‘Is It All Going Soft?’ The Turning Point in Russian Actor Training

Abstract

Whilst Stanislavsky spent much of his energy trying to simplify the processes of acting and avoiding a (pseudo-) scientific terminology for his acting system, he was nevertheless caught up in Stalin's appropriation of hard science after the Russian Revolution, to be paired with other ‘founding fathers’ of Soviet materialism, including Ivan Pavlov, in the creation of a powerful political orthodoxy. Here, Jonathan Pitches focuses on two of Stanislavsky's key contemporaries, Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, both of whom had worked with the founder of the System at different periods in their career, to pinpoint a significant shift, or turning point, in the development of twentieth-century Russian actor training. Drawing on Fritjof Capra's history of systemic thinking, the article argues that a radical shift of thinking took place in actor training in the 1920s and 1930s, which prefigures the global paradigm crisis Capra has identified at the turn of the last century. Jonathan Pitches is a Principal Lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge, 2003). This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the IFTR 2004 Conference in St Petersburg. Its argument derives from his forthcoming book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition (Routledge, 2005).