User:DoctorMabuse/Sandbox3


 * Sandbox for the article on Konstantin Stanislavski
 * This article is still in development. Remember the principles of WP:SS and MoS:Lead. The first paragraph has to be a general introduction to who he is and why he is notable for the general browser, rather than the theatre-specialist.

Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski (Константин Серге́евич Станиславский) (17 January 1863 – 7 August 1938), was a Russian actor and theatre director. He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique. His development of a theorised praxis—in which practice is used as a mode of inquiry and theory as a catalyst for creative development—identifies him as the first great theatre practitioner.

Theatre-making is a serious endeavour that requires dedication, discipline and integrity, Stanislavski thought, and he viewed the work of the actor as an artistic undertaking. He treated the theatre as an art-form that is autonomous from literature and one in which the playwright's contribution should be respected as that of only one of an ensemble of creative artists. Following a legendary 18-hour discussion with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, in 1898 Stanislavski and Nemirovich founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company. Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923-4) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911-12) established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre. Stanislavski's approach to theatre-making responded to a wide range of influences and ideas, including his study of the modernist and avant-garde developments of his time (naturalism, symbolism and Meyerhold's constructivism), Russian formalism, Yoga, Pavlovian behaviourist psychology, James-Lange (via Ribot) psychophysiology, and the aesthetics of Belinsky and the realists Pushkin, Shchepkin, Gogol, and Tolstoy.

Stanislavski's innovative contribution to modern acting theory has remained at the core of mainstream western performance training for much of the last century. That many of the precepts of his 'system' seem to be common sense and self-evident testifies to its hegemonic success. Actors frequently employ his basic concepts without knowing they do so. Thanks to its promotion and elaboration by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of his theoretical writings, Stanislavski's 'system' acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed an international reach, dominating debates about acting in Europe and America. His work was as important to the development of socialist realism in the Soviet Union as it was to that of psychological realism in the United States. Many actors routinely equate his 'system' with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with Stanislavski's multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in' and treats the actor's mind and body as parts of a continuum.

Biography
The biography of Konstantin Stanislavski straddles two centuries, a world war, and political and artistic revolutions. During his life, he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of Lenin and was one of the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR. He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered a reputation as one of the leading directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.

Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion. Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923-4) and its landmark productions of The Seagull (1898) and Hamlet (1911-12) established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre. By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays. He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov. At the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a massive heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking medical assistance). He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual An Actor's Work (1938).

To export to article on An Actor's Work
Throughout the writing process he worked closely with Gurevich, who served as his editor. On 22 April 1930, Stanislavski signed a contract with Elizabeth Hapgood, who had been working on an English translation, that granted her power to negotiate contracts for the publication of his books on the 'system' in all languages. The first volume was largely complete by August 1930. Unimpressed with the draft, Gurevich encouraged him to include more of the material he had already written, especially that which explained "bits and tasks"; she also suggested including the three-fold distinction between the "art of experiencing," the "art of representation," and the "stock-in-trade" approaches to acting from a draft called Various Trends in the Theatre. Stanislavski confirmed that he now thought in terms of two distinct versions, an American and a Soviet edition. He elaborated a plan in which the Russian An Actor's Work on Himself would be the first in a sequence of eight books (that would include My Life in Art) covering all aspects of theatre-making.

Productions
(draft: List of productions) He also worked with a number of important artists, stage designers, and composers, including Viktor Simov, Alexandre Benois, Aleksandr Golovin, and Konstantin Korovin.

Legacy
Many of Stanislavski's former students taught acting in the USA, including Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Michael Chekhov, Andrius Jilinsky, Leo Bulgakov, Varvara Bulgakov, Vera Solovyova, and Tamara Daykarhanova. Others—including Stella Adler and Joshua Logan—"grounded careers in brief periods of study" with Stanislavski. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya founded the influential American Laboratory Theatre in 1923.

Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya went on to found the influential American Laboratory Theatre (1923-1933) in New York, which they modeled on the First Studio. Boleslavsky's manual Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933) played a significant role in the transmission of Stanislavski's ideas and practices to the United States.

One of Boleslavsky's students, Lee Strasberg, went on to co-found the Group Theatre (1931-1940) in New York with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. Together with Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, Strasberg developed the earliest of Stanislavski's techniques into "Method acting," which he taught at the Actors Studio. Meisner, an actor at the Group Theatre, went on to teach at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he developed what came to be known as the Meisner technique.

"seemingly endless hostility among warring camps, each proclaiming themselves his only true disciples, like religious fanatics, turning dynamic ideas into rigid dogma."

His work provided a systematic base for students such as Evgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevolod Meyerhold to depart from, and for Lee Strasberg to develop (though many would say misconstrue) into the Method via students of Stanislavsky like Richard Boleslavsky, who went to work in the United States of America.

Jerzy Grotowski regarded Stanislavski as the primary influence on his own theatre work.

Stanislavski's work made little impact on British theatre before the 1960s. Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl were the first to introduce Stanislavski's techniques to Britain. 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 objectives. The actor Michael Redgrave was also an early advocate of Stanislavski's approach in Britain.


 * Need to include material on Brecht's assessment of Stanislavski's work.

Fictional references
Mikhail Bulgakov satirised Stanislavski by means of the character "Ivan Vasilievich" in his novel Black Snow (also called The Theatrical Novel). While Bulgakov portrays him as a great actor, he suggests that his famous "method" hinders actors' performances with its ridiculous exercises. Despite this caustic assessment, Stanislavski and Bulgakov remained good friends.

Scratchpad
He discovered his "principle of opposites," as expressed in his aphoristic advice to the actor: "When you play a good man, try to find out where he is bad, and when you play a villain, try to find where he is good."
 * Need to check this more thoroughly, since Benedetti challenges the accuracy of Stan's dating of this discovery.


 * Naturalistic. Idiosyncratic definitions