title: Orion Nebula

text: The Orion Nebula is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky and is among the most intensely studied celestial features. The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have directly observed protoplanetary disks and brown dwarfs within the nebula, intense and turbulent motions of the gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars in the nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The Orion Nebula is visible with the naked eye even from areas affected by some light pollution. It is seen as the middle "star" in the "sword" of Orion, which are the three stars located south of Orion's Belt. The "star" appears fuzzy to sharp-eyed observers, and the nebulosity is obvious through binoculars or a small telescope. The peak surface brightness of the central region of M42 is about 17 Mag/arcsec (about 14 milli nits) and the outer bluish glow has a peak surface brightness of 21.3 Mag/arcsec (about 0.27 millinits). (In the photos shown here the brightness, or luminance, is enhanced by a large factor.)


title: Orion Nebula

text: The Orion Nebula contains a very young open cluster, known as the Trapezium Cluster due to the asterism of its primary four stars within a diameter of 1.5 light years. Two of these can be resolved into their component binary systems on nights with good seeing, giving a total of six stars. The stars of the Trapezium Cluster, along with many other stars, are still in their early years. The Trapezium Cluster is a component of the much larger Orion Nebula, an association of about 2,800 stars within a diameter of 20 light years. The Orion Nebula is in turn surrounded by the much larger Orion molecular cloud complex which is hundreds of light years across, spanning the whole Orion Constellation. Two million years ago the Orion Nebula cluster may have been the home of the runaway stars AE Aurigae, 53 Arietis, and Mu Columbae, which are currently moving away from the nebula at speeds greater than .


title: Orion Nebula

text: Observers have long noted a distinctive greenish tint to the nebula, in addition to regions of red and of blue-violet. The red hue is a result of the Hα recombination line radiation at a wavelength of 656.3 nm. The blue-violet coloration is the reflected radiation from the massive O-class stars at the core of the nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The green hue was a puzzle for astronomers in the early part of the 20th century because none of the known spectral lines at that time could explain it. There was some speculation that the lines were caused by a new element, and the name nebulium was coined for this mysterious material. With better understanding of atomic physics, however, it was later determined that the green spectrum was caused by a low-probability electron transition in doubly ionized oxygen, a so-called "forbidden transition". This radiation was impossible to reproduce in the laboratory at the time, because it depended on the quiescent and nearly collision-free environment found in the high vacuum of deep space.


title: Orion Nebula

text: There has been speculation that the Mayans of Central America may have described the nebula within their "Three Hearthstones" creation myth; if so, the three would correspond to two stars at the base of Orion, Rigel and Saiph, and another, Alnitak at the tip of the "belt" of the imagined hunter, the vertices of a nearly perfect equilateral triangle with Orion's Sword (including the Orion Nebula) in the middle of the triangle seen as the smudge of smoke from copal incense in a modern myth, or, in (the translation it suggests of) an ancient one, the literal or figurative embers of a fiery creation.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Neither Ptolemy's "Almagest" nor Al Sufi's "Book of Fixed Stars" noted this nebula, even though they both listed patches of nebulosity elsewhere in the night sky; nor did Galileo mention it, even though he also made telescopic observations surrounding it in 1610 and 1617. This has led to some speculation that a flare-up of the illuminating stars may have increased the brightness of the nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The first discovery of the diffuse nebulous nature of the Orion Nebula is generally credited to French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, on November 26, 1610, when he made a record of observing it with a refracting telescope purchased by his patron Guillaume du Vair.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The first published observation of the nebula was by the Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Johann Baptist Cysat of Lucerne in his 1619 monograph on the comets (describing observations of the nebula that may date back to 1611).


title: Orion Nebula

text: His description of the center stars as different from a comet's head in that they were a "rectangle" may have been an early description of the Trapezium Cluster. (The first detection of three of the four stars of this cluster is credited to Galileo Galilei in a February 4, 1617, although he did not notice the surrounding nebula – possibly due to the narrow field of vision of his early telescope.)


title: Orion Nebula

text: The nebula was independently "discovered" (though visible to the naked eye) by several other prominent astronomers in the following years, including by Giovanni Battista Hodierna (whose sketch was the first published in "De systemate orbis cometici, deque admirandis coeli characteribus"). In 1659, Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens published the first detailed drawing of the central region of the nebula in "Systema Saturnium".


title: Orion Nebula

text: Charles Messier observed the nebula on March 4, 1769, and he also noted three of the stars in Trapezium. Messier published the first edition of his catalog of deep sky objects in 1774 (completed in 1771). As the Orion Nebula was the 42nd object in his list, it became identified as M42.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 1865 English amateur astronomer William Huggins used his visual spectroscopy method to examine the nebula showing it, like other nebulae he had examined, was made up of "luminous gas". On September 30, 1880 Henry Draper used the new dry plate photographic process with an 11-inch (28 cm) refracting telescope to make a 51-minute exposure of the Orion Nebula, the first instance of astrophotography of a nebula in history. Another set of photographs of the nebula in 1883 saw a breakthrough in astronomical photography when amateur astronomer Andrew Ainslie Common used the dry plate process to record several images in exposures up to 60 minutes with a 36-inch (91 cm) reflecting telescope that he constructed in the backyard of his home in Ealing, west London. These images for the first time showed stars and nebula detail too faint to be seen by the human eye.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 1902, Vogel and Eberhard discovered differing velocities within the nebula, and by 1914 astronomers at Marseilles had used the interferometer to detect rotation and irregular motions. Campbell and Moore confirmed these results using the spectrograph, demonstrating turbulence within the nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 1931, Robert J. Trumpler noted that the fainter stars near the Trapezium formed a cluster, and he was the first to name them the Trapezium cluster. Based on their magnitudes and spectral types, he derived a distance estimate of 1,800 light years. This was three times farther than the commonly accepted distance estimate of the period but was much closer to the modern value.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope first observed the Orion Nebula. Since then, the nebula has been a frequent target for HST studies. The images have been used to build a detailed model of the nebula in three dimensions. Protoplanetary disks have been observed around most of the newly formed stars in the nebula, and the destructive effects of high levels of ultraviolet energy from the most massive stars have been studied.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 2005, the "Advanced Camera for Surveys" instrument of the Hubble Space Telescope finished capturing the most detailed image of the nebula yet taken. The image was taken through 104 orbits of the telescope, capturing over 3,000 stars down to the 23rd magnitude, including infant brown dwarfs and possible brown dwarf binary stars. A year later, scientists working with the HST announced the first ever masses of a pair of eclipsing binary brown dwarfs, 2MASS J05352184–0546085. The pair are located in the Orion Nebula and have approximate masses of and respectively, with an orbital period of 9.8 days. Surprisingly, the more massive of the two also turned out to be the less luminous.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The entirety of the Orion Nebula extends across a 1° region of the sky, and includes neutral clouds of gas and dust, associations of stars, ionized volumes of gas, and reflection nebulae.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The Nebula is part of a much larger nebula that is known as the Orion molecular cloud complex. The Orion molecular cloud complex extends throughout the constellation of Orion and includes Barnard's Loop, the Horsehead Nebula, M43, M78, and the Flame Nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Stars are forming throughout the entire Cloud Complex, but most of the young stars are concentrated in dense clusters like the one illuminating the Orion Nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The current astronomical model for the nebula consists of an ionized (H II) region, roughly centered on Theta Orionis C, which lies on the side of an elongated molecular cloud in a cavity formed by the massive young stars.


title: Orion Nebula

text: (Theta Orionis C emits 3-4 times as much photoionizing light as the next brightest star, Theta Orionis A.) The H II region has a temperature ranging up to 10,000 K, but this temperature falls dramatically near the edge of the nebula. The nebulous emission comes primarily from photoionized gas on the back surface of the cavity.


title: Orion Nebula

text: The H II region is surrounded by an irregular, concave bay of more neutral, high-density cloud, with clumps of neutral gas lying outside the bay area. This in turn lies on the perimeter of the Orion Molecular Cloud. The gas in the molecular cloud displays a range of velocities and turbulence, particularly around the core region. Relative movements are up to 10 km/s (22,000 mi/h), with local variations of up to 50 km/s and possibly more.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Observers have given names to various features in the Orion Nebula. The dark bay that extends from the north into the bright region is known as "Sinus Magnus", also called the "Fish's Mouth". The illuminated regions to both sides are called the "Wings". Other features include "The Sword", "The Thrust", and "The Sail".


title: Orion Nebula

text: The Orion Nebula is an example of a stellar nursery where new stars are being born. Observations of the nebula have revealed approximately 700 stars in various stages of formation within the nebula.


