This emphasis on the rhythms of performance led Meyerhold to conceive of a theatre, designed but never built, in which all the dressing rooms opened directly onto the stage so that the actors could remain constantly aware of the stage proceedings. It has been said of Meyerhold that his rehearsals looked like performances and his performances looked like rehearsals. Against the prevailing approach of Stanislavsky, epitomized in the “building” of a character, Meyerhold instituted a holistic approach whereby the actors did not “mark” the actions but gave prototypical performances in rehearsal. Each rehearsal then produced a more complex prototype, and the process continued into the public performances. This approach is the one accepted now by many advanced theatre groups.
What unites Meyerhold and Piscator is their concept of an infinitely variable theatre within an oval shell, which would provide the total means to construct the environment and stage–audience relationship best suited for each production. Piscator commissioned plans for such a theatre from Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. The project was called Totaltheatre. A remarkably similar building was designed for Meyerhold. Neither were ever built.
The Russian theatre during these years produced many other talented and innovative directors. Three who deserve mention are Nikolay Evreinov, Aleksandr Tairov, and Nikolay Okhlopkov.
Like Craig in England and Meyerhold in his own country, Nikolay Evreinov looked to the history of theatre as the true basis for freedom and innovation. In 1907–08 he mounted a cycle of medieval plays through which he wished to capture the artistic essence of each kind of stage, unconfined by pedantic reconstruction. A cycle of plays from the Spanish Golden Age was presented in a large hall—each play given an original setting to re-create the atmosphere of the original performances. One play was set on boards and trestles in an innyard, another given a court setting with the full effects of the Baroque theatre.
Evreinov also began to explore the relationship between theatre and life, particularly how the processes of acting in the theatre related to social strategies. His work has had a considerable influence on the development of psychodrama and the therapeutic process of acting out concealed traumas. He also anticipated the sociological school of theatre analysts and acting coaches of the 1960s and ’70s.
Aleksandr Tairov used abstract settings of Cubist design and took the training of his actors so far as to posit the idea of the actor-dancer. The European tours of his Kamerny Theatre in the 1920s aroused special interest in France and sparked off a run of emulators.
Nikolay Okhlopkov, claimed Meyerhold, was the ideal biomechanical actor. His later work as director of the Moscow Realistic Theatre was innovative in the manner in which he planned the shape and relationship of both stage and audience for each individual production. His centre-stage production of Gorky’s Mother had subordinate stages and a walkway behind the audience. He experimented with stages in front of, behind, within, and above the audience. His intention was to revive the festival spirit and incorporate the audience into the spectacle, and his methods were not restricted to the spatial. In The Iron Flood, a play about guerrillas in the Russian Civil War, the audience was kept outside the theatre until the Red Army arrived to break open the doors and the audience flooded into the auditorium. The stage in this production was obliterated and replaced by an embankment running along one side of the room with small promontories jutting out into the audience, breaking up any fixed focus in order to make the audience follow the fluid action. The theatre laboratories of Grotowski and Odin Theatre follow the Okhlopkov tradition in their handling of space. Russian Futurism—Suprematism
The Russian Futurists, or Suprematists, declared their lineage from Jarry and their affiliation with the Italian Futurists in their first manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912). They differed from the Italians in that they were internationalist rather than nationalist in their politics and that their performances developed beyond the early antibourgeois, anti-art cabaret and variety shows that characterized both Italian Futurists and the Dadaists. The early Russian Futurist activities consisted of provocative street actions and cabaret performances, but with Victory over the Sun, an “opera” created in 1913 by the writer Alexey Kruchenykh, the composer Mikhail Matyuchin, and the painter Kazimir Malevich, they produced a work that expressed modern machine culture. The piece had affinities with Kandinsky’s Expressionist pieces in that the setting consisted of geometric forms, pieces of machinery, and fragments of typography. The text consisted of nonsense syllables and words without syntax. The costumes and masks were designed to eliminate the human element by transforming the actors into machines. An offstage accompaniment of battle noises, cries, and discordant choral and solo singing provided the score. The whole work optimistically predicted a new age when man’s mechanical inventions would supplant the Sun as the source of power. Later generations were to be more concerned with the dangers inherent in the realization of that proposition.
According to the composer Matyuchin, Victory over the Sun represented the first occurrence on a stage of the disintegration of traditional text, staging, and musical harmony. In retrospect, this production and the other Futurist works, including the early works of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, appear as extreme examples of a feverish experimentation concerned with separating analytically the various components of theatrical performance and resynthesizing these elements into new relationships. This analytical investigation and experimentation characterized the work of Kandinsky, Oscar Schlemmer, and the Bauhaus group as well; the work of the Expressionists, Piscator, and later Brecht began the resynthesis.
The theatre since the advent of Naturalism had been prone to producing manifestos of various kinds. As time went by, these declarations became less concerned with what theatre should be doing and more concerned with defining what theatre was. From Appia, Craig, and Fuchs onward there was a consistent body of theatre theory that had little to do with dramatic theory. The play and the playwright diminished in importance. The old dramatic criticism based on playtexts and how these were interpreted by actors lost relevance in the new world. The concept of genres such as tragedy, comedy, and farce collapsed as more and more theatre productions attempted to cope with experiences that could not be categorized so neatly.
Film, declared Lenin, was the most important of the media. The availability of resources for films that had an educational purpose rather than a commercial one stimulated filmmaking and the study of film as an art form. The director Dziga Vertov’s manifesto for Soviet film sets out to free film from intrusive elements such as music, literature, and theatre. The “theatre” that Vertov disclaimed was equally rejected by the theatre makers around him who derived inspiration from the developments in film. Sergey Eisenstein, who worked in theatre and film, developed further the Italian Futurist concept of the montage of attractions. The implementation of this theory would eliminate all the random, haphazard nature of theatre, which Craig saw as destructive to any concept of the theatre as art. Whereas Craig put his trust in the intuitive genius of an individual director, the Russians tried to find a generally applicable theory. The artist-genius was replaced by the artist-theorist. The propagandist theatre