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 * Sandbox for the article on Action (Stanislavski) • Remember the principles of WP:SS and MoS:Lead - the introduction needs to repeat and summarise the contents of each section.

Konstantin Stanislavski's 'system' of training, preparation, and rehearsal technique considers what actors communicate through their actions to be as important as the actual dialogue that they speak. It is on the basis of the deeds and actions of the characters portrayed, Stanislavski argues, that an audience expects to understand and judge them. "Action" (deistvie) is what an actor does to attempt to fulfil a "task". Tasks arise from the situations that confront a character during the course of a drama. Actors stimulate their imaginations with a question to which they respond with action: "what would I do if I were in this situation?" Action is described with active, transitive verbs and has both an outer, physical dimension and an inner, mental one.

Stanislavski believed that conscious preparation is necessary to establish a pathway from an actor's unconscious sources of creativity to its expression through concrete and specific actions. To that end, he argued that actors must study the course of the play's action in detail in the early stages of a rehearsal process. In his actor training, he encouraged his students to play games of "what if...", in which they would imagine a creatively stimulating set of circumstances that provoked them to take action. These improvisations trained them to use their imaginations in a focused and active exploration of the given circumstances, to follow through the consequences of any choice that they made in a logical sequence, and to justify their inner and outer actions. A clear and vivid imagination is an important ability for an actor, since it incites inner action, followed by outer, physical action.

Impulse, justification, and task
From as early as his work at the First Studio in the 1910s, Stanislavski taught that "action" is what an actor does to attempt to fulfil a "task". Tasks arise from the situations that confront a character during the course of a drama. Stanislavski recommends the use of what he calls the "magic if" to initiate the actor's involvement in the character's problems and experience—actors pose a question to themselves that stimulates their imaginations and that they answer with action: "what would I do if I were in this situation?" Action is what the actor does to address the problem that the "given circumstances" of a scene present. Stanislavski argued that the actor's choice of actions must be appropriate to those circumstances. Action is described with active, transitive verbs, such as arouse, beg, belittle, bully, challenge, confront, dismiss, encourage, entertain, flatter, ignore, impress, intimidate, mock, placate, reassure, tease, or threaten. It has both an outer, physical dimension (vneshnee, fizicheskoe) and an inner, mental one (vnutrennee).

Inner Impulse • concrete and specific vs. "in general" • justification

When an actor selects a task, its ability to impel action is a primary consideration.

"There is an unbreakable bond between the action on the stage and the thing which precipitated it."

Stanislavski draws a distinction between actions, which constitute the substance of drama, and activities (such as cleaning, dressing, eating, or smoking), which provide a context for its action. When an activity is driven by a character's task, it becomes an "action". Action is distinguished from other types of dramatic event insofar as it is purposeful—as the theatre semiotician Keir Elam explains, an "action" is performed when "there is a being, conscious of his [sic] doings, who intentionally brings about a change of some kind, to some end, in a given context."

According to the principles of what Stanislavski called the "art of experiencing", actors seek to create afresh each time, both in rehearsal and performance, by responding to the intentions that cause an action rather than reproducing the action itself (as the "art of representation" would).

The actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of the task that the character seeks to address at any given moment.

"Everything that happens onstage must occur for some reason or other."

Stanislavski calls actions that the actor does not justify "mechanical" and suggests that such actions are usually performed more quickly than justified ones.

Acting that is based on traditional, histrionic conventions rather than "human actions in real life", Stanislavski calls "ham" or "stock-in-trade acting". "At moments of intimacy," he writes of actors who perform in this way, "they come right downstage, look at the audience, and declaim their non-existent experiences in a loud, flashy emotional way."

Scoring of actions
The actor's individual actions with which he or she responds to the character's tasks are connected together in a "score" of the part (partitura deistvii, used in the same sense as a musician's "score"), which forms a "through-action." The combined action of all the actors' scores, as formed by their analyses and mutual adjustments in rehearsals, contributes to the overall score of the performance. In addition to the necessity of adapting each score to the interaction with the other characters during rehearsals, Stanislavski insists on the importance of "condensing" each score, in which all superflous emotion is stripped away and a simple, clear, and compelling form of embodiment is sought.

Action and emotion
You can't squeeze feelings out of yourself, you can't be jealous, love, suffer for the sake of being jealous, loving, or suffering. You can't force feelings. That only leads to the most repulsive kind of ham acting. So, when choosing an action, leave your feelings alone. They will appear of their own accord as a result of something which has gone before, that evokes jealousy, love, or suffering. Think hard about what has gone before and re-create it. Don't be concerned with the result. [...] The true actor should not ape the outward manifestations of passion, or copy outward form, or indulge in mechanical playacting according to some ham ritual or other, but perform actions in a genuine human fashion. You must not play passions and characters but react under the influence of passion, in character. The selection, shaping, and control over their actions enables the actors to evoke emotional experience and subconscious behaviour indirectly, since a sequence of feelings are provoked by their "through-actions".

Drama and dramatic structure
Acting is action. The basis of theatre is doing, dynamism. The word "drama" itself in Ancient Greek means "an action being performed". In Latin the corresponding word is actio, and the root of this same word has passed into our vocabulary, "action", "actor", "act". So, drama is an action we can see being performed, and, when he comes on, the actor becomes an agent in that action.

Stanislavski considered action as the outer form of drama and emotion as its inner content. Under the influence of the aesthetic ideas of Leo Tolstoy (as expressed in What is Art?), he thought that the arts are united by their common effort to convey emotion. In this scheme, action distinguishes theatre from other forms of art. "People on stage act", he wrote, "and these actions—better than anything else—uncover their inner sorrows, joys, relationships, and everything else about the life of the human spirit on stage." If action is the medium-specific language by which affective material is communicated in the theatre, then his 'system', Stanislavski proposed, is its grammar.

Action forms a crucial part of the analytical practice of Stanislavski's 'system', which offers a critical vocabulary that treats the dramatic text as a score for performance and characters as agents of the plot. Dramatic texts, Stanislavski understood, contain a structure of actions. In his later work, he encouraged the "active analysis" (deistvennyi analiz) of a play, in which actors improvise that structure. Instead of engaging in at-the-table discussions, the cast translate the text into what Vasily Toporkov calls "the language of actions" and thus, over the course of successive improvisations, act out the dynamic potential of each scene. "The best way to analyze a play", Stanislavski wrote, "is to take action in the given circumstances." Rehearsals identify the structure of conflict—with its inciting events, varying strategies, and abrupt reversal-points—that articulates the dynamics of action and counter-action in each scene. Stanislavski thought that actors could memorise a play's structure of action more easily and quickly than its words. Stella Adler advised that actors find it far easier to remember their lines after they have explored its action in this way and paraphrased its dialogue.

The actors' use of the Naturalistic convention of the fourth wall renders the action self-contained and autonomous from the audience.

Acting is inseparable, he thought, from its structural form in action. In contrast to the approach that Lee Strasberg's formulation of the Method takes, which promotes the power of the director in its understanding of action as a tool to manipulate actors, Stanislavski's approach promoted a creative actor who discovers actions from the "facts" of the play and in exercising control in this way assumes responsibility for its interpretation.