77 Facts About Constantin Stanislavski

Constantin Stanislavski was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation.

Constantin Stanislavski collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov.

Constantin Stanislavski continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An Actor's Work.

Constantin Stanislavski was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Lenin and was the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.

Constantin Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors should be banned from talking about themselves".

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Constantin Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection.

Constantin Stanislavski produced his early work using an external, director-centred technique that strove for an organic unity of all its elements—in each production he planned the interpretation of every role, blocking, and the mise en scene in detail in advance.

Constantin Stanislavski introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast.

Constantin Stanislavski began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy.

Constantin Stanislavski pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre.

Constantin Stanislavski organised his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology, which built on three major strands of influence: the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; the actor-centred realism of the Maly; and the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement.

Later, Constantin Stanislavski further elaborated the system with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action".

Constantin Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseyevs He was born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev—he adopted the stage name "Constantin Stanislavski" in 1884 to keep his performance activities secret from his parents.

Up until the communist revolution in 1917, Constantin Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his experiments in acting and directing.

Constantin Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business.

Increasingly interested in "experiencing the role", Constantin Stanislavski experimented with maintaining a characterization in real life.

One of Shchepkin's students, Glikeriya Fedotova, taught Constantin Stanislavski; she instilled in him the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, stressed the importance of training and discipline, and encouraged the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Constantin Stanislavski came to call "communication".

Constantin Stanislavski became interested in the aesthetic theories of Vissarion Belinsky, from whom he took his conception of the role of the artist.

In February 1891, Constantin Stanislavski directed Leo Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment for the Society of Art and Literature, in what he later described as his first fully independent directorial work.

In My Life in Art, Constantin Stanislavski described this approach as one in which the director is "forced to work without the help of the actor".

From 1894 onward, Constantin Stanislavski began to assemble detailed prompt-books that included a directorial commentary on the entire play and from which not even the smallest detail was allowed to deviate.

Whereas the Ensemble's effects tended toward the grandiose, Constantin Stanislavski introduced lyrical elaborations through the mise-en-scene that dramatised more mundane and ordinary elements of life, in keeping with Belinsky's ideas about the "poetry of the real".

Constantin Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right.

Constantin Stanislavski later compared their discussions to the Treaty of Versailles, their scope was so wide-ranging; they agreed on the conventional practices they wished to abandon and, on the basis of the working method they found they had in common, defined the policy of their new theatre.

Viktor Simov, whom Constantin Stanislavski had met in 1896, was engaged as the company's principal designer.

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In 1898, Constantin Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov.

Constantin Stanislavski went on to direct the successful premieres of Chekhov's other major plays: Uncle Vanya in 1899, Three Sisters in 1901, and The Cherry Orchard in 1904.

In 1902, Constantin Stanislavski directed the premiere productions of the first two of Gorky's plays, The Philistines and The Lower Depths.

Constantin Stanislavski based his characterisation of Satin on an ex-officer he met there, who had fallen into poverty through gambling.

The Lower Depths was a triumph that matched the production of The Seagull four years earlier, though Constantin Stanislavski regarded his own performance as external and mechanical.

Constantin Stanislavski staged other important Naturalistic works, including Gerhart Hauptmann's Drayman Henschel, Lonely People, and Michael Kramer and Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness.

In 1904, Constantin Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist.

Constantin Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in 1905: Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor and Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant.

The tour provoked a major artistic crisis for Constantin Stanislavski that had a significant impact on his future direction.

Sometime in March 1906—Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during An Enemy of the People—Constantin Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical.

Constantin Stanislavski began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art.

Constantin Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his system.

Constantin Stanislavski focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment.

Constantin Stanislavski developed his ideas about three trends in the history of acting, which were to appear eventually in the opening chapters of An Actor's Work: "stock-in-trade" acting, the art of representation, and the art of experiencing.

Constantin Stanislavski's production of A Month in the Country was a watershed in his artistic development.

At this stage in the development of his approach, Constantin Stanislavski's technique was to identify the emotional state contained in the psychological experience of the character during each bit and, through the use of the actor's emotion memory, to forge a subjective connection to it.

Constantin Stanislavski insisted that they should play the actions that their discussions around the table had identified.

Late in 1910, Gorky invited Constantin Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed actor training and Constantin Stanislavski's emerging "grammar".

Constantin Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio.

Constantin Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently developed system for creating internally justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play.

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Increasingly absorbed by his teaching, in 1913 Constantin Stanislavski held open rehearsals for his production of Moliere's The Imaginary Invalid as a demonstration of the system.

Constantin Stanislavski began to inflect his technique of dividing the action of the play into bits with an emphasis on improvisation; he would progress from analysis, through free improvisation, to the language of the text:.

