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The Dance of Images: Vladimir Mirzoev and Toronto's Horizontal Eight
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
In addition to being a theatre director, Vladimir Mirzoev is a novelist, poet, critic, and artist. Born in Moscow in 1957, he studied with Mark Mestechkin, a disciple of his teachers Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Before he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, in May 1989, Mirzoev was known in Russian theatre as an iconoclast and a leading figure of the avant garde. His productions of Voltaire, Pushkin, Gogol, Büchner, Strindberg, Claudel, Weiss, and Howard Barker became renowned for the plasticity of the actors' movement and the use of metaphor to convey meaning, and Russian critics hailed his extraordinary ability to sculpt his own distinctive theatrical language, blending the ironic and the grotesque. In NTQ32 (August 1992) we published an interview with Mirzoev conducted by Rita Much: here, Julie Adam takes up the story, with an assessment of the director's work with ‘Horizontal Eight’ in Toronto – notably the productions, of Gogol's The Inspector General, Wilde's Salome, Camus's Caligula, and Barker's The Possibilities.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994
References
Notes and References
1. Most of Horizontal Eight's performances are staged in their small studio, which seats forty to sixty people. One version of Barker's The Possibilities was staged at the Actor's Lab (a larger studio theatre with a gallery), as was the successful Caligula. Salome was performed at the Tarragon Theatre's Extra Space, also a smaller experimental stage.
2. Barker, Howard, The Possibilities (London: Calder, 1987), p. 21.Google Scholar
3. Barker, Howard, Arguments for the Theatre (London: Calder, 1989).Google Scholar
4. It must also be pointed out that English-Canadian theatre follows a different tradition than French-Canadian theatre, and that it has been for a long time essentially text-centred and text-driven. Imagistic theatre of various types is generally both richer and more appreciated in Quebec than in Ontario. The internationally acclaimed Quebecois theatre artist Robert Lepage, for instance, does not have the following in English Canada that he deserves or that one would expect.
5. ‘The Actor and the Breath of Chaos: Vladimir Mirzoev interviewed by Rita Much’, New Theatre Quarterly, VIII, No. 31 (08 1992), p. 264–8.Google Scholar
6. Meyerhold used preacting – a method taken from Chinese and Japanese theatres – to set the scene and prepare the audience psychologically and intellectually to receive the message. In Meyerhold's theatre the method had a propagandistic function. Compare Braun, Edward, The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage (London: Methuen, 1979).Google Scholar
7. The Inspector General and Caligula were in fact companion pieces. In both plays, as Mirzoev interpreted them, the central character – Khlestakov, the false inspector, and Caligula, the false prophet (both played by Jeffry Max Nicholls) – was created by those around him and ended up destroying them.
8. Vladimir Mirzoev, unpublished interview with Julie Adam.
9. Adam, Julie ‘Creating and Playing The Inspector General: an Interview with Vladimir Mirzoev’, Canadian Theatre Review, No. 67 (Summer 1991), p. 106.Google Scholar
10. A similar interpretation of dark glasses as connected with a moral and spiritual blindness and/or nocturnal vision as well as an underground existence appeared in other productions by Mirzoev, most recently and notably of course in Ghelderode's The Blind Men.
11. Vladimir Mirzoev, unpublished interview with Julie Adam.
12. ‘Creating and Playing The Inspector General’, op. cit.
13. Ibid.