Meyerhold's Biomechanics - IS MU

Meyerhold's Biomechanics About Vsevolod Meyerhold
http://web.syr.edu/~kjbaum/aboutvsevolodmeyerhold.html
(10. 2. 2008):
Vsevolod Emilovich Meyerhold (1874-1940) was one of two actors fresh out of
drama school who were invited to join the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre
in the spring of 1898. (The other was Olga Knipper, Chekhov's future wife.)
Meyerhold stayed with the Art Theatre for four years, playing approximately
eighteen roles-including Treplev in the Art Theatre's original production
of Chekhov's Seagull.
Meyerhold became increasingly interested in exploring other theatrical
forms in addition to the Realism/ Naturalism of the Art Theatre. His real
interest was no longer in a theatre that seeks to "recreate" life and whose
laws are those of "nature." Rather, Meyerhold sought a theatre capable of
revealing "inner dialogue by means of the music of plastic movement"
(Meyerhold on Theatre, Edward Braun). Meyerhold left the Art Theatre and
began developing his own aesthetic.
Meyerhold regarded movement, gesture, space, rhythm and "music" as the
primary elements of the "language of the theatre." He dreamed of
"retheatricalizing" the theatre, of creating a theatre that would give its
audience truthful images of life but that wouldn't seek to imitate or copy
life.
A director should, according to Meyerhold, begin his work in rehearsal with
the search for form. And this search begins with the creation of a
"movement score" for the production. The director's task is to create "a
pattern of movement on the stage" by means of a "deft mastery of line,
grouping and costume color" (V. E. Meyerhold quoted in Braun). Movement on
the stage is created not only by "movement in the literal sense, but by the
disposition of lines and colours and by the ease and cunning with which
these lines and colours are made to cross and vibrate" (V. E. Meyerhold
quoted in Braun).
Meyerhold's directorial experiments led to an invitation from Stanislavsky
to head a new experimental Studio at the Art Theatre. While this first
Studio was short-lived, Meyerhold's work there led him to a crucial
realization. There was a general consensus among theatre people who had
seen dress rehearsals that there were some interesting experiments in
suggestive and nonrepresentational design, but that the acting was
terrible. The actors were simply not equipped to meet the demands Meyerhold
made of them. Meyerhold realized that from now on an exploration of actor
training was going to have to run in tandem with his exploration of form in
the theatre. Like the American pioneers in modern dance after him, he would
have to create a system for training artists that would enable them to give
life to the forms he envisioned. For the next thirty-five years, Meyerhold
explored a vast array of styles as a director and developed the system of
actor training and approach to theatre that would become known as
"Biomechanics." Meyerhold's Biomechanics
http://web.syr.edu/~kjbaum/meyerholdsbiomechanics.html
(10. 2. 2008):
"If the tip of the nose works, the whole body works."
V. E. Meyerhold
Biomechanics is an approach to actor training and to theatre developed by
Russian actor, director and teacher, Vsevolod Meyerhold during the 1920'
and 1930's. For political reasons, Biomechanics was forced underground
after Meyerhold's execution by the Soviet regime in 1940. During the 1970's
it began to re-emerge semi-secretly.
In 1972 Moscow's prestigious Theatre of Satire invited the teacher of
Biomechanics from Meyerhold's own school, Nikolai Kustov, to train a group
of the Theatre's young actors. One of these was Gennadi Bogdanov. Mr.
Bogdanov has become one of the leading exponents of the living tradition of
Meyerhold's work. Glasnost and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union
have brought Mr. Bogdanov invitations to teach in the West-first in Europe,
then in the United States. Thus Meyerhold's legacy has become available for
study here.
This approach, which Meyerhold developed over some thirty-five years of
experimentation and exploration as a director and as a teacher, provides
the acting student with a comprehensive, detailed program for the
development of her/ his psycho-physical instrument. Probably the most
striking thing about training in Biomechanics is the degree of integration
between "purely" physical training and the application of that physical
work to concerns specific to acting.
