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.

Stanislavski doesn’t make an exception. He takes this interdependence as the basis of his system, and develops it further by focusing his work on the ultimate role of action as both a stimulator to the inner life of the actor and an indicator of the inner life of the character. He defines action as an integral and purposeful process of accomplishing a certain goal in a constant interaction with the circumstances, conducted in a unique way in time and space. This notion allows him to use action as a bridge for actors to grasp their roles in depth and create truthful and emotionally charged performances.

Even though he stops short of expanding his research over action in everyday life, his discoveries reach a point that goes above and beyond acting as a form of art. Stanislavski advises that the path to fully experiencing the inner life of the character starts with executing the simple physical actions the character would perform in a particular situation. The idea here is that the unforced recreation of the physical conduct of the imagined individual would stir within the actor a genuine familiarity towards the character. The value of this approach from the point of view of real-life human behavior lies in emphasizing the importance of simple acts in the course of comprehending the person’s bigger agenda. According to Stanislavski human actions are strongly related to each other by cause and effect, thus forming a sequence which winds like a thread through our entire individual existence. He calls it the through line of action – the bright red line that dominates our development.

This marks the next stage of his path toward the character; it rises over the small acts and introduces a more complicated part of action: the decision-making process. The suggested bits of action grow larger, and the dilemmas become harder to solve. In order to empower the actor in justifying the choices the character makes, Stanislavski introduces the objective – the anticipatory, desired, and oncoming action plan, a crucial prerequisite of any conscious action. All conscious acts we perform, Stanislavski argues, are guided by objectives which, in their aggregation within the stretch of a lifetime form the super-objective of the individual.  As with so many of Stanislavski’s other principles the value of this one significantly exceeds the prescription of a practitioner. It exposes the essence of human nature by delving into its innermost layers—that is, our desires. Pondering somebody’s objectives makes that person accessible not only on a rational level, but on an emotional level as well, since we all, actors on the stage of life, have if not similar desires, at least a similar urge in getting what we want from life. The question “What do I want?” followed by “What am I doing?”, “Why am I doing it?” and “How am I doing it?” are the first to be answered by the actor on behalf of the character. They also represent the most efficient, if not the only true means toward understanding human behavior in general, because they make us connect with the very essence of our drives, and in a scenic way at that: they prompt us to watch in our mind’s eye instead of hear, guess, or read about.

For its part the overall notion of the crucial role of action that both accrues from and reveals the character allows Stanislavski to unify the parameters of human behavior around action, and explain them through the prism of their relation to it. Up to now the science of acting considers infrangible terms like attention, circumstance, situation, event, tempo-rhythm, sense memory, emotion memory, and imagination, because all of their practical definitions are related to action. This elevates his theory to that of an integrated and holistic system, which can only be enriched and reconfirmed by the newly discovered isms Stanislavski talks about later in his life (A Tribute…).

Yet as important a role as action has in his work, it is not what this great director and theoretician considers the ultimate resort to understanding and recreating human behavior. The altar he bows to is a significantly more obscure, vaguer entity: our subconscious. For Stanislavski action is what the stage is for the true actor: an important medium, but not the target itself. As with any other innovator in art he aims at the source of the deep, ceaseless inspiration, which you can’t set up a manual for.  Action is the closest Stanislavski can get to rationally explaining human behavior. It is the foremost outpost, the pier overlooking the vast ocean of the subconscious.

