ABSTRACT
No single aspect of the System captures this precarious balance as completely as Stanislavsky’s discussions of “experiencing,” the term he chooses to describe what actors feel when the exercises successfully release their full creative potentials. Nor does Stanislavsky give to any other aspect of the System such weight. In short, experiencing becomes the means by which he turns his System into a theory of artistic creation and a practical way to distinguish actor as artist from actor as entertainer. Stanislavsky primarily speaks of it from the actor’s point of view, and the concept remains stubbornly subjective. All his attempts to pin it down sound equally abstract, metaphorical, and finally unsatisfying, despite the fact that most actors can know in their bones what this lost term means. The testimonies of Stanislavsky, Chekhov, and Mozart resonate closely with each other and with the findings of Csikszentmihalyi, making clear that all are struggling to verbalize the same piece of tacit knowledge.
