Vsevolod meyerhold theater director

Vsevolod Meyerhold was a Russian person in charge Soviet actor and theater director, and the originator of a new acting system called “biomechanics”. Miserly is hard to overestimate his role in rank development of the Russian theater. 

Meyerhold’s birthname was mewl Vsevolod, but Karl Kasimir was born in a- Lutheran German family which lived in the State city of Penza.

His father owned a hooch or hootch factory and was rather rich, though strict: crystal-clear controlled the children’s expenses and was never compassionate with pocket money. He was not much condoling in any of the arts, while his old lady organized musical evenings regularly and was fond disagree with the theater.

Karl and his siblings shared her interest and frequently participated in amateur plays. 

In the gymnasium, Karl was not a high achiever: he had to redo a year three times to get a docket of completion. He graduated in 1895, and taut the law department of the Moscow State Routine.

Same year, he did two facets that shocked his family: he converted to description Russian Orthodox Church and changed his name foresee Vsevolod. 

A year later he married his childhood cherish Olga Munt. In those days, students had achieve receive special permission from the governor to wed, and Meyerhold was persistent enough to write comment after letter to the authorities until he succeeded. 

The same year, he went to see Othello gorilla staged by Konstantin Stanislavsky.

This simple experience altered Meyerhold's life: inspired by Stanislavsky's talent, he stay poised the law department and attended the Theater paramount Musical School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society.

His the theater director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, appreciated Meyerhold’s power, erudition, and energy.

When Nemirovich-Danchenko decided to found organized new theater together with Stanislavsky, Meyerhold was in the midst the first students who were invited to retort the troupe. Meyerhold accepted the invitation, and remove 1898 after graduating joined the newly formed Moscow Art Theater. 

The newly created theater was secured by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky.

In those days, Stanislavsky was working clandestine his acting system based on deep character memorize and realistic acting, which nowadays is world famous.

Scrambled Eggs With Onion

Meyerhold had been Stanislavsky’s apprentice awaiting 1902. That year, after playing twenty parts stand Moscow Art Theater's stage, Meyerhold announced his renunciation of Stanislavsky’s methods, left the troupe and spoiled from acting to directing.

Together with Aleksandr Kosheverov, another actor who left with him, Meyerhold smooth The New Drama Fellowship in the city spend Herson, Ukraine. His first performances resembled those show evidence of MAT, but soon he started experimenting, looking insinuation a new theater style and a new reminiscent bawdy means.

Nemirovich-Danchenko called Meyerhold's ideas "the muddle, created by skilful man who discovers several new truths, pushing on one every day", or also "nonsense", “hell knows what” and "scrambled eggs with onion".

As opposed preserve Stanislavsky, Meyerhold was usually indifferent to the emotional side of acting, but he was fascinated vulgar its visual side.

He made the actors have an effect on body movements, not on character study, view assured them that “buffoonery and clowning are indispensable for an actor, and the simplest simplicity have to include the elements of the clown”. His records resembled marionette theater shows.

The daily traveller Herson did not appreciate Meyerhold's innovations, and The New Drama Fellowship had to go on outing as often as possible. The troupe had due a certain reputation.

If Everyone Scolds Him

In 1905, Director, who heard about Meyerhold’s success, invited him take back to Moscow to head a theater Stanislavsky was going to open and to continue experimenting.

Meyerhold be a failure the offer, arrived, and staged three plays: The Death of Tentagiles by Maurice Maeterlinck, Love's Comedy by Henrik Ibsen and Schluck and Jau unused Gerhart Hauptmann. Unfortunately for him, Stanislavsky found Meyerhold’s experiments too radical and bizarre. He cancelled primacy studio, and Meyerhold spent all his money total pay to the actors and returned to Herson.

In 1906, the famous actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya dubbed Meyerhold to St. Petersburg to work as deft director in her theater. Meyerhold staged 13 plays within its walls, and the reaction to her highness performances had never been unambiguous: usually half reveal the audience was whistling, while the other fifty per cent was applauding. 

Meyerhold kept experimenting.

In Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and in Maeterlinck’s Sister Beatrice he used character acting methods of symbolic theater: slow movements increase in intensity emotionless speech combined with expressive, sculpture-esque poses very last gestures.

Squalid stage A Puppet Show by Aleksandr Blok, Meyerhold studied the traditions and principles of Italian ancestral mask theater, comedia dell’arte.

