the s word: stanislavsky in context
TRANSCRIPT
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The S Word:
Stanislavsky in Context
An International Symposium 5, 6, 7 April 2019
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The Stanislavsky Research Centre Advisory Board Honorary Patron: Anatoly Smeliansky, President, Moscow Art Theatre School Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu, CNRS, Paris Andrei Malaev Babel, FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training, USA Sharon Marie Carnicke, University of Southern California, USA Kathy Dacre, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance Jan Hancil, Akademie múzických umění, Prague Bella Merlin, University of California, Riverside, USA Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds Laurence Senelick, Tufts University, USA David Shirley, Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts/Edith Cowan University Prof. Sergei Tcherkasski, Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Director: Paul Fryer, University of Leeds/London South Bank University Deputy Director: Jonathan Pitches, University of Leeds
Stanislavski Studies (Taylor and Francis) Editor in Chief: Paul Fryer, University of Leeds/London South Bank University Editors Julia Listengarten, University of Central Florida, USA Sergei Tcherkasski, Russian State Institute of Performing Arts Luis Campos, Rose Bruford College of Theatre & Performance, UK Reviews Editor: David Matthews, Kings College London Social Media Editor: Michelle LoRicco, Mill Mountain Theatre, USA Consultant Translator: Anna Shulgat, Writers Union of St Petersburg, Russia Editorial Advisory Board Stefan Aquilina, University of Malta, Malta David Chambers, Yale School of Drama, USA Alexander Chepurov, St Petersburg State Theater Arts Academy, Russia Carol Fisher, Sorgenfrei, UCLA, USA Adrian Giurgea, Colgate University, USA Jan Hyvnar, DAMU Prague, Czech Republic Nesta Jones, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK David Krasner, Five Towns College, USA Tomasz Kubikowski, Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland Bella Merlin, University of California, Riverside, USA Vladimir Mirodan, University of the Arts, UK. Maria Pia Pagani, University of Pavia, Italy Nikolai Pesochinsky, St Petersburg State Theater Arts Academy, Russia Dassia Posner, Northwestern University, USA Maria Shevtsova, Goldsmiths College, UK Peta Tait, Latrobe University, Australia Simon Trussler, Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK Ian Watson, Rutgers University, USA Andrew White, Valparaiso University, USA Rose Whyman, University of Birmingham, UK
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Welcome to
The S Word: Stanislavsky in Context
How time flies! It’s been three years since the first edition of The S Word. And here we are, opening the fourth meeting in Malta. For The S Word to have made it this far, we have of course to thank Prof. Paul Fryer and Prof. Bella Merlin for their hard work and leadership. It was indeed a pleasure for me to convene this fourth edition with Prof. Fryer. For this edition we have opted to use as a framing theme the idea of ‘Stanislavski in Context’. We hoped for proposals to reflect on Stanislavsky’s work within the social, cultural, and political milieus in which it developed, without however forgetting the ways in which this work was transmitted, adapted, and appropriated within recent and current theatre contexts. We looked forward to receive papers and workshop proposals that were both historical as well as contemporary, and for participants to think of Stanislavsky as an instigator of modern theatre and a paradigm for performance practices within twenty-first-century training and performance scenarios. I am happy to say that the symposium’s call for proposals received a very positive response, and today we can look forward to a full programme that explores Stanislavsky’s work in its endless variety. On behalf of my colleagues within the Department of Theatre Studies I would like to welcome you all to Malta and to this wonderful building of the UM Valletta Campus. The Campus serves as a setting for the hosting of international conferences, seminars, short courses, and summer schools. It also incorporates the Valletta Campus Theatre, which is home to a lot of the Department’s practical work, training, and performances. The Department itself is this year celebrating, with Music Studies, its thirty years anniversary. Throughout these three decades it has developed into an international institution with strong links in Europe and outside the continent. It is a partner of The S Word, and its staff are members on, amongst others, the IFTR Executive, the Editorial Board of the Stanislavski Studies journal, and the Medinea Network. It hosts yearly workshops and seminars by visiting practitioners and academies from abroad, and has recently produced book publications on performer training in the twenty-first century, the relationship between carnival and power, theatre communities, and interdisciplinary performance. May I take this opportunity to invite you to have a look at the Department’s website (https://www.um.edu.mt/performingarts/theatre) and to get in touch with us to discuss possible collaborations. Today, however, it is our mutual interest in Stanislavsky that has brought us together. His work remains engaging in its complexity, fascinating in its applicability, and captivating in the questions that it raises. Certainly, the Symposium will raise several such questions and engage us all in possible answers. The Symposium is supported by the School of Performing Arts of the University of Malta and Teatru Malta, Malta’s National Theatre. Prof. Sergei Tcherkasski’s visit is supported by the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Malta. Dr Stefan Aquilina Director of Research, School of Performing Arts Senior Lecturer, Theatre Studies Conference Co-convener
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The Stanislavsky Research Centre and The S Word
The Stanislavsky Research Centre was launched at The University of Leeds, UK, in January 2019. Following on from the work that originated at The Stanislavski Centre (Rose Bruford College), this new centre is a unique international initiative to support and develop both academic and practice-based research centered upon the work and legacy of Konstantin Stanislavsky. Inspired by the work of the late Professor Jean Benedetti, an internationally renowned authority and author of several major books on Stanislavsky’s work, the Centre hosts and promotes a series of lectures, workshops, study days, short courses, exhibitions and other events throughout the year, and offers support to researchers and research students. The S Word: Stanislavski and the Contemporary Theatre is a major collaborative international research project which, from Spring 2019, has been based at London South Bank University. Created by Bella Merlin and Paul Fryer, it was launched with a symposium on Stanislavski and the Future of Acting, in Spring 2016. A collaboration with The University of California Riverside, over 100 scholars and practitioners attended the event which was held at Rose Bruford College, UK. The second symposium, The S Word: Merging Methodologies, a collaboration with DAMU Theatre Academy, was held in Prague in March 2017. In April 2018, the third symposium, A Practical Acting Laboratory, was hosted by The University of California, Riverside. The S Word is a collaboration between a number of institutions. Each partner supports and promotes the project’s work and hosts symposia and other related events. The partners are London South Bank University, The University of California Riverside, DAMU Theatre Academy Prague, The University of Malta, Macunaima Theatre School (Sao Paulo, Brazil), The University of Leeds and The Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
This year we are delighted to be the guests of the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Malta and I would like to particularly thank our colleagues here in the beautiful historic city of Valletta for hosting this event, and for the tremendous support that they have given us. In particular, my co-convener Dr Stefan Aquilina, without whose tireless efforts, this event could not have taken place. Details of our next symposium can be found in the back of this programme, and we are currently planning future events in the UK, USA and Australia. For further information about The Stanislavsky Research Centre, please visit our website: https://stanislavski-research.leeds.ac.uk Paul Fryer Director of The Stanislavsky Research Centre Co-convener of The S Word
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Programme
FRIDAY 5 APRIL
17:00 Registration (Venue: Aula Prima, Second Floor)
18:30 Symposium Welcome (Venue: Aula Prima)
19:00 Keynote (Venue: Aula Prima)
Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University, USA
The Ever-Widening Contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky
20:30 Wine Reception (Venue: Bar Area, First Floor)
21:30 End
SATURDAY 6 APRIL
8:00 Registration desk open
9:00 Keynote (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre)
Vicki Ann Cremona, Associate Professor of Theatre, Department of Theatre Studies,
Head of Dance Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of Malta
Stanislavsky’s System: Mimesis, Truth, and Verisimilitude
10:00-10:30 Coffee Break
Meeting Room 6 Ground Floor
Meeting Room 5 Ground Floor
Valletta Campus Theatre
10:30- 12:00
Chair: Frank Camilleri (University of Malta) Kathy Dacre (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) Stanislavsky and The Context in Which He Wrote Sergey Panov (National University of Technology, Moscow)
Chair: Lucía Piquero (University of Malta) Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham (University of Georgia, USA) Stanislavsky’s Imagination and Experiencing: The Cognitive Link Gabriela Curpan (Goldsmith, University of London) Stanislavsky’s Creative State on the Stage: A Quasi-spiritual
10:30 Deepak Verma (University of East London, UK) The Yoga of Acting – Building the Charismatic Body: ‘The Actor and Prana’: A Dynamic, Working Confluence of Stanislavsky’s System and the Yogic Chakra System
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The Stanislavsky Method and the Artistic Culture of Modernity Dassia N. Posner (Northwestern University, USA) From Blue Bird to Seagull: The Theatrical Truth of Alisa Koonen
Approach to the ‘System’ Through Practice as Research Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK) Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis as Seen Through the Lens of Contemporary Research in Emotion, Memory, Embodied Cognition, and Social Neuroscience
11:15 Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, USA) Standing on Shoulders: Stanislavsky and Barba
12:00 Lunch Break
13:30-15:00
Chair: Jan Hančil (AMU Prague) Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London) The First Class: On the Contribution Made to UK Drama Training by the Actor Harold Lang, Arguably the First to Teach a Stanislavskian Acting Class in a British conservatoire Michaela Antoniou (National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece) Notes on a Part. Stanislavsky’s Influences as Detected on Dimitris Kataleifos’s Theatrical Notebooks/diaries on David Mamet’s Plays Nesta Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) Brian Friel: Ireland’s Chekhov
Chair: Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta) Dan Barnard (London South Bank University) Events and Bits/Beats/Units/Episodes in the British Professional and Pedagogical Context Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK) (Re)Animating Stanislavsky Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK) Emotion Memory: ‘A Dangerous Reputation’
13:30 Karen Benjamin (University of Gloucestershire, UK) Stanislavsky Backwards 14:15 Stéphane Poliakov (University of Paris 8) The ‘Perspective’ in Practice: from Plato to Chekhov
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15:00 Coffee Break
15:30-17:00
Chair: Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, US) Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (Birkbeck, University of London) The System of Service: Stanislavsky and Emotional Labour Today Vasilios N. Arabos (ΙΜΑΛΙΣ: Research Initiative for Ancient Drama, Athens, Greece) Wine, Tea, and Sympathy: for an Orphic Stanislavsky at the Turn of Three Centuries Tomasz Kubikowski (Akademia Teatralna, Warsaw, Poland) The Vaudevillean Universe: Creating Worlds in Stanislavsky
Chair: Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US ) Margot Wood (Anex Theatre Productions, South Africa) Devising Theatre for Traumatized Participants using Action-based Direction James Palm (Bird College, UK) ALICE: ‘Ben’s going in from a really horrible angle. It’s almost as painful as a smear test’ – DUST by Milly Thomas Should I (a middle-aged man) Teach Students the Theory and Practice of Stanislavskian Good Faith Using the Play DUST by Milly Thomas? Cymon Allen (Performers College, UK) With the Function and Requirement of the Actor Constantly Changing, How Can a System Written Almost 100 years ago Train the Modern Theatre Practitioner?
