The Studio on Povarskaia 1905: “Young Theatre of Searching”

ABSTRACT

The emergence of Symbolism in Russian theatre was a turning point for both Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, prompting the former to set up a studio in 1905 to experiment with the new drama. Accounts in English of the Studio on Povarskaia, as it was to be called, have tended to view it largely as a failure. On the contrary, the Studio process was important not only as an experiment with Russian Symbolist theatre but as a catalyst for both Stanislavsky in the development of the System and for Meyerhold in the development of his method, eventually to be termed Biomechanics. This essay makes use of Russian sources and archival materials to examine comprehensively, for the first time, the Studio’s importance as the starting point for both Stanislavsky’s and Meyerhold’s methods of actor education. The discussion also clarifies widespread misunderstandings of the work of both directors, which continues to be highly significant today.

KEYWORDS:

• Stanislavsky
• Meyerhold
• actor training
• Symbolism
• actor’s plastique

Introduction

The emergence of Symbolism in Russian theatre was a turning point for both Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, prompting Stanislavsky to set up a studio in 1905 to experiment with the new drama. Meyerhold, a founder member and actor at the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) had left, at Stanislavsky’s request, in 1902. Meyerhold founded an experimental Company of Russian Dramatic Artists in 1902, then Comrades of the New Drama in 1903. Figures in the Russian Symbolist movement such as poets Valery Briusov and Aleksey Remizov were associated with these companies. Stanislavsky asked Meyerhold to lead the new Studio, in fact the very first theatre “studio,” which lasted from May to October 1905. It was a controversial venture from the start: Jean Benedetti describes in Stanislavsky: His Life and Art how Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder of the MAT, who had originally taught Meyerhold acting, disliked the improvisatory direction Stanislavsky’s work with actors was taking. Nemirovich-Danchenko attributed Stanislavsky’s new approach to what he saw as the “malign influence of Meyerhold.”¹ Benedetti also details Stanislavsky’s substantial financial investment in converting a barn at Mamontovka, near Pushkino, into rehearsal premises, and in a 1,200-seater theatre on Povarskaia St in Moscow for the Studio’s performances. Stanislavsky was impressed with the first showing of work in May 1905, while busy with his own work at the MAT. Political unrest culminated in the autumn uprising, which began more or less at the same time as the dress rehearsals for the Studio work.

Accounts in English of the Studio on Povarskaia, as it was to be called, have tended to view it largely as a failure. Benedetti concludes that “[w]ork which seemed impressive in a converted barn proved inadequate in a fully equipped professional theatre.” He adds that Stanislavsky “contributed […] to the fiasco.” Meyerhold’s staging of Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles opened in semidarkness with the cast almost in silhouette – a staging innovation at the time. But soon, Stanislavsky

insisted that the lights were brought up […] the audience needed to see the actors faces […]. The increased lighting revealed the painful truth, the inadequacy of the young cast, who wavered between an uncertain realism and equally uncertain stylization. […] There had not in Stanislavski’s or in Briusov’s sense been a genuine breakthrough.²

Similarly, Rebecca Gauss, while detailing Meyerhold’s experimental process, concludes that the dress rehearsal of The Death of Tintagiles “verged on disaster.”³ Robert Leach, acknowledging the reactions to the work were somewhat mixed, states that “Stanislavsky was extremely disappointed and decided, reluctantly to postpone the opening.”⁴ Other accounts in English include that of Béatrice Picon-Vallin who briefly mentions the Studio in her account of Meyerhold’s Studio and Workshops, concluding “the experience ended badly”⁵ and that of Maria Shevtsova who concludes that the closure of the Studio “only reinforced Stanislavsky’s sense of the gaping holes in his theatre project.”⁶ However, a different picture is offered by publications in Russian drawing on archival resources. On the contrary, the Studio process was important not only as an experiment with Russian Symbolist theatre but as a catalyst for both Stanislavsky in the development of the System and for Meyerhold in the development of his method, eventually to be termed Biomechanics. Olga Radishcheva writes:

It had become clear to both […] that acting technique for the new art was lacking. […] Searching in the Theatre-Studio unexpectedly opened up before them the path to the creation of the different schools; Meyerhold’s biomechanics and Stanislavsky’s “system.”⁷

Though it was a development of all his earlier work, it was not until after the 1917 revolution that Meyerhold began to call his method “Biomechanics,” but Stanislavsky famously began to formulate his System while on holiday in Finland in 1906, the year after the closure of the Studio.

This essay makes use of Russian sources and archival materials to examine comprehensively, for the first time, the Studio’s importance as the starting point for both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold’s methods of actor education. The discussion also clarifies widespread misunderstandings of the work of both men. From the beginning, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold took different approaches to “the eternal problem of the inside and outside, inner emotion and external technique.”⁸ Meyerhold is reported to have said “Konstantin Sergeevich and I look for the same things in art. Only he goes about it from the inside out and I from the outside in.”⁹ The interpretation of Stanislavsky’s System as working from the “inside out” has led to Stanislavsky being widely viewed as preoccupied with the internal, confined to psychological naturalism at the expense of external expression and incapable of stylization. And Mel Gordon and Alma Law and many others have asserted that the basis of Biomechanics is the belief that the adoption of an external pose or movement is enough to generate emotion in the actor. They write that in Meyerhold’s view, “to trigger the sensation of fear, a person would only have to run – with his eyebrows raised and pupils dilated […] an automatic reflex signifying fear would be felt throughout his body.”¹⁰ In contrast to such reductive interpretations of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold’s work, my examination of the Studio on Povarskaia indicates the beginnings of Meyerhold’s and Stanislavsky’s different pathways in theatre work and yet how much they had in common. Both were pioneers of the art of the director, both had a profound aspiration to develop the art of the actor, and for Russian theatre to be influential throughout the world.

