In 2013, the theatre world is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski's birth. Such milestones consistently bring a renewed interest in the work of the practitioners involved. Anatoly Smelianski, deputy artistic director of the Moscow Art Theatre, regards this jubilee not as a mere formality but as a reflection ‘on the real problems of the performing arts today and how they relate to what Stanislavski was offering to the theatre of his time and the theatre of the future’.Footnote 1 This essay will contribute to contemporary discussions on Stanislavski by throwing light on a very particular area of his research into the actor and his work: the use of everyday images. Stanislavski's work will be used to argue for the validity of adopting situations encountered in day-to-day life both to facilitate communication in rehearsal situations and to circumvent political regulation in authoritarian regimes. My discussion will be centred on a specific point in Stanislavski's career: the rehearsals for the 1933 production of Artists and Admirers, which have seldom featured in any English-language studies on the director's work.Footnote 2 The everyday images Stanislavski used during this time can be divided into three categories: ‘the most everyday’, the animalistic, and the set derived from other arts. Michel de Certeau's theories on everyday life, especially his formulations on ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, underline the importance of the everyday and I will show how these two modes of social action were evident in Stanislavski's use of day-to-day actions and situations. De Certeau identifies everyday life as a locus to resist authoritarian and regulative practice, which corresponds to the ways in which everyday images as used by Stanislavski eluded appropriation by Soviet authorities.
The specifics of Stanislavski's language have been a source of debate among various scholars, due to the problematic history of translating his works. Discussions often revolve around the terminologies used as Stanislavski attempted to find appropriate ways ‘to speak with the actor in his own language’.Footnote 3 For example, Bella Merlin, a practitioner and scholar with a background in Russian actor training, has recently compared Jean Benedetti's translation of An Actor's Work to previous versions of An Actor Prepares and Building a Character.Footnote 4 She questioned whether Benedetti has actually further censored the original by exchanging the term ‘spirit’ for ‘mind’. My essay can be placed within such a body of work that seeks to shed light on Stanislavski's language. However, it will not seek to give possible meanings to particular terms, but will rather propose everyday images as an alternative to acting jargon.
Contrary to terminology, everyday images speak to actors in a way that reduces the possibility of misinterpretation because they are sourced from everyday experiences which recur time after time, a recurrence that places them at the basis of human experience and knowledge. In fact, ‘everyday images’ is a term developed in this essay to indicate those phenomena and experiences that are generally regarded as daily and ordinary by the majority of people, and which are therefore easily apprehended because they recur across different cultures. Everyday phenomena called upon by Stanislavski in his work include objects such as necklaces, doors and colours. Daily and ordinary occurrences permeate the rehearsal notes of Artists and Admirers, recalling the way in which everyday life surrounds us from all sides.Footnote 5 In fact, critical theorists of the everyday, of whom de Certeau is a major exponent, argue for the way in which daily life ‘imposes itself upon consciousness in the most massive, urgent and intense manner. It is impossible to ignore, difficult even to weaken in its imperative presence’.Footnote 6 It is this continuous presence that makes the meaning behind everyday images easy to understand. The play itself signposts everyday life in that it makes the day-to-day life of provincial actors its subject matter. Written by Alexander Ostrovski (1881), it revolves around Negina, a young actress passionate about the theatre, and her various admirers. The play reaches its climax when she renounces her love for Meluzov, a young and idealistic university graduate, in order to live with Velikatov, a wealthy landowner who can offer her a much better chance of success in the theatre.
Categories of everyday image
As stated previously, Stanislavski's everyday images fall into three broad categories, namely those of the ‘most everyday’, the animalistic, and the set derived from other arts. Among the clearest everyday images used by Stanislavski in the rehearsals for Artists and Admirers are the references to chess and sauce. The image of playing chess was used to explain how ‘[d]ialogue is not the speaking of words, one after each other. It is work, a struggle’ (233 emphasis in original). A chess player does not play a game by repeating a set of learned moves but reacts to what his opponent does. Dialogue onstage must similarly give the impression that it is being thought at the moment and in reaction to the situation at hand. The reference to sauce describes the supportive relationship between the small bits that make up a scene and the larger given circumstances: ‘I fragmented the big piece into smaller ones . . . And every small piece has to be dipped into the given circumstances, like in a sauce’ (238, emphasis in original). In a subsequent rehearsal, Stanislavski again used culinary images to describe the actor's engagement with a role as one's ‘appetite’ for it (240). Other images in the same vein include that of the dagger stuck into an open wound (215, to explain the dangers of rushing the opening of weak production) and diving into a pool head-first (241, to highlight one's engagement with physical action in a confident, fearless manner). Swimming was also used to explain that actors have to fix the line of physical actions first to then contend with more creative work: ‘first I'll learn how to swim [fix the line of physical actions], and then I'll bathe [i.e. concern myself with more creative tasks]’ (241).
