Stanislavski

Konstantin Stanislavski was born in 1863 in Moscow. Already at the age of seven he started acting. Stanislavski was to become the creator of naturalism. He created his own theatre, Moscow Art Theatre when he was twenty-five. He put on plays mainly by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorki, two Russian writers. 
Stanislavski did not like contemporary theatre. He believed that it was chaotic, with no structure. He believed that actors were not trained properly and rehearsals were not good enough. He disliked the “farce comedies” that were theatre at the time. He also believed that, unlike theatre of the time, costumes and props needed to planned and suited to the play.
Stanislavski believed that the key to portraying a character properly was for the actor to imagine a situation where they had felt the emotion that the character was feeling and to portray that.  This is called emotion memory.
Stanislavski created a three-part system. Firstly, the actor must get used to the role they are given, and explore what the character would do through thinking about the actor themselves would do. The second part is about using body and voice to portray a character. The third part is about applying the concepts to specific roles.
Stanislavski, especially later in his career, believed greatly physical movements. He wanted actors to be in character most of rehearsal as well as while acting. He wanted the actors to develop a believable character.
Stanislavski came up with a concept “Magic If”, in which an actor must think about what they would do in a situation if they were their character, considering the context of the play or the “given truth” of where when ect the character is. To create the character, actors also had to come up the biography of the character to make the character seem more real and to better understand what the character would do. The aim was to believable, because otherwise the audience would not believe it.
To help actors be more relaxed on stage, Stanislavski developed what is know as circles of attention. The actor first focuses on one other actor or prop as well as himself. Then they would focus on a larger circle, then a larger until their the whole stage is covered. The actors, while practicing must create a communion between the other characters to be able to convey the relationship between the two characters. Dialogues were always practiced with the other character.
Each actor had to develop the right way and speed that a line is to be delivered and practice it. Stanislavski also told the actors to dived the play into units, each unit having a specific purpose, and once achieved, it ended. Through this the actors knew what they wanted to happen- whether they wanted to achieve the aim or to prevent it. The super objective was the main goal of the whole play. Each actor had to know their character’s feelings towards the super-objective.
"Konstantin Stanislavski and Method Acting." BBC - H2g2. BBC, 1 Dec. 2005. Web.
15 Jan. 2011. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A5133151>.