title: Orion Nebula

text: In 1979 observations with the Lallemand electronic camera at the Pic-du-Midi Observatory showed six unresolved high-ionization sources near the Trapezium Cluster. These sources were interpreted as partly ionized globules (PIGs). The idea was that these objects are being ionized from the outside by M42. Later observations with the Very Large Array showed solar-system-sized condensations associated with these sources. Here the idea appeared that these objects might be low-mass stars surrounded by an evaporating protostellar accretion disk. In 1993 observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have yielded the major confirmation of protoplanetary disks within the Orion Nebula, which have been dubbed proplyds. HST has revealed more than 150 of these within the nebula, and they are considered to be systems in the earliest stages of solar system formation. The sheer numbers of them have been used as evidence that the formation of star systems is fairly common in the universe.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Stars form when clumps of hydrogen and other gases in an H II region contract under their own gravity. As the gas collapses, the central clump grows stronger and the gas heats to extreme temperatures by converting gravitational potential energy to thermal energy. If the temperature gets high enough, nuclear fusion will ignite and form a protostar. The protostar is 'born' when it begins to emit enough radiative energy to balance out its gravity and halt gravitational collapse.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Typically, a cloud of material remains a substantial distance from the star before the fusion reaction ignites. This remnant cloud is the protostar's protoplanetary disk, where planets may form. Recent infrared observations show that dust grains in these protoplanetary disks are growing, beginning on the path towards forming planetesimals.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Once the protostar enters into its main sequence phase, it is classified as a star. Even though most planetary disks can form planets, observations show that intense stellar radiation should have destroyed any proplyds that formed near the Trapezium group, if the group is as old as the low mass stars in the cluster. Since proplyds are found very close to the Trapezium group, it can be argued that those stars are much younger than the rest of the cluster members.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Once formed, the stars within the nebula emit a stream of charged particles known as a stellar wind. Massive stars and young stars have much stronger stellar winds than the Sun. The wind forms shock waves or hydrodynamical instabilities when it encounters the gas in the nebula, which then shapes the gas clouds. The shock waves from stellar wind also play a large part in stellar formation by compacting the gas clouds, creating density inhomogeneities that lead to gravitational collapse of the cloud.


title: Orion Nebula

text: There are three different kinds of shocks in the Orion Nebula. Many are featured in Herbig–Haro objects:


title: Orion Nebula

text: The dynamic gas motions in M42 are complex, but are trending out through the opening in the bay and toward the Earth. The large neutral area behind the ionized region is currently contracting under its own gravity.


title: Orion Nebula

text: There are also supersonic "bullets" of gas piercing the hydrogen clouds of the Orion Nebula. Each bullet is ten times the diameter of Pluto's orbit and tipped with iron atoms glowing in the infrared. They were probably formed one thousand years earlier from an unknown violent event.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Interstellar clouds like the Orion Nebula are found throughout galaxies such as the Milky Way. They begin as gravitationally bound blobs of cold, neutral hydrogen, intermixed with traces of other elements. The cloud can contain hundreds of thousands of solar masses and extend for hundreds of light years. The tiny force of gravity that could compel the cloud to collapse is counterbalanced by the very faint pressure of the gas in the cloud.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Whether due to collisions with a spiral arm, or through the shock wave emitted from supernovae, the atoms are precipitated into heavier molecules and the result is a molecular cloud. This presages the formation of stars within the cloud, usually thought to be within a period of 10–30 million years, as regions pass the Jeans mass and the destabilized volumes collapse into disks. The disk concentrates at the core to form a star, which may be surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. This is the current stage of evolution of the nebula, with additional stars still forming from the collapsing molecular cloud. The youngest and brightest stars we now see in the Orion Nebula are thought to be less than 300,000 years old, and the brightest may be only 10,000 years in age.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Some of these collapsing stars can be particularly massive, and can emit large quantities of ionizing ultraviolet radiation. An example of this is seen with the Trapezium cluster. Over time the ultraviolet light from the massive stars at the center of the nebula will push away the surrounding gas and dust in a process called photo evaporation. This process is responsible for creating the interior cavity of the nebula, allowing the stars at the core to be viewed from Earth. The largest of these stars have short life spans and will evolve to become supernovae.


title: Orion Nebula

text: Within about 100,000 years, most of the gas and dust will be ejected. The remains will form a young open cluster, a cluster of bright, young stars surrounded by wispy filaments from the former cloud.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Dwarf Fortress (officially called Slaves to Armok: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress) is a construction and management simulation and roguelike indie video game created by Bay 12 Games. Available as freeware and in development since 2002, its first alpha version was released in 2006 and received attention for being a two-member project surviving solely on donations. The primary game mode is set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful and wealthy fortress. Critics praised its complex and emergent gameplay but had mixed reactions to its difficulty. The game influenced "Minecraft", "Rimworld", and others, and was selected among other games to be featured in the Museum of Modern Art to show the history of video gaming in 2012.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The game has text-based graphics (using the CP437 character set) and is open-ended with no main objectives. Before playing, the player has to set in motion a process which generates a fantasy world with continents, oceans, and islands, produced via generative geology and hydrogeology, meteorology, and biogeography, and then fully simulates the evolution of all civilizations down to the lives of their inhabitants in order to yield a coherent world with internally consistent lore and history. The main game mode, Dwarf Fortress mode, is a colony management game that starts with selecting a suitable site from the generated world, establishing a successful colony or fortress, combating threats like goblin invasions, monster sieges, or undead hordes, generating economic wealth and taking care of the dwarves. Each creature, from animal to dwarf, is modeled down to its body parts, bodily fluids, organs, bones, teeth, hair, and tissues (which, depending on the creature, can be made of more unusual fantastic materials such as metal or stone, or even mist, fire, or moss) each of which can be injured or lost. Each creature has a discrete mind and individual personality, including likes and dislikes, and possesses specific trainable or innate skills in various labors and abilities, as well as short and long term memories to facilitate all this, as well as influencing its current emotional state. The second main game mode, Adventurer mode, is a turn-based, open-ended, open world roguelike where the player starts off as a player made adventurer in the world and is free to explore, complete quests, or visit old abandoned fortresses. The combat system in both modes is anatomically detailed with combat logs describing events like organs getting pierced, fat getting bruised and limbs getting severed. Creatures have no hit points, and instead death occurs as a result of the impairment or disruption of vital functions.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Prior to "Dwarf Fortress", Tarn Adams was working on a project called "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood" which was a role-playing game. By 2004, Adams decided to shift from the original "Armok" to "Dwarf Fortress" after the former became difficult to maintain. Adams calls it his life's work and said in 2011 that version 1.0 will not be ready for at least another 20 years, and even after that he would continue to work on it. The game has a cult following and an active online community. As there are no win conditions, every fortress or adventurer that isn't "retired", no matter how successful, is usually destroyed or defeated somehow. This prompted the community motto: "Losing is Fun!"