The Crisis of Naturalism and Actor’s Plastique

At the point where Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to work in the Studio, Stanislavsky, like other artists in the period, was in an artistic crisis as ideas from the Naturalist movement of verisimilitude and historical accuracy in staging, specifically the influence of the Saxe-Meiningen theatre, had lost their appeal for him. His productions at the MAT of Anton Chekhov’s plays and plays such as Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths in 1902 had brought the theatre great success, but Stanislavsky was dissatisfied. The production with Nemirovich of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1903 with detailed historical accuracy was seen by Stanislavsky as starting the theatre on a “downward path.”¹¹ Just previously, Briusov had published his article “Unnecessary Truth,” criticizing the MAT’s realistic sets, props and costumes, and an acting style that limited the imagination of the audience.¹² Briusov contrasted uslovnyi theatre, a theatre of convention, with realism. Meyerhold’s Symbolist experiments were to develop an avant-garde conventionalized theatre. Benedetti writes that Meyerhold, returning to Moscow to lead the Studio in March 1905, had “passion […] energy; he was extreme, he was intransigent” and that Stanislavsky responded to Meyerhold’s outpouring of ideas with “the enthusiasm of a man dying of thirst,” believing him to be the right person “to extend […] the work of the Moscow Art Theatre and provide a way out of an artistic impasse¹³ as Stanislavsky’s own attempts to find a way out of the crisis had so far proved fruitless.

A major question was how to educate the actor in plastique. The term plastique, originally adopted by theatre from ballet, indicated exercises done to promote suppleness and also an aspiration for movement to be expressive and harmonious. In the mid-nineteenth century, in Russia, plastique came to mean the sculptural expressiveness of the body and effectiveness of poses.¹⁴ Shcherbakov writes that “plastic theatre,” indicates “theatre which consciously refuses to pronounce words on stage and takes as its communicative means the language of movement, the whole variety of plastic expressiveness of the human body.”¹⁵ While the early twentieth-century avant-garde rejection of the text and celebration of the language of the body was more important for Meyerhold, both he and Stanislavsky, before beginning the Studio, took on the challenge of finding a new way to develop actors’ plastique, particularly in relation to Symbolism. Emerging ideas of plastique for the avant-garde were contrasted with the plastique of the Naturalist or realist theatre. Stanislavsky, always looking out for falseness in acting, abhorred the clichéd gesture of romantic or melodramatic theatre of the previous century, the “stencils” he criticized so widely, wanting the language of movement and gesture to be “natural,” as in life. This was a recurrent challenge: he and Olga Knipper-Chekhova were once improvising a scene from Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country in 1909 outdoors, and in their roles of Rakitin and Natalya Petrovna walked along a path speaking the text, then sat on a bench (a stage direction in the play):

I stopped, unable to go on. With living nature all around my acting seemed false.And to think it had been said that we had pushed simplicity to the point of naturalism! How convention-ridden what we usually do on stage actually was.¹⁶

While Meyerhold argued the fruitlessness of pursuing observation of trifling details of everyday life in order to develop a role,¹⁷ Stanislavsky, at the time of the Studio, was seeking plastique that would be truthful, “as in life,” but somehow went beyond this to suit the new plays. He was anxious that the theatre would remain dependent on “crude naturalism” and writes of the superconscious as the key, describing it as “artistic truth, whispered to us by nature,” the search for spiritual connection beyond everyday individual experience. He later defined the superconscious as beyond crude actor’s technique, the region beyond conscious every-day sense experience, the region of intuition:

The superconscious elevates the human soul. […] However, the essence of art and the main source of creativity is hidden deeply in the depth of the soul of the person; there in the very centre of spiritual life, there in the inaccessible region of the superconscious where there is the source of living life, the main centre of our nature, our sacred “I,” inspiration itself.¹⁸

Symbolism

In the late nineteenth century, French Symbolist writers, including Maeterlinck, had begun a critique of Naturalist and realist theatre. Theatre could never realize the poet’s dream-like vision. The materiality of the actor’s body resisted symbolism and robbed the art work of what Maeterlinck called its “mystical density.”¹⁹ It could only demonstrate exteriority, could not evoke inner truth.²⁰ Theatre denied the audience an opportunity to create, to respond with their own imagination to what was experienced by the author; using symbols was the ideal way to stimulate an audience in this way. Influenced by Ancient Greek tragedy, Maeterlinck developed mystical drama, aiming to express the impossibility of comprehending the universe for human beings. While he rejected organized religion, theatre held the significance of a temple for him, as Meyerhold put it,²¹ a temple in which people could contemplate the greatness of Fate and their own insignificance. Maeterlinck and other artists such as Edward Gordon Craig turned to the marionette or the puppet, and for Maeterlinck the marionette represented how human beings were controlled by Fate. He wrote The Interior, The Death of TIntagiles, and other plays for marionette theatre. This idea of the marionette also signalled a revolution against the notion of “character” and the notion of the actor’s body and voice as the means of expression of character. Lives of individuals were not the subject of plays so much as ideas, images, symbols. The Symbolists rejected the realists’ supposedly objective observation of everyday life. Gerould writes:

By the introduction of total subjectivity into drama – that mirror of a supposedly external reality – the symbolists imagined a new theatrical world, polyphonic in form and irreducible to rational analysis or univocal interpretation, and thereby opened the world for thesubsequent avant-garde movements that have dominated the stage in the twentieth century: expressionism, futurism, dada, surrealism and the absurd.²²

Meyerhold and Stanislavsky grappled independently with the question of the actor’s material body in relation to plastique. When previously the actor’s art and artistry had been in the truthful expression of character and emotion, how was the actor’s body and movement to express otherworldliness, ideas, images, symbols?

Russian Theatre and Symbolism

At Chekhov’s prompting, in 1904, Stanislavsky began his experiments in Symbolism with an evening of Maeterlinck’s short plays – The Blind, The Intruder, and The Interior – as a development of what he called the Line of Symbolism and Impressionism.²³ He wrote specifically of the work on Ibsen, that “our kind of symbolism sprang not from feeling but from thought. It was artificial, not natural […] we did not know how to refine our interpretation into a symbol.”²⁴ The plays, translated by Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, were all on the theme of Death, the inevitable Fate of human beings, largely static, with repetitive poetic speech alternating with silence.

