Drawing on material from an article to be published in the forthcoming Meyerhold Companion (Routledge 2007), this talk will briefly contextualise the biomechanical training system devised by Vsevolod Meyerhold in the 1920s before examining one of the fundamental tensions in his system: the place and function of individual expression within a demonstrably collective and formally consistent kind of actor training.
Working from stills and moving images of one specific étude (Throwing the Stone), the paper will outline the complex developmental history of biomechanics, from the 1920s in the early Soviet Union, to contemporary interpretations of the étude by two master-practitioners, Alexei Levinsky and Gennady Bogdanov. How far has this étude evolved since it was first devised? What is the place of improvisation, play and devising in biomechanical training? And what wider questions are raised about the politics of acting traditions by delineating this living link with the past?

Professor Jonathan Pitches is Chair in Theatre and Performance in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University. His monograph on Vsevolod Meyerhold for the Routledge Performance Practitioners series (2003) has been translated into Danish and Chinese and his second book Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2005) was described in Theatre Research International as ‘a remarkable achievement’. He has particular interests in European performer training and in the relationships between science and theatre. His most recent article was published in Contemporary Theatre Review in February 2007, an examination of Michael Chekhov, Anatoly Vasiliev and Platonic acting.