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To cite this Article Pitches, Jonathan(2007) 'Towards a Platonic paradigm of performer training: Michael Chekhov and
Anatoly Vasiliev', Contemporary Theatre Review, 17: 1, 28 — 40
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10486800601096006
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486800601096006
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Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 17(1), 2007, 28 – 40
consistently credited with holding the keys to the Russian theatre’s future,
not least for his establishment of a new, post-Stanislavskian system of actor
training – the ludo technique. For this, he is accorded a place in Mitter and
Shevtsova’s Fifty Key Directors (2005) and described by Birgit Beumers as
‘the founder of a new theatre which may be called verbal, conceptual,
3. ‘Anatoly Vasiliev’ in metaphysical or ritual’.3
Shomit Mitter and Of course, the Russian theatre has a long history of re-claiming the
Maria Shevtsova (eds),
Fifty Key Directors past in compiling a vision of the future, arguably more than most
(London: Routledge, theatrical traditions. Meyerhold was notable for doing this when he
2005), pp. 190–195
(p. 193). creatively combined popular theatre forms with contemporary theories of
industry in his system of biomechanics, and Stanislavsky’s own System
drew on Aristotle as much as it did on Ribot and the nascent, twentieth-
century science of psychology.
In his interview, Vasiliev’s reference to the past is to a philosophy
more ancient even than Aristotle’s, the clues to which lie in his prediction
of an elite band of aristocrats and philosophers surveying the theatrical
landscape – they might be called the governors of a Republic. He is
consciously provoking us, it seems, to examine an anti-Aristotelian
history of theatre, compelling us, through the starkness of his vision, to
assess instead the validity of a Platonic theatre as a ‘new’ paradigm in
performance.
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Imagine for a moment that the two famous seats of learning founded by
Plato (427–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) – the Academy and the
Lyceum respectively – were the ancient equivalents of an acting
conservatoire today. What kind of actors would they have produced?
Of course, the reflex response, at least in Plato’s case, may well be ‘stupid
30
question’! Plato is, after all, notorious for his condemnation of the
mimetic arts in the Republic and for his banishment of the dramatic
poet from his ideal state. ‘We can fairly take the poet and set him
beside the painter’, Plato argues in Book 10 of the Republic, the Theory
of Art:
He resembles him both because his works have a low degree of truth and
also because he deals with a low element in the mind. We are therefore
6. Plato, The Republic, quite right to refuse to admit him to a properly run state.6
trans. Desmond Lee
(London: Penguin,
1987), p. 435. But Plato’s outright rejection of the dramatic arts (‘low’ because
they stimulate the baser, emotional side of our character) should
not exclude us from asking, in principle, what an actor might learn
from Plato, particularly given the prominence for the next two millennia
of Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330 BC) – the first extant piece of dramatic
criticism.
To help stimulate our imaginations, let’s assume that each proto-
conservatoire was emblazoned with a metonymic image carved into the
stone of the building’s portico. For Plato, this might have been his model
7. See, for example, the of the soul or psyche:7 a charioteer controlling two contrasting steeds,
medallion-wearing described in Phaedrus.8 Here, the driver represents reason and the two
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bronze bust,
attributed to animals – one cooperative, the other straining at the leash – signify spirit
Donatello from 1440– and desire respectively. This model of the psyche is also reflected in the
50, depicting a winged
chariot rider and two philosophy of the Republic: it is the higher faculty of reason which
horses. controls the animal instinct of desire and which steers (not stirs) the
spirit.
8. Plato, The Collected In his introduction to the Poetics, Kenneth McLeish offers us an
Dialogues, Edith
Hamilton and equally rich image of Aristotelian thinking, one which might have
Huntington Cairns adorned the philosopher’s newly founded Lyceum:
(eds) (Princeton:
Princeton University
Press, 1961), p. 493. Universal order is like an embroidered cloth in which each stitch has its
place; if one stitch is dropped or the cloth is torn, the whole is damaged
9. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. and must be repaired.9
Kenneth McLeish
(London: Nick Hern
Books, 1999), p. xi. This dropping of the stitch or tearing of the cloth is the Aristotelian
notion of hamartia: a ‘falling short’ or ‘lapse from the ideal state
10. Ibid. of things’.10 By extension, tragic drama is underpinned by a fundamental
tension, between logic and order, on the one hand, and the collapse or
rupturing of that order, on the other. In the Poetics, Aristotle draws
on his teacher, Plato’s, love of rational thinking. But he is far less suspi-
cious of the results of this logic. In fact, he actively praises the results
of a well-organised muthos in one of the most cited passages from
Chapter 13:
The best kinds of muthos for tragedy are not simple but complex, and are
11. Ibid., p. 17. devised to represent incidents which arouse pity and terror.11
So, how might this translate into a contrasting model of classical actor
training? The following schema may be illustrative:
Plato Aristotle
Academy Lyceum
Forms Catharsis
Intelligence (nous) Plot and Action
Hidden and mystical truths Truth based on the senses
Dreamer Realist
An actor’s task, then, working within such a form, would be to play through
the organised series of actions without embellishment or deviation.
