Meyerhold: the inventor of 20th-century theatre
FOUGARO ARTCENTER welcomes the distinguished theatrologist Béatrice Picon-Vallin, invited by the Nafplio-based Department of Performing and Digital Arts (DPDA) of the University of Peloponnese, to the research seminar “Meyerhold, inventeur du théâtre du XXème siècle et martyre rejeté de l’histoire aujourd’hui plus qu’hier” [Meyerhold, the inventor of 20th-century theatre and rejected martyr of history, today more than ever] on Thursday 16 November 2023, 10.00-12.00, in Room 3.
The seminar will be conducted in French with summaries in Greek.
The seminar is addressed to the teaching staff of the DPDA and the Dept of Theatre Studies (DTS), to PhD candidates and postgraduate students of the two Departments and to the first graduates of the DPDA.
Meyerhold, the inventor of 20th-century theatre and rejected martyr of history, today more than ever
Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940) invented most of the theatrical formats of the twentieth century. After his assassination—preceded by imprisonment, torture and a parody trial of him as an ‘enemy of the people’—his name was removed from the history of theatre.
Is it due to his being a ‘foreign agent’, as it is claimed in Russia today, that the Meyerhold Museum and Centre vanished from Moscow’s map already in the first days of the invasion to Ukraine?
Meyerhold did not wish to leave the Soviet Union, as he was advised by some of his compatriots who had moved to Berlin. He had his audience, as large as Russia. It was for that audience that he became a communist and devised another theatre inspired by the great theatrical traditions—not returning to them but taking their key and universal foundations as a starting point. He studied rather than copy them, on the way towards a different theatre, political, poetic and musical, at the forefront of the avant-garde.
Béatrice Picon-Vallin
Born in 1946, she is former director for the Performing Arts at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France. Her research centres on Russian and Soviet theatre, the history of acting and directing in Europe and theatre’s relation to other arts and the new technologies. One of the top scholars on the work of Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, she has translated in French his entire theoretical oeuvre. She is in charge of publications in the fields of Performing Arts (CNRS Editions), 20th-century Theatre (L'Age d'Homme) and Stage Directing (Actes Sud-Papiers). Among other subjects she has taught theatre and direction history at the Conservatoire National and the Institut d’études théâtrales of Paris III Sorbonne-nouvelle.