A new approach to stage time and space was needed and Stanislavsky’s first instinct was to find a way to innovate previously established realistic set conventions. He chose not to work with Viktor Simov, the chief scenic designer at MAT since its foundation, but with young Armenian painter and sculptor Vardges Sureniants. Sureniants created sets where there was still realistic representation and yet hints of a new kind of theatricality, attempts to capture the intangible, influenced by Impressionism. In experiments with space in The Blind, tree branches disappeared into the sky.²⁵ In The Interior, extra-large windows were intended to draw the audience’s attention into the house. Stanislavsky attempted to find an expressive style of speech and to suggest the deeper mystical reality with unusual stage effects such as shadowy action behind a transparent fabric, and extensive musical accompaniment. The show opened in full darkness and a musical prélude lasted for several minutes to “prepare the audience for the eternal conflict between physical, earthly desires and unknowable spiritual forces of Maeterlinck’s mysterious world.”²⁶ But the evening was not well-received; critics detected different acting styles, mystical, romantic and everyday realist acting, which did not capture Maeterlinck’s symbolism. The tragic tones were not really Stanislavsky’s. In a tongue-in cheek letter to his friend, actress Vera Kotliarevskaia, he wrote, “I am immersed […] in the darkness of death and trying to look beyond the threshold into eternity. […] Obviously I need to get intoxicated. Where shall I turn, to women or to wine?”²⁷ Yet the staging of Maeterlinck’s one act plays was the beginning of Stanislavsky’s development of a new acting approach that would enable actors to move beyond individual character, reaching towards what he saw as the “eternal and general.”²⁸ Later, the overall aim of the System was to develop the sphere of stage realism so the art of the theatre could express the life of the human spirit, go beyond the personal talents of the actor and touch the superconscious, Stanislavsky’s term for that which in Symbolist thought, lay deep within the psyche.

In 1905, experimenting further with the new approach was the incentive for the opening of the Studio on Povarskaia. Stanislavsky wanted to see what Meyerhold could discover in view of what had happened in his own experiments with plastique. In the period of the crisis of Naturalism, when theatre was in “a blind alley,” Stanislavsky felt he was going on stage “empty inside with nothing more than my external actor’s habits with no inner fire.”²⁹ He turned to visual art, where the crisis had first been felt and painting was seen as discovering new expressive possibilities with the development of Impressionism and Symbolism. He describes standing in front of a painting by Mikhail Vrubel, who was important in the development of Russian Symbolist art. He writes:

I try mentally to get inside the frame, to slip into the picture so as to become part of its mood and become physically accustomed to it, not from the outside but from the inside, like Vrubel himself. But the inner content the picture expresses is unclear, inaccessible to the conscious mind, it can only be felt in certain moments of insight, but once felt is quite forgotten. During the superconscious flashes of inspiration, it seems that Vrubel passes right through you, your body, muscles, gestures and stance so that they begin to express the essential meaning of the painting.³⁰

But in attempting to repeat the experience in front of a mirror all he saw was posing, clichés. He questioned whether the problem was the materiality of the body or a lack of a method for plastique. Deciding that the task was not impossible, and inspired by other art forms and artists where ways to express what was abstract and elevated had been found, Stanislavsky became interested in Meyerhold’s work, expecting “superconscious flashes of inspiration, the discovery of new horizons.”³¹ He saw Meyerhold as someone from a new generation, whose youth could sense what was not accessible for older people.

In the experiments with his companies, which had a scandalous reputation, Meyerhold had begun looking for a new acting technique based on the unification of the various elements that make theatre performance, on the principle of “above life” rather than Stanislavsky’s “as in life.” In Meyerhold’s conception, it is the director who would create the ideal, spiritual world on stage and find “a stage language adequate to smooth out the great contrast between the earthly reality of the actor’s body and the cosmic abstraction of the new plays.”³² Furthermore, his interest in Symbolism, along with that of others of the Russian artistic intelligentsia, was a response to the political problems of the country that culminated in the 1905 riots, and the fateful sense of alienation and helplessness they experienced. Briusov wrote, “I do not see our reality. I do not know our century.”³³ Symbolism aspired to find the world of true being, bytie, through the world of art, transforming the experience of everyday reality through connection to the spiritual second reality. The sense of waiting for immense, predestined events in Maeterlinck’s plays (echoed by Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard in his own poetic realist way), entered into Russian Symbolist poetry as a reflection of the revolutionary movement. The drama that emerged from the Symbolist movement was

more sacred – or sacrilegious – than secular, returning theatre to its ritual origins, found not in everyday life experience but in man’s eternal bonds to the unknown, to the mystery in man himself and in the universe as he journeys over the abyss towards extinction.³⁴

And mystery, as conceived by Russian poet and playwright Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nietzschean theorist of Russian Symbolism, was a dramatic genre through which the Theatre of the Future would develop. One of the main aesthetic aims of Russian Symbolism was to comprehend the nature of art itself. Meyerhold’s task, therefore, was to stage mystery, to explore the nature of the new drama and to find a technique for Symbolist acting, freeing words and movements from the task of realistic representation.

The Studio Opening, May 1905

Briusov and other figures in the Russian Symbolist movement were invited to be part of the Studio personnel. Stanislavsky stated the Credo of the Studio, the very first theatre laboratory: “Now was the time for the unreal on stage. We needed to depict life not as it is in the real world but as we are vaguely aware of it in our dreams and visions, our moments of exaltation.”³⁵ Stanislavsky’s main aim for the Studio was to find an entire new basis for Russian theatre and for the studio participants ultimately to take roles of responsibility in the MAT, spreading its influence throughout the whole of Russia.³⁶ In his opening speech, he emphasized that however great the talents of individual performers were, “the time of temperaments on stage has gone.” He stressed that theatre did not have the right to serve art alone, it should respond to the social mood, be a teacher of society.³⁷ S.A. Popov, responsible for supervising the financial aspects, recalled that the Studio was envisaged initially as “a widely conceived social affair.” Stanislavsky was convinced that the aim of renewing Russian theatre would meet support, specifically from Moscow’s young merchant class, his own class, which was participating increasingly in widening cultural movements, and “in the eyes of whom Stanislavsky’s authority stood high.”³⁸ On the other hand, Meyerhold wanted to create a new theatre, linked with “its older brother – the MAT” but completely independent,³⁹ not imitative, and holding that “only individual art is beautiful.”⁴⁰ Happily, the differing aims co-existed at the stasNart and Stanislavsky allowed Meyerhold independence in developing the Studio.

