Shchepkin influence on stanislavski biography

Actors were required to ask many questions of their characters and themselves. One of the first questions they had to ask was, "What if I were in the same situation as my character? Stanislavski studied the work of Ribot, a prominent psychologist. Here he learned the notion of affected memory, which later developed into emotion memory.

This is the concept that it is possible to recreate past events and relive past emotions vividly. Social Context Stanislavski viewed theatre as a medium with great social and educational significance. This was very apparent during the civil unrest leading up to the first Russian revolution in Lenin offered Stanislavski his personal protection during the violence of the revolution.

From onward, Konstantin 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, Konstantin 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".

Konstantin Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right. Nemirovich was a successful playwright, critic, theatre director, and acting teacher at the Philharmonic School who, like Konstantin Stanislavski, was committed to the idea of a popular theatre. Konstantin 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 Konstantin Stanislavski had met in , was engaged as the company's principal designer. In , Konstantin Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov. Konstantin Stanislavski went on to direct the successful premieres of Chekhov's other major plays: Uncle Vanya in , Three Sisters in , and The Cherry Orchard in Konstantin 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 Konstantin Stanislavski regarded his own performance as external and mechanical. In , Konstantin 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.

Konstantin Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor and Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant. The tour provoked a major artistic crisis for Konstantin Stanislavski that had a significant impact on his future direction. Konstantin Stanislavski began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art.

Konstantin 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. Konstantin 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.

Shchepkin influence on stanislavski biography

Konstantin 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, Konstantin 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.

There was practically no factory in the country without its own dramatic circle, and at the time of the Civil War there were around 3, professional troupes alone. Plays written by Red Army soldiers made it round thousands of regimental drama circles, and in , the Red Army and Fleet had over 1, clubs to which 1, theatres and dramatic circles were attached.

There was not a country in the world at the time that could match this theatrical offering, nevermind provide such accessibility to the masses. Other mass spectacles included the special dramas, which were usually presented on public holidays. One of the most famous of these was the Storming of the Winter Palace , which was performed in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd on 7 November with over 8, participants and an orchestra of at least This included many people who had participated in the real event.

For the first time, theatre and the arts were not simply entertainment for the bourgeoisie, but part and parcel of the building of a new society. And what must you, modern actors, be? You must first of all be living people and you must carry about in your hearts all those new qualities which ought to help us all achieve a new kind of consciousness.

What kind of consciousness? The kind in which life for the good of all should no longer be the subject of idle dreams and unrealizable fantasies. The Bolsheviks however, and Lenin in particular, opposed this one-sided and mechanical interpretation of art, and understood that revolutionary Russia had to preserve and build upon the greatest artistic achievements of the past.

If there is a theatre which we must at all costs save and preserve from the past, it is, of course, the Art theatre. With the support of the Bolshevik government, the MAT continued to operate in and , and was only interrupted for a month during the revolution. Contrary to what the ruling class claim, in its early years, the Bolshevik government did not clamp down on, nor censor artistic freedoms in the manner that the Tsars had done, and as Stalin later did.

Lenin and the leading Bolsheviks approached artistic freedom with the sensitivity and appreciation it deserved. This is something Stanislavski himself recognised. Speaking at the 13th anniversary of the MAT in , he said the following:. In those days the Government came to our help and thanks to it our theatre was able to weather the storm… But, our Government earned my deepest gratitude for something quite different.

When the political events in our country had caught us… our Government did not force us to dye ourselves red and pretend to be what we were not. Writing in about the stifling of Russian artistic creativity under Stalinism, Trotsky explains:. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power—which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution… Artistic creation has its laws—even when it consciously serves a social movement.

Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. With the support of the Bolsheviks, the MAT thrived following With the support of the Bolsheviks, the MAT thrived following , and was one of the foremost state-supported theatres in Russia, practically becoming a national treasure.

