Alaina LemonUniversity of Michigan(Translation from Russian): “Theatricality and Meyerhold,” In Formalisms, ed. Serguie Oushakine. Kabinetnyi Uchenyi: Moscow-Ekaterinburg. 2014

Theatricality and Meyerhold on reflexivity and reflex

exciteability

or

The BioPoetic Function

Aleksandr Gladkov, who was Meyerhold’s close associate and

assistant from 1934-37, remembers Meyerhold at an “important

meeting” where prominent people discussed methods for cultivating

creative work. They were citing Hegel, they were quoting Gogol .

. . ponderously, and on and on. Then Meyerhold took the floor. He

began earnestly to recount his recent discovery of a new

theoretical text, one that offered revolutionary ways to reform

theatrical practice. He lauded the writing, arousing his

listeners’ curiosity. From out of his briefcase, he lifted a

small book wrapped in newspaper, began to leaf through the

introductory pages, and then, with increasing gravity, he read

1

aloud from the beginning. It was, it turned out, a book on

carpentry and cabinet making. As Gladkov recollected years

later, “The amusing thing was that the quotations he cited from

it turned out to be no worse than all the other quotations that

had been cited that evening” (Gladkov and Law: 69).

Gladkov reports that Meyerhold’s critics—unappreciative of

his capacity to maintain a very serious tone of irony and self-

irony (to the degree of stiob, we might say)—labeled this, along

with other of his public aesthetic interventions, “arrogance” and

“buffoonery.” From Gladkov’s reminiscence, we might easily

unfurl this introduction to Meyerhold’s writings by first

narrating Meyerhold’s gradual fall from favor through the 1930s

and then his abrupt arrest and violent execution in 1940. It is

not difficult to see how the director alienated people who were

invested in textual authority: he made an enemy of playwright and

producer Nemirovich-Danchenko very early on in his career, and

Stalin apparently hated him sight unseen. However, that story

has been told in many places. Here, instead, let us consider the

recitation of cabinet making instructions as a moment that

underscores some of the most interesting of Meyerhold’s

2

theoretical formulations as early contributions to formalism.

His live performance, as we might call it, of lines from a

carpentry text amplifies several of his key aesthetic

convictions, which he had been formulating in writing published

as early as 1912. Note the ways, in that performance, that he

does several things: he manipulates customary boundaries between

textual genres (making literary theory touch technical writing);

he muddles boundaries between speech genres (simultaneously

contributing to an official meeting while subverting it); and in

so doing he gesture to his arguments about the power of play with

formal conventions and with juxtapositions of forms in to evoke

fresh responses and reflexive understandings.

Conditionality/Conventionality and Theatricality

Throughout his writing and in his directorial practice, from

the early days through the last, Meyerhold argued for the

necessary conditionality—the conventional relativity—of all creative

forms:

Art such as “painting,” consists in this: you take a brush,

you prime the canvas, you layer the paint, but there is no

3

volume, no three dimensions. Everything happens all across

two. Such art would stop being what it was if we were to

take one of Schepkin’s portraits, and stick a nose on the

front [and have an extra hold it up]...It is conventional

and conditional that there is no nose stuck on, that we

don’t paint а statue. (Ideology and technology in Theater.

A talk with leaders of independent collectives, 12 декабря

1933)

All art, even those plays or pictures that claim the greatest

extremes of representational or documentary realism (e.g.

naturalism) is uslovno in the sense that those aspects of their

form or style that convey versimillitude—to specific audiences—do

so because they resonate through layers of conventionally

associated relationships:

In every country art can be receives as realistic if it is

built according to rules that are customary for its poeple.

Should we really classify Egyptian art as formalist? It is

sometimes interpreted as stylization, but the Egyptians

could have taken its conditions as necessary. The Chinese

person understand what happens on a Chinese stage, he reads

4

what seem to us these scenic hieroglyphs, freely penetrates

the contents of a play acted by Mei Lan’fam, because Mei

Lan’Fam speaks in the language of art already conventional

for that place, that nationality. (Чаплин и Чаплинизм)

Psychological Realism then, too, had come to seem real not

because it had finally unveiled reality, but through its

conventional familiarity (in part a familiarity based in social

norms and patterns). Realism’s modes of tracing individualized

biographies as they progress towards a goal over an obstacle rely

upon very specific, historically developed modes of telling

stories through categories of “character” and “chronotope.”

