Beyond Imitation: Grasping the Essence of Meyerhold's Biomechanics

I wanted to write something "inspiring," but when I see "Meyerhold’s biomechanics" in the works of modern "avant-garde directors," I can literally hear Vsevolod Emilievich screaming from the heavens:

"I SEE YOU!"

I see how you greedily snatch fragments of my biomechanical études - Dactyl, The Slap, Leap onto the Chest - and stitch them into your productions like exotic ornaments. You attend workshops, memorize sequences, and believe you’ve mastered my method. But tell me: when you insert these études into your work unchanged, fossilized in their 1920s form, what exactly are you honoring? The letter of my teaching - or its spirit?

Biomechanics was never meant to be a museum piece. It was a revolt - against the stagnation of psychological theater, against the tyranny of text over body, against art that merely decorates rather than transforms. I created these études not as finished products but as principles: tools to train actors in precision, rhythm, and the physics of emotion. They are not sacred rituals to be copied, but provocations - invitations to rediscover the actor’s body as the primary instrument of theatrical truth.

And yet, today I watch as you reduce them to aesthetic quotations. A Dactyl here, a Throwing the Stone there - gestures stripped of their revolutionary context, performed without understanding or inner necessity. You confuse form with function. Biomechanics is not about reproducing my exercises; it’s about renewing them. The tension between thought and movement, the economy of gesture, the actor’s awareness of space and time - these are the principles that must live in your theatrical language, not as quotes, but as evolution.

Ask yourself: Why should a 21st-century actor move like a 1920s GITIS graduate? The world has changed. Bodies have changed. Audiences have changed. My work was a response to my time; yours demands a response to yours. Study the why behind these études - the laws of motion, the play of resistance, the actor’s presence as both creator and material - then reinvent them. Let them breathe in your context. A contemporary biomechanical theater could discard every one of my original études and still remain truer to my vision than slavish imitation.

To those who claim to honor me: Honor me by disobeying me. Take the principles - not the forms - and create what I could never have imagined. Let your actors’ bodies speak the poetry of your era. Biomechanics is not a style; it’s a weapon - one that must be reforged for every new battle.

The stage doesn’t need relics. It needs revolutionaries.

Final Note:

If after this manifesto you want to "discuss" it over a glass of wine - you’ve already lost. Go train. Fall. Break your knees. Theater doesn’t begin where things are understood - it begins where it hurts.

-Yours, Meyerhold, who is already staging a new production in hell with everyone who dared.

P.S. No, this isn’t "inspirational." This is a call to arms. Your first step? Tear this text apart and glue the shreds into your manifesto.

~ Sergei Ostrenko

*translated from Russian using AI