On the Hidden Potential of Public Solitude, Part I: Ivan Vyskočil’s Theatre as Encounter

ABSTRACT

In this essay, we introduce Ivan Vyskočil (1929–2023), a Czech theatre maker, author, psychologist, and pedagogue – a case study par excellence for current studies on hybridization and transdisciplinarity as fosterers of creativity. Since Stanislavsky’s public solitude has played a key role for Vyskočil’s concept of authorial acting and its pedagogy, we track down ways Vyskočil elaborated on it as well as other resources that influenced his work (e. g. Brecht’s V-effekt, or the Czech avant-garde movement). Our study comes in a two-part series. In this Essay I, we identify major shifts through which Vyskočil transposed Stanislavsky’s small circle of attention – originally a tool for actors to escape the audience’s intimidating gaze – into the constitutive condition for theatre as encounter, in which the audience co-creates the play while it is emerging. Despite their origins on the big stage of the Moscow Art Theatre and its studios, it is argued here that Stanislavsky’s public solitude and creative state reveal their full potential through small stage forms of authorial creativity – as Vyskočil has shown via “Non-Theatre” productions and in journal articles. Essay II of this series then presents Vyskočil’s concept of dialogical and embodied education, especially when they cultivate the actor’s inner positions of spectatorship and authorship. This approach characterizes studies at the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy, which Vyskočil founded at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU) in 1994.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogical Acting
• Ivan Vyskočil
• public solitude
• improvisation
• inner speech

Introduction

In April 2023, on the next day after his 94th birthday, Ivan Vyskočil passed away. He was an important figure of Czech theatre and literature, and, as obituaries repeated, one of the big names of the “small stage forms,” an alternative theatre movement of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia. This movement, called Divadla malých forem in Czech, dates back to early twentieth-century cabarets, and underwent a significant boom in the 1960’s. Born in 1929, Vyskočil founded one of the well-known small stages Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí) in 1958. This materially-poor alternative theatre was also the first place to stage absurd dramas by Václav Havel, a playwright, thinker, and later a Czech president (1989–2003) whose dramatic talent Vyskočil recognized. Vyskočil’s unique acting productions started earlier, with two-men shows in the Reduta night club in Prague; together with his friend and stage partner Jiří Suchý they named these “text-appeals.”¹ Later shows and productions of Vyskočil’s original plays were known as Nedivadlo (“Non-Theatre”), and other improvised shows as Kuchyň Ivana Vyskočila (“Ivan Vyskočil’s Kitchen”). He also appeared in movies, co-created a radio show with an outstanding Czech poet Emanuel Frynta, and published several books of short novels, some of which got translated to German.²

Besides theatre and acting studies (graduated in 1952), Vyskočil studied psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy (PhD in 1957). As a result of his interdisciplinary interests, another part of his legacy is in the psychology of acting and the psychology of education – the latter being a field in which he collaborated with a psychologist (and his wife) Eva Vyskočilová. His main “invention” though, is the original training practice called “Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner” (Dialogické jednání s vnitřním partnerem). This holistic discipline draws on the elementary human experience of inner speech – dialogues people have with themselves while remembering, playing, problem solving, or imagining – and explores ways of its playful embodiment and articulation on the stage. Through this discipline and others (such as voice, speech, movement, and authorial reading), Vyskočil and his colleagues developed a psychophysical³ approach to acting and pedagogy. Courses first took place at a half-hidden “school for working people,” and only after the Velvet Revolution (1989)⁴ was Vyskočil invited to teach at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU). He became a professor in 1992 and founded the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy (below as DACP) in 1994.⁵ Studies at DACP are characterized by a psychophysical approach, with Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner (below as DA) offering a space for practice-based research that goes beyond actor training.

In this essay, we look into connections between the legacies of Ivan Vyskočil and Konstantin Stanislavsky. Neither of the two were solely interested in theatre-making; they reflected on their practice and searched for inspiration in different fields of human knowledge. Consequently, it is impossible to view their concepts of acting without outreach to other fields. Apart from their work on practice and theory (experiencing and reflecting), both were also pedagogues. Viewed in a larger historical context, the two contributed to an important developmental line of psychophysical acting and pedagogy. Are these parallels coincidental, or are they products of the influence of Stanislavsky’s legacy on Vyskočil’s work? Stanislavsky was born sixty-six years before Vyskočil and passed away when Vyskočil was nine years old. His teachings had already spread enough to influence Vyskočil in his studies, though it is clear that Stanislavsky represented only one of the streams that Vyskočil found inspirational. In what follows, we offer a map of some major streams, with special focus on the one originating in Stanislavsky’s public solitude.

This study is divided in two parts or essays. In Part I we discuss Vyskočil’s work as a postmodern example of the hybridization of approaches and its interrelation with creativity and innovation.⁶ It is divided in three sections. The first section gives some general parallels between Stanislavsky and Vyskočil, such as their shared interest in psychology as well as the spiritual dimensions in their lives and work. The second section reflects on other-than-Stanislavsky influences and inspirations in Vyskočil’s approach, such as the avant-garde, small stage forms, ludic playfulness, narrative approaches, and Brecht’s defamiliarization effect (Verfremdungseffekt). This allows us to better describe ways through which Vyskočil worked with Stanislavsky’s approach and transformed it, the values he added, where from, and what for. Finally, the third section looks closer into Stanislavsky’s terms that have been explicitly referenced by Vyskočil, such as public solitude (first circle of attention) and the creative state or acting of experiencing. This line of our research allows us to identify four main directions in which Vyskočil shifted some principles of Stanislavsky’s system, presented in table-form, towards the end of the essay. One of the main shifts, for instance, took place on the way from enacting a character in given circumstances towards improvisation as an open play, in which characters emerge in the present moment and circumstances are playfully developed.

