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How the work of Konstantin Stanislavski can be reinterpreted through a more empirical and cognitive lens using neurobiologist Bernard Baars' In the Theater of Consciousness. The study emphasizes the importance of constantly reexamining and refining our understanding of Stanislavski's System and the role of habit in acting. It also discusses Stanislavski's influence from William James and the concept of the absorbed state.
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Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theatre in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Adviser: Assistant Professor Valleri Hohman
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In his original draft preface to his first Russian book, An Actor’s Work on Himself, Konstantin Stanislavski stated that he believed “Art should be on good terms with science.”^1 This was far from an unqualified statement, as he stridently resisted the “scientific sophistries” that some actors used to replace true creative art. He recognized right away that art must make use of science in order to find nature, but that art was ultimately intuitive and outside the realm of science. He recognized, however, that science, particularly psychology, had an aim similar to his own – the exploration and explanation of the business of being human. We know for certain that Stanislavski was intensely preoccupied with psychologists. He went so far as to directly cite one in particular – Theodule Ribot – as a direct source for some of his work. Many of the psychological foundations on which he built are no longer tenable. Any work such as his, that is steeped in the time of Freud, Ribot, and William James, is in danger of obsolescence, as those theorists have been modified, built upon, and even discarded. One might expect that Stanislavski should likewise be considered obsolete; a mere curiosity of a time long past. Close and thoughtful study can, however, reveal that the exact opposite is true. Many things we have learned about the human mind and its connection to the body in the decades since Stanislavski’s death can serve to reinforce his work, as well as provide an exciting way forward for actors and acting teachers. This study uses a study from one such contemporary theorist to do exactly that. Psychology as James and Freud saw it still thrives today, but it has added to itself the newer field of Cognitive Science. This field’s major occupation is the study of cognition – the process of thought – and its function in the human mind. I use the 1997 work In the Theater of (^1) Stanislavski and Benedetti xxiv
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v For my mother, who has stood by me throughout this journey, and for my father, who only got to see the beginning.
Introduction “Isn’t that what it is to live and be an actor? Isn’t that inspiration?” “I don’t know. Ask the psychologists.”
Stanislavski’s death can serve to reinforce his work, as well as provide an exciting way forward for actors and acting teachers. This study uses a study from one such contemporary theorist to do exactly that. Psychology as James and Freud saw it still thrives today, but it has added to itself the newer field of Cognitive Science. This field’s major occupation is the study of cognition – the process of thought – and its function in the human mind. I use the 1997 work In the Theater of Consciousness by neurobiologist Bernard Baars to reorganize the Stanislavski System in more empirical and Cognitive terms. Demonstrating a kinship between these two seemingly disparate thinkers makes the case that Konstantin Stanislavski, while developing his System over some three decades, did more than just revolutionize acting in the West. We find that, as Rhonda Blair argues, he intuited “something fundamental about how we, as human beings and as actors, work.” 6 Demonstration of this immutable connection between the System and workings of the human mind allows us to understand the System itself in more empirical terms. It also reinvigorates the possibility of continuing Stanislavski’s process of exploration just as he might have. Had Stanislavski lived to see the staggering advances in both theoretical psychology and neuroscience, he would almost certainly have continued developing and refining his own work. This study serves as a reminder that the truest way to practice the Stanislavski System is to constantly reexamine and refine how we understand ourselves as actors and thinking beings. Justification and Significance In 1934, when Stella Adler returned to the Group Theater after studying with Stanislavski, she reported to Lee Strasberg that they Group had misunderstood much of the (^6) Rhonda Blair, “Acting and the Computational Theory of Mind,” Method Acting Reconsidered, ed. David Krasner, (New York: St. Martin’s Press 2000) 204.
