title: Flow cytometry

text: Recent progress on automated population identification using computational methods has offered an alternative to traditional gating strategies. Automated identification systems could potentially help findings of rare and hidden populations. Representative automated methods include FLOCK in Immunology Database and Analysis Portal (ImmPort), SamSPECTRAL and flowClust in Bioconductor, and FLAME in GenePattern. T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (tSNE) is an algorithm designed to perform dimensionality reduction, to allow visualization of complex multi-dimensional data in a two-dimensional "map". Collaborative efforts have resulted in an open project called FlowCAP (Flow Cytometry: Critical Assessment of Population Identification Methods,) to provide an objective way to compare and evaluate the flow cytometry data clustering methods, and also to establish guidance about appropriate use and application of these methods.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Fluorescence minus one (FMO) controls are important for data interpretation when building multi-color panels - in which a cell is stained with multiple fluorochromes simultaneously. FMO controls provide a measure of fluorescence spillover in a given channel and allow for compensation. To generate a FMO control, a sample is stained with all the fluorochromes except the one that is being tested - meaning if you are using 4 different fluorochromes your FMO control must contain only 3 of them (example: fluorochromes - A, B, C, D; FMOs - ABC_, AB_D, A_CD, _BCD).


title: Flow cytometry

text: Cell sorting is a method to purify cell populations based on the presence or absence of specific physical characteristics. In flow cytometers with sorting capabilities, the instrument detects cells using parameters including cell size, morphology, and protein expression, and then droplet technology to sort cells and recover the subsets for post-experimental use.


title: Flow cytometry

text: The first prototype sorter was built at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1965 by physicist Mack J. Fulwyler by joining a Coulter volume sensor with the newly invented ink jet printer. Live cell cell sorter or fluorescence-activated cell sorter (FACS) was generated by Len Herzenberg, who subsequently won the Kyoto Prize in 2006 for his seminal work.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Flow cytometry cell sorters have a collection system unlike flow cytometry analyzers. The collection process starts when a sample is injected into a stream of sheath fluid that passes through the flow cell and laser intercepts. The stream then carries the cell through a vibrating nozzle which generates droplets with most containing either one cell or no cells. An electrical charging ring is placed just at the point where the stream breaks into droplets and a charge is placed on the ring based immediately prior to fluorescence intensity being measured; the opposite charge is trapped on the droplet as it breaks from the stream and the droplets are therefore charged. The charged droplets then fall through an electrostatic deflection system that diverts droplets into containers based on their charge. In some systems, the charge is applied directly to the stream, and the droplet breaking off retains charge of the same sign as the stream. The stream is then returned to neutral after the droplet breaks off. After collecting, these cells can be further cultured, manipulated, and studied.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Flow cytometry uses the light properties scattered from cells or particles for identification or quantitative measurement of physical properties. Labels, dyes, and stains can be used for multi-parametric analysis (understand more properties about a cell). Immunophenotyping is the analysis of heterogeneous populations of cells using labeled antibodies and other fluorophore containing reagents such as dyes and stains.


title: Flow cytometry

text: A wide range of fluorophores can be used as labels in flow cytometry. Fluorophores, or simply "fluors", are typically attached to an antibody that recognizes a target feature on or in the cell; they may also be attached to a chemical entity with affinity for the cell membrane or another cellular structure. Each fluorophore has a characteristic peak excitation and emission wavelength, and the emission spectra often overlap. Consequently, the combination of labels which can be used depends on the wavelength of the lamp(s) or laser(s) used to excite the fluorochromes and on the detectors available. The maximum number of distinguishable fluorescent labels is thought to be 17 or 18, and this level of complexity necessitates laborious optimization to limit artifacts, as well as complex deconvolution algorithms to separate overlapping spectra. Flow cytometry uses fluorescence as a quantitative tool; the utmost sensitivity of flow cytometry is unmatched by other fluorescent detection platforms such as confocal microscopy. Absolute fluorescence sensitivity is generally lower in confocal microscopy because out-of-focus signals are rejected by the confocal optical system and because the image is built up serially from individual measurements at every location across the cell, reducing the amount of time available to collect signal.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Quantum dots are sometimes used in place of traditional fluorophores because of their narrower emission peaks.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Mass cytometry overcomes the fluorescent labeling limit by utilizing lanthanide isotopes attached to antibodies. This method could theoretically allow the use of 40 to 60 distinguishable labels and has been demonstrated for 30 labels. Mass cytometry is fundamentally different from flow cytometry: cells are introduced into a plasma, ionized, and associated isotopes are quantified via time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Although this method permits the use of a large number of labels, it currently has lower throughput capacity than flow cytometry. It also destroys the analysed cells, precluding their recovery by sorting.


title: Flow cytometry

text: In addition to the ability to label and identify individual cells via fluorescent antibodies, cellular products such as cytokines, proteins, and other factors may be measured as well. Similar to ELISA sandwich assays, cytometric bead array (CBA) assays use multiple bead populations typically differentiated by size and different levels of fluorescence intensity to distinguish multiple analytes in a single assay. The amount of the analyte captured is detected via a biotinylated antibody against a secondary epitope of the protein, followed by a streptavidin-R-phycoerythrin treatment. The fluorescent intensity of R-phycoerythrin on the beads is quantified on a flow cytometer equipped with a 488 nm excitation source. Concentrations of a protein of interest in the samples can be obtained by comparing the fluorescent signals to those of a standard curve generated from a serial dilution of a known concentration of the analyte. Commonly also referred to as cytokine bead array (CBA).


title: Flow cytometry

text: Impedance-based single cell analysis systems are commonly known as Coulter counters. They represent a well-established method for counting and sizing virtually any kind of cells and particles. The label-free technology has recently been enhanced by a "lab-on-a-chip" based approach and by applying high frequency alternating current (AC) in the radio frequency range (from 100 kHz to 30 MHz) instead of a static direct current (DC) or low frequency AC field. This patented technology allows a highly accurate cell analysis and provides additional information like membrane capacitance and viability. The relatively small size and robustness allow battery powered on-site use in the field.


title: Flow cytometry

text: The technology has applications in a number of fields, including molecular biology, pathology, immunology, virology, plant biology and marine biology. It has broad application in medicine especially in transplantation, hematology, tumor immunology and chemotherapy, prenatal diagnosis, genetics and sperm sorting for sex preselection. Flow cytometry is widely applied to detect sperm cells abnormality associated with DNA fragmentation in male fertility assays. Also, it is extensively used in research for the detection of DNA damage, caspase cleavage and apoptosis. Photoacoustic flow cytometry is used in the study of multi-drug-resistant bacteria (most commonly MRSA) to detect, differentiate, and quantify bacteria in the blood marked with dyed bacteriophages. In neuroscience, co-expression of cell surface and intracellular antigens can also be analyzed. In microbiology, it can be used to screen and sort transposon mutant libraries constructed with a GFP-encoding transposon (TnMHA), or to assess viability. In protein engineering, flow cytometry is used in conjunction with yeast display and bacterial display to identify cell surface-displayed protein variants with desired properties.


title: Flow cytometry

text: The main advantages of flow cytometry over histology and IHC is the possibility to precisely measure the quantities of antigens and the possibility to stain each cell with multiple antibodies-fluorophores, in current laboratories around 10 antibodies can be bound to each cell. This is much less than mass cytometer where up to 40 can be currently measured, but at a higher price and a slower pace.


title: Flow cytometry

text: In aquatic systems, flow cytometry is used for the analysis of autofluorescing cells or cells that are fluorescently-labeled with added stains. This research started in 1981 when Clarice Yentsch used flow cytometry to measure the fluorescence in a red tide producing dinoflagellate. The next year researchers published flow cytometric measurements of multiple algal species which could be distinguished based on their fluorescence characteristics. By 1983, marine researchers were assembling their own flow cytometers or using commercially available flow cytometers on seawater samples collected off Bermuda to demonstrate that phytoplankton cells could be distinguished from non-living material and that cyanobacteria could be sorted from a mixed community and subsequently cultured in the lab. Flow cytometry also allowed marine researchers to distinguish between dimly-fluorescing "Prochlorococcus" and heterotrophic microorganisms, a distinction that is difficult with microscopy-based assessments. Advances in technology now allow aquatic scientists to use flow cytometers continuously during research cruises and flow cytometers are used to provide images of individual phytoplankton cells. Marine scientists use the sorting ability of flow cytometers to make discrete measurements of cellular activity and diversity, to conduct investigations into the mutualistic relationships between microorganisms that live in close proximity, and to measure biogeochemical rates of multiple processes in the ocean.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Cell proliferation is the major function in the immune system. Often it is required to analyse the proliferative nature of the cells in order to make some conclusions. One such assay to determine the cell proliferation is the tracking dye carboxyfluorescein diacetate succinimidyl ester (CFSE). It helps to monitor proliferative cells. This assay gives quantitative as well as qualitative data during time-series experiments. This dye binds covalently with the long-lived molecules present inside the cell. When the cells divide, the molecules divide too and, the daughter cells possess half the dye than the parent population. This decrease in the intensity can be visualized by flow cytometry. In literature, this powerful technique of flow cytometry and CFSE has been used to find the efficiency of T-cells in killing the target cells in cancer such as leukemia. In order to visualize the target cell death, both rapid and slow, scientists have used CFSE labelling with antibody staining of certain kinds of cells and fluorescently labelled microbeads. This also gave information regarding the proliferation of the target cells upon the treatment of certain cytokines.


