By Bruce McConachie

Stanislavsky and Meyerhold

Two primary modes of training actors, the psychological and the sociological, dominated Western theatre between 1920 and 1970. The psychological mode, which emphasized the actor’s immersion in a stage character, began in the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) under Konstantin Stanislavsky, and later flourished in the U.S. (Figure 1). Deriving primarily from Stanislavsky’s interest in naturalism, the psychological approach to actor training continues to inform most training methods for film and television acting in Hollywood. Vsevolod Meyerhold initiated a modern version of the sociological mode, which involves the actor demonstrating the character to the audience. The sociological mode underlay Meyerhold’s constructivist experiments with actors, and it later provided the basis for Brechtian performance. Both approaches have deep roots in Western culture but also similarities to many non-Western modes.

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Stanislavsky began experimenting with the possibilities of a systematic approach to actor training in 1906 when he experienced difficulties with his own acting work at the MAT. In 1912, he set up the First Studio at the MAT to test his ideas and gradually convinced his reluctant acting company to try them. Stanislavsky continued to modify and improve his “system,” as he called it, until his death in 1938. This system, however, varied widely over his professional life and, despite its name, was not systematized at his death. By 1938, Stanislavsky had approved the final drafts for only two of the books that would bear his authorship: My Life in Art and An Actor’s Work on Himself. The translation of the latter book into English as An Actor Prepares omitted and misrepresented many of Stanislavsky’s precepts, leading later practitioners of the American “method” to misunderstand some of Stanislavsky’s ideas. Despite these difficulties, the Stanislavsky system and its U.S. spin-off as the method became the dominant model for the psychological mode of actor training.

Meyerhold joined the MAT as a young actor, but left in 1906 to explore movement-oriented methods for staging symbolist dramas. Before the Revolution, Meyerhold worked in several theatres and in cabaret in St. Petersburg, exploring and developing his ideas for the actor-puppet – a performer who could combine the arts of characterization, singing, dancing, and acrobatics with precise physical and vocal expression. In 1921, he named these concepts and practices “biomechanics,” to denote their fusion of biology and machinery, and began teaching them systematically to his students in a new Soviet school for actors. Like Stanislavsky, Meyerhold extended and perfected his approach to acting through practice and writing; by 1930 his ideas and exercises were virtually complete. The Russian Blue Blouse troupes first demonstrated simplified versions of some of Meyerhold’s performance ideas to other theatre artists in the West. Gradually, as directors from Germany, France, and the United States made their way to Moscow to witness Meyerhold’s bold productions in the 1920s and early 1930s, his ideas for actor training began to attain an international following. His sociological mode of actor training had a major impact on Brechtian aesthetics.

Comparing actor training programs

Comparing different modes of actor training is not an easy task. Because most training programs teach actors how to work on themselves and how to engage with a stage role, a description of the exercises for both kinds of preparation, noting similarities and differences, might appear to be a straightforward means of comparison. But assumptions about the self and about the process of characterization may be unstated or elusive. After all, ideas of the self vary, even within the same culture, and actors’ notions of what constitutes a stage role have shifted from one historical period to another. Finally, acting programs always assume that actors have certain responsibilities to the audience. These assumptions, too, are culturally and historically situated. For these reasons, it is helpful to adopt a scholarly language that approaches neutrality when comparing two training programs and then use this relatively neutral terminology to pose the same questions of both practices.

One scholarly approach distinct from any of the conventional orientations to actor training is conceptual integration, a branch of cognitive science. Conceptual integration can help theatre scholars answer the following questions.

1. What notion of the actor’s self is embedded in a particular program of training? What are the distinctive aspects of this self for the actor and what kinds of exercises help the actor to prepare her/himself to perform on stage?
2. What is the definition of character in this program of training? How is the self of the actor to become the character on stage? Which exercises prepare the actor for this transformation?
3. How does a particular training program understand the actor-audience relationship? What should actors attempt to do to and for their spectators?