A course in Biomechanics begins with physical training. But the purpose of
that training is to forge the connection between mind and body, to "teach
the body to think." In Biomechanics, even the simplest exercises that at
first glance might seem to be essentially traditional ones designed solely
to develop physical capacities such as strength, agility, coordination,
balance, flexibility and endurance become-because of the thought process
involved-acting exercises. Thus while students run, jump and work every
muscle and joint in a dizzying array of exercises during the initial
physical training phase of the work, they are already required to be
continually aware of their relationship to the space and to the other
actors in their "ensemble"-as well as their own "inner movement."
The training is highly systematic and sequential. Thus it begins with
fairly simple (although not necessarily easy!) exercises. In time actors
are asked to do a great variety of exercises: work with objects such as
balls and dowel rods, leaps and rolls over platforms and up and down ramps
and stairs, and partner lifts and acrobatics. This phase of the work
culminates in the study of the Classical Biomechanical Etudes. These are
highly stylized movement pieces which Meyerhold choreographed as exercise
material for his students.
The kinesthetic, spatial and relational awarenesses that the student
develops through training in Biomechanics may, initially, be primarily in
terms of the physical demands posed by the exercises. But as the training
progresses, the actor's moment to moment awareness expands and deepens. As
a result, Biomechanics provides the student with a concrete methodology for
addressing-physically and through action-issues of acting that are almost
universally regarded as fundamental in the Western tradition since
Stanislavski. These include: "as if for the first time," "give and take,"
"listening," "seeing," and "moment before."
All of this develops the actor's sense of her/ his psycho-physical being as
a malleable instrument and an awareness of space and rhythm as variables to
be explored in the creation of a role. The actor's heightened awarenesses
and capacities are equally valuable for work that is highly theatrical or
absolutely realistic. As Igor Ilynsky, one of Meyerhold's finest actors,
put it: "Technique arms the imagination" (quoted in Meyerhold at Work, Paul
Schmidt). Krátký film s ukázkou
http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Drama/directors/stan2.mov
(10. 2. 2008) Biomechanics
http://theatreconversation.blogspot.com/2006/05/biomechanics.html
(10. 2. 2008):
Meyerhold's revolutionary Biomechanics technique was first shown publicly
in June of 1922. Meyerhold introduced the acting technique within the
confines of the new sociopolitical structure of the Soviet Union. The
Communist revolution moved society into a mechanical age; one who puts the
skilled worker at the forefront of citizenry and societal involvement. It
is the age of the scientific revolution based heavily on Taylorism, posited
by Frederick
Taylor, writer of The Principles of Scientific Management. In his book,
Frederick Taylor speaks of a system "designed to increase industrial output
by rationalizing the production process. Meyerhold said in June 1922:
In the past the actor has always conformed to the society for which his art
was intended. In future the actor must go even further in relating his
technique to the industrial situation. For he will be working in a society
where labour is no longer regarded as a curse but as a joyful, vital
necessity. In these conditions of ideal labour art clearly requires a new
foundation [...] The actor embodies in himself both the organizer and that
which is organized (i.e. the artist and his material). The formula for
acting may be expressed as follows: N = A1 + A2 (where N = the actor; A1 =
the artist who conceives the idea and issues the instructions necessary for
its execution; A2 = the executant who executes the conception of A1). The
actor must train his material (the body), so that so that it is capable of
executing instantaneously those tasks that are dictated externally (by the
actor, the director...) [...] since the art of the actor is the art of
plastic forms in space, he must study the mechanics of his body.
Meyerhold would go on to underscore that everything in psychology, and
therefore emotion is dictated by physiological process; or put more
plainly, movement. In this seminal demonstration, Meyerhold's students
exhibited a number of Biomechanical "études." The études are basically
movement scores, or a series of movements that, in a way, tell a short
story; comprising a score from the sum of their parts. The études
demonstrate what Meyerhold and his pupils called "acting cycles." The
acting cycle has three parts: Intention, realization, and reaction.
The separate movements are comprised of four distinct parts, they are:
otkas (literally, refusal), posyl (literally, the sending), stoika (or
stance), and tormos (the brake). The otkas is the movemen