The second part of this study, published separately, opens one new direction in which Vyskočil’s elaborations on Stanislavsky’s legacy have led us. In Part II we introduce our current research project in the realms of embodied learning and dialogical concepts in psychology and education – both elaborated in Markéta Machková’s interdisciplinary work at DAMU and the University of Neuchâtel. We present the general pedagogical principles at DACP, their kinship with the psychophysical tradition in education, and the way they relate to the concepts of public solitude, actor-spectator relationship, and/or creative state. Specific attention is paid to movement education and the ways it is elaborated by Mish Rais and Jana Novorytová, both DAMU teachers. Our rediscovery of Stanislavsky’s concepts through the lens of Vyskočil’s DA, other psychophysical disciplines, and their pedagogy, sheds light on the actor-spectator relationship in general, and the actors’ capacity to see themselves through the eyes of spectators.⁷ In our practice-based research we refer to this as “multiple attention” (dvojí, trojí pozornost) and we look into pedagogical ways to cultivate it through DA and the movement practice of instant composition.⁸

In working on this essay, we relied on a variety of sources. Apart from published sources on Stanislavsky, Vyskočil, psychophysicality, and other secondary texts (see Bibliography), a number of interviews were also used. Some of these have been streamed or published online, such as interviews with Vyskočil by the charitable association Post Bellum⁹ or the interview with Vyskočil’s close collaborator Přemysl Rut.¹⁰ Martina Musilová, who has published in Stanislavski Studies and is currently working on a more detailed Stanislavskian project with Jan Hančil, was also consulted. In our interview, Musilová reflected on her experience of studying DA with Vyskočil and shared her expert knowledge on Stanislavsky’s work and its historical context.¹¹ Given that both of us authors graduated from the DACP programme of authorial acting, Vyskočil’s approach has inevitably become part of our personal “cultural baggage.” Researchers like the aforementioned Musilová, Hančil, and Rut, but also Eva Slavíková, and Michal Čunderle (quoted below) have all been our teachers and later colleagues at the DACP (and also pupils of Vyskočil). Therefore, we also relied on embodied knowledge and written reflections on our past studies within this community. We can say that both of us authors have experienced what we are trying to present here – Stanislavsky’s legacy in the development of Vyskočil’s concept of dialogical acting and the Authorial Acting programme study curriculum.¹² This essay allows us to put our embodied knowledge and its verbal reflexion into a larger cultural-historical context of acting, its theory, and pedagogy. And vice versa: this bigger picture becomes a base for our current and future practice-based research on the actor-spectator relationship (tbc in essay II).

Before we get into the main text, it is important to define these two key terms of dialogical and authorial acting. What do they mean and how do they relate to one another? Called by its whole name, Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner is a theatre-based discipline. When practiced regularly, “[i]t can be, and often is, about experiencing, understanding, and studying the principles of dramatic play. It can be, and often is, about experiencing, understanding, and studying non-object acting (playing, performing),” as Ivan Vyskočil says. Authorial acting then, is an approach to acting, perhaps even an acting style, in which one writes, dramatizes, directs, and performs their whole production and fully stands behind it as a person. From the point of view of “conventional” acting, authorial acting can be seen as a way of handling a personal theme, a character. In such case, characters and situations are created by the performer within a dialogue (with one’s inner partners and the personal theme). The study programme called Authorial Acting is based on DA, but includes other disciplines too, such as authorial reading, in which students learn to write and communicate their own texts. Thus, DA can be understood as the main part of the training towards authorial acting, however, some people practice DA to develop different potentials:

It can be, and often is, a way of understanding and grasping; “physicalizing” and meeting a specific challenge; answering a particular question; accomplishing a specific task; or realizing a certain text. It can be, and often is, if it is understood and comprehended as such, an open and opening path; a methodology of rehearsing, searching and perceiving, noticing and discovering.¹³

Stanislavsky Hybridized with Brecht and the Czech Avant-Garde

Some shared ideas or characteristics between Stanislavsky and Vyskočil are worth underlining at the outset. Could these characteristics serve as a common ground between the two, allowing Stanislavsky’s legacy to impact Vyskočil’s work? As we know from his own writings, Stanislavsky was an open person who took advantage of every encounter with inspiring people or interesting books as well as of every trip abroad. Similarly, by his innate curious nature, Vyskočil was excellent in bringing different bits and pieces together and transforming them creatively into a new approach. One of the realms of inspiration that was common to Stanislavsky and Vyskočil was psychology: Stanislavsky famously studied works by the French psychologist Théodule Ribot, who provided him “with a key to unlock the actor’s unconscious”¹⁴ and with a “scientific understanding of the emotions.”¹⁵ Apart from the unconscious and transference (Freud, Jung, Rogers), one of several psychological interests of Vyskočil’s was the experience of inner speech. Not only was he familiar with the work of its founding father, the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (his wife Eva Vyskočilová was a Piagetian scholar and correspondent), but he also knew the work of Lev Vygotsky, who elaborated on inner speech in the sense of its study today in the field of socio-cultural psychologies.¹⁶ Jacob L. Moreno’s psychodrama was of importance too.

