The Actor-Creator and the Kamerny Theatre School

• In Event: New Perspectives on Russian Theater and Performing Arts I: Liberating Lost Histories: Reclaiming Revolutionary Theatre Innovators

Abstract

In 1915, Alexander Tairov, a Jewish director from Berdychiv who founded Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre in 1914, opened a theatre school that ran continuously in varied forms, under various names, until the theatre was liquidated in 1949. This school’s inception marked the first time in Russian history that an innovative, comprehensive actor training system was directly implemented in all its parent theatre’s mainstage productions. Yet the new forms of acting the Kamerny pioneered have been almost entirely ignored in subsequent scholarship and actor training. ​​This paper examines the development, philosophy, and curriculum of the Kamerny school, from its 1915 inception to its formalization as the Experimental Theatre Workshops (EKTEMAS) at the MKT in 1923. My discussion provides access to an implementable, actor-centered system that could have achieved widespread use, had it not been repressed, and a historiographical intervention that will, I hope, lay to rest two commonly weaponized claims: that Tairov was disconnected from the Revolution and that he did not successfully cultivate the new actor.

Author

• Dassia N. Posner, Northwestern U