Movement for Actors (Second Edition)

Nicole Potter, Barbara Adrian, Mary Fleischer, Nicole Potter, Barbara Adrian, Mary Fleischer

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781621535430
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Actuación y audiciones

In this updated rich resource for actors, renowned movement teachers and directors reveal the physical skills needed for the stage and the screen. Readers will gain remarkable insights into the physical skills and techniques used in a wide variety of performance styles through ready-to-use exercises and approaches. Included in this new edition are chapters covering: Stage combat
Yoga for actors
Martial arts
Body-mind centering
Authentic movement
Bartenieff fundamentals
Grotowski-based movement
Those who want to pursue serious training will be able to consult the appendix for listings of the best teachers and schools in the country. This inspiring collection is a must-read for all actors, directors, and teachers of theater looking for stimulation and new approaches.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

PART ONE

A Little History

PREVIOUS PAGE: Chaplin, dancing his joy in The Floorwalker—a moment before being knocked down yet again.

Biomechanics: Understanding Meyerhold’s System of Actor Training

Marianne Kubik

Movement is the most powerful means of expression in the creation of a theatrical production. Deprived of words, costumes, footlights, wings, theatre auditorium, and left with only the actor and his mastery of movement, the theatre would still remain theatre.

—Vsevolod Meyerhold in 19141

The end of last century witnessed the resurrection of a technique for physical actor training that was first uncovered at the very start of it. Russian pedagogue Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940)2 developed a system of acting based upon the premise that “any art is the organization of material,” and in the art of theater, the actor is “at one and the same time the material and the organizer of it.”3 He coined the term “biomechanics” as it applies to acting and used it primarily as a teaching tool, or a means to an end, although what often came out of his classroom work was directly inserted into his highly stylized productions.

Fortunately for Meyerhold, both Imperial and Soviet Russia were receptive to his work throughout most of his career, appointing him to directorships with the Imperial State Theatre (1908), the State Higher Theatre Workshops (1921), and the State Institute of Theatre Art (GITIS) (1922). By 1926, his theater company, one of several he had founded, was officially recognized as the Meyerhold State Theatre, and his work was hailed by some as “Revolutionary Theatre in the Name of Meyerhold.” 4 While Meyerhold pledged allegiance to Bolshevism, however, he held greater personal allegiance to his art and theater pedagogy. He was interested in the socialist propagandist plays of the period because of what they offered him in his exploration of new theater forms and in the advancement of his career. Once propagandist writers began to lose their literary spark, Meyerhold moved on to material that explored more innovative theatrical ideas, going beyond constructivism toward formalism and the avant-garde.

The political tide began to turn against him in 1934, when Stalin mandated that the only acceptable form of Soviet art would be socialist realism, which Meyerhold the artist had moved well beyond. By 1936, he became victim to a vicious political campaign that pitted artist against artist in an attempt to abolish formalism and force allegiance to socialist realism. Both Meyerhold and his theater came under public attack, and in 1939, he was arrested by the Soviet government, interrogated, tortured, and forced to falsely confess rebellion against his country’s ideology. Awarded the title “People’s Artist of the Republic” a decade before,5 Meyerhold was shot in prison in 1940 and never referred to publicly for over thirty years. To Stalinist Russia, it was as if he and his achievements disappeared from history.

Meyerhold’s influence lived on secretly in the work of two former students: Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker, and Nikolai Kustov, the actor in the famous photographs brought to the United States by Lee Strasberg in 1934. Western practitioners had to rely on these stills, past accounts by foreign visitors to Meyerhold’s classes, and scant writings on the subject to define the concept of biomechanics, let alone utilize it in actor training. Biomechanics began to earn a reputation for being a static technique, where the actor moves like a machine, and it certainly held little strength against the widely popular Method approach.

In 1972, the Moscow Theatre of Satire assumed great political risk by inviting Kustov to train a select group of actors in the still-forbidden technique. Gennadi Bogdanov was one of eight students who received formal training from Kustov for three and a half years until his death. Bogdanov is currently the only one of the original eight who teaches biomechanics, and he is, therefore, the closest living link to it as a practical technique.

I had the opportunity to study twice with Bogdanov and Nikolai Karpov,6 in 1993 at the Institute in Meyerhold’s Theatrical Biomechanics hosted by Tufts University and in 1995 at the Moscow School of Theatrical Biomechanics hosted by the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (formerly GITIS, of which Meyerhold was founding director). My understanding of biomechanics as a system of actor training comes from my research and analysis, my formal training in the practice of the technique, and my incorporation of it into my courses for American actors. One can never duplicate the work of Meyerhold, and an attempt to do so would be for the sake of historical reconstruction. His ideas, and his practical instruction, however, live on in the work of those who teach and study biomechanics in order to understand the limitless possibilities of physical communication as applied to acting in the twenty-first century.

THEORY AND TECHNIQUE

There is a misconception that Meyerhold is the antithesis of Stanislavsky. Although Meyerhold left the Moscow Art Theatre in 1902 because of artistic and personal conflicts,7 he and Stanislavsky maintained a mutual respect for the other’s artistic endeavors throughout their careers. What Meyerhold learned from Stanislavsky is that every dramatic action requires justification; what he discovered for himself was a different means to the same end. He felt that Stanislavsky focused on developing the inner life of the actor at the expense of the physical. Actors inherently knew how to think, feel, and remember, believed Meyerhold; what they could not realize for themselves was how to dramatically express such thoughts and emotions through their body and voice. This was an actual skill in need of development.