Following its European and American tours of , the MAT became world-renowned, receiving critical acclaim everywhere it went. In this period, the theatre boasted an extensive repertoire of leading Russian and western playwrights. The Soviet-themed Armoured Train also earned the MAT success in and became a classic, unintentionally setting the mould for future Socialist Realist productions.

The play by Pierre Beaumarchais is a blistering criticism of the Ancien Regime and the privileged life of the nobility, and is perhaps the most revolutionary play of the 18th century. Stanislavski creatively used a revolve in the set, which turned the last act into a mad rush through the garden using four different locations. Meyerhold, although being a former-student of Stanislavski, was opposed to the Russian theatrical tradition represented by his former teacher and the MAT, and argued for the substitution of literature, psychology and representational Realism, in favour of the techniques of cubism, futurism and suprematism.

What the Bolsheviks understood was that the classic and the experimental approaches to artistic creation are not mutually exclusive; rather they can and should support one another. It was only as he approached 70, during the period of Stalinist repression in Russia, that Stanislavski agreed to codify his acting theory. He was initially hesitant, as he understood his theory as a constantly evolving method, where no single formulation seemed to satisfy him for too long.

In fact, he rebelled against the idea of a written manual on acting, which he thought could degenerate very easily into a set of mechanical practices, repeated by actors without thought or feeling. After much deliberation Stanislavski decided to publish his writings in the form of a seven-book, semi-fictional series. The goal of the inner work of an actor is to achieve a creative and inspirational state, which is to be gained with the application of psychological techniques.

Work on the role consists of studying the text in depth, and understanding the inner meaning and driving principle within it. This inner meaning gives life to the entire play, and to all the individual roles within it. Stanislavski died before he was able to complete his series on the system, leaving it to his students, associates, and editors to construct the leftover manuscripts.

Actors at the Studio were encouraged to totally immerse themselves in a character, and attempt to experience the emotions of a play in real life. Thus, if a character was to experience a heartbreaking sense of loss on stage, the actor was supposed to achieve this same emotion in real life, and transfer it into the performance. Such an approach was in danger of neglecting a proper study of the text, and adapting the character to the personality of the actor, rather than the other way round.

It was not intended as a strict rulebook, but rather as a guide, a reference point for how an actor might solve the problems of the creative process. Even understanding the laws of acting themselves are not sufficient to create a good performance, in the same way that mere knowledge of language and grammar is not sufficient to create a good story.

Whilst Stanislavski set out to scientifically understand the laws of acting, his system was never meant to be a substitute for creativity and experimentation. The tolerant approach of the Bolsheviks following would be turned on its head by Stalin. In the climate of Stalinist counter-revolution and the rise of the bureaucracy, the once-great MAT suffered an undignified, decades-long decline, from which it never recovered.

The theatre could not escape the political and social reaction taking place in Russia. Stanislavski, who was abroad at the time, realised that the play had already been staged before he had even finished his plan. Only three months of rehearsals had been allowed, and only a passive regard for his intentions were given. To his enormous credit, Stanislavski directly challenged the authorities in and won autonomy for the MAT, within certain limits.

In this period, the revolutionary approach, which was pioneered by the MAT in its early years, and in the years following , was systematically suppressed in favour of Socialist Realism, which became the official state art form in Socialist Realism is a style of art which purports to depict the values of communism. However, in reality it is a subordination of all artistic creativity to the whims and needs of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Shchepkin argued that an actor ought to get into the skin of a character, identify with their thoughts and feelings, observe life, and have knowledge of their nature, which provides the source for an actor's work. It is so much easier to play mechanically—for that, you only need your reason. Reason will approximate to joy and sorrow just as an imitation approximates to nature.

But an actor of feeling—that's quite different. He must walk, talk, think, feel, cry, and laugh as the author wants him to. You see how his efforts become more meaningful. In the first case, you need only pretend to live—in the second you have to live. Shchepkin's distinction between the 'actor of reason' and the 'actor of feeling' influenced the formation of the ideas about acting contained in the 'system' devised by Konstantin Stanislavski.