A First-Order Theory of Stanislavskian Scene Analysis

Abstract

At the turn of the last century, Constantin Stanislavski de-veloped a new system of acting, replacing the mannered ges-tures and forced emotion then popular with a more natural style. The core of his system lay in having actors perform a process of scene analysis, in which an actor would flesh out the circumstances of the play so that the character’s motiva-tions and actions would follow logically. This paper is an attempt to ground Stanislavski’s method of scene analysis in a formal theory of action. We discuss the relations between Stanislavskian and formal AI theories of action and planning, give a formal definition of the end product of a scene analysis, and characterize the conditions under which a scene analysis is coherent.