Pavel Urbanovich, Teacher of Biomechanics

Abstract

The paper publishes previously unknown photographs of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s biomechanics, from the private archive of the actor, stage director, and teacher, Pavel Vladimirovich Urbanovich. Urbanovich was a student of the first class of the Higher State Theatre Workshops. Shortly after beginning his studies, he started teaching biomechanics and acrobatics himself. While developing practical exercises, he collected various materials related to Meyerhold’s stage movement method. The photographs of biomechanical exercises, which were stored in his home archive, date from the early 1920s. Copies of some of the images are also stored in the A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum and are already known from publications devoted to Meyerhold and his students; others are published for the first time. Several photographs picture daily life in Meyerhold’s school at the time when the principles of theatre biomechanics were being formulated, developed and intensely practiced. They were to be deposited in the Meyerhold Theatre Museum and used for didactic purposes, possibly as illustrations for a manual of biomechanics.