In May, a plan emerged for a repertoire where both Meyerhold and Stanislavsky would direct experimental and traditional plays. There were daily discussions at Stanislavsky’s home, in which Briusov and other literary advisers took part. Stanislavsky had planned to direct Alexander Griboedov’s Woe from Wit at the MAT and to create Griboedov’s Moscow with exactness. He had also planned to direct Knut Hamsun’s The Drama of Life with conventionalized touches unknown before at MAT.⁴¹ Thus, he had established two courses for the Studio to take,⁴² that is, both traditional plays, where a new staging approach would be taken, and experimental work.

Meyerhold was politically ambitious for all the work, seeking the “dynamite” that would destroy the old world, with plays by Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Maeterlinck. One of the plays he intended to direct, The Death of Tintagiles, concerns a Queen who possesses complete control over her servants and people and has murdered most of Tintagiles’ family. Despite efforts to protect him, Tintagiles is imprisoned by the Queen and killed. Alluding to Russia’s social problems, Meyerhold wrote a speech he intended to give to the audience: “you will not just see a Symbolist play […] the island on which the action takes place becomes our life. […] On our island, thousands of Tintagiles, suffer in prisons.”⁴³ Another aim of his was for the performers to work in an experimental and collective way, which was a problem from the outset. He wrote in a letter to Vera Komissarzhevskaia in 1904, “as a director I value actors with initiative, not in a subservient role.”⁴⁴ In all his future studios, he invited the participants to collaborate with him. And in all his studios there was a conflict between Meyerhold “the Master” and his pedagogical approach where studio participants were expected to share responsibility in the experimentation. Meyerhold contrasted two types of actors, those who possessed individual creative flair and those who imitated the great actors of the past.⁴⁵ The first kind needed a new school of acting. In the Studio on Povarskaia, there were actors who had been involved in the Comrades of the New Drama and from the MAT theatre school who understood the enormity of the task of searching for a new theatre. But the majority were from the MAT theatre school and wedded to the way the established theatre worked.

Finding Conventional Staging

Despite the problems, over the short existence of the Studio, Meyerhold made significant discoveries in the search for a conventional theatre, firstly, in conventionalizing the stage setting, secondly, conventionalizing speech and vocal expression and, thirdly, in finding a conventionalized plastique. He wrote that, “[t]o create a plan for […] [a] Conventional theatre, to master a technique for it we must start with hints from Maeterlinck.”⁴⁶ Maeterlinck had written of an everyday tragedy, “more in keeping with true existence than the tragedy of great adventures” in Le Trésor des humbles (1896):

I have come to think that an old man, seated in his armchair, simply waiting beside the lamp, listening […] that this motionless old man was living in reality a deeper more human and more general life than the lover who strangles his mistress, the captain who wins a victory or the husband who avenges his honour.⁴⁷

Maeterlinck wrote of “Static Theatre” and Meyerhold asserted the need for a “Motionless Theatre,” and that it was not new, writing in 1907 that the best of the Ancient Tragedies are in fact motionless tragedies, “models of the dramaturgy of the Motionless theatre. […] [T]here is no psychological action, let alone material action or plot. […] The tragic axis is Fate and the position of Human Being in the Universe.”⁴⁸ The foundation of Maeterlinck’s dramas was the idea of a Christian God together with the ancient idea of Fate. Meyerhold wrote of Maeterlinck that he “heard people’s words and tears as a muffled sound falling into an abyss […] from a vantage point beyond the clouds,” wanting to evoke “humility, hope, compassion, fear” in the perception of Fate. The aim of the Studio production was to find the simplicity of the plays which “transports one to the realms of fantasy, a harmony which brings calm, joy”⁴⁹ to produce this effect of reconciliation. To open up a way to Motionless Theatre, Meyerhold innovated the MAT practice of the famous Chekhovian pause, with its internal dynamics expressing subtext and the poetic rhythmicity of his language including incomplete utterances.

Work on The Death of Tintagiles began with the MAT’s usual approach before rehearsals. Nemirovich-Danchenko advocated the director developing their ideas fully before beginning work with the actors. To find the tone of the play, Meyerhold studied Pre-Raphaelite art, history of costume, and primarily the London magazine called The Studio, An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. This was a fine arts and decorative arts magazine published from 1893 until 1964 and a major influence on the development of the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements. It featured the work of Charles Rennie MacIntosh and C.F.A. Voysey, George Frederick Watts, of illustrators, crafts people, and sculptors. Meyerhold selected images of paintings, engravings, stained glass, objects such as enamel boxes, and sculptures, material that suggested ideas for poses and movements of characters, making sketches of hand positions and turns of head which would influence the stylized plastique of the production. Ideas for costume and hairstyles, which would contribute to the image of character, and ideas for stage properties were also formed.

Next, with the same instinct as Stanislavsky in relation to the engagement of a designer, Meyerhold began working with young visual artists on the staging design. In his previous company, frustrations with set designers wedded to realistic techniques had pushed Meyerhold to the point where in a production of Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski’s Snow in Kherson, he had immersed the stage in darkness to create new moods and so as to disguise the lack of correspondence between the set decoration and his artistic ideas.⁵⁰ Now, he found collaborators in artists Sergei Sudeikin and Nikolai Sapunov, also Nikolai Ulyanov, who worked on Hauptmann’s Schluck and Yau. They all wanted to “burn and trample” the outdated techniques of naturalistic theatre.⁵¹ Meyerhold wrote that with the artists he was able to find a collaborative approach and to “get to know the unknown.”⁵² Sudeikin and Sapunov worked on The Death of Tintagiles in the Decorative style. Their main innovation in the preparatory work was to reject the established technique of developing maquettes or models of the set, working instead from sketches, producing delicate painted panneaux as background for the actors’ plastique. These replaced naturalistic stage set and furniture and were intended, along with rooms that had no ceiling and columns that were entwined with vines, to suggest space extending beyond the Queen’s castle. Decorative panneaux served for a number of Meyerhold’s productions including Hedda Gabler (1906), Sister Beatrice (1906), and Pélleas and Mélisande (1907) at Kommisarzevskaia’s theatre, until he concluded that a two-dimensional backdrop was not the best background for three-dimensional human figures in movement.