ideas have evolved over time, they have never quite healed the rift that began with a single angry conversation between Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. Debates between acting teachers can still tend toward the sectarian, and even newer techniques that claim to be “anti-Stanislavski” often continue this insistence on an ultimate “right’ or “wrong” in actor training. 9 To move this debate productively forward, I propose that we first move backward. By examining Stanislavski’s process of development and its sources I demonstrate that his basis was not just the reproduction of factual reality, as is so often thought. It is also not intended to focus an actor in on himself, as many detractors accuse. From the beginning, Stanislavski sought only to identify and access the tools that nature presents an actor in order to produce work of genius. These tools come from an actor’s personal makeup – his inseparable mind and body – and it was only by understanding the use of those tools in life that he could understand their use onstage. By demonstrating the System’s kinship with Cognitive Science, this study offers a new nomenclature to discuss and debate the job of the actor irrespective of a specific teacher’s training methods. One teacher might be said to be more effective at training one part of an actor’s mind or body, and another might have an equal effectiveness in a different area. Some teachers might disagree at a more basic level about the use of attention and consciousness onstage. Thus the many teachers of today, both within and without the Stanislavski “tradition,” can be examined as different points of view on the same material. Such a discussion could empower a student actor to find the appropriate teacher for her own particular mind and body without resorting to the “one size fits all” mindset that the search for Stanislavski’s “heir” would suggest. (^9) Close examination of many of these “anti-Stanislavski” techniques often reveals far more apposition than opposition.
Review of the Literature This study owes considerable debt to two writers in particular. The first, William Archer, wrote his Masks or Faces?: A Study in the Psychology of Acting a decade and a half before Stanislavski began his earliest work on the System. Archer meant primarily to oppose Denis Diderot and others that demanded an actor not feel emotion while performing. By directly questioning as many actors as he could about their actual methods, he elucidated the idea of a split consciousness that was capable both of feeling and not-feeling simultaneously. He thoughtfully explored many of the other components of an actor’s profession, and did so in an eminently readable and entertaining way. The thought processes and interrogative mindset of Masks or Faces made this study possible. It would be disingenuous, if not dishonest, to not likewise acknowledge the debt this study owes to the work of teacher, director, and theorist Rhonda Blair. Blair has become perhaps the most authoritative voice in the field today on the confluence between acting theory and cognitive science. Her 2008 book The Actor, Image and Action was an indispensable guide for this study. It was through her work that I found Bernard Baars’s work, and her ongoing experimentation made the utility of this study clear. I explore some of her work more explicitly in Chapters Two and Three, but this study can nearly be said to simply build off of a connection between two of the sources of her expansive and exciting work. Sharon Carnicke’s 1998 work Stanislavsky in Focus (sic) contains an important analysis of the System’s evolution, influences and interpretation. Her study is not explicitly cognitive in nature, and is therefore not heavily cited here. Her holistic view of the System as an ever- evolving process of experimentation and discovery has heavily influenced the foundational assumptions of this study, however.
My organizational methodology is almost exclusively from Bernard Baars. Baars primarily splits his theater model into two areas – the Conscious “Stage” and the Unconscious “Audience.” He makes mention of Context Operators as part of a “Backstage,” but does not give that backstage a central place within In the Theater of Consciousness. I take advantage of this mention to create my own preparatory space, and therefore dedicate my first chapter to these “Backstage” concepts, as well as the foundational Stanislavskian concept of the Creative State. My second chapter is on Baars’s most central occupation – Consciousness. After a brief overview of Consciousness as Baars understands it, I demonstrate several concepts from Stanislavski that would, according to the Russian master’s own description, likely fit onto the Baarsian “Stage.” My third chapter, on the cognitive Unconscious, requires a bridge from Consciousness. As Baars indicates, the operations of the Unconscious are largely “opaque.” 10 I therefore use a bridging concept from Baars, Volition, to discuss how Conscious effort unlocks Unconscious processes. I demonstrate that Stanislavski quite probably meant for many elements of the System to be performed unconsciously, and, with evidence from Rose Whyman’s “The Actor’s Second Nature: Stanislavski and William James,” I offer up ways in which Stanislavski meant to explicitly train an actor’s cognitive unconscious for use in performance. Limitations Cognitive Psychology, like acting theory, is a complex and ever-changing field. It would likely be possible to find a psychological backing for any number of ideas. To combat this, I limit the psychological scope of this study as much as possible to Bernard Baars’s In the Theater of Consciousness and the sources he directly attributes. The choice of this particular book (^10) Bernard Baars, In The Theater of Consciousness, (New York: Oxford UP 1997) 177
