Art of representation
Encyclopedia
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
theatre practitioner
Theatre practitioner
Theatre practitioner is a modern term to describe someone who both creates theatrical performances and who produces a theoretical discourse that informs his or her practical work. A theatre practitioner may be a director, a dramatist, an actor, or—characteristically—often a combination of these...
Konstantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Stanislavski
Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski , was a Russian actor and theatre director. Building on the directorially-unified aesthetic and ensemble playing of the Meiningen company and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic...
to describe a method of acting
Acting
Acting is the work of an actor or actress, which is a person in theatre, television, film, or any other storytelling medium who tells the story by portraying a character and, usually, speaking or singing the written text or play....
. It comes from his acting manual An Actor Prepares
An Actor Prepares
An Actor Prepares is a novel that was first published in 1936. It is the first volume of the translations of Konstantin Stanislavski's books on acting, which were published as a trilogy in English, though originally meant to be published as two books in Russia...
(1936). Stanislavski defines his own approach to acting as "experiencing the role" and contrasts it with the "art of representation". It is on the basis of this formulation that the American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Method acting
Method acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
teacher Uta Hagen
Uta Hagen
Uta Thyra Hagen was a German-born American actress and drama teacher. She originated the role of Martha in the 1963 Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee...
defines her recommended Stanislavskian approach as 'presentational' acting, as opposed to 'representational' acting. This use, however, directly contradicts mainstream critical use of these terms
Presentational acting and Representational acting
Presentational acting and the related representational acting are critical terms used within theatre aesthetics and criticism.Due to the same terms being applied to certain approaches to acting that contradict the broader theatrical definitions, however, the terms have come to acquire often overtly...
. Despite the distinction, Stanislavskian theatre, in which actors 'experience' their roles, remains 'representational
Representation (arts)
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements...
' in the broader critical sense.
'Experiencing' and 'representing'
Method acting
Method acting is a phrase that loosely refers to a family of techniques used by actors to create in themselves the thoughts and emotions of their characters, so as to develop lifelike performances...
is their frequent confusion of the first five of these categories with one another; Stanislavski, however, goes to some lengths to insist that two of them deserve to be evaluated as 'Art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
' (and only two of them): his own approach of ‘experiencing the role’ and that of the ‘art of representation’.
In Stanislavski's estimation, the crucial difference between the two approaches that are worthy to be considered 'Art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
' lies not in what an actor does when preparing for a role during the rehearsal process but rather what they do during their performance of that role before an audience.
During rehearsals, Stanislavski argues, both approaches make use of a process of 'living the part', in which the actor becomes "completely carried away by the play [...], not noticing how he [sic] feels, not thinking about what he does, and it all moves of its own accord, subconscious
Subconscious
The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a definition-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings....
ly and intuitively." The actor immerses him or herself in the circumstances of the fictional reality experienced by the character in the play. In a state of absorption, he or she responds 'naturally' and 'organically' to that situation and the events that proceed from it (a 'natural' and 'organic' response conceived along lines originating from Pavlovian
Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was a famous Russian physiologist. Although he made significant contributions to psychology, he was not in fact a psychologist himself but was a mathematician and actually had strong distaste for the field....
behaviourism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
and James-Lang
James-Lange theory
The James–Lange theory refers to a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion, developed independently by two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange.-Overview:...
via Ribot
Théodule-Armand Ribot
Théodule-Armand Ribot , French psychologist, was born at Guingamp, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc.In 1856 he began to teach, and was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in 1862...
Psychophysiology
Psychophysiology
Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, and has branched into subspecializations...
).
It is in the way in which this work is related to what an actor does during a performance that the two approaches diverge.
In Stanislavski's own 'experiencing the role' approach, "you must live the part every moment that you are playing it, and every time. Each time it is recreated it must be lived afresh and incarnated afresh." As the repeated use of 'afresh' suggests, Stanislavski's approach retains a quality of improvisation
Improvisational theatre
Improvisational theatre takes many forms. It is best known as improv or impro, which is often comedic, and sometimes poignant or dramatic. In this popular, often topical art form improvisational actors/improvisers use improvisational acting techniques to perform spontaneously...
in performance and strives to enable the actor to experience the emotions of the character on-stage (though emphatically not by means of focusing on those emotions).
In contrast, the approach that Stanislavski calls the 'art of representation' uses 'living the role' during rehearsals as "but one of the preparatory stages for further artistic work." The actor integrates the results of their 'living the part' from their rehearsal process into a finished artistic form (in contrast to the improvisatory quality of Stanislavski's approach). "The portrait ready, it needs only to be framed; that is, put on the stage." In performance, Stanislavski continues (quoting Coquelin
Benoît-Constant Coquelin
Benoît-Constant Coquelin , known as Coquelin aîné, was a French actor, "one of the greatest theatrical figures of the age."-Biography:Coquelin was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pas-de-Calais...
), "the actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection." The actor does not focus on 'experiencing the role' afresh, but, instead, on its "accuracy and artistic finish". This conception of the actor's work originates in the philosopher and dramatist Diderot's
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
Paradox of Acting.
The distinction between Stanislavski's 'experiencing the role' and Coquelin's 'representing the part' turns on the relationship that the actor establishes with their character during the performance. In Stanislavski's approach, by the time the actor reaches the stage, he or she no longer experiences a distinction between his or her self and the character; the actor has created a 'third being', or a combination of the actor's personality and the role (in Russian, Stanislavski calls this creation artisto-rol). In the art of representation approach, whilst on-stage the actor experiences the distinction between the two (Diderot describes this psychological duality as the actor's 'paradox').