Acting the Essence

The Performer's Work on the Self

Giuliano Campo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032001739
• eBook ISBN: 9781000586510
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Drama

Acting the Essence examines the theory, practice, and history of the art of the performer from the perspective of its inner nature as work on oneself, within, around, and beyond the pedagogy of the actor.

Ref lecting primarily on the legacy of Jerzy Grotowski, this book is composed of a series of ref lections on the Stanislavskian lineage of practitioners and related authors, in an attempt to revive awareness of the original path traced by the Russian master and to refine certain ambiguities in contemporary training. In a new media age of image and sound, accompanied by a proliferation of new technologies and means to communicate, emphasised by the COVID-19 crisis, a classic question comes to be asked of us again: What is the essence and the principal objective of the work of the performer? Is performing art still necessary? While proposing a theoretical advancement of the discipline and an historical overview of the relevant practices, this book provides tools for a better understanding of the traditional function of the performer's practice as work on the self, for its ecological renaissance through a conscient use of trance, attention, and altered states of consciousness.

This book offers insight for students in drama, theatre, and performance courses studying acting and performance at university.

PART ONE
Stanislavski and Grotowski
The Performer’s Work on the Self in European Theatre

1
THE WORK ON ONE’S SELF IN STANISLAVSKI’S LINEAGE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003173076-3

Theatre has always been, from its beginning to the early twentieth century, everywhere and at any time, without considering its mysterious birth and even more mysterious repeated disappearances, an art transmitted from generation to generation. When the modern European theatre system ended, only very few Western theatrical traditions survived, and Stanislavski gave birth to a new tradition.

When dealing with the issue of legacy in contemporary theatre, we can distinguish between modality and object of the transmission. In terms of modality, we can identify two approaches. The first proceeds from a declared intention of following certain sources historically or theoretically determined. This would lead to a new construction or to an attempt of reconstruction of forms, attitudes, and techniques. This is the case, for example, of the contemporary Commedia dell’arte, of the Odissi dance, or Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. The other modality functions as a transmission from master to novice, continuing a chain of ‘restored behaviour’¹ through an organic lineage. It is the case, for example, of the Noh theatre, of the Sicilian Pupi, or of classical ballet. We can easily acknowledge that taking Stanislavski’s work as a starting point, either from books (powerful examples of what Ferdinando Taviani, in Uomini di scena, calls ‘theatres in the form of books’) or from himself, as a person, and his pupils, both approaches have gone a long way. In terms of quality and quantity, both have achieved tremendous results over about only a century.

As has been widely discussed, a further specification of the various aspects of Stanislavskian legacy should comprehend the analysis of publications, editions, translations, circulation, and reception of his books, and in particular of An Actor’s Work on Himself (Rabota aktera nad soboi). It should also take into consideration the period when his teachings were delivered, the nature of the work that was employed by each specific pupil, and how each of them attempted to reproduce the work of his/her master once they become teachers and actor trainers. Grotowski was largely aware of this, when he explained that

Stanislavski propounded the most important questions and he supplied his own answers. Throughout his numerous years of research his method evolved, but his disciples did not. Stanislavski had disciples for each of his periods, and each disciple stuck to his particular period; hence the discussions of a theological order.²

(Towards a Poor Theatre, 174)

In some cases the two approaches, the use of literary sources and lineage, are interconnected. For example, following Jonathan Pitches’ (Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition) mapping of the most notable Stanislavskian contemporary theatre figures, we see that the Russian Vassiliev, Dodin, and the Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrošius, have all recreated their own Stanislavskian systems of training, although most of the new Russian acting schools have been massively influenced by the études of Michael Chekhov’s and Stanislavski’s direct pupil Maria Knebel (of whom Anatoly Vasiliev was a student, while Lev Dodin was a pupil of Boris Zon, another direct pupil of Stanislavski).³

Grotowski highly valued the direct ‘organic’ form of transmission, probably due to his early interest that accompanied him all his life, in the way Indian and Indian-influenced systems of knowledge have proceeded.⁴ He received his professional training initially at the State Theatre School in Kraków; however, he completed his Stanislavskian education at the directing programme of the GITIS in Moscow. In Moscow Grotowski was taught by and worked as an assistant director of Yuri Zavadsky, who had been in his turn a pupil of Sulerzhitsky, a collaborator and pupil of Vakhtangov, Demidov, and Stanislavski, and a former member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Here, Grotowski directed and co-directed plays at the GITIS, at the Mossoviet Theatre, and at the Moscow Art Theatre.⁵

