I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now mumbling more rapidly in time with my steps.
So the rhythm is established and takes shape – and rhythm is the basis of any poetic work, resounding through the whole thing. Gradually you ease individual words free of this dull roar.
VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY1
There are many reasons to consider ways in which ‘knowledge how’ focused on a particular activity may, in important respects, be more significant than general ‘knowledge that’. ‘To live,’ Bely asserted, ‘means to know how … to create or to go beyond the limits of everyday life.’2 Cognition, for him, was a wide knowing that, which included capability or knowledge how. The history of the avant-garde points to ways in which reliance on knowledge how, capacities made possible by the animate, kinaesthetic life of the body, reshaped cognitive understanding. This is most clearly evident in (but not at all restricted to) dance. Movement, dynamism and rhythm were not just themes that artists took up in poetry, painting, stage performance and theoretical manifestoes. Artists and intellectuals, like everyone else, moved. All animals move, to be sure. But in the early years of the twentieth century, people in the arts became self-conscious that they might move – and self-conscious about traditional forms of art in which there appeared to be rigidity or lack of movement. Hence the intensity and enthusiasm of the response to Duncan’s dancing. Artists did not, however, just stand by and watch dancers, though they sometimes did. They themselves danced. So, in this chapter, we turn to the sense of movement in the lives of artists themselves, and quite literally to their movement. We also make the argument that in a number of cases, with Mayakovsky perhaps being the most significant, personal experience of movement, of dance, entered into the art for which the artists became well known. The artists of the avant-garde – Andrei Bely, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexandre and Jeanne de Salzmann, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and many others – had capable bodies.
The prophet of ‘the widened outlook’ of perception, Mikhail Matiushin, welcomed Mayakovsky as a soul brother. At performances of Mayakovsky’s radically innovative poetry, which the poet gave in Moscow dressed in a yellow blouse, Mayakovsky appeared to swell up and to take up all the space. He also parried, imperturbably and quietly, philistine stupidity.3 The yellow blouse was soon changed for one with black and yellow vertical stripes, identifying the wearer as a leader in rebellion against conformity. The blouse was not simply yellow but of a warm colour, yellow-orange, approaching the then fashionable ‘colour of the tango’.4 Just before the First World War, Europe indeed experienced a veritable tango boom. In the winter of 1913–14 in Russia, professional dancers appeared in cabarets and theatrical shows, and it became a hit to perform the tango in public. The habitués of cafes tangoed side by side with the professionals, and Mayakovsky, we imagine, was to be found amongst them.
For the Russian Futurists, the budetliane, the tango became a sign of the contemporary urban style of life, a life broken and sharp, in which technology and ‘barbarian’ feeling, elegance and coarseness, existed together.5 In the Futurist cabaret, nonsense was declaimed, faces painted and the tango danced. ‘We found, finally, the dance that genuinely transforms our fine contemporary life, the contemporary life of a great city,’ wrote Bonch-Tomashevsky in a book dedicated to the tango. ‘We actually found the rhythmical outline of the world of the factories and machines.’6 Not all the Futurists agreed with him, however. In February 1914, for instance, Nada El’sner gave a lecture in Rostov-on-the-Don, ‘The Tango Gobble-Up’, where she described the dance as decadent and said that it ‘breaks down culture with gesture’. Contemporary dance, she declared, is performed ‘to the music of automobile horns’.7
One thing is clear: the budetliane loved dances. But did Mayakovsky, who remains the most famous radical poet of this generation, dance? It is interesting that Russian literary scholars have been reluctant even to think about this. For them, great poetry and popular dance inhabited different worlds. (Similarly, until recently, biographies of Pushkin failed to comment on the fact that he was a member of a gymnastic society: such a thing could not be relevant to the great writer.) Yet there is good historical evidence that Mayakovsky ‘moved lightly and danced excellently’. Galina Katanian recalled that at a party to mark twenty years of his creative activity, the poet ‘dance[d] with the blinding Polonskaia in a red dress, with Natasha, with me’. And Veronika Polonskaia remembered ‘how on one of the evenings he accompanied me home by Lubianskaia Square and suddenly, to the surprise of passers-by, set out on the square to dance a mazurka, alone, such a large and awkward person, but he danced very lightly and comically at the same time’.8
Mayakovsky not only moved well, as can be seen in film clips that have escaped destruction, but kinaesthetic perception helped him in creation. ‘I write verses with the whole of my body,’ he said to the poet V. Lugovskoi. ‘I stride about the room, stretch out my arms, gesticulate, straighten my shoulders. I do verses with the whole of the body.’9 The penetrating writer Yurii Tynianov called Mayakovsky’s verses ‘united with the muscular will rather than speech’.10 In his article, ‘How to Do Verse’ (from which we take the epigraph to this chapter), the poet emphasized the way the rhythm of verse, its energy, grows from movement, from ‘the hum’. Mayakovsky did not know precisely where this ‘grounding hum-rhythm’ originated:
The sound of the sea, endlessly repeated, can provide my rhythm, or a servant who slams the door every morning, recurring and intertwining with itself, trailing through my consciousness; or even the rotation of the earth, which in my case, as in a shop full of visual aids, gives way to, and inextricably connects with, the whistle of a high wind.11
Dance melodies may also have blown this hum-rhythm. Mayakovsky frequented a café where fashionable jazz was played, and he probably danced there. Creating verses, he shortened, then lengthened, his step; this was not pacing evenly but dance.