betrays another limitation. In the Theater of Consciousness is a book written less for neuroscientists and more for lay scholars and thinkers. This is important to note, because this study seeks to identify the ramifications of Baarsian metaphor as they apply to Stanislavski. This thesis proclaims no special knowledge that would advance the field of neuroscience. At its heart, In the Theater of Consciousness functions as a metaphor, not a prescription, and it is in that spirit that I use it in this study. While this thesis maintains that the work of Stanislavski cannot be taken as a singular snapshot, it does become necessary to define the scope of Stanislavski’s work as it pertains to this study. His work has been transmitted with qualitative differences by many agents: himself, his translators, his students, their students, and so on. Another, more exhaustive analysis of Stanislavskian ideas may be possible, but this thesis takes Jean Benedetti’s recent translation, The Actor’s Work, as the primary authority. This limitation has some serious ramifications, as differences in translation between Benedetti’s edition and the original English translations by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood could cause significant changes to this study, as could deep examination of Stanislavski’s own Russian editions. Using An Actor’s Work also necessitates a neglect of Stanislavski’s final work on the Method of Physical Action and Active Analysis – both of which are worthy of additional study. An easy argument can be made that the job of the actor includes far more elements, cognitive and otherwise, than are dealt with in Stanislavski. Some obvious elements external to Stanislavski will be addressed where appropriate, but primary consideration of these is left to future researchers. Likewise, this study tends toward American schools of mimetic acting. Further study along these lines could certainly be done for Eurasian successors of Stanislavski as
Chapter 1 Backstage: Forces that Define Conscious Experience Creative State, Absorbed State An actor performing is a human in conflict. She is subject to the simultaneous demands of the text, fellow artists and the audience. She must also satisfy her own needs for personal expression, professional comportment, and continued employment. Actors have risen to this daunting challenge for thousands of years. Konstantin Stanislavski wished to identify how actors confronted these demands to produce the best possible result. His conclusion was that actors of genius did not create because of these competing demands, but because they could divest themselves of them, and live naturally through the fictional circumstances created onstage by the actors and text. This ability, this openness to fictional or mimetic experience, was central to his work. He called this state of openness the Creative State. It had both inner and outer elements, but culminated in a unified state of physical and psychological openness. The sheer number of concepts introduced by the Stanislavski System might appear to contradict this desire. To add each of these concerns to an actor’s consciousness while maintaining a sense of openness and spontaneity would certainly be a daunting proposition should we accept it.^11 It is not, however, what Stanislavski intended. He explicitly wrote, “Work on the ‘system’ at home. Onstage put it to one side…You cannot act the ‘system.’” 12 His work was intended to get an actor as close as possible to nature while performing the apparently unnatural act of living within a fiction on public display. (^12) Stanislavski and Benedetti 612
This distinction between training, rehearsal, and performance is key to understanding his process. Each element Stanislavski introduces is often not an addition. Many are, in their own ways, subtractions. Stanislavski identifies specific sites of possible failure that must be removed from the actor’s consciousness. The chapters of An Actor’s Work are a way of training actors to reach the Creative State in performance, and to empty themselves of all else. An exercise meant to develop a particular skill is generally not meant to occupy an actor’s consciousness during performance – particularly not at the expense of the Creative State. This Creative State is, for Stanislavski, prerequisite for actors to produce “the art of experiencing.” 