Stanislavski’s conviction that the subconscious is the ultimate source for the actor’s creativity actually means that he believed in man’s ability to pull out of his inner depths, and to genuinely experience the passions of any other person. This premise is of extreme importance not only for actors. It opens the door to the exploration of human nature as a collection of identical individual qualities (inner circumstances) engaged in unique interrelations (hierarchies). Surely each and every one of us is a unique being, but our uniqueness lies mostly in the arrangement of our characteristic features – both inborn and contracted, all of which can form myriad combinations. The case that many of these features are out of the reach of our consciousness doesn’t make them non-existent. They are part of our nature, but since they don’t influence our behavior in any way, they remain inner facts. Yet in the setting of an outstanding outer situation, or through consistent training they can become accessible to our consciousness, i.e. become circumstances. This is exactly what delving into the subconscious means. What results from this process – the inspiration, that Stanislavski loves so much to talk about, is an immediate product of the discovery of the unsuspected powers we have in our possession. The flow of fresh facts about ourselves that springs to life from the depths of our subconscious fills us with the awareness that we are worth much more than we have shown so far. The newly found self-confidence facilitates our access to those facts even further. No wonder that man has created God in his own image – the idea of the omnipotent and omnipresent spirit is incorporated in all humans, the difference being that we have buried an enormous part of our godlike features deep inside us, hidden from all, and mostly from ourselves. In this regard the ultimate truth, which mankind has been seeking for generations through religion and philosophy is simply that we are all made of one and the same clay; but since the truth is not a truth unless you embrace it with your soul, there are people who don’t give up digging deeply until they find on a transcendental level that they bear the whole of humanity within themselves. “Holy men” – that’s what some would call them.

Jason doesn’t remember his parents. They died when he was still a toddler. He has been brought up by relatives. He didn’t have a parenting model he could look up to. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t have a good relationship with his two daughters either. He is not able to understand their world, and whenever his wife prompts him to intervene in matters regarding the eighteen year old twins he does it awkwardly, as if it’s not his kids he’s dealing with. Sometimes he overreacts and his shouts wake up the neighbors; other times – which looks even worse – he tries to hold hands with either of the girls and fix things by sharing his own irrelevant experience. Maybe that’s why neither of them doesn’t seem too shaken when he agrees to fly on a civil mission to Afghanistan. As a National Guard officer and a working engineer he is invited to join a crew for tracing out a road-bed in the southern part of the country in preparation for a major highway construction. The money is good, and since he would be absent for less than three months only, the family agrees to let him go.

At the end of the second month of his assignment the convoy finds itself in a mountainous area near an abandoned village. As they start setting up the camp the military guards alert of a possible hostile presence. It turns out to be just two teenage boys asking for food. Yet everybody is still suspicious. From the middle of the terrain Jason watches how the boys are being warned not to come any closer and advised to go home as quickly as possible. Through the falling darkness he spots the two tiny figures sinking into a dark tumble-down hut six hundred yards away, on the other side of the valley. Shortly before the break of dawn Jason finds himself six hundred yards from his camp, holding almost his entire weekly ration in one hand, and knocking on the hut’s bullet ridden door with the other. As the door opens he picks out the frail silhouettes of the boys pressed against the opposite wall, pointing two long crooks towards him. Unfazed, Jason steps inside and leaves the food on the table. Then without a word he turns around and gets out. A dozen steps into the field he looks back to see the boys standing in the door’s frame, eyeing him silently. It takes Jason a while before deciding to walk back and hand the grip of his dirk to the bigger boy. For the next thirty seconds the three of them stand still, looking at each other, the precious military knife in the boy’s hand. Ten minutes later Jason is assembling his tent, his brief absence having been noticed only by the two guards from the current shift, who don’t say anything. Another forty days or so, and Jason reunites with his wife and daughters.

Months after his encounter in the Afghan village he still can’t explain to himself what made him do what he did there. Even more inexplicable is the new way he now communicates with his girls. He is attentive and calm; his advice is assuring and respectful; his overall demeanor is self-confident, yet loving and warm. For the twins it feels like they’ve gotten a new version of their dad; for him it is as if he has found a heretofore unknown part of himself. It looks like his absence from home has something to do with the change. Or probably it was that chilly morning, or perhaps the night before to have served as a turning point in Jason’s self-perception as a parent.