A second shared interest between the two is the need for a spiritual level in their life and work. As scholars like Sharon Carnicke and Sergei Tcherkasski have argued, the practices of yoga, meditation, and hypnosis influenced Stanislavsky’s work especially when it came to the cultivation of the actor’s attention and being in the present moment, in visualization, exercises of focus on one small object, etc.¹⁷ Vyskočil’s interest in inner speech was connected with his interest in prayer as theorized, for example, by Romano Guardini and amplified by readings in humanism, personalism, and dialogism.¹⁸ Important sources however, came from personal-cultural contexts too: both Stanislavsky and Vyskočil were spiritually-oriented persons, the former with a strong religious family background (his parents belonged to the Old Ritualists in the Eastern Orthodox Church),¹⁹ the latter a practicing Catholic (Vyskočil’s parents converted to Catholicism and he made his first playful productions in the basement of the church they attended).²⁰ As Musilová has argued, Stanislavsky understood “theatre as a temple and artists as priests”²¹ while Vyskočil was more interested in the experience of encounter, dialogue, responsive relationship, and also joy.

Importantly, another theatre maker who found Stanislavsky’s spiritual approach worth attention was Bertolt Brecht, when he wrote that “there was a ‘priesthood’ of art, a ‘congregation,’ a ‘captivated’ audience. ‘The word’ had something mystically absolute about it, and the actor was a ‘servant of art.’”²² As Vyskočil’s former students, we can say his approach worships “the word” as well, but only as far as the actor becomes it in an authorial, dialogical, and playful way, within an encounter with the audience. Vyskočil wouldn’t go as far as to open a theatre season with a worship service, as Stanislavsky had done in 1898 during the first meeting of the Moscow Art Theatre;²³ however, we can share from our personal (and genuinely joyful) experience that semesters at DACP always opened and closed by singing the traditional song “That God Would Love Us” (Aby nás Pánbůh miloval), a sung prayer commonly performed by teachers and students at an informal (yet ceremonial) gathering – and this is something we have only just fully realized.

The third parallel between Stanislavsky and Vyskočil is in the fact that both were in one way or another limited by their socio-historical circumstances, i.e. the political regimes. It is always interesting to ask whether unique concepts and artefacts would have been thought or created had there not been a specific set of outer limitations imposed, directly or indirectly, on their authors. Even if an analysis of the social, cultural, and political circumstances surrounding Stanislavsky and Vyskočil is beyond the purpose of this essay, below we open more on Vyskočil’s biography and what influenced his work apart from Stanislavsky (e.g. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the epic theatre and the ludic-poetic approaches of the avant-garde movement) – we do this to give a new perspective on Stanislavsky’s legacy outside the ideologized social realism and the mainstream “method” acting.

It may seem so far that it was only natural for Vyskočil to adopt Stanislavsky’s principles as he learned them during his studies at the DAMU. Vyskočil studied dramatic arts and acting between 1948 and 1952. He was educated by theatre makers with experience in both the avant-garde scenes and the realistic interpretative theatre (měšťanská činohra). However, from 1950 onwards many of them were replaced by people who were friends with the communist regime, and, unluckily, Stanislavsky’s approach was appropriated by two Czech absolvents of the Soviet GITIS theatre school, Eva Šmeralová and Vladimír Adámek. In 1952, the “vulgarised method” was made “the only acceptable model of education.”²⁴ In these circumstances, when Stanislavsky was presented to the students as the author of the new and almighty method imported to Prague from Moscow, Vyskočil kept rejecting his system until years later.

Similarly, Vyskočil initially remained reserved towards the approach that had led Brecht to the foundation of the Berliner ensemble in 1949. Vyskočil’s motivation to make theatre was far from appealing to the audience for social change. His views changed during the 1960’s, as both Stanislavsky’s and Brecht’s legacies were “slowly getting liberated from their misuse by the ideologies of social realism, respectively, the military leftism of some Brechtians.”²⁵ Vyskočil started taking Stanislavsky’s approach seriously first through dialogues with one of his teachers and friends, the famous Czech actor Radovan Lukavský,²⁶ and then became more interested when viewing it from the perspective of psychology that he studied until 1957. Regarding Brecht, his epic theatre and its dialectical nature would eventually inspire Vyskočil’s thought and practice, possibly because of his own gift for words and interest in narrative theatre (vyprávěné divadlo) that is based on speech, but also for his interest in the constant questioning of things from different perspectives (i.e. philosophy in its broad sense). A few years ago, Musilová, in fact, presented Vyskočil’s DA as a discipline in which “Stanislavsky meets Brecht.” She argued that “[i]n Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner, […] which is generated in the situation of public solitude, the [Brecht’s] distancing effect necessarily turns back to the student as an impulse for evolving the play.”²⁷ Further below, we will take a closer look into the role of public solitude in DA and how it relates to playing.

This encounter of two major European streams would never have been possible in such an open, playful, and creative way had Vyskočil not been influenced by the Czech (and also German and Russian) avant-garde movement. He was influenced by the heritage of Czechoslovak cabarets that had emerged already during the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and particularly by the avant-garde small stage forms. These scenes used a variety of genres on the lines of satire and grotesqueness. They shared the ludic approach specific to the Central European regions where a new playful language and artforms appeared as a contrast to the rigid language and kitsch artforms of the ossified monarchies.²⁸ The artists were “[…] solving the unsolvable through somersaults of wit and courage and cascades of humour,” as it was written about Vyskočil’s favourite nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern.²⁹ Personally, Vyskočil often mentioned the Větrník theatre as one of his biggest inspirations. This small stage form theatre existed during the second world war (1941–46), its young actors and creators represented the second wave of the Czech avant-garde and later influenced the 1960’s boom in theatre and film.³⁰

