Meyerhold’s Experiments and Beijing Opera: Blok’s Play, 1914

Abstract

The process of interaction and mutual influence of the cultures of the West and the East, including the sphere of theatrical art, acquired a qualitatively new meaning in the Silver Age in connection with the emergence and formation of the art of directing, especially the part oriented towards theatrical conventions. The most significant in this respect is the figure of Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold (1874 1940), whose production experiments in the Studio on Povarskaya (1905) and in the Komissarzhevskaya Theater in Officer street (1906 1907) and their theoretical justification in the article "On the history and technology of the theater" (1907) [1] laid the foundations of the Meyerhold methodology of the Conventional theater. During his creative process, V. Meyerhold turned to stage art of the East, designed to enrich the artistic expressiveness of the Conventional Theater. This article aims to analyze how V. Meyerhold’s methodology is connected with the techniques and approaches of the Beijing opera. The focus of this article is the analysis of the Blok's play “The Stranger”, which serves as an example of the Russian director’s experience to draw upon the Oriental theater.