What actually happened was that the unexpected and extremely strong and unfamiliar outer circumstances (the hungry alien boys, the rough and scary surroundings, the loneliness, and the memory of the dear and distant faces of his loved ones) stirred an overwhelming amount of compassion and warmth in Jason’s heart. Plucked out of his narrow circle and thrown into an environment of a life-and-death struggle, he faced occurrences that his arsenal of hitherto convenient, securely-checked and well-trusted qualities simply couldn’t handle. He could have stayed indifferent to the situation, or found in himself the motivation for a bold and humane reaction. The inner facts of his subconscious allowing him to level up to what was going on around him turned out to be within his reach. He transformed them into circumstances. The others remained numb; probably just the two guards who didn’t say anything got a little closer to activating some unknown qualities in their own possession. Later on, once Jason became aware of the totally new behavior he was capable of, he preserved the sense of the new qualities that have lead him to it, and let them determine his conduct further, this time in regards to the most sensitive part of his world – his daughters. It was the action he had executed in the small, almost abandoned village that prompted him to dig into his subconscious and find there inspiration for being a person he had never been before.

Stanislavski was right: it is action, and action alone, that brings up new layers of our hidden nature. It is action, and action alone, that raises us closer to God.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

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. The valuable contribution of this approach is relating concentration of attention to action, the latter being the decisive factor in determining what share of our attention each of the objects around us receives.

Using this simple pattern we can easily draw a picture of the distribution of our outer attention in real life. There are three major circles of the attention we pay to the outside world. The first one is – to use the Stanislavski terminology – the small circle. It encloses a relatively tiny space, its boundaries determined by the size and number of objects that interest us at a particular moment. The more focused our interest towards the objects within the circle is, the more stable these boundaries are. If I’m putting on paper a story or an article, for as long as I write my small circle of attention will certainly be constituted by my notebook.

At a certain point I might decide to continue my story on the desktop computer. In this case I’ll have to distribute my attention between two objects: the keyboard and the monitor. Even though both of them are within my immediate reach, they are separated from each other, which means that I’ll be operating within two small circles. What lies between them: the pen, the wallet, the cell phone and the coffee mug, is not related to what I’m doing; hence those objects are out of my area of attention. If I’m painting a vase on a stand next to the window my attention will cover even more small circles. I’ll be absorbed with an equal intensity alternatively by the palette, the canvas, and the vase. If I’m watching a horse race, my attention will jump between my bet and the other racers, thus forming a whole series of small mobile circles. In all of these cases the sum of the small circles forms the second major circle of human attention: the medium circle. It could also be called the useful circle, because all the objects found in it contribute to the fulfillment of our intentions.

The small circles within the medium circle are arranged in a hierarchy of importance. Let’s imagine that you are negotiating your annual pay increase with the owners of the company you work for. As a valuable part of the upper management you are being invited to a personal meeting with the president and the vice-president as well as the accountant general. Even though you predominantly address the president, you keep an eye on the other two in the room, especially in critical moments, such as when you get down to the numbers. All three of your conversation partners are included in your medium circle of attention, but among them the president represents the small circle, which holds most weight.

Let’s explore further. If the meeting is being held in an office, could the whole of the office space be counted as your medium circle? What if a big fat fly buzzes around, or the wind coming in from the open window keeps ruffling the papers on the desk? The medium circle is never a certain space in its entirety. This is why the most efficient way of determining it is by establishing the small circles it is comprised of, which in their contents and arrangement to each other are derivatives of our purposeful action.

Further on, there comes the large circle. It is formed by every object within the reach of our senses. Defining it certainly isn’t a question of size or distance. It could include the noisy construction site across the street as well as the smell of fried fish across the corridor. Every single irritant which we might see, hear, smell, taste, or touch is part of our large circle of attention. We might also call it the harmful circle, because spreading our attention as far as our senses can go always serves as a distraction to what we are doing at the moment, because it is irrelevant to our current business.

The harmful circle of attention stalks us at every moment of our conscious lives. As Stanislavski points out, the best way of preserving our concentration is to become fully involved in our action, letting it absorb us emotionally and “warm us up from within”. But concentration comes with the ability not only to focus, but also to quickly distribute and redistribute the focus among the small circles, to develop an attention that is flexible and capable of multitasking. This requires the additional abilities to quickly and clearly prioritize, briskly switch the priorities based on change of circumstances, confidently build up a strong imaginary wall between the medium and the large circles, and last but not least, be ready to blow this wall apart once an occurrence relevant to our intentions appears beyond it.