One of Vyskočil’s most important teachers of drama was Jiří Frejka (1904–52). Before directing a number of full productions for official theatres, or becoming a professor at The Drama Department of the State Conservatory (later DAMU), Frejka founded an alternative and poor Youth Theatre (Divadlo mladých), later The Liberated Theatre (Osvobozené divadlo), originally as a non-professional company with a passion for experimental poetics. From the very beginning, the scene was closely connected to Czech poets and visual artists united in the Devětsil company, whose members were inspired by the dada movement among others, and where artists looked for ways to express the poetics of ordinary things. This passion for the ordinary became one of the strongest points in Vyskočil’s approach. In his Dialogical Acting, for example, practitioners are encouraged to notice tiny little, impulses that are easy to neglect, and to turn them into big, even exaggerated dramatic events. This is part of the aforementioned need to question and explore the seemingly obvious.

The Liberated Theatre eventually turned into the most successful avant-garde stage, relying on the duo of authorial actors Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich (known as V+W). Nothing was more of an evident rejection of realism than their clown-white make up, direct addresses to the audience, and famous forestage improvisations. As Voskovec put it, Chaplin (and other movie creators) “became Stanislavski for the clowns.”³¹ In his lectures and writings, Vyskočil often made reference to Werich (1905–80). He took his description of creativity on the stage – “the ear is amazed at what the mouth is saying”³²– as a succinct description of the very core of improvisation. A parallel to Werich’s ear-mouth coupling could be seen in Stanislavsky’s techniques for working with an inward and outward focused attention, or in Brecht’s acting and alienating (drawing on Chinese acting approaches³³). Vyskočil was interested in the principle of duplication, or doubling, i.e. the state where one acts and observes oneself at the same time, which he considered as the most essential acting experience in general. However, Vyskočil would use it neither to build a pre-given character in a situation (like Stanislavsky), nor to address the audience with didactic comments on what was being performed (like Brecht). In his inaugural professorship lecture, Vyskočil explained:

The amazed ear will most probably show its amazement. It will reply to the mouth. And it will do so with its own mouth, which it has grown all of a sudden (from the surprise, that is). The mouth that started it all can probably hear the reply. It can hear the reply with its ear, which it has also grown. And so it goes on. The person in question is in the deep now [i.e. completely occupied], up to their ears.

What is most probably happening here is that process, that trick, which, when all is said and done, is simply about “hearing one’s partner and responding to them.” […] This duplication is the secret, or the main feat, the main trick, of spontaneous dramatic play.³⁴

Werich’s ear-mouth dialogical principle particularly spoke to Vyskočil because it opened doors to the theatre in the stage of birth as well as to the theatre as encounter.³⁵ Vyskočil was interested in co-creating the play with spectators and in observing the play with them as it was happening. The mediator of the actor-spectator dialogical relationship in improvisation was called the “inner partner:” “[…] not just an observing and co-playing partner, but a representative of real spectators,” as Vyskočil’s pupil, DAMU colleague, and psychology scholar Eva Slavíková explained.³⁶ In order to get a better understanding of these approaches, let us first take a closer look at Vyskočil’s referencing of Stanislavsky’s public solitude and creative state. As we will see, he argued that the use of Stanislavsky’s contribution was limited, in the sense that public solitude had more potential than it was originally thought. In other words, public solitude had more to offer in the realms of improvising and authorial small stage forms in particular.

Public Solitude and the Creative State in Authorial Theatre and Dialogical Acting

Stanislavsky’s terms that have explicitly been referenced by Vyskočil, apart from public solitude (first circle of attention), are creative state, acting of experiencing, and being on the stage in the present moment (“I am being”³⁷). For the purpose of this essay, we will focus on public solitude and the creative state. This line of our research is documented in a number of primary sources. For example, in an introductory text on Dialogical Acting, Vyskočil refers to Stanislavsky as follows:

On reflecting, almost everyone should be able to recall the experience of talking to oneself, the experience of playing on one’s own, from one’s own within. The point then is to study and learn how to produce similarly authentic, spontaneous, playful interaction and interplay (behaving and experiencing) in public, in a situation of “public solitude” (Stanislavsky), in the presence and with the attention of “an audience.” In a situation where it is “as if” the others, the audience, were not present, in particular without visual and physical contact [with them].³⁸

The “without visual and physical contact” reflects Stanislavsky’s invention of the first/small circle of attention as a tool for actors to prevent themselves from being distracted by “the black hole”³⁹ or from feeling “the magnet of the audience” and being “possessed by its [auditorium’s] power.”⁴⁰ Vyskočil’s Dialogical Acting creates a solid and safe framework needed for the experience of open dramatic play that doesn’t involve anything but one actor and their “inner partners” (unlike, for example, Stanislavsky’s objects of focus). Precisely in order to focus on their inner impulses that are emerging in the present moment, the practitioners, and beginners in particular, are advised to act (or first just be) in the space without any direct contact with spectators. Thus, all DA students literally start by turning their backs to the spectators and assistants and only later experiment with addressing them with a direct look, gestures, or even words. The direct contact with the audience on the other hand is trained through other disciplines of the Authorial Acting studies such as authorial reading or speech. “I had a tendency to rush nervously when about to read my text to the others, and Vyskočil would interrupt me and say ‘Slow down and take a good look at them [the audience] first, look at them thoroughly,’” recalls Musilová to illustrate the Brechtian infusions in Vyskočil’s approach.⁴¹