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: "Dwarf Fortress" has three primary game modes which take place in worlds created by the player, where most of the elements are randomly generated.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The first step in "Dwarf Fortress" is generating a playable world; only one game can be played per world at a time. The player can adjust certain parameters governing size, savagery, mineral occurrences and the length of history. The map shows symbols representing roads, hills, towns and cities of the various civilizations, and it changes as the generation progresses.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The process involves procedurally generated basic elements like elevation, rainfall, mineral distribution, drainage and temperature. For example, a high-rainfall and low-drainage area would make a swamp. Areas are thus categorized into biomes, which also have two variables: savagery and alignment. They have their own specific type of plant and animal populations. The next phase is erosion—which the drainage simulates. Rivers are created by tracing their paths from the mountains (which get eroded) to its end which is usually an ocean; some form into lakes. The salinity field defines oceans, mangroves or alluvial plains. Names are generated for the biomes and rivers. The names depend on the area's good/evil variable (the alignment) and though in English, they are originally in one of the four in-game languages of dwarves, elves, humans and goblins; these are the four main races in any generated world.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: After a few minutes the world is populated and its history develops for the number of in-game years selected in the history parameter. Civilizations, races and religions spread and wars occur, with the "population" and "deaths" counters increasing. The ticker stops at the designated "years" value, at which point the world can be saved for use in any game mode. Should the player choose to retire a fortress or adventure mode character, or should they be defeated, this world will persist and will become available for further games.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: When Dwarf Fortress mode is selected, the player is given the option to choose the embark location in the world. The player can consider the environment, elevations, biome, soil types and mineral concentrations which can pose significant challenges to the development or survival of the fortress. Customizing the colony's supplies, domestic animals and skills are available, but each dwarf's mental and physical attributes are randomly generated. The game describes in detail each dwarf's physical appearance, like hair and facial features. The mental abilities, individual preferences and desires are also randomly generated. Each dwarf's relationships with others and the deities they worship can be viewed.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The player embarks with the expedition team (seven dwarves, their livestock and supplies), and does not have direct control over them. In order to construct and operate the fortress, the player has to designate specific tasks to be performed and the dwarves will go about it. They can be assigned any labors, but their work still depends on their relative skill with it, which can increase as they perform said task. Some task categories are stone-working, woodworking, metalworking, farming, and crafting; there are further combat-related skills. They are categorized further, such as leatherworking, butchery, clothesmaking, gem cutting, glassmaking, and pottery. Activities take place in workshops which need to be constructed; for example, stills for brewing alcohol. The metal industry has a very important role because it produces weapons and armor for the military, trap components for defense, and high-value furniture and decorations.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The player initially can see a top-down view of the surface-level of the fortress site; each layer of a z-axis level can be viewed when the player changes it. An entire underground level would be seen as its entire section of terrain while a mountain at the surface level would have only its section visible with the remaining surface landscape. Thus, for digging, the player can designate, for every z-level starting from the surface, staircases to be carved, and, at the final designated level, end the staircase by having it dug into a room.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The geology in "Dwarf Fortress" is fairly accurate. Rocks like olivine and gabbro can be dug up. The topmost layer usually consists of sand, clay or plain soil—this can be used for underground farming. Deeper levels will be layers of rock; minerals appear in layers or clusters around the right depth. Gems like tourmalines appear in rare clusters. Water is simulated like falling sand, every space can contain up to seven levels of it. A tile having one level of water is the lowest, while a tile with seven is full. There is a system for simulating temperature and heat. Fires can spread and burn dwarves and furniture. There are four basic seasons in an in-game year: spring, summer, autumn and winter.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Mineral ores can be mined just like normal stone and the raw ore can be smelted to produce their corresponding metal bars. Different ores or metal bars can be alloyed together for higher quality materials. For steel production, flux stones are used to make pig iron bars and smelt it with regular iron and coal (or charcoal). Specific metal items can be melted back to their respective bars. Without steel, the alloy bronze or regular iron are the next best suitable metals to use. Bronze requires two ores or bars of tin and copper. The metal adamantine, found deep below, is extremely light but very strong, making it excellent for sharp weapons and armor. Raw adamantine can be extracted into strands and can further be either woven in cloth or smelted into wafers.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Underground farming has customized crops like "plump helmet" mushrooms, which can be brewed to make dwarven wine. As the fortress prospers, migrants come in larger numbers from the mountainhome (the colony's home civilization) and will need further accommodation. Trading caravans, which can be from the various neighboring civilizations including the home civilization, visit the fortress on a yearly basis and are useful for getting supplies not available in the player's fortress area. The role of bookkeeper, manager and broker can be assigned to any dwarf during early game. The bookkeeper maintains records of every item present in the fort, the manager auto-assigns jobs and the broker deals with trading caravans. The production of crafts from any material are useful for trading. The caravans come from civilizations of elves and humans but depending on the embark region and history, they may be absent or sometimes even hostile.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Dwarves need to be provided with food and drink (mostly in the form of alcohol). A dwarf will get negative thoughts for drinking plain water and even for drinking the same type of alcohol, making it necessary to grow different crops for producing different drinks. Things like not having a separate bedroom can upset a dwarf. They may make friends and sometimes marry; females give birth. Dwarves can get upset by sustaining injuries, having poor clothing, losing their pets, friends or relatives; interacting with or seeing their corpses can aggravate this. A frustrated dwarf may break furniture or attack others. Continuous stress will cause them to throw tantrums and eventually go "insane", whether going berserk and attacking their comrades in a homicidal rage, becoming suicidally depressed and jumping off a cliff, or simply going "stark raving mad" and stumbling around randomly until their untimely death. Their quality of life can be improved by giving them luxurious personal bedrooms and a well-decorated dining room, medical care, and providing them with a variety of drinks and well-cooked meals. A chain reaction where a single dwarf's unhappiness causes the entire fortress's population to start throwing tantrums can begin when one dwarf throws a tantrum, attacks and kills another one with many friends, which drastically affects the happiness of many more.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: As the fortress expands and develops, new noble positions become available. While regular dwarves will be happy with simple rooms provided to them, dwarves appointed or elected to noble positions will need more luxurious accommodation. Nobles will even make demands and mandates, getting negative thoughts if they are not fulfilled. A justice system is present to punish criminals, for example, dwarves who injure or kill another dwarf or destroy furniture. Occasionally, a vampire dwarf, with a fake background history, may arrive with a migrant wave and start killing and feeding on the other citizens without being noticed.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Inspired dwarves will occasionally get into a "Strange Mood". They will take over a workshop and go searching for the required materials to begin construction of an artifact. If they cannot find the materials, the dwarf will wait at the workshop, demanding it until it is available. After a few in-game weeks, the work results in a legendary artifact, an item so masterfully crafted that it is usually worth more than a beginning fortress' total wealth put together. These artifacts will be added to the world's records and its exact description can be viewed. Through this entire period of being in a strange mood, a dwarf will not eat, drink or sleep and will eventually go insane if they are unable to complete the artifact due to any reason (such as unavailability of materials).


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The first in-game year will usually consist of kobold thieves and goblin snatchers trying to infiltrate the fortress. Thieves try to steal valuables, while snatchers try to kidnap dwarven children to raise them as future soldiers. Goblin and kobold civilizations near the fortress will always be hostile and a source of frequent attacks. Wildlife is usually harmless, but depending on the fortress' location, more fierce elephants, bears, unicorns, giant spiders and wolves may be a threat. Wealthier and more populated fortresses will get ambushes and sieges from neighboring goblin (or other enemy) civilizations. A thriving fortress will attract certain "megabeasts" like hydras, titans or dragons, and randomly generated creatures called "Forgotten Beasts". These unique creatures have randomized physical qualities and abilities, thus giving them the potential to be very powerful. Undead attack mainly in evil biomes or if the player embarks with a Necromancer Tower being near the site. Undead are harder to kill, and often reanimate once they are defeated, with their body parts being separate units to fight.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Military squads can be assigned to barracks to train and be equipped with a uniform (armor and a weapon). Squads can be directly commanded to attack enemies. Crossbows can be made for ranged attacks and a range with targets can be constructed for training. Walls can be carved into fortifications and be used by ranged-units during attacks. Training areas can be made to train war animals, such as dogs. Players can use traps and engineering in addition to training an army. Traps can be made by constructing mechanisms and using metal or wood to construct large weapons like spikes, axe blades or cages. More complex lever-operated and pressure plate-triggering trap components are available.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The combat system in "Dwarf Fortress" is anatomically detailed. Combat is displayed by viewing the log which describes each weapon striking a specific part of the character's body. Internal organs can get punctured, combatants can fall to the ground, vomit, and lose body parts. Each dwarf has individually detailed limbs, each with damageable bone, fat, nerves, muscle and skin. Fat can be bruised without breaking bones and vice versa. Injuries sometimes can be permanent. There is a medical system where a hospital can be set up, where crutches for disabled dwarves, traction benches, plasters and cloth for casts and bandages, thread for suturing, soap for preventing infection, and splints can be provided to help with the healing process.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Digging deeper is usually done for finding magma, which, as a fuel source, removes the player's dependence on coal or wood. Another reason to dig deeper is for searching for specific raw materials, ores or gems. Magma pools or the even bigger, world-spanning, magma sea are found while digging into warm rock. Near the magma sea, raw adamantine strata can be found. They are shaped like columns, which pass down through the entire magma sea. These columns are hollow and can be broken, revealing an entire shaft leading deeper into the underworld or hell. Underworld creatures are countless and nearly always bring a fortress to ruin.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adventurer is the secondary game mode in "Dwarf Fortress". Unlike Fortress mode, Adventurer mode has the player control a single character. In Adventurer mode, character creation works similar to other role-playing games, with the player choosing the name, gender, race and personality of the character. Players also select from a choice of various skills and attributes, such as strength and agility. Like in Fortress mode, these skills further improve normally through exercised use unlike regular experience. They play in the same generated worlds, and these worlds continue to develop and advance while time passes as in Fortress mode. The character starts off in a town of their choosing, depending on the character's chosen civilization, and can interact with the various non-player characters (NPCs). NPCs can speak about the surrounding areas or offer to follow and help the player. Quests are given via a "rumor" system, where rumors can spread among the NPCs, or players can decide to serve a leader and attain more traditional quests from them via an "Agreement". Characters can also write poems, books and music compositions, based on procedurally generated forms and styles. The player can choose to form a site and build using materials they collect. Players can use the quick travel mode to quickly travel between geographical regions.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Like regular characters in Fortress mode, characters have thirst, hunger and exhaustion levels. To survive, they must eat, drink and sleep. They need to take shelter at night when evil creatures like bogeymen come out. In addition to the regular combat mechanism, in this mode, the player can also choose which body parts to strike. A player can visit their retired or ruined fortresses made in Fortress mode. Instead of quitting, the character can be retired, and depending on the player's achievements, their life events will be documented in the Legends mode among the historical figures.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Legends is the third way of interacting with a generated world, a listing of the events of historical figures, sites such as towns or fortresses, regions and civilizations. Legends also includes a "historical map" tool in which players can examine conflicts and other activities between civilizations. These generally take the form of sentences describing the actions of the characters, as well as notable completed events. Some historical entries also include notable kills, megabeasts, and allies and enemies within the game world. The character referenced in these details generally have their own historical entries alongside.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: At any time, the player can create an XML dump in which players can examine history outside of the game. Similarly, players can export detailed maps that show world details such as biome boundaries, rainfall and drainage. These XML files and map images can be used in third party software to view the generated world and its history in a more user friendly and comprehensive interface.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: One of Tarn and Zach Adams' early works was a text based adventure game called "dragslay", written in the BASIC language and influenced by "Dungeons and Dragons". This was the brothers' first fantasy project. In high school, Tarn Adams taught himself the C programming language and developed it further. "dragslay" would later have an important influence on "Dwarf Fortress". Adams explained his interest in fantasy games, that he had grown up "surrounded by that sort of thing...along with generic sci-fi, generic fantasy is part of our heritage." Years later, before entering graduate school in mathematics, Adams began working on a project he called "Slaves to Armok: God of Blood". It was named after a deity in "dragslay", originally named for a variable "arm_ok"—which counted the limbs the player still had attached. This new project was a two-dimensional (would later have 3D graphics) isometric fantasy role-playing game in which the player encountered and fought goblins.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adams took some time off "Armok" to work on small side-projects, and another one which would inspire "Dwarf Fortress" was "Mutant Miner". It was turn-based loosely inspired by a game called "Miner VGA". "Mutant Miner" involved the player digging underneath buildings, searching for ores and fighting monsters, and carrying radioactive "goo" back to the surface for application in growing extra limbs and gaining other abilities. Adams was dissatisfied with only having a single miner, and the game began to lag because it was turn-based. Adams said:


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: [I]nstead of rewriting the game, I thought, well maybe it should be dwarves instead. And it should be real-time to combat the [lag] problem. Now, you'd be digging out minerals in a mountain, combating threats inside, and making little workshops. Then I thought, well, how should the high score list work? We really like to keep records of plays. Not just high score lists, but expansive logs. So we'll often try to think of ways to play with the idea. This time, the idea was to let your adventurer come into the fortress after you lose and find the goblets you've made, and journals it generates.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adams began working on "Dwarf Fortress" in October 2002, estimating that the project would take two months, but suspended development soon after, in order to finish his previous work, "Armok". He explained that it began like the 1982 arcade game "Dig Dug". The Adams brothers started the Bay 12 Games company, launching its website and releasing their games online. "Armok" became harder to maintain due to him focusing on adding features to "Dwarf Fortress" instead, in addition to its inferior code and 3D graphics. By 2004, Adams announced on his website that he would be switching his main project to "Dwarf Fortress" after he struggled to continue working on it. Adams explained that it would be a simulation game with dwarves but kept Adventurer mode as a surprise feature, which was revealed during its release. At that time, his fan base consisted of a few dozen people and more came in when he made this announcement. He put up a PayPal button after a request from a fan; similarly, a subscriber system was added later. In the next five months, they made around $300, which brought in only enough to cover the site's $20 hosting cost. He dubbed the game "Slaves to Armok, God of Blood II: Dwarf Fortress"; Adams explained that it was a sequel because it continued to work on much of "Armok's" code but said its cumbersome name was mostly "for kicks."


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adams decided to focus on the game's development full-time during his first year of his math post-doctorate at Texas A&M in 2006. The university offered him $50,000 if he would stay another year. Adams agreed and commented on this, "I woke up the morning after I gave notice, like, I can actually make this work." Later, Adams expected he would use his $15,000 savings for a year and then have to get a job in order to support himself because the game had not been released yet. Development continued until 8 August 2006, when the first alpha version (version 0.21.93.19a) was released. Donations reached $800–1,000 in the following months, this average increased gradually until they were financially stable. He then decided to solely rely on donations.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: According to Adams, "Dwarf Fortress" is written in an "unsanctioned messy combination" of C and C++ using a free edition of Microsoft Visual Studio as the IDE. Adams did not use the 3D graphics which "Armok" had since its development was hampered because of it. He cited the ease in development of features like fluid simulation, copyright issues with the art and more unhindered possibilities as further reasons for not using it. Being used to the text-based graphics in roguelikes, he did not want graphical tilesets. The story-generation originated first from "Armok", although present to some extent in "dragslay". Tarn and Zach would write different chapters of events they would like to see, mix it together and try to implement it. Most of this story writing is managed by Zach, who has a role in the game's development. He graduated in ancient history and books like "The Twelve Caesars" and the writings of Assyrian kings influenced the game.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: "Hack", "Starflight" and the "Ultima" series were Adams' main influences. The 1985 roguelike "Hack" inspired Adams because of its randomly generated levels, deceased character persistence and detailed mechanics. Adams cited "Ultima" series as the inspiration for his generated worlds. The body part and wound system was inspired by 1990 role-playing game "Cyberpunk 2020". He prefers modeling on individual elements, rather than entire systems, for better simulations with the outcomes being under his control. He said midpoint displacement generates the elevation of the world and its initial basic elements use fractals, which give it an overall natural look. He further explained that he made an algorithm to simulate rain shadows which occur in areas at the side of mountain deserts. For the distinct personalities of each unit, he took it from NEO PI-R test of which he admitted knowing little about. The feature of carps eating dwarves was unexpected when the game was released. He had written them having the same size and carps were designed to be carnivorous. A tough part of the game for him to implement was the A* search algorithm for in-game character's pathfinding which, depending on their numbers and complexity of the path, can cause a heavy load on a computer. Adams composed the game's flamenco-inspired music.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: A z-axis was introduced in the 2008 release because he felt the limitations with a single plane increasing; the feature of making various constructions like walls was also added at this time. In the earlier version, players could dig only into a mountainside and not underground because of having only one "z-level", thus it was considered "2D". This was significantly easier to maintain due to the limited playable area. Adams commented that this major change was further difficult to implement because of considering details like fluid mechanics and cave-ins. Vampiric and lycanthropic infections with necromancers and undead were added in 2012.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: On his reliance on PayPal donations, Adams says he is content since he feels that people really like his work or they would not pay. Adams said that donations remain stable except during a new version update, where there is a sudden increase. Their expenses being low, he has maintained that he is happy as long as the game is self-sustaining and will not charge for it. In 2011, Adams refused a job offer from an unspecified major game developer and a $300,000 deal to license the name "Dwarf Fortress" from another company. Adams felt that this amount would not equate to long-term donations and that he prefers working on his own—not being part of the gaming industry. Adams said, "Barely in the black one month, a little in the red another month. ... It's a risk I'm willing to take, and really I couldn't have it any other way." He has spent no money on advertising and was happy when bloggers, reviewers like former game journalist Kieron Gillen from "PC Gamer" and "Games for Windows", wrote about his game. In 2015, Bay 12 Games set up a Patreon account to help fund it.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: In March 2019, the Adams brothers announced they will be releasing a paid-for enhanced version of "Dwarf Fortress" for Windows, featuring a graphical tileset and other improvements through Steam and itch.io, published by Kitfox Games. Adams stated this will not affect the ongoing free version of "Dwarf Fortress", but due to family situations at the time and the waning income from Patreon, they wanted to find another way to monetize the game. The Steam version includes support for Steam Workshop, which allows users to provide modifications to the game. The enhanced version was released on December 6, 2022.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Kitfox Games enlisted the help of an economist to perform an analysis of the game's projected sales, using the number of wishlists and sales data of games Kitfox had previously published as a reference. The initial estimate was that "Dwarf Fortress" would sell around 160,000 units within two months, but that goal was exceeded within the first day. The game was the best-selling title on Steam upon release. One Steam user expressed incredulity at the amount of positive reviews the game garnered in such a short amount of time, and took to the Steam forums to ask if people had "been playing free DF for 25 years [sic] and just waiting for an opportunity to pay $30?", to which over 3000 people replied "Yes".


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: the latest update was version 0.47.05, with it completing years in development despite being an alpha version. Adams and his brother have a to-do list of features the game should have before version 1.0 and the version number is the percentage progress of its completion. He says he has been able to maintain focus by shifting his attention to different aspects of the game, given its large coverage. While regular game development aim to perfect their work for release, he considers that a drawback since he continues exploring and learning while adding new features. "Wired" and Rock, Paper, Shotgun called some of its bug fixes unintentional and funny, with "PC Gamer" saying it makes an entertaining RSS feed to subscribe to. Adams has two favorite bugs. One is about a farmer dwarf planting his own bed, and the other involves a dwarven executioner, with broken arms, thus unable to use his hammer, delivering punishments by biting his victims and tearing off their limbs, keeping one in his mouth for years.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adams considers "Dwarf Fortress" his life's work, and has stated in 2011 that he does not expect version 1.0 to be released for at least another twenty years, and even after that, he would still continue to update it. Adams calls his game an open-ended "story generator". The game's code base is proprietary, and Adams has stated he has no plans to release it into the open-source domain, citing the risk of them going into financial trouble. He explained he would consider releasing its source if he could not maintain it anymore, seeing different game developers taking it up. He says that he does not mind any modifications as long as he is not put at financial risk.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Adams describes version 1.0 having an Adventurer mode that would be a regular role-playing game, with changing plots and ordering subordinates to perform various tasks. Fortress mode would have a closer relationship with the outside generated world through war, trade and diplomacy. The world being bigger, he envisions the game to have many more features like magic, a tutorial, and a better interface. According to him, a tutorial is a burden because of the additional need of updating it and interface improvement is not a major priority till then—citing numerous existing fan-made applications for improving the game's interface. He said of version 1.0, "sitting down with a fresh DF world would be like sitting down to read a middling fantasy author you haven't read before, but with all the extras that being a video game provides, including the ability to write your own sequels." Modern in-game technologies and 3D graphics were fan requests Adams said he would never implement, yet showing ambivalence about the latter if the task was easy enough.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The game received attention mainly because of its emergent gameplay, text-based graphics, complexity, poor interface and difficulty. Many reviewers described the game as unusually difficult to learn. It has been compared to other simulation games like "SimCity" and "The Sims", "Dungeon Keeper", and roguelike games like "NetHack". However, reviewers praised Adams' independence and attention to detail. "Gamasutra" said, "There have been few indie gaming success stories as big as "Dwarf Fortress"." "Wired" magazine, following one of its updates, described it as an "obtuse, wildly ambitious work-in-progress [that] mashes the brutal dungeon crawling of roguelikes with the detail-oriented creativity of city-building sims."


