The Russian Pre-Theatrical Actor and the Stanislavsky System by John Wesley Hill A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Theater and Drama) In The University of Michigan 2009 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Mbala D. Nkanga, Chair Professor Valerie Ann Kivelson Professor Leigh A. Woods Lecturer Martin W. Walsh In some cases, a children’s game, a folk game, or a village dance brings us closer to answering to the question of what is theater and what it should be than the work of a great playwright. A.I Beletskii Copyright John Wesley Hill 2009 To Leta, Lydia, and Vladimir ii Acknowledgements Thanks to: Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan, Lauren Atkins, Wojciech Beltkiewicz, Myra Bertrand, Jeffrey Blim, John Carnwath, Stratos Constantinidis, Janet Crayne, Kate Elswit, Jody Enders, Rachel Facey, Karen Frye, Jay M. Gipson-King, Maurice and Barbara Hill, Olga P. Ignateyva, Claudia Jensen, Mary-Allen Johnson, Valerie Kivelson, Boris Katz, Bonnie Kerschbaum, Sam Kinser, Natalie Kononenko, Ann Kushkova, Alaina Lemon, Irina Lewandowski , M.A. Lobanov, Ewa Małachowska-Pasek, Holly Maples, Rosalind Martin, Predrag Matejic, Pat McCune, Anna Meerman-Bader, Vitalii Mikhailovich Miller, A.F. Nekrylova, Mbala Nkanga, Linda Norton, D Ohlandt (Ross), Ingrid Peterson, Irakli Pipia, Greg Poggi, Henry Reynolds, Talia Rodgers, Svitlana Rogovyk, Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, Suleyman Sarihan, Becky Seauvageau, Eric Schinzer, I.I. Shangina, Mila Shevchenko, Stephen Siercks, Daniel Strauss, Hellen Sullivan, Maeve Sullivan, Marina Swoboda, A.L. Toporkov, Igor’ Ushakov, Bisera Vlahovljak, Martin Walsh, EJ Westlake, Erica Wetter, Steven Whiting, Faith Wigzell, Leigh Woods, and the staff of Interlibrary Loan at the University of Michigan. iii Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………….……..ii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................iii Abstract...............................................................................................................................v Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….…1 Chapter One. The Holiday Complex……………………………………..…………...…19 Chapter Two. The Actor and Imaginary Worlds of Play….……………..……………....45 Chapter Three. Acting and the Collective in Traditional Culture………………..……..103 Chapter Four. Collectivity, Ensemble, and the System: Stanislavsky, Sulerzhitsky, and the First Studio………………….…….………144 Chapter Five. Image of Action…………………………………………………….……186 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….......……219 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….……...230 iv Abstract The present study juxtaposes the “pre-theater” of Russian mummery and ritual sequences to Stanislavsky’s “System” of actor training. This approach affords an alternative perspective on the place and meaning of traditional performance in Russian theater history. The resulting narrative is based not on “evolution” and simplistic convergences such as the proposition that certain types of performance, such as those bearing a superficial resemblance to proscenium type presentations (mummers’ shows at Yuletide), were more “advanced” than less contained manifestations of traditional performance such as ambulatory rituals. Instead, continuity exists in structural and processual links between pre-theater and the System present in shared techniques for creating and inhabiting a character and the effects on this process of an actor’s relationship to fellow performers, audiences, and his community’s system of beliefs and practices. While pre-theatrical performance is not analogous to the System acting, traditional performers share many aspects of their approach with System actors. In this study, functional and structural features of each illuminate the other, such as applying Stanislavsky’s concept of “playing the self in given conditions” to describe the participant performer’s work as an actor in the traditional wedding sequence, and v comparing the phenomenon of collective action in traditional performance to the genesis of the System and its transmission in the classroom. Applying Stanislavsky’s System to pre-theater provides a useful theoretical model for mapping a comprehensive description of an actor’s process onto certain aspects of performance in traditional communities. This model privileges the role of individual creation as a key factor in the dynamic process of challenging and reinforcing cultural continuity. As such, this study offers an alternative to accounts of traditional culture where impersonal social and cultural processes predominate. In terms of theater history, this research represents both an alternative to “evolutionary” accounts of Russian theater history and a consideration