The “Stanislavski System” and paradox of acting

Ստանիսլավսկու սիստեմը և խաղի պարադոքսը

The paradox of acting

A summary

 The renowned “Stanislavsky system” appears to be the logical outcome of the 19th century psychological realism and naturalism, as well as the Russian acting school in particular. It’s adequately been highlighted by the notion of behaviorism, the theory of behavioral psychology having emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. The very first of Stanislavsky’s studio rehearsals (1912-13) are said to have coincided with John Watson’s lectures covering similar points at issue at Columbia University, whilst Stanislavsky’s strivings were quite independent from Watson’s views. Stanislavsky’s method was basically initiated having reference to Theodule Ribot’s experimental psychology and Pavlovian behavioral psychology which suggested the idea of the external response to the outer stimuli. Stanislavsky refuses to discern the established morphological elements of acting describing them as “штамп“ (cliché), thus initiating the method of making the actor’s acting behavior reach an absolute inherence. A person’s actual presence on the stage is being described as “a conditional intention”, its interrelated elements being revealed. This does not appear to be aesthetics. It can be referred to the field of applied psychology, which in its turn may either smoothly grow into aesthetics or take it too far away to a psychodrama. Watson inferred from person’s resistance to external stimuli, whereas Stanislavsky’s method basically derives from “classical conditioning”. Watson’s assessment of the psychic eliminates the consideration of ethical, social, religious and a number of other factors. Stanislavsky was bound to give an importance to the ethical factor in terms of which “the system “is believed to differ from behaviorism. Stanislavsky’s “system” is a closed array, a unique “closet” and it can be viewed in terms of its being merely psychological. It does not have to be confused with the author’s acting and directing practice, the way it has been done by some of the “system’s” interpreters. Some of his declared ideas and emotional statements do not have to be referred to his acting and directing practice as well. The artist’s creative nature has to be detached from his psychological experiments and the implied theory. The reclaimed analogy between “the system” and the aesthetics of the Moscow Art Theatre is another misguidance on the part of the interpreters of “the system”. There appears to be an apparent confusion of the cause and the effect. Evidently it is “the system” which can be regarded to be a product of the Arts Theatre experience. The theatre itself can in no way be the sequential product of “the system”. There used to be controversial attitudes towards “the system” which later served as a subject for academic criticism (Lev Vigotsky, Gustav Shpet). This might be one of the reasons for taking the word system into inverted commas by describing it as “the so called” by the initiator of the theory himself. And this suggests the idea of its being a thrown-down challenge. Something different occurred in reality. The interpreters of it accepted it as a final and definitive doctrine so that they restrained the critical attitude which consequently led to giving birth to pious followers of Stanislavsky and his “system”.

 Stanislavsky’s “system” is a method of work in its essence and composition. It is not a theory. Still we are faced with imposed definitions in it. This imposed doctrine excludes everything except for the truth of ethical and psychological reality. Stanislavsky defined his ethical and aesthetical determination as “super intention”.

Stanislavsky’s “system” can be systematic provided it is strongly interrelated with its essential logic within, which is psychobiological and is bound to describe the determined and circumstantial behavior under preconditioned stage circumstances. But distractions within the system can be observed due to internal changes and supplementation. Thus the issue of the actor’s freedom of muscles is not regarded to be relevant to the psychological point, whereas the latter is quite visible in the key aspects of “the system”, i.e. the focus of attention, the psychological object, the logic of behavior, interaction, the intermittent action, the ethical and psychic objective in the perspective. The constitution is logical within and can be both assumed and argued as an application of intentionality. But its interrelation with truthful art is a matter of different discourse. How pure is this constitution in terms of its own objectives? The fact that the person’s stage behavior is regulated externally and is basically grounded in psycho-physiological approach is arguable though quite apparent. But the postulate no longer works as soon as “the system’s” initiator walks out of the boundaries of his “closed system”. Freedom of muscles: why should it be regarded to be unrelated to the mental and psychic concentration at the very moment of the deliberation of the soul?

