Stanislavski

Ron Weiss

Stanislavski Reading

Directing Theory

9/13/23

This reading felt very familiar to me in the sense that so much of what Stanislavski is talking about Is what we have been learning for the past two years. I never studied stanislavsky before outside of our first year acting class with Tanya belov and that class really mostly focused on public solitude. when I was in high school I read about half of an actor prepares and thought I understood acting –Only to realize now that there's so much in his method.

 I really liked hearing about stanislavski as a person and investigator of Art because I resonate a lot with that. I feel like I'm really interested in examining what is the best way to do what we do and constantly trying to create new ways to deepen the work we make. I've been doing a lot of readings and watching a lot of documentaries about great artists recently like Stanislavski, Maria Irene Fornes, and Pina Bausch, and the thing they all seem to have in common is that they were trying to do something new and often they received a lot of pushback.Hearing this about the “greats” is so validating because at school I often feel dissatisfied with the status quo of the work we make and when I try to do something different not only is it often incredibly difficult, but it is not so quickly supported. which makes me very curious as to why?  When will we learn the lesson that new ideas are so often the right ideas? will we ever learn that lesson? I hope we do.

 I was also excited to see stanislavski recognizing his struggle with differentiating ordinary life and artistic life and how sometimes he received backlash from people saying that he only wanted to see the ordinary life on stage. I feel like I have had many times where I question can anything be more interesting than what’s real? it's still a question I think about a lot now. I think that what trumps this is Fantasy on stage at the same time as virtual reality gets more advanced I wonder if even fantasy in the theater will not hold up. when we get into a world where I can feel and smell and taste the theater and it can be anything– I can experience things that don't exist on this world naturally. then I don't see how the stage will hold up. I think I'm talking about a world that has become a simulation and a heightened version of our natural world, but it doesn't seem like we're too far away from that.

I'm excited too by how often stanislavski mentions geniuses. to hear a genius call someone a genius is just a very loving experience.