Stanislavsky and Cognitive Science

Dear Rhonda:

Thank you for the interesting and thought-provoking article ["Cognitive Neuroscience and Acting: Imagination, Conceptual Blending, and Empathy." TDR 53:4 (T204):93-103]. I would like to offer an alternative to the connections you draw between cognitive studies and an actor's process as described by Stanislavsky. Specifically I take issue with your connecting empathy with "what if" (101). You seem to be indicating that cognitive processes responsible for feelings of empathy, as described by the researchers you cite, are factors in an actor's use of "what if," specifically with regard to the approach to character.

You connect empathy in the actor's process to his reactions to others, whether voluntary or involuntary, and to the subject's empathetic identification with an "other" (100). You observe two scenarios, the first, a "bottom-up processing for empathy," in physical mirroring exercises. The second instance, a "top down" variant of empathy, is used, in your description, for "imaginative transporting of oneself into the thinking and feelings of another." In neither case, according to my understanding of Stanislavsky, does "what if" apply to any significant degree. Bottom-up, or involuntary mimicry, may indeed be a symptom of cognitive processes resulting in empathy. But mirroring exercises seem to me to be geared more towards the actor's conscious work (although the results may eventually manifest in the subconscious-Stanislavsky certainly hoped they would) by developing the skills of attention or focus (vnimanie) and interaction (obshchenie), rather than the "what if" mechanism. Your connection between top-down processing and "getting into character" also seems remote from the application of "what if." Empathy, which you describe on page 98 as the ability "to visualize or imagine yourself in the other person's situation and put yourself in his shoes," is not at work in the actor's process of character work according to Stanislavsky.

I detect a misapprehension of a key point of orthodox Stanislavsky technique; to wit, a conflation of character and stage partner. One's fellow actor, as an immediately accessible human being immersed in the same fictional world, can certainly be a source of affective stimuli available to the subject for empathetic responses. One's own character is not an "other." I don't believe, contrary to your assertion, that the actor experiences "an empathetic connection with the character" (100). There is no "experience" of one's character as an "other" to be empathized with according to Stanislavsky. Empathy resolutely presupposes an "other." In character work powered by "what if," there is no identification with another's experience, only immersion (pogruzhenie) into expediently selected given conditions of the role. Volume eight of Stanislavsky's Collected Works (Iskusstvo, 1961), contains a letter to Liubov' Gurevich:

You [...] write that [scenic acts and experiences] happen disinterestedly via the magic if without touching on personal interests. In my view this is not entirely correct. Creative moments on stage are only those that are provoked by what if. [...] If I sincerely answer the question posed by what if, [then] I am living my own personal, egotistical life. At such moments there is no role. There is only me myself. From the role and the play there remain only conditions, circumstances of its life, everything else is my own [...].

(285; emphasis added)

An actor's connection with his character must be based on placing himself in the play's and the role's given circumstances rather than empathizing with his character as an "other," because the sought result is stage action, not feeling.

Stanislavsky split given circumstances, the inseparable companions of what if, into two categories, external and internal. In volume one of the Moscow Art Theatre Yearbook for 1945 (Izdanie muzeia MKhATa, 1948), Stanislavsky writes:

First [the actor] needs to find not the feeling in the verbal text but only those circumstances given by the dramatist [concerning] the inner, spiritual life of the living organism of the role that provoke interaction with oneself and the external world.

(324; emphasis added)

A role is not another being but a complex of questions about how to behave while entertaining a set of given...