and at the Victorian College for the Arts Melbourne, 2018. She has

performed for companies in Russia, Europe, and Australia including Bell Shakespeare Company,

Sydney Art Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre Company, and NIDA.

Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques: A Research Project

Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)

Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques (CTATT) is a research project that studies how actor training practices are transmitted across cultures, and in this process appropriated and transformed. It studies both historical and contemporary instances of actor training transmission, with particular attention given to how modern approaches like Stanislavsky’s system and Meyerhold’s biomechanics are adopted in contemporary training. The project is based at the Department of Theatre Studies (University of Malta) and was officially launched in April 2018. In this presentation project director Stefan Aquilina contextualises the research within broader discourses about cultural transmission, and discusses the first event – a series of workshops on Stanislavsky’s magic ‘if’ with different European practitioners – organised within the project’s remit.

Stefan Aquilina is Director of Research and Internationalisation of the School of Performing Arts

and Theatre Studies Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. His research focus is Russian

modernism, especially Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, but has wider interest in the cultural

transmission of embodied practice, devised performance, and reflective teaching. Aquilina’s

publications include the co-edited volumes Stanislavsky in the World and Interdisciplinarity in the

Performing Arts: Contemporary Perspectives, as well as numerous journal essays. Aquilina is the

director of Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques, a research project investigating

how training techniques are transformed when transmitted across cultures (www.ctatt.org). He has

undertaken research as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds, as a William Evans Fellow at the

University of Otago in New Zealand, and at The Oxford Research Centre of the Humanities at the

University of Oxford.

„Я есмь“– Stanislavsky and Solovyov

Martina Musilová (Department of Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno,

Czech Republic)

The paper discusses the roots of using the expression „Я есмь“ in the Stanislavsky system and in

the book An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary – Part I. It explains the relation of this term to the

concepts of acting of experiencing (переживание) and supertask (сверхзадача) and its relation to

Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy. „Я есмь“ is an untranslatable Old Russian expression that is not

used in the contemporary everyday Russian language anymore. The English translation ‘I am’ is

insufficient as it renders the original term symptomless, while the Russian expression refers to the

orthodox liturgy (it is used for translating the biblical verse Ex 3,14, comprising the

tetragrammaton YHWH). The connection between Stanislavsky’s system, the acting of experiencing

and orthodox liturgy can be understood through the perspective of Vladimir Solovyov’s book

Lectures on Godmanhood (1878–1881) which might have been known to Stanislavsky as Solovyov

32

played a crucial role in Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The expression „Я

есмь“ in Solovyov’s sense of active ‘I’ can be found in Stanislavsky’s book An Actor‘s Work: A

Student’s Diary in the chapters VIII. Faith and a Sense of Truth and XVI. On the Threshold of the

Subconscious. Stanislavsky usually uses the expression as „Я есмь“ or the phrase состояниe „Я

есмь“ (conditions of ‘I am’) in these chapters. According to Stanislavsky the faith and sense of truth

can awake the conditions of ‘I am’ and the subconscious of the actor, while the supertask is joined

with the life work and life mission connected with the superconscious.

Martina Musilová graduated in theatre studies from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in

Prague, where she successfully defended her thesis in 2007 (published in 2011 under the title

Fauefekt. Vlivy Brechtova epického divadla a zcizujícího efektu v českém moderním herectví). During

her university studies she attended Professor Ivan Vyskočil’s lectures of Dialogical Acting with the

Inner Partner at AMU’s Theatre Faculty in Prague. Since 1999 she has been working as an assistant

of this discipline. Since 2009 she has been lecturing at the Department of Theatre Studies at the

Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno and since 2013 also at the Department of Theory and

Criticism at AMU’s Theatre Faculty in Prague. She specializes in the history and theory of acting and

the theatricality of public events.

Panel 8 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)

The Notion of Action

Robin Levenson (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York, USA)

Though critical studies on Anton Chekhov’s plays abound, as do studies on the nature of

translation, few theorists or theatre critics have concerned themselves with how Chekhov’s

plays, or other plays in translation, may actually be acted. Translation scholar Lefevere writes:

‘Literary analyses of translated dramatic texts very often were confined to its textual

dimension; to what was on the page. Neither discipline (linguistics or literary analysis)

developed the necessary tools to deal with other dimensions in a satisfactory way ’. The ‘other

dimensions’ often so difficult for literary critics and linguists to describe are the theatrical

ones. In this paper, I will discuss the most important of these: the notion of ‘Action’. Action is

not an intellectual concept, but a functional tool for actors and other theatre practitioners that

helps define the nature of the play itself, and the psycho-physical work of the performer. An

understanding of Action — as Stanislavsky and later practitioners have used it — is necessary

in describing how different word usage in various translations may influence the actor’s work

on Anton Chekhov’s plays in translation, and indeed all plays meant for performance.

Robin Levenson completed her BA in French and Dramatic Art at UC Santa Barbara, her MFA

in Acting at UC Riverside, and her PhD in Music and Performing Arts from NYU. She is an

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at LaGuardia CC, CUNY. Her first book, Acting

Chekhov in Translation: 4 Plays, 100 Ways came out in January 2019. She has written articles

for Communications of the International Brecht Society on Woyzeck and The

Seagull, the Dialogues in Social Justice Journal on Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Explorations in Media

Ecology Journal and for the New York Society on General Semantics on language and George

Gurdjieff, as well as publications for the New York State Communication Association, where

33

she is also on the Executive Board. Robin has acted professionally in L.A. and New York, on

stage and in film. Her research interests include how language influences thought and

behaviour, and the nature of performance.

By Means of Études: Boris Kulnev in an Advanced Actor Training Class in Beijing, 1955-56

Jiang (Harry) Hanyang (University of British Columbia, Canada)

From January 1955 to April 1956, the Soviet acting teacher Boris Grigorievich Kulnev (1904-1990)

conducted an Advanced Actor Training Class at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. This

programme was caught up in a larger agenda, which aimed at diffusing the Stanislavsky System of

acting throughout the newly established theatres and acting schools in the People’s Republic of

China. The participants were carefully chosen from all regions and levels of the country and had to

take entrance exams for admission. The year-and-a-half training programme encompassed all

classical Stanislavskian exercises such as concentration of attention, bodily self-perception, and,

among others, the étude technique focusing on improvisation within a simple given circumstance.

All in all, the students rehearsed four plays, including an adaptation of the Chinese novel Baofeng

zhouyu (The Hurricane), Gorky’s Philistines, Afinogenov’s Mashenka, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and

Juliet. Once the head of the Boris Shchukin Higher Drama School at the Evgeny Vakhtangov State

Academic Theatre, Kulnev was well immersed in the Vakhtangov school of stage art, a prestigious

lineage traceable to Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a protégé of Stanislavsky and Leopold Sulerzhitsky (1872-1916), who had adopted études as one of his signature training practices. By

analyzing the stenographic notes of the advanced class and several participants’ memoirs, this

paper focuses on the exercises of silent, solo, and duet études coached by Kulnev at the stage of

basic actor-training and the scenic études he used in devising The Hurricane. I argue that by

introducing études, Kulnev not only embodied his precept that the performer’s emotion should

arise from action. He also carried a dialogue with what Maria Knebel (1898-1985) termed the

‘active analysis of the play and the role’, a directorial method by means of études that was regarded

as the pinnacle of Stanislavsky’s creative heritage.

Jiang (Harry) Hanyang is a second year PhD student in Theatre Studies at the University of British

Columbia, Canada, under the guidance of Professor Siyuan Liu. His research interests include

the Stanislavsky System of acting; the history of Russian Theatre; screen performance and stage

acting in Modern China; cross-ethnic casting; plus, the interrelationship between theatre, emotion,

body, and mind.

