Lev Kuleshov and the Metrical-Spatial Web: Postmodern Body Training in Space and Time

In Russian silent filmmaker Lev Kuleshov's The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924), a satire about America's view of the Soviet Union, Mr. West is threatened by a group of bandits, dressed as Bolsheviks, who frighten him with a dazzling array of facial tics. They roll their eyes round and round, jut their jaws forward and side to side, flare their nostrils, and deeply furrow their brows. Suddenly, from nowhere, there is a shot of a man's bare torso, his stomach repeatedly sucking in and sticking out with the agility of a master yogi. This unusual display of physical dexterity, along with the facial tics of the bandits, illustrates Kuleshov's approach to acting: the actor's body is seen as a mechanized network of individual parts, each working independently toward the ultimate goal of clarity of action. While the bandit's rolling eyes, jutting jaws, and agile abdominal muscles may not seem especially threatening when viewed from the perspective of the more understated acting styles of modern psychological realism, the clarity, simplicity, and linearity of the action nevertheless express the bandit's threatening intentions in ways Kuleshov found appropriate for the material demands of silent film.

In the early 1920s, Kuleshov (1899-1970) developed a body-oriented theory of acting that professed to distinguish good silent film acting from theatrical acting. Kuleshov intended his theory of acting to be an antidote to the artificiality he saw in early-twentieth-century stage acting, whether in Meyerhold's constructivism or the experiments in psychological realism at the Moscow Art Theatre. Today, while largely unknown among theatre practitioners and teachers of acting, Kuleshov's representation of the human body as a mechanical network of individual parts presents a viable and interesting approach to stage movement training. His method involves movement sequences placed in what he called the Metrical-Spatial Web. Such training can help student actors achieve not only a precision and clarity of movement but an awareness of the body in both spatial and temporal dimensions. I find Kuleshov's training especially relevant for actors engaged in highly physical postmodern productions in which the actor's body is self-consciously positioned as part of an overall visual and/or aural composition, rather than as an independent, psychologically motivated character. Features in postmodern performance that are enhanced by Kuleshov's training include: 1) positioning the actor's body in a static, parallel relationship to the front of the stage; 2) blocking the actor's body along rigid and complex floor patterns that run parallel, perpendicular, and transverse to the front of the stage; and, 3) delinking the actor's body from both the obvious content of the text and the "emotion" of the moment. These stylistic choices are found in the works of directors such as Robert Wilson and Anne Bogart, among others.

Wilson's early productions position the actor's body parallel to the front of the stage, a relationship that art historian Heinrich Wölfflin calls a "planimetric" relationship (73). ¹ In this configuration, actors and objects are lined up along planes that run parallel to the front of the stage, as in the fourth act of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (Wilson 29), or in the way Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton maintain an abstract pose while in a planimetric relationship between the stage that lies in front of them and a projection of Einstein behind them in Einstein on the Beach (Wilson 46). Bogart also encourages actors to move along rigid and complex floor patterns. Indeed, one of Bogart's Viewpoints is Topography, or floor pattern. Actors trained in the Viewpoints create an imaginary grid of an infinite number of lines horizontal and perpendicular to the front of the stage, and the actors must remain within the confines of this linear floor pattern as they move. In...