A group of images is used to highlight the importance that Stanislavski attached to the natural growth of a scene or role: instead of rushing to a climax, an actor must take the time necessary to unravel the experiences which he is embodying on the stage. The process of organic growth is evident in nature, in the sense that phenomena in life (e.g. a child) have to pass through several stages of development before maturity. Stanislavski made gradual development a necessary consideration in the actor's work on a role:
The creation of a role really has a great deal in common with every other work of nature. There are analogous processes of fecundation, conception, birth, the shaping of an inner and outer form, the formation of will, conscience, spiritual elements, qualities, properties, habits, and so on. There is travail, stages of growth, and a definite length of time needed for completion of the creative work. Nature has set the time it takes to plant and grow fruit and oats, to conceive and give birth to a child. Likewise, creative nature has also set the length of time it takes to conceive, bear and bring up a role. It has its own stages of development after its first appearance on the stage, its infancy, adolescence and maturity. It has its special nourishing diet, its inevitable growing pains, and so on and so forth.Footnote 7
The natural process of growth cannot be omitted in life, in the sense that a fully grown human being cannot emerge from the womb. The same can be said about the work of the actor in the role so that every act, scene, situation, and physical action is similarly constructed around a clear beginning, middle, and end.
The rehearsal notes of Artists and Admirers refer a number of times to organic growth. In turn, the everyday images used clarify these references. A case in point is the scene of the Duke's proposal to Negina (Act I). In working on this scene, Stanislavski reprimanded the actors for moving too quickly to the end result. They missed the stages that lead from the Duke's proposal to Negina's subsequent offence and his eventual exit from the stage. Such development contained ‘the most interesting moments of misunderstanding, of incomprehension, and the desire to understand’ (216). The scene needed a slower build-up, through a process ‘undertaken in centimeters’ (218). The scene when Negina and her mother understand their dire financial situation was treated in a similar way. The various stages in the development of the scene, ‘the whole transition from one condition to another’, were elucidated (220). Stanislavski used the image of the gradual drop in temperature when a thermometer is moved outside in the cold to make actors aware of the organic growth within this particular situation (220: ‘from 18 degrees . . . to 17, from 17 to 16’).Footnote 8
These images were not derived from the practices that marked everyday life in Soviet Russia of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but from experiences that are more general and therefore present in different sociocultural contexts.Footnote 9 It is this presence that makes Stanislavski's use of everyday images relevant to an international audience as it is not bound to considerations of time and geographical space. Even though chess is an integral part of Russian culture, Stanislavski's use of it here was basic enough that it could be understood by anyone with the slightest knowledge of the game. Different cultures do give rise, of course, to disparate daily ‘forms’ of behaviour, in that people sit, dress and build houses in diverse ways, but Stanislavski's everyday images strike the reader for their straightforwardness. He spoke of swimming and food, as well as horses and paint. These are references that any actor can comprehend because they carry none of the complexities inherent in the formulation and unpicking of acting jargon. Their straightforwardness must have served Stanislavski in another way. Stanislavski's critical attitude towards his own work was a recurrent feature of his practice,Footnote 10 but this position seems to have been softened at the end of his life. Jonathan Pitches, a scholar whose work has informed contemporary discourses on the lineages operating within and beyond the Stanislavski acting tradition, hints at this, in his reading of Stanislavski's last years, as a ‘kind of zealotry’, directed towards consolidating the universal and international application of his techniques.Footnote 11 The use of everyday images, rooted as it was in the ordinary domain of daily life, was particularly attuned to the transfer of certain acting principles into other theatre contexts.