15:30 Julian Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK) The Application of Stanislavsky to Theatre of the Absurd Texts 16:15 Edward Caruana Galizia (Freelance Actor, Malta) The Art of Actioning
19:00 Special Presentation (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre) Sergei Tcherkasski (Russian State Institute of Performing Arts, St Petersburg)
Method of Action Analysis: from Stanislavsky to Today – A Practical Session on the
Director’s Craft of Play Analysis
20.30 End
SUNDAY 7 APRIL
09.00 The S Word in Prague (Venue: Meeting Room 6)
Paul Fryer, The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds.
Jan Hančil, AMU Prague
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Meeting Room 6 Ground Floor
Meeting Room 5 Ground Floor
Valletta Campus Theatre
9:15-10:30/ 10:45
Chair: Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK) Inga Romantsova (Australian Institute of Music/University of Newcastle, Australia) Stanislavsky versus Evreinov on Stage Realism and Theatricality Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta) Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques: A Research Project Martina Musilová (Department of Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) „Я есмь“– Stanislavsky and Solovyov
Chair: Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)
Robin Levenson (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York, USA) The Notion of Action Jiang (Harry) Hanyang (University of British Columbia, Canada) By Means of Études: Boris Kulnev in an Advanced Actor Training Class in Beijing, 1955-56 Ewa Danuta Godziszewska (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland) Inside the American Laboratory Theatre. Richard Boleslavsky’s Work with his Students
9:15 Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK) A Practical Exploration of Active Analysis Through a Synthesis of Viewpoints and Quilting the Text 10:00 Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US) The Acorn and the Grain of Sand
10:30 Coffee Break
11:00 Plenary Panel ~ Final Discussion (Venue: Valletta Campus Theatre)
Stanislavsky in Context: Why Is It Still Important?
Chair: Paul Fryer (The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK)
Panel members: Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London, UK)
Tomasz Kubikowski (Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland)
Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague, Czech Republic)
Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)
12:30 End
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Biographies and Abstracts
Friday 5th April
Aula Prima ~ 19:00
Keynote: The Ever-Widening Contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky
Laurence Senelick (Tufts University, USA)
Adopting and adapting Giorgio Strehler’s notion of treating a great play as a series of nesting boxes,
I intend to examine the contexts of Stanislavsky’s life and work as Matryoshka dolls, ever-widening
in significance. The first, most compact box is the biographical: the influence of family, education,
theatrical experience, and social status on his artistic programme. It is set within the second: the
historical, tracking his responses to the broader political and socio-economic events that bore in
upon him. The third is the ideological: siting his ideas within the intellectual and aesthetic trends
of his time. Finally, I hope to demonstrate how, in becoming an institution in modern theatrical
thought and practice, he has generated an all-encompassing context of his own.
Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University and a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author or editor of over
twenty-five books, the most recent being Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern
Culture. Those on Russian theatre include Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet, Serf Actor: The Life
and Art of Mikhail Shchepkin, Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists, Soviet
Theatre: A Documentary History, The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance,
Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters, and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre . His translations of
Chekhov, Gogol, Shvarts and others have been widely performed. He is the recipient of the St
George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian art and theatre.
Saturday 6th April
Valletta Campus Theatre ~ 9:00
Stanislavsky’s System: Mimesis, Truth, and Verisimilitude
Vicki Ann Cremona (Department of Theatre Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of
Malta)
Aristotle sees art as ‘Techne’, a productive skill or activity that engages knowledge as well as
rational processes. In his treatise on the Poetics, he links this productivity to mimesis which, he
claims, is an innately human factor that distinguishes man from all other creatures. Consequently, if
tragedy is the mimesis of action, then the function of actors is that of ‘including the characters for
the sake of their actions’ (Janko 1987: 9). From this, it can be derived that in embodying agency, the
actor takes up a double mimetic role: that of the mover of the action, and of the agent generating it.
Through this work, s/he delivers truths about universal actions (Daniels 2001: 49). In their effort to
interpret Aristotle’s work, Renaissance theorists see the poet’s function as keeping as close to the
truth as possible (Scaliger); it follows that the actor’s function is extended to that of faithfully
representing this representation of true facts. Stanislavsky’s lifelong elaboration of the system may
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be seen as a quest to develop the actor’s ‘techne’ or craftsmanship, through knowledge and thinking
of his skill. His search for the ‘inner truth of sensible behaviour on stage’ (Stanislavski 1928: 16)
requires truthfulness to life (Gorchakov 1994: 232). This paper will examine Stanislavsky’s system
in light of the concepts of truth and verisimilitude, and draw parallels between this methodology
and modern approaches to other artistic fields, to see whether Stanislavsky’s system may be
considered as applicable to areas both within and beyond theatre.
Vicki Ann Cremona is Chair of the School of Performing Arts at the University of Malta. She
graduated from the Université de Provence, France and was a Visiting Scholar at Lucy Cavendish
College, University of Cambridge. She was appointed Ambassador of Malta to France between 2005-
2009, and to Tunisia between 2009-2013. She is an executive member of the International
Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR) and has contributed towards founding Icarus Publishing
Enterprise, a joint initiative between TARF, Odin Teatret (Denmark) and The Grotowski Institute
(Poland). She has various international publications, mainly about theatrical events and public
celebration, particularly Carnival, Commedia dell’Arte, theatre anthropology, Maltese Theatre and
costume. Her most recent publication is entitled: Carnival and Power. Play and Politics in a Crown
Colony (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).
Session One: 10.30 – 12.00
Panel 1 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Frank Camilleri (University of Malta)
Stanislavsky and The Context in Which He Wrote
Kathy Dacre (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)
In 2007 Jean Benedetti was working on his new translations of Stanislavsky’s work. He liked a good
mystery and was keen to stress how interesting it might be to explore Stanislavsky’s publishing
arrangements, government censorship, and the questions that these might pose. This paper takes
up his challenge. Benedetti was particularly interested in how the American Hapgood translations
of An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and the later compilation, Creating a Role came about and
how a copyright agreement with the Hapgood’s controlled all English translations and all Western
European translations from these versions until 1992. The publication of Stanislavsky’s My Life in
Art in English, as Laurence Senelick points out, was part of a publicity campaign accompanying the
visit by the Moscow Art Theatre to the USA in 1923. The Russian born impresario Morris Gest,
‘created an aura of aesthetic sanctity around the players even as he noisily promoted them.’
Stanislavsky approached the Boston publisher Little Brown, with a proposal for a book about his
‘philosophy of creative performance’ but, with the atmosphere of celebrity surrounding the tour he
was persuaded to write a ‘colourful biography full of anecdotes and profiles’ that was called My Life
in Art and published in 1924. On his return to Moscow Stanislavsky began work on a Russian
version which he was much happier with and which became the basis for all subsequent non-
English translations. Stanislavsky, back in Russia, was however now writing texts in a Stalinist
Soviet Russia. His Russian version of My Life in Art was changed in order to conform to Soviet
Communist ideology and his subsequent writings develop what Anatoly Smeliansky calls ‘the
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limiting framework of life-like theatre that was imposed on him by the Soviet understanding of
theatre.’ Stanislavsky was, with Gorky, among Stalin’s favourite artists and, although Stalin’s worst
purges of intellectuals and artists took place after their deaths, state control was absolute in the
early thirties when Stanislavsky was writing. By 1934 all writing had to pass three levels of
censorship.
This paper will consider questions posed by the political context in which Stanislavsky wrote.
Kathy Dacre is a Professor of Theatre Studies at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance,
UK. She has taught drama in colleges and universities including Royal Central School of Speech and
Drama and London University in the UK and Vassar College and New York University in the USA.
She has written and been involved in the development of over twenty five undergraduate and
postgraduate degree programmes in the Performing Arts. With Paul Fryer she co-edited
Stanislavski on Stage to accompany the National Theatre exhibition and has written on
Stanislavski’s production of Lonely Lives and his rehearsal room approaches in Stanislavski Studies.
In 2008 she led the Teaching Stanislavski research project funded by the UK Standing Committee of
Drama Departments and The Higher Education Academy. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education
Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee and Chair of the Development Board
for Shakespeare North.
The Stanislavsky Method and the Artistic Culture of Modernity
Sergey Panov (National University of Technology, Moscow)
Previously, we tried to show that Stanislavsky’s method exceeds strict borders of social and
psychological typology by transforming the human duration in an evolutional movement towards a
sublime purpose of the historical process of all humanity. The new theatre poetics becomes an
intuitive form conditioning the transformation of the effects of emotional discharges in reflexes of
conscience and of the subconscious orientations of understanding and of will which are transferred
in reflective judgements and regulative ideas of human existence. That’s how it is possible to reflect,
to cope and to attribute to any reactive conscience a conviction objectified inside the mind, based
on the complete experimentation of impulsive and reflexive human nature, which is displayed in
this poetics. The artistic time by Stanislavsky establishes itself as a form of the unconscious
becoming of conscious orientations, so the transcendental form of self-sensation as a symbol of
infinite.
But after the apocalypse of the First World War, where humanity left itself guided by more archaic
forms of resolution of conflicts, all optimistic perspectives of the development of the world towards
the unit of good, of beauty and truth is devalued because they become convertable directly in
natural ontologies and ideological projections which are by definition inadequate to the initial
sense of our lived existence. That’s how we see being born the phenomenological theatre, drama
and novel (Proust, Kafka, Gorki, Pirandello) as a research of ‘lost time’, that is to say an infinite
reduction of natural attitudes as reflector and mimetic modes of reactive thought and behavior the
omnipresent thoughtless violence of which had pervaded all the human reality. In this perspective
phenomenological theatre (A.Efros, P.Fomenko, A.Vasiliev) is a form of infinite individualization
and of internalization of the intellectual and critical conscience which tends to reduce its own
intentional acts, that is to say effects of productive reflexes towards a simple contemplation of the
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temporal changeability of the things of the world. The phenomenological position transfers the
character of unforeseen suppleness of the states of the vital, sensory, reflexive and cultural world
by transforming the thoughtful and imagined product of this abstraction in the one and only object
of spiritual authorial pleasure.
Sergei Panov is associate professor at the National University of Technologies MISIS of Moscow (Russia). His main area of research is the philosophical anthropology of artistic culture and pragmatical deconstruction of the Russian and global theatre aesthetics, especially Stanislavsky and his heritage in the context of Russian and European cultural paradigm. Panov’s publications include Writing, semiosis and discource (Moscow, 2010), Replies of literature (Moscow, 2010), Stanislavsky languge into the theatre of Fomenko (Stanislavski Studies, 2018). He is a member of the International Association of Literary Criticism (France) and of the Centre for Superior Studies in Literature (France). From Blue Bird to Seagull: The Theatrical Truth of Alisa Koonen
Dassia N. Posner (Northwestern University, USA)
In 1906, Alisa Koonen began her acting career at the Moscow Art Theatre. She went on to become
one of the greatest actresses of the century: during her life she was often compared to Bernhardt,
Rachel, and Ermolova. Her first major role was that of Mytyl in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird (1908), a
production that remains in the repertoire of the MAT today. Koonen did not achieve her fame at the
MAT, however. In 1913, she signed a contract with Mardzhanov’s Free Theatre, where she met a
young director, Alexander Tairov, with whom she founded the Moscow Kamerny Theatre the
following year. Over the next thirty-five years, Koonen played many of the stage’s greatest
heroines—Sakuntala, Salomé, Phaedra, Antigone, Cleopatra—until the Kamerny was liquidated
during Stalin’s post-World War II pogroms. Koonen became renowned for her rich emotional
saturation, plasticity, musicality, and truthfulness—not to everyday reality, but to the heightened
creative worlds she first encountered in the MAT’s experiments with symbolism. Throughout her
life, she acknowledged Stanislavsky for her artistic upbringing, for introducing her to the art of
Isadora Duncan, and for instilling in her a deep commitment to the highest ideals of art. As a young
actress, though, she was frustrated by Stanislavsky’s early ‘system’ experiments during rehearsals
and felt constrained by the character type in which she was most often cast: the naïve young girl.
