Throughout its contradictory, meandering development psychology has invariably been devoted to one major goal: explaining the bond between human nature and human behavior, or in other words, our inner content and its outer display.  The premise that human actions are integrally related to their context is what makes the science of psychology possible. The context of the action explains its true purpose, and the action itself reveals the essence of the context from which it originates. To this day man considers this formula as the gateway to gaining a better idea of who he is and what his intentions are. (more…)

In describing how the actor’s attention works Konstantin Stanislavski comes up with a relative but extremely useful division of the space around us, through which we can distinguish the main areas of our outer attention, i.e. the attention we direct to the outer world. These areas are the ones we “light up” by directing our senses towards them. Calling them “circles of attention”, he arranges these areas in a hierarchy of importance to the person acting on stage, and gives each of them a very specific role in the successful fulfillment of her intentions. (more…)

Our perception of the environment is strongly individual due to our individual self-perception. The subjective arrangement of the circumstances in it is a result of our inborn inclinations, qualities and preferences, on one hand, and our experience, on the other. (more…)

“Human life is so subtle, so complex and multifaceted, that it needs an incomparably large number of new, still undiscovered ‘isms’ to express it fully.”

Konstantin Stanislavski

After working in theatre for more than 20 years I find myself compelled to acknowledge, that, no matter what great minds I have encountered on different stages of my career, I am a follower of Stanislavski. Why did it take me so long to discover this? It has been a difficult relationship, full of doubts and contradictions, swinging from blind repetition of his postulates to fierce rejection of his “old-fashioned” attachment to realism. (more…)