The second decade of the twentieth century was the epoch of ragtime, music with ‘torn time’ and confused, syncopated accents. Half-rhythmic forms appeared in music and in poetry: Igor Stravinsky broke out with ‘The Rite of Spring’, while Bely created a theory that verses become better the more they change their rhythm, the more the rhythm turns from regular metre. With this history partly in mind, the fine and original scholar of poetry, A. P. Kviatkovsky, proposed a theory of rhythmology. Drawing an analogy with musical time, he distinguished a ‘measured-time period’ in verse which does not coincide with the traditional measures of the trochee, iambus and so on. In music, the most popular times are four-four and three-four. The first is associated with evenly measured motion, the second with waltz steps and other dances. In poetry, Kviatkovsky affirmed, word sequences correspond to musical lengths, lengths filled with pauses and the duration of uttered vowels, not only syllables. In poetry, also, the time-length is divided by numbered parts, giving three-part and four-part time (the times which were Kviatkovsky’s concern).
FIGURE 8 Vladimir Mayakovsky (1924).
Kviatkovsky especially admired Mayakovsky’s ‘revolutionary marches’. He called the poems, ‘Our March’ (1917) and ‘Left March’ (1918), the indubitable chef-d’oeuvre of rhythmically phrased verse. In this connection, he advanced a hypothesis that some scholars reject but which we should like to take up. Kviatkovsky argued that one should read these verses so that, while reading, one may step as to march music in four-four time. So, in ‘Left March’, ‘the refrain “Left!” must everywhere and unchangingly coincide with the strike of the left leg, but the pause which completes the four-four time coincides with the strike of the right leg’.12 Mayakovsky loved march rhythms, and in music he preferred ‘the tense, coarse marches’ of the early Sergei Prokofiev. Later, however, the argument continued, Mayakovsky’s ‘marches’ ‘appeared in great number … [in] the much more rhythmically expressive three-four time’. A change took place in the years 1924–25. Kviatkovsky gave as examples the poems written ‘with cheerful, even mischievous rhythm’: ‘I Go’, ‘Verlaine and Cézanne’ and ‘The Altai Ocean’, all in three-four time. Why the change? Kviatkovsky suggested that the poet ‘moved’ a lot, that is, for a long time journeyed about Russia and abroad. This suggestion only went so far, however, and did not explain ‘the mischievous rhythm’ of the new verses. Discussing the poem ‘About This’ (about love), Kviatkovsky noted that Mayakovsky chose three-four time and a ‘waltz-like’ rhythm, and suggested that the main rhythm of the poem was connected with its content, a reference to the waltz, content that gave clear direction for performance:
It’s a theme that’ll come
And demand:
‘The Truth!’
It’s a theme that’ll come
And order: ‘Beauty!’
And,
though nailed to the cross,
you forget your rood,
a waltz-tune
or something
absently tooting.13
Perhaps the change in the rhythm of Mayakovsky’s verses was connected with his immersion in the dance craze of ‘the roaring twenties’. At this time, he abandoned the rhythm of marches in favour of more dance-like rhythms reminiscent of the waltz, maxixe and foxtrot.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Europeans, having tired of the waltz, got to know Latin-American dances, the tango and the Brazilian maxixe. Mayakovsky knew the energetic maxixe very well:
And so today
From morning to the soul in me
The maxixe cut out lips
I go supporting my shaking arms
And everywhere pipes dance on the roofs
And with each column was thrown out four-four!14
Following these dances, in the United States people took to the so-called animal dances: the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the eagle crag, the rabbit’s embrace, the marabou polka. They were danced to the music of African-American ragtime and jazz, to which it was impossible to sit, and the steps improvised the movements of animals. New dances appeared almost every month. Unlike the old ball-dances, dances to the syncopated strain of ragtime music allowed great freedom and improvisation. To dance the cakewalk, one-step, two-step and black-bottom appeared simpler than to tango, but the embrace of the partners was no less close and warm. For this reason, in 1914, the Vatican condemned the tango and another popular salon dance, the turkey trot, while the American Association of Teachers of Dance refused to teach any kind of dance to syncopated music.15 The dance, based on the one-step and two-step and called the foxtrot, was related to these dances.