Stanislavsky refused to speak to Koonen for many years following her MAT departure. Although
they eventually reconciled, he never entirely forgave his protégé and never fully acknowledged her
success. Together with Tairov, her lifelong collaborator, she developed a new form of theatre that
expanded the inner emotional truth of the virtuosic actor into the full physical environment of the
stage. In her theatrical world, emotion was expressed through the actor’s voice and plasticity and
further amplified in the music and vivid scenic environment. This paper will illuminate the
significance of Koonen’s acting innovations in the context of her MAT roots and her subsequent
creative career at the Kamerny Theatre.
Dassia N. Posner is Associate Professor of Theatre and Slavic Languages and Literatures at
Northwestern University. Her books include The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material
Performance (2014), co-edited with Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, and The Director’s Prism: E. T.
A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde (2016), in which she analyses the vivid
directorial and design innovations of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein.
Her companion website to The Director’s Prism, which features over a hundred archival Russian
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theatre sources, can be accessed at: www.fulcrum.org/northwestern. Recent dramaturgy projects
include Grand Concourse, Russian Transport, and Three Sisters at Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
Posner is currently an ACLS Fellow.
Panel 2 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Lucía Piquero (University of Malta)
Stanislavsky’s Imagination and Experiencing: The Cognitive Link
Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham (University of Georgia, USA)
In Rhoda Blair’s The Actor, Image, And Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience, ‘Imagination is a, if
not the, key term that provides a link between acting and cognitive neuroscience.’ Sharon
Carnicke’s influential Stanislavsky in Focus asserts that Stanislavsky’s most important ‘lost term’
perezhivat (to experience), equates to his idea of ‘living the part’. This paper argues that
imagination is the key to Stanislavsky’s idea of ‘experiencing a role’, and current understandings of
cognitive science help us understand not only the link between the two, but also how we can better
use imagination to enhance the ability of an actor to live the part during performance. The first part
of this paper examines the social, cultural, and political contexts and influences of Stanislavsky’s
understanding of imagination and experiencing. The second part uses several recent influential
cognitive science theories of mind, imagination, and simulations to glean additional context and
focus for these ideas. Imagination occurs in networks across the brain, allowing actors to
experience anew in each performance as they adjust to incoming stimuli and play actions as they
‘experience’ the performance in the complex manner Stanislavsky suggested.
Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham is a director, actor, scholar, media designer, and educator in both theatre
and film. Her primary interests include how the cognitive sciences may lead to new pedagogical
strategies in directing and acting and the effect they may have on the respective theoretical discourses. She is currently the Producing Artistic Director of the professional non-profit Circle
Ensemble Theatre Company. Arp-Dunham received her M.F.A. in Dramatic Media with a Directing
Emphasis from the University of Georgia, where she is a PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance
Studies. She also holds a B.F.A. in Acting from The Ohio State University.
Stanislavsky’s Creative State on the Stage: A Quasi-spiritual Approach to the ‘System’ Through Practice as Research Gabriela Curpan (Goldsmith, University of London)
This paper presents research which aims to rediscover and test a more spiritually orientated way of
preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable type of artistic creativity defined by
Stanislavsky as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox
background, as well as his yogic/Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the
actor, from being oneself towards becoming the character. But how can such process of becoming
be delineated? Where does it start, and what are the possible paths to be followed? To answer such
questions, cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches were called for in order to
understand and follow an appropriate and clear direction. Therefore, the research considered all
the possible and probable avenues of influence for Stanislavsky’s theatrical legacy, including his
Orthodox faith. The practice was structured in three major stages and was developed on another
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three highly interconnected levels. By using various meditation techniques (as an underlying
principle of breath), and by observing certain spiritual ways of behaving, the practice began with
the creation and constant maintenance of a virtually sacralised atmosphere. Later on, during
training (the first stage), when rehearsing (the second stage), or while performing an adaptation of
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (the third stage), the work evolved into testing all the elements of
the ‘system’, with a particular focus given to seven of them that might hold both technical and
spiritual values or usability. The procedures, through which these elements can be addressed in
practice, were translated into specific acting exercises and études, designed to elucidate such
possibly religiously-originated Stanislavskian principles as ‘morality’, ‘nature’,
‘love’/’beauty’/’truth’, ‘experiencing’, ‘incarnation’, ‘spiritual action’, ‘the supertask’ or the
‘superconscious’.
Gabriela Curpan is a PhD Candidate at Goldsmith, University of London, with a research interest in
applied Stanislavsky and Nicolai Demidov’s technique. She is a Romanian professional actress,
trained both in her country and in the UK, with over twenty years of stage experience, currently
teaching acting at University of Wolverhampton, as well as Staffordshire University.
Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis as Seen through the Lens of Contemporary Research in Emotion,
Memory, Embodied Cognition, and Social Neuroscience
Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK)
Contemporary theories of emotion, memory, embodied and situated cognition, and social
neuroscience afford a lens through which to derive a better understanding of the human processes
implicit in Stanislavsky’s method of Active Analysis, as developed by Maria Knebel. Insights derived
from such an understanding afford the facilitator of learning (i.e. the trainer), or the director
possibilities for a more finely nuanced and intentional approach to the invocation of Active Analysis
during the learning and rehearsal processes. Contemporary theories see emotions as functional,
pre-conscious precursors to discursive thought that directly inform an actor’s intentions and
process of decision-making. Fallacies of memory, while primarily adaptive in nature, also result in
an actor’s capacity to remember, with absolute conviction, that which did not happen. Research in
neuroscience also suggests that there is significant overlap in the brain systems utilized in the
processes of imagining the past, imagining the future, and imagining fictional circumstances. The
emotional resonance model of creative thought suggests that a global wave of remote associations
spread through an actor’s memory system, activating disparate, emotion laden, unconscious
memory fragments and the concepts or images to which they are attached. Theories of embodied
and situated cognition reject notions of cognition as an embrained process and foreground the
centrality of phenomenological experience and the affordances of the environment in the processes
of cognition (i.e. understanding) and creativity. Social neuroscience suggests the key role played by
the human mirror mechanism (systems of mirror neurons) in facilitating social cognition and co-
regulated behaviour between actors and between characters and audience. An improvisatory
approach to text allows an actor to fuse her psychophysical experience of environment, movement
and language through a synthesis of Active Analysis, Viewpoints and a technique I term Quilting the
Text, derived from the Lacanian notion of floating signifiers.
Roger Smart comes originally from the UK, but has worked for the past 30 years as a director and
trainer of actors, primarily in the USA. A teacher and director of collegiate and professional actors,
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he has an MFA in Directing from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD from Goldsmiths
College, University of London. In addition to university appointments, he served as Director of
Education and Training at Court Theatre, Chicago and Artistic Director of Shattered Globe Theatre,
Chicago. He currently works as a freelance director and trainer in the UK and as a visiting lecturer
and guest director at the University of Northampton (UK).
Workshop 1 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
10:30 – 11:15
The Yoga of Acting – Building the Charismatic Body: ‘The Actor and Prana’:
A Dynamic, Working Confluence of Stanislavsky’s System and the Yogic Chakra System
Deepak Verma (University of East London, UK)
The Yoga of acting aims to give actors the tools to deeper connect with themselves in order to reach
the character/performance. This workshop will consist of simple yoga exercises and breathwork.
No previous experience is required. The Yoga of acting allows the actor to acquire and explore tools
to experience the Charismatic body to expand radiance and Prana (lifeforce energy) within the
body and in connection with the people, places, and things around you in your space (in life and on
stage). Through Chakric Analysis the actor can have a deeper connection with the character they
are embodying.
Deepak Verma trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He is a television and
stage actor, a playwright, screenwriter and currently completing his P.H.D. at Rose Bruford College
and University of East London – the Yoga of Acting- a methodology which explores the confluence
of Yoga and Stanislavsky’s system. Deepak is a Kundalini Yoga level 2 Teacher- trained in Los
Angeles.
Workshop 2 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
11:15-12:00
Standing on Shoulders: Stanislavsky and Barba
Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, USA)
Eugenio Barba claims that he stands on the shoulders of giants and that there is no taller giant for him than Stanislavsky. Barba’s metaphor suggests something less than blood but more than shared
interests passing in the wings of history’s theatre. It is true that both Stanislavsky and Barba
embrace performer-centred theatre; however, they appear to do so in very different ways.
Stanislavsky’s approach to theatre is grounded in a learned heritage technique in which the actor’s
creativity is guided by an author’s script and a learned process that transforms inspiration into
embodied action. Barba’s theatre, on the other hand, rejects a codified technique that can be passed
down from teacher to pupil in favour of a personal training regimen grounded in the devised and
physical. So, in talking of giants and shoulders, is Barba speaking solely in terms of a shared
obsession with the actor’s craft, which he and Stanislavsky clearly share; or is he alluding to a more
familial linkage to his predecessor – one in which there are connections between Stanislavsky’s
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codified acting technique and his own autodidactic approach to harnessing the actor’s creativity? I
would offer that it is the latter.
This workshop will briefly examine what I regard as some of the relationships between
Stanislavsky’s and Barba’s approaches to acting and how those relationships can be harnessed to an
actor’s benefit. Potential areas to be addressed include:
The role of improvisation in creating a scene Playing an action The ‘Inside-out’ versus the ‘Outside-in’ The As If The given circumstances.
Ian Watson teaches at Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N) where he is Professor of Theatre as well
as the Director of the Theatre Program. He is also the founder and current Director of the Urban
Civic Initiative at RU-N, which combines arts practice with educational strategies as tools of
community engagement in a social justice context. He is the author of Towards a Third Theatre:
Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret (Routledge, 1995, 1993) and Negotiating Cultures: Eugenio
Barba and the Intercultural Debate (Manchester University Press, 2002). He edited Performer
Training Across Cultures (Harwood/Routledge, 2001). He has contributed chapters to over a dozen
books, including Creation in Modern Performance (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2013), Twentieth Century
Actor Training, (Routledge, (2010, 2000), Scholarly Acts: A Practical Guide to Performance Research
(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Acting [Re]Considered (Routledge, 2002, 1995), Performer Training:
Developments Across Cultures (Harwood/Routledge, 2001), and is a contributor to the Oxford
Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. He has also published numerous articles in journals such
as New Theatre Quarterly; About Performance; The Drama Review; Theatre, Dance and Performer
Training; Issues in Integrative Studies; The Latin American Theatre Review; Asian Theatre Journal;
Latin American Theatre Review; and Gestos. He is an Advisory Editor for New Theatre Quarterly;
Theatre, Dance and Performer Training; About Performance; Stanislavski Studies; and Kultura I
Społeczeńśtwo (Culture and Society).
