The secret of action: a cognitive exploration of eyewitness accounts of Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article approaches eyewitness accounts of Stanislavsky’s late practice through the lens of cognitive science. Findings from this field identify relevant and robust theoretical reasons for statements by Vasili Toporkov and Maria Knebel that describe mental and emotional phenomena arising from physical actions. Cognitive neuroscience provides us with theory that is both grounded in phenomenological experience and also moves beyond it to allow us to better understand how Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis stimulates these responses.

KEYWORDS:

• Active Analysis
• Embodied Cognition
• Maria Knebel
• Vasili Toporkov
• action-based theory of language
• situational self

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, 50.

2. Knebel, Active Analysis, 30.

3. These include works by Bruce McConachie, Rhonda Blair, Amy Cook, John Lutterbie, John Sutton, Evelyn Tribble, Rick Kemp, Tomasz Kubikowski, Naomi Rokotnitz, Maiya Murphy, Nicola Shaughnessy, Melissa Trimingham, Joelle Ré Arp-Dunham, Ysabel Clare, Vladimir Mirodan, Scott Illingworth, and Dan Leberg, among many others. For an extensive list see the Bibliography.

4. Carnicke, “Stanislavsky’s Prescience,” 15. In the quotation Carnicke is referring to her chapter in the collection The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (see biblio for details).

5. Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action, 6.

6. Ibid., 5.

7. Pitches, Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting, 2.

8. Merlin, “This Side of Reality,” 60.

9. Knebel, Active Analysis, 93.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 95.

12. Varela et al¸ The Embodied Mind, 173.

13. Gallese, “Mirror Neurons and the Neural Exploitation Hypothesis,” 317.

14. Pulvermüller and Fadiga, “Active Perception,” 355.

15. Glenberg and Gallese, “Action Based Language.”

16. McNeill, https://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/writing/topics.html

17. McNeill, Language and Gesture, 130.

18. Ibid., 19.

19. Ibid.

20. Knebel, Active Analysis, 96

21. Carnicke, “Stanislavsky’s system: pathways for the actor,” 24–29; Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 189–202; Merlin, Beyond Stanislavsky, 151–65; Merlin, The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, 177–216.

22. Blair, The Actor, Image, and Action, 111.

23. Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, 49–50.

24. Ibid., 17.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 85. Emphasis added.

27. Delafield-Butt and Gangopadhyay, “Sensorimotor Intentionality,” 399.

28. Delafield-Butt and Colwyn, “The ontogenesis of narrative,” electronic resource, no page numbers.

29. Carnicke, “Stanislavsky’s system: pathways for the actor,” 32.

30. Kemp, Embodied Acting, 123–4.

31. Gallese and Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts,” 456.

32. Aziz-Zadeh et al, “Congruent embodied representations.”

33. Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 94–5.

34. Ibid., 91.

35. Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” 15.

36. Grush, “The Emulation Theory of Representation;” Simons Wang and Rodenberry, “Object Recognition is Mediated by Extraretinal Information;” Wexler Kosslyn and Berthoz, “Motor Processes in Mental Rotation;” Wexler and Klam, “Movement prediction and movement production.”

37. Melzer and Palnick Tsachor, “How Do We Recognize Emotion From Movement?” electronic resource, no page numbers.

38. Gallagher and Meltzoff, “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others,” 211–12.

39. Ibid., 216.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard J. Kemp

Richard J. Kemp is Professor of Theatre and Head of Acting and Directing at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA. A Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar on Neuroscience and Art, he has received the Institut Français award for theatre, the British Telecom Innovations Award, and the Heinz Endowments Creative Heights Award. Credits in the UK include The Almeida, 1982 Co., Complicité, The Oxford Playhouse, Riverside Studios, Tricycle Theatre, Traverse Theatre, and co-founding London’s Commotion Theatre Company. In the USA, he has worked with Unseam’d Shakespeare, Pittsburgh Playhouse, Quantum Theatre, New York’s Perry Street Theatre, Squonk Opera, and internationally at Toronto’s Harbourfront Theatre, Warsaw’s Teatr Polski, Madrid’s Festival de Otono and Peter Brook’s Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris. Publications include Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Performance (Routledge 2012), The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq (Routledge, 2016), and The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science (Routledge 2019).