title: Flow cytometry

text: Flow cytometry has been used to measure genome sizes, or more precisely: the amount of DNA in a cell or nucleus. Although genomes can be analyzed with more precision by genome sequencing, this is often difficult due to a high fraction of micro-chromosomes or repetitive sequences which may be missed by sequencing (or which get filtered out during the analysis step when they cannot be assigned to chromosomes). However, flow cytometry is not perfect either. The resulting genome sizes may differ based on the dye used. An analysis of fish genomes resulted in significantly different genome sizes when propidium iodide (PI) and DAPI were used, respectively. For instance, the genome of "Anguilla japonica" was found to contain 1.09 pg of DNA with PI vs. 1.25 pg with DAPI. Similarly, the genome of "Myxocyprinus asiaticus" was found to contain 2.75 pg of DNA (PI) vs. 3.08 pg (DAPI). That is, the differences were on the order of 12-14%.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski ( Alekseyev; ; 7 August 1938) was a seminal Soviet Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his "system" of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski (his stage name) performed and directed as an amateur until the age of 33, when he co-founded the world-famous Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) company with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, following a legendary 18-hour discussion. Its influential tours of Europe (1906) and the US (1923–24), and its landmark productions of "The Seagull" (1898) and "Hamlet" (1911–12), established his reputation and opened new possibilities for the art of the theatre. By means of the MAT, Stanislavski was instrumental in promoting the new Russian drama of his day—principally the work of Anton Chekhov, Maxim Gorky, and Mikhail Bulgakov—to audiences in Moscow and around the world; he also staged acclaimed productions of a wide range of classical Russian and European plays.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: He collaborated with the director and designer Edward Gordon Craig and was formative in the development of several other major practitioners, including Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom Stanislavski considered his "sole heir in the theatre"), Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and Michael Chekhov. At the MAT's 30-year anniversary celebrations in 1928, a massive heart attack on-stage put an end to his acting career (though he waited until the curtain fell before seeking medical assistance). He continued to direct, teach, and write about acting until his death a few weeks before the publication of the first volume of his life's great work, the acting manual "An Actor's Work" (1938). He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Lenin and was the first to be granted the title of People's Artist of the USSR.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski wrote that "there is nothing more tedious than an actor's biography" and that "actors should be banned from talking about themselves". At the request of a US publisher, however, he reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, "My Life in Art" (first published in English in 1924 and in a revised, Russian-language edition in 1926), though its account of his artistic development is not always accurate. Three English-language biographies have been published: David Magarshack's "Stanislavsky: A Life" (1950) ; Jean Benedetti's "Stanislavski: His Life and Art" (1988, revised and expanded 1999). and Nikolai M Gorchakov's "Stanislavsky Directs" (1954). An out-of-print English translation of Elena Poliakova's 1977 Russian biography of Stanislavski was also published in 1982.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection. His system of acting developed out of his persistent efforts to remove the blocks that he encountered in his performances, beginning with a major crisis in 1906. He produced his early work using an external, director-centred technique that strove for an organic unity of all its elements—in each production he planned the interpretation of every role, blocking, and the "mise en scène" in detail in advance. He also introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast. Despite the success that this approach brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, Stanislavski remained dissatisfied.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Both his struggles with Chekhov's drama (out of which his notion of subtext emerged) and his experiments with Symbolism encouraged a greater attention to "inner action" and a more intensive investigation of the actor's process. He began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy. He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre. Stanislavski organised his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology, which built on three major strands of influence: (1) the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; (2) the actor-centred realism of the Maly; and (3) the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The system cultivates what Stanislavski calls the "art of experiencing" (to which he contrasts the "art of representation"). It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment (a "task"). Stanislavski's earliest reference to his system appears in 1909, the same year that he first incorporated it into his rehearsal process. The MAT adopted it as its official rehearsal method in 1911.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the system with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised. "The best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances."


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Just as the First Studio, led by his assistant and close friend Leopold Sulerzhitsky, had provided the forum in which he developed his initial ideas for the system during the 1910s, he hoped to secure his final legacy by opening another studio in 1935, in which the Method of Physical Action would be taught. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals. Meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West. With the arrival of Socialist realism in the USSR, the MAT and Stanislavski's system were enthroned as exemplary models.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseyevs. He was born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev—he adopted the stage name "Stanislavski" in 1884 to keep his performance activities secret from his parents. Up until the communist revolution in 1917, Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his experiments in acting and directing. His family's discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur until he was thirty three.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: As a child, Stanislavski was interested in the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. Later, his family's two private theatres provided a forum for his theatrical impulses. After his debut performance at one in 1877, he started what would become a lifelong series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems—it was from this habit of self-analysis and critique that Stanislavski's system later emerged. Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Increasingly interested in "experiencing the role", Stanislavski experimented with maintaining a characterization in real life. In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, with whom he also explored the coordination of body and voice. A year later, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School but, disappointed with its approach, he left after little more than two weeks. Instead, he devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of Russian psychological realism (as developed in the 19th century by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin).


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Shchepkin's legacy included a disciplined, ensemble approach, extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination, and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft. Stanislavski called the Maly his "university". One of Shchepkin's students, Glikeriya Fedotova, taught Stanislavski; she instilled in him the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art, stressed the importance of training and discipline, and encouraged the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication". As well as the artists of the Maly, performances given by foreign stars influenced Stanislavski. The effortless, emotive, and clear playing of the Italian Ernesto Rossi, who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in 1877, particularly impressed him. So too did Tommaso Salvini's 1882 performance of Othello.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: By now well known as an amateur actor, at the age of twenty-five Stanslavski co-founded a Society of Art and Literature. Under its auspices, he performed in plays by Molière, Schiller, Pushkin, and Ostrovsky, as well as gaining his first experiences as a director. He became interested in the aesthetic theories of Vissarion Belinsky, from whom he took his conception of the role of the artist.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: On , Stanislavski married Maria Lilina (the stage name of Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova). Their first child, Xenia, died of pneumonia in May 1890 less than two months after she was born. Their second daughter, Kira, was born on . In January 1893, Stanislavski's father died. Their son Igor was born on .


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In February 1891, Stanislavski directed Leo Tolstoy's "The Fruits of Enlightenment" for the Society of Art and Literature, in what he later described as his first fully independent directorial work. But it was not until 1893 he first met the great realist novelist and playwright that became another important influence on him. Five years later the MAT would be his response to Tolstoy's demand for simplicity, directness, and accessibility in art.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's directorial methods at this time were closely modelled on the disciplined, autocratic approach of Ludwig Chronegk, the director of the Meiningen Ensemble. In "My Life in Art" (1924), Stanislavski described this approach as one in which the director is "forced to work without the help of the actor". From 1894 onward, Stanislavski began to assemble detailed prompt-books that included a directorial commentary on the entire play and from which not even the smallest detail was allowed to deviate.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Whereas the Ensemble's effects tended toward the grandiose, Stanislavski introduced lyrical elaborations through the "mise-en-scène" that dramatised more mundane and ordinary elements of life, in keeping with Belinsky's ideas about the "poetry of the real". By means of his rigid and detailed control of all theatrical elements, including the strict choreography of the actors' every gesture, in Stanislavski's words "the inner kernel of the play was revealed by itself". Analysing the Society's production of "Othello" (1896), Jean Benedetti observes that:


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right. The dramatic meaning is in the staging itself. [...] He went through the whole play in a completely different way, not relying on the text as such, with quotes from important speeches, not providing a 'literary' explanation, but speaking in terms of the play's dynamic, its action, the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, the world in which they lived. His account flowed uninterruptedly from moment to moment.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Benedetti argues that Stanislavski's task at this stage was to unite the realistic tradition of the creative actor inherited from Shchepkin and Gogol with the director-centred, organically unified Naturalistic aesthetic of the Meiningen approach. That synthesis would emerge eventually, but only in the wake of Stanislavski's directorial struggles with Symbolist theatre and an artistic crisis in his work as an actor. "The task of our generation", Stanislavski wrote as he was about to found the Moscow Art Theatre and begin his professional life in the theatre, is "to liberate art from outmoded tradition, from tired cliché and to give greater freedom to imagination and creative ability."