In itself, there is nothing particularly surprising in this analysis but
fantasising about the Lyceum as a conservatoire does point up
spectacularly the affinity between Aristotelian thinking (as it is expressed
in the Poetics) and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Realist
12. This is not to say that school, specifically the training System of Stanislavsky:12 causal plotting,
Stanislavsky was only mimesis based on the representation of reality, the primacy of action-
to be associated with
the Realist school. His based work derived from a close reading of text. Little wonder, then, that
work in opera, Stanislavsky acknowledges this link in An Actor’s Work on Himself.
symbolism,
melodrama and Sharon Carnicke explains:
seventeenth-century
comedy is clear
evidence of the scope
Stanislavsky believes that action distinguishes drama from all the other arts,
of his System. citing as proof Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as an ‘imitation of action’.
Stanislavsky also invokes the etymology of drama from the Greek root,
13. Sharon Carnicke, dran, ‘to do’.13
‘Stanislavsky’s System:
Pathways for the
Actor’, in Alison Although both Michael Chekhov and Anatoly Vasiliev publicly
Hodge (ed.), recognise their debt to Stanislavsky, it is not a philosophical affinity they
Twentieth Century
Actor Training are acknowledging. In very different ways, their acting systems take us
back to Plato’s Academy not Aristotle’s Lyceum.
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(London: Routledge,
2000), pp. 11–36
(p. 24).
Whilst Reason, Will and Feeling occupy an equal status as Inner Motive
Forces in Stanislavsky’s System – ‘our art recognises all three types and in
14. Constantin their creative work all three forces play leading parts’14 – in the Platonic
Stanislavsky, An Actor conservatoire Reason is the main driver, as the charioteer image tells us.
Prepares, trans.
Elizabeth Hapgood This is because of Plato’s deep-seated suspicion of emotion, fuelled in
(London: Methuen, part by the death of his mentor Socrates, and his belief that the material
1980), p. 251.
world is one of illusion and ignorance. He illustrates this belief in the
Republic with his strikingly theatrical Simile of the Cave (Book 7), which
constitutes an extension of his antipathetic opinion of Tragedy. Here,
three levels of understanding are exemplified: the lowest, characterised by
illusory imitations or shadows, the second level or the sensible realm,
where objects are perceived by measurement, and the third, the realm
of the Forms – where ‘real’ objects are perceived by only a few,
15. Viewed in conjunction philosophically enlightened individuals in abstraction.15 Plato uses a
with Plato’s Divided symbolic language to illustrate these levels with the lowest one (eikasia)
Line, there are in fact
four levels to this represented by chained cave dwellers, forced to observe a shadow-play on
taxonomy: A: the wall of the cave; the second level, (pistis) associated with direct
Knowledge, B: Reason,
C: Belief and D: Illusion perception, has one of the prisoners turn towards the fire and finally go
(Plato, Republic, outside into the blinding light, and the third (connected to intelligence
p. 461). Here, for
simplicity’s sake, and
or nous) is illustrated by the liberated prisoner gazing at the planets and
following Nicholas P. ultimately the sun – the symbol of Good as well as of philosophical
White, A Companion to enlightenment. Those able to do so, the elite thinkers of this utopia, are
Plato’s Republic
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, the ‘philosopher kings’ of Plato’s Republic. Importantly, they are charged
1979), p. 185, B þ C later with the responsibility of applying their knowledge and returning to
are conflated.
rule the ignorant cave population.
33
Applying this complex nexus of ideas and images to the craft of acting
isn’t easy but just suppose Plato did not cast out the first cohort of actors
from his conservatoire, before, at least, he had a chance to influence them
in some way! The make up of his graduates would be significantly
different from those emerging from the Lyceum. Firstly, with Reason or
dianoia elevated to first place (from Aristotle’s third), the Platonic actor’s
position is radically changed. This may manifest itself in the actor taking a
demonstrably critical perspective on the text, its characters or him/
16. Tony Gash has herself, in a conventionally Brechtian sense,16 or it might lead to a clear
suggested that Brecht, shift in relationship to the audience: a dialogic rather than a cathartic
Craig and Artaud are
all working in the engagement. Second, Plato’s actors would develop a necessary suspicion
tradition of Plato, if in of illusory emotions, perhaps even of the material world itself, and be
very different ways.