 The advent of inner states through forms of appearance had never been extrinsic to Stanislavsky himself.  It had traditionally been inherited from the acting experience of the past. Still it does appear to be extrinsic to the initiator of “the system” and he involuntary breaks the rule of “the system”. This is the first controversial point. The second one is that he coins the term accommodation (приспособление) which in no way can accommodate “the driving forces of the psychic life”. The use of the word приспособление in Russian is twofold and vague in terms of its meaning and remains unclear. On the one hand it refers to action or an element of action, and it would make sense to use the term приспосабливание. And it also suggests external pretense of   circumstances or the psychic state. In this case the idea of the external formal element is involuntarily assumed by Stanislavsky, the one which he had refused to acknowledge at the dawn of his “system” coining it as “штамп“ (cliché). There can be observed a certain attempt to differentiate between “штамп “and “accommodation” describing the first one as a conscious act of pretence and the second one as a subconscious one. Hence the issue gets stuck. Stanislavsky not only contradicts the key principle of his own, but also misleads his followers into a different aesthetic reality.

 The words “штамп” and “accommodation” are not academic notions and cannot be applied as terms. The key point is that the establishment and transfer of morphemes are proved to be inevitable within the framework of all forms of poetic thinking and they are also doomed to be unified, consolidated and transferred from one form to another, and finally, reconsidered once again. Hence, the prosody and rhyming, the structure of architectural patterns, the pas, the pirouettes and the  pas de ciseaux in ballet, the dots and lines  on a canvas which are beyond the geometrical structure, etc. And acting is not an exception. Morphemes, unrelated to the psychological aspect are a key part of acting. It’s the established positions and gestures, the application of the mise-en-scene, the use of the dynamic and static points in the stage space, the leverage of the pitch and rhythm in speech, etc.  There appear certain indications of worn-out, insipid and over-simplified manifestations of these in “the system”, which in no way can be assumed. The point is to what extent the confirmed morphemes are live or deadly, as Peter Brook mentioned. Aesthetic thinking does not involve categories like “old” and “new”, “duplication” or “innovativeness”, “conscious” or “subconscious”. It is the living morphemes, no matter borrowed or discovered, emotionally experienced or performed, that survive in art. They come true in the percipient’s range of emotions. Stanislavsky gives the most admirable definition of acting _ “an endurance of human spirit”. Whereas he tracks down this endurance to the sphere of the psychic. The notions of “spirit” and “soul” are identified with each other, thus creating a background for giving an explanation to the emotional experience practiced on the stage. So, the source of stage commotion or sensation is being searched under supposed circumstances in the range of actor’s sensational memories and the ethical and speculative conception of the author. The first rule is to act truthfully relying on the logic of emotions. It may be truthful, but not sensational. Some critics, Lev Vigotsky and Gustav Shpet among them argued the point which related to the interrelation between the person’s memories of senses and the submitted circumstances on the stage. The outspoken argument over this issue taken place between Mikhail Chekhov and Stanislavsky is said to have been quite illustrious (1928). Earlier, in 1922 Gustav Shpet’s seminal article on acting saw the light. “Emotional experience is interpreted as a mere content of the actor’s creative activity. Aesthetics has been misled into a psychological mistake when recognizing this theory as such <…> And when it (the theory) is supplemented with an absurd assessment of acting techniques , saying “truthful emotional experience is impeccable, and the lack of emotional experience in play is deprived of perfectness”, the whole thing turns into nonsense.”(Gustav Shpet). Shpet defines the truthfulness of play as a type of emotional state which responds to the author’s central proposition. It is the emotional attitude towards the text, which is a finite piece of poetic reality. A brief and thought-provoking definition has been given by Vahram Papazian, the eminent Armenian actor _ “a responsive emotional experience”. This definition makes us believe that play derives from a spiritual burden rather than from the emotional one.

