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You read, you ask -- and the answer must be there...
First, I am surprised to see a lot of folks searching my websites for Biomechanics. Second, I do get emails about Meyerhold. Third, the books about Meyerhold are out of print!The questions:
1. Why was Meyerhold executed?
2. What did happen to Meyerhold's theatre?
3. Was Meyerhold a communist?
4. Was Meyerhold a Jew?
5. Why was Meyerhold against the Method Acting?
6. Did Stanislavsky recognize Meyerhold's Biomechanics?
7. Where is Meyerhold's grave?
8. Where can I see Biomechanics on stage?
See my webpages! The "questions" sections!
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Anatoly 2001
PS. 2002: still working... and not on BM pages.
Connections with other approaches to acting training:
The Alexander technique is a method of movement and alignment that teaches people to use their bodies more efficiently. It helps individuals improve their posture, let go of muscle tension, and move with greater ease. The goal of this technique is to eradicate such poor habits as slouching and tensing (which can lead to pain, decreased mobility, and other health problems) and replace them with good postural habits.
The originator of this technique was Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), an Australian actor who suffered bouts of hoarseness on stage. When medications and rest failed to help him, Alexander found his career in jeopardy. Using mirrors, he observed that the way he lowered his head and tensed his neck muscles when he recited his lines was restricting his vocal cords. He realized these habits were so ingrained that they had probably become second nature to him. He worked hard to correct his posture, and found that when he did so his voice was restored. Based on this personal success, Alexander created his eponymous technique around 1896 and published his first book about it, Man's Supreme Inheritance, around 1910.
Alexander was so successful that other actors and artists, George Bernard Shaw among them, sought his help. Eventually he stopped acting and created a formal program to promote his method. Today the Alexander technique is taught all over the world. Many performing arts schools incorporate Alexander's precepts into their curricula, and athletes also use it to help prevent injury. In addition, people suffering from back problems and other types of chronic pain have turned to Alexander's methods to ease their discomfort and to improve postural habits.PS
I have so many questions. Where is this FAQ page I need to get to?
NB
This and the Glossary page can't be finished...
The anti-naturalist system of acting.Homework
Search and Research!Kiebuzinska, Christine Olga "Book Review: Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, and: Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia" 
Theatre Journal - Volume 48, Number 4, December 1996, pp. 519-521 The Johns Hopkins University Press
"Few artists have influenced twentieth-century theatre as profoundly as the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold. A ceaseless experimenter with new forms and techniques, Meyerhold used theatre as a laboratory to try out the expressive limits of myriad approaches, from symbolism through commedia dell'arte, circus tricks, and clowning to Kabuki, montage, agit-prop, suprematism, and constructivism. His collaboration with the artists Alexander Golovin, Kazimir Malevich, and Liubov Popova, the playwrights Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov, the composers Alexander Glazunov and Dmitri Shostakovich, and the film director Sergei Eisenstein transformed the very vocabulary of theatrical representation. There are indeed few innovations regarded as avant-garde in today's theatre that Meyerhold did not think up and put to use at some time during a career spanning some forty years, influencing successors such as Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Joan Littlewood, Eugenio Barba, Ariane Mnouchkine, Yury Lyubimov, Tadeusz Kantor, and Roman Vitiuk."
You take an intriguing figure from history -- in this case the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold -- and you dramatize the key moments in a momentous life. In between the boring scenes, you stir things up with exciting song-and-dance numbers.
Writer/director Mark Jackson's "Meyerhold" is not a musical, per se. There's plenty of lush Russian music on the sound system (Shostakovich, Knipper, Soloviyov-Sedoy), but instead of songs, Jackson incorporates Meyerhold's somewhat bizarre performance methodology.
Where Meyerhold's contemporary (and teacher) Stanislavski believed in psychological realism and method acting, Meyerhold created what he called "biomechanics."
This approach, which Meyerhold developed in the 1920s and '30s, focused much more on the physical and borrowed heavily from Japanese Kabuki and Italian commedia dell'arte. The system relies heavily on rhythm and exaggerated movement and asks actors to work from the outside in.
Seeing biomechanics on stage is not unlike watching dancers perform without music but with the addition of dialogue.
Meyerhold's new method was revolutionary, but not nearly so bloody as the revolution occurring in the streets of Russia in the first half of the 20th century.
As Jackson's play offers thrilling examples of biomechanics in action, he also unfolds Meyerhold's biography -- his clashes with Stanislavski, the formation of his various theater companies, his marriage to the actress Zinaida Raikh, his ultimate success and finally his arrest and execution by Stalin's henchmen.
Jackson, the founding artistic director of Art Street Theater, was pulled into the Shotgun fold by artistic director Patrick Dooley, who's also a member of the "Meyerhold" cast. As Dooley could probably tell you, he, along with his 11 fellow actors, was given extensive training in biomechanics to fully realize Jackson's vision and to accurately represent Meyerhold's lasting contribution to world theater.
As a director, Jackson is wildly talented. His dynamic use of the stage at Berkeley's Live Oak Theatre makes excellent use of Leonard Bechler's simple, solidly built platform set.
Action unfolds on multiple levels, and the use of red curtains lends just the right amount of color.
The cast features a number of Shotgun regulars, and their work under Jackson's guidance reveals new depths. Dave Maier, Reid Davis, Andy Alabran and Clive Worsley bring fiery passion and broad comedy to their multiple roles and do some of their best work yet for the company.
Richard Louis James as Stanislavski makes a strong impression, especially in his final scene with Meyerhold (Cassidy Brown) when the two men, who for so long have fought artistic battles, join together to fight the rising oppression of the Soviet government.
Brown's Meyerhold suffers a fate common to central characters in a dramatic biography that renders the subject one of the least colorful people on stage. The performance is admirable, but the character is ultimately unfocused.
The show is virtually stolen by Beth Wilmurt as the actress Maria Babanova.
Auditioning for Meyerhold's company, Babanova performs her own version of "Hamlet" in which she plays all the parts wordlessly until the very end, when she whispers, "The rest is silence." Wilmurt is graceful, precise and utterly compelling. She is, in short, magnificent." *
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