The New Year of 1922 was met in the same way in Paris, Berlin, Petrograd and Moscow, with the foxtrot. The Russians Valentin Parnakh danced in émigré cafés in Paris and Andrei Bely foxtrotted in Berlin. In Petrograd, several dozen people greeted New Year in the mirrored dining room of the House of Art:
All were here – from Akim Volynsky to Ida and from Lunts to Akhmatova.… In the mirrored hall Radlov with his partner and Otsup with Elsa danced the foxtrot, the one-step, the tango, in shiny shoes and pressed trousers.…
In the hall there are four couples dancing who have miraculously borrowed from somewhere all the fashionable dances of a Europe as distant as a dream. People feast their eyes on them, stand in doorways, greedily drink in the novel syncopations of the foxtrot, and look at the figures swaying and fused together.16
There was a premiere in Moscow on the same New Year’s Eve. The director Nikolai Foregger staged a spectacle, Being Good to Horses, to the motif of a poem by Mayakovsky. The activity in Foregger’s post-revolutionary theatre-workshop (with the acronym Mastfor) came close to the genre of review and variety, and, as was then said, was the theatre of small forms (and for large forms, it is true, there were neither resources nor space). Mastfor put the show on in the House of Printing, in a hall of 200 seats, and it scarcely covered the production costs. Somehow, a couple central to the avant-garde world, Lilya and Osip Brik, looked in on one of the evening rehearsals. She was sometimes called ‘the muse’ of the avant-garde, and he was a writer and literary critic. At the beginning of the 1920s, Lilya Brik, who always loved to dance, was enthusiastic about fashionable salon dances. Osip Brik and Mayakovsky joined her. They presented Foregger with the latest collection from abroad of pieces transcribed for the piano, Contemporary Dances to Jazz. Foregger then staged variety numbers, including a ‘tango-apache’ (a macho dance with complex backings and refined movement) to the two most fashionable songs, ‘Mucky from Kentucky’ and ‘Mon homme’.
FIGURE 9 Nikolai Foregger. Machine Dances. From Ritm i kul’tura tantsa (Rhythm and the Culture of Dance) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1926).
In Being Good to Horses, later in 1922, people in Russia heard for the first time the sounds of jazz, played by Parnakh’s ‘Eccentric Orchestra’. The poet and dancer, Parnakh, discovered jazz in Paris and, having returned in the summer of 1922 to Moscow, brought with him instruments for a jazz band, which he himself called an ‘orchestra rumpus’: trombone, banjo, xylophone, drums, shakers, horns, rattles, bells and cymbals.17 The show was a success, thanks not least to the jazz and Parnakh’s jazz dances.
The critics at once took up arms against Mastfor. In Petrograd, the performance of Being Good to Horses was nearly banned for using the phrase, ‘we establish a café-chantant for the proletariat of every country’. Mayakovsky beat back the censors: ‘Yes, chantant and music hall. Enough of dry, bitter-sweet [satire]. Give us dancing ideology, cheerful, impetuous music hall propaganda, sparkling revolutionary theatricality.’18 Osip Brik justified the different style to the viewers: ‘operetta, chantant, grotesque’ is not only ‘more technically accomplished’, but is a more democratic theatrical form. If in the traditional theatre the notorious ‘fourth wall’, the proscenium arch, separates the actor from the audience, then in cabaret or variety the actor turns directly to the audience and often speaks with it on a topic of the day. Brik even thought up a term for the times, ‘agit-hall’ (‘propaganda-hall’), to denote political cabaret for the masses. He wanted the proletariat to take the ‘light genre’ of cabaret out of the hands of ‘bourgeois entrepreneurs’.19
On a wave of success, in the autumn of 1922, Mastfor received its own space in Moscow. The new season opened with the show Being Even Better to Horses, and with a programme of dance numbers. Included in the show were ‘Machine Dances’, and these, with other ‘eccentric’ dances, owed something to Parnakh. ‘A Walk’, ‘No. 6’ and ‘Pastoral’ were quickly established as Mastfor’s crowning numbers.
Parnakh thought up his own ‘eccentric dance’ under the influence of jazz. In his memoirs, he described how, at the time of the war, when he was in Paris and when the majority of the café-chantant and bars were closed, he suffered without music and dance. The day the bars reopened was for him a day of celebration. Full of excitement, he jumped up on a billiard table and broke into a dance, thinking up his own previously unseen movements. In his verse, he brought in the fashionable foxtrot and marabou polka, though he himself also thought up many movements:
As if the trumpets of prophets began to be heard,
The first strike,
Foxtrot, its triumph,
A trembling dervish!
Pneumatic belly.
Marabou.
Movement of the flock.20
On returning to Russia, he demonstrated his ‘eccentric dance’ to Foregger.