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's historic meeting with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko on led to the creation of what was called initially the "Moscow Public-Accessible Theatre", but which came to be known as the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). Their eighteen-hour-long discussion has acquired a legendary status in the history of theatre.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Nemirovich was a successful playwright, critic, theatre director, and acting teacher at the Philharmonic School who, like Stanislavski, was committed to the idea of a popular theatre. Their abilities complemented one another: Stanislavski brought his directorial talent for creating vivid stage images and selecting significant details; Nemirovich, his talent for dramatic and literary analysis, his professional expertise, and his ability to manage a theatre. Stanislavski later compared their discussions to the Treaty of Versailles, their scope was so wide-ranging; they agreed on the conventional practices they wished to abandon and, on the basis of the working method they found they had in common, defined the policy of their new theatre.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski and Nemirovich planned a professional company with an ensemble ethos that discouraged individual vanity; they would create a realistic theatre of international renown, with popular prices for seats, whose organically unified aesthetic would bring together the techniques of the Meiningen Ensemble and those of André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (which Stanislavski had seen during trips to Paris). Nemirovich assumed that Stanislavski would fund the theatre as a privately owned business, but Stanislavski insisted on a limited, joint stock company. Viktor Simov, whom Stanislavski had met in 1896, was engaged as the company's principal designer.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In his opening speech on the first day of rehearsals, , Stanislavski stressed the "social character" of their collective undertaking. In an atmosphere more like a university than a theatre, as Stanislavski described it, the company was introduced to his working method of extensive reading and research and detailed rehearsals in which the action was defined at the table before being explored physically. Stanislavski's lifelong relationship with Vsevolod Meyerhold began during these rehearsals; by the end of June, Meyerhold was so impressed with Stanislavski's directorial skills that he declared him a genius.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The lasting significance of Stanislavski's early work at the MAT lies in its development of a Naturalistic performance mode. In 1898, Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov. The MAT production of "The Seagull" was a crucial milestone for the fledgling company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama." Despite its 80 hours of rehearsal—a considerable length by the standards of the conventional practice of the day—Stanislavski felt it was under-rehearsed. The production's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski went on to direct the successful premières of Chekhov's other major plays: "Uncle Vanya" in 1899 (in which he played Astrov), "Three Sisters" in 1901 (playing Vershinin), and "The Cherry Orchard" in 1904 (playing Gaev). Stanislavski's encounter with Chekhov's drama proved crucial to the creative development of both men. His ensemble approach and attention to the psychological realities of its characters revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage, while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the text forced Stanislavski to dig beneath its surface in ways that were new in theatre.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In response to Stanislavski's encouragement, Maxim Gorky promised to launch his playwrighting career with the MAT. In 1902, Stanislavski directed the première productions of the first two of Gorky's plays, "The Philistines" and "The Lower Depths". As part of the rehearsal preparations for the latter, Stanislavski took the company to visit Khitrov Market, where they talked to its down-and-outs and soaked up its atmosphere of destitution. Stanislavski based his characterisation of Satin on an ex-officer he met there, who had fallen into poverty through gambling. "The Lower Depths" was a triumph that matched the production of "The Seagull" four years earlier, though Stanislavski regarded his own performance as external and mechanical.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The productions of "The Cherry Orchard" and "The Lower Depths" remained in the MAT's repertoire for decades. Along with Chekhov and Gorky, the drama of Henrik Ibsen formed an important part of Stanislavski's work at this time—in its first two decades, the MAT staged more plays by Ibsen than any other playwright. In its first decade, Stanislavski directed "Hedda Gabler" (in which he played Løvborg), "An Enemy of the People" (playing Dr Stockmann, his favorite role), "The Wild Duck", and "Ghosts". "More's the pity I was not a Scandinavian and never saw how Ibsen was played in Scandinavia," Stanislavski wrote, because "those who have been there tell me that he is interpreted as simply, as true to life, as we play Chekhov". He also staged other important Naturalistic works, including Gerhart Hauptmann's "Drayman Henschel", "Lonely People", and "Michael Kramer" and Leo Tolstoy's "The Power of Darkness".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In 1904, Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist. Despite his enthusiasm, however, Stanislavski struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static, lyrical dramas. When the triple bill consisting of "The Blind", "Intruder", and "Interior" opened on , the experiment was deemed a failure.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Meyerhold, prompted by Stanislavski's positive response to his new ideas about Symbolist theatre, proposed that they form a "theatre studio" (a term which he invented) that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors." The Theatre-Studio aimed to develop Meyerhold's aesthetic ideas into new theatrical forms that would return the MAT to the forefront of the avant-garde and Stanislavski's socially conscious ideas for a network of "people's theatres" that would reform Russian theatrical culture as a whole. Central to Meyerhold's approach was the use of improvisation to develop the performances.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: When the studio presented a work-in-progress, Stanislavski was encouraged; when performed in a fully equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded. Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him", he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion." Reflecting in 1908 on the Theatre-Studio's demise, Stanislavski wrote that "our theatre found its future among its ruins." Nemirovich disapproved of what he described as the malign influence of Meyerhold on Stanislavski's work at this time.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in 1905: Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor and Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant. Stanislavski revised his interpretation of the role of Trigorin (and Meyerhold reprised his role as Konstantin) when the MAT revived its production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" on .


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: This was the year of the abortive revolution in Russia. Stanislavski signed a protest against the violence of the secret police, Cossack troops, and the right-wing extremist paramilitary "Black Hundreds", which was submitted to the Duma on the . Rehearsals for the MAT's production of Alexander Griboyedov's classic verse comedy "Woe from Wit" were interrupted by gun-battles on the streets outside. Stanislavski and Nemirovich closed the theatre and embarked on the company's first tour outside of Russia.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The MAT's first European tour began on in Berlin, where they played to an audience that included Max Reinhardt, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Eleonora Duse. "It's as though we were the revelation", Stanislavski wrote of the rapturous acclaim they received. The success of the tour provided financial security for the company, garnered an international reputation for their work, and made a significant impact on European theatre. The tour also provoked a major artistic crisis for Stanislavski that had a significant impact on "his" future direction. From his attempts to resolve this crisis, his system would eventually emerge.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Sometime in March 1906—Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during "An Enemy of the People"—Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical. He spent June and July in Finland on holiday, where he studied, wrote, and reflected. With his notebooks on his own experience from 1889 onwards, he attempted to analyze "the foundation stones of our art" and the actor's creative process in particular. He began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a "Manual on Dramatic Art".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his system. On his return to Moscow, he explored his new psychological approach in his production of Knut Hamsun's Symbolist play "The Drama of Life". Nemirovich was particularly hostile to his new methods and their relationship continued to deteriorate in this period. In a statement made on , Stanislavski marked a significant shift in his directorial method and stressed the crucial contribution he now expected from a creative actor:


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The committee is wrong if it thinks that the director's preparatory work in the study is necessary, as previously, when he alone decided the whole plan and all the details of the production, wrote the "mise en scène" and answered all the actors' questions for them. The director is no longer king, as before, when the actor possessed no clear individuality. [...] It is essential to understand this—rehearsals are divided into two stages: the first stage is one of experiment when the cast helps the director, the second is creating the performance when the director helps the cast.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's preparations for Maeterlinck's "The Blue Bird" (which was to become his most famous production to-date) included improvisations and other exercises to stimulate the actors' imaginations; Nemirovich described one in which the cast imitated various animals. In rehearsals he sought ways to encourage his actors' will to create afresh in every performance. He focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment (what he would come to call their "task"). This use of the actor's conscious thought and will was designed to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Noting the importance to great actors' performances of their ability to remain relaxed, he discovered that he could abolish physical tension by focusing his attention on the specific action that the play demanded; when his concentration wavered, his tension returned. "What fascinates me most", Stanislavski wrote in May 1908, "is the rhythm of feelings, the development of affective memory and the psycho-physiology of the creative process." His interest in the creative use of the actor's personal experiences was spurred by a chance conversation in Germany in July that led him to the work of French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot. His "affective memory" contributed to the technique that Stanislavski would come to call "emotion memory".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Together these elements formed a new vocabulary with which he explored a "return to realism" in a production of Gogol's "The Government Inspector" as soon as "The Blue Bird" had opened. At a theatre conference on , Stanislavski delivered a paper on his emerging system that stressed the role of his techniques of the "magic if" (which encourages the actor to respond to the fictional circumstances of the play "as if" they were real) and emotion memory. He developed his ideas about three trends in the history of acting, which were to appear eventually in the opening chapters of "An Actor's Work": "stock-in-trade" acting, the art of representation, and the art of experiencing (his own approach).


