Abstract
This chapter explores the contemporary actor’s predisposition to couple Aristotelian analysis with acting techniques that draw upon Stanislavski’s early pedagogic experiments, rather than insights and practices derived from his ongoing, psychophysical explorations (or subsequent integrative training systems) to the multiple challenges of acting tragedy. This recurring alignment of Aristotelian principles and Stanislavski-based practices also plays a major role, it is argued, in defining a sense of the ‘classical’ within contemporary actor-training communities, resulting in a text-based (logocentric) understanding of tragedy and its potentials. However, this challenge can be addressed by re-focusing attention on psychophysical aspects of Stanislavski’s actor-training pedagogy, and the various integrative training and acting practices which, today, work through a synthesis of intellectual and embodied creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
For a comprehensive overview of Stanislavski’s legacy as director, artist, and pedagogue, see White (2013).
- 2.
How the claims of actor training now refer to the sciences of the brain or mind to validate or reinforce its basic principles; see McConachie & Hart (2006).
- 3.
Stanislavski recalls how he came up with the idea of connecting feeling with inner truth in these terms: ‘During one performance in which I was repeating a role I had played many times, suddenly, without any apparent cause, I perceived the inner meaning of the truth long known to me that creativeness on the stage demands first of all a special condition […]. For an actor, to perceive is to feel. For this reason I can say that it was on that evening that I “first perceived a truth long known to me”’ (cited in Evans, 5).
- 4.
- 5.
The term perezhivanie has several related meanings. Essentially, its use is an attempt by Stanislavski to differentiate a quality of acting that conveys an ‘ongoing organic’ process or ‘emotional experience’ in the performer as opposed to a mechanical, unspontaneous, and artificial form of acting (Krasner, 197). In translation, the Russian sense of ‘living through’ an experience became confused with the anglicized sense of ‘undergoing’ a personal experience; hence the heavy reliance on personal memories and histories for many actors who learn acting in the studio systems of America (Benedetti 2005, 147).
- 6.
Elizabeth R Hapgood’s accounts of Stanislavski’s work include An Actor Prepares (1936), Building a Character (1948), and Creating a Role (1957). Jean Benedetti’s translations, An Actor’s Work (2008b) and An Actor’s Work on a Role (2010), offer a more comprehensive and updated translation of Stanislavski’s formal writing and reflections.
- 7.
Bella Merlin similarly accounts for psychophysical work which, in her definition, ‘aims to inculcate within actors an interdependent sense of their inner-personal psyche and outer-physical characterisation’, operating on the principle that a physical action generates psychological reactions, and vice versa (2007, 23–5).
- 8.
On Aristotle’s logocentrism, see Lehmann (19–21).
- 9.
For example, Wiles suggests the ancient concept of mind (phrên) was associated with the region of breathing near the lower torso, which generated thoughts and words, and the liver (êpar) was the site of profound emotions (2000, 154).
- 10.
On approaches to staging the gods of tragedy, see Goldhill (Chap. 6).
- 11.
Plato articulates this conundrum in his interrogation of an ancient singing poet (rhapsode) named Ion, discussed in more detail in Chap. 5 (Acting Myth).
- 12.
Stanislavski was also influenced by the ideas of Russian realism, informed by Pushkin and Gogol, who maintained that literature and theatre needed a truthful portrayal of real life—what was common to humanity—to be powerful and effective (Benedetti 2005, 109).
- 13.
Aristotle (arguably) comes tantalizingly close, in his Nichomachean Ethics, to a rule-of-thumb principle which may apply to Stanislavski’s sense of balance between emotional indulgence and mechanical distance, when he advises poets to seek the mean ‘between excess and defect’ (Kenny, xxiii).
- 14.
See further the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on ‘Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy’ (2006, revised 2018). Available from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-natphil/ (viewed 1 March 2018).
- 15.
The ‘coherent articulation of the system of rules’ that Stanislavski provided in his work, proceeds, in much the same way as Aristotle’s writings about nature, inductively from ‘micro to macro levels’ (Yule, 48).
- 16.
- 17.
See van den Bosch (2013).
- 18.
‘The actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life’, and thereby induces a ‘feeling of truth’ (Stanislavski cited by Fortier, 48).
- 19.
Nonetheless, it would be appropriate to exercise some caution in this lab-coat view of Stanislavski. While he may have wanted art to be on ‘good terms with science’ (Benedetti 1982, xxiv), he in fact drew scientific ideas from early psychological theories, such as those developed by Théodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916) on affective emotional states, and William James (1842–1910) on consciousness and subjective experience. Ribot and James combined metaphysics and early cognitive thinking to describe human behaviour and emotion, which suited Stanislavski’s descriptive and explanatory language of acting.
- 20.
On ancient commentaries concerning oratory, rhetoric, and the actor, see Benedetti (2005, 17–21).
- 21.
- 22.
Blair’s assumptions here are based on a reading of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s work on emotions and cognition.
- 23.
Compare Benedetti (2008a, 292).
- 24.
Auslander further argues that there is no essential ‘logocentric’ actor, referring to Derrida’s sense of différance: things are defined not by something essential within them but in relation to their difference to other things or actions (58–9). Voice studies scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis (2015) argues similarly from the standpoint that the phenomenon of the individual voice is too complex in its affective powers and significations to simply be perceived as a vehicle or sounding board for ‘logos-as-reason’ knowledge.
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Dunbar, Z., Harrop, S. (2018). The Stanislavski Legacy. In: Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_3
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