After each premier, in the foyer of Mastfor there was a ‘vauxhall’ (named after the locality in London where there had been an entertainment park), a closed party at which theatrical-artistic Moscow came together. Always present were the Briks and Mayakovsky. Parnakh’s jazz band performed and there was the premiere of the Futurist ‘noise orchestra’ of klaxons, rattles and saucepans. The idea of a ‘noise orchestra’ belonged to the Italians, Marinetti and Russolo, but in Russia it was first staged by Foregger’s actors. Further, certainly, the foxtrot and shimmy were danced at the ‘vauxhalls’. Parnakh himself gave lessons to Muscovites, including Ippolit Sokolov in the Laboratory-Theatre of Expressionism and Eisenstein, the future famous film director, in the theatrical studio of Proletkul’t. Eisenstein, who already had the beginnings of choreographic training, studied the foxtrot with Parnakh with pleasure. As he acknowledged, from these lessons he mastered the rules of dance improvisation, dance subordinated only to rhythm and to the new freedom of movement.21
Parnakh, with his orchestra and choreography, also participated in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s performance, D.E. The first part of the show featured ‘positive Soviet heroes’ – acrobats, sportsmen, sailors – demonstrating biomechanical exercises. The second part parodied ‘the decadent West’ and showed the tango, foxtrot and shimmy, choreographed by Kas’ian Goleizovsky, while Parnakh showed his own dances, ‘Hieroglyphs’ and ‘Idol-Giraffe’. When the performance was closed for being ‘decadent’, Osip Brik threw himself into its defence. He was indignant: ‘Why is ballet decent and foxtrot indecent?’ ‘In what way is Duncan naked more proper than Goleizovsky naked? It’s time to discard this old-girlish approach to the theatre.’22 Brik affirmed that, in the country of workers, dance must become ‘a kind of sport to restore the physical and spiritual strength of a person after the heavy work of the day’.23
According to the witness of such a searching critic as Lilya Brik, Osip himself danced ‘ideally’.24 The couple established dance evenings at their home and even acquired a permanent ballroom pianist. The students of Meyerhold’s theatre workshops, who already danced American tap-dance at the highest level, invited Osip Brik to head a ‘club for dances’ (though the club never opened). Lilya had embraced dancing, and when already an adult she had studied ballet, not to dance on the stage but to become gracious and to try out a new image on herself. She gradually took on traits of a flapper, the independent girls of the 1920s, followers of fashion, contemporary dances and automobiles. Lilya wore a dress from the celebrity dresser, Nadezhda Lamanova, and ‘Mama Nadia’ created for her a hat, a cloche, a detail without which it was not possible to imagine oneself in fashion. And, like a real flapper, Lilya embraced the foxtrot and other ‘Nep-Man’ dances, which were danced in newly opened café-chantants and cabarets. (The ‘Nep-Men’ were the private entrepreneurs who became legal and who flourished after Lenin ordered, in 1923, the ‘new economic policy’, NEP, to counter shortages.)
The epoch of the café turned out to be a short one. It declined and then fell under prohibition, tarred with ‘bourgeoisism’ and accused of bad taste, eroticism and vulgarity. Defenders claimed, however, that the foxtrot, like other dances of the jazz era, was free from ideology and expressed only the performers’ good physical form. Foregger and Osip Brik considered the dances to be dynamic, ‘in the spirit of the time’, part of the utopia of that ‘socialist America’ into which Russia had to be turned. But even a critic sympathetic to Foregger called his Americanism ‘half-mythical’ and, ‘for us, other’. The critic added: ‘what irony! In the circumstances of the kerosene burner [literally, as a source of cooking, in the absence of electricity], to preach Americanism only in the dance review!’25 Then, in 1924, the Commission for Dance, organized at the All-Russian Committee for Physical Culture (VSFK), announced a discussion about ‘contemporary American dances’. Members of the Choreological Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Art Sciences, Foregger, Parnakh and others took part. There was talk about creating ‘a proletarian class-based’ or ‘national’ foxtrot. Suitable music was even found for it: the well-known dynamic melody, ‘Little Apple’, at one moment allegretto, metrical, at another moment, two beats, rhythmical, and at a third moment with points of syncopation belonging to the general human rhythms of contemporary times.26 To the huge unhappiness of dance fans, the Moscow city council, with a special decree, forbad holding balls in public places. Nonetheless, the foxtrot must have continued to be danced, if at reviews and in dance squares. When, in the Academy of Art Sciences, there was a lecture with a demonstration of contemporary American dances, a record number – more than a hundred people – came to watch and listen. The presenter of the paper, Ia. N. Andronikov, demonstrated the advantages of ‘American dances’: constructivism in composition, purposeful change of ornamental gesture and the correlation of all the principles of contemporary physical culture. All the same, neither the lecture nor the demonstration convinced the ossified critics.
In 1928, Maxim Gorky fell upon jazz in the party newspaper, Pravda, calling it ‘music of fat people’: ‘under its rhythm, in all the splendid cabarets of “the cultured” country, fat people, cynically moving their hips, dirty and simulate the act of reproduction between a man and a woman’. The stormy petrel of the Revolution opposed ‘the beauty of the minuet and the live passion of the waltz … to the cynicism of the foxtrot and the convulsions of the Charleston’.27 There was a need, Gorky wrote, to substitute new dances, for example, those which the Section of Dance (changing its name into the Section of Artistic Education) hastily thought up. The Section, indeed, set up ‘the necessary social and scientific control’ over dance education.28
The same disciplining of movement was evident even in the radical theatre. In the middle of the 1920s, brigades of proletarian actors, named ‘the Blue Blouse’, were active in workers’ reviews and peasant clubs. Osip Brik and Mayakovsky were the initiators of the movement. Foregger became its director and staged numbers of ‘a live newspaper’, which included physical culture pyramids and ‘machine dances’, for which, in 1925, he earned the name ‘honorary blue blousenik’. All the actors of this agit (propaganda)-theatre dressed in uniform, a blue blouse with a black skirt below the knees for women, and black trousers for men; the physical culture numbers were performed in shorts and striped T-shirts. Thus striped singlets and canvas shoes became a fashion alternative to the ‘decadent’ flapper.