Grotowski said of Stanislavski: ‘I considered him once to be my father’ (in Schechner and Wolford, The Grotowski Sourcebook, 218), ‘I was brought up on Stanislavski; his persistent study, his systematic renewal of the methods of observation, and his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work make him my personal ideal’ (Towards a Poor Theatre, 15, 16); however, elsewhere, added ‘I continued his research and did not just repeat what he had already discovered’ (in Richards, At Work with Grotowski, 105). The first known article published by Grotowski, in 1954, is indeed titled ‘The artistic testament of K.S. Stanislavski’, and it is an in-depth analysis of the method of physical actions. The continuation of Stanislavski’s research appears immediately as distinct from professionalism; according to Stanislavski himself the method of physical actions (as reported by Antarova in her diary of the Opera Bolshoi lectures) was not meant to be a technique or a moralistic set of rules, but an ethical way to reunite art with life, in a moment when the art of theatre was collapsing, (Grotowski called it the ‘ruined house’), leaving on the ground only the 1800s ‘professional’ clichés. As far as the object of the transmission is concerned, we can distinguish between creation of professional actors and pedagogy that moves outside the boundaries of theatre, a typical trait of the twentieth-century Great Reform. Although we cannot superimpose the two previous categories of self-affirmed legacy and of lineage to the latter categories, since their margins are wide and ephemeral, we can say that somehow professionalism and pedagogy of life epitomise the two principal aims, the two strands of activities that come from this same specific source; that is, the teaching of the Russian master.

Most of the Stanislavskian traditions that originated from textual interpretations aimed at the highest level of professionalism through actor training. However, a similar approach originated also in actual pupils of Stanislavski, even from his pedagogy-centred First Studio, such as Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya. They are popular in the USA, in the UK, in Russia, and in almost all Eastern European countries whose theatrical structure were influenced by the Soviet Union. By the way Boleslavsky, who was Polish, before moving to the USA, spent a few years after the Russian Revolution in Poland teaching, and it is reasonable to suppose that he had an influence on the building of a new Polish theatrical culture which informed the background in which Grotowski grew up as an artist and a pedagogue.⁶

The other Stanislavskian traditions, almost exclusively coming from organic, direct lineages, are instead focused on pedagogy, for a harmonic development of the human being. In some cases, they do not involve theatre productions at all. These are still present in the same geographical areas; however, they established themselves mostly elsewhere, especially in continental Western Europe and in Latin America. Stanislavski himself said that

There is nothing in the world more eager for beauty than the human soul. In art it is only possible to inspire. Only the teacher whose love of it has excited your enthusiasm and in whom you saw an example of the influence of his living soul on yours will be able to introduce you into the circle.

(Stanislavski, Stanislavsky on the Art, 197)

Grotowski, although he had achieved the highest levels of professionalism and expertise in actor training, has certainly been one of the major proponents of this second approach.⁷ It is not by chance that his Stanislavskian lineage finds its origin in Leopold Sulerzhitsky, the co-founder of the First Studio, who was a Tolstoyan pedagogue rather than a teacher of the profession of theatre maker, and one of the most important reformers of the twentieth century, who reshaped theatre as a laboratory; that is, a protected environment built to serve the work on the self before, throughout, and beyond the craft. A laboratory theatre is meant to build a new actor, and through the actor, a new human being. It is a terrain where individuals can move from an artistic, aesthetic experience, to a life experience. The first to use this terminology was the American Laboratory Theatre founded in New York in 1924 by the two Stanislavski followers, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya; the second was Grotowski in 1962 in Opole with his Teatr Laboratorium; the third was Eugenio Barba’s Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Holstebro since 1966 (as a branch of the Odin Teatret which was originally created in Oslo in 1964). However, other terms have been used since the beginning of the century to name the same kind of experiences, such as ‘atelier’, ‘theatre workshop’ or ‘school’ and these on some occasions were part of the activity of theatre companies. ‘However the original name was “Studio”, and the first was the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, founded by Stanislavski in 1912’ (Ruffini, Stanislavskij – Dal lavoro, 122; see also no 1, 165). Twentieth-century theatre is based on this evidence that theatre and theatre performance are not synonymous, and that ‘theatre includes performance, but does not entails it’ (Ruffini, Stanislavskij – Dal lavoro, 143). When Grotowski left the theatre of productions in 1970, he did not leave the theatre, and Stanislavski, during his classes at the Bolshoi Theatre Opera Studio (1918–1922) that were based on his long-life theatre experiences, warned his pupils that the objective of the work was not the creation of a performance, but the achievement of the ‘heroic condition’ that takes the actor⁸ of ‘charme-nobility of mind’ and ‘gladness (joy)’ beyond one’s own self to his/her second birth of a ‘new “I”’ (Stanislavski, Lezioni al Teatro Bol’šoj, 110–112, 124). The system of recruitment for the First Studio was radically different from any recruitment of a professional company or acting school. Stanislavski meant to create a ‘spiritual order of artists’, where Suler was a ‘spiritual guide’, accompanying the pupils to overcome the stage of one-at-a-time creation to a ‘creative condition’, to be sustained as second nature. Similarly, Copeau described his school as a ‘confraternity of artists’, and Grotowski started his theatrical adventure with a ‘brotherhood of arms’ (see Ruffini, Stanislavskij – Dal lavoro, 124–127).