For the last six months the parents of 15-year-old Kevin are being repeatedly summoned to their son’s school. First the homeroom teacher, then most of the others express concerns over Kevin’s poor grades. Things get even worse when the deputy principal suggests a visit to the doctor, and even a check-up for ADD. Devastated, a couple of days later the father shares this information with his brother, who lives less than 30 miles away, in the uplands. Oddly enough, once hearing about his nephew’s drama, Kevin’s uncle doesn’t make a single comment on the family’s problem; instead, after a few remarks about the weather and another beer he suggests that Kevin is sent to him for the upcoming winter vacation. “The doctor can wait”, the uncle insists. “Do not put the burden of your panic onto the kid’s shoulders; let him take his time, and relax, for God’s sake!” Kevin loves to visit his uncle’s family, and his tears over his father’s initial refusal finally work: the next weekend he is on his way to his uncle’s town.

As it turns out his time doesn’t pass chatting with his cousin in her room or daydreaming by the stove as he has expected. Instead, his uncle introduces him to an exciting new venture: duck hunting. Kevin is given a pair of new boots, a hunting suit and – wow! – a pump gun. Every morning both of them drive to the marshes near town, spread out the decoys and sink behind their blind. No matter whether they make a good bag or not, with each passing visit to the hunting grounds Kevin gets better in mastering the basics of the craft: operating the decoys, duck calling, helping his uncle setting up the blind or camouflaging their faces. Not wanting to miss anything the teenager develops a good taste for details. He makes sure to adjust the blind while his uncle is busy with the ammunition or the dog. Based on the weather conditions and wind direction his uncle tells him about he starts participating in deciding which spot is to be picked for the day. Every new flock enriches his knowledge of species, recognizing different birds on the wing according to their size and flight characteristics, and predicting where they would land. He even starts challenging his uncle in locating the biggest group of ducks in the fog only by listening to the noises they make.

Without even knowing it Kevin devotes his vacation to learning how to manage his attention. By unstringing decoys in the dark within the limited preparation time he learns how to focus completely in a small circle of attention; aiming his gun while trying to stay completely silent improves his ability to concentrate in his small circle even more; while watching the swimming or diving birds and choosing his target he perfects in quickly switching the small circles holding on to his medium one at the same time; by keeping an eye and an ear on new birds flying down without getting distracted by the bizarre clouds, the rain, or the sounds from other groups of hunters, he develops the ability to keep his medium circle flexible, and his large circle suppressed and outside his attention zone. He begins to excel in distributing his focus between following the direction of the wind by feeling it on his face and looking out for a new flock of ducks approaching from among the clumps of reed. By remembering the exact places of the calls or the different kinds of decoys in the trunk he even manages to cultivate his visual memory, and quickly bring it back to life upon necessity.

Three weeks later Kevin goes back to school. Even without the motivation of the hunting venture or the responsibility of being trusted by an adult his class results improve dramatically. No surprise – someone taught him how to use what he already had.

© 2010 Peter Budevski

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.

Many of the differences among us in terms of the way we digest the environment derive directly from our genes. We like things that are often disliked by others because our natural tastes, unlike theirs, make these things attractive to us, and vice versa. But we also adore or fear other things because our memory has stored the information of how sweet and attractive, or respectively how unpleasant and dangerous to us personally such things can be; we plunge into or avoid different ventures to a different extent than others, because our conscious assessment of our own strengths or weaknesses is different than theirs. This is how our self-knowledge, which combines our innate tastes and our experience, determines the degree of significance we grant to the various circumstances of the outer world. Therefore, from the hierarchy of these circumstances, which is visible through our behavior, one can judge our self-perception.