Against psychological realism (and forms of naturalism, too)—

which deny their conventionality and relativity—Meyerhold

championed a theater of theatricality, that is, a theater that

would recognize (and in this he often quoted Pushkin) that the

laws of art are not the laws of life: theater should not be

content to copy life.

Meyerhold also stood against Literaturnost’ in his

theatricalized theater. He is often quoted for the phrase: “Will

they soon inscribe on the theatrical tablets the law: the word in

5

theatre is the design across a canvas of movement? (Балаган, 1912). On the

surface of it, it might seem that he thus stands against language

as a whole, as well as, for instance, against literary

formalists’ calls to examine “the word as such.” This is,

however, only a surface distinction: while Meyerhold and the

literary Formalists may focus on different media in which

semiotic forms manifest (e.g. words vs. gestures, print type vs.

costume, phoneme vs. lighting change, etc.) Meyerhold still lines

up with other formalists in the way in which he stresses

relations among forms. Their senses of the relativity of

conventional signs—of signs’ dependence upon a system of other

related forms and materials within a stylistic system—are in fact

parallel, and quite similar.

Meyerhold’s antipathy, really, is directed less towards the

forms that come into play when one attends to the “the word as

such” as it is towards the power of the literary author—the

authority of the playwright in the theater.1 When Meyerhold 1 The full quote: Чтобы пишущего для сцены беллетриста сделать драматургом, хорошо бы заставить его написать несколько пантомим.Хорошая "реакция" против излишнего злоупотребления словами. Пустьтолько не пугается этот новоявленный автор, что его навсегда хотят лишить возможности говорить со сцены. Ему дозволено будет дать актеру слово тогда лишь, когда будет создан сценаґрий

6

lifts a carpenter’s words out of their print context and sets

them against those quotations of Hegel, that act reflects his

agnostic attitude towards “the word” of authorial authority,

embodied in the script, not antipathy towards any and all

“words.” It signals his mistrust of ideologies about theater

that prescribe that stage performances should accurately

reproduce “the script.” In many of his writings, Meyerhold

continues to oppose literaturnost’ (literariness) in the theater: the

actors should not serve the script, but the audience in front of

them. It is the director who is the one who knows how to mediate

this contact, not the author, who more often than not, composes

not with space and time, gesture and sound in mind, but shadows

in mind of past lines from past texts. It is the director who

sees the stage in the moment, who thinks in terms of

Theatricality—of those conventions of costume or bodily rhythm,

make-up, mask, and movement that can shake or rouse an audience.

The job of the director, one might say, is to correct the text,

to boil it to the bone, down to the dancing skeleton of the story

in motion.

движений. Скоро ли запишут на театральных скрижалях заґкон: слова втеатре лишь узоры на канве движений?

7

The job of the director who wishes to innovate, moreover, is

to make decisions about how to combine conventions in new ways

that will both trigger and unsettle familiar associations. This

may require, for instance, dismembering literary structures and

reassembling them in ways that resonate with stage movements—or

even with current events off stage—instead of with other texts or

novels. It was according to this principle that Meyerhold broke

Ostrovskii’s Forest (and later, Gogol’s Revizor) into episodes, took

them out of their realist temporal sequence, their straight line

of narrative progression, and rearranged them into a montage of

thematically evocative clusters: “The five acts in Ostrovsky’s

play were chopped up into 33 episodes that conflicted with each

other. This, of course, affords a преимущества to act upon the

spectators.» (On Chaplin and Chaplinism).

Having recognized the inherent Theatricality and stylization

in all theatrical genres, we become free to manipulate

conventions at a meta-level, to resituate forms in relation to

each other, and in relation to actors and audiences, “to stir the

pot.” New juxtapositions and formal play with conventions, it

was hoped, would spark thus reflexivity. Without using the term

8

ostranenie, Meyerhold campaigned similarly for attention to

fictionality, and for productions that would make theatrical

conventions themselves their own topic, that would leave

representations incomplete, inviting audiences to actively fill

the gaps with their own memories and thoughts, that would bare

the stage machinery and devices of illusion and make the familiar

strange.