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's production of "A Month in the Country" (1909) was a watershed in his artistic development. Breaking the MAT's tradition of open rehearsals, he prepared Turgenev's play in private. They began with a discussion of what he would come to call the "through-line" for the characters (their emotional development and the way they change over the course of the play). This production is the earliest recorded instance of his practice of analysing the action of the script into discrete "bits".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: At this stage in the development of his approach, Stanislavski's technique was to identify the emotional state contained in the psychological experience of the character during each bit and, through the use of the actor's emotion memory, to forge a subjective connection to it. Only after two months of rehearsals were the actors permitted to physicalise the text. Stanislavski insisted that they should play the actions that their discussions around the table had identified. Having realised a particular emotional state in a physical action, he assumed at this point in his experiments, the actor's repetition of that action would evoke the desired emotion. As with his experiments in "The Drama of Life", they also explored non-verbal communication, whereby scenes were rehearsed as "silent "études"" with actors interacting "only with their eyes". The production's success when it opened in December 1909 seemed to prove the validity of his new methodology.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Late in 1910, Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed actor training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar". Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that employed the techniques of the "commedia dell'arte", Gorky suggested that they form a company, modeled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In his treatment of the classics, Stanislavski believed that it was legitimate for actors and directors to ignore the playwright's intentions for a play's staging. One of his most important—a collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on a production of "Hamlet"—became a landmark of 20th-century theatrical modernism. Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently developed system for creating internally justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play. Craig envisioned a Symbolist monodrama in which every aspect of production would be subjugated to the protagonist: it would present a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Despite these contrasting approaches, the two practitioners did share some artistic assumptions; the system had developed out of Stanislavski's experiments with Symbolist drama, which had shifted his attention from a Naturalistic external surface to the characters' subtextual, inner world. Both had stressed the importance of achieving a unity of all theatrical elements in their work. Their production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, placing it "on the cultural map for Western Europe", and it has come to be regarded as a seminal event that revolutionised the staging of Shakespeare's plays. It became "one of the most famous and passionately discussed productions in the history of the modern stage."


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Increasingly absorbed by his teaching, in 1913 Stanislavski held open rehearsals for his production of Molière's "The Imaginary Invalid" as a demonstration of the system. As with his production of "Hamlet" and his next, Goldoni's "The Mistress of the Inn", he was keen to assay his system in the crucible of a classical text. He began to inflect his technique of dividing the action of the play into bits with an emphasis on improvisation; he would progress from analysis, through free improvisation, to the language of the text:


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: I divide the work into "large bits" clarifying the nature of each bit. Then, immediately, in my own words, I play each bit, observing all the curves. Then I go through the experiences of each bit ten times or so with its curves (not in a fixed way, not being consistent). Then I follow the successive bits in the book. And finally, I make the transition, imperceptibly, to the experiences as expressed in the actual words of the part.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's struggles with both the Molière and Goldoni comedies revealed the importance of an appropriate definition of what he calls a character's "super-task" (the core problem that unites and subordinates the character's moment-to-moment tasks). This impacted particularly on the actors' ability to serve the plays' genre, because an unsatisfactory definition produced tragic rather than comic performances.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Other European classics directed by Stanislavski include: Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice", "Twelfth Night", and "Othello", an unfinished production of Molière's "Tartuffe", and Beaumarchais's "The Marriage of Figaro". Other classics of the Russian theatre directed by Stanislavki include: several plays by Ivan Turgenev, Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit", Gogol's "The Government Inspector", and plays by Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, and Pushkin.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Following the success of his production of "A Month in the Country", Stanislavski made repeated requests to the board of the MAT for proper facilities to pursue his pedagogical work with young actors. Gorky encouraged him not to found a drama school to teach inexperienced beginners, but rather—following the example of the Theatre-Studio of 1905—to create a studio for research and experiment that would train young professionals.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski created the First Studio on . Its founding members included Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslawski, and Maria Ouspenskaya, all of whom would exert a considerable influence on the subsequent history of theatre. Stanislavski selected Suler (as Gorky had nicknamed Sulerzhitsky) to lead the studio. In a focused, intense atmosphere, their work emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery. Following Gorky's suggestions about devising new plays through improvisation, they searched for "the creative process common to authors, actors and directors".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski created the Second Studio of the MAT in 1916, in response to a production of Zinaida Gippius' "The Green Ring" that a group of young actors had prepared independently. With a greater focus on pedagogical work than the First Studio, the Second Studio provided the environment in which Stanislavski developed the training techniques that would form the basis for his manual "An Actor's Work" (1938).


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: A significant influence on the development of the system came from Stanislavski's experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio, which was founded in 1918. He hoped that the successful application of his system to opera, with its inescapable conventionality and artifice, would demonstrate the universality of his approach to performance and unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin. From this experience Stanislavski's notion of "tempo-rhythm" emerged. He invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin to teach expressive movement and dance and attended both of their classes as a student.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski spent the summer of 1914 in Marienbad where, as he had in 1906, he researched the history of theatre and theories of acting to clarify the discoveries that his practical experiments had produced. When the First World War broke out, Stanislavski was in Munich. "It seemed to me", he wrote of the atmosphere at the train station in an article detailing his experiences, "that death was hovering everywhere."


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The train was stopped at Immenstadt, where German soldiers denounced him as a Russian spy. Held in a room at the station with a large crowd with "the faces of wild beasts" baying at its windows, Stanislavski believed he was to be executed. He remembered that he was carrying an official document that mentioned having played to Kaiser Wilhelm during their tour of 1906 that, when he showed it to the officers, produced a change of attitude towards his group. They were placed on a slow train to Kempten. Gurevich later related how during the journey Stanislavski surprised her when he whispered that:


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: [E]vents of recent days had given him a clear impression of the superficiality of all that was called human culture, bourgeois culture, that a completely different kind of life was needed, where all needs were reduced to the minimum, where there was work—real artistic work—on behalf of the people, for those who had not yet been consumed by this bourgeois culture.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In Kempten they were again ordered into one of the station's rooms, where Stanislavski overheard the German soldiers complain of a lack of ammunition; it was only this, he understood, that prevented their execution. The following morning they were placed on a train and eventually returned to Russia via Switzerland and France.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Turning to the classics of Russian theatre, the MAT revived Griboyedov's comedy "Woe from Wit" and planned to stage three of Pushkin's "little tragedies" in early 1915. Stanislavski continued to develop his system, explaining at an open rehearsal for "Woe from Wit" his concept of the state of "I am being". This term marks the stage in the rehearsal process when the distinction between actor and character blurs (producing the "actor/role"), subconscious behavior takes the lead, and the actor feels fully present in the dramatic moment. He stressed the importance to achieving this state of a focus on action ("What would I do if ...") rather than emotion ("How would I feel if ..."): "You must ask the kinds of questions that lead to dynamic action." Instead of forcing emotion, he explained, actors should notice what is happening, attend to their relationships with the other actors, and try to understand "through the senses" the fictional world that surrounds them.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: When he prepared for his role in Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri", Stanislavski created a biography for Salieri in which he imagined the character's memories of each incident mentioned in the play, his relationships with the other people involved, and the circumstances that had impacted on Salieri's life. When he attempted to render all of this detail in performance, however, the subtext overwhelmed the text; overladen with heavy pauses, Pushkin's verse was fragmented to the point of incomprehensibility. His struggles with this role prompted him to attend more closely to the structure and dynamics of language in drama; to that end, he studied Serge Wolkonsky's "The Expressive Word" (1913).