Another reference to public solitude can be found in Vyskočil’s memories of his Non-Theatre (Nedivadlo). In this case, he mentioned a dispute he had with the critic and theoretician Vladimír Just at the beginning of the 1980s. Their rather sharp argument, published in the České Divadlo journal (Czech Theater) in the form of a series of open letters, is a precious source for two reasons. First, Vyskočil otherwise systematically avoided theorizing his approach and practice, because he was persuaded that “the meaning and sense are in the authentic experience itself ”⁴²; second, because it shows Vyskočil’s revolutionary approach to spectators and his elaborations of public solitude in this regard. He recalled:

This ability to “just” exist is called “public solitude” in Stanislavsky. We had a very long dispute about this with Dr Just, because he was understanding this public solitude solely in relation to Stanislavsky’s psychological theatre. But it is not so. It is simply the human ability to exist on the stage without having to reproduce anything pre-given, the ability to set oneself up on the stage as if there weren’t any spectators. But they are there, all the more, because the feedback becomes more powerful.⁴³

The dispute between Just and Vyskočil could well be a matter for a separate study and it would help reveal the full potential (existential and dialogical) of the small circle of attention. For the purpose of this essay, we only summarize the core of the argument. Just quoted Stanislavsky-Tortsov’s description of the narrow light of a lamp,⁴⁴ its rays falling on objects on the table, creating the first/small circle of attention. Doing so, he meant to show that public solitude was an “isolation exercise,” a defence, a helpful “escape trick” for actors to use during a performance to separate themselves from the audience’s intimidating gaze. He reproached Vyskočil for the “methodical negligence of spectators” when taking public solitude as the main desired state on the stage and not just a tool for actors to reach the creative state and to produce a truthful enactment of a character in a situation – a well performed play in its full aesthetical form. Vyskočil responded with an example of performances he and his Non-Theatre (Nedivadlo) gave in Brno, and explained that their “methodical negligence of spectators” had actually been a conscious process of “setting up the conditions of public solitude” specific to their authorial theatre:

[W]e usually […] announced to the spectators that from a certain moment on, we would “intentionally ignore them,” and why. Because “public solitude” is, in the framework of dramatic play, its organic and substantial part, and, in one way or another, always a “play on public solitude.” And the spectators got it very well, maybe also because they knew whose production and what kind of performance they came to see. […] When our story took roots and sprouted within our common play and “public solitude,” when […] functional “characters” (who were still “looking for their author”) and situations showed themselves to us, when we suddenly had something to tell to us and to the spectators, something to demonstrate, something to ask about, we were able to – and we had to – cancel the “public solitude” and open the play. […] [We] had a reason to turn to the audience directly […].⁴⁵

Further on, Vyskočil described that at moments when the levels of “conductive tension” between performers and audience started to decrease, the actors got back and re-created their public solitude for exactly the amount of time that was needed to restore the conditions for a directly communicating play. He concluded his response to Just by arguing that it was “precisely because public solitude activated and inspired authorial creativity, play, and interplay, that Stanislavsky and his students had paid it little attention, which corresponded to their aims and aesthetics […].”⁴⁶

We have already mentioned the creative state and that the small circle of attention helps to provoke it in the actor. Or, more broadly, public solitude is expected to lead towards or to offer welcoming conditions for the creative state. But what does the creative state notion mean in our Stanislavsky-Vyskočil comparative context? The following quotation from Vyskočil’s description of the DA study process shows the way he acknowledged creative state as Stanislavsky’s finding and term, while elaborating on it within the framework of his specific background and small stage forms context:

[Participants] gradually start acting dialogically and they start experiencing a dialogical being: they experience what it is to dialogically – and often paradoxically – be. They reach a “creative state” (Stanislavsky), they reach inspiration. They experience what it means for “it to be playing in and with a person” (Patočka)⁴⁷ and what it is when “the ear is amazed at what the mouth is saying” (Werich).⁴⁸ They get to “hear one’s partner and respond to him” (Voskovec and Werich).⁴⁹ They mature into their own [psychosomatically skilful] condition,⁵⁰ the one needed for conscious, creative communication. This takes at least three years of systematic, continual study […].⁵¹

Some Stanislavsky scholars and practitioners of his “system” have argued⁵² that his concept of the “general creative state” (GCS below) is very close to what was later theorized as “the flow state,” most famously by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.⁵³ Jay Acutt, who has been exploring the potential of acting techniques for enhancing creative performance in designers, notices that “[i]n Stanislavski’s GCS, we can find many correlates to validated psychological ideas, although largely pre-dating them by over 50 years. Primarily, we can see anticipations of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept […].”⁵⁴ The fact of anticipating concepts that would be scientifically explored and described later is also present in Vyskočil’s work. If we admit that Stanislavsky discovered and worked with what later would be called “flow,” we can accordingly say that Vyskočil explored and worked with what has gradually been gaining more and more attention of psychologists – the “inner speech.”⁵⁵

The most fascinating thing about the “discoveries” of these phenomena is that they have actually always been there as part of our universal human experience. It is viewing them as learnable/trainable skills that is groundbreaking, and this is where Stanislavsky’s and Vyskočil’s theatre making and thinking required another layer to their activities: pedagogy. Stanislavsky developed and described techniques to enable actors to consciously enter the creative state, whilst Vyskočil developed a theatre-based practice through which actors as well as non-actors, continuously cultivate their “psychophysical condition” (psychosomatická kondice – see endnote 49) – a personal condition for creative communication in any kind of public exposure. In Stanislavsky’s work, the creative state was the place which the actor needed to be led to by the director/pedagogue, a state where an actor can enact a character, in a particular situation and in relation with other characters, towards a specific goal, and in a truthful manner. In Vyskočil’s approach, however, the creative state was not just a pedagogical goal. It rather became a constitutive element of the whole teaching/learning process, as we will discuss further in the second essay.

