EMBODIED COGNITION, ACTING AND STANISLAVSKY: A NEUROSCIENTIFIC LENS ON STANISLAVSKY’S CONCEPTS OF EMOTIONS, PHYSICAL ACTION, IMAGINATION AND THE WILL

While debates about the acting process raged from the eighteenth century onwards, there were few systematic, repeatable training programs developed in the west by the dawn of the twentieth century. The person often credited with first trying to develop a repeatable system for “truthful” acting is the Moscow Art Theatre director and acting teacher Constantin Stanislavsky. His dedication to developing a system for actor training and rehearsals that would serve the actor when inspiration failed has had a profound impact on contemporary American-European acting training programs. His approach continues to affect actors today. However, his theories are mired in controversy, translation issues, cultural misunderstandings and changes in “Stanislavsky’s System” over time.

This study demythologizes four concepts that are key to Stanislavsky’s System — emotion, physical actions, imagination, and the Will — and relates them to current understandings of human behavioral neuroscience. Stanislavsky drew on the science of his time, and likewise, this dissertation explores the relationship between Stanislavsky’s central ideas and the science of our own day. Specifically, it investigates ways in which current research in behavioral neuroscience corroborates Stanislavsky’s work, contradicts it, adds to it, and suggests adjustments to it.

This project has important implications both for scholarship and practice, giving performance scholars a richer and more precise understanding of Stanislavsky’s work, while allowing teachers and directors to zero in on the techniques that are most likely to help them achieve their goals and to exclude those that are superfluous or even detrimental.