1. Vygotsky & Stanisklavski
Dr Hannah Grainger Clemson

2. In the process of social life, feelings develop and former connections disintegrate; emotions appear in new relations with other elements of mental life Lev Vygotsky
Our type of creativeness is the conception and birth of a new being – the person in the part. It is a natural act similar to the birth of a human being.
Konstantin Stanislavski

3. K. Stanislavski
L. Vygotsky
Born Russia 1863
Actor &
Theatre Director
Born Russia 1896
Teacher &
Psychologist

4. Previous experiences
Self in action
Current environment

5. ‘task’ that guides an actor’s performance
LENINGRAD
Pavlov’s
Laboratories
Conditioned Reflex
Institute of Psychology
MOSCOW ART THEATRE
Identifying a
character’s
‘task’ that guides an actor’s performance
KREMLIN
SERPUCHOVSKAIA STREET
Goal-directed thought
Awareness of “own responses as new stimuli”

6. V S perezhivanie ‘lived through’
Experiences contribute to internal state of actor
↓ ↓
External theatrical character realised and spontaneously recreated
Experiences internalised and understood
↓ ↓
(Children) make meaning of social existence & act upon the world
Investigating the motivation and interpretation of human behaviour...

7. Text of the Play Parallel Motives
SOPHYA: O, Chatsky, but I am glad you’ve come.
CHATSKY: You are glad, that’s very nice; But gladness such as yours not easily one tells. It rather seems to me, all told, That making man and horse catch cold I’ve pleased myself and no one else.
LIZA: There, sir, and if you’d stood on the same landing here Five minutes, no, not five ago You’d heard your name clear as clear. You say, Miss! Tell him it was so.
SOPHYA: And always so, no less, no more. No, as to that, I’m sure you can’t reproach me.
[A. Griboedov, Woe from Wit, Act I]
Parallel Motives
Tries to hide her confusion.
Tries to make her feel guilty by teasing her. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself ?”
Tries to force her to be frank.
Tries to calm him. Tries to help Sophya in a difficult situation.
Tries to reassure Chatsky. “I am not guilty of anything”
Performed MAT 1906
KS Notes

8. Emotional experiences
Dramatic tensions
Emotional experiences
Shared space
Communicative tools
Social networks
New perspectives

9. ‘Fictional’
‘Real’
‘Meta’

10. TOOLS
SUBJECT
GOAL
RULES
COMMUNITY
RESPONSIBILITIES

11. Vygotsky died in 1934 of tuberculosis, aged 37.
Though premature, his death perhaps saved him from a worse fate at the hands of the authorities.

12. Stanislavski died in 1938, aged 74.
Stanislavski prepared to hand over the Moscow Art Theatre to his former pupil Meyerhold, who was unemployed and under great threat.
Stanislavski died in 1938, aged 74.

13. But that year, Meyerhold
the surviving link between these two men, as a former student of Stanislavski and teacher to Zaporozhets, a student of Vygotsky,
- was himself arrested, tortured, and shot.

14. Stanislavski’s writings were translated into English in the 1930s and have formed a significant part of actor training in the West ever since.
Vygotsky’s ‘Thought and Language’ was first published in Russian in 1936, two years after his death. It was not until 1962 that it was first published in English and his ideas became widespread in the field of education.

18. ...The experience of the actor, his emotions, appear not as functions of his personal mental life, but as a phenomenon that has an objective, social sense and significance that serves as a transitional stage from psychology to ideology.
Lev Vygotsky, 1932
‘On the Problem of the Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work’