© Dorien Thomsen
Biomechanics (more precisely: theatrical biomechanics or acting biomechanics) is a training and performance system for actors, developed in the early 1920s by the Russian actor, director, theatre manager, and theorist Vsevolod E. Meyerhold. Biomechanics was part of the curriculum at the acting schools of the state-run Meyerhold Theatre. It emerged from the effort to respond to the social upheavals of the October Revolution by creating a fundamentally new, synthetic stage aesthetic.
Biomechanics combines elements of traditional theatre—such as commedia dell’arte, Russian fairground theatre, and various Asian theatrical forms, especially Peking Opera and Kabuki—with the reform movements of the early 20th century, such as those of Craig, Dalcroze, and Appia, as well as certain insights from contemporary work ergonomics (Taylorism). Influences from the then still-emerging art of (silent) film are also present.
Meyerhold sought to clearly distance himself with his constructivist-materialist biomechanics from the psycho-technique of his teacher and mentor Stanislavsky, as well as from early forms of expressive dance. After initially enjoying great success during the NEP era of the 1920s, he increasingly came under political pressure, ultimately falling victim to Stalin’s doctrine of socialist realism as a so-called ‚formalist.‘
His assasination in 1940 was followed by the destruction of his research, and Meyerhold was declared a non-person. It was not until the 1970s that, in Moscow, cautious efforts toward a revival of biomechanics began under Nikolai Kustov, a former biomechanics chief instructor. At the same time, Mel Gordon and the Living Theater in New York attempted a reconstruction.
From Kustov’s class at the Theater of Satire emerged two instructors who, since the early 1990s, have once again made the living tradition of biomechanics accessible to a professional public: Gennady Bogdanov and Alexander Levinsky. Especially in Russia, but also in Western Europe, North America, and Australia, biomechanics has since entered a new phase of practical exploration. Since the mid-1990s, there have been ongoing efforts to transfer this complex training and education system into theatrical practice, and the number of biomechanically trained performers and teachers has since steadily grown.
Biomechanics is a school of skills. Its aim is the comprehensive training of the performer’s instrument and the provision of a wide range of expressive tools. The theatrical-biomechanical training essentially consists of a compendium of exercises to build and improve the actor’s physical constitution, as well as to study the principles of movement analysis and construction. Through preparatory exercise sequences and the so-called „etudes“—canonized movement forms with simple theatrical subjects—actors train a method for creating complex physical actions.
A sense of form, spatial coordination, physical control, rhythm and musicality—but above all, eccentricity and the grotesque, i.e., the search for physical states of extremity—are key characteristics of biomechanical performance culture.
Biomechanically trained actors master an exceptionally wide range of expressive possibilities and can shift their performance mode rapidly—from expressive-artificial, through restrained naturalism, to slapstick and clowning.
The astonishing versatility of biomechanics and its ability to integrate new influences into its own system make it, in today’s context, a powerful tool for eclectic, postdramatic performance styles that aesthetically reflect the presentational nature of theatre.
