Unit of action

[2] These were the terms that Stanislavsky chose to use while teaching his system of acting to students at the Opera-Dramatic Studio in Moscow in the final years of his life, when he was concerned about the risk of losing sight of the play as a whole after breaking the action down into small bits.

[3] In Stanislavsky's conception, division into "episodes" can reveal the basic building-blocks of action, while subdivision into "facts" can help uncover the changes that occur from one moment to the next.

[3] Such divisions can be used to help players explore their characters and discover their actions through improvisation work during the early stages of rehearsal.

[4] The transformation of "bits" into "beats" may derive from the pronunciation of émigré Russian teachers in America, possibly in conjunction with the image of a string of "beads" on a necklace.

[1] It has been suggested that oral teachings by Richard Boleslavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, who helped bring Stanislavsky's system to America, may have triggered the persistent mistranslation, and ultimately the metaphor commonly encountered in method acting of the script as a musical score.