The International Symposium The S Word: Stanislavsky's Last Words… The Event results from an international research collaboration between Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU), The S Word and The Stanislavsky Research Centre (University of Leeds/University of Malta).

Stanislavsky's heroic struggle to complete his life's mission in the last four years of his life ran in two parallel lines which can be considered complementary. His practical research developed in the form of Active Analysis/Method of physical actions and his documenting the System, recollecting and reworking his older texts and experiences. This laid the ground for a potential dichotomy and uncertainty in respect of the transmission of live practice and methodology.

This symposium will focus on the problems of the transmission of Stanislavsky's final research in its artistic, socio-political and broadly historical context and follow its contemporary re-discovery and renewal, explored through the sharing of both theoretical and practical research.

The symposium will bring together a number of distinguished international guest speakers. The event will feature Keynote addresses by Professor Maria Shevtsova (Goldsmiths University of London), author of Re-Discovering Stanislavsky and Professor Sharon Marie Carnicke (University of Southern California) whose books include Stanislavsky in Focus. Professor Bella Merlin (University of California Riverside), author of The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit will present a guest workshop, and Professor Rhonda Blair author of The Actor, Image and Action (Southern Methodist University) will chair a special guest panel event.

The Stanislavsky Research Centre and its associated activities wishes to acknowledge its unequivocal support for Ukrainian arts workers, performers, teachers and researchers and for those Russian practitioners and academics who have bravely and openly condemned the actions of the government of the Russian Federation in their unprovoked attack upon the people of Ukraine.

The S Word: Stanislavsky's Last Words will include a special session devoted to Ukrainian Theatre and the work of Ukrainian practitioners and academics in our field.

This symposium is the third event developed in the collaboration between DAMU and The S Word, the first was Merging Methodologies (2017), and the second was Bertolt Brecht: Contradictions as a Method (2019).