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: "Dwarf Fortress" was praised for its depth and complexity. Jonah Weiner from "The New York Times" stated, "Many simulation games offer players a bag of building blocks, but few dangle a bag as deep, or blocks as small and intricately interlocking, as "Dwarf Fortress"." "PC Gamer" Steve Hogarty commented, ""Dwarf Fortress" reluctance to expend even a joule of energy in prettying itself results in astonishing hidden complexity." Regarding the open-ended nature and emergent gameplay, "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" Graham Smith found that with its procedurally generated world and characters simulated "down to the most minute detail", the game's results are "often hilarious, occasionally tragic, and always surprising." Mike Rose from Gamasutra said, "... to an outsider looking in on this game so many years into development, with such a wide scope of features and potential play styles, it's fair to say that getting into "Dwarf Fortress" is perhaps one of the most daunting tasks the video game industry as a whole can provide."


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The lack of graphics, poor interface and controls were seen as the reasons for the game's difficulty. However, the reviewers also noted most of it having a role in gameplay and the argument that the text-based graphics forces players to use their own imagination, making it more engaging. Weiner wrote, "[the game] may not look real, but once you're hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. A micro-manager's dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill." Quintin Smith from "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" said, "The interface has a tough job to do, bless it, but getting it to do what you want is like teaching a beetle to cook." "Ars Technica" Casey Johnston highlighted the difficulty in performing basic actions and felt that tinkering or experimenting ended up being unproductive; she compared it to "trying to build a skyscraper by banging two rocks together". She pointed out the lack of in-game tutorial and said how players can learn by themselves in other games, which are also open-ended or have intuitive mechanics, but in "Dwarf Fortress", there is no autonomy "even after hours" of gameplay.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The editors of "Computer Games Magazine" presented "Dwarf Fortress" with their 2006 "Best Free Game" award. In 2020, "Rock, Paper, Shotgun" rated "Dwarf Fortress" the third best management game on the PC.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: "Dwarf Fortress" currently has "universal acclaim" on Metacritic, with a score of 95 out of a 100, from 5 reviews. The Steam release sold 160,000 copies within 24 hours of release, and 300,000 copies within its first week.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: "Dwarf Fortress" has attracted a significant cult following. The game's difficulty, with most fortresses eventually succumbing to various forms of defeat, led to its unofficial slogan "Losing is fun!" Adams has said that the slogan was originally a throw-away joke from the game manual, and is meant to create comfort with the concept of permadeath. The slogan 'strike the earth' is used in marketing and community content. Tarn and Zach Adams answer questions from players on the game's official podcast, "Dwarf Fortress Talk". Donors receive personalized crayon drawings or short stories from Tarn Adams, and their names are displayed on a "Champions' List" online. In addition to cash donations, Adams said he has received many in-kind donations. For example, volunteers handle the bug tracking system.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Players and members of the community have often written creative interpretations of game events. They have made diaries, short videos, comics and audio depicting their stories whether it involved success or defeat. Besides testing the game, sharing it with others and supporting it through donations, they make suggestions, help newcomers, share stories, and information in the Bay 12 Games forums. They maintain the dedicated wiki; there are also fan-organized podcasts and meet-ups. In 2006, a saga called "Boatmurdered", where fans passed around a single fortress and each played the game and saved it before sending it to another, was portrayed in detail from the start to its destructive end. This spread around gaming sites and boosted the game's popularity. There have been tutorials on YouTube with one being a 15-part series, and another 12-part written series called "The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress". An illustrated guide to the game, called "Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress: Learn to play the most complex video game ever made" was released by technology publisher O'Reilly Media in 2012 written by Peter Tyson. Containing 240 pages, it has a foreword from Adams and is updated along with the game's development.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: On the game's community, Adams said, "They are the reason I've been able to make the step from hobbyist to full-time developer. I'm lucky to be able to run with whatever ideas we have and try new things." On players sending him forum posts or emails detailing their stories or events that happened during the game, Adams said, "It's really gratifying, because it's one of the things we set out to do is to get people to write these narratives about their game." Adams has admitted that some feats of the community surprised even him. Adams stated that the most impressive thing he had ever seen done with the game was when a player managed to create a Turing-complete 8-bit computer powered by dwarves.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Third-party utilities and mods like "Dwarf Therapist" help players manage toggling labors and skills. The utility "Stonesense", based on the "DFHack" library, can render the game in a 3D isometric view. The "DF to Minecraft" utility allows players view their "Dwarf Fortress" maps by converting them into "Minecraft" dungeons. Adams has acknowledged the role of the community in supporting development and endorsed third-party tools, visualizers and interface code; indeed, he has said that he admires third-party developers who create tools for "Dwarf Fortress" in spite of the fact that the game is closed-source.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: On 11 June 2016, an event called "Dwarfmoot" was held at Mox Boarding House in Bellevue, Washington to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the game's release. It was organized by video game developer Kinnon Stephens. The Adams brothers attended and though he was unable to attend in person, Richard Garfield, the creator of "" provided a pre-recorded introduction.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The game influenced "Minecraft", which reviewers considered a more user-friendly version of "Dwarf Fortress". Adams says he is thankful for the "Minecraft" developers citing his game because that drew more players. Other games inspired by "Dwarf Fortress" have largely failed to replicate its visual style and depth. Homages to "Dwarf Fortress" appear in "World of Warcraft". In July 2014, the game won a poll conducted by Turtle Beach as the community's most "Beautiful Game"; games were nominated by fans posting videos, images or text, and a list was compiled by the community which also contained "", "Far Cry 3" and "The Last of Us". Justin Ma, one of the developers of "", commented on its use of text-based graphics, "Part of the reason "Dwarf Fortress" can include a breadth of mechanics unseen in other games is because complex mechanics are expressed in the most simple of visual forms." In 2015, Rock, Paper, Shotgun ranked "Dwarf Fortress" 7th on its The 50 Best Free Games On PC list. In February 2019, "PC Gamer" listed Dwarf Fortress as one of the best open world games.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: In March 2012, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City exhibited "Dwarf Fortress" among other games selected to depict the history of video gaming. As new updates are made available, the Museum of Modern Art instantly downloads them and archives them in their server. Curator of the exhibition, Paola Antonelli, said she was amazed by the combination of "beautiful aesthetics" and "mind-boggling" complexity in the game.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Game designer Craig Ellsworth commended "Dwarf Fortress" for having a uniquely long "staying power". According to Ellsworth, it will not be replaced by any other more advanced game of its genre: "There is simply no such thing as a flashier "Dwarf Fortress", and there can't be, by definition." He predicted that the game's popularity "will reach its apex" at its final release.


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: Upon the game's Steam release, many indie game developers came out to praise "Dwarf Fortress" and cite its influence on their own games, including the developers of "Terraria", "Caves of Qud" and "Prison Architect".


title: Dwarf Fortress

text: The game has been the subject of several academic papers investigating a range of fields. These include studies on artificial intelligence, computer game landscapes and computer game pedagogy.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The Communist Party of Cuba (, PCC) is the sole ruling party of Cuba. It was founded on 3 October 1965 as the successor to the , which was in turn made up of the 26th of July Movement and Popular Socialist Party that seized power in Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The party governs Cuba as an authoritarian one-party state where dissidence and political opposition are prohibited and repressed. The Cuban constitution ascribes the role of the party to be the "leading force of society and of the state".