Session Two: 13:30 – 15.00
Panel 3 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague)
The First Class: On the Contribution Made to UK Drama Training by the Actor Harold Lang,
Arguably the First to Teach a Stanislavskian Acting Class in a British Conservatoire
Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London)
This paper examines the original contribution to UK actor training made by the flamboyant,
Stanislavskian actor Harold Lang (1922-1970) and explores his ‘psychological’ approach to the
rehearsal of Shakespearean drama. Trained at RADA in the early forties alongside other figures
influential in actor training such as John Blatchley and Colin Chandler, Lang taught acting at Central
between 1960 and 1963. Unusually for those times, he promoted a Russian, not an American, view
of Stanislavsky. His teaching was considered innovative enough for him to be the subject of a 1961
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BBC Monitor programme directed by John Schlesinger. Throughout the sixties, Lang toured
productions internationally and in 1964 presented his play Macbeth in Camera as part of The
Adelaide Festival of Arts. This didactic piece, which forms part of the Lang archive, dramatizes an
encounter between Lang’s actors and a local festival organiser and academic, who disrupts their
rehearsals to insist that a psychological approach to Shakespeare is an affront to the writer’s genius.
The ensuing argument reveals much about Lang’s efforts to align Stanislavskian techniques with a
literary appreciation of Shakespearean text.
This account of Lang’s work provides a ‘missing link’ in the record of the Stanislavskian legacy in
Britain: it places Lang between the Komisarjevsky and the Method generations of acting teachers
and anticipates the efforts of later directors to ‘marry the two traditions’ (Barton 1984) of
Stanislavsky’s system and ‘text-based’ approaches to Shakespeare’s plays.
Vladimir Mirodan is Emeritus Professor of Theatre, University of the Arts London. Trained on the
Directors Course at Drama Centre London, he has directed over 50 productions in the UK as well as
internationally and has taught and directed in most leading drama schools in the UK. He was
Director of the School of Performance at Rose Bruford College, Vice-Principal and Director of Drama
at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Principal of Drama Centre London and Director of
Development and Research Leader, Drama and Performance, Central Saint Martins.
Throughout his career, Professor Mirodan took a keen interest in director training and formulated a
significant number of formal and informal training frameworks. He served for many years as Vice
Chair of the Directors Guild of Great Britain, on the Drama Committee of the Scottish Arts Council
and on the Board of the Citizens’ Theatre. He is a former Chairman of the Conference of Drama
Schools and a Deputy Chair of the National Council for Drama Training. He is currently the Chair of
the Directors Guild of Great Britain Trust and of the Directors Charitable Foundation.
Professor Mirodan’s research interests revolve around issues of acting psychology, in particular as
this relates to the neuropsychology of gesture and posture. He is also interested in the history and
evolution of actor and director training as well as in defining the ways in which the dramatization
and staging of non-dramatic texts may reveal meanings alongside textual and contextual analyses.
He has published on these topics and The Actor and the Character, his book on the psychology of
transformation in acting, was published by Routledge in November 2018. Together with
neuroscientists from University College London, Professor Mirodan is engaged in a research project
on emotional contagion in acting funded by the Leverhulme Foundation. He is a member of the
Editorial Board of the journal Stanislavski Studies and Review Editor of the journal Frontiers in
Performance Science.
Notes on a Part. Stanislavsky’s Influences as Detected on Dimitris Kataleifos’s Theatrical
Notebooks/diaries on David Mamet’s Plays
Michaela Antoniou (National and Kapodistrian University, Athens, Greece)
The important Greek actor Dimitris Kataleifos has been consistently appearing on the Greek stage,
playing leading and important parts, since the 1980s. A member of significant theatre groups, such
as Morfes in the 1990s, whose primary aim was the creation of ensemble companies, he has been
seeking for a system that would help him construct the roles that he performed. His notebooks
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concentrate the way in which he analyses, synthesises, and approaches each character. They
comprise notes on the role’s history, its background, habits, and so on. They follow Stanislavsky’s
key concepts, such as, ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘for what reason’, and notions, such as, ‘phantasy’ and
‘imagination’. This paper will review the notebooks on the five David Mamet plays in which
Kataleifos has appeared: American Buffalo (1992), The Cryptogram (1996), A Life in the Theatre
(1999), Glengarry Glen Ross (2001), and Oleanna (2013). It will illuminate Stanislavsky’s impact on
Kataleifos and delineate conscious and subconscious choices related to Stanislavsky’s system. It will
also delimit the links of Stanislavsky with Mamet, and the impact of Mamet on the Greek stage.
Michaela Antoniou is Special Teaching Staff in Acting at the Theatre Studies Department at the
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She was born in Piraeus and grew up in Athens and
Thessaloniki. She received her diploma at the National Theatre of Greece Drama School and her BA
Degree at the Theatre Studies Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
She completed her MA (‘Performance and Culture’) and PhD (on Acting and Directing) with
Professor Maria Shevtsova at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has taught at the Theatre
Studies Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her articles have been published in Greek
and international journals, such as New Theatre Quarterly, Stanislavski Studies, and Parabasis. She
has performed on the stage under the guidance of directors, such as Spyros Evangelatos, Yiorgos
Michailidis, and Antonis Antoniou. Her translations for the theatre include Death and the Maiden by
Ariel Dorfman and Home by David Storey. Her play Untitled due to Amnesia was performed in Athens and Patras, 2009-2010. She has written two novels Daisy and the Sunflowers and Daisy and
the Sea.
Brian Friel: Ireland’s Chekhov
Nesta Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)
Aristocrats (1979) was the first of Brien Friel’s original plays to be described as ‘Chekovian’, not
only for its echoes of The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters, but also its subtlety in characterization
and clear-eyed observation of human frailty expressed ironically in a form of poetic realism.
Several others have Chekovian resonances such as his last play The Home Place (2005). Friel
considered Chekhov to be ‘the man who reshaped twentieth-century theatre’, and ‘translated’ Three
Sisters (1981) and Uncle Vanya (1998) into Hiberno-English, followed by The Yalta Game based on
the short story ‘The Lady with the Lapdog’ (2001) and The Bear (2002), specifically for
performance by Irish actors. This last was produced in a double-bill with Afterplay, an original piece
that ‘revisits the lives of two people, Andrey Prozorov and Sonya Serebriakova, who had a previous
existence in two separate plays’, in a ‘run-down café in Moscow in the early 1920s’. The paper
considers the validity of this soubriquet.
Nesta Jones was formerly Professor and Director of Research at Rose Bruford College of
Theatre and Performance; and Reader in Theatre Arts and Head of Drama for many years at
Goldsmiths, University of London. She has published on Brian Friel (Faber & Faber and Oxford
University Press), Tanika Gupta (Oberon Books), David Mamet (Methuen), Sean O'Casey
(Methuen and Chadwyck-Healey), and J.M. Synge (Methuen) amongst others. She was a
founder member and project co-ordinator of CONCEPTS (Consortium for the Co-ordination of
European Performance and Theatre), a member of the Council of Europe's Network Forum
that initiated pan-European projects including conferences and expert seminars with funding
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from the European Commission, the European Cultural Foundation, the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, and Arts Council England. She has organised projects for the British
Council in eastern Europe; directed productions, conducted workshops, and given papers,
many with live performance elements, at international conferences in continental Europe, the
Middle East, North America, and the UK. She has taught at and researched with Trinity College
Dublin and was involved in the founding and development of The Lir, Ireland ’s National
Academy of Dramatic Art. Currently, she lectures in Modern Drama & Performance for New
York University at its base in London; is involved in research projects with the Royal
Shakespeare Company and the Abbey Theatre Dublin; is a Contributing Editor of New Theatre
Quarterly and on the Advisory Editorial Board of Stanislavski Studies; and is a Fellow of the
Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Panel 4 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)
Events and Bits/Beats/Units/Episodes in the British Professional and Pedagogical Context
Dan Barnard (London South Bank University)
Katie Mitchell places great emphasis on Events in her adaptation of Stanislavsky’s process. This is
evidenced in her professional directing practice, in her book A Director’s Craft and her teaching of
other directors. Events are the moments where a Task/Intention/Objective changes. By
highlighting them, the actor or director can bring out the story, meaning, or rhythm of a scene and
reveal the moments where characters undergo change. I will outline Mitchell’s approach to Events
and an adaptation of it that I have developed through my professional directing and teaching in the
UK. We will explore the relationship between Mitchell’s Events and Stanislavsky’s writings on
Tasks/Objectives and on Bits/Units. We will look at how I work with students to identify Events,
the approach that I have developed towards giving them names and how I invite actors and
students to use elements of stagecraft to bring them out. I will share how Events fit into the wider
approach to scene analysis that I have adapted from Drama Centre London’s pedagogy and from
Stanislavsky’s, Mitchell’s, and Hagen’s writings. The paper will end with some reflections on the
strengths and weaknesses of how Stanislavsky’s approach has been adapted in the British context.
Dan Barnard is Artistic Director of fanSHEN Theatre Company and Senior Lecturer in Drama and
Performance at London South Bank University. For fanSHEN he has co-directed 10 professional
productions. At LSBU he leads the acting strand and teaches the Stanislavsky-based modules Acting
a Role and Text and Performance. His training includes extensive workshops with Katie Mitchell,
Bella Merlin, and Elen Bowman. He led a week-long Stanislavsky Laboratory at the Young Vic. He
was Assistant Director to Ian Rickson on Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem at the Apollo Theatre.
(Re)Animating Stanislavsky
Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK)
My ongoing research is concerned with whether through the combination of computer graphics
technologies and automated/behavioural character animation we can create convincing, believable
portrayals of human emotion. Ultimately it asks if an android or avatar can create the procedural
movements, gestures, and/or facial expressions in response to live, real-time ‘given circumstances’
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that enable an audience to be emotionally moved. Or put simply, ‘can an avatar act?’. These two
arenas rapidly collide. Automating the acting process inevitably involves attempting to systematise
it, which is essentially what Stanislavsky spent his life working towards. Psychologists and
neuroscientists have long observed and modelled the outward expression of inner emotion; such
that it is argued that there may be a palette of poses, gestures, and facial expressions which connote
and portray arrays of emotional states, albeit complicated, context-dependent and variable
according to the dramatic situation. To experiment and explore this, it seems fittingly ironic to
create a digitally animated likeness of Stanislavsky himself – an iconic figure every sense – to model
various expressions, gestures, and other modes of portrayal, and measure their efficacy as a set of
convincing performances. Eighty years after the great man’s death, it’s time to see if we can bring
Stanislavsky back to life.
