<P> "The Method" is an elaboration of the Stanislavski's "system" of acting developed by the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski . In the first three decades of the 20th century, Stanislavski organized his training, preparation, and rehearsal techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology . The "system" brought together and built on: (1) the director - centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; (2) the actor - centred realism of the Maly; (3) and the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement . </P> <P> The "system" cultivates what Stanislavski calls the "art of experiencing" (to which he contrasts the "art of representation"). It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less - controllable psychological processes--such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour--sympathetically and indirectly . In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment (a "task"). Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the "system" with a more physically grounded rehearsal process known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at - the - table discussions, he now encouraged an "active analysis", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised . "The best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances ." </P> <P> The transmission of the earliest phase of Stanislavski's work via the students of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) revolutionized acting in the West . When the MAT toured the US in the early 1920s, the young Lee Strasberg saw all of their productions and was deeply impressed by their ensemble performances . At that time, Richard Boleslavsky, one of Stanislavski's students from the First Studio, presented a series of lectures on the "system" that were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933). The interest generated led to a decision by Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya (another student at the First Studio) to emigrate to the US and to establish the American Laboratory Theatre . The version of Stanislavski's practice that travelled to the US with them was that developed in the 1910s, rather than the more fully elaborated version of the "system" detailed in Stanislavski's acting manuals from the 1930s, An Actor's Work and An Actor's Work on a Role . The first half of An Actor's Work, which treated the psychological elements of training, was published in a heavily abridged and misleadingly translated version in the US as An Actor Prepares in 1936 . English - language readers often confused the first volume on psychological processes with the "system" as a whole . </P> <P> Many of the American practitioners who came to be identified with the Method were taught by Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theatre . The approaches to acting subsequently developed by their students--including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner--are often confused with Stanislavski's "system". Strasberg's adaptation relied exclusively on psychological techniques and contrasted sharply with Stanislavski's multivariate, holistic and psychophysical approach, which explores character and action both from the "inside out" and the "outside in". </P>

Who is often credited as the first modern director