Constantin Stanislavski created the Second Studio of the MAT in 1916, in response to a production of Zinaida Gippius' The Green Ring that a group of young actors had prepared independently.

Significant influence on the development of the system came from Constantin Stanislavski's experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio, which was founded in 1918.

Constantin Stanislavski hoped that the successful application of his system to opera, with its inescapable conventionality and artifice, would demonstrate the universality of his approach to performance and unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin.

Constantin Stanislavski invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin to teach expressive movement and dance and attended both of their classes as a student.

Constantin Stanislavski spent the summer of 1914 in Marienbad where, as he had in 1906, he researched the history of theatre and theories of acting to clarify the discoveries that his practical experiments had produced.

Constantin Stanislavski remembered that he was carrying an official document that mentioned having played to Kaiser Wilhelm during their tour of 1906 that, when he showed it to the officers, produced a change of attitude towards his group.

Constantin Stanislavski continued to develop his system, explaining at an open rehearsal for Woe from Wit his concept of the state of "I am being".

When he prepared for his role in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, Constantin Stanislavski created a biography for Salieri in which he imagined the character's memories of each incident mentioned in the play, his relationships with the other people involved, and the circumstances that had impacted on Salieri's life.

Constantin Stanislavski welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and its overthrow of the absolute monarchy as a "miraculous liberation of Russia".

Constantin Stanislavski thought that the social upheavals presented an opportunity to realize his long-standing ambitions to establish a Russian popular theatre that would provide, as the title of an essay he prepared that year put it, "The Aesthetic Education of the Popular Masses".

On 5 March 1921, Constantin Stanislavski was evicted from his large house on Carriage Row, where he had lived since 1903.

The tour began in Berlin, where Constantin Stanislavski arrived on 18 September 1922, and proceeded to Prague, Zagreb, and Paris, where he was welcomed at the station by Jacques Hebertot, Aurelien Lugne-Poe, and Jacques Copeau.

Constantin Stanislavski discussed with Copeau the possibility of establishing an international theatre studio and attended performances by Ermete Zacconi, whose control of his performance, economic expressivity, and ability both to "experience" and "represent" the role impressed him.

At the request of a US publisher, Constantin Stanislavski reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art, since his proposals for an account of the system or a history of the MAT and its approach had been rejected.

On his return to Moscow in August 1924, Constantin Stanislavski began with the help of Gurevich to make substantial revisions to his autobiography, in preparation for a definitive Russian-language edition, which was published in September 1926.

Constantin Stanislavski continued to act, reprising the role of Astrov in a new production of Uncle Vanya.

Aware of the disapproval of Bulgakov felt by the Repertory Committee of the People's Commissariat for Education, Constantin Stanislavski threatened to close the theatre if the play was banned.

Constantin Stanislavski's working methods contributed innovations to the system: the analysis of scenes in terms of concrete physical tasks and the use of the "line of the day" for each character.

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Ideally, Constantin Stanislavski felt, it would consist of two volumes: the first would detail the actor's inner experiencing and outer, physical embodiment; the second would address rehearsal processes.

Constantin Stanislavski first explored this approach practically in his work on Three Sisters and Carmen in 1934 and Moliere in 1935.

In contrast to his earlier method of working on a play—which involved extensive readings and analysis around a table before any attempt to physicalise its action—Constantin Stanislavski now encouraged his actors to explore the action through its "active analysis".

Constantin Stanislavski felt that too much discussion in the early stages of rehearsal confused and inhibited the actors.

In performance the actor is aware of only one step at a time, Constantin Stanislavski reasoned, but this focus risks the loss of the overall dynamic of a role in the welter of moment-to-moment detail.

Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Constantin Stanislavski worked with the American actress Stella Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances.

Constantin Stanislavski arranged a curriculum of four years of study that focused exclusively on technique and method—two years of the work detailed later in An Actor's Work and two of that in An Actor's Work on a Role.

Once the students were acquainted with the training techniques of the first two years, Constantin Stanislavski selected Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for their work on roles.

Constantin Stanislavski worked with the students in March and April 1937, focusing on their sequences of physical actions, on establishing their through-lines of action, and on rehearsing scenes anew in terms of the actors' tasks.

From late 1936 onwards, Constantin Stanislavski began to meet regularly with Vsevolod Meyerhold, with whom he discussed the possibility of developing a common theatrical language.

On his death-bed Constantin Stanislavski declared to Yuri Bakhrushin that Meyerhold was "my sole heir in the theatre—here or anywhere else".

Constantin Stanislavski was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, not far from the grave of Anton Chekhov.