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 * Sandbox for the article on the Theatre-Studio

The Theatre-Studio, also known as the Studio on Povarskaya Street, was a theatre studio that Vsevolod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavski created in 1905. In response to the innovations of Russian Symbolism in other arts (poetry, painting, and music) and under the auspices of the Moscow Art Theatre (though in reality funded privately by Stanislavski himself), their collaboration aimed to establish symbolism in the theatre.

Founding of the Theatre-Studio
The ideas of the Russian Symbolist movement represented the avant-garde in Russia at the time. Materlinck's essay on symbolist drama "The Tragic in Daily Life" (1896) had been published in Russian translation in 1901 (as part of his The Treasure of the Humble). Valery Bryusov called for a form of acting that released the actor's creativity and the audience's imagination from the limitations of the conventions of realism. "The theatre's sole task is to help the actor reveal his soul to the audience". He criticised the realism of the MAT in a famous article entitled "Unneccessary Truth" (1902). As Stanislavski would come to do with his 'system', Bryusov placed the burden for a modernist transformation of the art of the stage squarely on the shoulders of the actor: the "art of the theatre", he wrote, "and the art of the actor are one and the same thing."

In 1904, Stanislavski had finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by the Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. In practice, though, Stanislavski struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static, lyrical qualities of Maeterlinck's symbolist drama. When the triple bill consisting of The Blind, Intruder, and Interior opened at the MAT on 14 October 1904, the experiment was deemed a failure.

Soon after, however, Meyerhold returned to Moscow with the results of the experiments he had conducted with his "New Drama Association" in the Ukraine and Georgia. Meyerhold had left the MAT in the spring of 1902 and by the autumn had established a company with Alexander Kosheverov in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine. When in 1903 Meyerhold assumed sole responsibility for the company, he renamed it the "New Drama Association"; Rudnitsky explains that, two years before Stanislavski's experiments, this had been "the first sign that there was in Russia a director who would at least try to depart from the aesthetic system of psychological realism and in practice apply the principles of Symbolism to the theatre. For Meyerhold soon made it known that 'New Drama' was for him not only Ibsen, Hauptmann and Chekhov, but also Maeterlinck, Przybyszewski, and Schnitzler" (1981, 33). Having toured a number of other Russian cities, in 1904 the company moved to the more cosmopolitan Tbilisi in Georgia.

Stanislavski responded positively to Meyerhold's new ideas, which prompted Meyerhold to propose a "theatre studio" (a term which he invented) that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors." Officially attached to the MAT but actually subsidised privately by Stanislavski himself, the Theatre-Studio was inaugurated on 15 June 1905. Meyerhold was to be the artistic director, with Stanislavski serving as a co-director. The Theatre-Studio's company consisted of actors from Meyerhold's "New Drama Association," actors from the MAT, some from the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, and students from the Art Theatre School. Stanislavski hired a run-down theatre for the Theatre-Studio on the corner of Povarskaya Street and Merzlyakovsky Lane, the former Nemchinov theatre in the Girsh house, which he paid more than 20,000 roubles to renovate.

Aims of the Theatre-Studio
The Theatre-Studio aimed to develop Meyerhold's symbolist aesthetic ideas into new theatrical forms that would return the MAT to the forefront of the avant-garde in Russia and Stanislavski's socially-conscious ideas for a network of "people's theatres" that could reform Russian theatrical culture as a whole. At the first meeting of its members, Stanislavski defined the studio's task as "to find together with new currents in dramatic literature correspondingly new forms of dramatic art." In his proposal, Meyerhold had described its task as the search for "new means of representation for a new dramaturgy." Bryusov became involved as its literary advisor and helped to define the company's artistic principles.

Stanislavski wrote that their Theatre-Studio was based on the belief that: [...] realism, the depiction of everyday life, had outlived its time. The time had come for the unreal on stage... One must show not life as it flows by in reality, but as we dimly perceive it in our dreams, visions, moments of elevated feeling. This is a spiritual state and it must be conveyed in the theatre, just as painters of the new school show it in their canvases, musicians of the new trend in their music and the new poets in their verse. The works of these painters, musicians, poets have no clear outlines, definite finished melodies, clearly expressed ideas. The strength of the new art lies in the combination and pairing of colours, lines, musical notes, in the harmony of words. They create overall moods unconsciously affecting their audience. They convey allusions which cause the spectator himself to create through his own imagination". The studio's planned repertoire was to include plays by Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaeren, Stanisław Przybyszewski, Knut Hamsun, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, August Strindberg, Valery Bryusov, and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Work and failure of the Theatre-Studio
Central to Meyerhold's approach was the use of improvisation to develop the performance. When the studio presented scenes from Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles, Hauptmann's Schluck and Jau, and Ibsen's Love's Comedy on 23 August 1905 at Pushkino, Stanislavski was encouraged. When the work was performed in a fully-equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded.

Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him," he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion." Meyerhold would go on to explore physical expressivity, co-ordination, and rhythm in his experiments in actor training (which would found 20th-century physical theatre), while, for the moment, Stanislavski would pursue psychological expressivity through the actor's inner technique. Reflecting in 1908 on the Theatre-Studio's demise, Stanislavski wrote that "our theatre found its future among its ruins." Nemirovich disapproved of what he described as the malign influence of Meyerhold on Stanislavski's work at this time.