Conceptual integration and Stanislavsky’s system

Reading Stanislavsky’s system through the lens of F&T’s understanding of conceptual integration and Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphorical concepts of different selves will give us a basis for comparing it to Meyerhold’s biomechanics. A review of Stanislavsky’s language in his exercises for the actor’s development of his/her concentration, imagination, and communication reveals that his system primarily depends on a locational conception of the self. From a cognitive point of view, the Stanislavskian performer relies on a concept of identity that is a container – for herself, her role in the play, and her actor/character. Simply put, the actor/character contains the intentions of this blended identity, plus specific physical, emotional, and interpersonal attributes. Actors playing characters attempt to fulfill their roles’ intentions and overcome their obstacles within the “given circumstances,” as Stanislavsky termed them, of their characters’ situations. Performers must learn through analysis, concentration, and imagination how to contain the world of their characters within themselves.

Metaphors of containment are also apparent in Stanislavsky’s “rays of energy” and “circles of attention” exercises. Influenced by yoga, which he practiced most of his adult life, Stanislavsky believed that people communicate both verbally and non-verbally through rays of energy that can be controlled by the self. In one exercise, he urged actors to absorb energy from their surroundings and send it out again, through the fingers of their extended hands, to others in the room. According to Stanislavsky, actors in performance can sharpen their concentration by imaginatively dividing the stage and the auditorium into concentric circles of increasingly larger circumference that ripple out from the self. Inside the first circle are usually other characters of great significance to the actor’s role. The next circle might include the setting and the other actor/characters on stage. The largest circle takes in the audience and the entire auditorium. Stanislavsky taught that actors must restrict themselves to the smallest possible circles necessary for the moment-to-moment performance of their roles in order to retain a sense of themselves as private people, despite their public exposure on the stage. In both of these acting exercises, Stanislavsky placed the self of the actor at the center of rays of energy and concentric circles. As in the actor’s self, each of the circles is a container with an inside, an outside, and a boundary between them.

In terms of the actor’s work on the character, Stanislavsky recommended that the actor primarily engage with the role in the play through empathetic projection. That is, the actor must understand the feelings and values of the character and empathize with this imagined identity to such an extent that the actor sees the circumstances and actions of the character through that character’s eyes and responds accordingly. For example, in an exercise Stanislavsky termed “affective cognition,” he recommended that actors visualize distinct moments in the lives of their characters so that these images would trigger affective, empathetic responses to the characters they were playing. In general, Stanislavsky’s understanding of characterization was similar to that of many nineteenth-century novelists. Like them, he saw characters as complex human beings with many attributes, feelings, and unconscious desires with whom readers could be invited to empathize. Stanislavsky’s famous “magic if” – which might be paraphrased as, “if I were this character in the midst of the circumstances of this scene, what would I do?” – depends on empathy. Once the actor began to understand her/his character from the character’s point of view, Stanislavsky required actors to analyze the script for the character’s intentions and physical actions and to “score” them as a composer might develop a melody. Rehearsing the intentions and actions of the character ensured that the actor in performance would not depart from his/her empathetic involvement with his role to play directly for applause or become distracted by off-stage circumstances.

As an artist of the theatre, Stanislavsky understood that spectators could engage with actors playing roles in a number of ways. In cognitive terms, spectators could distance themselves from actor-characters, objectify and laugh at them, brand them as villains or sympathize with them. Several of Stanislavsky’s best productions, however, established an empathetic bond between actors and spectators. For the 1909 MAT production of A Month in the Country by Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), Stanislavsky was able to direct actors trained in the techniques of his First Studio to empathize with their characters through close attention to the conflicts between their inner lives and their social facades. In one scene in which a young mother is attracted to the tutor of her son, Stanislavsky directed the actor to heighten the contrast between her inner desires and her outward distraction. By playing the identity of the character in this way, the actor pulled the audience into the problems of her contained character and induced them to empathize with her plight.

A cognitive approach to biomechanics

Meyerhold’s understanding of acting and his program for actor training differed substantially from Stanislavsky’s. Regarding his conception of the actor’s self, Meyerhold primarily held to a notion of the physical object self, not the locational self. Most of Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises to prepare the actor’s sense of him/herself for the stage involved the performer consciously moving his or her physical body. Meyerhold’s syllabus for his new acting school in 1921, for example, required his students to learn gymnastics, fencing, juggling, a variety of dances, and several other physical skills, plus anatomy and physiology so that the students would understand the potential of their bodies. During the 1920s, Meyerhold frequently compared his biomechanics to the industrial time-and-motion studies of Frederick W. Taylor, who recommended changes in the routines of assembly-line work in the U.S. to increase efficiency. Both Taylor and Meyerhold (the capitalist and the communist) experimented to understand how a given task might be accomplished by a worker or actor as quickly and easily as possible.