Mike and his girlfriend are studying for a college test in her apartment. It is late in the afternoon when they hear the slam of the front door. A couple of seconds later the teenage brother of Mike’s girlfriend appears in the living room. He is crying and rambling something that no one can understand. After a while it becomes clear that three older boys have just apprehended him in front of the building, slapped him several times across the face and taken away the twenty bucks he had in his pocket. Obviously now the boy isn’t as much scared as he is humiliated. His adolescent pride and dignity has just been unscrupulously violated, and his sister starts worrying that this threatens to turn his whole fragile world upside down. That’s why her whole attention turns to Mike, as the Man in the situation. But his reaction is nothing like what she expects. After a few more questions and a long silence, instead of jumping from his seat and darting outside to deal with the gangsters, he goes back to his notebook. His girlfriend is angry and disappointed. After taking care of her brother she barely says a word until Mike leaves. Less than a week later she breaks up with him.

Of course, she knows that Mike isn’t a bodybuilder. She knows that especially when she is present Mike feels uncomfortable around strong muscular guys, and she guesses that he is pretty sensitive about his short stature. But she also believed that he loved her, and has naturally admitted looking after her to be one of his top priorities. Now she understands how wrong she has been. As it turns out Mike’s self-perception has the circumstance “I’m unable to fight and I dread fighting” on a higher position than “I love her and I would do anything for her”. Probably these two inner circumstances have never had to compete with each other before, so the result must be a total surprise not only to Mike’s girlfriend, but also to Mike himself. The interesting part is that Mike’s girlfriend is able to grasp the real Mike (or his true self-perception) by revealing his perception of the environment in a critical moment: since he obviously chooses the circumstance of the upcoming college test over the circumstance of the incident, the latter is obviously not so important, which obviously means that everything related to her, as dramatic as it may be, is not so important, hence she herself is not so important to Mike! Which girl would stay in a relationship after having made these conclusions?

Our self-perception is visible through every single choice we make from among the circumstances of the environment. Even within the smallest, most insignificant situation one can distinguish a part of our inner essence. The genius of Konstantin Stanislavski discovered this interrelation more than a century ago. His famous Method of physical actions is based on this notion. It affirms that the inner life of the character with its most subtle nuances can be experienced by the actor and revealed to the audience by building up a precise score of his/her physical behavior. Why? Our physicality is a demonstration of the individual preferences we have towards the circumstances that constitute the environment. By observing our physical life one can gain a clear impression of our preferences – the hierarchy in which we arrange the outer circumstances. Since our perception of the environment (or hierarchy of outer circumstances) is interlocked with our self-perception (chapter I.1.), the physical actions we perform reveal our inner life in all its complexity.

Let’s take a look at the simplest physical action from our everyday life: our gait. The way we walk is not just a display of our physicality; it is molded by our psychology as well. The proof can often be found in the weird way we keep balance, or the pattern of “decorating” our walk with all kinds of unnecessary movements that go beyond what Mother Nature requires from us. These “additions” are a direct result of the way we perceive the environment, and speak volumes about our self-perception.

The first and most obvious sign of our inner life comes from our body posture: it indicates, even to an unprejudiced eye, whether our self-perception is topped by a self-projection or a self-preservation circumstance. People who are driven by the urge to project themselves are not shy of revealing how their body functions; they openly enjoy their physicality. The impression some of them give is as if they walk on air. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who hate or fear their surrounding world. They often have their shoulders slumped forward, or their chest is sunken, or the palms of their hands are turned backwards. Their whole posture indicates discomfort; their body looks like being pulled systematically down towards the ground.

Once we set off the careful observer would reveal even more about us: from the indications of which segments of the environment we perceive as important he could successfully guess on the specific circumstances that crown our self-perception. The young girl who passes the crowded open space restaurant with an alluring swagger obviously considers the world a place filled with men appreciative of female beauty; hence one of the important circumstances of her self-perception is her seductive appeal. The lawyer who thrusts himself forward even while shopping with his wife obviously views humanity as members of a stupid jury who need intrusion into their physical space in order to return to their senses; his self-perception is dominated by the circumstance of his persuasion weakness. The stumbling doorman at night who raises the blood pressure of every late arrival to the building by walking slowly to unlock the front door obviously wants to underline his importance and reinforce his authority in a world that passes him by with indifference; his self-perception is being consistently eroded by the inner circumstance of his own insignificance.