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The highest body within the PCC is the Party Congress, which convenes every five years. When the Congress is not in session, the Central Committee is the highest body. Because the Central Committee meets twice a year, most day-to-day duties and responsibilities are vested in the Politburo. Since April 2021, the First Secretary of the Central Committee has been Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has been serving as President of Cuba since 2018. Despite plans to retire in 2021, current Second Secretary José Ramón Machado Ventura has remained in office since 2011. Abelardo Álvarez Gil also remains Head of the Department of Organization and Staff Policy.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: Marxism–Leninism, a fusion of the original ideas of German philosopher and economic theorist Karl Marx, and Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, was gradually formalized as the party's guiding ideology and remains so to this day. The party pursued state socialism, under which all industries were nationalized, and a command economy was implemented throughout Cuba despite the long-term embargo by the United States. The PCC also supports Castroism and Guevarism and is a member of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: Cuba had a number of communist and anarchist organizations from the early period of the Republic (founded in 1902). The original "internationalised" Communist Party of Cuba formed in the 1920s. In 1944, it renamed itself as the Popular Socialist Party for electoral reasons. In July 1961, two years after the successful overthrow of Fulgencio Batista and the creation of a revolutionary government, the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) was formed from the merger of:


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: On 26 March 1962, the ORI became the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC), which in turn became the Communist Party of Cuba on 3 October 1965. In Article 5 of the Cuban constitution of 1976, the Communist Party is recognized as "the superior guiding force of society and of the State, that organizes and orients common efforts toward the high goals of the construction of socialism and the advancement toward communist society". All parties, including the Communist Party, are prohibited from publicly advertising their organizations.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: For the first fifteen years of its formal existence, the Communist Party was almost completely inactive outside of the Politburo. The 100 person Central Committee rarely met and it was ten years after its founding that the first regular party Congress was held. In 1969, membership of the party was only 55,000 or 0.7% of the population, making the PCC the smallest ruling communist party in the world. In the 1970s, the party's apparatus began to develop. By the time of the first party Congress in 1975, the party had grown to just over two hundred thousand members, the Central Committee was meeting regularly and provided the organizational apparatus giving the party the leading role in society that ruling Communist parties generally hold. By 1980, the party had grown to over 430,000 members and it grew further to 520,000 by 1985. Apparatuses of the party had grown to ensure that its leading cadres were appointed to key government positions.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The Communist Party of Cuba held its first party Congress in 1975 and has had additional congresses in 1980, 1986, 1991, 1997 and 2011. The Seventh Congress took place from 19 to 22 April 2016, around the 55th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, concluding with remarks by Fidel Castro.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The leading bodies of the party were the Politburo and the Secretariat until 1991 when the two bodies were merged into an expanded Politburo with over twenty members. However, the Secretariat was re-introduced in 2002. There is also a Central Committee which meets between party congresses. At the Fifth Congress, the size of the Central Committee was reduced to 150 members from the previous membership of 225. Fidel Castro was the party's First Secretary (or leader) since its inception while Raúl Castro was the Second Secretary. Upon Fidel Castro's 2008 resignation from the party and Cuban government, Raúl Castro became First Secretary.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: A 14-strong Politburo was elected by the 1st Plenary Session of the Central Committee on 19 April 2021 following the 8th Congress.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: A 6-strong Secretariat was elected by the 1st Plenary Session of the Central Committee on 19 April 2021 following the 8th Congress.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The Communist Party of Cuba has a youth wing, the Young Communist League ("Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas", UJC) which is a member organization of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. It also has a children's group, the José Martí Pioneer Organization.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: The party has been more reluctant in engaging in market reforms, though it has been forced to accept some market measures in its economy due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resultant loss of economic subsidies. The Communist Party of Cuba has often pursued an interventionist foreign policy, actively assisting left-wing revolutionary movements and governments abroad, including the ELN in Colombia, the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and Maurice Bishop's New Jewel Movement in Grenada. The party's most significant international role was in the civil war in Angola, where Cuba directed a joint Angolan/Soviet/Cuban force in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. More recently, the party has sought to support Pink Tide leaders across Latin America, such as Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. Since the Cuban Revolution, the party has also followed the doctrines of Castroism (the ideology of Fidel Castro, including some elements of social conservatism and inspiration from José Martí) and Guevarism.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: Medical diplomacy has also been a prominent feature of the Party's foreign policy. The party maintains a policy of sending thousands of Cuban doctors, agricultural technicians, and other professionals to other countries throughout the developing world.


title: Communist Party of Cuba

text: Raúl Castro, after becoming the leader of the party, campaigned to "renew" Cuba's socialist economy through incorporating new exchange and distribution systems that have been traditionally seen as "market" oriented. This has led to some speculation that Cuba may transition towards a model more similar to a socialist market economy like that of China or a socialist-oriented market economy like that of Vietnam. Private property and the need for foreign investment were recognized in the new constitution promulgated in 2019.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing" (with 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").


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Later, Stanislavski further elaborated the system with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". Minimising at-the-table discussions, he now encouraged an "active representative", 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."


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Thanks to its promotion and development by acting teachers who were former students and the many translations of Stanislavski's theoretical writings, his system acquired an unprecedented ability to cross cultural boundaries and developed a reach, dominating debates about acting in the West. Stanislavski’s ideas have become accepted as common sense so that actors may use them without knowing that they do.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Having worked as an amateur actor and director until the age of 33, in 1898 Stanislavski co-founded with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and began his professional career. The two of them were resolved to institute a revolution in the staging practices of the time. Benedetti offers a vivid portrait of the poor quality of mainstream theatrical practice in Russia before the MAT:The script meant less than nothing. Sometimes the cast did not even bother to learn their lines. Leading actors would simply plant themselves downstage centre, by the prompter's box, wait to be fed the lines then deliver them straight at the audience in a ringing voice, giving a fine display of passion and "temperament." Everyone, in fact, spoke their lines out front. Direct communication with the other actors was minimal. Furniture was so arranged as to allow the actors to face front.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's early productions were created without the use of his system. His first international successes were staged using an external, director-centred technique that strove for an organic unity of all its elements—in each production he planned the interpretation of every role, blocking, and the "mise en scène" in detail in advance. He also introduced into the production process a period of discussion and detailed analysis of the play by the cast. Despite the success that this approach brought, particularly with his Naturalistic stagings of the plays of Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky, Stanislavski remained dissatisfied.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Both his struggles with Chekhov's drama (out of which his notion of subtext emerged) and his experiments with Symbolism encouraged a greater attention to "inner action" and a more intensive investigation of the actor's process. He began to develop the more actor-centred techniques of "psychological realism" and his focus shifted from his productions to rehearsal process and pedagogy. He pioneered the use of theatre studios as a laboratory in which to innovate actor training and to experiment with new forms of theatre.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Throughout his career, Stanislavski subjected his acting and direction to a rigorous process of artistic self-analysis and reflection. His system of acting developed out of his persistent efforts to remove the blocks that he encountered in his performances, beginning with a major crisis in 1906.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski eventually came to organise his techniques into a coherent, systematic methodology, which built on three major strands of influence: (1) the director-centred, unified aesthetic and disciplined, ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; (2) the actor-centred realism of the Maly; and (3) the Naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement. Stanislavski's earliest reference to his system appears in 1909, the same year that he first incorporated it into his rehearsal process. Olga Knipper and many of the other MAT actors in that production—Ivan Turgenev's comedy "A Month in the Country"—resented Stanislavski's use of it as a laboratory in which to conduct his experiments. At Stanislavski's instistence, the MAT went on to adopt his system as its official rehearsal method in 1911.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: This system is based on "experiencing a role." This principle demands that as an actor, you should "experience feelings analogous" to those that the character experiences "each and every time you do it." Stanislavski approvingly quotes Tommaso Salvini when he insists that actors should really feel what they portray "at every performance, be it the first or the thousandth."


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Not all emotional experiences are appropriate, therefore, since the actor's feelings must be relevant and parallel to the character's experience. Stanislavski identified Salvini, whose performance of Othello he had admired in 1882, as the finest representative of the art of experiencing approach. Salvini had disagreed with the French actor Cocquelin over the role emotion ought to play—whether it should be experienced only in rehearsals when preparing the role (Cocquelin's position) or whether it ought to be felt in performance (Salvini's position).


title: Stanislavski's system

text: On this basis, Stanislavski contrasts his own "art of experiencing" approach with what he calls the "art of representation" practised by Cocquelin (in which experiencing forms one of the preparatory stages only) and "hack" acting (in which experiencing plays no part). Stanislavski defines the actor's "experiencing" as playing "credibly", by which he means "thinking, wanting, striving, behaving truthfully, in logical sequence in a human way, within the character, and in complete parallel to it", such that the actor begins to feel "as one with" the role.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's approach seeks to stimulate the will to create afresh and to activate subconscious processes sympathetically and indirectly by means of conscious techniques. In this way, it attempts to recreate in the actor the inner, psychological causes of behaviour, rather than to present a simulacrum of their effects. Stanislavski recognised that in practice a performance is usually a mixture of the three trends (experiencing, representation, hack) but felt that experiencing should predominate.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: The range of training exercises and rehearsal practices that are designed to encourage and support "experiencing the role" resulted from many years of sustained inquiry and experiment. Many may be discerned as early as 1905 in Stanislavski's letter of advice to Vera Kotlyarevskaya on how to approach the role of Charlotta in Anton Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard":


title: Stanislavski's system

text: First of all you must live the role without spoiling the words or making them commonplace. Shut yourself off and play whatever goes through your head. Imagine the following scene: Pishchik has proposed to Charlotta, now she is his bride... How will she behave? Or: Charlotta has been dismissed but finds other employment in a circus of a café-chantant. How does she do gymnastics or sing little songs? Do your hair in various ways and try to find in yourself things which remind you of Charlotta. You will be reduced to despair twenty times in your search but don't give up. Make this German woman you love so much speak Russian and observe how she pronounces words and what are the special characteristics of her speech. Remember to play Charlotta in a dramatic moment of her life. Try to make her weep sincerely over her life. Through such an image you will discover all the whole range of notes you need.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Exercises such as these, though never seen directly onstage or screen, prepare the actor for a performance based on experiencing the role. Experiencing constitutes the inner, psychological aspect of a role, which is endowed with the actor's individual feelings and own personality. Stanislavski argues that this creation of an inner life should be the actor's first concern. He groups together the training exercises intended to support the emergence of experiencing under the general term "psychotechnique".


