Editorial: Issue 4.1 (May 2016)

First of all: I'm very thankful for being here as your guest at this seminar.

Starting from the brief description of worldwide theater practices before Konstantin S. Stanislavski and culminating with his breakthrough ideas, I enjoyed writing this paper that contains both some private insights and useful information on the 'Russian people's theater.'

Stanislavski Studies Practice, Legacy, and Contemporary Theater, 2017

This article highlights Stanislavsky’s discoveries of 1910s in actor training. It analyses the unique project that took place at St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy in 2012–2016. For four years, students and teachers of Prof Tcherkasski’s Acting Studio followed the initial steps of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre founded in 1912. The aim was to get a better understanding of the methodology of actor training under Stanislavsky and Sulerzhitsky’s guidance in the early (to be more precise – basic) period of the Stanislavsky System. The multidisciplinary project resulted in both theoretical discoveries revealed in the article, as well as intimate insights into the artistic work of the founding members of the First Studio who subsequently became the influential masters of the Russian and international stage – Evgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, among them. It had culminated in today’s productions of the once famous plays from the repertoire of the First Studio and the Moscow Art Theatre – The Good Hope by Heijermans, The Cricket on the Hearth by Dickens and A Month in the Country by Turgenev.

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 2018

An artist’s creative work can become the primary lens through which he or she sees the world; it is a fundamental tool for interpreting life. But artistry can also teach a great deal about effective leadership. Based on the principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the father of modern acting, this essay reflects on five important lessons for life and leadership: The Power of Purpose, The Power of Context, The Power of Listening, The Power of Partnerships, and The Power of Community. After a year of studying Russian culture, history, and foreign policy, I believe these lessons can be applied on the international level as well as the personal. How might a Russian actor advise our leaders in Moscow and Washington? Read and find out. A Brief History of the Stanislavsky System European and American culture of the late 19th century touted science as a social panacea. As early 19th century Romanticism gave way to modern science, overblown, melodramatic acting began to fade, and a new dramati...

Stanislavski Studies, 2020

This article presents the acting method that the important Greek actor Dimitris Kataleifos uses when approaching a role by presenting and analysing his work process as it is presented in the theatrical notebooks that he keeps. These notebooks concentrate the way that he analyses, synthesises and approaches each character. They comprise notes on the role’s history, his background, his habits and so on. They follow Stanislavski’s key concepts, such as, ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘for what reason’, and notions, such as, ‘fantasy’ and ‘imagination’. The notebooks will be reviewed in relation to the five David Mamet plays in which Kataleifos has appeared, namely, American Buffalo (1992), The Cryptogram (1996), A Life in the Theatre (1999), Glengarry Glen Ross (2001) and Oleanna (2013).

Metro Magazine, 2006

Actors frequently misunderstand the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky. A rediscovery of the Russian master by Australian actors is made and a few ways are suggested that screenwriters can use his techniques to heighten the dramatic impact of their stories.

Theatre Topics, 2002

A few years ago I attended a conference session on feminist theory, theatre, and performance. One of the participants, in describing a performance she had seen, told how she was deeply moved by it and then apologized for having had such a response; in short, she seemed to be apologizing for having felt something. In the session as a whole, there was a skeptical stance toward feeling, narrative, and imagination. Though that particular conference session was centered on reception and this essay is centered on the performer, I believe the anecdote is apposite, since a mistrustful attitude toward feeling and the biological body in general has been common in feminist theories of performance since the early 1980s. These anxieties are understandable, given the power of feeling, imagination, and narrative, and the way that these and pseudo-scientific constructions of sex and race in biological bodies have historically been manipulated to oppress women. However, we feminists must move beyond responses based on received information and routinized antiessentialism (which itself is a kind of essentialism). Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience and neurophysiology can provide a fruitful way for reengaging issues of feeling, consciousness, and performance, and concomitantly, for reassessing Stanislavsky's contributions to systematizing the actor's process.

Performance Research, 2024

In ‘Stanislavski versus the Peasant Woman: Acting habits beyond the neutral’, Ilinca Todoruț analyses Western theatre’s fraught relationships with acting habits by reading between the lines of Konstantin Stanislavski’s short account of a daring casting experiment gone awry. In a slippery two-page text, Stanislavski narrates how he attempted to cast an unnamed peasant woman in the 1902 production of Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness. Prying open what went wrong at the Moscow Art Theater, despite the best of intentions, helps guide a critique of contemporary performance training methods geared towards eliminating habit.