Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and Boris Zakhava's Educational Work

The article deals with two different approaches to training actors. One of them is Stanislavski’s system, and the other is Meyerhold’s biomechanics. Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko are reformers of the Russian theater. As the Art Theater founders, they understood that the emergence of a new drama would require a completely different approach to working with actors and a different design of the stage space. With regard to new performances, it became possible to pose critical social questions related to everyday life before the viewer. Therefore, it was logical that the director's profession became very important. Working on his system, Stanislavski paid great attention to the need for an actor’s comprehensive development. Many wonderful actors who attended his acting school were among the students of this great theater director. Vsevolod Meyerhold was one of them. However, the latter chose his direction and began to engage in staging performances actively and search for new means of expression, having come to an absolute convention on the stage. Meyerhold created his method of working with an actor, known as biomechanics, in the theatrical environment. The principle of this approach is the opposite of Stanislavski's system. With all the difference in views on the theater, in the early stages of Meyerhold's independent practice, Konstantin Stanislavski offered him the opportunity to cooperate, which led Vsevolod Meyerhold to the Studio on Povarskaya Street in Moscow. Evgeny Vakhtangov was another student of Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko. At the request of Stanislavski, Vakhtangov was engaged in educational work in the studio of Moscow Art Theatre. Unlike Meyerhold, he thoroughly mastered the system and then created his theatrical direction called fantastic realism. Vakhtangov's legacy was preserved thanks to the activities of his students, among whom was Boris Zakhava. He turned to Meyerhold for help and spent several seasons with the master, gaining invaluable experience, including revealing the features of biomechanics in practice. Boris Zakhava remained faithful to Vakhtangov’s principles and continued his teacher’s work at the Shchukin Theater Institute.

Nadezhda Bromley and Boris Sushkevich: Actors, Directors, Vakhtangov Followers (Materials for a Creative Biography)

Boris Sushkevich and Nadezhda Bromley (Sushkevich-Bromley) are remarkable theatrical figures, actors and directors whose lot was connected with the bright and dramatic periods of our country’s theatrical life from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century. They devoted a part of their professional life to the 1st Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (from 1919 — Moscow Art Academic Theatre), which later became a separate theater (Moscow Art Academic Theatre II, 1924—1936). Since the middle of the 1930s, they worked in leading Leningrad theaters — the Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater (Alexandrinsky Theatre) and the New Theater (1933—1953, now the Saint Petersburg Lensoviet Theatre). This article introduces little-studied archival sources of biographical nature related to the work of these outstanding cultural figures.Nadezhda Nikolayevna Bromley was a heiress of the Bromley — Sherwood creative dynasties, which had made a significant contribution to Russian culture. She joined the troupe of the Moscow Art Theater in 1908, performed on the stage of the 1st Studio (1918—1924), was one of the leading actresses of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II after its separation, participated in its Directing Department being in charge of the literary part. Generously gifted by nature, N. Bromley wrote poems, short stories, novels; her fictional works “From the Notes of the Last God” (1927) and “Gargantua’s Descendant” (1930) earned critical acclaim. Two plays by N. Bromley were staged in the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II. One of them — the full of hyperbole and grotesque “Archangel Michael” — was passionately accepted by E.B. Vakhtangov and A.V. Lunacharsky, though never shown to a wide audience. At the Leningrad State Academic Drama Theater and the New Theater, N. Bromley not only successfully played, but also staged performances based on the works by A.P. Chekhov, A. Tolstoy, M. Gorky, F. Schiller, and W. Shakespeare.Boris Mikhailovich Sushkevich, brought up by the Theater School of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre and in the Vakhtangov tradition of the playing grotesque, is one of the most interesting and original theater directors of his time. His directorial work in the play “The Cricket on the Hearth” based on a Christmas fairy tale by Charles Dickens became the hallmark of the 1st Studio (and later of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre II as well). This play remained in the theatre’s repertoire until January 1936. B. Sushkevich was a recognized theatre teacher — with his help, the Leningrad Theater Institute (now the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts) was established in 1939. Together with N. Bromley, he managed to fill the New Theater with bright creative content and make it a favorite of the Leningrad audience.This research expands the understanding of a number of yet unexplored aspects of the history of theater in our country and recreates the event context of the era.

