Editing Stanislavski's system (section)

==Heritage==
[[File:Van Vechten Marlon Brando image 170904.jpg|thumb|[[Marlon Brando]]'s performance in ''[[A Streetcar Named Desire (1951 film)|A Streetcar Named Desire]]'', directed by former [[Group Theatre (New York)|Group Theatre]] member [[Elia Kazan]], exemplified the power of [[method acting]], the American development of Stanislavski's system, in the [[1950s in film|cinema of the 1950s]].<ref>Blum (1984, 63) and Hayward (1996, 216).</ref>]]

Many of Stanislavski's former students taught acting in the [[Theater of the United States|United States]], including [[Richard Boleslavsky]], [[Maria Ouspenskaya]], [[Michael Chekhov]], Andrius Jilinsky, Leo Bulgakov, Varvara Bulgakov, Vera Solovyova, and [[Tamara Daykarhanova]].<ref name=c3>Carnicke (1998, 3).</ref> Others—including [[Stella Adler]] and [[Joshua Logan]]—"grounded careers in brief periods of study" with him.<ref name=c3/> Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya went on to found the influential [[American Laboratory Theatre]] (1923—1933) in [[New York City|New York]], which they modeled on the First Studio.<ref>Benedetti (1999a, 283, 286) and Gordon (2006, 71—72).</ref> Boleslavsky's manual ''Acting: The First Six Lessons'' (1933) played a significant role in the transmission of Stanislavski's ideas and practices to the West. In the [[Soviet Union]], meanwhile, another of Stanislavski's students, [[Maria Knebel]], sustained and developed his rehearsal process of "active analysis", despite its formal prohibition by the state.<ref>Carnicke (2010, 99—116).</ref>

In the United States, one of Boleslavsky's students, [[Lee Strasberg]], went on to co-found the [[Group Theatre (New York)|Group Theatre]] (1931—1940) in [[New York City|New York]] with [[Harold Clurman]] and [[Cheryl Crawford]]. Together with Stella Adler and [[Sanford Meisner]], Strasberg developed the earliest of Stanislavski's techniques into what came to be known as "[[Method acting]]" (or, with Strasberg, more usually simply "the Method"), which he taught at the [[Actors Studio]].<ref>Krasner (2000, 129—150) and Milling and Ley (2001, 4).</ref> Boleslavsky thought that Strasberg over-emphasised the role of Stanislavski's technique of "emotion memory" at the expense of dramatic action.<ref>Banham (1998, 112). [[Michael Chekhov]], who also founded a theatre studio in the US, came to reject the use of the actor's emotion memory in his later work as well; see Chamberlain (2000, 80–81).</ref>

Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in [[Paris]], Stanislavski worked with Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances.<ref name="Benedetti 2006">Benedetti (1999a, 351) and Gordon (2006, 74).</ref> Given the emphasis that emotion memory had received in New York, Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort.<ref name="Benedetti 2006"/> He recommended an indirect pathway to emotional expression via physical action.<ref>In his biography of Stanislavski, Jean Benedetti writes: "It has been suggested that Stanislavski deliberately played down the emotional aspects of acting because the woman in front of him was already over-emotional. The evidence is against this. What Stanislavski told Stella Adler was exactly what he had been telling his actors at home, what indeed he had advocated in his notes for [[Leonid Leonidov|Leonidov]] in the production plan for ''[[Othello]]''"; see Benedetti (1999a, 351).</ref> Stanislavski confirmed this emphasis in his discussions with [[Harold Clurman]] in late 1935.<ref>Benedetti (1999a, 351—352).</ref> The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his approach.<ref name="Benedetti 2006"/> Adler's most famous student was actor [[Marlon Brando]]. Later, many American and British actors inspired by Brando were also adepts of Stanislavski teachings, including [[James Dean]], [[Julie Harris (actress)|Julie Harris]], [[Al Pacino]], [[Robert De Niro]], [[Harvey Keitel]], [[Dustin Hoffman]], [[Ellen Burstyn]], [[Daniel Day-Lewis]] and [[Marilyn Monroe]].

Meisner, an actor at the Group Theatre, went on to teach method acting at New York's [[Neighborhood Playhouse|Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre]], where he developed an emphasis on what Stanislavski called "communication" and "adaptation" in an approach that he [[brand]]ed the "[[Meisner technique]]".<ref>Krasner (2000, 142–146) and Postlewait (1998, 719).</ref> Among the actors trained in the Meisner technique are [[Robert Duvall]], [[Tom Cruise]], [[Diane Keaton]] and [[Sydney Pollack]].