By the middle of the 1930s, the Soviet Union had its own, new neo-bourgeois elite. In this social setting, the foxtrot no longer served as a sign of deviance but became, like the haut couture skirt, the possession of the Soviet establishment. It is highly probable that Lilya and Osip Brik, together with other partners, continued to dance the foxtrot well into the Stalin era.
So, was the enthusiasm of Mayakovsky, the Briks and their avant-garde friends for fashionable dances just a diversion from serious activity as artists and cultural leaders? We think not. Dancing united sociability and the body, improvisation and self-control, refinement and vitality, and people of the 1920s were captivated by all of this. Having fed and entertained European intellectuals at the beginning of the century, the café culture became the poetry of Mayakovsky, his friends and his lovers. With the end of NEP, this culture disappeared from Russia. Not wishing to give up the café-chantant and music hall, Mayakovsky, Foregger and Brik proposed in its place the ideologically sustainable ‘agit-hall’ and ‘theatre of the small form’. Perhaps ‘the Blue Blouse’ grew in part from the wish of Mayakovsky and the Briks to dance. Moreover, we have suggested, the enthusiasm for dance entered into the change in the rhythmic structure of Mayakovsky’s poetry, to which Kviatkovsky drew attention. As a result, even Mayakovsky’s late ‘October March’ (1929) was written not in four-four but in three-four time, as if it were not a ‘square’ march but a dance, a foxtrot.
Mayakovsky’s powerful corporeity revealed itself in both his writing and his drawings. Towards the end of his tragically curtailed life, Mayakovsky recalled his work in Okna ROSTA, the agency where he wrote and painted propaganda posters:
‘We worked 16 to 18 hours a day, slept without undressing, always hungry and … happy! I so trained myself that, with my eyes closed, I could draw with charcoal a bourgeois, a worker with a hammer and a Red Army soldier.’
He stood to the side of the chair, having given his recollections, looking somewhere far off and far in the past, made a step towards the grey side-wing [of the stage] and, as if he had a charcoal in his hand, he held it in the air, as if drawing. Then he turns to us, he closes his eyes, continues to draw in the air, and suddenly smiles broadly:
‘And, if you please, I can now!’29
Mayakovsky’s body knew how to draw posters: it was knowledge how, embedded in his kinaesthetic and kinetic nature. He made posters, like poems, with his whole body.
The post-revolutionary cult of labour, industrial art and Constructivism, without doubt, facilitated the growth and impact of alternatives to academic knowledge. Such alternatives were also talked about earlier, in Formalist declarations on language amongst other places. Moreover, sport, dance, theatre and the circus influenced and informed them no less than the ideological directives of the Revolution or Formalist theory. Adding to the range of movement practices, in the years immediately following the Revolution, the theatre director Meyerhold introduced the system of exercises for training actors known as biomechanics. If there was a connection between the sciences and arts of movement, this is most obviously where we might expect to find it. Meyerhold’s biomechanics was a system of knowledge in capability, technique, knowing how: trained by such a system, the actor possessed a kinaesthetic intellect, bodily knowledge about how to do things on the stage. Art, expertise and intellect became interdependent.
There are two biomechanics: the scientific theory of the movements of the organism and of the mechanical properties of its tissues, and the theatrical set of exercises that Meyerhold devised. As a term, ‘biomechanics’ first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century in German-language medicine, where it denoted the application of the laws of mechanics to the construction of the functioning organism. The term arrived in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to the anatomist and pedagogue, P. F. Lesgaft, who came from a family of Russian Germans. In 1910, a student of Lesgaft, a doctor, G. A. Kogan, proposed to teach an introduction to biomechanics in a medical school in Petersburg and to organize a parallel practical course for orthopaedists, physiotherapists and specialists in therapeutic gymnastics – that is, for all those who might benefit from knowledge of bodily mechanics.30 We need to state emphatically that biomechanics owed nothing to Pavlov.
How did this term arrive in the theatre? Meyerhold had always declared a special interest in plastic movement, or movement for performance. He recommended ‘to the actor a new theatre … consisting of a whole code of techniques to know how to live, theatrically, on the stage: to bow low with a cap, as if this head-gear is strewn with pearls, and to throw over a shoulder an old ragged coat with the gesture of a hidalgo’.31 His system of actor-training attended closely to movement on the stage, pantomime and acrobatics. At first, Meyerhold placed meaning in the study of the laws of rhythm, fencing and gymnastics, so that the actor might ‘liberate himself’, ‘temper himself and turn himself to nature’ and acquire ‘the natural’ movement of a beast.32 In the years 1915–16, in the studio on Borodinskaia Street in Petersburg, the master undertook studies with the actors which he called ‘Di Grasso’, after the name of the Italian tragedian. Meyerhold often recalled one of the scenes which clearly illustrated Giovanni Grasso’s technique: the hero stole up to the seducer of his wife and, suddenly having squeezed his Adam’s apple, sprang on his chest; the seducer bent his head back, and Grasso fastened onto him by the throat.