The Belarusian Theatre Studio in Moscow: 1921–1926

The subject of this study is the work of the Belarusian theatre studio in Moscow from 1921 to 1926. It traces the various periods of the studio’s activities, the process of educational programme design, the attitude of students to study, and the attitude of the Belarusian authorities to the studio. The author had the opportunity to collect valuable material and reconstruct the work of the studio by virtue of the National Archives of the Republic of Belarus, the Academy of Sciences of Belarus, and the Belarusian State Archive-Museum of Literature archival materials, as well as memories of the artists themselves. The studio is the most important event in the history of Belarusian theatre: without the reconstruction of its activities, the picture of the work of the Yakub Kolas National Academic Drama Theatre in Vitebsk would be far from complete. Within five years, the studio raised actors and directors who later began their activities in Belarus. The programme proposed by the actors-pedagogues of the Moscow Art Theatre was innovative for them. An important part of the article is dedicated to Valentin Smyshlyaev, the director of the studio. It is worth remembering that there was no acting school in Belarus at the time and the first professional theatre was not opened until 1920.

‘The New Spirit’ in Theatre

The second interchapter examines discussions of Russian theatre in Britain. In a period of transition for British theatre, there was a call to look abroad for inspiration. This interchapter reviews the obstacles to the development of an art theatre movement in Britain, and details three potential conduits of Russian innovations in staging and design: Edward Gordon Craig’s collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, the staging of Russian symbolist plays by Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players, and the journalism of Huntly Carter, whose many articles on theatre, opera, art, ballet, and—after the war—film, promoted a ‘new spirit’ in the avant-garde, which he increasingly located in Russia.

Pages from Memory – Maeterlinck and the Russian Theatre Creators

The dramaturgy and the essays of Maurice Maeterlinck are the starting point for essential changes in the art of theatre representation, marking the transition from realism, which had become naturalist, towards a theatre in which the essence and theatricality conduct to a revitalization of the theatre. The Russian directors V.E. Meyerhold and K.S. Stanislavsky are two of the most important theatre personalities who have searched for the new forms of theatre. Analyzing the first steps of Meyerhold’s directing, it is easy to see that the symbolist roots of theatre making can be found in the French theatre art, also inspired by Maeterlinck. Stanislavsky, the master from The Moscow Art Theatre, was also the first director to stage The Blue Bird, before the text was even published. We shall follow, in the next pages, fragments from the Russian theatre which refer to these episodes.

Visualizing Theatrical and Novelistic Discourse with Bakhtin

A constant vision in Mikhail Bakhtin's works: polyphonic dialogue, this above all in the novel, but his love for theatre should not be neglected. Consequently, a central focus in Bakhtin's reflections is the polyphonic novel which he first identifies in Dostoevsky's novels. Bakhtin establishes a close relation between the novel, popular culture and carnival, evidencing the carnival component of novelistic discourse, therefore of life. Moreover, as he recounts in his 1973 conversations with Victor Duvakin, his interest in the novel overlapped with theatre, in particular the Moscow Art Theatre. In Bakhtin and Theatre, Dick McCaw relates Bakhtin's vision of art and life to theatre as visualized by Stanislavksy, Meyerhold and Grotowski, each of whom operated a “revolution” in their own original terms comparable to the so-called “Bakhtinian revolution” in philosophy of language and literary criticism. With the difficult socio-political events of the time on the background, this essay explores important aspects of the real dialogue between these three masters of the theatre and of the ideal dialogue established between the latter and Bakhtin, thereby creating a special perspective on theatre with special reference to the Bakhtinian concepts of “polyphony” and “dramatization”. Overall are evidenced, for the quality of life, the importance of such values as dialogism, otherness, participative unindifference, creativity which also emerge as characteristics that specify the artwork, whether novelistic or theatrical, thereby showing how art and life are vitally interrelated and capable of enhancing each other.

Serafima Birman: the Path of the Actress from the Moscow Art Theatre to People's Artist of the USSR

Serafima Birman was an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre who worked in the First Studio and Second Moscow Art Theatre throughout the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s–1920s) and went on to have a distinguished career as a performer, teacher, and director in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s–1970s). In this article Rose Whyman investigates her artistic and cultural contribution in the development of the Stanislavsky System and of her approach to acting, working alongside Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, and influenced by Meyerhold and other artists of the avant-garde. She was the first female director at the theatre, continued to act and direct in Soviet theatres, and worked in film, notably with Eisenstein on Ivan the Terrible. The development of her career required great determination and necessitated making theatrical and political choices in order to survive and maintain the artistic principles on which her work was based. Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and is the author of The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge, 2008) and Stanislavsky: the Basics (Routledge, 2013).