My Life In Art by constantin stanislavski

books tittle : My Life is Art
books by : constantin stanislavski
thick book : 582 pages

This book is tell about Stanislavski’s journey from childhood and adolescent devotion to amateur theatrics to the founding, with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898, its difficulties in the pursuit of a “new kind of art” , and its embattled position after 1917 when it was under attack from the revolutionary left, which had its own new art to offer. Stanislavski’s pages on his meeting with Nemirovich-Danchenko make for engrossing reading as they detail the current stage practices and substandard working conditions that the MAT intended to oppose; and they include the commercialism of the theatre, its reliance on star turns, actors’ stock-in-trade posturing and tricks, makeshift, unsanitary, and unheated dressing rooms with broken windows and gaping doors, and the lack
 of respect shown to actors in society at large. The writing is immediate, passionate, and precise, focusing attention not simply because the MAT set its sights high against a prehistoric age, but because you find yourself thinking that that age has not yet vanished. There is much, still, to value in Stanislavski’s claims for the dignity and integrity of “art” (as distinct from what he called “convention”), actors, and the theatre profession. In many ways, these pages anticipate the chapter “Ethics and Discipline” that comes towards the end of An Actor’s Work and which is something of a credo on why doing theatre with principled seriousness could and should matter for self and others.
Stanislavski’s focus throughout on the how and why of theatre—and his accounts of productions are finely observed—leaves little room for personal sentiment in his observations on various key figures: Edward Gordon Craig whose innovations he admired; Nemirovich-Danchenko, with whom he was no longer on speaking terms; Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, his brilliant pupils, whose criticism of the psychological realism he had pursued down different pathways for more than two decades must have hurt him to the core. He is similarly discreet about his close friend and collaborator Leopold Sulerzhitsky to whom he entrusted the First Studio, founded in 1912. The First Studio was set up to test and develop the “system,” as Stanislavski called it—in quotation marks to indicate its provisional nature.

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