Jakub Korčák
THE POETRY OF PEDAGOGY BY MARIA OSIPOVNA KNEBEL
Experience of Active Analysis in the pedagogical process
When I, as her student, first saw Maria Osipovna Knebel at her age of 84, as a small, white-haired old woman who, with the support of her assistants, carefully shuffled into the rehearsal room of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow, I could not imagine her handling the group of fifteen young people who had become her students of directing. With her big nose and nimble eyes in her wrinkled face, she resembled a frightened bird. Yet as soon as she stood in front of her audience, a small miracle happened: Maria Osipovna smiled. The sun of wrinkles around her eyes and her wide mouth with a massive lower lip played with indomitable energy. What a temperament and understanding emanated from her!
Every time she shook my hand in greeting, I felt connected to the greatest personalities of Russian culture who shook that little hand before me and I remembered the legends associated with the story of her life. Her father, Joseph (Osip) Nikolaevich Knebel, was born in western Ukraine into a Jewish community in the city of Buchach in Galicia, which at that time was part of the Austrian Empire. Having studied in Vienna, he put scraps of paper with names of various European cities in his hat to find out where to settle next. The hat decided that Josef Knebel would go to Moscow and discover there in the Tretyakov Gallery the world’s largest collection of Russian fine art.
Although he was penniless, he managed to persuade the patron Tretyakov to entrust him with the publication of a book of paintings from his collection. This is how the first Russian publishing house focusing on fine arts came to existence. The small bookstore of Knebel’s publishing house became a popular meeting place for painters and writers. As a little girl, Maria Osipovna once saw there a man with a rich white beard: “Mom, Grandpa Frost is at Dad’s,” she cried enthusiastically. “I’m not Grandpa Frost, but a writer,” said the bearded man, ”and I also write stories for children. I’ll tell you one if you want.” And so she found herself on the lap of L. N. Tolstoy.
Maria Knebel came to theatre by chance. A girlfriend of hers made it possible for her to secretly watch Michael Chekhov’s acting lesson. Chekhov unexpectedly decided to play a collective étude that day. Maria Osipovna had no choice but to join in and hope that no one would notice her. However, Chekhov soon discovered the intruder with her pointed nose and suggested that she come again. She agreed enthusiastically. Later, after studying with Chekhov, she continued her acting classes in the school of the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (MCHT) where she was trained by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko.
Having finished the school, she was engaged in the ensemble of the MAT, where she acted until 1950. From the thirties, she also worked as a director and devoted herself to pedagogical activities. As a teacher at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS), where she worked from 1948 until her death in 1985, she fundamentally influenced several generations of theatre makers with her method of Active Analysis. Oleg Yefremov, Anatoly Efros, and Anatoly Vasiliev were among her most important pupils.
Before I obtained a ten-month internship at GITIS in 1982– 1983, I became practically acquainted with the Stanislavsky System as the student of directing at the Theatre faculty of AMU in Prague mainly through specific acting exercises on Imagination and Given Circumstances: opening an imaginary door, dressing an imaginary coat, ten degrees of cold, ten degrees of fear, reciting an inner monologue, and so on. These exercises were aimed primarily at the ability to experience psychologically and adapting to a series of circumstances by developing a corresponding behaviour. Each exercise was preceded by a detailed written preparation and theoretical analysis behind a table. I found it had little to do with inspiration and the development of personal creativity.
In the lessons with Maria Osipovna Knebel and her former pupils Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasiliev, I began to discover a completely different approach to Stanislavsky’s legacy. We did not theorise about Stanislavsky, nor did we practice any of his exercises, nor did we waste time and energy on general conversations about the play at the table, but from the first moment on, we rehearsed situations from plays by Shakespeare, Gogol, Molière, or Vampilov through improvised études in space. If Maria Osipovna ever heard that her students spent the rehearsal debating at the table, she would get so angry that she began to bang her fist on the bench: “How dare you rehearse at the table in my course?”
A long-standing practice of Moscow Art Theatre was rehearsing at the table, during which actors before entering the space usually spent weeks reading the play and, under the leadership of the director, engaged in a detailed theoretical analysis of all aspects of the text in terms of Given Circumstances, Supertask, Subtexts or Relationships between characters. Over the years, however, Stanislavsky discovered problematic aspects of such an approach. It turned out that working at the table often led actors to passivity, transferring full responsibility for dealing with the play and their role to the director.
Maria Knebel was Stanislavsky’s assistant in his last creative period, when he decided to completely transform the first phase of rehearsals. The actors, instead of a theoretical work behind a table, entered the space and analysed the play and their role through action in improvised études. After Stanislavsky’s death, Maria Knebel further developed this method of Active Analysis, combining the principles of Stanislavsky’s method of Physical Action in Given Circumstances with the Structural Literary Analysis by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Michael Chekhov’s improvisational techniques. Active Analysis became a connection between Russian pre-revolutionary theatre and its most progressive post-revolutionary trends.
During our rehearsals under the leadership of Maria Knebel at GITIS, Anatoly Efros at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre or Anatoly Vasiliev at the Taganka Theatre, we began to develop selected scenes from the plays as Molière’s The Impromptu at Versailles, Shakespeare´s Midsummer Night´s Dream or Vampilov´s Duck Hunting in short études with improvised dialogues. Each of us was responsible for rehearsing a scene as the director, and participated in another one as an actor. The first études were based only on the simple question: “What would you do if this or that happened?”. Initially, we focused on the basic facts of a plot and the material conditions which directly affect the action. Action in the situation, unencumbered by previous speculative interpretations, helped us to gradually uncover more complex motivations concealed in the situations of the play. After each étude, we sat down and answered the question: “What did you act?” Each of us reflected on his actions and named the problems that he had to solve. Finally, a detailed analysis of the étude by the professors followed.