13 It is in this state that true acting is possible, and when excessive reliance on technique or clichés of business becomes unnecessary. This Creative State exists when actors believe in the world of the play, and truly act as the author’s character within themselves. In his first chapter on the “Actor’s Creative State,” he gives us this (fictionalized and idealized) account of an actor’s first experience of it: “At that moment my head started to spin. I lost myself in the role, and didn’t know what was me and what was the character.“ 14 Put this way, the Creative State reads like a kind of trance, or possession. Kostya, Stanislavski’s invented (and eponymous) student goes so far as to think it a “magical transformation.” This equation of the Creative State and a trance or possession is both strengthened and clarified by Stanislavski’s own sources. His lifelong search for a reliable path to genius began not just in his art, but within the realm of fin de siècle psychology. Stanislavski is known to have studied (and cited) Theodule Ribot, whose “ Essai sur le Passions” (Essay on the Creative Imagination) was published in 1906, the same year Stanislavski (who was fluent in French) (^13) Stanislavski and Benedetti 16. (^14) Stanislavski and Benedetti 325
way to induce that interaction. He prefers instead “mediating” concepts, where a person selects something he can consciously attend to that is known to excite subconscious results. 19 This was an overriding demand of Stanislavski’s process and investigation - to access “the subconscious through the conscious.” 20 For a long period he openly adapted concepts from Ribot. 21 Indeed, the entire System could be seen as a Ribotian mediation, an extended metaphor that can be attended to in order to access that which cannot. There is, however, another likely psychological antecedent to Stanislavski that may provide a greater perspective. Rose Whyman contends that Stanislavski’s work is also heavily influenced by the psychology of William James. Whyman makes a clear circumstantial case that Stanislavski was familiar with James, whose Principles of Psychology had been translated into Russian by 1896, and who was cited in books on psychology that we know were in Stanislavski’s personal library.^22 Whyman makes a convincing case that the role of habit in “the actor’s toilette” that Stanislavski proposes is borrowed almost verbatim from James.^23 James was a towering figure in the understanding of mind and brain at the close of the nineteenth century, and his expansive reasoning provides another clear example for our understanding of Stanislavski. In Principles of Psychology, the closest analog to inspiration and the Creative State (where conscious and unconscious interact) is the state of hypnosis. It had been known for some time as “mesmerism” or “animal magnetism,” until the name “hypnosis” was added by Dr. (^19) This process of mediating deeply informs Ribot’s Affective Memory that Stanislavski adapted to his own uses in his early work. (^20) Stanislavski and Benedetti 18. (^21) Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers 1998) 131. (^22) Rose Whyman, "The Actor's Second Nature: Stanislavski and William James," New Theater Quarterly 23. (2007): 115- 23 (^23) Whyman 115-23.
James Braid in 1852.^24 It had long been thought that this phenomenon was almost magical, that it introduced an entirely altered state of consciousness and a loss of individual will. William James described it as a brain-centered (hence natural) phenomenon that could be defined by a certain set of observable prerequisite conditions that could be called a “trance-state.” 25 James makes no attempt to describe how such a hypnotic state occurs, though he does describe various methods by which hypnotic operators attempt to induce it. Since he cannot define the state itself in neurological terms, he instead lists various “symptoms” that can be found or produced. 26 In a hypnotic state, subjects can dissociate the “real” world from their hypnotic world, forgetting (once brought out of hypnosis) that they had been led through “liveliest hallucinations and dramatic performances.” 27 They are also highly suggestible, accepting as fact the stimuli and commands given them by the operator, whether or not what they are told is factually true. Subjects can be made to believe any number of hallucinations that can take auditory or visual form, or even false memories and altered personality traits. Within this state, subjects can (when suggested) spontaneously set body functions in motion that normally would not be consciously controlled. 28 Thus, in a hypnotic state, a person can live or experience a life that is not their own, and do so bodily. Modern thinking tends to discount hypnosis as a discrete phenomenon. James himself leaned that way, but could not find a way to discount the phenomenon and explain the observed qualities of subjects under hypnosis. 29 Bernard Baars, writing a century later, reconciles the two. (^24) "Hypnosis." The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science. Hoboken: Wiley, 2004. Credo Reference , U of IL Lib. 11 January 2010 http://www.credoreference.com/entry/wileypsych/hypnosis (^25) William James, The Principles of Psychology 2 vols. (New York: Holt, 1923) II.601. (^26) James II.602. (^27) James II.602. (^28) He includes on this list blushing, which calls to mind the famous blush of Eleonora Duse. (^29) James II.599-601.