A famous instance on the role of the external traits as a bridge to the inner essence of a character is Stanislavski’s description of his work on the part of Dr. Stockman from Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”:
“On their own accord my second and third fingers used to stretch forward for more persuasiveness – as if to implant into the interlocutor’s very soul my emotions, words and thoughts. All these needs and habits appeared instinctively, unconsciously. Where did they come from? Later on I accidentally revealed their origin: several years after Stockman’s creation, at a meeting in Berlin, in a scientist I had known from before I recognized my fingers from Stockman.” (“My Life in Art”)

© 2009 Peter Budevski

“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.

When I was six, I got the chance to participate in the Easter service at a large Orthodox church in Turkey. As a guest and a member of a wealthy Bulgarian family in Istanbul (which used to be a big contributor to the church community), my grandmother arranged my inclusion among the boys who were supposed to follow the procession of priests before and during the service. They dressed me up in my boy-sized heavy vestment, and instructed me on which way to go and how to carry the candle. It was a thick, tall candle, which I had never seen before. My garments were richly embroidered in gold, mysteriously sparkling in the semi-darkness of the interior. I felt like I was entering a dreamlike reality, full of the fairy creatures of my dreams. And I was one of them!

Then the chorus began singing, and we solemnly came out from behind the altar. I was so excited I could barely walk. The music, the dazzling garments, the glimmer of the burning candles, all made my head spin. But most impressive was the crowd filling the church and spilling onto the sidewalks, a constant sway of people each trying to catch a glimpse of our group. Those respectful and adoring eyes, as well as the stares of the saints from the paintings which covered the walls and the ceiling made me feel part of something beautiful and sacred, which I knew I would never relinquish for the rest of my life. I had never experienced anything even close to what I felt during those hours in the church.

This is how my self-centered love for acting began. The following year I enrolled in the drama group of the Children’s Palace in Sofia. The stage became my church. I was desperate for its grace and persistently attempted to dedicate more time there than my pupil’s schedule allowed. Yet I often grew annoyed with the rehearsals, especially with the exercises we practiced as preparation for our shows. Since all I wanted was to demonstrate my genius in front of an audience, I didn’t take any pleasure in repeating my actions over and over on stage. The only purpose of this, as it seemed to me at the time, was to impose restrictions on my artistry!

I was already several years into my “active acting” when Stanislavski, with his “Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art” entered our vocabulary. I wasn’t quite aware of who he was, but because all of my teachers used his name, I embraced it as part of my process of becoming the greatest actor on the face of the earth.

I was about thirteen when I first read “My Life in Art”. I immediately fell in love with it. Every page revealed such a meticulous devotion to theatre that it didn’t take much effort to identify with the author and begin applying his attitudes wherever I could. I became so active that hardly a week passed without me offering to present a sketch to guests coming to our home or a poem to my class at school. Most of all I loved acting in front of my grandmother’s friends. No matter what I performed, by the end their eyes were heavy with tears, and their praises for my “shows” were beyond what even I could handle. I can only imagine the patience my parents had to exercise in coping with my acting mania. As for my classmates, I guess I was too weird to them to even get mocked.

Growing up only reinforced my obsession. I participated in any theatrical venture in sight. I loved the smell of the painted set, the colorful pile of costumes in the dressing room, and the bizarre makeup on my face (we used to play all kinds of creatures). I was crazy about the noise of the waiting audience before the shows. It promised me another hour of public adoration, which would reassert my significant presence in the world of art.

This was my state of mind and soul when I was accepted in the Theatre Academy at the age of 19. This seemed a logical development of my increasing influence upon the trends and tendencies of contemporary theatre. The first shock, though, came shortly afterwards. My initial “presentations” on stage were based on exercises given to us as an introduction to the realm of professional acting. From my very first attempts my professors started acutely criticizing me for overacting. Whatever behavior I chose to play, it was unflinchingly labeled as a consecution of clichés, serving as a substitute to real acting.

