By means of études: Boris Kulnev in an advanced actor training class in Beijing, 1955-1956

Abstract

ABSTRACT From January 1955 to April 1956, the Soviet acting teacher Boris Grigorievich Kulnev (1904–1990) conducted an Advanced Actor Training Class at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. This programme was caught up in a larger agenda, which aimed at diffusing the Stanislavsky System of acting throughout the newly established theatres and dramatic schools in the People’s Republic of China. The participants were carefully chosen from all regions of the country and had to take entrance exams for admission. The year-and-half training programme encompassed all classical Stanislavskian exercises from concentration of attention to the method of étude. All in all, the students rehearsed four plays, including an adaptation of the Chinese novel Baofeng zhouyu (The Hurricane). Once the head of the Boris Shchukin Higher Drama School at the Vakhtangov Theatre, Kulnev was steeped in the Vakhtangov school of stage art, a prestigious lineage traceable to Evgeny Vakhtangov, a protégé of Stanislavsky and Leopold Sulerzhitsky who had adopted the étude technique as one of his staple training practices. By analysing the transcripts of the Advanced Class, this article zooms in on the exercises coached by Kulnev at the stage of basic actor-training and the thematic études he used in devising The Hurricane. I argue that by introducing études, Kulnev enabled the actors to adapt to changing conditions onstage, with improvisation erupting into their performance time and again. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this paper are the author’s own.