The second category of everyday images refers to animals, where the most conventional temperaments and qualities of certain animals were used to make actors aware of the difficulties being encountered. For example, a scene which does not develop properly becomes as crude as a picture drawn by a horse (219). The image of the horse made a second appearance, but in a different way, when Stanislavski discussed the emotional and temperamental growth of a role:
A role is like an excited horse, which lunges forward during the race. An actor, like the rider, has to know how to hold the role in line, keep the horse back for a bit in order to gather up steam. Then, on the last sprint, he carefully releases the reins. This isn't the same as choking your temper. It is controlling it. (224)
Animal imagery also assisted actors in accomplishing physical tasks pertinent to their roles. In one rehearsal, Stanislavski suggested to an actor to ‘raise your hand not like a car barrier, but rather like a swan unraveling its neck’ (231). He also likened a character's walk to the way a goose swims: ‘Walking on stage doesn't just mean moving your legs. You must grab the ground with your foot and throw it back the same way a goose swims. It grabs and pushes the water away’ (236–7). The use of such animalistic imagery seems to have become standard practice in these rehearsals. It was even used by the actors to answer Stanislavski's own questions. For example, V. A. Orlov (who played the part of Narokov) likened his impatience with Negina to ‘an annoying fly’. Her infuriating comments were to be swatted away (230).Footnote 12 It is interesting to note earlier usages of animal imagery in Stanislavski's practice. For example, it had already featured in the experimentation of the First Studio, where one exercise had actors relating dramatic characters to circus animals.Footnote 13 The practice of stimulating the actor's imagination through animalistic images, therefore, persisted right through the twenty years separating the initial work of the First Studio from the rehearsals of Artists and Admirers to highlight the cumulative nature of Stanislavski's research that did not discard past practices but rather reintegrated them into new work situations.
Painting and music provided some additional images. For example, ‘The happiness [needed in a particular scene] is a colour that is put on the action. First make a precise pencil painting, and then colour it. That method of work is more reliable’ (224). This image supports the one of swimming and bathing referred to above as it similarly presses on the actor the importance of working on physical action to stimulate the actor's emotional involvement. Stanislavski delineated between good actors and actors of genius through similar painting images. A genius artist only needs a few brush strokes to make a picture come to life. Likewise, ‘Big actors, the stars, can make a big scene out of any hint in the play’ (226–7). Stanislavski's reference to the sordino, a mute placed on a string or brass instrument, made an actress aware that she was playing a scene too harshly (227). A second musical image described the delivery of flowing diction in ‘the way singers [sing] when directed by a good conductor’ (231).
One might argue against the relative ‘everydayness’ of these latter images, as Stanislavski sourced them from the highly specialized fields of the arts that are rooted in training, skill and a particular terminology. Cultural theorist David Chaney supports this claim, as he speaks of cultural activities as ‘elevated’ and extra-daily realms that are anything but ordinary, even when they profess to represent everyday realities.Footnote 14 However, the extra-daily phenomena of the specialized arts are to become, in Stanislavski's vision, part of the actor's daily routine. He recommended the visiting of museums, libraries, concerts and exhibitions to widen the actor's cultural palette.Footnote 15 An actor's cultural education becomes an everyday task, and one that informs his daily theatre work. Stanislavski also suggested the study of music, and applied musical terminology as a model for acting terminology.Footnote 16
The images derived from music elucidate an important development in the way that Stanislavski treated everyday life. Stanislavski had previously advised caution regarding the actor's everyday concerns, seeing them as a possible distraction.Footnote 17 However, in the Artists and Admirers rehearsals he asked his actors to acknowledge these daily preoccupations: ‘When you come out on the stage, forget about technique, and just trust the way you feel today, i.e. your nature’ (240; emphasis in original). The daily experiences which the actor necessarily brings with him to the theatre were treated as that particular day's ‘tone’, to which the actor ‘carr[ies] out the same tuning that a violinist does before every performance. It is very important that you have a freshly opened door, today's door, to lead you into the first bit of the role’ (230).Footnote 18 It is interesting to note the fluidity in the use of everyday images, as the reference to the door was placed side by side with the musical recommendation. The two supported each other in a most congenial way. A similar tuning image was used in a subsequent rehearsal, when Stanislavski asked an actress to use her first scene to ‘tune’ herself to the day's work. This time, Stanislavski made reference to the tuning of a piano ‘before a concert. During this tuning the experienced pianist tries to catch the sound it has on that day. You can check your line of action in this way, which is from the perceptive of this particular day’ (233).
