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Page 4 of 6 Béatrice Picon-Vallin (French National Centre for Scientific Research) ‘Meyerhold: towards an actor of the scientific era and double reference’ Vsevolod Meyerhold discovered and explored new directing methods. He charted new territories for twentieth century theatre, enriching it with music, dance, the visual arts, pageant theatre, stage and circus entertainment, film, radio, and other technologies. Based on a new understanding of the workings of the body and brain, he wanted to a work method for the actor-poet who can ‘create’ his acting, drawing on a variety of physical and cultural habits. Meyerhold organized the multidimensionality of a theatre work using the strategy of double reference, which combines contradictory aesthetic categories. Insisting on the scientific organization of the work of the actors – as biological and thinking beings – the director, fascinated by the humanities and natural sciences, and drawing on his relationships with the contemporary world, crafted an intercultural theatre. Janne Risum (Aarhus University) ‘Meyerhold’s casting of actresses in male roles’ When Mei Lanfang, the Chinese male performer of female roles, and his jingju (Beijing Opera) troupe came to Moscow in 1935, Meyerhold approvingly explained to the journal Sovetskoe iskusstvo: ‘To have a male actor play a female is the highest form of conventional theatricality’. Correspondingly, in my paper I shall examine Meyerhold’s own practice of cross-gender casting by looking at his casting of actresses in male roles in a small but significant number of instances, contrasting them with his casting of an actor in a female role in Tarelkin’s Death in 1922. |