Vsevolod Meyerhold

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold (born Karl Kazimir Theodor Meyerhold) (1874 - 1940) was a Russian theatrical director, actor and theorist.

Life and work

Meyerhold was born in Penza on 28 January (9 February) 1874 into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. After completing school in 1895 he began the study of law at the Moscow University which he never completed. On his 21st birthday, Meyerhold converted to Orthodox Christianity, and accepted "Vsevolod" as an Orthodox Christian name. His acting career began when he became a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre where Meyerhold later served as an actor.

Having left the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902, Meyerhold indulged himself in a number of theatrical projects, acting both as a director / producer and an actor. The numerous projects of Meyerhold served as an arena for experiment and creation of new staging methods. Meyerhold was one of the most fervent advocates of symbolism in theatre, especially when he worked as the chief producer of the Vera Kommisarzhevskaya drama theatre in 1906-1907. In Poltava in the brief span of two July weeks in 1906 Meyerhold put into practice three epoch-making innovations advocated by avant-guarde theorists: Andrei Bely, Valery Bryusov, and Georgy Chulkov.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 made Meyerhold one of the most enthusiastic activists of the new Soviet Theatre. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theater Division (TEO) of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, forming an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the Division in 1918-1919. Together, they tried to radicalize Russian theaters, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. However, Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis in May 1919 and had to leave for the south. In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin's permission to revise government policy in favor of more traditional theaters and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919See Robert Leach and Victor Borovsky. A History of Russian Theatre, Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 0521432200 p. 303..

After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1920, which was known as The Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold fiercely confronted the principles of theatrical academism, claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. Meyerhold’s methods of scenic constructivism and circusisation of theatre were used in his most successful works of the time: Mayakovsky’s Mistery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu Magnifique, and Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s Tarelkin’s Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and it is said that Mayakovsky wrote The Bed Bug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide. The actors participating in Meyerhold’s productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics, the system of actor training that was later taught in a special acting school created by Meyerhold.

Meyerhold inspired revolutionary artists and filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, whose films employed actors who worked in Meyerhold’s tradition.

His acting technique was opposite to Constantin Stanislavski's Stanislavski System and Lee Strasberg's subsequent Method Acting. Where method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes and focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing outward emotion. He argued that people feel physically before they feel emotionally, so that by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements, emotions will automatically occur. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters.

An example of his style of acting can be found in the films of Eisenstein, who cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and who followed Meyerhold’s stylized acting methods. In Strike!, which portrays the beginnings of the Bolshevik revolution, the oppressive bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are athletic and chiseled.

Meyerhold was strongly opposed to socialist realism, and in the beginning of the 1930s, when Joseph Stalin clamped down on all avant-garde art and experimentation, his works were proclaimed antagonistic and alien to the Soviet people. His theatre was closed down in 1938, and a year later Meyerhold was arrested and imprisoned. He was brutally tortured and forced to make a confession, which he later recanted before the court. He was sentenced to death by firing squad on 1 February 1940. The date of his death is unclear; some sources say he was executed on 2 February 1940. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in 1955, during the first wave of destalinization.

Notes

Bibliography

in English:

Texts by Meyerhold

Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. by Edward Braun, with a critical commentary, 1969. London: Methuen and New York: Hill and Wang.
Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses (Russian Theatre Archive), by V. Meyerhold, Alexander Gladkov (ed.) and Alma Law (ed.), Routledge, 1996
Meyerhold at Work, Paul Schmidt (ed.), Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1996

Works on Meyerhold

Vsevolod Meyerhold (Routledge Performance Practitioners Series), by Jonathan Pitches, Routledge, 2003
Meyerhold: The art of conscious theater, by Marjorie L Hoover, University of Massachusetts Press, 1974 (biography)
Vsevolod Meyerhold (Directors in Perspective Series), by Robert Leach, Christopher Innes (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1993
Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Grotesque: Post-revolutionary Productions, 1920-32, James M. Symons, 1971
Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, by Edward Braun, University of Iowa Press, 1998
The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution and the Modern Stage by Edward Braun, 1995
Stanislavsky and Meyerhold (Stage and Screen Studies, v. 3), by Robert Leach, Peter Lang, 2003
Meyerhold the Director, by Konstantin Rudnitsky, Ardis, 1981
Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia by Alma H. Law, Mel Gordon, McFarland & co, 1995
The Death of Meyerhold A play by Mark Jackson, premiered at The Shotgun Players, Berkeley, CA, December 2003.

External links

1874 births | 1940 deaths | Theatre directors | Russian and Soviet theatre directors