Yoga and Stanislavski: reflections on the past and applications for the present and future

Stanislavski’s interest in yoga and the influence of the discipline on the creation of the System have been illuminatingly acknowledged and examined by a number of scholars. Nonetheless, an aspect that has gone largely unnoticed is that Stanislavski drew from a kind of yoga that in some crucial respects is very different from the kinds of contemporary yoga that are practised internationally today. The most important difference is the absence of established yoga postures in the manuals that Stanislavski used in his day, and the centrality of yoga postures in the practice of the discipline today. Based on this crucial difference, this paper will propose ways in which understandings of contemporary yoga can be brought into relationship with key aspects of the System. It begins by summarising the historical background to the relationship between yoga and actor training with particular reference to the position of yoga postures within nineteenth-century literature on yoga. It then considers how ideas and practices within Stanislavski’s system – such as those related to “purposeful action”, “inner action”, “inner life”, “active imagination” and the idea of the “monitor” – can be illuminated, accessed and challenged by approaches to the yoga postures as they have been developed in the last 50 years. In so doing, the article, as a whole, takes as a premise the increasing demands on the young actor for performer flexibility and range, rather than specialization, and in its conclusion will touch on ways in which yoga can act as a bridge for the contemporary actor between different models of actor training and thereby affect a shift towards possible future models.