See Tony Gash, looking for a higher level of abstraction in their models of acting – not
‘Plato’s Theatre of the the shadow-like, first level of sense perception but a mystical quest for the
Mind’, in Anthony
Frost (ed.), Theatre
underlying Form of things. Third (and given this Platonic demand for
Theories from Plato to abstraction), the kind of work created by his graduates may reflect a
Virtual Reality particular paring back of the conventions of the theatre: the creation,
(Norwich: Pen and
Inc, 2000), pp. 1–24 perhaps, of a richly metaphorical and minimalist stage picture, in keeping
(p. 3). with the stark theatricality of the Cave and with the idea that the
Platonist is more Dreamer than Realist.
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18. Elena Polyakova, closely and concretely based on episodes in the play’.18 Unwittingly,
Stanislavsky, trans. Liv Knebel had witnessed Chekhov’s first and Stanislavsky’s last contribu-
Tudge (Moscow:
Progress), p. 353. tions to the history of modern actor training.
Thirty years later, in 1968, Knebel was witness to another beginning,
as she and her colleague, Alexei Popov, taught Vasiliev the same method
of Active Analysis, as part of the director’s programme at GITIS. She,
later, was instrumental in launching Vasiliev’s postgraduate career,
introducing him to Oleg Yefremov at the Moscow Arts Theatre (MAT)
and ensuring that his work was supported. Exactly fifty years, then,
separate Chekhov and Knebel’s playful experiments with the improvised
étude form, and Vasiliev’s first Active Analysis class with Chekhov’s pupil.
But it is not just the figure of Knebel that allies the contemporary
Muscovite director with Michael Chekhov. Both men ask profound
questions of Stanislavsky, driven, in part by a common desire to challenge
the linear determinism of his System, exemplified in the overarching
principle of the supertask (zverkhzadacha). Vasiliev encourages his actors
to reconstruct the supertask or superobjective of the play, re-directing it
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that the very different cultural and political context within which
Chekhov was operating, coupled with his own personal mental crisis and
his subsequent espousal of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, led him to a
palpably different philosophy of actor training. For the sake of this article,
Chekhov’s alternative basis for training the actor is best illustrated with
reference to the following: the Higher Ego, Archetypes and the
Psychological Gesture (PG).
Our artistic nature has two aspects: one that is merely sufficient for our
ordinary existence and another of a higher order that marshals the creative
powers in us. By accepting the objective world of the imagination . . . [w]e
19. Michael Chekhov, On confront the Higher Ego.19
the Technique of
Acting (London:
Harper Perennial, Here, Chekhov is drawing directly on Rudolf Steiner’s teachings (from
1991), p. 15. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, specifically) and
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Such a reading of Chekhov is given greater weight when his notion of the
PG is taken into account. Chekhov unconsciously borrows on a number
of sources in assembling his definition of the PG: in part, it is an
36
Path, p. 215.
abstract form to make his point:
24. Dartington Trust
Archive, 29 October
1937, Catalogue Ref Let us take the example of the triangle. How many kinds of triangle are
No. MC/S4/10/C there in the world? But when we speak of a triangle, we understand that it
is not a square. We have the archetype of the triangle in our mind. One
exercise is to try to imagine all kinds of triangle at once – all the
25. Michael Chekhov, geometrical things at once. You will have become a triangle inside.25
Lessons to the
Professional Actor
(New York: Chekhov then extends his analysis to look at the archetype of the King
Performing Arts and of the Father, stating that the archetype, rather like the PG, ‘does not
Journal Publications,
1985), p. 112. take part visibly in my action – it is my own secret’.26
Chekhov’s PG operates in a similar way, as a mental morphology of the
26. Ibid., p. 113. character one is playing – either for the whole of the play or for specific
moments. It is an image, or a Form in the Platonic sense, developed
through physical improvisation work in the studio and then internalised
and stored in the body memory of the performer. Once internalised, it
can be drawn on and individualised constantly through the power of
imagination, by working on Qualities of Action or Atmospheres, for
example. But as such, the PG itself is operating at a higher level of
abstraction than the individualised interpretations we see on stage – not
quite the triangle of all triangles but the Treplev of all Treplevs
internalised by the actor.
In order for actors to act on a different level they have to go through a long
schooling in philosophical texts. On Plato. And after a year or two they
formulate their consciousness in a new way. They teach themselves to exist
27. Vasiliev, workshop on a new plane of feelings, on a new plane of experiences.27
transcript.