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The French theatre practitioner Jacques Copeau contacted Stanislavski in October 1916. As a result of his conversations with Edward Gordon Craig, Copeau had come to believe that his work at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier shared a common approach with Stanislavski's investigations at the MAT. On , Stanislavski's assistant and closest friend, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, died from chronic nephritis. Reflecting on their relationship in 1931, Stanislavski said that Suler had understood him completely and that no one, since, had replaced him.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and its overthrow of the absolute monarchy as a "miraculous liberation of Russia". With the October Revolution later in the year, the MAT closed for a few weeks and the First Studio was occupied by revolutionaries. Stanislavski thought that the social upheavals presented an opportunity to realize his long-standing ambitions to establish a Russian popular theatre that would provide, as the title of an essay he prepared that year put it, "The Aesthetic Education of the Popular Masses".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Vladimir Lenin, who became a frequent visitor to the MAT after the revolution, praised Stanislavski as "a real artist" and indicated that, in his opinion, Stanislavski's approach was "the direction the theatre should take." The revolutions of that year brought about an abrupt change in Stanislavski's finances when his factories were nationalized, which left his wage from the MAT as his only source of income. On 29 August 1918 Stanislavski, along with several others from the MAT, was arrested by the Cheka, though he was released the following day.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: During the years of the Civil War, Stanislavski concentrated on teaching his system, directing (both at the MAT and its studios), and bringing performances of the classics to new audiences (such as factory workers and the Red Army). Several articles on Stanislavski and his system were published, but none were written by him. On 5 March 1921, Stanislavski was evicted from his large house on Carriage Row, where he had lived since 1903. Following the personal intervention of Lenin (prompted by Anatoly Lunacharsky), Stanislavski was re-housed at 6 Leontievski Lane, not far from the MAT. He was to live there until his death in 1938. On 29 May 1922, Stanislavski's favourite pupil, the director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, died of cancer.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In the wake of the temporary withdrawal of the state subsidy to the MAT that came with the New Economic Policy in 1921, Stanislavski and Nemirovich planned a tour to Europe and the US to augment the company's finances. The tour began in Berlin, where Stanislavski arrived on 18 September 1922, and proceeded to Prague, Zagreb, and Paris, where he was welcomed at the station by Jacques Hébertot, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, and Jacques Copeau. In Paris, he also met André Antoine, Louis Jouvet, Isadora Duncan, Firmin Gémier, and Harley Granville-Barker. He discussed with Copeau the possibility of establishing an international theatre studio and attended performances by Ermete Zacconi, whose control of his performance, economic expressivity, and ability both to "experience" and "represent" the role impressed him.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The company sailed to New York City and arrived on 4 January 1923. When reporters asked about their repertoire, Stanislavski explained that "America wants to see what Europe already knows." David Belasco, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feodor Chaliapin attended the opening night performance. Thanks in part to a vigorous publicity campaign that the American producer, Morris Gest, orchestrated, the tour garnered substantial critical praise, although it was not a financial success.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: As actors (among whom was the young Lee Strasberg) flocked to the performances to learn from the company, the tour made a substantial contribution to the development of American acting. Richard Boleslavsky presented a series of lectures on Stanislavski's system (which were eventually published as "Acting: The First Six Lessons" in 1933). A performance of "Three Sisters" on 31 March 1923 concluded the season in New York, after which they travelled to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: At the request of a US publisher, Stanislavski reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, "My Life in Art", since his proposals for an account of the system or a history of the MAT and its approach had been rejected. He returned to Europe during the summer where he worked on the book and, in September, began rehearsals for a second tour. The company returned to New York on 7 November and went on to perform in Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, Newark, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit. On 20 March 1924, Stanislavski met President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. They were introduced by a translator, Elizabeth Hapgood, with whom he would later collaborate on "An Actor Prepares". The company left the US on 17 May 1924.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: On his return to Moscow in August 1924, Stanislavski began with the help of Gurevich to make substantial revisions to his autobiography, in preparation for a definitive Russian-language edition, which was published in September 1926. He continued to act, reprising the role of Astrov in a new production of "Uncle Vanya" (his performance of which was described as "staggering"). With Nemirovich away touring with his Music Studio, Stanislavski led the MAT for two years, during which time the company thrived.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: With a company fully versed in his system, Stanislavski's work on Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Days of the Turbins" focused on the tempo-rhythm of the production's dramatic structure and the through-lines of action for the individual characters and the play as a whole. "See everything in terms of action" he advised them. Aware of the disapproval of Bulgakov felt by the Repertory Committee ("Glavrepertkom") of the People's Commissariat for Education, Stanislavski threatened to close the theatre if the play was banned. Despite substantial hostility from the press, the production was a box-office success.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In an attempt to render a classic play relevant to a contemporary Soviet audience, Stanislavski re-located the action in his fast and free-flowing production of Pierre Beaumarchais' 18th-century comedy "The Marriage of Figaro" to pre-Revolutionary France and emphasised the democratic point of view of Figaro and Susanna, in preference to that of the aristocratic Count Almaviva. His working methods contributed innovations to the system: the analysis of scenes in terms of concrete physical tasks and the use of the "line of the day" for each character.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In preference to the tightly controlled, Meiningen-inspired scoring of the "mise en scène" with which he had choreographed crowd scenes in his early years, he now worked in terms of broad physical tasks: actors responded truthfully to the circumstances of scenes with sequences of improvised adaptations that attempted to solve concrete, physical problems. For the "line of the day," an actor elaborates in detail the events that supposedly occur to the character "off-stage", in order to form a continuum of experience (the "line" of the character's life that day) that helps to justify his or her behaviour "on-stage". This means that the actor develops a relationship to where (as a character) he has just come from and to where he intends to go when leaving the scene. The production was a great success, garnering ten curtain calls on opening night. Thanks to its cohesive unity and rhythmic qualities, it is recognised as one of Stanislavski's major achievements.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: With a performance of extracts from its major productions—including the first act of "Three Sisters" in which Stanislavski played Vershinin—the MAT celebrated its 30-year jubilee on 29 October 1928. While performing Stanislavski suffered a massive heart-attack, although he continued until the curtain call, after which he collapsed. With that, his acting career came to an end.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: While on holiday in August 1926, Stanislavski began to develop what would become "An Actor's Work", his manual for actors written in the form of a fictional student's diary. Ideally, Stanislavski felt, it would consist of two volumes: the first would detail the actor's inner experiencing and outer, physical embodiment; the second would address rehearsal processes. Since the Soviet publishers used a format that would have made the first volume unwieldy, however, in practice this became three volumes—inner experiencing, outer characterisation, and rehearsal—each of which would be published separately, as it became ready.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The danger that such an arrangement would obscure the mutual interdependence of these parts in the system as a whole would be avoided, Stanislavski hoped, by means of an initial overview that would stress their integration in his psycho-physical approach; as it turned out, however, he never wrote the overview and many English-language readers came to confuse the first volume on psychological processes—published in a heavily abridged version in the US as "An Actor Prepares" (1936)—with the system as a whole.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: The two editors—Hapgood with the American edition and Gurevich with the Russian—made conflicting demands on Stanislavski. Gurevich became increasingly concerned that splitting "An Actor's Work" into two books would not only encourage misunderstandings of the unity and mutual implication of the psychological and physical aspects of the system, but would also give its Soviet critics grounds on which to attack it: "to accuse you of dualism, spiritualism, idealism, etc." Frustrated with Stanislavski's tendency to tinker with details in preference to addressing more important missing sections, in May 1932 she terminated her involvement. Hapgood echoed Gurevich's frustration.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In 1933, Stanislavski worked on the second half of "An Actor's Work". By 1935, a version of the first volume was ready for publication in America, to which the publishers made significant abridgements. A significantly different and far more complete Russian edition, "An Actor's Work on Himself, Part I", was not published until 1938, just after Stanislavski's death. The second part of "An Actor's Work on Himself" was published in the Soviet Union in 1948; an English-language variant, "Building a Character", was published a year later. The third volume, "An Actor's Work on a Role", was published in the Soviet Union in 1957; its nearest English-language equivalent, "Creating a Role", was published in 1961. The differences between the Russian and English-language editions of volumes two and three were even greater than those of the first volume. In 2008, an English-language translation of the complete Russian edition of "An Actor's Work" was published, with one of "An Actor's Work on a Role" following in 2010.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: While recuperating in Nice at the end of 1929, Stanislavski began a production plan for Shakespeare's "Othello". Hoping to use this as the basis for "An Actor's Work on a Role", his plan offers the earliest exposition of the rehearsal process that became known as his Method of Physical Action. He first explored this approach practically in his work on "Three Sisters" and "Carmen" in 1934 and "Molière" in 1935.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: In contrast to his earlier method of working on a play—which involved extensive readings and analysis around a table before any attempt to physicalise its action—Stanislavski now encouraged his actors to explore the action through its "active analysis". He felt that too much discussion in the early stages of rehearsal confused and inhibited the actors. Instead, focusing on the simplest physical actions, they improvised the sequence of dramatic situations given in the play. "The best analysis of a play", he argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances." If the actor justified and committed to the truth of the actions (which are easier to shape and control than emotional responses), Stanislavski reasoned, they would evoke truthful thoughts and feelings.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski's attitude to the use of emotion memory in rehearsals (as distinct from its use in actor training) had shifted over the years. Ideally, he felt, an instinctive identification with a character's situation should arouse an emotional response. The use of emotion memory in lieu of that had demonstrated a propensity for encouraging self-indulgence or hysteria in the actor. Its direct approach to feeling, Stanislavski felt, more often produced a block than the desired expression. Instead, an indirect approach to the subconscious via a focus on actions (supported by a commitment to the given circumstances and imaginative "Magic Ifs") was a more reliable means of luring the appropriate emotional response.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: This shift in approach corresponded both with an increased attention to the structure and dynamic of the play as a whole and with a greater prominence given to the distinction between the planning of a role and its performance. In performance the actor is aware of only one step at a time, Stanislavski reasoned, but this focus risks the loss of the overall dynamic of a role in the welter of moment-to-moment detail. Consequently, the actor must also adopt a different point of view in order to plan the role in relation to its dramatic structure; this might involve adjusting the performance by holding back at certain moments and playing full out at others. A sense of the whole thereby informs the playing of each episode. Borrowing a term from Henry Irving, Stanislavski called this the "perspective of the role".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Stanislavski worked with the American actress Stella Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances. Given the emphasis that emotion memory had received in New York City, Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort. The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Lee Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his version of the system.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Following his heart attack in 1928, for the last decade of his life Stanislavski conducted most of his work writing, directing rehearsals, and teaching in his home on Leontievski Lane. In line with Joseph Stalin's policy of "isolation and preservation" towards certain internationally famous cultural figures, Stanislavski lived in a state of internal exile in Moscow. This protected him from the worst excesses of Stalin's "Great Terror".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: A number of articles critical of the terminology of Stanislavski's system appeared in the run-up to a RAPP conference in early 1931, at which the attacks continued. The system stood accused of philosophical idealism, of a-historicism, of disguising social and political problems under ethical and moral terms, and of "biological psychologism" (or "the suggestion of fixed qualities in nature"). In the wake of the first congress of the USSR Union of Writers (chaired by Maxim Gorky in August 1934), however, Socialist realism was established as the official party line in aesthetic matters. While the new policy would have disastrous consequences for the Soviet avant-garde, the MAT and Stanislavski's system were enthroned as exemplary models.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Given the difficulties he had with completing his manual for actors, Stanislavski decided that he needed to found a new studio if he was to ensure his legacy. "Our school will produce not just individuals," he wrote, "but a whole company". In June 1935, he began to instruct a group of teachers in the training techniques of the system and the rehearsal processes of the Method of Physical Action. Twenty students (out of 3,500 auditionees) were accepted for the dramatic section of the Opera-Dramatic Studio, where classes began on 15 November. Stanislavski arranged a curriculum of four years of study that focused exclusively on technique and method—two years of the work detailed later in "An Actor's Work" and two of that in "An Actor's Work on a Role".


