Stanislavskian Acting as Phenomenology in Practice

This essay offers an interpretation of An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, drawing attention to phenomenological aspects of the acting process it describes.¹ Specifically, I will focus on “Year One: Experiencing”—from Constantin Stanislavski’s renowned fictionalized account of actor education—through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology in Being and Time.² I argue that the approach to actor training and role preparation described by Stanislavski bears some striking connections with what we might call a practical philosophical exploration. Notwithstanding the absence of phenomenological terminology, Stanislavski is detailing an acting process that requires an embodied understanding of the way that the world presents itself to human consciousness in its rich, lived experience. This understanding is developed not for its own sake but rather to produce controlled artistic presentation on stage, while avoiding the inconsistencies of an untrained intuition. In this sense, the actor’s art can be seen as an embodied philosophy that makes different ways of “being-in-the-world” manifest and, ultimately, gestures toward the “meaning of being”.³

Of course, there are also fundamental differences between the respective projects of Heidegger and Stanislavski. The former was attempting a radical revision of philosophy which challenged the idea that “knowing” is the fundamental way in which human beings experience the world (a premise that entails a split between mind and body endemic in Western philosophy). The latter was attempting to articulate different ways actors might avoid a reliance on fickle inspiration in performance and to foster maximal conditions for creativity through self-awareness and detailed understanding of the fictional and actual worlds of the performer. The conceptual territory between these two thinkers constitutes a third space where a fruitful dialogue might be possible between the practical understanding of the actor and the theoretical project of phenomenology.

On the one hand, the practical insights of actor preparation and performance might well shed light on philosophical and theoretical understandings of human experience. Conversely, a phenomenology of consciousness may indeed be useful in devising new techniques and approaches to performance. Quite obviously, an awareness of the structures of experience is useful to the art of the actor. It might also offer actors a way of better articulating aspects of their experience. My argument is not that Stanislavski explicitly saw himself as a phenomenologist, but rather that he sought a practical understanding of “being” in the context of theatrical creation and the art of acting. Placing his work in relation to phenomenological concepts makes explicit, and to a certain degree explains, how the world reveals itself to consciousness in different ways and how these are uncovered through some acting exercises. In other words, phenomenology and acting might be constructively thought of as mutually informing discourses. Furthermore, the extent to which phenomenological description accurately captures the lived experience of the world gives a basis upon which it can be judged. In this sense, the art of acting might be one way to “road test” phenomenological theory in a practical context. If a phenomenological description or model is accurate, then it has the potential to be useful in practice.

Of course, such a reading of Stanislavski’s theory of acting through philosophical phenomenology is not straightforward and there are many aspects of his social and historical context that allowed for the development of his approach that I will acknowledge below. First, however, I will briefly consider the broader intersection between theatre and philosophy.

Theatre and Philosophy

“The history of theatre” writes Joseph Roach in his foundational book, The Player’s Passion, “is the history of ideas.”⁴ His study offers a conceptual archaeology of different ways in which humans have, historically, understood the self/world relationship and shows how these understandings are implicit within past approaches to acting. Specifically, Roach investigates how scientific theories of emotion throughout history have informed different historical practices of performance. Such a rethinking of acting raises an important question about the relationship between philosophy and practice. If every instance of performance contains an “implicit theory of acting,” as Phillip Zarrilli suggests, each also contains an implicit theory of self and an ontology of...