Conventionalising Voice and Movement

In early June, the Studio transferred to the converted barn in Mamontovka. A series of productions of experimental and traditional productions were planned, including work by Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Przybyszewski, Briusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and others. Acting roles, production, and directorial responsibilities began to be assigned with V.E. Repman, G.S. Burdzhalov, and Meyerhold as directors. Stanislavsky was to be involved at a later date. Work began on rehearsals for several productions at the same time: Meyerhold intended to use methods of working intensively that he had developed with his experimental companies. A company member noted that in the summer months, during work on The Death of Tintagiles, “a completely new atmosphere, a real theatre emerged”⁵³ as Meyerhold’s experiments with conventionalizing voice and movement progressed.

He began rehearsals finding new methods with the company, and the actors read excerpts from Tintagiles in the French original. Instead of psychological motivation for dialogue and experiencing specific emotions, the actors were to experience the form and not “allow temperaments to erupt until the point where they had mastered the form.”⁵⁴ The form here was a melodic structure of speech and choreographed plastique. Meyerhold wrote, “our starting point was worship,”⁵⁵ seeking the sound of “a chorus of souls singing sotto voce of suffering, love, beauty and death.” To express Maeterlinck’s mystery, “mystical vibration, and not the emotional tremolo of realist acting should be conveyed through the eyes, the lips, the sound and manner of delivery.”⁵⁶ In experiments on Snow with Meyerhold’s previous companies, a system of pauses and “mystical accents,” a term Remizov had invented,⁵⁷ had defined the rhythmic structure of phrases and the rhythm of stage experiencing, which was so different from that of everyday life. This meant disrupting logical sentence structure and breaking up phrases into incomplete utterances, with surprising rhythmic ruptures. Internal connections in the dialogue were broken apart, so for example, the dialogue of three women servants was turned into a single monologue, spoken as a chorus, the idea being that they spoke to the force of Fate above and beyond human existence.⁵⁸ Notes to the actors preserved in the archive emphasized:

1. Experience of the form and not experience of single psychological emotions.

2. A smile for all.

3. Never tremolo.

4. Read the lines as if there were hidden in every phrase a profound belief in an all-powerful force.

5. Firmness of tone, since blurring the sound will make it sound “moderne.”

6. Motionless theatre.

7. Do not drag out the end of words. The sound should fall into a great depth. It should be clearly defined and not tremble in the air.

8. Like a piano. That is the reason for no vibration.

9. Not speaking in a rapid pattern. Epic calm.

10. Madonna-like movements.⁵⁹

In a later summary of the voice and speech experiments entitled “Diction,” Meyerhold wrote that he and the actors, in avoiding psychology and actor’s tremolo, intuitively found a bright, cold sound in rehearsals. He coined the term chekanka⁶⁰ for speech free from vibration, plaintiveness, and tension. The sound should always have support, the words should fall like drops into a deep well, the clear strike of the drop sounding without trembling of the sound in space. He went on to assert that mystical vibration was more powerful than the “temperament” of the old theatre, beating of chests, and so on. Rather, “the internal tremor of mystical vibration is reflected in the eyes, on the lips, in the sound, in the way the word is pronounced. This is external peace of volcanic experiencings.” Another point was that the “experiencing of heart-felt emotions, all the tragedy, is indivisibly linked with the experiencing of the form, which is inseparable from content, as it is inseparable in Maeterlinck.”⁶¹ To contrast the new tragic expression with acting from “temperament,” he gave the example of the Dominican fifteenth-century friar Giralamo Savonarola’s descriptions of Mary witnessing the death of Jesus:

If an actor of the old school wished to move the audience deeply, he would cry out, weep, groan, and beat his breast with his fists. Let the new actor express the highest point of tragedy just as the grief and joy of Mary were expressed: with an outward repose, almost coldly – without shouting or lamentation. He can achieve profundity without recourse to exaggerated tremolo.⁶²

The majesty of tragic experiences should be expressed “with a smile on the face.”⁶³ All the vocalization and dialogue sounded against a background of music, composed by Ilya Satz, intended to draw the audience further into the world of Maeterlinck’s play and to convey meaning. Satz’s music as response to the prayers and curses of the character Ygraine conveyed a “certain echo, a certain base hateful ‘cursed’ unearthly mocking.”⁶⁴ Meyerhold drew from Early Renaissance painter Botticelli’s picture Derelicta⁶⁵ for the plan of the fifth act and according to studio member Valentina Verigina, this conveyed the “empty sound of despair.” In the culminating moments, where the greatest intensity of feelings had built up, and where in naturalistic performance there would be a cry, it was replaced by an unexpected intense silence.⁶⁶ Donatella Gavrilovich conjectures that on a recent visit to Italy, Meyerhold had seen Agostino Fonduli’s sculpture of 1483, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, writing that “[n]o cry is heard, yet the viewer ‘hears’ the scream that tears the soul because the sculptor has created a ‘theatrical silence.’”⁶⁷ Thus, Meyerhold innovated the Chekhovian silence, with the internal dynamics of tragic subtext, and in stillness artistic energy was held with intensity, an intensity which should have an ecstatic quality.

Conventionalising Plastique

The work on plastic expression took place at the same time as the work on vocal expression, but the approach to conventionalizing movement was formulated later. As mentioned, Meyerhold determined that the form of the role was equally the rhythm of language, with the mystical accents and silence and the rhythm of the movements, and only when both aspects were mastered could emotion or temperament be unleashed. He coined the term risunok (literally picture or drawing), writing that “for Motionless theatre a technique of Motionlessness, a technique which considers movement as plastic music and as the external risunok of internal experiencing (movement is the illustrator), is necessary.”⁶⁸ Restraint of gesture and economy of movement were preferred to commonplace gesture. There were to be no superfluous movements in order not to distract the audience’s attention from complex internal experiencing, which can be “overheard only in a whisper, in a pause, in a faltering voice, in a tear clouding the eye of the actor.”⁶⁹ There are two dialogues, one “externally necessary,” i.e. the words accompanying and explaining movements, and constructed so that characters are required to speak a minimum of words while the action contains a maximum of intensity. The audience should “overhear” the internal dialogue or experiencing, not in words but in pauses, not in cries but in silences, not in monologues but in the “music of plastic movements.”⁷⁰ New forms of expression were needed to reveal Meyerhold’s internal experiencing and to fulfil Briusov’s desire for “conscious conventionality” where the artist is freely revealing his soul⁷¹ to the audience. Meyerhold began to find a new form by placing the actors on the stage in the situation of bas-reliefs from frescoes of the Middle Ages, particularly of Madonna.