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Once the students were acquainted with the training techniques of the first two years, Stanislavski selected "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet" for their work on roles. He worked with the students in March and April 1937, focusing on their sequences of physical actions, on establishing their through-lines of action, and on rehearsing scenes anew in terms of the actors' tasks. By June 1938 the students were ready for their first public showing, at which they performed a selection of scenes to a small number of spectators. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises that Stanislavski described in his manuals.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: From late 1936 onwards, Stanislavski began to meet regularly with Vsevolod Meyerhold, with whom he discussed the possibility of developing a common theatrical language. In 1938, they made plans to work together on a production and discussed a synthesis of Stanislavski's Method of Physical Action and Meyerhold's biomechanical training. On 8 March, Meyerhold took over the rehearsals for "Rigoletto", the staging of which he completed after Stanislavski's death. On his death-bed Stanislavski declared to Yuri Bakhrushin that Meyerhold was "my sole heir in the theatre—here or anywhere else". Stalin's police tortured and killed Meyerhold in February 1940.


title: Konstantin Stanislavski

text: Stanislavski died in his home at 3:45 pm on 7 August 1938, having probably suffered another heart-attack five days earlier. Thousands of people attended his funeral. Three weeks after his death his widow, Lilina, received an advanced copy of the Russian-language edition of the first volume of "An Actor's Work"—the "labour of his life", as she called it. Stanislavski was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, not far from the grave of Anton Chekhov.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: "The Boys of Summer" is a song released in 1984 by Eagles vocalist and drummer Don Henley, with lyrics written by Henley and music composed by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The lead single from Henley's album "Building the Perfect Beast", "The Boys of Summer" was released on October 26, 1984. It reached number five on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart in the US, number one on the "Billboard" Top Rock Tracks chart, and number 12 in the UK Singles Chart.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The music video won several awards. "The Boys of Summer" was also performed live by Henley with the reunited Eagles; a version is included on the group's 2005 DVD "."


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell wrote a demo for "The Boys of Summer" while experimenting with a LinnDrum drum machine. He showed it to Tom Petty, but they felt it did not fit with the record they were working on, "Southern Accents." At the suggestion of producer Jimmy Iovine, Campbell played it for Don Henley, who wrote the lyrics and recorded the vocal. They rerecorded the song after Henley decided to change the key.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The song is cemented by a repetitive guitar riff. The song was recorded in the key of F major with a tempo of 88 beats per minute. Henley's vocals span F to A.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The lyrics appear to be about the passing of youth and entering middle age, with the nostalgic theme of "summer love" and reminiscence of a past relationship. In a 1987 interview with "Rolling Stone", Henley explained that the song is about aging and questioning the past—a recurring theme in Henley's lyrics (cf. "The End of the Innocence", and "Taking You Home".) In an interview with "NME" in 1985, Henley explained the '"Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac" lyric as an example of his generation selling out.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The song's title is borrowed from Roger Kahn's 1972 acclaimed book about the Brooklyn Dodgers, which in turn borrowed it from a famous Dylan Thomas poem.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: "The Boys of Summer" reached No. 5 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 and topped the "Billboard" Top Rock Tracks chart for five weeks. It was his most successful hit in the United Kingdom, reaching No. 12 on the UK Singles Chart. A re-release of the single in 1998 also reached No. 12.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: In 1986, Henley won the Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song. "The Boys of Summer" was ranked No. 416 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "The Boys of Summer" is included in "The Pitchfork 500", Pitchfork Media's "Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to Present."


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: Tom Petty was astounded by the track's success. One day, he and Campbell were out on a car drive to listen to a mix of their song "Don't Come Around Here No More", but turned on the ignition and heard "The Boys of Summer". Campbell changed the station in case the song would upset Petty, but another station was also playing the song. Petty enjoyed listening to it and regretted initially turning it down.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The music video to "The Boys of Summer" is a French New Wave-influenced piece directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Shot in black-and-white, it shows the main character of the song at three different stages of life (as a young boy, a young adult and middle-aged), in each case reminiscing about a past relationship. Interspersed with these scenes are segments of Henley singing the words of the song while riding in a pickup truck. The young boy in the video is played by a seven-year-old Josh Paul, while the girl is played by Audie England. Interspersed with these scenes are segments of Henley articulating the words of the song while driving in a convertible. At its conclusion, the video uses the post-modern concept of exposing its own workings, as with a wry expression Henley drives the car away from a rear projection screen.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: The video won the Video of the Year at the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards (leading Henley to comment at the Awards the following year that he had won for "riding around in the back of a pickup"). It also won that year's awards for Best Direction, Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography. The Best Direction award was presented to Mondino by Henley's then-former Eagles bandmate Glenn Frey.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: In 2002, Spanish trance artist DJ Sammy (with vocals performed by Dutch singer Loona) covered the song. It was released in 2002 as the third and final single from second studio album, "Heaven" (2002). This cover peaked at number two in the United Kingdom and was one of New Zealand's most successful hits of in 2002, reaching number three and earning a gold certification from Recorded Music NZ (RMNZ). The cover also reached number nine in Australia and the top 20 in Flanders, Ireland, and the Netherlands.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: In 2003, the rock band The Ataris covered "The Boys of Summer" for their album "So Long, Astoria". The song became their second single when a radio station began to play it. The Ataris' version of the song replaced the "Deadhead sticker" reference with one that the band felt was more appropriate to the age group of their fans, namely a "Black Flag sticker", in honor of the punk rock band from the 1980s. The single peaked at No. 2 on the "Billboard" Modern Rock Chart (held off the No. 1 top spot by Linkin Park's "Faint") and No. 20 on the "Billboard" Hot 100. It remains their most successful single.


title: The Boys of Summer (song)

text: Mike Campbell claimed that he enjoyed the Ataris cover, stating that "it's not a song you expect a young band like that to do, but I kind of like their version of it."