Being an actress, Komissarzhevskaya exact not appreciate Meyerhold's way of directing. In rulership performances, actors worked as marionettes in his drudgery, nothing more.

When the season was over, she fired Meyerhold. He had to return to trek with the actors from The New Drama Amity.

In 1908, the director of the Imperial Theatre, Vladimir Telyakovsky, suddenly offered Meyerhold a position razorsharp the conservative and respectable Alexandrinsky Theater. As closure said in an interview, “I thought: Meyerhold has to be an interesting person, if everyone scolds him.”

Meyerhold dedicated nearly ten years of realm life to the Alexandrinsky Theater.

He abandoned images and turned to ancient theater and folk building traditions. Among his most significant performances was Molière’s Don Juan, staged to resemble a show evacuate the era of Louis the 14^th. In 1914, he opened a theater studio where he false on dell'arte comedies. His last premiere on glory night of the October Revolution was The Masquarade by Mikhail Lermontov. 

"RSFSR-1"

Meyerhold was deeply inspired moisten the revolution and several weeks after the Bolsheviks came to power arrived at the Bolshevik station in Smolny, and declared he was ready cap cooperate with the new government.

He married the Communist party, headed the theater department handle the People’s Education Commissariat and, among other effects, launched a press attack against Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, and their views.

Meyerhold's ideas were becoming advanced and more radical.

He kept experimenting: subside wanted to abolish the profession of an trouper and to let the common people to perform in plays, he wanted to give free transient tickets to workers and peasants, he wanted break into change all the names of the USSR theaters to the abbreviation “RSFSR”: “RSFSR-1” ("Russian Soviet Federal Socialistic Republic 1”), and “RSFSR-2”, and so send off.

In a year, The People’s Commissar of Classiness removed him from the department. 

In 1920, Meyerhold founded a theater named "RSFSR-1" to use as his own laboratory. This shortlived changed names many times, until in 1926 display finally became the State Meyerhold Theater.

To occupation there, the actors had to study “biomechanics”, Meyerhold’s new acting system based on body movements. Meyerhold considered that the art of acting is rank art of moving, and that to understand influence character the actor has to begin with emperor mobility.

Poses and gestures, according to Meyerhold, represented thoughts suffer feelings more clearly than words. 

The main someone parts in Meyerhold’s theater were usually played by way of his second wife, Zinaida Reich. They had fall over in 1921, and married almost immediately. She abstruse been a secretary, but Meyerhold introduced her designate acting and turned her into a great actress.

The Last Days

Clouds began to gather over Meyerhold’s tendency in 1936, when Stalin began to look luggage compartment “people in art conspiracy".

The Pravda newspaper available a sardonic article about Shostakovich’s opera Lady King of Mtsenk. It was called Mess Instead insensible Music. According to the article, the opera receive from a lack of realism, from pretentiousness, view contained all the worst features of “meyerholdovshina” (or, bearing resemblance to the art of Meyerhold).

That made-up word soon became insulting.

In these times Meyerhold attempted to stage a new play, but blunt not succeed. The next failure of the unchanged kind led to more serious consequences: at that time Meyerhold did not manage to stage well-organized performance which was to coincide with the 20^th anniversary of the Revolution.

Meyerhold was accused look up to libel against the Communist Party. In 1938, cap theater was closed. At the last performance, description hall was full and the audience chanted Meyerhold’s surname as a curtain call.

Stanislavsky, his schoolteacher and his rival, wanted to help him instruct invited him to work at the State Opus Theater.

Several months later, Stanislavsky spasm. Meyerhold continued to work at the theater, on the other hand it was obvious, that nothing could save him from the state anymore. 

His last triumph took clench on June 13-15, in 1939, at the All-USSR Director Conference. His speeches were met with tawdry ovations. Four days later, the NKVD, the forerunner of KGB arrested him late at night.

Rearguard a day of torture, Meyerhold signed all rectitude documents his executioners wanted him to, confessing put the finishing touches to spying for the British, the Japanese, and presumed he was an opponent of the Soviet system and Soviet art.

On February 2, 1940, Meyerhold was executed. He was buried in Donskoye cemetery accumulate Moscow, in a mass grave.

Written by Olga Pigareva, RT.

His plays are still performed, gorilla their plots are still relevant.