Meyerhold also perfected more complex movement exercises that he called études. In his “Shooting from the Bow” étude, for example, the actor pantomimes a series of rhythmic movements that suggest running toward a quarry, shooting an imaginary arrow, and celebrating the kill. The exercise involves a thorough workout of the muscular tension and release appropriate for each movement. The actor’s ability to manipulate him/herself, understood as a physical object, is fundamental to all of this training (see Figure 2).

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After an intense regimen of this program, the Meyerholdian performer is ready for characterization. Stanislavsky thought of the identity of characters in much the same way as he thought of actors: both were contained, complex selves. Meyerhold, in contrast, considered actors as physical selves but thought of characters as social selves. As Meyerhold saw it, a character in a drama was not a fully rounded, complex individual who had a kind of existence apart from the actor’s body and imagination, as might a character in a novel. Rather, for Meyerhold, a playwright’s characters were little more than traditional social types. In one of his syllabi for an acting workshop, Meyerhold listed 17 set roles for men and women, such as the fop, the heroine, the moralist, the young girl in love, the clown, the matchmaker, and the guardian – all traditional type characters played by actors since medieval times.

Like the great French actor Constant-Benoît Coquelin (1841-1909), Meyerhold believed that it was the actor’s responsibility to flesh out these types, to embody them with actions and emotions appropriate to their social roles and their situations in the play. He gave his actors mask exercises in which they froze their faces into social masks and explored movements appropriate to their expressions. Meyerhold went beyond Coquelin and other traditionalists, however, and emphasized that an actor could play several types within the same actor/character and even momentarily break from one of these types by throwing in an action that contradicted and commented upon the social role he was playing, for example. At one point, the actor might empathize with his/her character and attempt to see and respond to the world of the play from the identity of the blended actor/character. At another point, however, the actor could step back from the integrated actor/character to comment directly on the figure she/he had just portrayed. From Meyerhold’s point of view, a successful production presented a series of discrete, self-contained units of action and the role played by an actor within these units need not add up to a consistent characterization. In the end, the characters had to serve the purposes of the actor’s performance and the director’s production, not the other way around.

How this worked is best seen in one of Meyerhold’s most famous productions, The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). In Fernand Crommelynck’s tragifarce, a village miller, Bruno, is infatuated with his lovely young wife, Stella, but so doubtful of his own sexual appeal that he believes Stella must have a lover. So he forces her to sleep with every man in the village to discover the identity of the lover. As previously noted in Chapter 8 (in the section on Meyerhold and constructivism), the constructivist setting for the production by Lyubov Popova suggested the machinery of a miller’s windmill, but also created a series of movement possibilities for the performers in the production. Maria Babanova, a small, radiant, energetic actor, played Stella as a series of related types. According to one eyewitness report:

[Babanova’s] performance is based on rhythms, precise and economical like a construction. … The role develops, strengthens, matures without restraint – violently, yet according to plan. One moment, she is talking innocently to a little bird, the next she is a grown-up woman, delighting in the return of her husband; in her passion and devotions, she is tortured by his jealousy. And now she is being attacked by a mob of blue-clad men, furiously fending them off with a hurricane of resounding blows.

(Braun 1995: 182)

Although this report is not precisely worded, it is clear that Babanova moved quickly among several social types, dropping one to embody another, often without transition. Igor Ilinsky also deployed several character types to depict Bruno. He even undercut his most prominent characterization of the miller with clowning. As a fellow actor stated:

Bruno … stood before the audience, his face pale and motionless, and with unvarying intonation, a monotonous declamatory style, and identical sweeping gestures he uttered his grandiloquent monologues. But at the same time this Bruno was being ridiculed by the actor performing acrobatic stunts at the most impassioned moments of his speeches, belching, and comically rolling his eyes whilst enduring the most dramatic anguish.

(Braun 1995: 183-4)

Where Stanislavsky primarily taught his actors how to induce a psychological response from an audience, Meyerhold mostly wanted spectators to engage with actors on physical and social levels. In the earlier example from the Magnanimous Cuckold, Babanova/Stella’s physical presence excited affection, desire, and admiration, by turns, from the audience. Meyerhold apparently allowed some psychological identification with her: when she fought off the advances of other men, the audience probably took her values as their own, for example. But he mostly encouraged spectators to see her as a physical object. In the action noted above for Ilinsky/Bruno, the actor’s belching no doubt undercut the pontificating of his character’s speech. Such a situation encourages the audience to unblend the actor/character integration and to identify with the actor at the expense of the character. Spectators could empathize with both actor/characters at the physical-social level of their embodiment, but also occasionally distance themselves from the actors’ representations of both types. Meyerhold always wanted his audience to understand that theatre was a game. That actors could jump in and out of representing actor/characters was part of the fun.

Although these are complicated responses to describe from a cognitive linguistic point of view, it is important to keep in mind that they happened quickly and mostly unconsciously in the theatre. Where a Stanislavsky-trained actor might need several scenes to involve an audience in the complexities of her or his character, the Meyerhold-trained performer could deftly sketch a type for the audience with a few rhythmic movements, quickly draw them in to the character’s situation, and provoke the desired response within the action unit.

By the end of a production, the ideal ensemble of Meyerholdian actors will have created a series of actions that challenge the spectators to make use of what they have learned through their responses. While Stanislavsky thought of audiences as similar to novel readers, bringing individual, psychological responses to what they saw and heard, Meyerhold conceived of spectators as a group of filmgoers whose social responses would help to transform the new Soviet nation. For Meyerhold, these were not Hollywood filmgoer-consumers, as movie audiences would later become, but self-conscious viewers aware of the construction of film montage and meaning. Rather than creating an illusion on the stage, Meyerhold sought to create a kind of carnival in the entire auditorium, and often had his actors breaking the illusion of the fourth wall or even running through the playhouse to engage spectators directly. By training his actors to physicalize social types for the stage, Meyerhold wanted to call attention to the kinds of physical and social transformations necessary for the welfare of the new Soviet Union. In the 1920s, Meyerhold believed that his theatre could help to move Russia toward a Communist utopia by providing new social models trained and energized with physical efficiency.

Conclusion

Can an actor use training methods from both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold to join the psychological and sociological modes together in performance? From the point of view of cognitive science, there is no reason these methods cannot be fused. When integrating actor and character into an actor/character for dramatic representation, human beings can choose from among a variety of identity concepts. Even though our history and culture will edge us toward one choice or another, we have the natural capacity to understand ourselves as containers, social types, and as physical objects. When contemporary actors perform traditional plays, the kinds of characters they are playing will likely involve them in choosing identity concepts that are out of their comfort zone. Performing the part of a prince or a gravedigger in Hamlet, for example, requires actors to conceptualize these figures, at least partly, as social types. Taking on any role in a commedia dell’arte scenario will require even a Stanislavskian-based performer to think about the identity of her/his character and the eventual identity of the actor/character as both a social type and a physical object.

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Given the possibility of combining the training programs of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, it is not surprising that many programs since the 1960s have moved toward the integration of both of these modes. These include the movement-based work of Jacques LeCoq (1921-1999) in Paris, Suzuki Tadashi’s (1939-) psychophysical regimen for actors in Japan, and the actor-as-facilitator model developed and applied by Brazilian Augusto Boal (1931-2009).

Key references

Books

Benedetti, J. (1988) Stanislavski: A Biography, London: Methuen.

Braun, E. (1995) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.

Carnicke, S.M. (1998) Stanislavsky in Focus, London: Harwood.

Edelman, G.M. and Tononi, G. (2000) A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, New York: Basic Books.

Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books.

Hodge, A. (ed.) (2000) Twentieth-Century Actor Training, London: Routledge.

Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books.

Leach, R. (1989) Vsevolod Meyerhold, Christopher Innes (ed.) Directors in Perspective Series, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McConachie, B. and Hart, F.E. (2006) Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn, London and New York: Routledge.

Milling, J. and Ley, G. (2001) Modern Theories of Performance: From Stanislavski to Boal, New York: Palgrave.

Stanislavski, K. (1948) An Actor Prepares, trans. E. Hapgood, New York: Theatre Arts Books.

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