Nikolai Demidov: the Future of Acting Pedagogy

Blog #1

A Contemporary of Stanislavsky
Nikolai Demidov has been called Russian theatre’s best kept secret. A close associate of Stanislavsky for more than 30 years, he was one of the three original outstanding teachers of Stanislavsky’s System. Stanislavsky said of Demidov that he was the only student who really understood his System. Contrary to popular understanding, Stanislavsky never taught his System in any of the Moscow Art Theatre School Studios: he developed it in rehearsal with his actors.

In the course of teaching Stanislavsky’s techniques, Demidov kept stumbling into what he considered to be Stanislavsky’s mistakes, and went on to disagree with Stanislavsky’s methods. They agreed on the destination – the art of living and experiencing on stage – but not on the way to get there.

We have been fortunate that after so many years in the wilderness, the Demidov work was given new life in recent years by Professor Andrei Malaev-Babel, who spent many years reconstructing the technique from his research of Demidov’s writings found in the Moscow Art Theatre archives. And through his book, Nikolai Demidov: Becoming an Actor-Creator, the work is now available to the world.

Demidov and the Creative Process
Demidov was a trained psychiatrist from a theatrical family, and as such had a keen insight into the nature of the actor’s psyche and creative process. One of his major disagreements with Stanislavsky was the latter’s overly analytical approach to what Demidov saw as a truly organic process – breaking up the actor’s creative process into separate elements to be learned individually: object, task, relaxation, communion, grasp, attention, concentration, imagination, public solitude, superobjective, throughline of action, tempo-rhythm, etc. A process which is still taught in various forms to this day in various permutations of Stanislavsky.

For Demidov, this division of the creative process left actors trying to juggle several balls at once and kept actors in their heads, thwarting any possibility of true experiencing on stage. Not only was it harmful to the creative process, but it was completely unnecessary. Demidov set about over many years systematically developing his own technique – or rather school – of acting, facilitating the actor’s sense of freedom, spontaneity and creative individuality. He believed that rather than artificially dividing up an organic process, from the first day of training the actor should be accessing his or her subconscious creativity, which contains everything the actor needs, and in the process gaining increasing faith in their own instincts and talent.

In Blog #2: The Demidov Etudes…