But the most painful and meanest (as I considered it back then) part of the criticism was the reference to Stanislavski’s system, which had consistently rejected approaches like mine. Certainly, I felt not only humiliated, but betrayed, even robbed of my most intimate artistic relationship. Instead of inspiration, the name of Stanislavski startled me and became a perpetual creative cul-de-sac. Since I couldn’t make a rational stand against his postulates, they piled up like boulders in my mind, becoming an insurmountable barrier. I began to feel less and less inspired, and the stage and its demands grew much higher for me than for my classmates. This resulted in a new quality in my acting: I became more shy, my performances subtler, my stage behavior more subdued, reserved, even minimalistic. What I got out of it, if not a better understanding of Stanislavski, was at least the approval of my teachers.

Within a year I was admitted as a student in theatre directing. Since I was the only student-director of that year, I got the chance to stay in the same class. I continued studying acting, working with my fellow students on my stage projects at the same time. Although I was still unsure how to put in practice my extensive readings of Stanislavski’s books, I received help from “my” actors, who, paradoxically, were truer to his system than I was because they were less obsessed by it. From my continuous work with them I was at least able to develop a sense of what “truth on stage” meant, and, following in my colleagues’ footsteps, tried to apply it in my evolution as an actor. Success was disputable, but gradually I eliminated my sense of self-importance while acting.

My demand for artistic truth grew stronger after my graduation, once I began working as a full-time director in theatres all over the country. Through my experience in dealing with professionals I began regarding the demand for truth as the cornerstone of Stanislavski’s teachings, and I cherished dearly the results it brought to my work.

For the time being I had stopped acting, but my memories of my first pathetic steps on stage assisted me as I attempted to lead the team of actors in the right direction. As it turned out a couple of years later, my initial frustrations with Stanislavski were now the province of others in theatre, some of them having transformed it into a new system of beliefs.

At that time one of my shows got invited to a national festival dedicated to contemporary drama for the youth. I was (and still am) very proud of our work. The confirmation had been coming from the audience, which continued to fill the small town theater for more than 40 consecutive performances. Yet, during the after-show discussions some critics accused us of following the path of psychological realism, which they viewed as obsolete and irrelevant to modern theatre. They were simply ignoring the play’s impact on spectators; unable to reject outright the results of our meticulous approach to truth of actions and emotions on stage, they simply denied the approach itself. The most inappropriate name one could mention in our defense was that of Stanislavski. In all likelihood this would have enraged the attending crowd even more. In my subsequent work I appropriated, in my own way, some of the criticism from that event. I became less timid in my experimentation and exploration of more provocative, often formalistic creative means, though never at the expense of scenic truth, and never at the expense of the actor’s belief in the imaginary stage reality.

Still, I didn’t feel that I was knowledgeable enough about Stanislavski’s principles, especially regarding the mechanism of turning an actor into a real artist. My first steps in teaching acting only confirmed my ill-preparedness. I was an arrogant young director, my students at the Theatre Academy just several years younger than me. What I intended to impose upon them was actually not my knowledge, but my sense on how things could work in theatre. Far from having a well established educational system, I hid behind the name of Stanislavski every time I had troubles explaining why something wouldn’t “fly”. Needless to say, the students didn’t like me, and I wasn’t thrilled with my job.

My next opportunity to become a lecturer in acting came from the Screenwriting Program at the Film Department of the Academy. This time I took the invitation under heavy consideration. My decision to accept the position came only after I made the simple agreement with myself to become way more tolerant and attentive to the students’ inquiries, and to forget about coming up with postulates I didn’t quite fully grasp. I applied this agreement by listening closely to what the students had to ask or say, and developing acting proposals based on their background and point of view. As a result, theories began mixing with real-life situations, analysis of characters overlapped with observations, abstract statements were substituted by facts and personal memories. Suddenly the name “Stanislavski” sprang back to life. The terminology both the students and I had been fed up with found its unexpected application not in movie quotes or dramaturgical reminiscences, but in instances from our everyday experience. Our lectures became fun sessions, where the liberty of artistic expression led us if not effortlessly, at least joyfully along the path of recreating “the life of the human spirit”.

