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

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

Dassia N. Posner
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  • Overview

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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Published: 2016
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-8101-3357-0 (e-book)
  • 978-0-8101-3355-6 (paper)
  • 978-0-8101-3356-3 (hardcover)
Subject
  • Performing Arts

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  • Chapter 1: Meyerhold-Dapertutto: Framing the Grotesque6
  • Chapter 2: Tairov-Celionati: Mime-Drama and Kaleidoscopic Commedia1
  • Chapter 3: Peregrinus Tyss Meets Pipifax: Eisenstein, the Grotesque, and the Attraction26
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  • creative process
  • grotesque18
  • commedia dell’arte13
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  • Eisenstein, Sergei24
  • Meyerhold, Vsevolod3
  • Temerin, Alexei3
  • Callot, Jacques1
  • Dementiev, P.1
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Drawing of two male figures facing one another with crossed swords, one wooden, the other real. The figure on the left is nude aside from the cape he holds in his left hand.

Duel, drawing

A typed list of the episodes in Inspector General with the run time for each written in by hand.

Chronometrage report for Inspector General

This rare rehearsal photo of episode 1 shows the actors’ long, crisscrossing pipes and their tight semi-circular grouping around the table. The Mayor (Starkovsky, right) stands clutching his heart while Doctor Hubner (Temerin) tends to him.

Rehearsal photo for episode 1 of Inspector General

This photograph shows the Inspector General dumb show mannequins, made by V. M. Petrov, in the process of being created. The bodies are newspaper papier-maché over wire armatures, while the faces (with surprised expressions) are wax. The figures are permanently attached to the small platforms on which they later stood at the end of the production.

Photo of dumb show mannequin construction, Inspector General

Actors stand in a variety of positions, each the personification of shocked dismay, to pose for the creation of the dumb-show mannequins that replaced their live bodies at the end of Meyerhold’s Inspector General.

Photo of actors posing for the dumb show mannequins, Inspector General

This “Record of Audience Responses,” dated December 11, 1924, tracked audience responses for episodes 20-23 of The Forest.

Audience response chart for The Forest

Cover of the 1910 piano score for Pierrette’s Veil, with an illustration of the dead Pierrot draped on a chair in the foreground and the aghast Pierrette looking at him in the background, both of them in white.

Koonen’s piano score for Pierrette’s Veil

This rare photograph of Eisenstein and Meyerhold together in rehearsal depicts a bustling creative atmosphere with Meyerhold, center, pointing out something on a piece of paper and Eisenstein, left, sitting behind a round table. Those in the photograph—all men—are in jackets and ties, except Meyerhold, who wears a striped sweater under his open blazer.

Photo of Meyerhold and Eisenstein at rehearsals for The Prelude

This unfinished scene design, partly drawn in pencil, partly painted, hearkens directly to medieval "mansions," side-by-side settings that depict multiple locations simultaneously.

Simultaneous setting design for Comedy of the Black Goat

This pencil sketch features several figures in turbans and robes, center, framed by commedia dell'arte characters that include Pantalone (left) and Harlequin (right).

Costume design for Amusements on the Water and in a Field

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

In this design sketch of a city street, created for Gozzi’s Green Bird, Eisenstein experiments with refracting Sebastiano Serlio’s 1545 comedy stage design (from On Perspective, his second architecture book). Onlooking framing figures are sketched into several of the balconies.

Scene design for The Green Bird

Scene design for Four Harlequins with a generous forestage, onstage balconies, and bridge arches beyond which the canals of Venice can be glimpsed.

Scene design for Four Harlequins

In this costume design, Olimpia, the beautiful automaton in Tales of Hoffmann, is assembled from unnatural cubist shapes that together create a vague impression that she is on the verge of breaking, despite the cheerful look on her doll-like face.

Costume design for Olimpia in Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

In this scene design for Tales of Hoffmann, the black-and-white checkerboard floor and successive side wings (yellow wall sections with furniture and windows painted on them) together create an impression of sharply forced perspective.

Scene design for act 2 wings, Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

In this scene design for Tales of Hoffmann, the black-and-white checkerboard floor remains, but the "wings," actually periaktoi––three-sided, reconfigurable scenic elements––are placed in new configurations that allow actors to interact with, hide behind, and even climb on them.

Scene design for act 2 periaktoi, Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

This sketch, the reverse side of Scene design for act 2 periaktoi, Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein), shows the measurements of the periaktoi along with several views from above of the periaktoi configurations. According to this drawing, the configuration in Scene design for act 2 wings, Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein) was to be used when the guests first entered.

Periaktoi configuration sketches for Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

In this costume design for act 2 of Tales of Hoffmann, a female guest wears a purple and orange striped gown, the skirt of which curves out sharply then in again at the base, making her look like a vanka-vstanka (a doll with a rounded base that always returns to its upright position) or an enormous jug. The impression of the latter is strengthened by her vivid green headdress and hair, which together resemble a spout.

Female costume design for act 2 of Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

In this costume design for act 2 of Tales of Hoffmann, a male guest appears to be part insect, part bird: while his enormous eyes are solid blue, his red on-end hair fans out like feathers. His blue jacket is a deep yellow underneath, and his green-clad calves trail away into nothingness.

Male costume design for act 2 of Tales of Hoffmann (Eisenstein)

In this scene design sketch, towers flank an ornately carved proscenium arch, the opening of which is bridged by a gymnast's bar that provided a practical playing space in the air above the stage. In the upstage distance are the rooftops of the city of Nuremberg. As is typical of Eisenstein's sketches, the edges of the drawing are populated by faces and figures in varying states of completion.

Design sketch for Master Martin

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