Juxtapositions

Of all possible ways to bare the device, material

juxtapositions and temporal rearrangements—what in film would

come to be reworked as montage—were Meyerhold’s preferred

methods. These juxtapositions need not be stark. Think back to

Gladkov’s memoir: when Meyerhold reads from the carpenter’s

handbook, his progressive shifts in seeming seriousness never

quite clearly demarcate a shift to irony. But that is the fun of

it: he quite ambiguously animates that unexpected voice. If we

9

may mix Voloshinovite and Bakhtinian terms, we might say he

affects a subtle quasi-double voicing. In this he showcases a

virtuosic talent for mobilizing estranging juxtapositions to

emotional effect, as we can see in his a special fondness for

mixing horror and hilarity.

Most likely, Meyerhold came to his insights about

juxtaposition and relational meaning without having read Saussure

on difference—on meaning as a product of relations among

signifiers and among signifieds—as had Moscow literary Formalist

critics. More likely he came to this inclination after thinking

through his earlier encounters with literary contrasts of prosaic

and profane in masters of the fantastic, such as E.T.A. Hoffman.

At the turn of the century, Meyerhold writes of the power of

“grotesque” juxtapositions to provoke a sense of meta-awareness

of form and meaning in a way that seems to foreshadow ideas later

developed further in Shklovky’s writing on ostranenie:

The grotesque, seeking the supernatural, is tied into a

synthesis of contradictory extracts, and creates a

phenomenal picture, leads the viewer towards an attempt to

solve an unsolvable riddle. . . Is this not the task of

10

stage grotesques, to constantly hold the viewer in a

condition of this double relation to scenic action, changing

his movements with contrasting strokes? (The Show Booth).

The kinds of juxtaposition that first interested Meyerhold are

significant to understanding not just his logic, but his

preferences and style. What especially caught his attention were

grotesque melds of human-animal or human-object. He often quotes

from Hoffman, who describes а quality he called “familiar-alien”

in the hybrid figures inhabiting 17th century paintings where

peasants dance under musicians perched in tree branches like

birds; in drawings of the saints’ temptations where little devils

11

blow from flutes protruding from their anuses or fire from gun

Hoffman’s own illustration for DasFremdeKind.

Barrels pointing out their noses. Such mixtures, according to

Hoffman, “Open to the serious and deep observer all the secret

hints hidden under the cover of the comic» (quoted in Lecture 13

Сценоведение, 23 Aug1918).

Meyerhold claims that such artistic play with fantastical

juxtapositions and hybrids of animal-human are a way that, from

the beginning of humanity, people attempted to transcend daily

12

life. To, via pantomime hunts, costume feathers and tiger face

paint, become other than the self:

You see here, in the moment of theater's birth, the urge to

set humans next to animals and to make no difference

between them. Humans want. . . to stop resembling

themselves. . . (Lecture 13, Сценоведение 1918)

Of course, in recounting observations of rituals and

entertainments in far-away places Meyerhold made the assumption

common at that time—that one can project such observations into

the distant evolutionary past. Here he shared much with others of

the avant garde (especially those who passed through Symbolism or

into futurism).

Meyerhold’s first impulses against realism indeed tended

towards representations of the extra- or super-natural—but with

the goal being to prepare audiences to accept that “when, in the

art of the grotesque, in the war of form with content, the first

prevails, then the spirit of the grotesque will become the spirit

of the stage. . .the fantastic will play with its own

pecularities» (The Show Booth). Soon enough he would channel the

imperative to alter or intensify theatrical perception and

13

experience through other sorts of material juxtapositions. By the

time of the Revolution, he intensifies his experiments with

movement, and with using material constructions to alter

arrangements of space and time, and he begins to engage

scientific discourses about the body and its nervous energies, as

represented in the writings of scientists such as Pavlov, Taylor,

Bekhterov.