Stanislavski invented, or, better, rediscovered and systematised the concept and the practice of ‘score’ or ‘partitura’. This is one of the principal elements that have been incorporated into the Grotowskian practice. However, this simple and logical theatrical procedure (used in the theatre of any epoch and belonging to any culture) can be traced in the theory and in the practice of other major and extremely influential contemporary theatre figures or pedagogues, such as Gurdjieff or Artaud, who made its outcome even clearer. The Artaudian cruelty is, using another word, ‘necessity’, and implies an actor be trained in and to perform the repetition of an established form, achieving that state of consciousness where she wants to do what she has to do, (see Ruffini, I Teatri di Artaud and Stanislavskij – Dal lavoro, 113). This cannot be reduced to a theatrical tool, and rather than simply a metaphor, it is properly a technique of life. Theatre and pedagogy come to be reunited into one only stream, and this acknowledgement allowed Grotowski to say that ‘Stanislavski asked the key methodological questions’, that he ‘propounded the most important questions and he supplied his own answers’ (Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre, 16 and 174) and to sum up all of Stanislavski’s quest in one single ‘fundamental question’, that is ‘the experience of life’ (Grotowski, ‘Reply to Stanislavsky’). According to Grotowski, Stanislavski brought all this about ‘within the setting of the theatre of his country, his time, of […] an existential naturalism’ (175). So, we have to be careful not to get confused by the style of Stanislavski’s theatre, and understand his approach beyond the usual definitions and the common uncritical appropriations of his methods.

Eugenio Barba explained that he and Grotowski used to distinguish between two kinds of techniques:

the ‘technique 1’ for the theatre and the ‘technique 2’ for the inner development (for example yoga): ‘Technique 1’ referred to the vocal and physical possibilities and to the various methods of psycho-technique handed down to us since Stanislavski. This ‘technique 1’, which could be complex and sophisticated, could be achieved through rzemiosło, i.e. the theatre craft.

‘Technique 2’ aimed at releasing the ‘spiritual’ energy in each of us. It was a practical path which concentrated the self on the self and, by overcoming subjectivity, opened the way to the regions known to shamans, yogis and mystics where all the individual psychic forces are integrated. We believed profoundly in the capacity of the actor to gain access to this ‘technique 2’. We imagined its path and we searched for the precise steps which might help to penetrate into the dark night of one’s inner energy.

(Barba, Land of Ashes, 55)

The systematic use of yoga is symptomatic, as it demonstrates that the research on what Grotowski calls ‘technique 2’ for the actors was initiated in Stanislavski’s First Studio. It was Sulerzhitsky who introduced Vakhtangov and his colleagues and pupils to yoga. Sulerzhitsky had also close relationships with groups of Doukhobors, and his religious approach as a pedagogue is well described by Vakhtangov in his diaries (La gioia della scena). There is plenty of evidence that Stanislavski was in his turn interested in sacred sciences, in yoga, in theosophy and anthroposophy (see Whyman, The Stanislavski System, 86).⁹ Smeliansky invites us to discuss the ‘deeply religious roots beneath Stanislavski’s understanding of acting’, and reminds us that Stanislavski described his ideal theatre as

‘Simpler, lighter, higher and more joyful’. This is a quintessential description of Stanislavski’s own life, his own years of work in search of new forms, where ‘earth’ (simpler and lighter) can easily merge with the ‘heavens’ (higher and more joyful). These four words are inscribed next to the portrait of Stanislavski that crowns the stage door of the Moscow Art Theatre.

(Smeliansky in Dacre and Fryer, Stanislavski on Stage, 32, 33)

Even Vsevolod Meyerhold, the favourite among all Stanislavski’s pupils,¹⁰ had a history of contrasted acquaintance with the Orthodox Church and sacred sciences, through his association with Vyacheslav Ivanov, the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Acting with Bad Intentions
• PART ONE Stanislavski and Grotowski: The Performer’s Work on the Self in European Theatre
• PART TWO Theatre and Ritual: The Performer’s Work on the Self Beyond Theatre
• PART THREE Pirandello and Weil: The Performer’s Work on the Self Outside Theatre
• Index