The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold brings together a wealth of scholarship on one of the foremost innovators in European theatre. It presents a detailed picture of the Russian director’s work from when it first emerged on the modern stage to its multifarious present-day manifestations.
By combining an historical focus with the latest contemporary research from an international range of perspectives and authors, this collection marks an important moment in Meyerhold studies as well as offering a new assessment of his relation to today's theatre-making. Its dynamic blend of research is presented in five sections: Histories enlarges on more conventional subjects like the grotesque and Biomechanics, to overlooked topics such as Meyerhold's ‘failed’ projects and his work in film; Collaborations and Connections extends understandings of Meyerhold’s well-known collaborative capacities to consider new cultural influences and lesser known working relationships; Sources engages with hitherto untapped material in Meyerhold’s oeuvre by reproducing and contextualising previously untranslated primary sources on his work; Practitioner Voices offer lively, on the ground, testimony of the contemporary impact of Meyerhold's practice; Meyerhold in New Contexts maps the routes of his practice across continents and examines ways in which his work is being applied in a number of contemporary scenarios, such as motion capture, computer-based 3D visualisations, and the ‘new normal’ of digital pedagogy.
This is a key resource for students and scholars of European Theatre, acting theory, and actor training, as well as for those more broadly interested in the socio-political impact of theatre.
Author(s): Jonathan Pitches, Stefan Aquilina
Series: Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 531
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Poetic frontispiece
General Introduction
Part I Histories
Introduction
1 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Cinema
2 Meyerhold, the Musician
3 Meyerhold in the 1930s: Language, Text, Performance
4 Meyerhold’s Hamlet: An Unrealised Dream
5 Looking at Meyerhold’s Unseen Theatre
6 Performing Communism, or, What if we Took Meyerhold’s Politics Seriously?
Part II Collaborations and Connections
Introduction
7 Meyerhold and Stanislavsky: Forty Years of Cordial Disagreement
8 An Unknown Legacy: Uncovering Traces of Savva Mamontov’s Work in Meyerhold’s Conditional Theatre
9 Meyerhold’s Female Collaborators
10 The Influence of Giovanni Grasso on Meyerhold’s Works, Theories, and Biography
11 Towards Conscious and Independent Action: Pyotr Lesgaft’s System of Physical Education as Inspiration for Meyerhold’s Biomechanics
12 Meyerhold and Trotsky
Part III Sources
Introduction
13 The Commedia Dell’arte Origins of Biomechanics:
Part 1: Actor Training and Collective Creation at Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio
Part 2: Documents on Actor Training and Collective Creation at Borodinskaia
14 Fragments of a Creative Life: Introduction to Five New Sources
Letters to Anton Chekhov, 1899–1904
Comments by Doctor Dapertutto on ‘The Denial of Theatre’ by Yury Aikhenvald, 1914
Theatre Pamphlets I: On Dramaturgy and Theatre Culture, 1921
From Meyerhold’s Speech at the Discussion ‘Creative Methods at the Meyerhold Theatre’, 25 December 1930
On the Spatial Composition of Performance, 2 April 1936
Part IV Practitioner Voices
Introduction
15 A Theatre Company as a Meyerholdian Experiment in Grotesque
16 The Evolution of Proper Job: Working with Meyerhold in the Contemporary British Theatre
17 Biomechanical Diasporas: Practitioner Perspectives on the Transmission of Meyerhold’s Techniques
18 Transmission Impossible
19 Decoding the Riddle: Applying Meyerhold’s Conception of the Director’s Explication
Part V Meyerhold in New Contexts
Part V.1 Transnational Migrations
Introduction
20 Meyerhold’s Influence on Twentieth-century Japanese Theatre
21 Nesting Dolls: Sketches in Search of Meyerhold in Australia
22 An Unexpected Triangle: Politis, Meyerhold, and Karaghiozis in Interwar Greece
23 Biomechanical Resonances in Turkey: The Working Method of Studio Oyuncuları
24 Meyerhold’s Influence on the Production Processes of PERFORMA TEATRO (Brazil)
Part V.2 Interdisciplinarities
Introduction
25 Meyerhold in the 21st Century: The Meeting Points of Biomechanics and Postdramatic Performance
26 The New Meyerhold Theatre: Visualising A Lost Architectural Experiment
27 Theatrical Biomechanics and Movement Science
28 Biomechanics in Lockdown: Teaching Meyerhold in the Age of COVID-19
Index