One of Vasiliev’s key sources for his work with actors is Plato’s Meno,
dating from the same middle period as the Republic. In the Meno, Plato
casts his beloved Socrates in a dialogue with a wealthy young aristocrat
(Meno), pursuing amongst other things the question of whether know-
ledge is acquired or a recollection from a previous incarnation. As a
consequence, the immortality of the soul is debated and Socrates ‘proves’
the pre-existence of knowledge by questioning one of Meno’s slaves on
the subject of geometry. It is this famous exchange between Socrates,
Meno and the Slave which Vasiliev asks his actors to study in detail, in
order to ‘formulate their consciousness in a new way’, as he puts it.
The Meno is ideal for this, as one of its central themes is the challenging
of blunt acceptance (or ignorance) and the inculcation in the Slave of a
belief in the pursuit of individual understanding. Socrates does this by
28. Plato, Protagoras and ‘perplexing him and numbing him like the sting-ray’28 before continuing
Meno, trans. W. K. C. his questioning in such a way as to encourage the slave to grasp the
Guthrie (London:
Penguin, 1956), abstract proof himself.
p. 135. Vasiliev clearly sees himself as a modern day Socrates, developing his
students’ capacity to see things at higher level of abstraction. In his
masterclasses on text (almost always on Dostoyevskian text), this is
evident in his highly theorised explication of what he calls the ludo
system – his riposte to Stanislavsky. During a week-long workshop I
attended on Dostoyevsky’s The Meek One (Krotkaya), Vasiliev explained
how he distinguished between the two systems, effortlessly conflating the
director’s and the audience’s perspective in the process:
Let’s take The Seagull. If you choose the psychological system as a member
of the audience I will experience the story of these people. If I direct The
38
Seagull and I use the ludo system I will observe the story but I will
experience a story about these ideas – I will be an observer; I will
29. Vasiliev, workshop experience the story of the life of these ideas.29
transcript.
Image 1 Notes from a working notebook of Anatoly Vasiliev’s 1996 Masterclass: the
psychological system versus the ludo system. I am indebted to Tony Graham for his
permission to reproduce this extract from his notebook here
39
PASSIVE ANALYSIS
What is also evident from Graham’s notes is that Vasiliev still maintains a
line of analysis inspired by his teacher, Maria Knebel. Knebel, we recall,
was credited with taking Stanislavsky’s last thoughts on Active Analysis
and developing them with generations of actors and directors at GITIS.
In essence, Active Analysis proposes a simple method: identifying two key
moments in the dramatic text – the Initial or Inciting Event or IE
(iskhodnoe sobytie) and the Main or Climactic Event or ME (osnovnoe
sobytie). The IE is the action in the play that initiates the rest of the plot –
the overall cause, if you will, of the play’s events. The ME is the
culminating event, ‘one which resolves the through action’, as Carnicke,
30. Carnicke, quoting Knebel, puts it.30 This Active Analysis leads to an identification
‘Stanislavsky’s of the conflicting anatomy of the play, its points and counter-points, and
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System’, p. 28.
through the use of improvised études, allows the actors to flesh out the
play both corporeally and imaginatively.
31. For an illustration of But in his reconstruction of the System, Vasiliev subverts this structure
this idea, taken from in his efforts to break up what he considers to be its linear determinism.
Vasiliev’s workshop,
see my Science and the His reading of Dostoyevsky’s Meek One, in the 1996 masterclass, posited
Stanislavsky Tradition a reversal of the ME and IE, such that the actors involved would play the
(London: Routledge,
2005), p. 183. text with a conscious prospective awareness of the ME.31
Suspicious of the emotional stimulus Active Analysis can have on a
performer – the ignition of the ‘emotion’s logic’, as Bella Merlin
32. Bella Merlin, observes32 – Vasiliev proposes what might be called a Passive Analysis, in
Konstantin his pursuit of distanced abstraction. Such an approach takes us back to his
Stanislavsky (London:
Routledge, 2003), interview with Haerdter in 1992, made before his programme for a ludo
p. 143. theatre was formed. For it is precisely this kind of philosophical enquiry
into Drama, drawing on Platonic ideals, which Vasiliev is now committed
to, pursuing ‘a new aesthetic’ in Russian theatre, and, perhaps
consciously, estranging those audiences, who are content to remain in
33. Vasiliev, ‘Theatre as the darkened cave of ignorance.33
Monastic
Community’, p. 72.
CONCLUSION
Chekhov recorded his own vision of the future of theatre some sixty years
earlier in The Path of the Actor, and it has much in common with
Vasiliev’s. The ubiquitous style of Naturalism, he argued, is on a one-way
course towards ever-gratuitous and sensational imagery. ‘A naturalism-
dominated future in the theatre is a dismal prospect’, he argues:
[It] will be compelled to seek out ever more fiery combinations of facts,
combinations that are capable of having a greater effect on the nerves of an
40