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's "Magic If" describes an ability to imagine oneself in a set of fictional circumstances and to envision the consequences of finding oneself facing that situation in terms of action. These circumstances are "given" to the actor principally by the playwright or screenwriter, though they also include choices made by the director, designers, and other actors. The ensemble of these circumstances that the actor is required to incorporate into a performance are called the "given circumstances". "It is easy," Carnicke warns, "to misunderstand this notion as a directive to play oneself." A human being's circumstances condition his or her character, this approach assumes. "Placing oneself in the role does not mean transferring one's own circumstances to the play, but rather incorporating into oneself circumstances other than one's own."


title: Stanislavski's system

text: In preparation and rehearsal, the actor develops imaginary stimuli, which often consist of sensory details of the circumstances, in order to provoke an organic, subconscious response in performance. These "inner objects of attention" (often abbreviated to "inner objects" or "contacts") help to support the emergence of an "unbroken line" of experiencing through a performance, which constitutes the inner life of the role. An "unbroken line" describes the actor's ability to focus attention exclusively on the fictional world of the drama throughout a performance, rather than becoming distracted by the scrutiny of the audience, the presence of a camera crew, or concerns relating to the actor's experience in the real world offstage or outside the world of the drama. In a rehearsal process, at first, the "line" of experiencing will be patchy and broken; as preparation and rehearsals develop, it becomes increasingly sustained and unbroken.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: When experiencing the role, the actor is fully absorbed by the drama and immersed in its fictional circumstances; it is a state that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow." Stanislavski used the term "I am being" to describe it. He encouraged this absorption through the cultivation of "public solitude" and its "circles of attention" in training and rehearsal, which he developed from the meditation techniques of yoga. Stanislavski did not encourage complete identification with the role, however, since a genuine belief that one had become someone else would be pathological.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: An actor's performance is animated by the pursuit of a sequence of "tasks" (identified in Elizabeth Hapgood's original English translation as "objectives"). A task is a problem, embedded in the "given circumstances" of a scene, that the character needs to solve. This is often framed as a question: "What do I need to make the other person "do"?" or "What do I want?"


title: Stanislavski's system

text: In preparing and rehearsing for a role, actors break up their parts into a series of discrete "bits", each of which is distinguished by the dramatic event of a "reversal point", when a major revelation, decision, or realisation alters the direction of the action in a significant way. (Each "bit" or "beat" corresponds to the length of a single motivation [task or objective]. The term "bit" is often mistranslated in the US as "beat", as a result of its pronunciation in a heavy Russian accent by Stanislavski's students who taught his system there.)


title: Stanislavski's system

text: A task must be engaging and stimulating imaginatively to the actor, Stanislavski argues, such that it compels action:


title: Stanislavski's system

text: One of the most important creative principles is that an actor's tasks must always be able to coax his feelings, will and intelligence, so that they become part of him, since only they have creative power. [...] The task must provide the means to arouse creative enthusiasm. Like a magnet, it must have great drawing power and must then stimulate endeavours, movements and actions. "The task is the spur to creative activity, its motivation. The task is a decoy for feeling." [...] The task sparks off wishes and inner impulses (spurs) toward creative effort. The task creates the inner sources which are transformed naturally and logically into action. The task is the heart of the bit, that makes the pulse of the living organism, the role, beat.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's production of "A Month in the Country" (1909) was a watershed in his artistic development, constituting, according to Magarshack, "the first play he produced according to his system." Breaking the MAT's tradition of open rehearsals, he prepared Turgenev's play in private. The cast began with a discussion of what Stanislavski would come to call the "through-line" for the characters (their emotional development and the way they change over the course of the play). This production is the earliest recorded instance of his practice of analysing the action of the script into discrete "bits".


title: Stanislavski's system

text: The pursuit of one task after another forms a through-line of action, which unites the discrete bits into an unbroken continuum of experience. This through-line drives towards a task operating at the scale of the drama as a whole and is called, for that reason, a "supertask" (or "superobjective"). A performance consists of the inner aspects of a role (experiencing) and its outer aspects ("embodiment") that are united in the pursuit of the supertask.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: In his later work, Stanislavski focused more intently on the underlying patterns of dramatic conflict. He developed a rehearsal technique that he called "active analysis" in which actors would improvise these conflictual dynamics. In the American developments of Stanislavski's system—such as that found in Uta Hagen's "Respect for Acting", for example—the forces opposing a characters' pursuit of their tasks are called "obstacles".


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski further elaborated his system with a more physically grounded rehearsal process that came to be known as the "Method of Physical Action". The term itself was only applied to this rehearsal process after Stanislavski's death. Benedetti indicates that though Stanislavski had developed it since 1916, he first explored it practically in the early 1930s. The roots of the Method of Physical Action stretch back to Stanislavski's earliest work as a director (in which he focused consistently on a play's action) and the techniques he explored with Vsevolod Meyerhold and later with the First Studio of the MAT before the First World War (such as the experiments with improvisation and the practice of anatomising scripts in terms of bits and tasks).


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Benedetti emphasises the continuity of the Method of Physical Action with Stanislavski's earlier approaches; Whyman argues that "there is no justification in Stanislavsky's ["sic"] writings for the assertion that the "method of physical actions" represents a rejection of his previous work". Stanislavski first explored the approach practically in his rehearsals for "Three Sisters" and "Carmen" in 1934 and "Molière" in 1935.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: 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." He continues:


title: Stanislavski's system

text: For in the process of action the actor gradually obtains the mastery over the inner incentives of the actions of the character he is representing, evoking in himself the emotions and thoughts which resulted in those actions. In such a case, an actor not only understands his part, but also feels it, and that is the most important thing in creative work on the stage.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Just as the First Studio, led by his assistant and close friend Leopold Sulerzhitsky, had provided the forum in which he developed his initial ideas for his system during the 1910s, he hoped to secure his final legacy by opening another studio in 1935, in which the Method of Physical Action would be taught. The Opera-Dramatic Studio embodied the most complete implementation of the training exercises described in his manuals. Meanwhile, the transmission of his earlier work via the students of the First Studio was revolutionising acting in the West. With the arrival of Socialist realism in the USSR, the MAT and Stanislavski's system were enthroned as exemplary models.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Many actors routinely equate his system with the American Method, although the latter's exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with the multivariant, holistic and psychophysical approach of the "system", which explores character and action both from the 'inside out' and the 'outside in' and treats the actor's mind and body as parts of a continuum. In response to his characterisation work on Argan in Molière's "The Imaginary Invalid" in 1913, Stanislavski concluded that "a character is sometimes formed psychologically, i.e. from the inner image of the role, but at other times it is discovered through purely external exploration." In fact Stanislavski found that many of his students who were "method acting" were having many mental problems, and instead encouraged his students to shake off the character after rehearsing.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: The First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) was a theatre studio that Stanislavski created in 1912 in order to research and develop his system. It was conceived as a space in which pedagogical and exploratory work could be undertaken in isolation from the public, in order to develop new forms and techniques. Stanislavski later defined a theatre studio as "neither a theatre nor a dramatic school for beginners, but a laboratory for the experiments of more or less trained actors." The First Studio's founding members included Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslavsky, and Maria Ouspenskaya, all of whom would exert a considerable influence on the subsequent history of theatre.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Leopold Sulerzhitsky, who had been Stanislavski's personal assistant since 1905 and whom Maxim Gorky had nicknamed "Suler", was selected to lead the studio. In a focused, intense atmosphere, its work emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery. Until his death in 1938, Suler taught the elements of Stanislavski's system in its germinal form: relaxation, concentration of attention, imagination, communication, and emotion memory. On becoming independent from the MAT in 1923, the company re-named itself the Second Moscow Art Theatre, though Stanislavski came to regard it as a betrayal of his principles.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Benedetti argues that a significant influence on the development of Stanislavski's system came from his experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio. He created it in 1918 under the auspices of the Bolshoi Theatre, though it later severed its connection with the theatre. Stanislavski worked with his Opera Studio in the two rehearsal rooms of his house on Carriage Row (prior to his eviction in March 1921). His brother and sister, Vladimir and Zinaïda, ran the studio and also taught there. It accepted young members of the Bolshoi and students from the Moscow Conservatory. Stanislavski also invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin (from the Bolshoi Ballet) to teach expressive movement and dance.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: By means of his system, Stanislavski aimed to unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin. He hoped that the successful application of his system to opera, with its inescapable conventionality, would demonstrate the universality of his methodology. From his experience at the Opera Studio he developed his notion of "tempo-rhythm", which he was to develop most substantially in part two of "An Actor's Work" (1938).


title: Stanislavski's system

text: A series of thirty-two lectures that he delivered to this studio between 1919 and 1922 were recorded by Konkordia Antarova and published in 1939; they have been translated into English as "On the Art of the Stage" (1950). Pavel Rumiantsev—who joined the studio in 1920 from the Conservatory and sang the title role in its production of "Eugene Onegin" in 1922—documented its activities until 1932; his notes were published in 1969 and appear in English under the title "Stanislavski on Opera" (1975).


