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54 Chapter Two The Biomechanics of Infidelity: Range of Motion and Limits of Control in Meyerhold’s Theater Nothing is more nonsensical than an imitation of reality, nothing more superfluous: there is enough reality already. —Max Frisch, as quoted in Kiebuzinska, Revolutionaries in the Theater G A S T E V ’ S I M P O R TAT I O N O F Western militaryindustrial biomechanics onto Russian soil constituted an attempt to preserve the doctrinal purity of the scientific management of labor under economic, political, and cultural conditions distinctly different from those in which the theory had developed. Biomechanics was to enter and transform Russian culture, introducing new aesthetic principles for various modes of creation. In the hands of Vsevolod Meyerhold, the visionary avant-garde theater director , it is biomechanics itself that undergoes adulteration and eccentric interpretation. The already pronounced foreignness of biomechanics to Russian culture was compounded, as Meyerhold combined the discipline with classical Greek pantomime, adding for good measure a dose of the medieval Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte, and a pinch of the Japanese kabuki theater. Submerged in this stylistic cauldron, biomechanics reemerged reincarnated from a conveyor belt Taylorist science of the body in motion into a timeless, ludic art. Discovering the potential in biomechanics for play, subtlety, and subterfuge, Meyerhold’s theater at the same time underscored, quite unwittingly, the ideological threat this theory posed within the Soviet environment. Despite its theoretical emphasis on de rigueur productivity, theatrical biomechanics, by which Meyerhold meant a system of actors’ training, in practice entailed a combination of scientific rigor, artistic detachment , and liberating play, with the body serving as an instrument of investigation and self-discovery rather than of societal change. In 1922, to showcase his new system of biomechanical actor training, Meyerhold staged The Magnanimous Cuckold,1 a play by Belgian playwright Fernand Crommelynck, which provided fitting material for Meyerhold’s display of the full range of The Biomechanics of Infidelity 55 potential delights and difficulties associated with the aspiration—which preoccupied postrevolutionary culture at large—of total control of the body, its cultivation into a machine. The Magnanimous Cuckold featured content so shocking that opponents of Meyerhold’s training were scandalized; his supporters, for their part, either skirted the issue or proposed that the stylized performance in Meyerhold’s theater somehow effaced the salaciousness of the content, distancing the viewer from the obscene matter at hand. Crommelynck’s play concerns a poet, Bruno, desperately devoted to his wife Stella, whom he begins, quite groundlessly, to suspect of infidelity. Bruno is confronted by that universal epistemological problem, the radical alterity of the other. One, after all, can never be fully sure just what the other really is, and to avoid this excruciating uncertainty, Bruno compels Stella to sleep with all the male residents of their village, one after the other. This bizarre solution is meant to expose the hidden lover, who Bruno is sure will not show up to take his place in line; more importantly, it will free Bruno from his painful doubt, rendering his wife precisely that which he suspects her to be, an adulteress. Thereby, physical, external reality will finally harmonize with the poet’s imagination. Despite his efforts to orchestrate and control his wife body and soul, however, Bruno ends up losing not his doubt and uncertainty, but Stella. Attempts by Meyerhold and his followers to downplay this plot notwithstanding, I would emphasize that the choice to stage precisely The Magnanimous Cuckold is a significant one; and that content is indelibly connected to form. I will argue in this chapter that the interplay here between content and form allegorizes the director’s relationship to his craft, allowing Meyerhold to probe his philosophy of art, as well as all the trappings and entrapments of theatrical biomechanics. Paradoxically, in the gap between the play’s biomechanical form and its antibiomechanical content lies the true nature of Meyerhold’s artistic enterprise, which is not the utility-driven affirmation of aesthetic dictatorship, via biomechanical control as previous scholarship has argued, but a cognitive exercise investigating its potential failure. Meyerhold’s biomechanical theater, dedicated on the face of it to the promulgation of the rhetoric of efficiency, functionality, and control, thrives precisely on its opposite: dysfunctionality, rupture, and excess. But first let us sketch an overview of the most salient elements of biomechanics as practiced by Meyerhold. THE LANGUAGE OF MOVEMENTS Just as Gastev’s interest in the body predated his adoption of biomechanics, Meyerhold began thinking...

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