After the Revolution, it occurred to Meyerhold to employ in the theatre the then innovative and fashionable system, NOT, the acronym of the scientific organization of labour, and to become involved with ‘Taylorization of the theatre’. He wanted to goad the theatre with physical culture, having created an organization for ‘the theatralization of physical culture’ (abbreviated to tefizkul’t).33 At the same time, the director borrowed from the literary Formalists their matériel (equipment), though not their forms of expression. He required the new actors to relate to themselves as to pieces of equipment which it was necessary to study and to keep in good condition. The actor, Meyerhold stated, had ‘not only to train his movement according to a definite system’, into which entered the basics of classical dance and an introduction to acrobatics, but also needed to take up the study of his ‘nervous apparatus’.34 It was for precisely this purpose that Meyerhold turned to biomechanics, the science of movements of the living organism. The outcome, in the School of Acting Craft and in the Courses of the Craft of Stage Presentation in Petrograd, was that Dr A. P. Petrov, medical man and Olympic medallist in free-style wrestling, taught biomechanics as a valuable discipline at the point where anatomy, mechanics and medicine met.
Aleksandr Petrovich Petrov trained at the Military-Medical Academy in Petersburg and then in Heidelberg, and he followed a standard career into forensic medicine. What was not standard was that Petrov became a gymnast and sportsman at the international level and also studied medicine in connection with sport and physical culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the rider and athlete Count G. I. Ribeaupierre who set the pattern of much of the sporting life in the northern capital. Together with the wrestler Ivan Lebedev, nicknamed ‘Uncle Vanya’, the writer Aleksandr Kuprin and Petr Lesgaft, the count founded the Saint-Petersburg Athletic Society, which Petrov joined. In 1897, in the manezh (riding arena) that the count owned, they organized and directed the first championship in Russia of French (free-style, classical) wrestling. Ribeaupierre helped to bring out into the world arena many talented Russian athletes, and he took part in the formation of the Russian teams participating in their first Olympic Games and financed their journey. Petrov was selected for the Olympiad in London in 1908, where he won a silver medal. Besides this, Petrov took prizes in practically all kinds of sport: gymnastics, swimming, riding, skiing, light athletics, fencing, wrestling, boxing and cycling.
This Petrov, then, in the 1910s, not only gave a theoretical course in medical higher education but taught gymnastics to future teachers of physical culture. The Society of Physical Education, ‘Bogatyr’ (the collective name of the mythical heroes who carved out the lands of the Russian people) had been founded at the beginning of the century; and the Gymnastics Institute for the Preparation of Male Teachers and courses for women then followed. From 1905 to 1915, Petrov led the women’s courses in pedagogic gymnastics, and he taught anatomy in the Gymnastics Institute. Besides this, he taught therapeutic gymnastics in the Psycho-Neurological Institute founded by V. M. Bekhterev. After the Revolution, Petrov trained red commanders in ju-jitsu, created a programme of physical education for new Soviet schools and, as before, did much university teaching. In the Herzen Pedagogical Institute, he not only gave theoretical courses but led a circle of ‘gymnastic dancing’. One of his students recalled:
In the Herzen Institute, Professor Petrov gave us lectures on physical education. Attendance was then optional, but Aleksandr Petrovich – he looked imposing: tall, broad-shouldered, thickset – always assembled a full audience. And besides that, I went to him in the circle of gymnastic dancing. He worked from plastic but not balletic movement. These were dances built on gymnastics and anatomy. Our demonstration performances invariably went with great success. We danced the [Hungarian] Csárdás, [Ukranian] Gopak, waltz and Tirolean dance. But none of us guessed that our professor was such a splendid sportsman.35
Thus, movement in sport and movement in dance, movement for teaching physical culture and movement for aesthetic pleasure, came together. Both before and after the Revolution, that coming together was not a coincidence but served national aspirations. After the Revolution, however, there was the opportunity, at least for a few years, to innovate radically in the way physical culture and avant-garde aesthetics interrelated. This can be seen in the work that Meyerhold did for mass stagings in the service of the Bolshevik state, work which was of considerable importance for his now better-known work in the theatre.
As a result of all of this, Petrov, a well-known man in Petrograd, was invited to teach actors ‘gymnastics by some kind of new system’.36 We suppose that he introduced biomechanics into Meyerhold’s courses at first as a theoretical tool, side by side with anatomy and physiology, and then as a convenient foundation for his gymnastics. It was obligatory for participants in these courses to study movement. The politically oriented activity required of students, such as leading theatre studios in the Baltic Fleet or organizing mass events and travelling street performances on tram platforms and lorries, demanded the actors’ thorough physical preparation. Meyerhold himself, it appears, well appreciated Petrov’s gymnastic system and his understanding of biomechanics. When the director opened work in Moscow, the State Higher Directing Workshop, he taught ‘biomechanics’ there himself. The first information about this known to us appeared on 27 January 1921 in the Theatre Bulletin. A somewhat confused article appeared about ‘the education of the actor on the basis of the laws of pan-technics [sic], of expressions … in physics, mechanics, music and architecture’. The author (it might have been Meyerhold’s student, Konstantin Derzhavin) wrote about the actor ‘as real physical material, subordinate … to general mechanical laws: size, metre and rhythm’.37 Meyerhold and others affirmed that ‘the roots of a new, communist staging of drama lie in the physical culture of the theatre which gradually overcomes doubtful psychological laws, with their pseudo-science, with the science, by contrast, of precise laws of movement based on biomechanics and kinetics’.38 Biomechanics helped Meyerhold to decide what were then being discussed as vital questions: the proximity of art to life, and the verification of the science of art.