Meyerhold did adapt these discoveries about the body to

authorize and explain the need for developing what he called the

actor’s ideal рефлекторнaя возбудимость/reflex exciteability.

However, it is crucial to recognize that he always subsumed the

teaching of biomechanics—minutely precise as its exercises might

be—within a larger framework of theatrical practice that demanded

teaching actors to be aware of relations among all the material forms

and physical bodies on the stage. It is such relational awareness

that allows for virtuosic theatrical play. So, for instance, the

actor, in parallel with learning biomechanical exercises (to

which we will return separately below) must also study raccoursi—

the effects of various angles and perspectives, of the effects

14

created by shifting angles of perception, or by shifting

positions of bodies and objects relative to each other.

The actor needs to understand how varying positions and

poses of his body—relative to other bodies and objects on the

stage, relative to distances from and angles shown to the

audience—will effectively frame the meanings and emotional forces

that audiences may apply to gestures and facial expressions.

Meyerhold gives the example of a toy known to his readers (he

15

calls her “BiBaBo”): we may see the doll as one minute laughing,

the next as crying, even though its face never moves. The

secret, he asserts, is not in the facial expressions themselves,

but rather depends entirely on relative changes in angles and

perspectives, achieved through skillful arrangement of the body

on the stage. A good actor, for instance, should always make his

first entrance with his eyes level to the horizon: that way any

changes of glance vector or tilt of the head—up, down, left right

—will register as meaningful to the audience. (The situation of

the Actor, graduated from ГЭКТЕМАСом при Театре им.

Вс.Мейерхольда KITM).

Materiality and Agency

16

That Meyerhold chose, as Gladkov recounts, to read from a

cabinet-making handbook and not, say, a handbook on etiquette—

that is, from a text that detailed precisely the treatment of

wood and nails—hints to his long-term interest in the

possibilities of material forms. Or, more precisely, in the

possibilities afforded by human engagement in the constant

reconstruction and rearrangement of forms:

Any art is built upon its own limitations. Art is always

and before all a war with materials (Principles of

Biomechanics. Course1921-1922 Материалy, собранные

М.Кореневым. KITM p. 29)

Psychological realism, Meyerhold frequently maintained, had

ceased to struggle with, and instead had come to rely upon

particular arrangements of materials. Stage architecture,

including the arrangements of lights and the proscenium arch,

bore most of the burden to frame stage dialog and action—in the

case of realism, as if they were all happening in a “here and

now” separate from the audience. These architectural conventions

dovetailed all too smoothly with domestic scales and styles,

17

creating an audience that becomes an accidental voyeur just

beyond the invisible domestic “fourth wall” (or, as Meyerhold

liked to put it, “at the Keyhole”). Worse, the audience becomes

passive captive to this “stage box, presupposing and counting on

illusion” (Reconstruction of the Theatre, p.195), even inclined

to discuss about the play no more deeply than to debate how well

or poorly the crew had emulated the sound of rain on the windows.

In building a new kind of Theater, a first task was to

eliminate the balconies and special boxes: an amphi-theatrical

arrangement, for instance, would inhibit divisions of spectators

into first, second, even third class. Having broken down such

social boundaries, a theater of vast size would allow audiences

1000s strong to wind up that sense of collective energy here-to-

for known only in sports arenas, or else marshaled not by the

people themselves, but by forces such as the Vatican (or else

dissipated in the endless spectacle of street market activity, as

in Paris).

Most of all, the amphi-theatrical arrangement of space in

the hall would afford the possibility to stage a new kind of

spectacle, one that would be co-created jointly by the actor and

18

audience together. The audience would no longer be passive:

Every play that is put on now is produced with the intention

to call the spectators’ hall to participate in completing

the play. In dramaturgy and in technique, the modern

director activates his machines with the calculation, that

the play will be created not only by the power of the actors

and the scenic machinery, but also by the powers of the

audience. (195)

Along the way, such a new theater would finally overwhelm the

inertial tedium of the “stage box.” The new stages, with

protruding prosceniums and revealed carpentry, would allow

artists to overcome the dull, overworked supports of realism

(such as the Unities of place and time), that squeeze a play’s

action into three or four unbearable, slow acts. The new material

arrangements would allow quick and limber scene changes.