To sum up Vyskočil’s approach in a condensed (and thus simplified) manner: when an actor’s “ear is amazed at what their mouth is saying,” they are a) fully concentrated on what is emerging in the present moment, while enacting and observing it at the same time (which enables them to move smoothly from action to reflective response and so forth), and, b) due to this full concentration (creative state in public solitude) the actor’s “amazement” is being transmitted to the audience and back onto the stage – Vyskočil calls this phenomenon “the law of transference,” while also referencing to studies on mirror neurons and empathy.⁵⁶ As an ideal consequence, the audience then experiences the performance as an encounter, in which they participate in the performers’ explorations of characters, situations, and potential stories. The actor’s own “amazement” at what is emerging activates the audience’s interest, and the other way around, in the sense that the audience’s attention fosters the actor’s ability of inner spectatorship. Given that the spectators don’t come to see pre-made products, but to be with the performer(s), their kind of attention is unjudging, or even wishing, as Vyskočil calls it (přející pozornost). The spectators wish for the performers that they make the most out of the open dramatic play, while knowing that their attentive being with is part of the creative process.⁵⁷

The historical-theoretical overview of Vyskočil’s work given and the ways he took inspiration from Stanislavsky allows us to identify some major differences/shifts between the two, as we present them in the table below:

Table

Stanislavsky	Vyskočil
acting of experiencing	authorial and reflected acting of experiencing (also dialogical acting)
enactment of characters in dramatic theatre plays by playwrights	spontaneous open play in authorial theatre of small stage forms
conscious exercises to foster one’s ability to act in an artistic manner	continuous cultivation of one’s overall psychophysical condition
actors’ intense studies of the role (character and given circumstances) beyond rehearsals	actors’ intense and ongoing studies of oneself - one’s dispositions, potencies, and personal themes (repertoire)

The first point of the table above has already been published about⁵⁸ and we have explained the second and third point in this essay. Vyskočil’s pedagogical approach will be addressed in part II.

Conclusion: Hybridity & Transdisciplinarity

The variety of streams of inspirations in Vyskočil’s theatre work, combined with his expertise in psychology and the education of creativity, make him a case study for hybridity, particularly as defined by Spanish artist and artistic researcher and pedagogue Matilde Obradors:

Those of us who have been teaching creativity for years have seen that this is a human ability that improves with practice and immersion in innovative models. In turn, one of the fundamental operations of creativity is the association of ideas, analogy, mixing and combination of examples that leads to new things.⁵⁹

It was already Václav Černý, Czechoslovak literary scholar, critic, and philosopher, who spoke of Vyskočil as a “mixer” when he remembered him as an agent of small stage forms:

The main stages [of the small stage forms were the] Theatre on the Balustrade (founded in 1958 by Jiří Suchý with Ivan Vyskočil), the Semafor (opened in 1959 by Jiří Suchý with Jiří Šlitr), etc., even the Jára Cimrman Theatre that was founded in 1967. […] But the main names [of the small stage forms] are Ivan Vyskočil, the expertly psychologically trained mixer of existentialism with a grotesquely exaggerated absurdism, and, Václav Havel, who – starting with the 1963 “Garden Party” at the Theatre on the Balustrade – furthered the politically engaged genre, the unmasking anti-drama of the absurd, into the most impressive essence in a series of grotesque sketches.⁶⁰

The way Černý described Vyskočil’s creative tendencies in 1982 – as existentialism mixed with a grotesquely exaggerated absurdism – was also confirmed in other words by Jiří Suchý. In a recent interview, Suchý described his friend and former stage partner as a “Franz Kafka of Czech humour,”⁶¹ meaning Vyskočil’s work had the depth of Kafka’s existentialism and absurdity but expressed and shared it in a joyously playful manner. Similarly, we can assume now that Vyskočil had a deep understanding of Stanislavsky’s psychology of acting, and found ways to make further use of it through small stage forms, in improvisational settings of open play, bringing together the variety of sources of inspiration named above.

In this essay, we have introduced Ivan Vyskočil, Czech writer, playwright, actor, performer, improviser, psychologist, and pedagogue. In doing so, we focused on those layers of his life span and work which helped us understand why and how he reflected on Stanislavsky’s principles of acting of experiencing, and the concepts of public solitude (first/small circle of attention), and creative state. In the core of this essay, we identified three major differences between Stanislavsky’s and Vyskočil’s approaches; more precisely, we have described directions into which Vyskočil shifted Stanislavsky’s concepts. We have shown how Stanislavsky’s public solitude, initially developed as the actor’s protection from the public’s gaze, got transposed into a theatre as an encounter, in which the audience’s wishing attention (positively engaged) fosters the actor’s ability of inner spectatorship, and in which the audience co-creates the play in the present moment. On a more general level, we suggested Vyskočil and his work as a case study for current research on hybridization and creativity.

In the second essay we will open further on the pedagogical concepts and study curriculum at the DACP. In connection with our current research questions – the actor’s capacity for “multiple attention” and ways of its cultivation, and the role of the creative state in teacher’s work – we will extend further the line from Stanislavsky’s acting of experiencing to Vyskočil’s authorial dialogical acting. We will do so by including the improvisational discipline of instant composition, a postmodern dance stage format, as it is practiced and taught by Julyen Hamilton (among others). Drawing on the solid historical-theoretical base of this first essay, we will present the topic of “multiple attention” as part of our efforts to revise and innovate the movement education at DACP.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Stefan Aquilina for his invitation, encouragement and support and to our two reviewers for their suggestions for improvements. Thank you Martina Musilová and Eva Slavíková for your expert advice and sharing of memories and embodied knowledge, and Tania Zittoun for your reading and consultation from the point of view of psychology. Thank you David Machek and James Munro for your reading and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This publication was written at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as part of the project “Performer as an actor and viewer at the same time” with the support of the Institutional Endowment for the Long Term Conceptual Development of Research Institutes, as provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic in the year 2023. The open access funding was provided by the University of Neuchâtel.

Notes on contributors

Markéta Machková

Markéta Machková is currently working on her doctoral project which looks into dialogical theories in cultural psychology and education, using practice-based research approaches, namely Dialogical Acting. This transdisciplinary work is realized within the joint thesis supervision agreement between the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and the University of Neuchâtel. As a passionate teacher, she is bringing practice-based approaches and playful creativity together with intellectually oriented education.

Mish Rais

Mish Rais PhD., is leading the English BA/MA programme Authorial Acting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Her major research interests are currently in improvisation, especially when it comes to movement practices and their pedagogy; her latest publications concern the practice of instant composition. Besides research and teaching, she enjoys her performing activities in various roles, namely with the CreWcollective and Partial Uncertainty.

Notes

1. The name “text-appeal” was a play of words on “sex-appeal” and expressed the format in which the texts that Vyskočil and Suchý performed (short stories or songs) were the attractive and appealing elements of the night club productions.

2. Vyskočil, Knochen; Vyskočil, Bei-Spiele.

3. When we refer to Vyskočil’s approach to acting disciplines and education at the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy, we use the term “psychosomatic.” In this essay, however, we use “psychophysical” to indicate the connection to similar approaches worldwide. An overview of these can be found in Hannu Tuisku’s doctoral thesis that “investigates the traditions of psychophysical actor training.” See Tuisku, Developing Embodied Pedagogies of Acting for Youth Theatre Education.

4. Transition of power in Czechoslovakia took place in November 1989. This led to the communist government resignation and to a parliamentary democracy. The name “Velvet revolution” (Sametová revoluce in Czech) refers to the non-violent character of the strikes and protests led by students and dissidents.

5. We worked with the compact Vyskočil’s biography and study into his Nedivadlo productions, published in Czech: Čunderle and Roubal, Hra školou. The title of the book Hra školou means “Play as a School” and it is a word-play referencing the famous work on education by the Czech thinker Jan Amos Comenius “School as a Play” (Schola ludus, 1630). It points to the fact that Vyskočil’s educated playfulness gave birth to an original pedagogical approach.

6. Sources about hybridity include Camilleri and Kapsali, “On Hybridity;” Obradors, “Hybridizations and Overflows between Disciplines and Sectors in Art and Communication;” Romano, “It Is Useless to Refrain the Wave.”

7. Our work on the actor-spectator relationship is a unique contribution to inquiries into the I-Other relationship in social and cultural psychology. More can be found in Marková, “On the ‘Inner Alter’ in Dialogue.”

8. The practitioner and teacher of this improvisational approach, whom we currently work with, is Julyen Hamilton. This dancer and performer of British origin is – like Stanislavsky and Vyskočil – another practitioner, thinker, and pedagogue at once. More about his concept and practice of instant composition is introduced in Part II of our work. For context see Machková, Rais, and Novorytová, “Cultivating Compositional Attention”; Rais, Eliášová, and Le Quesne, “‘Improvisation as Performative Freshness’: Interview with Wendy Houstoun [Online]”; Polanská Turečková, “‘Radicality of Body: An Interview with Julyen Hamilton’ [In Czech: Radikalita těla: rozhovor s Julyenem Hamiltonem] [online]”; Eliášová, Le Quesne, and Rais, “A Dance Practice of ‘Choreographic Improvisation’: An Interview with Rosalind Crisp.”

9. Post Bellum runs the international Memory of Nations project in Czechia; for more information, see https://www.memoryofnations.eu/en/about-project.

10. Burian, Jan. “A Curious Interview with Přemysl Rut about Ivan Vyskočil [In Czech: Zvědavý rozhovor s Přemyslem Rutem o Ivanu Vyskočilovi].” Burianovo zavěšený kafe. Accessed July 23, 2023. https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/janburiankafe/episodes/Burianovo-zaven-kafe-40---Zvdav-rozhovor-s-Pemyslem-Rutem-o-Ivanu-Vyskoilovi-e24pc4f.

11. Musilová, “Vyskočil and Stanislavsky. A Work-in-Progress Interview.”

12. The practical disciplines of Dialogical Acting and Acting Propaedeutic have been particularly relevant; the former for experiencing public solitude, creative state, and being/acting in the present moment, the latter for acting of experiencing, or work with tempo-rhythm. Our acting teacher, actress, and researcher Jaroslava Pokorná introduced us to a variety of exercises by Stanislavsky and M. Chekhov. Pokorná’s acting work, including praised and awarded casts in Ibsen’s Wild Duck (performed in Divadlo v Dlouhé) or the HBO movie series Burning Bush (Hořící keř), is a perfect example of the use of the psychophysical and authorial approach in mainstream productions.

13. Vyskočil, “Dialogical Acting: Information for Authorisation [Online].”

14. Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction, 46.

