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The Director's Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde

Dassia N. Posner 2016
The Director's Prism investigates how and why three of Russia's most innovative directors— Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein—used the fantastical tales of German Romantic writer E. T. A. Hoffmann to reinvent the rules of theatrical practice. Because the rise of the director and the Russian cult of Hoffmann closely coincided, Posner argues, many characteristics we associate with avant-garde theater—subjective perspective, breaking through the fourth wall, activating the spectator as a co-creator—become uniquely legible in the context of this engagement. Posner examines the artistic poetics of Meyerhold's grotesque, Tairov's mime-drama, and Eisenstein's theatrical attraction through production analyses, based on extensive archival research, that challenge the notion of theater as a mirror to life, instead viewing the director as a prism through whom life is refracted. A resource for scholars and practitioners alike, this groundbreaking study provides a fresh, provocative perspective on experimental theater, intercultural borrowings, and the nature of the creative process.
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  • 978-0-8101-3356-3 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-8101-3355-6 (paper)
  • 978-0-8101-3357-0 (e-book)
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  • Performing Arts
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This short film shows the outside of the Kamerny Theatre, Tairov and the Stenberg Brothers (smoking), and several scene excerpts from The Hairy Ape, including the Fifth-Avenue fox-trotters, Yank's attempt to break the bars that enclose him, and the stokehole pantomime for which the production was so famous.

Filmed scenes from The Hairy Ape

From Chapter 2: Tairov-Celionati: Mime-Drama and Kaleidoscopic Commedia

Filmed scenes from The Hairy Ape, by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Alexander Tairov and L. L. Lukianov, Moscow Kamerny Theatre (premiere: January 24, 1926). НВ 3826/2. Copyright © A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

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