Meyerhold trained his company of actors in a variety of physical skills to provide a solid awareness of balance, control, and expressive ability in the acting instrument. By 1915, his “Studio Programme” consisted of classes in ballet, music, athletics, gymnastics, fencing, juggling, pantomime, diction, and vocal production. With his students, he developed a series of exercises that applied this foundation work specifically to theatrical performance. Influenced by science, technology, and kinesiology, he established an entire system based on the creation of efficient and effortless stage movement. By 1922, this system was publicly known as “biomechanics,” the analysis of the mechanics of the acting instrument in order to fully integrate it into performance. What follows is a description of the ideas behind the system, delineated in no particular order of importance, as they are all interrelated and essential to one another.

The Actor Has a Dual Personality

Meyerhold was influenced by the acting theory of Constant-Benoit Coquelin, who believed in the “dual personality” of the actor: “He has his first self, which is the player, and his second self, which is the instrument.”8 Meyerhold “borrowed” Coquelin’s formula for acting verbatim, stating that

N = A1 + A2

where N is the actor who is made up equally of two selves, A1 and A2. A1 is the first self, the player of the instrument; it represents the metaphysical actor, or the conceiver of the idea. A2 is the second self, the instrument played upon; it represents the physical actor, or the executor of the idea. While the muscles of the metaphysical actor (A1) are stretched and strengthened through an ongoing process of self-discovery, life experience, and the imagination, the muscles of the physical actor (A2) require a more conscious stretching and strengthening through intense physical training.

In rehearsal, it is the A1 who determines what the A2 will execute. In performance, it is the A2 who allows what is behind the A1 to come through. In other words, once the actor has consciously choreographed his movement to his character intention, it is then the movement that provides the form through which the character emotion flows. Otherwise, the emotive performance by the actor becomes a cathartic experience for himself alone; the audience cannot experience the actor’s intention, no matter how much he means it, if it remains locked inside an unskilled body and choking out an underdeveloped voice.

Meyerhold believed that, because art represents not a copy of life but the dramatic truth in it, art must be a conscious process, with the actor making choices about how his intention is best to be expressed: “The art of the actor consists in organizing his material: that is, in his capacity to utilize correctly his body’s means of expression.”9 The actor is at the same time the organizer of his material and the material itself.

Movement Is the Result of the Work of the Entire Body

A visitor to Meyerhold’s class in 1933, André Van Gyseghem observed that an actor “must be able to use his whole body as an instrument to play upon. His mind and body must be in complete harmony. What he understands with his mind he must be able to express with the movement or non-movement of his body.”10 In order to achieve this, the actor’s body must be in a constant state of equilibrium, continually making adjustments in order to find maximum expressiveness. The slightest move of an arm, or even a finger, causes a shift in the scales of balance and counterbalance, and the rest of the body must find the most efficient adjustment to maintain equilibrium, which is why “when the tip of the nose works, so does the entire body.”11

In life, a body can be in a state of balance; on stage, it must be in a state of equilibrium. A body in balance is a stable force, an aesthetically pleasing integration of the equal and opposite influences acting upon it; it is what Eisenstein referred to as a static pose. A body in a state of equilibrium is alive and dynamic, even in repose, continually moving in reaction to the forces acting on it and inside of it, playing between the balance and counterbalance; it is what Eisenstein called a raccourci. This is a conscious act, as both the A1 and A2 of the actor must remain in a constant state of readiness, prepared to work against the forces of gravity and momentum to maintain dynamic expressiveness. It is movement working with countermovement; it is equilibrium.

The Body Is the Machine, the Actor the Machinist

If one looks at how the musculoskeletal system of the human body is designed to provide a useful system of levers and counterbalance, one will see that the essence behind each movement as Meyerhold devised it is inherent to the body. He did not invent it; rather, he accurately surmised it through both careful observation of the body in space and through his own natural instinct for movement. His logical and scientific mind made connections between the human body and the physical world around him, which is why he was readily influenced by American industrialist Frederick Winslow Taylor’s study of “motion economy” on a factory production line. Meyerhold connected Taylor’s model of the skilled factory worker to the Soviet concept of a “new worker” of the theater, believing that one must observe in both the absence of superfluous or unproductive movements and correct positioning of the body’s center of gravity, rhythm, and stability.12 Taylor’s “work cycle” became Meyerhold’s “acting cycle,” involving a studied relationship between movement and rest that would enable the worker, and Meyerhold’s actor, to produce the most efficient performance with the least degree of effort.

Combining Coquelin’s idea of the dual personality with Taylor’s system of worker efficiency, Meyerhold compared the A1 and A2 of the actor to the machinist and his machine. If a factory worker can learn to work with his machine efficiently, then the production line is an effective one. If the actor can uncover for himself the complex workings of his own machine, his acting instrument, then his dramatic actions will be equally effective while particular to the work of the performer. Add to this the human capacity for thought and emotion, and the human machine in performance excels beyond any other.

The acting cycle is not foreign to life, observed Meyerhold, but sorely neglected on the stage. Because he saw theater as theatrical rather than lifelike, he concluded that every theatrical moment should be executed to its fullest. Through a careful study of the muscular coordination and system of levers already inherent in the human form, the actor can make ...