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The Thin Man is a 1934 American pre-Code comedy-mystery directed by W. S. Van Dyke and based on the 1934 novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. The film stars William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a leisure-class couple who enjoy copious drinking and flirtatious banter. Nick is a retired private detective who left his very successful career when he married Nora, a wealthy heiress accustomed to high society. Their wire-haired fox terrier Asta was played by canine actor Skippy. In 1997, the film was added to the United States National Film Registry having been deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The film's screenplay was written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple. In 1934, the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. The titular "Thin Man" is not Nick Charles, but the man Charles is initially hired to find – Clyde Wynant (part way through the film, Charles describes Wynant as a "thin man with white hair"). The "Thin Man" moniker was thought by many viewers to refer to Nick Charles and, after a time, it was used in the titles of sequels as if referring to Charles.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Dorothy Wynant discusses with her father Clyde about her upcoming wedding. She discusses the fact with her father that her fiance knows all about her family yet still wants to marry her. Later, her father discovers that his $50,000 bonds are missing. They were supposed to be a wedding present for his daughter. They were left in his safe. The only other person who knows the combination of the safe would be his secretary, Julia. He confronts Julia about his missing bonds. She confesses that she cashed them in and has only $25,000 left. He threatens to call the police unless she comes up with the rest of the $25,000.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Nick Charles is a retired detective and former client of Clyde's. Nick and his wealthy wife, Nora, live in San Francisco but are visiting New York City for Christmas, staying in a glamorous apartment-like suite at the Hotel Normandie. While in New York, Nick is pressed back into service by Dorothy, as her father, the "Thin Man" of the movie title, was supposed to have left on a secret business trip with a promise to return home before his daughter's wedding, but he has mysteriously disappeared. She convinces Nick to take the case, with the assistance of his socialite wife, who is eager to see him in action again. What appears to be a missing person situation rapidly turns into a murder case, when Julia Wolf, Clyde's former secretary and girlfriend, is found dead, and evidence points to Clyde as the prime suspect. Dorothy refuses to believe that her father is guilty. Nick and Police Lieutenant Guild visit Nunheim, a frequent source for the lieutenant. After being pressed for information, Nunheim excuses himself momentarily, only to slip away down the fire escape. He arranges a meeting with the yet-unidentified murderer (someone whose face is not yet shown) to collect $5,000 from him. When Nunheim arrives, however, he is immediately shot four times and killed.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: On a hunch, Nick soon visits Wynant's closed shop in the dead of night and unearths a skeletonized, but fully dressed, body, buried under the floor. In the dark shop, Wynant's bookkeeper, Tanner, suddenly appears. After that, the police—whom Nick had called once he found the body—arrive and concludes that Wynant committed the murders of Julia and now this newly discovered body. They assume that the remains belong to the "Fat Man"—a long-ago enemy of Wynant's—because of its oversized clothing with a belt buckle bearing an "R," that notorious figure's first initial. But Nick has already all but solved the case—and soon invites the full cast of suspects to an elegant dinner party.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: There, as planned, the murderer is exposed. Nick—who had accompanied the medical examiner when he X-rayed the buried body—theorizes that the clothes were planted to hide the body's true identity, as the X-ray revealed telltale shrapnel, presumably from an old war wound, in one leg, the exact same injury that had plagued the "Thin Man": the missing Wynant. Nick deduces that the real culprit murdered Clyde once he discovered that the killer had been embezzling from him, and then the culprit murdered his own accomplice, Julia Wolf, because she knew about Clyde's murder, and after that, he murdered Nunheim since he had witnessed Julia's murder and was blackmailing him.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Nick unfurls more of his theory to the dinner guests. Herbert MacCauley, Clyde's attorney, panics and tries to shoot Nick. Nick punches him out and declares MacCauley to be the murderer.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Finally, Nick and Nora, along with Dorothy and her new husband, Tommy, celebrate as they ride a luxury train back to California. Nora, in the lower bunk, wants to sleep with Asta, but Nick tosses Asta to the upper bunk and joins Nora himself. Asta looks down on the couple and covers his eyes with his paw.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The film was based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett, released in January 1934. Hammett's novel drew on his experiences as a union-busting Pinkerton detective in Butte, Montana. Hammett based Nick and Nora's banter upon his rocky on-again, off-again relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: MGM paid Hammett $21,000 for the screen rights to the novel. The screenplay was written by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who had been married for three years. Director W.S. Van Dyke encouraged them to use Hammett's writing as a basis only, and to concentrate on providing witty exchanges for Nick and Nora.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Van Dyke convinced MGM executives to let Powell and Loy portray the lead characters despite concerns that Powell was too old and strait-laced to play Nick Charles and that Loy had become typecast in exotic femme fatale roles.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Skippy played Asta, the dog of Nick and Nora. Skippy was subsequently cast in two screwball comedy classics, "The Awful Truth" (1937) and "Bringing Up Baby" (1938).


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The film was shot with a budget of $226,408 by cinematographer James Wong Howe. For Powell's first scene in the film, Van Dyke told him to take the cocktail shaker, go to the bar and just walk through the scene while the crew checked lights and sound. Powell did it, throwing in some lines and business of his own. Suddenly he heard Van Dyke say, "That's it! Print it!" The director had decided to shoot the scene without Powell knowing it so that he would be as relaxed and natural as possible.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Van Dyke often did not bother with cover shots if he felt the scene was right on the first take, reasoning that actors "lose their fire" if they have to do something over and over. It was a lot of pressure on the actors, who often had to learn new lines and business immediately before shooting, without the luxury of retakes, but Loy credited much of the appeal of the film to Van Dyke's pacing and spontaneity. He paid the most attention to Powell and Loy's easy banter between takes and their obvious enjoyment of each other's company and worked it into the movie. The director often encouraged and incorporated improvisation and off-the-cuff details into the picture. In order to keep her entrance fresh and spontaneous, Van Dyke did not tell Loy about it until right before they shot it.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Powell loved working so much with Loy because of her naturalness, her professionalism, and her lack of any kind of "diva" temperament. Of her, Powell said:


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: When we did a scene together, we forgot about technique, camera angles, and microphones. We weren't acting. We were just two people in perfect harmony. Myrna, unlike some actresses who think only of themselves, has the happy faculty of being able to listen while the other fellow says his lines. She has the give and takes of acting that brings out the best.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: According to Loy, the actors were not allowed to interact between takes with the dog Skippy; trainers felt it would break his concentration. Skippy once bit Loy during filming.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Although she had great compliments for Powell's charm and wit, Maureen O'Sullivan (who played the daughter of Wynant) later said she did not enjoy making the picture because her part was so small and the production was so rushed.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The scene of Nick shooting the ornaments off the tree was added after Powell playfully picked up an air gun and started shooting ornaments the art department was putting up.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Loy wrote that the biggest problem during shooting was the climactic dinner party scene in which Nick reveals the killer. Powell complained that he had too many lines to learn and could barely decipher the complicated plot he was unraveling. It was the one scene when several retakes were necessary, which brought up an entirely new problem. The script called for oysters to be served to the dinner guests and, in take after take, the same plate of oysters was brought out under the hot lights. "They began to putrefy," Loy recalled. "By the time we finished that scene, nobody ever wanted to see another oyster."


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The film was released on May 25, 1934, to overwhelmingly positive reviews, with special praise for the chemistry between Loy and Powell. Mordaunt Hall of "The New York Times" called it "an excellent combination of comedy and excitement", and the film appeared on the "Times" year-end list of the ten best of the year. ""The Thin Man" was an entertaining novel, and now it's an entertaining picture", reported "Variety". "For its leads the studio couldn't have done better than to pick Powell and Miss Loy, both of whom shade their semi-comic roles beautifully." "The screen seldom presents a more thoroughly interesting piece of entertainment than this adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's popular novel", raved "Film Daily". "The rapid fire dialogue is about the best heard since talkies, and it is delivered by Powell and Miss Loy to perfection." John Mosher of "The New Yorker" wrote that Loy and Powell played their parts "beautifully", adding, "All the people of the book are there, and I think the final scenes of the solution of the mystery are handled on a higher note than they were in print." Louella Parsons called it "the greatest entertainment, the most fun and the best mystery-drama of the year." The "Chicago Tribune" said it was "exciting", "amusing" and "fat with ultra, ultra-sophisticated situations and dialog." It also called Powell and Loy "delightful". Harrison Carroll of "The Los Angeles Herald-Express" wrote that it was "one of the cleverest adaptations of a popular novel that Hollywood has ever turned out."


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: "The Thin Man" was voted one of the ten best pictures of 1934 by "Film Daily"'s annual poll of critics.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: In 2002, critic Roger Ebert added the film to his list of Great Movies. Ebert praised William Powell's performance in particular, stating that Powell "is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance. His delivery is so droll and insinuating, so knowing and innocent at the same time, that it hardly matters what he's saying."


