Stanislavski and his Approach to Acting

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.

Creative imagination is a central concept in critical philosophy which establishes the framing faculty of the subject in the middle of the cognitive process. Linking the internal and the external, imagination is also key for dramatic acting methodologies. This mediation has been alternatively interpreted in Western tradition under a reversible perspective, giving priority to either the process that goes from the outside inwards (aesthesis) or just the opposite (poiesis). Going beyond dialectics, this article will connect philosophy with dramatic theory. My proposal explores the virtual drama of identity to emphasise how the transcendental and empirical get linked theatrically.

Following the 'turn to religion,' thinkers in a whole host of subjects across the humanities have been finding God to be significantly less 'dead' than Nietzsche led us all to expect. What does this mean for contemporary staging praxis of Shakespeare's most spiritually provocative play?