An Outline of the Stanislavski System

An Outline of the Stanislavski System

1.     Relaxation. Learning to relax the muscles and eliminate physical tension while performing.

2.     Concentration. Learning to think like an actor and to respond to one’s own imagination.

3.     Work with the senses.  Discovering the sensory base of the work: learning to memorize and recall sensations, often called “sense memory” and /or “affective memory”; learning to work from a small sensation and expand it, a technique Stanislavski called “spheres of attention”.

4.     Sense of truth. Learning to tell the difference between the organic and the artificial. Stanislavski believed that there were natural laws of acting, which were to be obeyed.

5.     Given Circumstances. Developing the ability to use previous four skills to create the world of the play (the circumstances given in the text) through true and organic means.

6.     Contact and communication. Developing the ability to interact with other performers spontaneously, and with an audience, without violating the world of the play.

7.     Units and objectives. Learning to divide the role into sensible units that can be worked on individually, and developing the ability to define each unit of the role by an active goal desired by the character rather than as an entirely literary idea.

8.     Logic and believability.  Discovering how to be certain that the sum of the combined objectives are consistent and coherent and that they are in line with the play as a whole.

9.     Work with the text. Developing the ability to uncover the social, political, and artistic meaning of the text, and seeing that these ideas are contained within the performance.

10.  The creative state of mind. An automatic culmination of all the previous steps.