Jon Weinbren is head of Digital Media Arts (DMA) at the University of Surrey. DMA at Surrey is a
multi-disciplinary programme which develops creative practice and research in the swathe of
contemporary and emerging moving image media forms, including film, television, visual effects,
animation, performance capture, games, immersive media, interactive, digital theatre, motion
graphics, and computational arts. His areas of research interest include digital actor performance,
emotion synthesis in animated characters, virtual cinematography, interactive narrative, and digital
theatre. His focus is on these and other spaces where the culture, practice, and theory of film,
animation, television, theatre, games, and other artistic arenas collide and coalesce. Coming into the profession initially as a scriptwriter for film, television, and games, Jon is also a practical film-
maker, digital animator, previsualisation artist, and game designer. Prior to joining Surrey, he set
up and ran the Games Department at the National Film and Television School having spent many
years in both industry and academia as a maker and producer in emerging media forms. Jon has
developed particular expertise on the nature of mediated emotion portrayal in acting and
performance, particularly within performance capture, animation and the digital avatar. Jon’s unit
is currently working with leading motion capture outfit Centroid to set up an upgraded in-house
performance capture studio within the department, to complement other advanced production
facilities already in-place.
Emotion Memory: ‘A Dangerous Reputation’
Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)
In October of 2018, Backstage published an article by Alex Yates called ‘The Definitive Guide to the
Stanislavski Acting Technique’. This was a very cursory and superficial description of his life and
some of his ideas. It was certainly in no way ‘definitive’. In fact, it perpetuated some common
misconceptions about his work. For instance, it says he merely ‘dabbled in the performing arts as
an amateur actor, opera singer, producer, and director’, with no mention of the Moscow Art
Theatre and the years he spent there. However, as the author talks of the merging of the System
of Stanislavsky with the Method of Strasberg, he makes a comment I hadn’t heard since I was
an undergraduate – that Emotion Memory has a ‘dangerous reputation’ and that ‘[s]ome high-
profile actors have merged their personal lives with that of their characters’ lives in
psychologically unhealthy ways’. It reminded me of my own early training where we were told
specifically not to read An Actor Prepares because this kind of work had driven actors to
suicide. There was no evidence for this assertion and in all of the years I have been studying
his work, I have not encountered any. But the sternness of the warnings meant I di dn’t study
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his work until more than a decade later. In my doctoral research, I surveyed more than 300
actors, many who had trained in System/Method-based programs, and none of them
mentioned any emotional distress. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone who said that they ‘merged
with their character’ and then ‘took their character home with them’. So where did these
notions come from and why do they persist? In this paper, I aim to trace the lineage of this
notion of the danger inherent in studying Stanislavsky and attempt to find actual evidence.
Eric Hetzler is a Senior Lecturer in Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the University of
Huddersfield. His ‘Survey of the Actor’s Experience’ led to several publications examining how
actors describe emotion in performance and the importance of awareness on stage. In his
continuing exploration of emotion and acting he has been studying the Alba Method of Emotion and
is a certified level 3 Teacher.
Workshop 3 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
13.30 – 14.15
Stanislavsky Backwards
Karen Benjamin (University of Gloucestershire, UK)
Comedy improvisers work instantaneously to create relationships, characters, and situations from
suggestions offered by an audience. Therefore, how much is the comedy improviser using the
method as their approach to create work and how are they applying this process? Offers from the
audience come in the form of suggestions for characters, relationships, specific places, problems the
improvisers have to solve on stage, or simply just an object. Whatever the offer the players respond
quickly in order to create a scene or play the game. This may mean that they work backwards
through the method responding to ‘where’ first, as in place, and then creating a character, often also
in response to offers from their partner on stage. Johnstone (1981) writes ‘the improviser has to be
like a man walking backwards’, taking the offers and making sense of the world in which they play
and using the approach of who, what, where, and why are essential elements in creating this world.
A world of ‘why not-ness’ as defined by Angelo De Castro in which anything can happen as long as
the player is committed to that world.
Karen Benjamin has a background in performing having initially worked professionally in TV and
theatre after graduating with a Drama & Dance degree. She was Director of her own Community
Theatre Company for seven years and has experience of working with a wide range of children and
young people through many years in Theatre in Education and through delivery of workshops and
running youth theatres. At the University of Gloucestershire she delivers Modules in Acting,
Devising, Laban Movement for Actors and Theatre in Education, as well as being involved in
European Projects promoting transfer of knowledge. Most recently working on ARTPAD (Achieving
Resilience Through Play & Drama) an Erasmus + research project culminating in a training course
for teachers and educators on how to use drama techniques and approaches within the classroom.
Karen continues to direct shows outside of the University and performs with Box of Frogs, a
Comedy Improv company in Birmingham and Off Broad Street, a Musical Improv group.
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Workshop 4 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
14.15-15:00
The ‘Perspective’ in Practice: from Plato to Chekhov
Stéphane Poliakov (University of Paris 8)
Stanislavsky teaches about two perspectives: a perspective of the role and a perspective of the
actor. Perspective is an important tool for playing scenes in Chekhov and generally speaking in
drama from the circumstances through the conflict and the continuity of action. Vasiliev proposes a
‘reverse perspective’ theorized from P. Florensky, B. Uspensky, and, of course, Stanislavsky. It is
supposed to build the material for acting from the end and not only from the situation. If this
structure is particularly clear on conceptual texts (Plato, Shakespeare, Molière) it is also possible to
apply these principles in Chekhov, Pirandello… In this workshop, we will try to experiment with
this approach in Chekhovian texts (The Cherry Orchard) and possibly on conceptual texts.
Stéphane Poliakov is a director, actor, and theatre pedagogue. He teaches at the University of Paris
8 as Associate Professor. He translates Stanislavsky into French and wrote his PhD on the
Stanislavsky system. He studied for many years with Anatoly Vasiliev both in Russia and France. His
current work is linked with Stanislavsky and the practice of Plato’s dialogue. He published
Constantin Stanislavski (2015), a translation of Maria Knebel’s books on active analysis (L’Analyse-
Action, 2006), and a book on Vasiliev: L’art de la composition (2006). He has led many workshops
and staged work by Plato, Chekhov, Diderot, and Orwell.
Session Three: 15:30 – 17.00
Panel 5 ~ Meeting Room 6 Chair: Ian Watson (Rutgers University-Newark, US)
The System of Service: Stanislavsky and Emotional Labour Today
Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal (Birkbeck, University of London)
This paper will examine the ways in which elements of Stanislavskian actor training are finding
new iterations in the recruitment and training of employees in the contemporary service sector.
Specifically, this paper will focus on the demand for ‘emotional labour’ in customer facing service
work, considering the ways in which Stanislavsky’s work has already been drawn upon in the
analysis of such jobs, and how this analysis can be further extended and developed by paying closer
attention to the trajectory of his thought and teaching. In her seminal work The Managed Heart,
sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild defines emotional labour as ‘work which involves the
management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display’. Building on this
definition, I argue for an understanding of emotional labour as work which requires certain
characteristics or traits to be performed before an audience, and that focusing on the performative
element of emotional labour is a fruitful avenue of study.
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Hochschild herself uses Stanislavsky to bolster her claim that emotional labour can be best
understood through a dichotomy of deep or surface acting, corresponding to performances
involving either ‘natural’ and ‘spontaneous’ feeling, or those which are ‘put on’ and based only on
outwardly appearance. Drawing on my own data from two workplaces in London, including
participant observation and interviews with employees, I will offer a departure from this model of
deep/surface acting in emotional labour, which is heavily reliant on the use of affective memory
and the influence of the American ‘method’ approach. I will argue instead that by turning to other,
later, elements of Stanislavsky’s teaching, such as the method of physical action, we can develop a
stronger analysis of emotional labour using the lens of performance.
Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal is a doctoral candidate in Arts and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is interdisciplinary, combining insights from theatre and performance studies with methods from the social sciences to examine the rise of 'emotional labour' in the service sector, and its similarities with the work of professional actors. She is interested in the development of performance studies as methodological framework and its application to the study of economic and industrial changes. Jaswinder received her BA in English and Drama from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in Text and Performance from Birkbeck and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She is also a playwright whose work has been performed at the Old Vic, Old Red Lion, and Rosemary Branch theatres in London, as well as the Brighton Fringe, RADA and VAULT festivals. Wine, Tea, and Sympathy: for an Orphic Stanislavsky at the Turn of Three Centuries
Vasilios N. Arabos (ΙΜΑΛΙΣ: Research Initiative for Ancient Drama, Athens, Greece)
The influence of (neo)Platonic thought on Stanislavsky in his construction of the System has
been covered in the academic literature in terms of the larger Russian Symbolist and neo -
Idealist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The relationship,
however, of this theoretical substrate of Ancient Greek thought to the art of acting and the
application of its principles to the staging of Greek plays in particular —by Stanislavsky
himself or his scions— has not been rigorously investigated, nor indeed has their correlation
with the practice or theory of theatre of the Greeks been revisited on the terms of their own
philosophical or performance tradition. Conducted in situ in Epidauros since 2011, my
research originates in the lyrical prosodic drama and amphitheatric performance topologies of
Ancient Greek theatre, which I treat as the interface of χώρος/λόγος/σώμα, or
space/verb/body, in both physical and abstract terms based on this correlation; this paper will
share the results of that research as a performance and training dimension strongly implicated
by the context and core of Stanislavsky’s approach to acting, but largely unexploited on the
contemporary stage. The application of Greek philosophical principles by other significant
figures (Craig, Laban) will also be considered, and the demonstration of specific techniques
based on the correspondence of practices culled from the primary Greek dramatic texts will be
presented as an illustration of the potential these principles hold for us today.
Vasilios N. Arabos is Artistic Director of the Imalis Center for Ancient Hellenic Theatre of
Epidauros (2011-2016). He is an independent director, dramatist, researcher, and educator,
holding advanced degrees from the Actors Studio School of Dramatic Arts (MFA Directing), the
University of Paris VIII, and the Ecole Normale Supérieure (DEA+3, Texte Imaginaire Société),
Harvard University (MTS, World Religions), and the University of Rochester (BS/BA in
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Maths/Optics). His work for film and television has earned several international awards and he has
created and staged international theatre productions, most recently in London, that have gone on to
tour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and currently in Germany. His research and work-
demonstrations in Ancient Greek Theatre have been presented at academic and research
conferences internationally.