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: In 2000 American Film Institute designated the film as one of the great comedies in the previous hundred years of cinema.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The film is 32nd on the American Film Institute's 2000 list AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs and was nominated for the following lists:


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: "The Thin Man" earned total theater rentals of $1,423,000, with $818,000 from the US and Canada and $605,000 in other foreign rentals, resulting in a profit of $729,000.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: The trailer contained specially filmed footage in which Nick Charles (William Powell) is seen on the cover of the Dashiell Hammett novel "The Thin Man". Nick Charles then steps out of the cover to talk to fellow detective Philo Vance (also played by Powell) about his latest case. Charles mentions he hasn't seen Vance since "The Kennel Murder Case", a film in which Powell played Vance, released in October 1933, just seven months prior to the release of "The Thin Man". Charles goes on to explain to Vance that his latest case revolves around a "tall, thin man" (referring to Clyde Wynant's character), just before clips of the film are shown.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: "The Thin Man" was dramatized as a radio play on an hour-long broadcast of "Lux Radio Theatre" on June 8, 1936. William Powell, Myrna Loy, Minna Gombell, Porter Hall, William Henry, and Thomas Jackson reprised their film roles, and W. S. Van Dyke was host.


title: The Thin Man (film)

text: Long available on VHS and DVD, "The Thin Man" was released on Blu-ray Disc by the Warner Archive Collection on July 30, 2019. The 1080p high-definition master was made from a 4K restoration based on new transfers of the picture's best surviving film elements, with digital correction of a multitude of defects seen in earlier home-media releases. Blu-ray.com reported that the film "looks exceptional and, aside from a true 4K option, will likely never get a better home video release". Extras include the theatrical trailer, the 1936 "Lux Radio Theatre" broadcast, and the 1958 second-season premiere of the NBC television series.


title: Chris Redfield

text: Chris also appears in "" (2000), in which he looks for his missing younger sister, Claire, and in "" (2007), where he takes down the Umbrella Corporation with Jill. Chris returned in "Resident Evil 5" (2009), working alongside his new partner Sheva Alomar, and in "" (2012). In "Resident Evil 6" (2012), he and his partner Piers Nivans attempt to stop a worldwide bioterrorism attack. He makes a cameo at the end of "" (2017), leading a revised Umbrella Corporation team aligned with the BSAA, and stars in the downloadable content "Not a Hero" and "End of Zoe". Chris returns in "Resident Evil Village" (2021) as the Alpha leader of the BSAA Hound Wolf squad.


title: Chris Redfield

text: He is also featured in novelizations and other game franchises, including "Marvel vs. Capcom" and "Project X Zone". In later games, such as "Resident Evil 7" and "Village", his features were based on model Geordie Dandy. In the live-action films, Chris has been portrayed by actors Wentworth Miller and Robbie Amell. Chris has been well received by critics, being considered one of the most important characters in the franchise, and recognized for his sex appeal.


title: Chris Redfield

text: Hideki Kamiya, described Chris as a "blunt, tough-guy type", admitting that he was a fan of this archetype. During the game's development, Chris was also designed to be physically tougher than Jill Valentine, being able to run faster and absorb more damage. Reuben Langdon did Chris' motion capture for several "Resident Evil" games.


title: Chris Redfield

text: In "Resident Evil 5", Chris' increased muscle mass was to show that he had trained heavily in order to fight the series' powerful villain Albert Wesker bare-handed. Modeler Yosuke Yamagata added that they "made a new design that retained their signature color—green for Chris, blue for Jill—to carry over the same look from the past. The facial structures are mainly based on the visuals of the GameCube version, and we added various details to these in order to develop a realistic structure."


title: Chris Redfield

text: "Resident Evil 5"s producer Jun Takeuchi said that the series' fans "would really love" a video game featuring both Leon and Chris as the protagonists due to their popularity, and at the same time, it would be "pretty dramatic" if the two characters never met before the series would end. For "Resident Evil 6", Chris has a slightly disheveled look due to his alcoholism and post-traumatic amnesia. However, in "Resident Evil 7", Chris was given an entirely new design as the producers wanted to give Chris a more realistic look. The character new design made it completely unrecognizable by commentators and players. Executive producer Jun Takeuchi also said that "At the time, we were putting forward Chris as the main character. It was the first time you'd seen him in a while and he had to be made into this big hero. I realised, in retrospect, the process of developing Chris into a hero character is not the same process of developing a "Resident Evil" game." In "Resident Evil Village", Chris is once more redesigned but closer resembles his look in "Resident Evil 6", due to fan outrage of his look in "Resident Evil 7".


title: Chris Redfield

text: Chris Redfield debuted in the original "Resident Evil" as one of the playable protagonists, along with Jill Valentine, partnered with the rookie officer Rebecca Chambers. He is introduced as a former U.S. Air Force pilot hailing from New York City, and a member of the Raccoon City Police Special Tactics And Rescue Service's (S.T.A.R.S) Alpha team, sent to investigate the disappearance of Bravo team after their helicopter goes missing in a nearby forest. Chris, accompanied by Jill, Albert Wesker, and Barry Burton, soon find themselves trapped in a nearby mansion, filled with horrific monsters and deadly traps. Chris' scenario is more challenging than Jill's, as he has a smaller carrying capacity and lacks certain items. Unlike Jill, he is not equipped with a lock-pick and needs to find keys. He can take a lot more physical damage from enemies than she can. In the end, Chris and his comrades learn how the incident began, and witness the death of Albert Wesker, who was betraying them all along. They also face and kill a prototype Tyrant released by Wesker. Following the so-called "Mansion Incident", Chris leaves Raccoon City, embarking on a personal mission against the Umbrella Corporation, after learning of how Umbrella instigated the viral outbreak in the mansion.


title: Chris Redfield

text: Set five months later, "" sees Chris return as the protagonist of the second half of the game. He attempts to rescue his younger sister, Claire, from the Umbrella Corporation's research facilities on the fictional Rockfort Island, in the Pacific Ocean, and in Antarctica. Upon discovering she is in Antarctica, Chris is briefly confronted by Wesker, who is revealed to have survived the events of the "Mansion Incident" and now has enhanced strength and speed, and is seeking revenge on Chris for having destroyed his plans. Eventually, he confronts Alexia Ashford, the creator of the T-Veronica virus. At the end of the game, he fights with Wesker shortly after killing Alexia. He is no match for him, and their fight is cut short because of the imminent destruction of the base. They vow to finish things another time.


title: Chris Redfield

text: Chris is one of the main characters of "", reuniting with Jill Valentine. Sections of the game are essentially a retelling of "Resident Evil". The two join a private biohazard containment force, and in 2003 embark on a mission to destroy the Umbrella Corporation after hearing rumours of a new Bio Organic Weapon (B.O.W) being developed. The resulting attack on an Umbrella facility in Russia's Caucasus region is successful.


title: Chris Redfield

text: In "Resident Evil 5", Chris is the protagonist of the game and one of the founding members of the UN paramilitary group Bio-terrorism Security Assessment Alliance (B.S.A.A). In the game, he investigates a terrorist threat in Kijuju, Africa while looking for Jill, who is missing and presumed dead. Accompanying him is his new partner Sheva Alomar. Eventually, Chris and Sheva manage to find and free Jill, and ultimately defeat and destroy Wesker who was planning to release a new virus into the atmosphere, ensuring complete global saturation.


title: Chris Redfield

text: In "" Chris appears as a playable character in the "Game of Oblivion" scenario's last chapter, a re-imagining of "Code: Veronica". He is also available in the Extreme Battle mode featured in the later versions of "Resident Evil 2" (the PlayStation 2 DualShock edition and the PC, Dreamcast and GameCube ports), and is one of the eight playable characters in "". He returns in "", with Jill Valentine.


title: Chris Redfield

text: "Resident Evil 6" sees Chris return as one of the three protagonists alongside Leon S. Kennedy, and Jake Muller, the son of Albert Wesker. In the game, Captain Chris Redfield leads a squad of B.S.A.A soldiers to investigate a bio-terror attack in Europe. Ambushed by Carla Radames, posing as Ada Wong, they suffer severe casualties. Only Chris and Piers Nivans survive the assault, with the rest of his team being turned into monsters by Carla. Chris is overwhelmed with guilt and resigns from the B.S.A.A. Piers convinces Chris to rejoin the B.S.A.A to avenge their fallen comrades. They travel to China to investigate bio-terror activity and find themselves in another C-virus outbreak. While attempting to rescue Jake Muller, who possesses the anti-bodies needed to stop the outbreak, Chris and Piers encounter HAOS, a powerful B.O.W. Piers is grievously injured during the battle and injects himself with the C-virus to gain super-human powers. He saves Chris, but sacrifices himself to ensure HAOS is destroyed. Chris continues to serve the B.S.A.A in Piers' memory.


title: Chris Redfield

text: At the end of "Resident Evil 7: Biohazard", a man identifying himself as "Redfield" arrives to rescue Ethan Winters. While the credits refer to the character as Chris Redfield, the helicopter he arrives in is branded with the Umbrella Corporation logo, which is now blue instead of red, initially causing people to question the person's identity. Capcom later confirmed this character to be Chris, in spite of the noticeable change in his appearance due to a different actor portraying him. Additionally, this new version of Umbrella opposes their predecessor's B.O.W research and instead works closely with the B.S.A.A. Chris appeared in the downloadable content campaign, "Not a Hero", which was released on December 12, 2017. This subchapter focuses on Chris attempting to apprehend Lucas Baker, and although he fails to save his men, he confronts and kills Lucas. He also appears at the conclusion of the "End of Zoe" downloadable content.