 The reality of art occurs in the percipient’s emotion being both realistic and beyond the boundaries of reality. A melody, an image, a temple column, a passage from a poem may serve as a source for cultivating emotions, as they give birth to a reproduction of the emotional state. An actor is a reader. He gets inspired from reading and plays the inspiration. The play is supposed to be psychologically distant from the presupposed state of affairs. This is emotional experience in play and not a self-destructiveness and a desperate effort to squeeze emotions out one’s body. Play is a fertile calamity in itself. It is a subconscious desire to achieve a virtual reality, which is imaginary and wonderful. In circus it is the improbability and the absurdity. The notion of play is eliminated by Stanislavsky. He quite often conjugates the verb to play in his volumes while the noun play does not develop into a category in his works. No action can be of poetic interest whether in the reality of life or on the stage, unless it carries a play element and is regulated by rhythm, norm and rule. The play invites publicity and audience, thus establishing itself as a morphemic base for stage action. Eliminating the notion of play Stanislavsky happened to skip the ontological status of stage craft.

 In terms of its being a theory of person’s psychological self-imitation Stanislavsky’s “system” invites a question, which is “Who is the actor on the stage? An artistic creator or a substance for creative activity? Is he a player or a plaything? A subject or an object?

 As far as the American experience of using the Stanislavsky system of acting techniques is concerned (Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Robert H. Hetmon) the method was put into practice aiming at a preparation of actors for the cinema. There actors were taken as models and were offered roles absolutely similar to the ones of exemplars chosen at random. Glenn Wilson, a psychologist and a theatre critic believes that this sort of practice reveals the one-sided nature of both “the system” and its American interpretation. Lee Strasberg is said to have adopted the accomplished part of “the system”, which in its essence was the technique of a person’s self-imitation and had no relation with the issue of a person’s self-transformation. The person’s self-transformation is of secondary importance. This question has not been covered by the Russian interpreters. Besides, the unfinished chapter entitled “Typicalness” seems to lack completeness and is detached from the psychological understanding of the subject matter. In case the issue was developed into a deeper understanding of the subject matter, Stanislavsky would come very close to considering the morphemes issue, which in its turn would make him grow to realize the controversial nature of his initial point. Nevertheless he was capable of seeing the root of the problem. This can be observed in two statements of his:

“Whatever man’s desire and actions are, he will never be able to quit his own Self”.

“Make every effort not to lose your own Self”.

However, Stanislavsky brings us.

Stanislavsky himself does not touch upon this aspect, but a single word closer to the philosophical aspect of the issue. Who is man in public loneliness? Is it Him in his personal identity? Or does he run away from his own Self?

 Stanislavsky himself does not touch upon this aspect, but a single word of his, i.e. перевоплощение makes us think of it speculatively. The Russian word seems to have no equivalent in English language in terms of its terminological usage. And it is definitely not the word transformation. Lee Strasberg, the orthodox Stanislavsky follower, appeared not to bother about finding the exact equivalent. Strasberg adopted the accomplished part of “the system” skipping the last and the unfinished one. Meanwhile, the truth is, that it is impossible for man to reincarnate, but it is possible for him to change his personal nature and his personal behavior in a different social setting, depending where he is, who he communicates with and what he is expected of. Paul Rickeur gives his own definition to this _ “me as different”. The shortest definition owes to Martin Heidegger _ “in a co-presence everyone is different, and no one is Him”. A person’s presence on the stage is a kind of co-presence. There we are faced with changes in the inner attitudes of a person, and therefore changes in expression as well. Stanislavsky makes a hint of this in the unfinished chapter of his book, he mentions this beyond his “system”. Various essays regarding external forms of play are compiled in this chapter. In it the author approaches “the method of physical action”. He attempts to compare and synthesize the intonation, masquerading, the make-up and the grimace, but “the transformation issue” still remains unsolved.

The stage demand can be defined as personification of the text. It is the highest level of individual reading which appears as a response to the author. The question whether it is the person who conforms to the role or vice versa is of secondary importance. In aesthetic terms it doesn’t make any difference whether the person carries the role or the role carries the person. The artistic product is Man. A final definition does not exist. Man is always Him and always different, never mind whether in real life or preconditioned circumstances.

Translated by   Astghick H.Hovhannissian