In this process of Active Analysis of the play and the role through action, we proceeded in études from one nodal point of the situation to the next, and bit by bit, turn after turn, we uncovered and gradually acquired the whole chain of plot facts, motivations, sources, and impulses of the through-line of a character’s action. At the same time, we discovered how the action lines of different characters clash, cross, intertwine, unite, and divide each other. In the course of unveiling the situations through improvised actions, dramatic peaks, and semantic accents emerged, and the sketches of the mise-en-scène gradually came to existence. The emphasis was on the process. Anatoly Efros used to say that “from the nodal point of the situation we develop the line of the action process as a thread”. Anatoly Vasiliev strongly warned: “Do not play results! By playing the results, you are hammering nails into the coffin of a living process.”
As directors, we were responsible for organising rehearsals, but we applied our knowledge of a play only when the actors really needed it. We did not put the actors in front of a ready-made model of the scene, which needs to be “rehearsed”, but offered them options that they could “try out.” In the scenes where we participated as actors, Active Analysis allowed us to become partners of the director in revealing the structure of the situations. In this sense, Anatoly Vasiliev spoke of the director and the actor as two “antagonistic professions that clash in a parallel creative process.” He appreciated actors who did not just fulfil the director’s tasks, but who were able by their independent thinking and acting to convince the director of other possibilities and “to break down the director’s concept”. The final shape of the production is born as a “higher sum” resulting from this “unity in dispute” of the director and the actor.
However, Active Analysis is not just about activating the actor in relation to the director. It emphasises concrete action and the dramatic potential of the play. Instead of passively experiencing roles in Given Circumstances, we focused on actions and events. Since we were forced to act purposefully in a situation, and we did so from the first moment, the process led us to concrete thinking. We quickly got rid of the temptation to engage in theoretical speculation, abstract interpretations, and general impressions. We had to deal with concrete motivations, impulses, twists and turns of the situations. Anatoly Efros, emphasising concreteness, warned against the vagueness, approximation, and generality of the so-called “Student Theatre”: “It usually means that only the music is turned on and the light dims,” he said. “In the end, however, it will be limited to a general impression without a shred of concreteness. Everything you do has to be concrete like a note in a musical score.”
Active Analysis allowed us to rehearse from the first moment in the indivisible unity of body, soul, and spirit, and to bridge the unnatural contradiction between physical and psychological action. Theoretical analyses or directorial tasks did not hinder us, and we could interpret the play and the role based on our own psychophysical experiences. Thus, we avoided the frequent danger of psychophysical untruth resulting from theorizing during the rehearsing at the table. Incorrect solutions from the table must then be corrected in the space, and the play is actually rehearsed twice: once at the table and then again in the space. Active Analysis immediately led us to solve the psychophysical nature of the mises-en-scène.
Our verbal actions in the process of Active Analysis did not take place in isolation, but were an integral part of our psychophysical action in a given situation. Maria Osipovna always said that actors often tend to hide behind the text. Instead of focusing on acting, thinking, and feeling in a given situation, they focus on remembering and externally illustrating the text. Active Analysis first brought us to the sources and causes of a psychophysical action, and verbal action with an improvised text arose from the urge to solve a specific situation. While improvising the text, we found out how words are born from situational impulses and communicate with our actions. We got to the exact wording of the play only when we fully mastered the structure of situations and the through-line of the psychophysical action of our character.
Active Analysis opens the way to a theatre which is not an illustration of what is known in advance, but a way of learning about life. As Anatoly Vasiliev said while paraphrasing Paul Cézanne: it is a journey to a theatre that “is not a depiction of life, but a new life.” Playing out situations in études is full of unexpected twists and surprises, provokes astonishment, reveals unexpected possibilities, asks questions, and raises problems. The body has its wisdom and if it is not hindered by rational interpretations, anticipation, and criticism, it can discover hidden meanings in immediate reactions to situational impulses. In this respect, Anatoly Efros has always emphasised the “right intuition,” which will allow for a sudden and surprising penetrating into the essence of the work.
Active Analysis requires all participants to accept joint responsibility for the course of the rehearsal, so that the études can be played out in complete concentration and in a creative atmosphere permeated with mutual trust and openness. Maria Osipovna therefore always emphasised that “a director must love his actors”. She herself was able to fill each of the rehearsals with festive excitement and initiate études as a joyful, unintentional game freed from the necessity of fulfilment of tasks and the fear of errors and mistakes. It was as if she gently led us by the hand to an inner transformation and supported us to overcome pitfalls that just a moment before would have seemed insurmountable. At the same time, she kept repeating how much she had learned from her students. Her lessons, in harmony with the title of her most famous book, were a genuine: “Poetry of Pedagogy”.
In the period of Stalinism and uncompromising Socialist Realism, it was not possible to openly talk about Active Analysis as an alternative to the official ideologized version of the Stanislavsky System. The principles of Active Analysis could only spread unofficially in the immediate pedagogical process. Maria Knebel could publish her first systematic treatises only in the 1970´s. It is not surprising that the totalitarian regime could not reconcile itself to principles of Active Analysis suppressing authoritarian leadership and promoting the free personal initiative and creativity of each individual.
Úvodní obrázek: Maria Osipovna Knebel. Foto: obálka knihy Knebel, M. (2021). Active Analysis