Meeting Meyerhold

What an interesting and rather fantastic day it was today. 

The first and possibly best bit of news is that I have been offered an interview for the solo artist residency at VU.  It is scheduled for 26th November which is only a couple of days away, so I had better get my thoughts together and gather some materials to show that I have a plan!  I guess that is my weekend sewn up for me lol.

I also watched the final two Masters of Writing for Performance readings today.  Overall it has been a pleasant series.  Only one reading I wanted to walk out of.  I might have if I hadn't been sitting right next to Rob Draffin and if Raimondo Cortese hadn't been in the house.  It didn't improve and I will never get that hour and a half back.  I learnt a lot about performance structure watching the various readings - about what works and, more importantly, what doesn't work.  I had some fun too.  There was a horror piece called 'Dead Twin' which was fun.  Mainly for it's genre, but fun anyway.  Also, 'Virgins and Cowboys' had me laughing out loud a lot.

Probably the most productive part of my day, however, was my research into Meyerhold's Biomechanics.  I am looking into it because I want to incorporate it into the production of 'The Exception and the Rule' because Brecht was really into his work.  When I was a student at VCA I had a research assignment into Stanislavsky and I first met Meyerhold there.  I have to confess that I had very little understanding of what he was trying to do or how it fit in with Stanislavsky's work.  Today, I realised that the whole point is that it didn't.  It was actually a reaction against realism and naturalism.  I watched a lot of YouTube and saw some great examples and analysis.  I saw one clip, though, that really opened my eyes about how it works in performance.  A group of actors at a University in Iowa spent months researching biomechanics and then performed Meyerhold's first play 'The Magificent Cuckold'.  I soooo get it now.  It actually falls into a school of story telling which includes Commedia and Farce amongst others.  It is highly exagerated and incredibly specific, and kind of works like a moving tableau over which the text is layered, rather than starting with the text as you would with realism or naturalism.  I can see this is going to be fun.

My next step is to have a look at Chinese Theatre because Brecht really liked that too, and I want to incorporate some mask work which I think will be informed by this.