19

A stage without doors or curtains, with movable platforms and

pulleys (both up and down, and across the stage)—in short, a new

form of kinetic construction—would afford new material

possibilities for the transformation of actors’ play on stage,

and its expansion across new dimensions.

Reflexivity, mirroring, and biomechanics

Materially speaking, according to Meyerhold, if the theater—

even the reconstructed, new, Soviet theater—should be stripped of

all its lights, ramps, props, and if all that were left were the

actors alone, with their mastery of movement, the theater would

20

retain its theatricality. In fact, actors can make theater

anywhere they happen to be: in a field, on any street corner

(here we see early arguments for what others would later call

“poor theater”).

In the movements of the body, in the collective rhythms of

bodies in motion: this is where Meyerhold described what he saw

to be condensed principles of theatricality, at their source.

Like Futurist and Symbolist poets and others of the avant-garde

of the time (Ivanov looking back to Greece, Scriabin to India,

the Futurist poets to “Scythian” sounds), Meyerhold saw essential

forms of movement hiding in the most “ancient” of dances, games,

21

carnival as the sources of stage art (see On Dramaturgy and

Culture of the Theatre, 1921).

In his earlier writings, he often emphasized return to past

celebrations of movement over text in drama, interpreting dance

and pantomime as pathways to stir feeling and expression. After

the revolution, he shifted the point from which he anchored his

arguments for the teaching methods that would emphasize the

primacy of movement, and wrote of the inevitability that bodily

motion and action would induce emotion in the language of

sciences of kinetics and gravity:

But this movement is of the sort such that all those so

called “living through/experiencing” arise from its process

– with just the unstrained ease and confidence with which a

ball thrown in the air falls to earth. (On Dramaturgy and

Culture of the Theatre, 1921)

Note that «living through/experiences», above in quotes, is a

reference to Stanislavsky’s studio work, and an invitation to

contrast the way the two positioned bodies and gestures in their

approaches to creating and conveying emotion on stage:

One flicker of the hand decides the authenticity of the

22

labored particle “ach,” which the

“living through-er/experience-er” tortures out of himself,

alternating it with his impotent exhale. … the only right

way to construct a scenario: the movement births the cry and

word.

Such statements too often have been taken as a mechanical

assertion of the primacy of material over spirit. Indeed,

Meyerhold did privilege the body—but he never envisioned the body

as separate from the mind. To the contrary, his system depended

on a vision of body/intention/mind/emotion all working and

responding together. Meyerhold had no wish to create an army of

actor-robots, as some have come close to asserting.

Not a few of those Western visitors to the USSR who met

Meyerhold in the 1930s most likely would have interpreted his

play juxtaposing carpentry instructions with Hegel with flat-

footed seriousness: “See: he reduces artistry to the assembly

line. Theatrical art as building cabinets, indeed.” Alma Law

addresses (p.2) describes such accounts of Meyerhold’s

biomechanics in the West—as machine-like, mechanical style—as

misinterpretations “sometimes based on a single photograph.”

23

To be sure, Meyerhold (as did Mayakovsky of making poetry)

spoke of theatrical work through metaphors of craft and form.

But the actor was not to become a mindless machine: mastery of

forms of movement, the cultivated ability to simultaneously

perform and to break down any gesture was intended to hone the

ability to mindfully see one’s own body as it engages with other

spaces and bodies, as in a mirror. The actor was always to

remain aware of her duality as both artist and object of art, and

to do this must develop the ability to “mirror” the self and

others. To act while simultaneously seeing the self and the

action from the outside—and also to respond to others and to the

outside.

24

Meyerhold’s references to Taylorism, Gastev, Pavlov and

Bekhterev have been overstated in many sources, while his

attraction and references to animals, to fantasy, Asian

performance practice, and to the Grotesque have been relatively

understated, especially in the West. As a result, the ways such

influences actually informed and shaped his understandings of

reflexivity have been glossed over. Attending to them reveals

that while Meyerhold indeed advocated that artists of the stage

concentrate first on developing control over external forms, he saw

external and internal, mind/body, as intimately connected.