The study materials from The Studio – An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art enabled him, according to Verigina, to “saturate […] his imagination” in search of a plastique expressing “tender mystery.”⁷² Meyerhold also drew motifs from illustrations by Charles Doudelet for the edition of Twelve Songs of Maeterlinck⁷³ and the Arnolfini portrait of Jan van Eyck74 was also significant in developing a system of decorative plastic motifs. These included inclining the head or bowing, varied repeated placements of arms and hands, together in prayer or crossed, with closed fingers or open hands (with the palms facing up). Poses expressed humility, blessing, solace; there were kneeling figures with hands together in prayer and a gaze directed down or towards heaven. There were also poses expressing powerful impulses, despair, or terror. There were frequent compositions of women’s figures in pairs, one placed behind the other and also compositions suggesting a mise-en-scène for the atmosphere of different episodes of the play.⁷⁵ In July, when the plastique of the production had begun “to acquire a most interesting and new savour,” the style that was coming together from these various sources was defined by the working term “Botticelli.”⁷⁶ As mentioned, Botticelli’s picture Derelicta (1495) was a significant source for sound, as well as for atmosphere and plastique.

When contrasting his new plastique to that of truthful expression of everyday movement on stage, Meyerhold termed it statuesque plastique. The precise and dynamic mise-en-scène of bas reliefs punctuated the musicality and rhythmicity of plastic movement. In August, Meyerhold noted that in comparison with the bas reliefs the gait of the characters seemed “everyday”⁷⁷ and the company worked to overcome this lack of correspondence in style (as mentioned, the task was for the actors to find “Madonna like movements”). Meyerhold termed the style of plastique he sought icon-like⁷⁸ “severely beautiful,” perhaps drawing from a term used to describe the style of eleventh-century Byzantine icons. The style of the production therefore arose from Meyerhold’s creative fusion of many impressions from a range of sources and also came to be defined as “primitive” style.⁷⁹

From this experiment, Meyerhold was to develop the idea of “Plastique that does not correspond with the words. […] Just as Wagner uses the orchestra to speak about internal soul experiencings so I use plastic movements to speak about them.”⁸⁰ This was central to his later work. He explained that the director works with the writer’s themes to produce risunok of movements and poses expressing the truth of relationships between friends, enemies, or lovers on stage, so that the audience not only hears the words but can also penetrate into the internal hidden dialogue in the same way as the director and the actors. The risunok can transform the audience into the position of “an astute observer […] who can define the characters’ spiritual experiencing. Words are for the ear, plastique for the eye. The spectator’s fantasy works with the power of two kinds of impressions, visual and aural.”⁸¹ He emphasized that the main difference between the old and the new theatre is that in the new theatre plastique and words are each subjugated to their own rhythm, and the two rhythms do not always coincide.

Studio member V.A. Petrova was recognized as largely succeeding in her role and according to Verigina it was only in the final scene that Petrova’s acting leaned towards realism, with a hysterical note to her voice.⁸² Otherwise her subtle nuances made the role of Tintagiles “symbolic of the soul.”⁸³ She thus conveyed the symbolic generalization Maeterlinck had proposed in the way Meyerhold had wanted the actors to construct the roles: to free them from psychological motivation and everyday colouring, to constrain them with conventional form, to keep them to the internal rhythm of silences and utterances, using stillness and movement that prevented melodramatic expression of temperament, while preserving experiencing.

The Closure of the Studio

As discussed, Stanislavsky did not “accept” the production and, in his view, there was not sufficient inner life. In analysing what had happened, Meyerhold recognized that the new principles of plastique and speech had not blended with the set design⁸⁴ nor with the orchestral music. He and Satz had placed a heavy load on the music to express all the external effects of the play, such as the wind howling.⁸⁵ There was some lack of correspondence between the music and the statuesque plastique and movement. Neither did the plastique correspond fully with the panneau, which was designed for the 1,200-seater theatre and drowned some of the figures.⁸⁶ In the earlier rehearsals in August, the backdrop of simple canvas had defined the risunok of gestures⁸⁷ but this had been lost. And Sapunov and Sudeikin’s design appeared to Meyerhold to be only half-heartedly conventionalized. Despite the hint at a castle with no floors or ceilings, the action still took place in a specific time and space – there was a moonlit night for example⁸⁸ – rather than the design reflecting the symbolism of the play.

Despite the problems, the dress rehearsal should not be dismissed as a fiasco as Benedetti called it or the experiment seen as a failure. Some of the audience at the dress rehearsal were moved by the interpretation of Maeterlinck’s fairy tale as a political allegory of the Russian reality, and its primitive ecstatic form, expressing alienation and general unease. Briusov said it was one of the most interesting pieces of theatre he had ever seen.⁸⁹ But the showing of Schluck and Yau on the same day, which Stanislavsky had worked on in the early phases, was also seen as problematic and with increasing financial pressure and the start of the 1905 revolution, Stanislavsky closed the Studio. The “Young Theatre of Searching” lasted from 2 May to 24 October 1905 and was dissolved by December that year.

