Biomechanics (Meyerhold)

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Biomechanics is the name of a method for teaching acting and performing on stage, which was developed in the 1920s by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold .

Meyerhold's teacher Konstantin Stanislawski had already worked on the practical problem of how an actor could spontaneously find his way into a required emotion . After the attempt to start exclusively from inner experience had failed, Stanislawki worked with postures and other "external" suggestions in order to get the actors' emotions going.

Meyerhold took up this approach and, even more than his teacher, assumed precisely defined movement structures and postures. In doing so, he took up a technique that was famous before 1900 as the Delsarte system .

Biomechanics reversed the idea that movements and postures are an “automatic” consequence of inner experience for the actor and explained that his physiology determines the mental state of the character being played.

In the background of these ideas stands the fascination for technology in the time of futurism and silent films . Suggestions came from psychotechnology , which started out from the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg . Anatoly Wassiljewitsch Lunacharsky also provided cultural-political impulses . The rediscovery of popular theater forms such as the Commedia dell'arte , the influence of East Asian theater such as the kabuki or the abstraction and depersonalization efforts in the artistic avant-garde promoted a physically accentuated game of the stage actors, to which Meyerhold wanted to give a methodical basis with biomechanics.

According to Meyerhold's system, acting training, like music lessons, is based on “ etudes ” which, as basic elements of movement, are in turn brought together in a cycle.

Biomechanics influenced Bertolt Brecht's theatrical aesthetics . More recently, for example, the director Thomas Ostermeier has taken up Meyerhold's suggestions. In Germany, Meyerhold's biomechanics is taught at the Athanor Academy for the Performing Arts by the actor and director Philip Kevin Brehse in Passau and at the New Drama School in Nuremberg.

literature

  • Jörg Bochow: Meyerhold's theater and biomechanics , Berlin: Alexander 2005. ISBN 978-3895810077
  • Alma Law / Mel Gordon: Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics. Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia . McFarland & Company. Inc. Publishers. 1996