Stanislavsky in the World: The System and its Transformations Across Continents

Description

Stanislavsky in the World is an ambitious and ground-breaking work charting a fascinating story of the global dissemination and transformation of Stanislavsky's practices. Case studies written by local experts, historians and practitioners are brought together to introduce the reader to new routes of Stanislavskian transmission across the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and South (Latin) America. Such a diverse set of stories moves radically beyond linear understandings of transmission to embrace questions of transformation, translation, hybridisation, appropriation and resistance. This important work not only makes a significant contribution to Stanislavsky studies but also to recent research on theatre and interculturalism, theatre and globalisation, theatre and (post)colonialism and to the wider critical turn in performer training historiographies. This is a unique examination of Stanislavsky's work presenting a richly diverse range of examples and an international perspective on Stanislavsky's impact that has never been attempted before.

Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. He specialises in the study of performer training and has wider interests in intercultural performance, environmental performance and blended learning. He is founding co-editor of the journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training and has published several books in this area: Vsevolod Meyerhold (2003), Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2006/9) Russians in Britain (2012) and Stanislavsky in the World (with Dr Stefan Aquilina 2017). He is currently working on two new book projects, Great Stage Directors Vol 3: Komisarjevsky, Copeau, Guthrie (2017) and Performing Landscapes: Mountains (2018), supported by the AHRC. Stefan Aquilina is a lecturer within the Theatre Studies Department of the School of Performing Arts (University of Malta). His main area of research is Russian and early Soviet theatre, especially the work of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. This particular research interest is developed through the application of critical theories on 'everyday life'. Aquilina also runs a research project called 'Performance Lineage: the Russian Tradition of Actor Training' through a grant offered by the University of Malta.

The editors are to be congratulated on taking us far beyond the Western mainstages to incorporate non-professional theatre in locations as diverse as Malta and Bangladesh. They have proved that the pedagogical fluidity that Stanislavsky himself intended has been realised over more than a century through a dynamic process of cross-cultural hybridity. This is theatre scholarship of the highest quality, that opens up new fields of study, moves long-standing debates forward and inspires creative practice. There are many introductory books on Stanislavsky, but Pitches and Aquilina have contributed an advanced study for the connoisseur, an intense and engrossing resource for practitioners and scholars alike. -- Nicola Heywood * Australasian Drama Studies *