The Beginnings of the System and Bomechanics

Briusov wrote that the experiment showed it was impossible to create a new theatre on a previous foundation. Either it was necessary to continue building the Antoine-Stanislavsky Theatre, or to start again completely.⁹⁰ Meyerhold’s exploration of the nature of theatricality and technique for Symbolist acting, freeing words and movements from the task of realistic representation, was significantly furthered in the Studio experiment. In May, the principle of stylization, which he later formulated as that of “conventionality, generalization and symbol” had emerged⁹¹ and formed the beginnings of plastic theatre and twentieth conventional and stylized theatre. In Meyerhold’s search for a theatre that would resonate with the social and political mood of the time, he began work which was to be widely influential within Russia and beyond, significantly initially on Bertolt Brecht.⁹² Meyerhold’s statuesque plasticity was the basis of his later very successful productions of plays such as Sister Beatrice and Pelleas and Melisande. He also found the principle of plastique that does not correspond with the words, central to his work where plastic movement can work in counterpoint to text and text can be disrupted, one aspect of the polyphony and counterpoint that characterized the musicality of his productions. Pesochinskii asserts that today’s understanding of performativity and post-dramatic technique derives from the next phase of Meyerhold’s work, that is the Borodinskaia Studio⁹³ for which the work of the Povarskaia Studio was foundational.

Meyerhold prioritized the visual in his theatre and thus developed a new relationship with the audience. A crucial part of the audience’s creative involvement was visual engagement. His experiments after the Revolution with what he termed tsenovedenie (scenology) – how the actors’ movement in space and engagement with partners, how the construction of the stage space by directors and designers, and the risunok of movement and sound acts on the audience – began in the Studio. Movement was central to his theatre and he took influence in the years after the Studio for new ideas of actor’s plastique not from visual art but from the work of Isadora Duncan, Delsartism, and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze as they began to inspire Russian dance and theatre. Significantly, working in the Studio on Borodinskaya in 1912, leaving behind the spiritual aspects of Symbolism, he experimented with popular theatre movement forms, with commedia dell’arte, circus acrobatics, and juggling. He defined his style as grotesque, embracing “expressive movement, mischievous cabotinage, representation; bright comedian costumes; ridicule of psychology; searching for contact with the public, the constant involvement of the auditorium in the playing space of theatrical action.”⁹⁴ All this flowed into Meyerhold’s work after the Revolution when the term “Biomechanics” began to be used. The influence of the Povarskaia Studio experiment can be seen in the use of stillness and movement as emotional expression emerges from stillness in the Biomechanical études. The main compositional principle of biomechanics consists in the delineation of any sequence of movements into chains of three elements: stoika (stance), otkaz (refusal), and posyl (sending). Stoika is a still mise-en-scène, demonstrating that the performer is ready for the following movement. The pause preserves the energy of stoika, which is like a punctuation mark, ‘interrupting the mass of words and organizing it to obey laws of a grammatical form.”⁹⁵ Similarly, raccourci (a term from visual art) indicated a temporary stop of movement, a point of transition in a process intended to engage the audience through its biomechanical construction of the most expressive arrangement, in visual terms of the actor’s body in the stage space.

Stanislavsky and the System

Benedetti summarizes that after the Studio, Stanislavsky “was left with a set of unanswered questions concerning his own art and his future. He could not return, much as Nemirovich-Danchenko would have welcomed it to the old traditional methods.”⁹⁶ Stanislavsky acknowledged that “between the dreams of a director and the realisation there is a great distance […] and that for the new art, what is needed is new actors with a completely new technique.”⁹⁷ He soon got over his disappointment in the Studio and began to immerse himself in explorations of actors’ creativity, with experiments which he said were in the spirit of the former studio. It was in 1906 that Stanislavsky began to formulate what became the System, to enable actors to find the way into the Creative State, to access the superconscious, the development of psycho-technique, always grounded in individual personal experience but going beyond it. He maintained that “Realism ends where the superconscious begins. […] Without realism, almost bordering on naturalism, you cannot enter into the superconscious. If the body is not alive, the mind cannot believe in it.”⁹⁸ From 1907, he found refined staging means that “stage action was irradiated by waves of spiritual energy formerly not in theatre’s power.”⁹⁹ This is what he meant by writing that the MAT wisely made use of the results of the young intellectual ferment, concentration of which was the Studio.¹⁰⁰ The 1908 production of Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird became one of Stanislavsky’s most successful productions. He felt he had finally found a way to stage a Symbolist play with a realist framework. The play is set in the mind of a child and the production reflected that, with the actors’ task to enter the child’s imagination. His experimentation with Symbolism and avant-garde approaches lasted seven years, with his productions of Knut Hamsun’s The Drama of Life as well as The Bluebird in 1908 and Leonid Andreev’s The Life of Man, and his collaboration with Gordon Craig on the staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1911.¹⁰¹ Essentially, the Studio on Povarskaia inspired him to go beyond his Chekhovian poetic realist approach to Ibsen and Hauptmann¹⁰² in his experiments with Nemirovich-Danchenko on realism. While every element of acting should always be justified, they experimented with different kinds of realism, indicated by terms such as artistic realism, refined realism and so on, and Stanislavsky continued his experiments with different work, including grotesque, commedia dell’arte, and opera.

Conclusion

In summary, in plastique Stanislavsky relied on psychologically truthful action, justified by personal experience, and Meyerhold on the musicality of plastic movement, with a precise mise-en-scène of the actor’s bodies on stage, in relationship to the partner, and engaging the audience visually. Aspects of yoga were to become crucial in the System, preparing the ground for Stanislavsky’s continued aspiration for the superconscious and the creative sense of the self on stage to appear. Maeterlinck’s mystery and spirituality was not something Meyerhold continued to pursue as he began to be involved with the Revolution and its ideological emphasis on materialism, biology, and reflex theory. Meyerhold also rejected personal emotional experience as the basis for truth in acting. However, Meyerhold never denied experiencing and his approach to what was “inner” through what was “outer” began to be formed at this early stage in his work. He later developed his understanding of how experiencing is engendered but controlled through the constraints of form and sustaining inner rhythm in Biomechanics. As mentioned earlier, his enthusiasm in the Revolution for the new notion of the reflex have led to reductive interpretations of his work. In 1912, both set up Studios; Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Studio in St Petersburg and Stanislavsky’s First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Despite the differences, the Studios had

the same aim – of educating the actor of the new directors’ theatre, of distinguishing what is the creative freedom of the actor and how this freedom can be combined with the score of the production created earlier, the aim of defining the optimal relationship in the new stage art of what has been set zadannost’ and improvisation.¹⁰³

Meyerhold’s creative individuality, shaped by his political beliefs, his virtuosic musicality, and rhythmicity differed from Stanislavsky’s individuality and commitment to truth. Meyerhold was a tragic artist, moving from the majestic tragedy of Symbolist theatre to the tragifarce of famous productions such as The Government Inspector (1926). The development of the System and his future work was informed by Stanislavsky’s non-tragic, humanitarian world-view. Their world-views differed but the experiment of the Studio on Povarskaia was fundamental in the development of the work of each of the great theatre directors.

