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Page 3 of 6 Katarzyna Osiñska (Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences) ‘From Biomechanics to bio-objects: the actor in the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Tadeusz Kantor’ Meyerhold’s Biomechanics contained ideas of the avant-garde and was a response to the challenges of Constructivism. ‘Bio-object’ is a concept from the vocabulary of Tadeusz Kantor, a member of the avant-garde of the second part of the twentieth century. ‘Bio-object’ was Kantor’s term for a hybrid body of an actor integrated with an object. Unlike Meyerhold’s trained actors, whose movements were machine-like, the actions of the Cricot 2 actors were marked by instability. Yet Kantor emphasized his interest in Biomechanics and used this technique in an unorthodox way. The juxtaposition of Biomechanics with ‘bio-object’, and a look at Biomechanics through the eyes of the Polish artist will provide insight into the essence of the changes related to corporality that occurred in the twentieth century theatre. Nikolai Pesochinsky (Saint Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy) ‘The acting method in the Meyerhold Theatre. Technology as philosophy’ The theory of the Meyerhold Theatre has put forward acting as a philosophical problem which involves the questions of mimetism and metaphysics, material and creator, reality and surreality, integrity and segmentarity, unity and contradiction, living substance and technicism, nature, game, mythology, language and meaning (Gustav Shpet), personal and superpersonal, typology and synthesis as acting mechanisms, the objectiveness and non-objectiveness of theatrical character. Each performance launches its own distinctive interpretation field, and the acting technique derives from the worldview contained therein. Meyerhold called for the transformation of the actor’s everyday figure into artistic material using complementary but contradictory approaches: observing, creating, and self-reflecting. The grotesque became a creative way of thinking for the Meyerholdian actor. |