THE COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE ORIGINS OF BIOMECHANICS: Part 1: Actor Training and Collective Creation at Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio

This documentary essay illuminates the commedia dell’arte origins of Meyerhold’s system of biomechanics as developed at the director’s pre-Revolutionary Borodinskaia Street Studio (1913-1917). The aims of Meyerhold and his Studio colleagues were simple yet ambitious: to create a new kind of actor for a new, playful, self-referential, audience-centric kind of theatre. At the heart of their experimental practice was a commitment to reimagining commedia in a contemporary context and to reviving the art of improvisation in Russia. Studio actors-in-training were taught to play with stage objects, to develop keen awareness of their stage environment, to hone physical plasticity that was both precise and heightened, and to devise their own original work. An introductory essay on the Studio’s historical and theoretical commedia context is followed by the first full English translations of four years of Studio class notes by Meyerhold and collaborator Vladimir Soloviev, published in Meyerhold’s journal Love for Three Oranges: The Journal of Doctor Dapertutto; these notes are accompanied by excerpts from lectures and student memoirs that together document how these experiments in commedia, movement, improvisation, and collective creation laid a foundation for all of Meyerhold’s subsequent work.