The Vaudevillean Universe: Creating Worlds in Stanislavsky
Tomasz Kubikowski (Akademia Teatralna, Warsaw, Poland)
In this paper, I consider Stanislavsky’s intuitions in the context of the parallelly emerging
phenomenological tradition. ‘You don’t yet know what world of feelings you must live in while
performing this type of play. I intentionally use the word “world”, because vaudeville is a world of
its own, inhabited by creatures whom one does not meet in comedy, drama or tragedy…’. This
instruction given by Stanislavsky while directing vaudeville and reported by Gorchakov lets us
clearly see into the way Stanislavsky regards the creation of a theatre performance as a creation of
a complete alternative world; it is always realistic, but its reality diverges from our own: e.g. ‘The
Vaudevillians’ may share most of the human traits, but nevertheless, they are ‘creatures’ of some
distinct, different characteristics, which we must reconstruct through our actions. This seems to
coincide with the insights and techniques developed by Edmund Husserl under the name of
‘phenomenology’. In his Ideas… Husserl describes the process of the mutual creation of the human personalities through the so-called Einfühlung and the subsequent process of creating the
‘communicative world’ which forms our social reality. Like Stanislavsky, Husserl refrains from
creating it ‘in general’, rather letting it focus on details (‘all evidence in seizing upon essences
requires a complete clarity of the single underlying particulars in their concreteness’). If we follow
Lubov Gurevitch’s testimony, they also share a similar, specific notion of the ‘essence’ itself. The
same can be traced through recent continuators of the phenomenological reflection, especially John
Searle, whose notions of ‘background’ or ‘social reality’ can be well use to describe Stanislavsky’s
techniques of a stage creation.
Tomasz Kubikowski is currently a professor at the Theatre Academy in Warsaw and the
literary manager of the National Theatre of Poland. He is a performance researcher, essayist,
dramaturge, translator and reviewer, author of numerous texts published in journals, and of
four books on theory, of which the most recent are: Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Experience
(2014), and Survive on stage (2015).
Panel 6 ~ Meeting Room 5
Chair: Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US)
Devising Theatre for Traumatized Participants using Action-based Direction
Margot Wood (Anex Theatre Productions, South Africa)
When dealing with personally traumatized participants, and devising theatre dealing with these
traumatic events, the emotions involved are real and often overwhelming for participants.
Emotional recall, in such circumstances, might trigger a reliving of the original traumatic event and
its accompanying emotions. Theatre practitioners, no matter how empathetic, are generally not
trained therapists and therefore not well equipped to deal with the possible after effects of such
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experiences. Action-based instruction, that is instruction focusing on physical states of being and
physical action, can provide a framework within which emotionally charged issues can be revisited
and explored. This paper documents the use of embodied acting techniques and action-based
direction to devise a performance script and performance piece dealing with personal trauma.
Margot Wood is a theatre-maker and lecturer in Educational Drama and Theatre at the Cape
Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Her most recent area of research is
in devising theatre for participants with physical, neurological, and cognitive challenges. She is a
puppeteer and storyteller and has worked with the elderly and traumatized groups to create
meaningful theatrical experiences through Storytelling for Healing. She is the Artistic Director of
two theatre companies based in Cape Town. Her directing credits include People are Living there
(Best Production Fugard Festival 2010) and The Captain’s Tiger (Best Production Fugard Festival
2011) – realistic plays by South African playwright, Athol Fugard. As a director, she has
experimented with many approaches and influences ranging from Stanislavsky, Michael Chekov,
and Arthur Lessac to Commedia dell’Arte and clowning.
ALICE: ‘Ben’s going in from a really horrible angle. It’s almost as painful as a smear test’ –
DUST by Milly Thomas
Should I (a middle-aged man) Teach Students the Theory and Practice of Stanislavskian Good
Faith Using the Play DUST by Milly Thomas? James Palm (Bird College, UK)
I teach the theory and practice of Acting Towards Good Faith. This synthesises existential
philosophy and Stanislavskian principles of acting; the student is free to make any choice they wish
in the pursuit of a physically achievable objective. The goal of this methodology and method is to
free the student to become the physical embodiment of radical freedom through their actions; the
dramaturgy of acting towards good faith emerges through the student’s actions. Thus, my objective
is to free my students from the inchoate dramaturgical prerequisites of mimesis, representation,
naturalism, realism et al.
The problem: As a middle-aged man should I avoid using plays such as DUST due to their content?
DUST is a play in which the character of Alice describes sex, masturbation, menstruation, self-harm,
and suicide.
In the current political and social context, the middle-aged man has become a figure of distrust,
contempt, and ridicule. Many men who look like me have been exposed for wielding their privilege
with impunity; middle-aged male politicians, priests, directors, producers, and pedagogues have
exploited the silence of their victims and hidden behind their privilege. In the less dramatic day-to-
day narrative of conservatoire teaching, the patriarchal narrative of the male guru is perpetuated
and validated; I embody this privilege.
The Question: Is using DUST in conjunction with my methodology and method an exploitation of
my students?
James Palm trained as an actor at the East 15 School of Acting and the Royal Central School of
Speech and Drama (RCSSD), achieving an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice. He also has a PGCE in
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Drama from the University of Reading. James was in receipt of the Elise Fogerty Studentship and
awarded a PhD in actor training by RCSSD examined by Bella Merlin and David Shirley. He
continues to lecture at RCSSD teaching, mentoring and assessing modules on the MA/MFA in Actor
Training and Coaching. James is the Head of Acting at Bird College. As a part of his research he
regularly visited New York to develop his own actor training methods; his research is based on
acting techniques taught at the Lee Strasberg Studio, Stella Adler Studio, Meisner Studio, Chekhov
Studio, Atlantic Theatre School, and The Classical Studio at New York University. As an actor James
has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Old Vic, Young Vic, BAC, The Gate, Channel 4, BBC, Thames
Television, ITV1, and Independent Radio. James has taught, lectured, and directed at: The Royal
Central School of Speech and Drama; Arts Ed’; GSA; Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and
Dance, and The Urdang Academy.
With the Function and Requirement of the Actor Constantly Changing, How Can a System
Written Almost 100 years ago Train the Modern Theatre Practitioner?
Cymon Allen (Performers College, UK)
This paper will look at the adaptions that various practitioners have made to the System to
benefit the teaching of acting within a musical theatre teaching environment. I will explore
how to implement Stanislavsky’s work within tight teaching time frames, and how with the use
of Meisner, Chekov, active analysis and the work of both Sergei Tcherkasski’s Stanislavski and Yoga and Nikolai Demidov’s Becoming an Actor Creator, can allow multi-disciplinary students
to be able to fold a Stanislavskian approach into their work practice. The paper will also look
at how areas of dance and singing reinforce the ideas of Stanislavsky to allow students to
embrace the System across the entirety of their practice. The student should then always
create truthful characters that behave in the way the given circumstances of the work
demands.
Cymon Allen teaches acting at both Performers College and MEPA in the UK. He trained at
Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and worked as an actor for over 25 years until he
began teaching. As an actor he worked in plays, musicals, television, and as an actor musician.
He has worked in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Career highlights include Good at the Donmar
Warehouse, Burial at Thebes, with Nottingham Playhouse UK and USA tour, Sweeney Todd in
the West End, The Merchant Of Venice, at Greenwich Playhouse, Return to the Forbidden Planet,
My Fair Lady and Chess, UK tours as well as appearing on EastEnders and Holby City for the
BBC.
As a teacher Cymon taught at GSA before undertaking an MA at Surrey University in Creative
Practices and Direction – Actor Training Pathway. He is hoping to undertake PhD study in the
integration of targeted actor training into a musical theatre training model , and is dedicated to
placing Stanislavsky’s System as a central foundation of the training of musical theatre
students.
Workshop 5 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 15.30 – 16.15
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The Application of Stanislavsky to Theatre of the Absurd Texts Julian Jones (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK)
Building upon the practical research carried out during my last ERASMUS Teaching Mobility trip to
Malta (April 2018) I will further explore the application of Stanislavskian techniques to absurdist
plays. The workshops I ran last year explored the use of the magic if when working on a variety of
non-naturalistic texts. This workshop presents a piece of practice-as-research that tests the
applicability of a wider range of Stanislavskian ‘tools’, but with a narrower focus in relation to text. I
will look specifically at the plays of Harold Pinter. The historical/social/cultural context considered
will, as a consequence of the choice of material, include both the contemporary environment of
actor training in the academy and the period in which Pinter’s early plays were written and first
produced. Questions relating to the concerns of British playwrights in the mid-twentieth century
may be seen to intersect with, or stand in tension against, questions raised in relation to
contemporary actor training – the place of psychological realism both for the actor and the
playwright then and now, for instance. The presentation will comprise a short introduction relating
to context, and outlining the objectives of the research, followed by a 20 minute practical exercise.
Julian Jones trained at RADA and has worked as an actor in Theatre, Television, and Film for the
past thirty-three years. Recently: Prospero in The Tempest (2015); Dr Wilson in Human Emotional
Process (2016) and Marley in A Christmas Carol (2017). He is a Senior Lecturer in Acting at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance where he both teaches and directs. For several years
Jones has – with David Zoob – delivered a workshop on Brecht for the MA Directing course at
Birkbeck College and has also run workshops on Brecht and Shakespeare for the East 15 Director’s
Course. Jones is Artistic Director of his own company: Burning Oak, which in 2013 took their
production of Royal Court young writer Thomas Clancy’s new play, Novemberunderground, to The
Edinburgh Festival following London Performances at the Soho Theatre Upstairs and Theatre 503.
Their second production, Pussy, again by Clancy, was premiered at The Phoenix Artist Club in
London in July/August 2014. In 2011 Julian and a group of Rose Bruford graduates ran several
workshops at the Rose Theatre Kingston, with the aim of developing a series of exercises intended
to help the actor when approaching Brecht. These exercises constitute the final chapter of Stephen
Unwin’s The Complete Brecht Toolkit. Jones is currently working on a book based on his approach to
teaching Shakespeare. Since 2015 Jones has taught yearly workshops on Stanislavsky’s ‘system’ at
the University of Malta. His particular interest in Greek Theatre led to a BA in History and
Archaeology (First Class) from Birkbeck College; a Masters in Classical Studies (with Distinction)
from the Open University; and a diploma from the Epidauros Summer School run by the University
of Athens. He is a Fellow of The Higher Education Academy.
Workshop 6 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 16.15 – 17:00
The Art of Actioning Edward Caruana Galizia (Freelance Actor, Malta) Stanislavski’s method of acting is a common method used by theatre and film practitioners alike. An integral part of this method is the process of actioning. Actioning is the process whereby an actor
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hones in on what their character ‘wants’ and then pinning down how they get it. The ‘how’ is the action. It needs to be a transitive verb, in other words a verb that needs both a subject and object (e.g. I invite you). Howe ver many actors seek to rush through this vital process, resulting in a weak or irrelevant actioning verbs, which then leads to the actor simply ‘guessing’ during the rehearsal period. Many actors find this stage boring and far to ‘academic’, and in doing so they miss out on a nurturing and creative part of their character formation.
In this short workshop we will look at ways of making actioning a more inspirational process rather
than an academic one. Using Stanislavski’s method of breaking a scene down into beats, we will
explore ways of finding inspiration from the character, script, and research, and how this can be
used to make an actor’s performance better.