Inside the American Laboratory Theatre. Richard Boleslavsky’s Work with his Students

Ewa Danuta Godziszewska (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,

Poland)

Konstantin Stanislavsky became part of US history in 1923 and 1924, when the Moscow Art Theatre

toured the country. For a great many American actors, the MAT’s performances were a revelation of

what could be achieved in the realm of theatre art and team acting. American acting style of that

time was making a general impression of rant and overreacting. The American theatre had money

and technical know-how, but what they didn’t have, and could barely even envision, was ‘a true

repertory company, a band of players who had the benefits of similar training, years of practical

experience in working together, a body of distinguished plays to draw from, and agreed-upon aims

34

and ideas’ (Hirsch, 1984). There weren’t many places dedicated to the solution of creative problems

that were not being addressed by the commercial stage and that would provide sound actor

training and a home for the young actor’s growth and development. This was one of the main

reasons why Stanislavsky’s former student Richard Boleslavsky (Polish actor and director trained

in the Moscow Art Theatre, who decade later made an impressive Hollywood career) decided to

stay in New York and established The American Laboratory Theatre (1923), which represented the

first programmatic attempt to introduce Stanislavsky’s ideals and ideas to American practitioners

and put them into practice in a serious methodical way. Boleslavsky worked with his students on

their acting development and lectured eagerly (the principles he enunciated were often described

‘like the coming of a new religion which could liberate and awaken American culture’ (Roberts,

1981) but due to a paucity of written material, his teaching remained only in the classroom and the

entire generation of US theatre artists necessarily embraced Stanislavsky’s system as an oral

tradition. Among his numerous students were future founders of The Group Theatre (1931-1941)

and afterwards The Actors Studio (1947-till today) who were consistently passing on their

knowledge about the system to the next generations of actors. In my paper I will analyse the way in

which Boleslavsky worked with his students at the ALT. I will mostly focus on the materials

gathered from the Scranton University Archive which includes transcribed interviews with

Boleslavsky’s students and co-workers (by J.W. Roberts and R. A. Willis) as well as transcribed

lectures given by Boleslavsky at the ALT.

Ewa Danuta Godziszewska is a PhD candidate at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies

programme at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. She

graduated from the Theatre Studies Department of the A. Zelwerowicz National Academy of

Dramatic Art in Warsaw. She was a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Southern

California, School of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles (2019) and at Barnard College, Columbia

University in New York (2016). Laurette of the Kosciuszko Foundation Grant (2018), and the

scholarship programme Młoda Polska 2015 (Young Poland 2015). She is the translator and editor

of a volume of Richard Boleslavsky’s texts, Lekcje aktorstwa. Teksty z lat 1923-1933 (Lessons of

Acting. Texts from 1923-1933) and author of articles, review, and interviews published in the

Aspiracje, Scena, and Nietak!t quarterlies, the Teatr monthly and the Teatralny.pl website.

Workshop 7 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

9:15-10:00

A Practical Exploration of Active Analysis Through a Synthesis of Viewpoints and Quilting the

Text

Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK)

The workshop affords the opportunity for a practical exploration of Active Analysis, Viewpoints and

a technique I term Quilting the Text, derived from my practice-led research as a director and trainer

of actors. The workshop will explore an improvisatory approach to discovering an embodied and

personalized understanding of text through improvisation, imagination and intuition; it draws upon

contemporary theories of emotion, memory, embodied and situated cognition, and social

neuroscience.

For biography see Session Two.

35

Workshop 8 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

10:00-10:45

The Acorn and the Grain of Sand Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US)

If not Life, Stanislavsky teaches us, Theatre is the closest thing to Life there is. At every stop of our work, the sources of Theatre are to be found not in Theatre but in Life itself. If the means are always artificial, blatantly manufactured and crudely put together, the starting point and the connective tissues are real, common, accessible. The workshop is a playful exercise in creating a living, complete Theatre experience that is both familiar and intangible. Adrian Giurgea is an American Stage Director, based in New York. He is teaching acting and directing at Colgate University. He was born in Romania where he studied dramaturgy and directing and where he began his professional career. He directed in several Romanian theatres and taught at the Bucharest Academy of Theatre and Film. He was forced to emigrate from Romania when his production based on Sologub’s The Petty Demon was deemed to be to be too dangerous and provocative. He apprenticed his craft on some of the most famous stages of the world. He assisted, among others, Liviu Ciulei, Maurizio Scaparro, Giorgio Strehler, and Robert Wilson. He directed about 120 productions and taught acting and directing in Romania, Israel, Italy, Russia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, and the U.S. He started his Russian career in 2004 as an actor, playing the Fool in Dmitry Krymov production of Three Sisters (‘King Lear’) at the Anatoly Vasiliev School of Dramatic Art in Moscow. He later directed Krankheit der Jugend (Bolesny Molodosty) by Ferdinand Bruckner, Blackbird by David Harrower and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in St Petersburg; Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello and The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov at the Samara Drama Theatre, Samara, Russia, The Aliens by Annie Baker at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, and Circle Mirror Transformation, also by Annie Baker, at the Moscow Art Theatre. Three of his last four productions were directed in Tallinn, Estonia. In 2018 he directed The Lake by Mikhail Durnenkov in St Petersburg.

