In class writing on Stanislavski

1.Stanislavski was one of the greatest practitioners of theater in 20th century. He was born in a wealthy businessman family in 1863, Moscow, Russia. He started his actor career in his teenage age. Nevertheless, he found himself tired of acting and watching at the classical theater play which actors or actresses exaggerated their movements and acted out everything over-exaggerated in his mind. He wished to have a real life performance stage which means actors or actresses should behave naturally. One anecdote about him was that he used to pretend himself as someone else whose life and background was imagined by him for days. Later he set up Moscow Art Theater. Here, he led his group tours which brought enormous influence to the theater all over the world to Europe and the US.

He developed his own system of acting. He was the one who proposed that performers' first priority should be the experience of acting rather than those vocal techniques or movement lessons. Before I studied from him, I thought theater and acting were all about practicing vocal techniques, memorizing lines, rehearsing again and again. In his point of view, he did not ask people to put all their attention on those things that I just mentioned, he asked us to find the true understanding of the lines and the characters. So that we would act more likely as the character not ourselves. Before learning his theory, I was so mad on memorizing lines on the assigned paper, then I did made some short pause on stage for anxiety of saying lines out loud. However, after I understood what he means to be the character, I am able to create good conversations on the stage because I know who I am on the stage and what I want to do. Also, I like that free-body exercise for it gives me a great chance to relax before the rehearsal or the performance and gives me a space to fall into the character's mind.

2.I think the importance of his theory was to break some traditions and open up new perspective of theater. In his time, there were no microphones to augment performers' voice and no  televisions for the audiences in the back, so his theory could be doubted. As the time goes by, his system makes performers to create more realistic characters on the stage which is the need of modern audiences and makes audiences understand the play or movie easier for what performers are playing is from daily life. As a result, his system is widely adopted by modern theaters and art schools. His system brings people more realistic and natural performances.

3.The system has cons and pros. I really like the system for following reasons. If I use his system to practice and act a character, I will not have the feeling of lost on the stage. I have already figured out who am I and what I want on the stage, so I do not have to worry about forgetting lines and I always have an objective. Moreover, I will not annoyed by practicing over and over again because I am trying to imagine more about my character all the time and get to know someone else’s life is an interesting thing. However, there are also things that I think is not that good in his system. To represent a character in the system, I have to spend tons of time to think about what are the things about the character so that could not be an effective way. Also, it is hard to find the feeling of being in the character and most of the time characters are just being themselves rather than the character.