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Near the end of his life Stanislavski created an Opera—Dramatic Studio in his own apartment on Leontievski Lane (now known as "Stanislavski Lane"), under the auspices of which between 1935 and 1938 he offered a significant course in the system in its final form.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Given the difficulties he had with completing his manual for actors, in 1935 while recuperating in Nice Stanislavski decided that he needed to found a new studio if he was to ensure his legacy. "Our school will produce not just individuals," he wrote, "but a whole company." In June he began to instruct a group of teachers in the training techniques of the 'system' and the rehearsal processes of the Method of Physical Action. The teachers had some previous experience studying the system as private students of Stanislavski's sister, Zinaïda. His wife, Lilina, also joined the teaching staff. Twenty students (out of 3500 auditionees) were accepted for the dramatic section of the Opera—Dramatic Studio, where classes began on 15 November 1935. Its members included the future artistic director of the MAT, Mikhail Kedrov, who played Tartuffe in Stanislavski's unfinished production of Molière's play (which, after Stanislavski's death, he completed).


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Jean Benedetti argues that the course at the Opera—Dramatic Studio is "Stanislavski's true testament." Stanislavski arranged a curriculum of four years of study that focused exclusively on technique and method—two years of the work detailed later in "An Actor's Work on Himself" and two of that in "An Actor's Work on a Role". Once the students were acquainted with the training techniques of the first two years, Stanislavski selected "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet" for their work on roles. He "insisted that they work on classics, because, 'in any work of genius you find an ideal logic and progression.'" He worked with the students in March and April 1937, focusing on their sequences of physical actions, on establishing their through-lines of action, and on rehearsing scenes anew in terms of the actors' tasks. "They must avoid at all costs," Benedetti explains, "merely repeating the externals of what they had done the day before."


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Many of Stanislavski's former students taught acting in the United States, including Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Michael Chekhov, Andrius Jilinsky, Leo Bulgakov, Varvara Bulgakov, Vera Solovyova, and Tamara Daykarhanova. Others—including Stella Adler and Joshua Logan—"grounded careers in brief periods of study" with him. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya went on to found the influential American Laboratory Theatre (1923—1933) in New York, which they modeled on the First Studio. Boleslavsky's manual "Acting: The First Six Lessons" (1933) played a significant role in the transmission of Stanislavski's ideas and practices to the West. In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, another of Stanislavski's students, Maria Knebel, sustained and developed his rehearsal process of "active analysis", despite its formal prohibition by the state.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: In the United States, one of Boleslavsky's students, Lee Strasberg, went on to co-found the Group Theatre (1931—1940) in New York with Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford. Together with Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, Strasberg developed the earliest of Stanislavski's techniques into what came to be known as "Method acting" (or, with Strasberg, more usually simply "the Method"), which he taught at the Actors Studio. Boleslavsky thought that Strasberg over-emphasised the role of Stanislavski's technique of "emotion memory" at the expense of dramatic action.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Stanislavski worked with Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances. Given the emphasis that emotion memory had received in New York, Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort. He recommended an indirect pathway to emotional expression via physical action. Stanislavski confirmed this emphasis in his discussions with Harold Clurman in late 1935. The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his approach. Adler's most famous student was actor Marlon Brando. Later, many American and British actors inspired by Brando were also adepts of Stanislavski teachings, including James Dean, Julie Harris, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, Daniel Day-Lewis and Marilyn Monroe.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Meisner, an actor at the Group Theatre, went on to teach method acting at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he developed an emphasis on what Stanislavski called "communication" and "adaptation" in an approach that he branded the "Meisner technique". Among the actors trained in the Meisner technique are Robert Duvall, Tom Cruise, Diane Keaton and Sydney Pollack.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Though many others have contributed to the development of method acting, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner are associated with "having set the standard of its success", though each emphasised different aspects: Strasberg developed the psychological aspects, Adler, the sociological, and Meisner, the behavioral. While each strand of the American tradition vigorously sought to distinguish itself from the others, they all share a basic set of assumptions that allows them to be grouped together.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: The relations between these strands and their acolytes, Carnicke argues, have been characterised by a "seemingly endless hostility among warring camps, each proclaiming themselves his only true disciples, like religious fanatics, turning dynamic ideas into rigid dogma." Stanislavski's Method of Physical Action formed the central part of Sonia Moore's attempts to revise the general impression of Stanislavski's system arising from the American Laboratory Theatre and its teachers.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Carnicke analyses at length the splintering of the system into its psychological and physical components, both in the US and the USSR. She argues instead for its psychophysical integration. She suggests that Moore's approach, for example, accepts uncritically the teleological accounts of Stanislavski's work (according to which early experiments in emotion memory were 'abandoned' and the approach 'reversed' with a discovery of the scientific approach of behaviourism). These accounts, which emphasised the physical aspects at the expense of the psychological, revised the system in order to render it more palatable to the dialectical materialism of the Soviet state. In a similar way, other American accounts re-interpreted Stanislavski's work in terms of the prevailing popular interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. Strasberg, for example, dismissed the "Method of Physical Action" as a step backwards. Just as an emphasis on action had characterised Stanislavski's First Studio training, so emotion memory continued to be an element of his system at the end of his life, when he recommended to his directing students:


title: Stanislavski's system

text: One must give actors various paths. One of these is the path of action. There is also another path: you can move from feeling to action, arousing feeling first.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: "Action, 'if', and 'given circumstances'", "emotion memory", "imagination", and "communication" all appear as chapters in Stanislavski's manual "An Actor's Work" (1938) and all were elements of the systematic whole of his approach, which resists easy schematisation.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Stanislavski's work made little impact on British theatre before the 1960s. Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl were the first to introduce Stanislavski's techniques there. In their Theatre Workshop, the experimental studio that they founded together, Littlewood used improvisation as a means to explore character and situation and insisted that her actors define their character's behaviour in terms of a sequence of tasks. The actor Michael Redgrave was also an early advocate of Stanislavski's approach in Britain. The first drama school in the country to teach an approach to acting based on Stanislavski's system and its American derivatives was Drama Centre London, where it is still taught today.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Many other theatre practitioners have been influenced by Stanislavski's ideas and practices. Jerzy Grotowski regarded Stanislavski as the primary influence on his own theatre work.


title: Stanislavski's system

text: Mikhail Bulgakov, writing in the manner of a "roman à clef", includes in his novel "Black Snow (Театральный роман)" satires of Stanislavski's methods and theories. In the novel, the stage director, Ivan Vasilyevich, uses acting exercises while directing a play, which is titled "Black Snow". The playwright in the novel sees the acting exercises taking over the rehearsals, becoming madcap, and causing the playwright to rewrite parts of his play. The playwright is concerned that his script is being lost in all of this. When he finally sees the play performed, the playwright reflects that the director's theories would ultimately lead the audience to become so absorbed in the reality of the performances that they forget the play. Bulgakov had the actual experience, in 1926, of having a play that he had written, "The White Guard", directed with great success by Stanislavski at the Moscow Arts Theatre.


title: Widow's peak

text: A widow's peak is a distinct point in the hairline in the center of the forehead; there are varying degrees of the peak. Although it is commonly taught as an example of a dominant inherited trait, there are no scientific studies to support this.


title: Widow's peak

text: The term stems from the belief that hair growing to a point on the forehead – suggestive of the peak of a widow's hood – is an omen of early widowhood. The use of peak in relation to hair dates from 1833. The expression widow's peak dates from 1849. The use of peak may refer to the beak or bill of a headdress, particularly the distinctive hood with a pointed piece in front – a biquoquet – which widows wore as a hood of mourning dating from 1530. Another explanation for the origin of the phrase suggests that it may be related to the mourning caps worn as early as the 16th century. A mourning cap or 'Mary Stuart Cap' is a cap which features a very distinctive triangular fold of cloth in the middle of the forehead, creating an artificial widow's peak. The use of peak referring to a point in the cloth covering the forehead dates to at least 1509 when it appears in Alexander Barclay’s "The Shyp of Folys":