Special Presentation ~ Valletta Campus Theatre 19.00 – 20.30
Method of Action Analysis: from Stanislavsky to Today – A Practical Session on the Director’s
Craft of Play Analysis
Sergei Tcherkasski (Russian State Institute of Performing Arts, St Petersburg)
This theoretical and practical session will expose fundamentals of Action Analysis (Analysis
through Actions) of the play – a tool of translating a play (dramaturgy) into a work of stage art
(production). The ideas of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and modern Russian directors’ school will be
revealed and discussed.
First approaches to play analysis were formulated by Stanislavsky in the 1910s (drafts on Woe from
Wit). They summarized his own director’s practice and were influenced by his dialogue with
Nemirovich-Danchenko, not only a cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre, but a professional
playwright. Shifts in Stanislavsky’s understanding of actor training in the 1930s also developed his views on analysis of a play (drafts on Othello and General Inspector). But he never wrote down the
fundamentals of his director’s practice. Even the term Action Analysis was coined not by
Stanislavsky, but by his protégé of the 1930s, Maria Knebel.
Russian theatre practitioners of the 1960s-1990s – the above-mentioned Knebel and Alexander
Polamishev in Moscow as well as Georgi Tovstonogov and Mar Sulimov in Leningrad–St. Petersburg
developed Stanislavsky’s approaches in different ways. Their writings and teaching of many years
in leading Russian theatre institutions had established a broad field of practical and methodological
understanding of Action Analysis. Further steps were proposed by Anatoliy Vasiliev, Knebel’s
student in GITIS, who modified Action Analysis for needs of his Ludo theatre, thus also opening
possibilities of its further dialogue with post-modern theatre.
This presentation will clarify the relationship between the Method of Action Analysis, Method of
Physical Actions, and Étude technique. It will also explore the vocabulary of Action Analysis: event,
given circumstances, through-line of action, objective and super-objective, etc.
The practical part of the session will deal with an analysis of Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare,
General Inspector by Gogol, and The Seagull by Chekhov. We encourage future participants to reread
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these plays to fully enjoy the session. If you’ll have these texts with you that will be appreciated. All
registered participants will receive soft copies of the plays to their emails.
Sergei Tcherkasski is Professor of Acting and Directing, Head of Acting Studio at the Russian State
Institute of Performing Arts (St Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy, est. 1779). He is a director,
teacher and theatre historian and holds Ph.D. and D.Sc. (Theatre Arts). He was formerly Artistic
Director of the Pushkin Drama Theatre in Krasnoyarsk and has taught and directed productions all
over the world, including the Komisarjevsky Drama Theatre, Liteinii Theatre (St Petersburg), and
RADA (London), NIDA (Sydney), and National Theatre (Bucharest). His books include Stanislavsky
and Yoga (Routledge, 2016, also in three other languages); Sulimov’s School of Directing (2013); and
the multi-awarded Acting: Stanislavsky – Boleslavsky – Strasberg (National Prize for Best Theatre
Book, 2016, International Stanislavsky Award, 2017).
Sunday 7th April
Session Four: 9:15-10:30/10:45
Panel 7 ~ Meeting Room 6
Chair: Jon Weinbren (University of Surrey, UK)
Stanislavsky versus Evreinov on Stage Realism and Theatricality
Inga Romantsova (Australian Institute of Music/University of Newcastle, Australia)
The theatrical avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century in Russian culture produced
many theories that influenced the development of world theatre for generations. Among them,
Stanislavsky’s Method of Physical Actions is widely used, while Evreinov’s unique Monodrama is less
well known but no less influential. Evreinov’s theatrical career was overshadowed by Stanislavsky
as a result of social changes in Russia. This paper examines the differences and similarities between
Evreinov and Stanislavsky, specifically in their approach to Stage Realism and Theatricality.
Evreinov claimed through his theoretical work that life is full of theatrical conventions; theatre is an
organic urge as basic as hunger or sex. Referring to this urge as Theatricality or the Instinct of
Transformation, he brought the theatre into life and not the other way around. For Stanislavsky,
Theatricality was equated with exaggeration, and an intensification of behaviour that rang false when juxtaposed with what should be the ‘realistic truth’ of the stage. This paper reflects on
Stanislavsky’s and Evreinov’s theoretical work within the social and political context as well as
their influence on the contemporary theatre, also illuminating, as both practitioners have had a
direct influence on contemporaries such as Grotowski and Artaud. The author argues that
practitioners approached the Theatricality and Stage realism from different perspectives, but in fact
they are two sides of the contemporary theatrical tool.
Inga Romantsova is a Russian-born actress specialising in Russian acting techniques. Beginning
her career as an actor in theatre and film as a graduate with Bachelor (Hons) from St Petersburg
State Theatre Arts Academy, since the late-1990s she has acted extensively in Australia. She
received her Masters in theatre and film from UNSW and just completed her Thesis on Evreinov and
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Questions of Theatricality at the University of Newcastle. She is currently a sessional academic at the
University of Newcastle. Inga has presented her research at conferences including the Annual
Conference of Australasian Association of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies conference at
Sydney University in 2016, and at the Victorian College for the Arts Melbourne, 2018. She has
performed for companies in Russia, Europe, and Australia including Bell Shakespeare Company,
Sydney Art Theatre Company, Griffin Theatre Company, and NIDA.
Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques: A Research Project
Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)
Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques (CTATT) is a research project that studies how actor training practices are transmitted across cultures, and in this process appropriated and transformed. It studies both historical and contemporary instances of actor training transmission, with particular attention given to how modern approaches like Stanislavsky’s system and Meyerhold’s biomechanics are adopted in contemporary training. The project is based at the Department of Theatre Studies (University of Malta) and was officially launched in April 2018. In this presentation project director Stefan Aquilina contextualises the research within broader discourses about cultural transmission, and discusses the first event – a series of workshops on Stanislavsky’s magic ‘if’ with different European practitioners – organised within the project’s remit.
Stefan Aquilina is Director of Research and Internationalisation of the School of Performing Arts
and Theatre Studies Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. His research focus is Russian
modernism, especially Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, but has wider interest in the cultural
transmission of embodied practice, devised performance, and reflective teaching. Aquilina’s
publications include the co-edited volumes Stanislavsky in the World and Interdisciplinarity in the
Performing Arts: Contemporary Perspectives, as well as numerous journal essays. Aquilina is the
director of Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques, a research project investigating
how training techniques are transformed when transmitted across cultures (www.ctatt.org). He has
undertaken research as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds, as a William Evans Fellow at the
University of Otago in New Zealand, and at The Oxford Research Centre of the Humanities at the
University of Oxford.
„Я есмь“– Stanislavsky and Solovyov
Martina Musilová (Department of Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno,
Czech Republic)
The paper discusses the roots of using the expression „Я есмь“ in the Stanislavsky system and in
the book An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary – Part I. It explains the relation of this term to the
concepts of acting of experiencing (переживание) and supertask (сверхзадача) and its relation to
Vladimir Solovyov’s philosophy. „Я есмь“ is an untranslatable Old Russian expression that is not
used in the contemporary everyday Russian language anymore. The English translation ‘I am’ is
insufficient as it renders the original term symptomless, while the Russian expression refers to the
orthodox liturgy (it is used for translating the biblical verse Ex 3,14, comprising the
tetragrammaton YHWH). The connection between Stanislavsky’s system, the acting of experiencing
and orthodox liturgy can be understood through the perspective of Vladimir Solovyov’s book
Lectures on Godmanhood (1878–1881) which might have been known to Stanislavsky as Solovyov
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played a crucial role in Russian culture at the end of the nineteenth century. The expression „Я
есмь“ in Solovyov’s sense of active ‘I’ can be found in Stanislavsky’s book An Actor‘s Work: A
Student’s Diary in the chapters VIII. Faith and a Sense of Truth and XVI. On the Threshold of the
Subconscious. Stanislavsky usually uses the expression as „Я есмь“ or the phrase состояниe „Я
есмь“ (conditions of ‘I am’) in these chapters. According to Stanislavsky the faith and sense of truth
can awake the conditions of ‘I am’ and the subconscious of the actor, while the supertask is joined
with the life work and life mission connected with the superconscious.
Martina Musilová graduated in theatre studies from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in
Prague, where she successfully defended her thesis in 2007 (published in 2011 under the title
Fauefekt. Vlivy Brechtova epického divadla a zcizujícího efektu v českém moderním herectví). During
her university studies she attended Professor Ivan Vyskočil’s lectures of Dialogical Acting with the
Inner Partner at AMU’s Theatre Faculty in Prague. Since 1999 she has been working as an assistant
of this discipline. Since 2009 she has been lecturing at the Department of Theatre Studies at the
Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University in Brno and since 2013 also at the Department of Theory and
Criticism at AMU’s Theatre Faculty in Prague. She specializes in the history and theory of acting and
the theatricality of public events.
Panel 8 ~ Meeting Room 5 Chair: Eric Hetzler (University of Huddersfield, UK)
The Notion of Action
Robin Levenson (LaGuardia CC, City University of New York, USA)
Though critical studies on Anton Chekhov’s plays abound, as do studies on the nature of
translation, few theorists or theatre critics have concerned themselves with how Chekhov’s
plays, or other plays in translation, may actually be acted. Translation scholar Lefevere writes:
‘Literary analyses of translated dramatic texts very often were confined to its textual
dimension; to what was on the page. Neither discipline (linguistics or literary analysis)
developed the necessary tools to deal with other dimensions in a satisfactory way ’. The ‘other
dimensions’ often so difficult for literary critics and linguists to describe are the theatrical
ones. In this paper, I will discuss the most important of these: the notion of ‘Action’. Action is
not an intellectual concept, but a functional tool for actors and other theatre practitioners that
helps define the nature of the play itself, and the psycho-physical work of the performer. An
understanding of Action — as Stanislavsky and later practitioners have used it — is necessary
in describing how different word usage in various translations may influence the actor’s work
on Anton Chekhov’s plays in translation, and indeed all plays meant for performance.
Robin Levenson completed her BA in French and Dramatic Art at UC Santa Barbara, her MFA
in Acting at UC Riverside, and her PhD in Music and Performing Arts from NYU. She is an
Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at LaGuardia CC, CUNY. Her first book, Acting
Chekhov in Translation: 4 Plays, 100 Ways came out in January 2019. She has written articles
for Communications of the International Brecht Society on Woyzeck and The
Seagull, the Dialogues in Social Justice Journal on Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Explorations in Media
Ecology Journal and for the New York Society on General Semantics on language and George
Gurdjieff, as well as publications for the New York State Communication Association, where
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she is also on the Executive Board. Robin has acted professionally in L.A. and New York, on
stage and in film. Her research interests include how language influences thought and
behaviour, and the nature of performance.
