GURDJIEFF’S ‘WORK’ AND STANISLAVSKI’S ‘METHOD’
The twentieth-century Russian magus G. I. Gurdjieff never tired of repeating that modern humans are machines, and that their mechanicalness comes from the fact that they are not conscious. Did he not see that the more conscious human beings are, the more mechanical they become?
Certainly he perceived that humans in whom consciousness is highly developed cannot help becoming actors. Hence the kinship between Gurdjieff’s ‘work’ and Constantin Stanislavsky’s ‘method’. Occultists who seek Gurdjieff’s inspiration in Sufi or Tibetan teachings should look closer to home. The greatest influence on this latter-day shaman may have been a twentieth-century theory of acting.
Gurdjieff used theatre and dance as devices to assist disciples to gain mastery of their bodily movements and thereby – he claimed – to awake from the common sleep. It is hardly coincidental that his ‘work’ should have been an influence on some of the most radical developments in theatre. Following Gurdjieff, dramatists such as Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski have used theatre as a laboratory in which to explore the nature of human action.
Perhaps training actors was the real aim of Gurdjieff’s ‘work’. As he said: ‘Everyone should try to be an actor. This is a high aim. The aim of every religion, of every knowledge, is to be an actor.’ What would a human life be if it was all acting? Gurdjieff’s awakened human being could only be an actor in a script written by someone else. Cut off from the unconscious emotions and perceptions that give meaning to the lives of sleeping humans, a fully conscious human being could only be an automaton, controlled not from within but by another human being.
Gurdjieff may genuinely have believed that the more conscious we become, the more creative we can be in our lives. Stanislavsky knew better. ‘When he has exhausted all avenues and methods of creativeness an actor reaches a limit beyond which human consciousness cannot extend … only nature can perform the miracle without which the text of a role remains lifeless and inert.’