Meyerhold and the New Millennium

In this article, Katie Normington outlines the increasing interest in Meyerhold's work and assesses previous applications of his methods to contemporary production work. She goes on to consider how working as movement director for Red Shift Theatre Company's adaptation of Herman Melville's short story, Bartleby, enabled research into the application of Meyerhold's system of Biomechanics. Rehearsals for Bartleby combined actor-training and text rehearsals so that the Stanislavskian-trained actors gained ownership of biomechanical principles and could apply aspects to their independent exploration. This article analyzes the results of the work, and concludes that Meyerholdian techniques developed a physical architecture for the performance which, even during an arduous tour, maintained the clear shape and rhythm of the production. The use of principles such as rakurs, often neglected within present-day experimentation, proved to be essential in providing actors with a sense of composition and an awareness of their bodies in space. However, aspects such as facial expression and emotional excitability require further investigation. Katie Normington is Senior Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.