Background
Stanislavski's initial choice to call his acting technique his System struck him as dogmatic, so he preferred to write it without the capital letter and in quotation marks to appear as his ‘system’ in order to indicate the provisional nature of the results of his investigations.
The system arose as a result of questions that Stanislavski had in regard to great actors that he admired, such as the tragedians Maria Yermolova and Tommaso Salvini. To him, these actors seemed to operate under different rules from other actors of the time, but their performances were still susceptible on some nights to flashes of inspiration, or completely 'being a role,' while on some nights their performances were good or merely accurate.
Although Stanislavski was not the first to codify a system of acting, he was the first to take questions and problems of psychological significance and directly link them to acting practices. When psychology was formalized, it influenced Stanislavski's system. Stanislavski attempted to create a system before psychology was widely understood and formalized as a discipline.
As a result, Stanislavski began developing a grammar of acting in 1906. In 1909, he began creating his first draft of the system. This draft was based on his personal experiences onstage as well as his observations of other actors in the Moscow Art Theatre. By finding similarities among the talented actors and their performances, Stanislavski began to create techniques that could be applied to the training of other actors to develop similar stage performances. By 1911, he was able to experiment with his new methods. He trained willing actors using his new techniques as he continued to work and alter his techniques as he saw fit in order to develop the most effective technique for actors. Though his approach changed throughout his life, he never lost sight of his ideals of truth in performance and love of art.
At times, Stanislavski's methodological rigor bordered on opacity: see, for instance, the chart of the Stanislavski 'system' included as a fold-out in editions of Robert Lewis' book "Method or Madness," a series of lectures. The chart, made by Adler, lists all aspects of the actor and of performance that Stanislavski thought pertinent at the time. His dedication to completeness and accuracy often conflicted with his goal of creating a workable system that actors would actually like to use. Most of today's actors on stage, television, and film owe much to Stanislavski's system.
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