Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:39:47.748Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Meyerhold's Biomechanics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

Extract

In my Biomechanics, I was able to determine altogether twelve or thirteen rules for the training of an actor. But when I polish it, I'll leave perhaps no more than eight.

Vs. Meyerhold

Biomechanics was a system of actor-training that Meyerhold devised shortly after the Revolution. Although not always clearly understood, it received wide attention during the twenties and thirties due to Meyerhold's unique position as the foremost revolutionary avant-garde director. Curiously, Meyerhold's own conceptions about Biomechanics, which were almost unchanged throughout his career, appeared to be both grandiose and seemingly modest: While maintaining that the mastery of Biomechanics afforded the actor all the essential skills necessary for scenic movement—skills that would take the ordinary actor nearly a life-time to learn, he relegated his own class in Biomechanics at the Meyerhold Workshop to a status equal to that of the other studies in body movement that were taught there, such as acrobatics, modern dance, or eurhythmics.

Type
Meyerhold Section
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 The Drama Review

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The above spatio-dynamic drawing by I. Shlepyankov illustrates the motions of the preparatory biomechanical gesture.

The author would like to thank Stella Hamershlag, Daniel Gerould, Bernard Koten, Aimée Su, and M.S. Ivanova for their invaluable assistance.

A correction has been issued for this article: