Vsevolod Yemilyevich Meyerhold

Vsevolod Meyerhold was a Russian director, actor, and producer who experimented with the physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting. He lived from February 10, 1874 to February 2, 1940. His theatre training began in 1896 when he became a student under Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko who was the co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). He played numerous roles while at MAT and continued acting and directing after he left MAT in 1902. Each performance that he was involved in meant that he could further experiment with different staging methods. He became an advocate of symbolism and pushed for reforming theatre back to the style of Commedia dell'arte from 1907 - 1917. In 1918 he joined the Bolshevik party and allied with Olga Kameneva to attempt to radicalize theatre and making theatre more national under Bolshevik control.

Meyerhold created his own theatre in 1922 known as The Meyerhold Theatre. He advocated scenic constructivism and circus-style effects in his method. Rather than having this connection between the actor and the character being portrayed Meyerhold thought that the two should be connected in terms of psychological and physiological processes and focus more on learning gestures and movements to express outward emotion. He also believed in Stanislavki's views of how the actor's physical and emotional states were linked and that the actor could elicit an emotion by practicing poses, gestures, and movements. And so Meyerhold developed various poses/positions that the actor could assume in order to create these emotions.