of the fundamental cultural roots of the System, those aspects of actor training and approaches to embodied performance which transcend not only 20th century acting theory but all of Russian theater as a national variant of the European stage-play tradition. vi Introduction At the center of this dissertation is a notion about the relationship between traditional Russian popular performance, or folkloric “pre-theater,” and some of the most important aspects in modern Russian theater and contemporary acting techniques, specifically Stanislavky’s System for actor training. If thought of as “chapters” in the history of Russian theater, these two phenomena represent extremes or book-ends. Otherwise, they are typically seen to have little in common, at least when considered chronologically. This sort of “evolutionary” model of Russian theater historiography guarantees that materials are organized and interpreted in certain ways. This approach thus automatically excludes from scholarly consideration a number of other questions, hypotheses, and theorems about the nature of Russian theater and the relationship between certain of its manifestations. What if, however, rather than being placed at opposite ends of a time-line, pre-theater and the System are considered synchronically? What if we dispense, at least for the sake of argument, with all evolutionary connections between the two and focus instead on commonalities based on the actor’s process in the context of society and culture? I accepted this challenge and the present dissertation is the result of where such a “perverse” notion brought me. A synchronic consideration of pre-theater and the System appears unorthodox at first glance in the light of conventional approaches in Russian theater historiography. 1 Surveys of Russian theater history begin with a chapter or two on folk theater: mummery, wedding rites, and calendar and family cycle festivals, along with very speculative accounts of the skomorokhi1 as the reified “face” of Old Russian performance. Then this thread breaks off and another begins with the “importation” of the Western stage play in the late 17th century. This importation was certainly a watershed. The European theatrical tradition was brought by Westerners like the German Pastor Gregory, who staged Russia’s first theatrical performance in 1672 for Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (with German actors).2 When Muscovy annexed the Ukraine in the mid 1600s, Jesuit-style School Theater came along with the new lands and subjects. Intriguingly, the Tsar’s court theater arrived within a few decades of edicts against manifestations of native popular-performance culture. As Russell Zguta has written, [I]n December of 1648 Aleksei issued two famous gramoty outlawing the skomorokhi, along with a host of other “pagan” traditions and practices. The long and colorful history of Russian minstrels was thus officially brought to an end. (63)3 While “pagan” practices like mummery, holiday revelry, and rites such as the very theatrical traditional “wedding drama” survived into the 20th century, the skomorokhi, at least “officially,” vanished as a class. Once the Tsar had “adopted” the model of the European stage-play, the work of Russian actors, directors, and dramatists would henceforth be understood and evaluated in terms of imported models. “Theater” in 1 Russia’s popular performers or “minstrels” of the medieval and early-modern era. 2 See I. M. Kudriavtsev’s introduction to Artakserksovo deistvo: Pervaia p’esa russkogo teatra XVII v. Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1957, and chapter one of L. Starikova’s Teatral’naia zhizn’ starinnoi Moskvy. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1988. 3 The gramoty are reproduced in Akty, sobrannye v bibliotekakh i arkhivakh Rossiiskoi Imperii arkheograficheskoiu ekspeditsieiu imperaterskoi akademii nauk, Vol. 4: 1645-1700. St. Petersburg, 1836, 138-139. 2 Russia began its development as a variety of European stage culture of the modern era, sometimes slavishly imitative, at other times leading the way. What of the “native” tradition? The mainstream view that Russian theater accepted the European stage-play as it model and never looked back implies that traditional performance survived as a living fossil practiced in villages “on the periphery” both in terms of actual geography—remoteness from the metropole—and in terms of the cultural “backwardness” of the performance traditions of the illiterate masses. How were these two “theaters” to be reconciled in the story of the Russian stage? In narrative after narrative, folk performance, although it was still being practiced and attested for centuries after the debut of the Tsar’s court theater in 1672, was put in the only place it seemed