Note: translations from Russian texts are my own.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Brian Door for all the support and encouragement of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rose Whyman

Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham, UK and a specialist in Russian Theatre and the science of actor training. She is a member of the Professional Association of Alexander Teachers www.paat.org.uk. Latest publication: “The Science of Acting in the Russian Theatre at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century – From the Modern Epoch to the Avant-Garde” – ScienceDirect. Other publications include The Stanislavsky System of Acting; Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance’ (CUP, 2008), Anton Chekhov (Routledge, 2010), Stanislavski - the Basics (Routledge, 2012), a translation of Biomechanics for Instructors by N.A. Bernstein (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), and a co-authored chapter “Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky’s System and the Moscow Art Theatre” for The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, edited by Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Rose is currently working on a monograph on Meyerhold – Performance in Revolutionary Russia: the Art and Science of Biomechanics – for Routledge.

Notes

1. Benedetti, Stanislavsky,156.

2. Ibid., 161.

3. Gauss, Lear’s Daughters, 19.

4. Leach, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, 58.

5. Picon-Vallin, “Meyerhold’s Laboratories,” 122.

6. Shevtsova, Rediscovering Stanislavsky, 110.

7. Radishcheva, “Ya Vas Lyublyu-vy nie strelyaites,” 266.

8. Muza, “Meyerhold at Rehearsal-New Materials on Meyerhold’s Work with Actors,” 16.

9. Schino, An Indra’s Web, 91fn.

10. Gordon and Law, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics, 36–7.

11. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold, 50.

12. Briusov, “Nienuzhnaya Pravda,” 67–74.

13. Benedetti, Stanislavski, 155.

14. Mironov et al, Teatra’lniye Terminy III, 178–9.

15. Shcherbakov, “O Plastichnom Teatre,” 2.

16. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 212–3.

17. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 25.

18. Stanislavskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, 4, 155–6. Probably written in 1917–18. See Stanislavskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, 4. 476.

19. Taroff, The Spectacle Within, 215.

20. Perez-Symon, After Symbolism, 7.

21. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 132.

22. Gerould, Symbolist Drama, 7.

23. Stanislavsky had directed Gerhart Hauptmann’s Hannele, a Symbolist play in 1896, though without any particularly symbolist approach.

24. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 191–2.

25. Stroeva, Rezhisserskie Iskaniya, 147.

26. Listengarten, “Stanislavsky and the Avant-Garde,” 69.

27. Stanislavskii, Sobranie Sochinenii 7, 287–8.

28. Stroeva, Rezhisserskie Iskaniya, 137.

29. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 243.

30. Ibid., 243.

31. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 12.

32. Shcherbakov, Pantomimy Serebryanogo Veka, 19.

33. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold, 51.

34. Gerould, Symbolist Drama, 7.

35. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 247.

36. Vinogradskaia, Zhizn’ i Tvorchestvo 1, 494.

37. Stanislavskii, Stat’i. Rechi. Besedy. Pisma, 175.

38. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 13.

39. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 89.

40. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold, 53–4.

41. When the production was eventually realized in 1906, some of his audience declared a “Death to Realism!” Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 262.

42. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 18.

43. Rudnitsky Meyerhold, 58.

44. Meierkhol’d, Perepiska, 44.

45. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 52n.

46. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 125.

47. Cited in Leach, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, 46.

48. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 125.

49. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 53–4.

50. Volkov, “Po odnoi rabote niel’zya bylo sudit’ o teatre iskanii,” 258.

51. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 108.

52. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 20.

53. Ibid., 23.

54. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 134n.

55. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 28.

56. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 54.

57. From 1912, Meyerhold used the term “artistic accents.” Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 29.

58. Rudnitsky, Meyerhold, 64.

59. Ibid., 64–5.

60. Chekhanka, literally the coinage or minting (of coins) that suggests a metallic, clear impression of the sound.

61. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 133–4.

62. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 55.

63. Volkov, “Po odnoi rabote niel’zya bylo sudit’ o teatre iskanii,” 260.

64. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 457.

65. Ibid., 544.

66. Ibid., 722.

67. Gavrilovich, “An Unknown Legacy,” 141.

68. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 125.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., 126.

72. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 533.

73. Ibid., 163–4.

74. Ibid., 535.

75. Ibid., 533.

76. Ibid., 30.

77. Ibid.

78. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 136.

79. Primitive is a term which in Meyerhold’s time was applied to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish art. Modern artists venerated the simplicity, sincerity, and expressive power of this art.

80. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 135.

81. Ibid.

82. Verigina in Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 724.

83. Ibid., 30.

84. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 128.

85. Ibid., 244.

86. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 37.

87. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 136.

88. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 38.

89. Meierkhol’d, Stat’i, 105.

90. Ibid., 111.

91. Ibid., 109.

92. See Jestrovic, Theatre of Estrangement, 14–15.

93. Oves, “Liubov” k trem apel’sinam,” 25.

94. Shcherbakov, Pantomimy Serebryanogo Veka, 177.

95. Shcherbakov, “Podrazhanie Shampol’onu,” 399.

96. Benedetti, Stanislavski, 161.

97. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 249.

98. Ibid., 152.

99. Meierkhol’d, Nasledie 3, 13.

100. Stanislavskii, Sobranie 9, 145.

101. Listengarten, “Stanislavsky and the Avant-Garde,” 67.

102. Stroeva, Rezhisserskie Iskaniya, 137.

103. Shcherbakov, Pantomimy Serebryanogo Veka, 178–9.