Meyerhold often referred to the ways Kabuki actors studied

their roles in front of a mirror, developing a fine sense both of

static elegance and of formal relations among movements. If we

go beyond simply mentioning this influence, as most sources do,

and pause to look more closely at the ways “The Forms,” or Kata

are practiced in Kabuki (and in related martial arts systems), we

may be able to speculate about what has been missed by those who

would focus on biomechanics in isolation, or on a single

photograph or image of biomechanical training. Kata, like

biomechanical exercises, are central to the “basic training” of

25

the Kabuki (or martial) artist. Like biomechanical routines,

they too appear ordered, down to every angle and micro gesture.

However, those patterns do not determine the final improvisations

of staged drama or combat, for which the player or fighter must

respond to other actors and audience as a story or situation

unfolds. In fact, kata, like biomechanical exercises (or like

jazz scales), are structured to prepare repertoires of creative

response—to cultivate nervous reactivity—to external forces and

to the movements of others. Kata are sometimes described as a way

to keep “two things in sync” or harmony with one another. If one

observes the sequences of movements in, for instance, Shotokan

karate katas (such as one named Gojushiho-daj, which is said to

depict conflict in terms of “returning waves” of energy), one

can see how even the solo performer of a kata practices readiness

to refract, redirect, and return the blows of imaginary

opponents. Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises likewise were

structured to place partners in sensitive opposition one to the

other, to pay attention to others’ bodies.

Biomechanics, then, is not a method for training puppets,

but a way for actors to learn self-reflexively—and non-

26

referentially—how to estrange the usual automatic engagements of

the body with the material world, and to thus intensify awareness

of those engagements (to make the stone stony, in Shklovsky’s

terms). Biomechanics, far from teaching simple, empty

repetitions, is a transposition of something like what Jakobson

would call the poetic function in language to the movements of

the body: it is a way to train actors to address the forms and

gestures of the body at a meta-level, with the body about the

body.

Absent Presence: Meyerhold in and beyond Theater

There are many who have claimed that Meyerhold’s innovations

—especially in biomechanics—disappeared with him. Nevertheless,

27

at the same time, the international theatrical world seems

cyclically to claim to have “rediscovered” him, or to have

“reinvented” some of his favorite appropriations from Commedia

dell’Arte (such as extended prosceniums, elimination of the

curtain, theater in the round, etc.). In the former USSR, by the

mid-1950s, directors argued to rehabilitate Meyerhold, and by the

early 1960s once again very publically subverted or broke the

fourth wall, drew attention to the artifices of staging, and

worked to blend the worlds of audience and actor. Thus, in fact,

fifteen years of official silence was not long enough to make his

students, as a generation, forget Meyerhold. Some theaters and

studios were experimenting again with “non-realist” styles even

before Krushchev’s secret speech (see Houghton 1962, reporting on

a staging of Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug in Moscow in 1955). The

1950s had not ended when Nikolai Okhlopkov, former student of

Meyerhold, and later artistic director of the Mayakovsky theater

published his controversial article in Teatr 1959, Об условности:

“The new world is too new and grandiose, too romantic and poetic

to be shown within the frame of the traditional everyday-life

play and old theatrical techniques.” As Alma Law points out (and

28

she derives this conclusion from various non-official sources,

such as film clips, photos, notes, and conversations with

teachers who still remembered him) there was much more continuity

than some might think, even through Stalin’s time. We know that

many in the acting academies—at GITIS and elsewhere—continued

teaching with Meyerhold’s architectural and biomechanical

principles in mind, even during times when his name was not to be

mentioned.

Moreover, if the principles of biomechanics really do work

at a meta-level, through a reflexive, what I would like to call a

“bio-poetic function,” then their continuity was no simple matter

of un-reflexive mimesis, because they always suggested unspoken

ironies—unspoken in words, but uttered all the same.