In 1919, N. I. Podvoisky, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council and head of Vsevobuch (the Main Directorate of General Military Education), posed the question of the ‘theatralization of physical culture’. Vsevobuch was active in training recruits to the Red Army and oversaw a section of physical development and sport. Moreover, a month after the creation of Vsevobuch, in May 1918, the first military physical culture parade on Red Square took place. In the spring of 1920, however, Podvoisky had to set out for the Civil War where, on the staff of the Tenth Army, he took part in what for the Reds was the liberation of Novorossisk in the south of Russia. Meyerhold was in Novorossisk at the time. Their paths crossed, and the director ran a course for young soldiers and began to work in the political section of the army under Podvoisky’s direction. When, with the end of the Civil War, the commander returned to Vsevobuch, he was accustomed to work with his former comrade-in-arms.
Podvoisky dreamed about training strong, brave and agile ‘red Spartans’. On 10 October 1920, in Moscow, with his participation, the foundation stone for ‘a physical culture camp’ was triumphantly laid on the Sparrow Hills. The organisers planned that, besides the Red Stadium for 60,000 spectators, there would be a theatre of mass action, which Meyerhold was to direct. The theatre director at this time headed the Theatrical Section (TEO) of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) and had begun to prepare his ‘Theatrical October’. For the third anniversary of the Revolution, he planned ‘mass actions’ with the participation of Red Army soldiers, and he counted on Vsevobuch’s help. Meyerhold and Podvoisky indeed supported each other. Podvoisky called for ‘the bringing together of the activity of physical culture with mass theatrical activity’, while Meyerhold declared: ‘It’s necessary to bring closer together theatre with natural and physical culture and to create conditions for the new actor – who is to be agile and strong.’39
Besides two parents, in the form of Podvoisky and Meyerhold, the idea of ‘theatrical physical culture’ had a midwife, Ippolit Sokolov. He was mobilized in the Civil War, began to serve in Vsevobuch and made himself a specialist in physical training. With all the poetic temperament and energy of his nineteen years, he took up the project of tefizkul’t. He considered its tasks to be the struggle with physical degeneration, working up labour gymnastics, the organization of ‘mass actions’ and the ‘Taylorization of the artistic formation of labour demonstration’.40 It was also Sokolov who first proposed the formation, in the former Nikitin Brothers Circus, of a Palace of Physical Culture. This gave Meyerhold the idea of staging a mass action, ‘The Taking of the Bastille’, with the help of the circus and with the participation of Red Army soldiers. The Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky, gave his approval.
This project interested Meyerhold so much that, leaving TEO in the spring of 1921, he retained duties in tefizkul’t for himself. In addition to gaining a space for his theatre laboratory, he hoped to receive rations for the students of the Theatre Courses from Vsevobuch. When making the request, Meyerhold stated that the purpose was to achieve ‘a new basis for a proletarian theatre tightly connected with the principles of physical culture’. Indeed, the first course, and part of the second, involved the students in considerable physical training. The programme included ‘the presentation of normal movement, gymnastics, biomechanics, gymnastic play, dance, martial movement, the strengthening of rhythmic awareness (Dalcroze system), the laws of stage movement, imaginative movement with the size and form of a stage space and pantomime’.41 Biomechanics, understood as the scientific study of movement, here took a place in a long row of other techniques; this was to change.
It appeared realistic to set up tefizkul’t in the old circus, and a mandate for this was even received. Meanwhile, the physical culture camp was to open on Workers’ Day, 1 May. Meyerhold and Podvoisky planned a staging on Khodynskoe Field of a mass action, ‘Fight and Victory’, in which more than 2,000 foot soldiers, 200 cavalry, artillerists, aeroplanes, armoured cars and motorcycles, and also combined detachments of sports clubs, studios and military orchestras and choirs, were to take part. The slogan of the festival proclaimed ‘the theatralization of physical culture’. Both plans, however, remained unrealized: money was not forthcoming, and the circus site was moved. All the same, those committed to tefizkul’t continued to construct grandiose plans: the musician Evgeny Krein proposed staging an event under the title ‘Spartak’, to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Duncan was invited to participate in the performance), and Meyerhold proposed Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’. Nevertheless, in spite of Podvoisky’s support, tefizkul’t did not succeed in getting financed by Vsevobuch, and then, with the end of the Civil War, Vsevobuch itself was eliminated. Just at this time, however, Meyerhold finally received his own stage where, on 1 October 1922, they premiered The Magnanimous Cuckold.42
Tefizkul’t was a ‘mobilized’ version of modernist theatrical art for the masses. To realize it depended on bringing together sport and physical culture with theatrical gesture; and, of course, it also depended on the political will to provide funding during a period of severe shortages. There was, in fact, a highly unstable relation between the visionary innovations of a few avant-garde artists dedicated to the Revolution and the realities of achieving mass organization. Nonetheless, it was a decisive time for the history of mass political spectacle in the new Soviet state, and indeed elsewhere. At this time, the kinaesthetic world of the avant-garde transformed from an individual, subjective reality, a potential domain of free dance and symbolic enactment of the spirit, into a potentially collective, manufactured reality in the service of the state. Taking this road, the movement arts recreated the position of sports generally. Sport was, as of course it still is, both the display of individual kinaesthetic perception and ability and public performance, ritual, for collective ends.
