Reflections on an Expanding Horizon

“ Where?” is one of the six fundamental questions Stanislavsky asked of his actors to determine the Given Circumstances of the work and to stimulate their imaginations. In trying to answer this question, the placement of acting and its histories is anything but straightforward. Following cultural geography, we know that “places mean something to people” (Horton & Kraftl, 2014, 267). If we echo Stanislavsky’s injunction to look back on the critical turn in performer training and its historiography, we find that the significance (and mutability) of place-sensitive knowledges and understandings has been central to much of the development of Stanislavsky studies. With regard to the many practitioners who moved out of Russia to other locations, place was often overridden as practices became embedded within the body. In this chapter, I use a simple dualism—Stanislavsky as place and Stanislavsky and place—to review the last two decades of my own publications, coming to the conclusion that in the discussion of practitioner histories—their movement, influence and utility—we simply cannot ignore place.