The tactical nature of everyday images
Up to this point, Stanislavski's use of everyday images during the Artists and Admirers sessions has been treated as a means to facilitate communication in rehearsal situations. Michel de Certeau's theories on everyday life, however, demonstrate how everyday images can be understood as tactical ploys that eluded the Communist Party's appropriation and regulation of Stanislavski's theories. In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau contended that everyday life has an inherent potential that transforms it beyond superficial experience.Footnote 19 This is the potential to resist authoritarian systems:
If it is that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also ‘minuscule’ and quotidian) manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them in order to evade them.Footnote 20
De Certeau believes that everyday practices share common principles and an inherent logic which links them together in a way that transcends the disparity between temporal and geographical contexts. In other words, the operating modes functioning in everyday practices, which he calls ‘strategies and tactics’, recur to the extent that they become ‘norms [and] generalizations’.Footnote 21
A strategy is an entity that exerts discipline and control over its users. Such strategic entities would be government, workplace, prisons, clinics and the military, as ‘[p]olitical, economic and scientific rationality has been constructed [as] . . . strategic model[s]’.Footnote 22 Strategies call upon a marked visibility and tangibility, very often construed around the colonization of a central and monumental space, to imprint a permanent presence in the people's practice of everyday life. A ranking system and an accompanying terminology are articulated to facilitate the exercise of power and regulation. For example, factories display a very precise system to distinguish among the workers (manager, director, foreman, full-time and part-time workers, and so on). This system is backed by a bureaucratic set of regulations which, though making operation possible, often suffocates individual creativity. Strategic bureaucratization is also formalized through acts of writing, signed agreements, issue of memos, and the like, texts that make the strategic operation tangible and, most importantly, seemingly long-lasting.
Tactics are activities by means of which the ordinary users of a strategy (e.g. the workers) resist regulation. However, rather than seeking to oppose the strategy in an all-too-clear and visible way by, for example, going on strike, tactical players exhibit an inventive nature that recalls acts of ‘disguise, surprise, discretion, secrecy, wit, play, [and] bluff’.Footnote 23 A tactic does not have the strength to match the longevity of the strategy and, consequently, it leans towards more ephemeral practices to exploit the cracks within a particular institution. For instance, tactical play was evident when an author in Soviet Russia hid his criticism of contemporary society by displacing the narrative to another time and space.Footnote 24 Subliminal approaches were thus adopted by those Soviet writers who intended to question the status quo, a key feature of tactics in general.
Stanislavski's use of everyday images was similarly tactical in nature. The years prior to the work on Artists and Admirers were characterized by a ‘battle’ over his language. At the centre was his use of terms like the ‘magic-“if”’. This term was popular with both Russian and foreign actors as Stanislavski had been using it since the earliest incarnation of the system. Its mystical and magical connotations, however, had no place in a Soviet context that was fast moving towards ‘dialectical materialism’.Footnote 25 Two conferences organized by the Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) were held in January and December 1931, where the system was openly attacked as ‘inimical to proletarian art’.Footnote 26 The RAPP was the main Soviet interlocutor in literary matters, but it also showed a keen interest in the theatre.Footnote 27 A number of issues were raised in these conferences that dealt directly with Stanislavski and his system. Which acting terminology was appropriate? Which was politically correct? How do such terms as the ‘magic-“if”’ – but also ‘spirit’ and ‘subconscious’ – fit within Soviet philosophy and psychology? At stake in these conferences was the system's use and validity in the staging of the pro-Soviet pieces being endorsed.
The playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov was particularly vocal in his criticism of Stanislavski's work and terminology.Footnote 28 He labelled the system ‘idealistic’ in an article that appeared in early March 1931. Afinogenov also expressed his doubts on the system's actual contribution in the creation of the ‘real Bolshevik’ that had featured in the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Vladimir Kirshon's play Bread.Footnote 29 A letter written in April 1931 to Liubov Gurevich, Stanislavski's then literary adviser, shows the director's awareness of and exasperation with the situation, which he described as ‘a matter of a stupid, uncouth, talentless audience that does not feel art but wants to approach it through their intelligence. I mean an unworthy audience that splits hairs over words, people like Afinogenov’.Footnote 30 Terminological contention also served Stanislavski as pedagogical material. During one session for The Government Inspector, he used Tortsov's voice to answer a student's remark on the nature of a particular action by saying, ‘I thought we had agreed, you and I, not to quibble over words. Besides which we decided that there was a great deal of psychological in the physical and a great deal of physical in the psychological’.Footnote 31 Stanislavski was being tactical, like his contemporaries, the authors referred to above, as he addressed the debates surrounding his work through the fictitious setting of a student's imaginary diary rather than the more formal or official space of a newspaper article.