Though many others have contributed to the development of method acting, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner are associated with "having set the standard of its success", though each emphasised different aspects: Strasberg developed the psychological aspects, Adler, the sociological, and Meisner, the behavioral.<ref name=krasner129>Krasner (2000b, 129).</ref> While each strand of the American tradition vigorously sought to distinguish itself from the others, they all share a basic set of assumptions that allows them to be grouped together.<ref>Krasner (2000, 129—150).</ref>

The relations between these strands and their acolytes, Carnicke argues, have been characterised by a "seemingly endless hostility among warring camps, each proclaiming themselves his only true disciples, like religious fanatics, turning dynamic ideas into rigid dogma."<ref>Carnicke (1998, 5).</ref> Stanislavski's Method of Physical Action formed the central part of Sonia Moore's attempts to revise the general impression of Stanislavski's system arising from the American Laboratory Theatre and its teachers.<ref>Carnicke (1998, 149—) and Moore (1968).</ref>

Carnicke analyses at length the splintering of the system into its psychological and physical components, both in the US and the USSR. She argues instead for its [[Psychophysiology|psychophysical]] integration. She suggests that Moore's approach, for example, accepts uncritically the [[Teleology|teleological]] accounts of Stanislavski's work (according to which early experiments in emotion memory were 'abandoned' and the approach 'reversed' with a discovery of the scientific approach of [[Behaviorism|behaviourism]]). These accounts, which emphasised the physical aspects at the expense of the psychological, revised the system in order to render it more palatable to the [[dialectical materialism]] of the Soviet state. In a similar way, other American accounts re-interpreted Stanislavski's work in terms of the prevailing popular interest in [[Sigmund Freud|Freudian]] [[psychoanalysis]].<ref>Though Strasberg's own approach demonstrates a clear debt to [[psychoanalysis]], he make it clear in his books that he thinks that the philosophical foundations of Stanislavski's work lie in [[Ivan Pavlov|Pavlovian]] [[reflex]] and were unaffected by [[psychoanalysis]].</ref> Strasberg, for example, dismissed the "Method of Physical Action" as a step backwards.<ref>Carnicke (1998, ''[[passim]]''). Carnicke writes: "Just as it is 'true' for Stanislavsky [''sic''] that action is central to theatre, so is it 'true' that emotion is central to his System [''sic'']"; (1998, 151).</ref> Just as an emphasis on action had characterised Stanislavski's First Studio training, so emotion memory continued to be an element of his system at the end of his life, when he recommended to his directing students:
<blockquote>One must give actors various paths. One of these is the path of action. There is also another path: you can move from feeling to action, arousing feeling first.<ref>Quoted by Carnicke (1998, 151);</ref></blockquote> 
"Action, 'if', and 'given circumstances'", "emotion memory", "imagination", and "communication" all appear as chapters in Stanislavski's manual ''An Actor's Work'' (1938) and all were elements of the [[system]]atic whole of his approach, which resists easy schematisation.<ref>See Stanislavski (1938), chapters three, nine, four, and ten respectively, and Carnicke (1998, 151).</ref>

Stanislavski's work made little impact on [[Theatre of the United Kingdom|British theatre]] before the 1960s.<ref>Gordon (2006, 71).</ref> [[Joan Littlewood]] and [[Ewan MacColl]] were the first to introduce Stanislavski's techniques there.<ref name=l46/> In their [[Theatre Workshop]], the experimental studio that they founded together, Littlewood used [[improvisation]] as a means to explore character and situation and insisted that her actors define their character's behaviour in terms of a sequence of tasks.<ref name=l46/> The actor [[Michael Redgrave]] was also an early advocate of Stanislavski's approach in Britain.<ref>Benedetti (1999a, xiii) and Leach (2004, 46).</ref> The first [[drama school]] in the country to teach an approach to acting based on Stanislavski's system and its American derivatives was [[Drama Centre London]], where it is still taught today.<ref>Mekler (1989, 69; 73—75). [[Drama Centre London]]'s approach combines Stanislavski's system with the movement work of [[Rudolf Laban]] and the character typology of [[Carl Jung]] to produce a "movement psychology" for the analysis and development of [[Character (arts)|character]]s. As a result, though, its approach to [[Characterization|characterisation]] differs significantly from Stanislavski's, moving away from his [[Modernism|modernist]] conception towards a [[Romanticism|romantic]], essentialist treatment; see Mirodan (1997, 136—170). The school's work also draws on the work of [[Joan Littlewood]] and [[Theatre Workshop]].</ref>

Many other [[theatre practitioner]]s have been influenced by Stanislavski's ideas and practices. [[Jerzy Grotowski]] regarded Stanislavski as the primary influence on his own theatre work.<ref name=l46>Leach (2004, 46).</ref>