15. Jackson, “Ribot, Emotion and the Actor’s Creative State,” 246.

16. More about inner speech can be read in Machková, “Enacting Inner Speech on the Academic Stage.”

17. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus; Tcherkasski, Stanislavsky and Yoga.

18. Guardini, “Playfulness of the Liturgy;” Buber and Smith, I and Thou; Buber et al., The Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue; Fromm and Funk, The Essential Fromm; Bachtin, Holquist, and Emerson, The Dialogic Imagination. A large part of these readings was recommended by Jaroslav Plichta (1929–2006), a Czech psychologist, special pedagogue, and dramaturgist whom Vyskočil invited to DAMU, after he returned from emigration in Western Germany in 1989.

19. Musilová, “Stanislavski Resurrected.”

20. Post Bellum, “Ivan Vyskočil (1929–2023).”

21. In her article (“Stanislavski Resurrected”) and in our interview, Musilová mentions Stanislavsky’s draft from 1908–9, which was explicitly called “Theatre as a Temple. Actor as a Priest” and quoted in Czech translation in Hyvnar, Herec v moderním divadle.

22. Brecht, “Notes On Stanislavski,” 156.

23. Musilová, “Stanislavski Resurrected,” 37.

24. Our translation from the DAMU webpage: Department of Dramatic Theatre (Katedra činoherního divadla). https://www.damu.cz/cs/katedry-programy/katedra-cinoherniho-divadla/o-katedre/?.

25. Musilová, “Vyskočil and Stanislavsky. A Work-in-Progress Interview.”

26. For a study on Lukavský see Sílová, “Radovan Lukavský and the Stanislavsky’s Method of an Actor’s Work.”

27. Musilová, “Stanislavski in Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner – In the Neighbourhood with Brecht,” 82.

28. Probably the internationally most famous Czech work that encapsulates this ludic playfulness pointing to absurdities is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–3). The novel was later looked into by Emanuel Frynta, Czech poet, translator and close friend to Ivan Vyskočil. Frynta was mainly interested in nonsense poetry (another genre dealing playfully with absurdity and kitsch) and besides writing his own work, he translated the work of Christian Morgenstern who founded the Galgenbrüder cabaret in 1895 in Berlin.

29. Czech Germanist Hugo Siebenschein as quoted in Balvín, “The Cabaret as a Parody Theatre.”

30. Musilová, Fauefekt, 115–21.

31. As quoted in Burian, “The Liberated Theatre of Voskovec and Werich,” 155.

32. Vyskočil’s paraphrase of Werich’s orally, often-repeated thought. In writing, Werich formulated it in his letter to his late improv partner Miroslav Horníček. In Werich and Horníček, “Dear Horníček.”

33. Brecht and Hewitt, “On Chinese Acting.”

34. Vyskočil, “On the Study of Acting,” 1–2.

35. Vyskočil, “Small Stage Forms or How To Go About It?,” 4.

36. Slavíková, “Filiations,” 29–30.

37. See also Musilová, ““Я Есмь“– Stanislavski and Solovyov.”

38. Vyskočil, “Dialogical Acting: Information for Authorisation [Online].”

39. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, 87.

40. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 99 and 23.

41. Musilová, “Vyskočil and Stanislavsky. A Work-in-Progress Interview.”

42. Vyskočil, Nedivadlo Ivana Vyskočila, 306 (our translation from Czech).

43. Ibid., 191.

44. Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, 101.

45. Vyskočil, Nedivadlo Ivana Vyskočila, 305.

46. Ibid.

47. Jan Patočka (1907–77) was an important Czech philosopher, famous for his work in phenomenology and on European culture, the grounds of which he saw in Plato’s concept of the “care for the soul.” Vyskočil attended Patočka’s seminars that people secretly hosted in their private apartments, hiding from the communistic regime. Patočka also wrote an essay on Vyskočil’s work in theatre; Vyskočil, Nedivadlo Ivana Vyskočila, 14–18.

48. Werich and Horníček, “Dear Horníček.”

49. More about the V+W improv approach can be read in Burian, “The Liberated Theatre of Voskovec and Werich,” or listened to in Werich, Jan Werich and Miroslav Horníček at Kampa.

50. At the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy, we use the specific term of “psychosomatic condition,” also “personal fitness,” in which the “psychosomatic/personal” (also referred to as psychophysical) means holistic (engaging the person’s body, mind, and spirit) and the “condition/fitness” means a state in which one is well able to integrate their skills into acting in this holistic way.

51. Vyskočil, “Dialogical Acting: Information for Authorisation [Online].”

52. Acutt, “The General Creative State, and the Art of Experiencing;” Polanco and Bonfiglio, “Stanislavski’s Objectives, Given Circumstances and Magic ‘If’s through the Lens of Optimal Experience.”

53. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow.

54. Acutt, “The General Creative State, and the Art of Experiencing.”

55. Alderson-Day and Fernyhough, “Inner Speech;” Fossa, New Perspectives on Inner Speech.

56. Vyskočil, “Small Stage Forms or How to Go About It?,” 11.

57. In Part II of this study we look into the “law of transference” and “wishing attention” as major elements of Vyskočil’s pedagogical concept.

58. Musilová, “Stanislavski in Dialogical Acting with the Inner Partner – In the Neighbourhood with Brecht.”

59. Obradors, “Hybridizations and Overflows between Disciplines and Sectors in Art and Communication.”

60. Černý, Paměti III (1945–1972), 476–7; our translation.

61. Suchý, “Jiří Suchý: I am too busy to contemplate about my death.”