Moscow Art Theatre trip – May 2008

I spent two weeks training at Moscow Art Theatre in late May. The exchange programme between MAT and University of Kent runs each year with up to a dozen students from MAT spending time in the Drama department in Canterbury in early May before an exchange later in the month. Set up by Stanislavski in 1897, the theatre became renowned for its work on naturalism and for profiling the work of Anton Chekhov, as well as providing actor training rooted in Stanislavski’s method. Now the school is world-renowned, and provides training largely rooted in the work of Michael Chekhov who developed Stanislavski’s work to provide a model for actor training that was much more interested in the using physical (external) gesture as a way towards creating an internal life for a character.