To see that Meyerholdian aesthetic principles of contrast

and estrangement have become increasingly familiar in Moscow and

beyond, one has only to browse through theatrical publicity

photos of the last decade. Since the end of the 20th century and

turn of the 21st, some of the most striking, moving, and popular

productions have involved orchestrations, at grand and minute

scales, of scenic elements and actorly gesture that would have

29

made the man both proud and envious. One finds disarming and

poignant play with shifting prosceniums, with contrastive

raccourci, with precisely choreographed bodily movements—and not

only on any of the main stages in the capital, but also in the

diploma productions of the theatrical institutes.

For readers of this collection, who may be more broadly

interested in Meyerhold’s contributions to and echoes with

Formalist thought, and in Formalist contributions to social and

cultural theory, there is also more to say about how Meyerhold’s

thinking is currently poised to make waves internationally,

beyond theatrical practice.

For instance, Meyerhold may prove particularly useful for

scholars thinking about what is being called, by some, a “post-

human” world. In many ways, Meyerhold was well before his time,

thinking about cyborgs and avatars long before scholars such as

Latour or Haraway were claiming to have discovered the material

agencies of human-non-human assemblages or NatureCultures. For

Meyerhold, we have always been—or have always wanted to become—

not only-Human. One can imagine Meyerhold’s probable delight in

Russia’s grotesque Gogolian-inflected, Cyber-punk fictional

30

characters of recent decades, from Tolstaya’s Slynx and Pelevin’s

telepathic foxes, to Bekmambetov’s changeling bears and vampire

bureaucrats. And what would Meyerhold have made of an on-line,

late night, international gathering of furries on Second-Life?

Meyerhold would not fear “new media” for being “new,” nor fret

overly much over the allegedly addictive dangers of sacrificing

“real” life to participate in “the virtual”—for Meyerhold, human

life in art has always been virtual. To learn to move between

those ontological orders that we define and redefine as “real”

vs. “unreal” makes us smarter, more empathic, more alive—way not

maximize their differences?

31

Utopian as this may seem to many, Meyerhold nevertheless

also offers a powerful corrective for the tendencies of many of

us inclined to throw all forms and structures off the steamship

of post-modernity. For some time, perhaps more troublingly in

some parts of the world than others, social theory and cultural

studies forgot, or deliberately denigrated, the importance of

paying attention to particular contrasts among material forms and

patterns—once one has deconstructed a structural binaries of some

ideal master category, we can have done with those nasty forms!

Meyerhold reminds us to pay attention to the pleasures and risks

for real people when they play with contrasts among forms, and to

the structural affordances that make estrangement possible or

not. Imagine Meyerhold at an important meeting where people are

quoting from Baudrillard, Delueze and Guattari, Butler, Zizek….he

pulls from his backpack a weathered copy of Mastering Color Knitting:

Simple Instructions for Stranded, Intarsia, and Double Knitting…

Additional Sources

Edward Braun, Meyerhold on theatre. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969).

32

Gladkov, Aleksandr and Alma Law, Meyerhold Speaks/Meyerhold Rehearses (Russian Theatre Archive). (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publichers, 1997).

Гладков А. К. Не так давно. Мейерхольд, Пастернак и другие… [cб. воспоминаний: «Пять лет с Мейерхольдом»; «Встречи с Пастернаком»; Другие воспоминания ]. М.: Вагриус, 2006.

Law, Alma H. and Mel. Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and biomechanics: actor training in revolutionary Russia (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1996).

Houghton, Norris, Moscow Rehearsals: An Account of Methods of Production in the Soviet Theatre. (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1936).

Houghton, Norris, Return Engagement: a Postscript to Moscow Rehearsals. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961).

Leach, Robert. Vsevolod Meyerhold, Directors in perspective (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Охлопков. Н. Об условности. Театр, 1959, № 11, с.77

Posner, Dassia N. A Theatrical Zigzag: Doctor D’appertutto, Columbine’s Veil, and the Grotesquw. Slavic and East European Performance, Vol 29, No. 3: 43-53. 2009.

Рудницкий К. Режиссёр Мейерхольд. (Москва: Наука, 1969). 

33