By the early 1930s, the concerns of the country had shifted to centralization. It was, in fact, the early phase of the first Five-Year Plan, a time when the country was pushed to commit to industrial and economic regeneration through quantitative production. In Certeau-ian terms, it was the task of the Communist Party to create a large-scale strategic space. The arts were processed in a similar manner. The Party's drive for the institutionalization of theatre activity reached its apex in the various governing bodies that were set up in the late 1920s and early 1930s (e.g. RAPP, the Union of Soviet Writers, All-Union of Soviet Film Trust, and so on). All these aimed at the regulation and control of artistic activity. Additionally, the Party's official position placed Soviet realism as the only artistic style possible and it also gave a strong operative hand to the Glavrepertkom (Theatre Censorship Committee). In such an intensely controlling and strategic context, everyday images became a ‘safe’ way for Stanislavski to talk to his actors, one that circumvented the political tugs of war of the time. While the authorities paid more and more attention to terminology, in itself a controlling practice binding phenomena to specific meanings, Stanislavski's everyday images tactically eluded strategic organization because they could not be appropriated and formalized, in the same way that it is impossible to catch smoke with one's bare hands. Everyday images exhibited an ephemeral quality in that they appeared and disappeared in quick succession. Moreover, the everyday examples discussed above have little meaning if detached from the particular rehearsal context in which they were used. The use of any one was not recurrent enough to elevate the image to the level of a metatheory that ‘reflect[s] more generally on the nature, practice, and phenomenon of acting’.Footnote 32 On the other hand, every image reflected the nature and practice of one specific rehearsal situation. Their value lay in their transient nature, in the way they responded to the demands and difficulties of the moment without coveting any permanent place in the actor's vocabulary.
Conclusion
This essay revolved around Stanislavski's use of everyday images during the 1932–3 rehearsals of Artists and Admirers. It posited everyday images as a means to stimulate the actor in his work, while simultaneously facilitating communication in a manner that was more direct than terminology. The application of terminology to theatre practice is indeed a double-edged sword. It is beneficial when it helps the sharing of meaning, but it can also be detrimental when the formulation of terminology becomes an end in itself. As Eugenio Barba says, ‘Taken literally, they [terms and definitions] become leaden and fall on top of us’.Footnote 33 What is therefore important is not to give aspects of the actor's work nomenclatures which define them once and for all, but to create images that enable one to understand intrinsic concepts and to refer to them in order to recall the spirit and breadth of the work. Everyday images, intrinsically tied in Stanislavski's practice to the here-and-now moment of rehearsal, offered an alternative to terminology that sidestepped many potential pitfalls.
This essay also argued that everyday images screened Stanislavski from the political forces operating at the time. These forces were treated as strategic practices aimed at the regulation of all spheres of life, including the work of the actor. Everyday images conflicted with this regulation because their tactical ephemerality admitted nothing of strategic longevity. It remains to contend Stanislavski's actual awareness of the resistive and political dimension of everyday images. One can only conjecture here about Stanislavski's intentions, but it is worth noting that there is a spontaneous cause-and-effect relationship between strategies and tactics that also seems present in Stanislavski's case. The spontaneity and ‘naturalness’ of tactics is clear: acts of tactical resistance flourish of their own accord wherever an authoritarian space is created. Symptoms of a similar spontaneity are evident in Stanislavski's use of everyday images, which were first and foremost made tactical because of the regulatory forces that surrounded them. The regulatory hand of the Party did dogmatize, of course, Stanislavski's teachings, but the discussion here about everyday images shows that such regulation could never be complete or entirely successful. Moreover, that Stanislavski made no reference to the political implications of everyday images does not equate to ignorance of the bigger picture. Tactical exploits are, after all, never trumpeted because that very vocalization would go against the silent nature of tactical activity.
Finally, a historical survey of Stanislavski's use of everyday images contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms operating behind power, and the various means that could be adopted to challenge coercion and oppression. The discussion in this essay suggests that everyday images have certain political implications that still resonate in a twenty-first century world that is increasingly being marred by violent oppositions to power regimes. In the last few years we have been inundated by images in the media of very clear and direct ways of opposing strategic – read totalitarian – regimes. People have taken to the streets, occupied buildings, and effectively made theatre performances out of their fights for freedom. Stanislavski's use of everyday images reminds us that there are other, more subliminal and tactical, ways of opposing power. These ways might not feature as the ‘news of the day’ but are nonetheless geared towards halting the influence of power regimes. Stanislavski's use of everyday images to manoeuvre the heavily controlling scene of the early 1930s becomes an invitation to contemporary theatre-makers to find similarly subliminal ways of making their claims for human freedom.