In subsequent classes I deepened the newfound approach by placing the initial emphasis on discussing our everyday behavior rather than rushing forward with explanations on how to act on stage or in front of the camera. Our exercises gradually revealed the immense simplicity and effectiveness of Stanislavski’s principles. They became the most natural points of reference in our debates.

This methodology proved to be especially useful in the process of introducing kids and teenagers to acting. By the time the Young Acting Academy at our Free Theatre Company was created, I had become extremely aware of the potential dangers on the rich, yet fragile artistic nature of youngsters making their first steps on stage. That’s why, with the full support of the other educators, I established a teaching process that utilized games (“The Game” actually became the name of our school), to ensure the free, unimpeded and unforced self-expression of our students. This approach not only didn’t divert us from making the young acquainted with the natural laws of human behavior, but permitted them to become enthusiastically involved in analyzing and training in context with these laws. We were not shy in discovering together the true meaning of Stanislavski’s terminology, thus building up a common and fully comprehensible artistic language. Our annual productions bore the signs of joyful creativity that sparkled throughout the performances.

This chapter of my teaching experience was the “last straw” which made me fully fathom that Stanislavski didn’t actually invent anything. He merely discovered and formulated the existing laws of nature, and opened up a broad road to understanding how human behavior worked, and how to recreate it with all its complexity into the world of art. This revelation was reinforced once I began acting again. Over the following years I took roles in some of my own productions. I needed to check, to my own cost, the knowledge I gained. Throughout the performances I didn’t always achieve the “inner creative state” Stanislavski wrote about, and if I did, it wasn’t necessarily through following closely his directions. But knowing his teachings, I tried to find my personal actor’s approach to the character, and when it worked, somewhere down the road I inevitably struck a territory, already explored by Stanislavski, and used his suggested tools to enhance and deepen my performance.

This was possible only because he had based his theories on an extreme regard to the actor’s individuality. The very system is built on the notion that it is the actor, and him alone, who would use his mind, body and soul to play the character. Applying his knowledge of the laws that drive human nature, the actor has to “live through his own experiences”, which are “individual to him and analogous to those of the person he has to portray”. This is the natural path to reaching the threshold of the subconscious, when “he has no conscious realization of how he accomplishes his purpose” (“An Actor Prepares”). Thus I realized how open a theory Stanislavski has created. It provides every theatrical style and every new age with the tools to express their concepts and ideas. It emboldens every actor and every director to pursue their own approach to creativity and self-expression. It’s not by accident that every major Western theatre practitioner of the twentieth century has used Stanislavski as a starting point of his/her theories even if, in their development, they deviate from his system. It’s also not by accident that the first significant alternative theories on acting were authored by Stanislavski’s own students. The influential works of Meyerhold, Vakhtangov or Michael Chekhov would never have occurred, at least not to the extent of their innovative brilliance, were these great minds not participants in the process of establishing Stanislavski’s discoveries. The theatrical world still relies on these discoveries, and every memorable performance in the realm of theatre and film proves that.

This is what my journey towards Stanislavski went through. I know that I may never be able to grasp his system in its completeness. But perhaps I am not supposed to. Maybe time is the ultimate co-author, capable of disclosing full comprehension. As our lives, decade after decade, constantly change, so does our self-perception. Each level of the developing dynamics of our existence requires a relevant approach to mastering the laws driving human nature. Every generation has the justifiable right to deepen the knowledge it has been brought up with. Live theories can’t be put on a pedestal; they are powerful rivers, gaining their strength from the tributaries of every passing age. On their part tributaries are being formed by the streams and streamlets of creative personal contributions. Some dry out before reaching the main flow. But others persist winding down, through and around. Probably because their creator has revealed the right spring: that of his or her own unique individuality. 

© 2008 Peter Budevski