Output details

Stanislavski On Stage Exhibition

The Stanislavski on Stage exhibition comprised photographs of seven key productions at the Moscow Art Theatre featuring Konstantin Stanislavski’s work as actor, director and producer. This exhibition of material drawn from the archive of The Stanislavski Centre, of which the curator is Head, was originally staged at The National Theatre to mark the opening of the Centre, and then re-staged in a new format at Pushkin House specifically designed to mark the 150th anniversary of Stanislavski’s birth.

In the first iteration of the exhibition, Fryer collaborated with curator Robert McIndoe and designer Nigel Hook and co-edited the associated exhibition book, (Stanislavski on Stage, Stanislavski Centre, 2008). This featured a series of essays by members of the Centre’s Advisory Board.

For the second iteration, the producer incorporated the role of curator to create a new exhibition of 80 photographs. This involved significant research on the original photographs and for the preparation of accompanying text and captions on each of the productions represented. Fryer also curated a series of four contextual lectures to accompany the exhibition: these covered the work of Jean Benedetti, the introduction of the Stanislavski system into the British acting tradition, Stanislavski’s influence on contemporary Russian acting and an exploration of the role of the photograph in the documentation of theatrical performance.

Subsequent to the initial exhibition and shortly prior to the second exhibition, the entire photographic collection was digitised and made available for commercial use in a collaboration with ArenaPal, a leading British photographic agency that specialises in theatrical work. The producer/curator played a central role in this process, researching and writing the captions for each of the 200 images that were included.