Biomechanics (Meyerhold)

Biomechanics is the name of a method of teaching drama and the stage presentation, which was developed in the 1920s by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold.

On the practical problem of how an actor could spontaneously into place in a required emotion, already Meyerhold teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky had worked. After the mixture had failed, but solely on the inner experience, Stanislawki worked with postures and other " external " suggestions to bring the emotions of the actors in motion.

This approach took on Meyerhold and went much faster than his teacher of well-defined structures of movements and postures from. He tied back to a technique that was famous as Delsarte system before 1900.

The biomechanics returned the idea that movements and postures are an " automatic " consequence of inner experience, for the actor in a sense, and explained that its physiology determine the mental condition of the played character.

In the background of these ideas, the fascination with technology is during the period of Futurism and the silent film. Suggestions came from the psycho-technique, which emanated from the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg. Culture Political impetus initially made ​​by Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky. The rediscovery of popular theater forms such as commedia dell'arte, the influence of the East Asian theater like Kabuki or abstraction efforts in the artistic avant-gardes promoted at that time a physical game stage performer, the Meyerhold Biomechanics wanted to give a methodical basis.

After Meyerhold's system the spectacle training builds like the music lessons on " Etudes ", which are in turn merged as basic elements of movement to a cycle.

The biomechanics had influence on the aesthetics of theater of Bertolt Brecht. Recently, for example, has taken up the suggestions director Thomas Ostermeier Meier Meyerhold. In Germany the biomechanics after Meyerhold taught at the Athanor Academy of Performing Arts in Burghausen and the new drama school in Nuremberg.