read in Dutch original:
“De acteur, atleet van het hart : Meyerhold, Decroux, Lecoq en Grotowski, pioniers van de fysieke acteur”
This is a book about the origins of “physical acting”, i.e. acting through the body. I have only read the introduction and the first chapter about Meyerhold. It’s a fascinating book that is a lot of fun to read but I couldn’t feel how it would help our project any further and I have many other things to read first.
Le Cocu Magnifique, Moscow, 1922
Meyerhold is an interesting character. He was a pupil of Stanislawski who inspired the famous American school of Method Acting. As you may know, Method Acting is all about the actor trying to really feel the emotions he needs to express on stage or film set. Despite of being life long friends, Meyerhold’s approach is completely opposite and much more related to Diderot’s theory.
Meyerhold took Diderot to its ultimate conclusion by abstracting the motions of the actors into some form of physical constructivism, in part inspired by the more folkloristic arts of Commedia dell’Arte, the circus and Elizabethan theater.
Posted on June 16, 2006 at 5:07 pm
[…] One solution could perhaps be found in stylisation. Certain forms of theater have embraced such stylisation. The Commedia dell’Arte is a well known example that inspired modern artists like Meyerhold to develop an extremely stylised form of acting. Since the vocabulary of such acting is limited, it could serve as a model for a virtual actor system. […]