‘Lures’ of Stanislavsky, ‘Deconservation’ of Moreno, and ‘Dialogical Acting’ of Vyskočil as ways of Awakening the Creative State
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | One of the fundamental questions of acting is how to keep performance alive when repeated. Acting teachers seek ways to awaken or re-initiate this aliveness, to awaken the creative state in the actor. In this paper, I will compare three approaches that differ not only in aesthetics but also in contemporary context and the concept of acting. In his System, Konstantin Stanislavsky juxtaposes theatrical and human clichés vs. experiencing and truthfulness. He offers the actor ‘decoys, magic “ifs”, Given Circumstances, the Supertask, everything that guides the creative process and produces the creative state’. While working at the Stegreiftheater (the Theatre of Spontaneity) in Vienna in the early 20th century, Jacob Levy Moreno discovered the opposition of spontaneity vs. cultural conserves. In his later practice in the USA, where he developed psychodrama, he began to use new ways to rediscover spontaneity and spontaneous expression, primarily warming up and deconservation. Inspired by Stanislavsky and Moreno, Ivan Vyskočil developed the psychosomatic discipline of Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner in the 1970s. In his conception of acting, Vyskočil juxtaposed life and cultural stereotypes, self-alienation vs. spontaneity, and authentically experienced dramatic play. The question remains how different approaches to acting pedagogy can guide an actor in his work without being used as applications of diverse techniques and methods. I believe that Vyskočil’s approach, conceived under the conditions of a totalitarian regime during the so-called Brezhnev stagnation, allows the actor to take responsibility for his creativity, in other words, to be creative about his creativity. |
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