Once Meyerhold had his own theatre, biomechanics, which had appeared in the programme of the earlier acting courses as a specialist discipline, the study of the body and its movements, became the distinguishing characteristic of the theatre. Everything began to take second place to it: ‘Physical culture, acrobatics, dance, rhythmics, boxing, fencing are useful tools, but they succeed in having utility when they are introduced as ancillaries to the course of “biomechanics”, to the basis of technique necessary for each actor.’43
Seeing the success of theatrical biomechanics, A. K. Gastev, the Director of the Central Institute of Labour (TsIT), also decided to take it up in earnest. In July 1922, an article came out in Pravda where the Director wrote: ‘in the human organism there is a motor, there is “transmission”, there are shock-absorbers, there is a precision regulator and there is even a pressure gauge. All this demands study and utilization. There has to be a special science – biomechanics.’ This science, Gastev added, ‘cannot be narrower than “[the science of] labour”, [but] it must border on sport, where strong and agile movements are at the same time light in breath and mechanically artistic’.44 Gastev’s slogan, ‘the machine that works is the machinist’, was very close to ‘the first principle of biomechanics’ formulated by Meyerhold.
From the end of the 1930s, nothing was remembered in public about theatrical biomechanics: it was, one might say, repressed together with Meyerhold, its creator. All the same, thanks to Meyerhold’s students, biomechanics was kept alive. One of today’s teachers, A. A. Levinsky, spoke about its meaning for the actor:
Biomechanics may bring you into balance. Balance comes into existence through it, and literally you learn to see on an inner level and to hear yourself from the side. You learn how ‘to mirror’. It contains an emotional element within certain shores.… And simple repetition of this form collects you, subdues and, as if limiting your freedom, maximally directs you to one side. The side of precision! … Biomechanics is a kind of theatrical yoga … But at the same time, biomechanics is attached to the fulfilment of theatrical forms. It is oriented towards the viewer.45
Biomechanics is a training for the actor, but it takes into consideration the viewer, and it is training not simply in movement but in movement of expressions. It presupposes perceptual knowledge of the body, kinaesthesia, but from a definite point of view, as material for the creation of expressive artistic form. The psychologist Rudolf Arnheim stated that for expression the dancer uses muscular tension and relaxation, balance and stability, as building material for the creation of a choreographic image. The dynamic nature of the results of movement practices, Arnheim emphasized, underlies ‘the surprising correspondence between what the dancer creates by his muscular sensations and the image of the body seen by the audience’.46 Kinaesthesia, the sixth sense, and, in the words of the director Eugenio Barba, ‘muscular responsiveness’, is pivotal in performance and in its reception.47 This is the insight we have traced in the theatre to Meyerhold.
Meyerhold first became familiar with biomechanics as a science which could help to reform the theatre and take it in the direction of labour and physical culture. It also helped him to find experimental ways to establish the laws of actors’ movements in the stage space. In the theatre, theoretical knowledge turned out to be practical, and to know that became to know how. When, at the beginning of the 1920s in Moscow, the director himself led ‘the activity in biomechanics’, he led not a scientific discipline but a practice in stage movement. The directions that he had already given to his actors in 1915–16 reappeared under a fashionable scientific label. As a result, the word ‘biomechanics’ received a new meaning: it became ‘a system of training the actor, the aggregate of techniques and skills (gymnastics, plastic movement, acrobatics), with the help of which the actor gains the possibility creatively, precisely, as a whole and naturally to direct the mechanism of movement of his body’.48
It was important that the anatomist, Lesgaft, and the doctor and sportsman, Petrov, helped Meyerhold; thanks to them theatre biomechanics acquired the status of knowledge, though it was not in the first place written knowledge. Biomechanical exercises were brought in to teach the actor not only to relate irreproachably to her or his own body, but also to think with this body. Barba underlined the fact that, as part of the actor’s training, biomechanics is ‘a way to acquire physical intelligence’.49 The thought of the actor or dancer appears through the technique which organizes activity, creating a definite dramaturgy. Exercises are like a box with many tools inside, which the acting body-thought can use to break itself into parts or reconstruct, in order to master the embodied means of thinking. The theatre demands a kinaesthetic intellect, an intellect stepping out from the frame with which it is usually associated, in order to distance itself from ordinary behaviour and enter a region of extraordinary behaviour for the stage.
In seeking to answer questions about the secret of the art of the dancer, the actor or the performer, and about the role of technique, Barba turned to Michael Polanyi’s far from exhausted concept, tacit knowledge.50 Tacit knowledge is hidden, implicit and ‘personal’ knowledge, in contrast to explicit, theoretical or formal and ‘collective’ knowledge. All knowledge is in some way social, or shared, knowledge. But because tacit knowledge is unspoken knowledge, it can also be highly individual and personal. This is especially the case for the knowledge underlying the capability in movement of a special dancer or actor. In conclusion, there is more to say about kinaesthesia as knowledge.
