No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
Meyerhold's Theatrical Biomechanics: An Acting Technique for Today Jane Baldwin The American theatre has undergone radical changes in its repertory and staging practices in the last thirty-five years. As a result, actors are called upon to display a multiplicity of skills that, sadly, many do not possess. For, with a few notable exceptions, American actor training has not kept pace with the needs of contemporary theatre. Psychological realism in the form of the Method retains its iron grip. In New York, which maintains its reputation as the U.S. center for theatre training, the Method is the primary tool of instruction. Universities and conservatories , it is true, frequently augment their acting programs with movement and speech, but these courses are too often taught in isolation, their content separated from that of the acting classes. Other acting techniques, other acting traditions, are not widely explored. One such alternative tradition, Theatrical Biomechanics, was introduced to American theatre practitioners in June of 1993. Master teachers Gennadi Bogdanov and Nikolai Karpov were invited to teach Vsevolod Meyerhold's system in its authentic form at an institute hosted by Tufts University.1 Subsequently , Bogdanov spent several weeks in New York training the actors of the Phoenix Ensemble in preparation for a production in the Biomechanical style directed by Ivan Popovski. This article discusses the usefulness of Biomechanics for the American actor. It describes and assesses the training at the institute , including student reaction, and provides a brief depiction of the application of the technique to production. The Revival of Theatrical Biomechanics in Russia The revolutionary director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) developed Theatrical Biomechanics, which is both an acting technique and a production style, as an antidote to his former mentor Stanislavsky's psychological realism . Biomechanical experimentation was cut short in the 1930s by Stalin's condemnation of all forms of art except socialist realism. The Communist 181 182 Jane Baldwin Meyerhold found himself in the incongruous position of having his art condemned as "bourgeois" and "alien to Soviet art" by the state Committee on the Arts (Rudnitsky 540). By 1938, having completely fallen from favor with the regime, the victim of a vicious smear campaign, Meyerhold had lost his theatre . Two years later he was dead, shot in prison on February 2, 1940, after a secret trial (Chentalinski 96).2 A victim of the political corruption and egregious human rights violations of the Stalinist era, he had been tortured to extract a false confession (Chentalinski 75). With his death, Meyerhold became a non-person in the Soviet Union, his writings and practices outlawed. In the West, acting teachers periodically attempted to resurrect Theatrical Biomechanics as a methodology. For years, their sources consisted of a few sketchy writings, plus two dozen photos of an actor performing a Meyerhold étude brought back to the U.S. by Lee Strasberg in 1934. However, even as archival material slowly became more available to Western scholars, missing was a living link to the work. Thus the results of these Western attempts were inaccurate , unsatisfactory, and ultimately unsuccessful. The practice of Theatrical Biomechanics was presumed to have vanished from the theatre. Yet in 1972, more than thirty years after Meyerhold's death, the figure in the photographs, Nikolai Kustov, emerged from the theatrical underground to which he had been relegated. Valentin Pluchek, director of the Moscow Theatre of Satire, had taken the unprecedented step of inviting Kustov, a former actor/teacher in Meyerhold's company, to train a select group of eight young actors in Theatrical Biomechanics.3 Until his death three and a half years later, Kustov worked with the group, training them in the almost forgotten and still forbidden art of Biomechanics. Perhaps his most avid student was Gennadi Bogdanov, newly engaged by the Theatre of Satire after his graduation from GITIS, Russia's leading drama school. Biomechanics was a revelation to Bogdanov, who had been trained in the state-sanctioned Stanislavsky System. Bogdanov recalls Kustov—then in his sixties, ailing and aged beyond his years—as a brilliant teacher. No longer able to sustain the pace of the physical work, Kustov sat most of the time, chain smoking, observing the students closely, only getting up to...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.