Panel Discussion and Debate ~ Valletta Campus Theatre

11:00-12:30

Stanislavsky in Context: Why Is It Still Important?

Chair: Paul Fryer (The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK)

Panel members: Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London, UK.)

Tomasz Kubikowski (Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland)

Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague, Czech Republic)

Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)

To conclude the symposium, an international panel will address the vital question – why is

Stanislavsky still important to us today? The session will end with an open debate which we hope

will provoke ideas to take forward to our next events in Prague and London.

36

Bertolt Brecht: Contradictions as a Method An international symposium presented by DAMU and The S Word 8th to 10th November 2019, @ Theatre Faculty, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), Prague, Czech Republic. DAMU and The S Word present a symposium on the theatrical legacy of one of the most influential personalities of 20th century theatre and his relationship to Konstantin Stanislavsky. Under the auspices of Jan Hančil, rector of AMU and the minister of Education of The Czech Republic, the symposium will bring together scholars and theatre practitioners; explore Brecht’s influence on the work of directors and acting teachers, and the relationship between Brecht and Stanislavsky; trace the influences on the approach to directing theatre in various countries, to playwriting and consider Brecht’s politics and theatre as highly social art. A comparison with Stanislavsky’s approach to theatre training, the development of modern theatre directing, and dramatic, alternative and authorial theatre will also be explored. Guest speakers, paper presentations, workshops and panel debates will take place in three focus areas: Brecht, his legacy and modern theatre practice, Brecht, Stanislavsky and the actor and Brecht’s Theatre practice and criticism.

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Stephen Parker (Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester, UK), author of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Bloomsbury), described by The London Review of Books as a ‘superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer’. Prof. Jean-Louis Besson (Professor Emeritus, University of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Defense), author of over 100 publications, translations, articles and papers, including ‘Brecht and the centaurs’ and ‘Brecht in Hollywood’. Special Guest Speaker: Thomas Ostermeier, the distinguished multi-award-winning international theatre director, whose work is often seen at the Schaubühne, Berlin.

Guest Speakers/workshop leaders include: Prof. David Barnett (University of York), author of A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press), and Brecht in Practice (Bloomsbury) David Zoob (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK), author of Brecht: A Practical Handbook (Nick Hern Books) NB. Speakers are subject to final confirmation.

37

We now invite proposals for the following: Paper presentations (20 minutes), workshops (40 minutes) and panel presentations of a minimum of 3 speakers (60 minutes). Submissions (not more than 300 words) should be accompanied by a short biographical note, and must be received by 14th June 2019. Please send by email to Prof. Paul Fryer (paul@paulfryer.me.uk). Selected papers from this event will be published in a special edition of the journal Stanislavski Studies (Taylor & Francis) in Autumn 2020.

38

Stanislavski Studies: Practice Legacy and Contemporary Theater (Routledge/Taylor and Francis).

The journal published twice a year, in May and November, is a peer-reviewed publication with an international scope, focusing not only on Stanislavski's work as an actor, director and teacher, but more broadly on his influence and legacy which can be seen in the work of many of the theatre's most influential figures.

We aim to be accessible to both the academic reader and the practitioner by collecting together some of the best contemporary scholarship, translations and information about major research

resources. We provide a forum for the analysis and discussion of the history, legacy and application of Stanislavski's theories and we publish articles that investigate, take issue with and consider the applications of his theories to the contemporary theatre. We are committed to the support of all forms of scholarship and our interest in practice-research is embodied in our link with the international research project, The S Word. Papers and other material generated by this project are published in alternate editions of the journal.

To submit an article or proposal, or to discuss your ideas for a future submission, please contact Paul Fryer (paul@paulfryer.me.uk).

For further details of the journal, and advice on submission, please visit https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfst20.

39

40

‘Higher, Lighter, Simpler, More Joyful’