Russian theater theory

I'm afraid I am getting a little behind on relating my conversations with Helena Iara... my only excuse is that I am spending more time with her and less with the computer.  In any case, I have to go back to Saturday for this story.

As the early morning sun came into our bedroom Saturday morning, Helena and I played one of those silly games that parents play with their little babies, making strange faces at each other.  I'm not sure who was imitating whom, quite frankly, but we went through the same toolbox of exaggerated expressions, and I ended up laughing quite a lot.  She didn't exactly laugh, but she seemed to smile, and definitely enjoyed the game, because she wanted to keep playing.

As Rita took a shower, I brought Helena Iara downstairs and put her in her cradle and rocked her lightly as she dozed.  Since we had talked about William James and his ideas of emotions before, I started to talk about theater theory, particularly the difference between the ideas of Constantin Stanislavsky and Vsevelod Meyerhold, two leading directors who worked in Russia during the time of the revolution.

Now, most of us know at least a parody of Stanislavsky because of movies about acting: the pretentious actor always asking "What's my motivation?" is asking a fundamental question for the Method.  Stanislavsky challenged his actors to create the internal feeling that their parts should experience, to live the emotion of their part, believing that the expressions of their face and body would then reflect or represent these inner states.  Meyerhold presented the opposite hypothesis, insisting on intense discipline of the surface of the body, so that an actor would work from the outside-in. (It's worth noting that Meyerhold was Jewish and worked at the National Yiddish Theater, and this idea of ortho-praxis, perfecting the externality, fits very well with Judaism, while starting in and moving out is a much more traditionally Christian way of thinking ethics and behavior)

In fact, the game that Helena Iara and I had been playing that morning is something that almost any theater student would recognize: an exercise where one actor stands face to face with another, imitating every detail and gesture in the face and body of the other.  The theater game comes more out of the Meyerhold tradition than from the Method, and many organizations that work with social theater think it fundamental for building empathy and understanding of the other.  When a boy mirrors a girl or a white a black, you stand in the shoes of the other for a moment.

With the dominance of film in the world of acting, Stanislavsky seems to have won the battle for drama training, but I wonder if the game that Helena and I were playing doesn't suggest that Meyerhold was right on the way that people learn emotions and grow.  We'll see what happens as Helena Iara grows up.