By Means of Études: Boris Kulnev in an Advanced Actor Training Class in Beijing, 1955-56
Jiang (Harry) Hanyang (University of British Columbia, Canada)
From January 1955 to April 1956, the Soviet acting teacher Boris Grigorievich Kulnev (1904-1990)
conducted an Advanced Actor Training Class at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. This
programme was caught up in a larger agenda, which aimed at diffusing the Stanislavsky System of
acting throughout the newly established theatres and acting schools in the People’s Republic of
China. The participants were carefully chosen from all regions and levels of the country and had to
take entrance exams for admission. The year-and-a-half training programme encompassed all
classical Stanislavskian exercises such as concentration of attention, bodily self-perception, and,
among others, the étude technique focusing on improvisation within a simple given circumstance.
All in all, the students rehearsed four plays, including an adaptation of the Chinese novel Baofeng
zhouyu (The Hurricane), Gorky’s Philistines, Afinogenov’s Mashenka, and Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet. Once the head of the Boris Shchukin Higher Drama School at the Evgeny Vakhtangov State
Academic Theatre, Kulnev was well immersed in the Vakhtangov school of stage art, a prestigious
lineage traceable to Yevgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922), a protégé of Stanislavsky and Leopold Sulerzhitsky (1872-1916), who had adopted études as one of his signature training practices. By
analyzing the stenographic notes of the advanced class and several participants’ memoirs, this
paper focuses on the exercises of silent, solo, and duet études coached by Kulnev at the stage of
basic actor-training and the scenic études he used in devising The Hurricane. I argue that by
introducing études, Kulnev not only embodied his precept that the performer’s emotion should
arise from action. He also carried a dialogue with what Maria Knebel (1898-1985) termed the
‘active analysis of the play and the role’, a directorial method by means of études that was regarded
as the pinnacle of Stanislavsky’s creative heritage.
Jiang (Harry) Hanyang is a second year PhD student in Theatre Studies at the University of British
Columbia, Canada, under the guidance of Professor Siyuan Liu. His research interests include
the Stanislavsky System of acting; the history of Russian Theatre; screen performance and stage
acting in Modern China; cross-ethnic casting; plus, the interrelationship between theatre, emotion,
body, and mind.
Inside the American Laboratory Theatre. Richard Boleslavsky’s Work with his Students
Ewa Danuta Godziszewska (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw,
Poland)
Konstantin Stanislavsky became part of US history in 1923 and 1924, when the Moscow Art Theatre
toured the country. For a great many American actors, the MAT’s performances were a revelation of
what could be achieved in the realm of theatre art and team acting. American acting style of that
time was making a general impression of rant and overreacting. The American theatre had money
and technical know-how, but what they didn’t have, and could barely even envision, was ‘a true
repertory company, a band of players who had the benefits of similar training, years of practical
experience in working together, a body of distinguished plays to draw from, and agreed-upon aims
34
and ideas’ (Hirsch, 1984). There weren’t many places dedicated to the solution of creative problems
that were not being addressed by the commercial stage and that would provide sound actor
training and a home for the young actor’s growth and development. This was one of the main
reasons why Stanislavsky’s former student Richard Boleslavsky (Polish actor and director trained
in the Moscow Art Theatre, who decade later made an impressive Hollywood career) decided to
stay in New York and established The American Laboratory Theatre (1923), which represented the
first programmatic attempt to introduce Stanislavsky’s ideals and ideas to American practitioners
and put them into practice in a serious methodical way. Boleslavsky worked with his students on
their acting development and lectured eagerly (the principles he enunciated were often described
‘like the coming of a new religion which could liberate and awaken American culture’ (Roberts,
1981) but due to a paucity of written material, his teaching remained only in the classroom and the
entire generation of US theatre artists necessarily embraced Stanislavsky’s system as an oral
tradition. Among his numerous students were future founders of The Group Theatre (1931-1941)
and afterwards The Actors Studio (1947-till today) who were consistently passing on their
knowledge about the system to the next generations of actors. In my paper I will analyse the way in
which Boleslavsky worked with his students at the ALT. I will mostly focus on the materials
gathered from the Scranton University Archive which includes transcribed interviews with
Boleslavsky’s students and co-workers (by J.W. Roberts and R. A. Willis) as well as transcribed
lectures given by Boleslavsky at the ALT.
Ewa Danuta Godziszewska is a PhD candidate at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Studies
programme at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. She
graduated from the Theatre Studies Department of the A. Zelwerowicz National Academy of
Dramatic Art in Warsaw. She was a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Southern
California, School of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles (2019) and at Barnard College, Columbia
University in New York (2016). Laurette of the Kosciuszko Foundation Grant (2018), and the
scholarship programme Młoda Polska 2015 (Young Poland 2015). She is the translator and editor
of a volume of Richard Boleslavsky’s texts, Lekcje aktorstwa. Teksty z lat 1923-1933 (Lessons of
Acting. Texts from 1923-1933) and author of articles, review, and interviews published in the
Aspiracje, Scena, and Nietak!t quarterlies, the Teatr monthly and the Teatralny.pl website.
Workshop 7 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
9:15-10:00
A Practical Exploration of Active Analysis Through a Synthesis of Viewpoints and Quilting the
Text
Roger Smart (University of Northampton, UK)
The workshop affords the opportunity for a practical exploration of Active Analysis, Viewpoints and
a technique I term Quilting the Text, derived from my practice-led research as a director and trainer
of actors. The workshop will explore an improvisatory approach to discovering an embodied and
personalized understanding of text through improvisation, imagination and intuition; it draws upon
contemporary theories of emotion, memory, embodied and situated cognition, and social
neuroscience.
For biography see Session Two.
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Workshop 8 ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
10:00-10:45
The Acorn and the Grain of Sand Adrian Giurgea (Colgate University, US)
If not Life, Stanislavsky teaches us, Theatre is the closest thing to Life there is. At every stop of our work, the sources of Theatre are to be found not in Theatre but in Life itself. If the means are always artificial, blatantly manufactured and crudely put together, the starting point and the connective tissues are real, common, accessible. The workshop is a playful exercise in creating a living, complete Theatre experience that is both familiar and intangible. Adrian Giurgea is an American Stage Director, based in New York. He is teaching acting and directing at Colgate University. He was born in Romania where he studied dramaturgy and directing and where he began his professional career. He directed in several Romanian theatres and taught at the Bucharest Academy of Theatre and Film. He was forced to emigrate from Romania when his production based on Sologub’s The Petty Demon was deemed to be to be too dangerous and provocative. He apprenticed his craft on some of the most famous stages of the world. He assisted, among others, Liviu Ciulei, Maurizio Scaparro, Giorgio Strehler, and Robert Wilson. He directed about 120 productions and taught acting and directing in Romania, Israel, Italy, Russia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, and the U.S. He started his Russian career in 2004 as an actor, playing the Fool in Dmitry Krymov production of Three Sisters (‘King Lear’) at the Anatoly Vasiliev School of Dramatic Art in Moscow. He later directed Krankheit der Jugend (Bolesny Molodosty) by Ferdinand Bruckner, Blackbird by David Harrower and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in St Petersburg; Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello and The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov at the Samara Drama Theatre, Samara, Russia, The Aliens by Annie Baker at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, and Circle Mirror Transformation, also by Annie Baker, at the Moscow Art Theatre. Three of his last four productions were directed in Tallinn, Estonia. In 2018 he directed The Lake by Mikhail Durnenkov in St Petersburg.
Panel Discussion and Debate ~ Valletta Campus Theatre
11:00-12:30
Stanislavsky in Context: Why Is It Still Important?
Chair: Paul Fryer (The Stanislavsky Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK)
Panel members: Vladimir Mirodan (University of the Arts, London, UK.)
Tomasz Kubikowski (Theatre Academy, Warsaw, Poland)
Jan Hančil (AMU, Prague, Czech Republic)
Stefan Aquilina (University of Malta)
To conclude the symposium, an international panel will address the vital question – why is
Stanislavsky still important to us today? The session will end with an open debate which we hope
will provoke ideas to take forward to our next events in Prague and London.
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Bertolt Brecht: Contradictions as a Method An international symposium presented by DAMU and The S Word 8th to 10th November 2019, @ Theatre Faculty, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), Prague, Czech Republic. DAMU and The S Word present a symposium on the theatrical legacy of one of the most influential personalities of 20th century theatre and his relationship to Konstantin Stanislavsky. Under the auspices of Jan Hančil, rector of AMU and the minister of Education of The Czech Republic, the symposium will bring together scholars and theatre practitioners; explore Brecht’s influence on the work of directors and acting teachers, and the relationship between Brecht and Stanislavsky; trace the influences on the approach to directing theatre in various countries, to playwriting and consider Brecht’s politics and theatre as highly social art. A comparison with Stanislavsky’s approach to theatre training, the development of modern theatre directing, and dramatic, alternative and authorial theatre will also be explored. Guest speakers, paper presentations, workshops and panel debates will take place in three focus areas: Brecht, his legacy and modern theatre practice, Brecht, Stanislavsky and the actor and Brecht’s Theatre practice and criticism.
Keynote Speakers: Prof. Stephen Parker (Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester, UK), author of Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (Bloomsbury), described by The London Review of Books as a ‘superb biography of a great iconoclastic writer’. Prof. Jean-Louis Besson (Professor Emeritus, University of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-La Defense), author of over 100 publications, translations, articles and papers, including ‘Brecht and the centaurs’ and ‘Brecht in Hollywood’. Special Guest Speaker: Thomas Ostermeier, the distinguished multi-award-winning international theatre director, whose work is often seen at the Schaubühne, Berlin.
Guest Speakers/workshop leaders include: Prof. David Barnett (University of York), author of A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge University Press), and Brecht in Practice (Bloomsbury) David Zoob (Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance, UK), author of Brecht: A Practical Handbook (Nick Hern Books) NB. Speakers are subject to final confirmation.
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We now invite proposals for the following: Paper presentations (20 minutes), workshops (40 minutes) and panel presentations of a minimum of 3 speakers (60 minutes). Submissions (not more than 300 words) should be accompanied by a short biographical note, and must be received by 14th June 2019. Please send by email to Prof. Paul Fryer ([email protected]). Selected papers from this event will be published in a special edition of the journal Stanislavski Studies (Taylor & Francis) in Autumn 2020.
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Stanislavski Studies: Practice Legacy and Contemporary Theater (Routledge/Taylor and Francis).
The journal published twice a year, in May and November, is a peer-reviewed publication with an international scope, focusing not only on Stanislavski's work as an actor, director and teacher, but more broadly on his influence and legacy which can be seen in the work of many of the theatre's most influential figures.
We aim to be accessible to both the academic reader and the practitioner by collecting together some of the best contemporary scholarship, translations and information about major research
resources. We provide a forum for the analysis and discussion of the history, legacy and application of Stanislavski's theories and we publish articles that investigate, take issue with and consider the applications of his theories to the contemporary theatre. We are committed to the support of all forms of scholarship and our interest in practice-research is embodied in our link with the international research project, The S Word. Papers and other material generated by this project are published in alternate editions of the journal.
To submit an article or proposal, or to discuss your ideas for a future submission, please contact Paul Fryer ([email protected]).
For further details of the journal, and advice on submission, please visit https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfst20.
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‘Higher, Lighter, Simpler, More Joyful’