1913 - 1930 Russian Constructivist Movement - Moscow under the artistist/designer, Vladimir Tatlin and significantly influenced by sculptor/designers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner
The movement developed in reaction to post-Russian Bolshevik Revolution and alluded to technological advancements of the age. The industrial age was beginning to prosper and man, industry, and machine were beginning to become related as one. The simplest forms of geometric shapes chunked together to comprise the whole composition of which the audience must derive the meaning from its parts is the basis of the Russian Constructivist Movement.
Precisely composed, they favored the basic shapes of squares, rectangles, circles and triangles. In using modern forms and industrial materials, the concept was to show the machine in the modern world and its triumph over nature and how man was a product of the machine or a part of it.
1920s Meyerhold influenced the development of experimental dramatic art in his artistic endeavors know as BIOMECHANICS. Under his acting technique, man became machine and learned to use his body to enhance the emotional "point of excitability" in drama.
Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy....Movement is the most powerful means of theatrical expression...
- Vsevolod Meyerhold
Meyerhold theorized about how to bring the actor to a, “point of excitability,” so that a theatrical stimulus would elicit a reflexive movement response in the actor.
The biomechanical system of acting, starting from a series of devices designed to develop the ability to control one’s body within the stage space in the most advantageous manner, leads one to the most complex questions of acting technique, problems concerning the coordination of movement, words, the capacity to control one’s emotions, one’s excitability in performance. The emotional state of the actor, his temperament, his excitability, the emotional sympathy between the actor as artist and the imaginative process of the character he is performing - all of these are fundamental elements in the complex system of biomechanics.
- Vsevolod Meyerhold
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