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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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ISBN(s)
  • 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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  • Chapter 2: Tairov-Celionati: Mime-Drama and Kaleidoscopic Commedia1
  • Chapter 3: Peregrinus Tyss Meets Pipifax: Eisenstein, the Grotesque, and the Attraction4
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  • Dementiev, P.1
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    • mise-en-scène design
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Pencil drawing of a columned ballroom crowded with wedding guests dancing on broad stairs and the floor below. Upstage a balustrade encloses a tiny platform upon which the wedding musicians are uncomfortably crammed.

Mise-en-scène design for the Pierrette’s Veil wedding ball

Scene design in red, purple, and blue for The Snake Woman, created in three parts: a front elevation, ground plan, and a detail of the curtain mechanism and attendants. Emphasis in these designs is on the forestage as a primary playing area and on the fully visible attendants who pull back the stage curtain.

Stage designs for The Snake Woman

Drawing (detail) of P. Dementiev’s proposed solution to how to stage the audience-within-an-audience of Puss in Boots: with the fictional audience sitting along the lip of the stage, their heads ringing the forestage like footlights.

Mise-en-scène drawing for Puss in Boots (Dementiev)

Two drawings for The Glass House, annotated in English, in which a transparent glass floor becomes a means for juxtaposing still images with rapidly moving ones: a stationary cat is positioned against "a whirling town," and feet stand on a "glass balcony above the moving street."

Static and moving image drawings for The Glass House

Sergei Eisenstein, drawing (detail) of the sharp shift in perspective made possible by watching scenes from below through transparent floors.

Drawing of scenes viewed through transparent floors, The Glass House

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