Meyerhold and Theatre of the Future

The new issue of the journal includes articles based on the materials presented at the international scientific conference Meyerhold. Theatre of the Future, held at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts — GITIS under the active support of the State Institute for Art Studies. Meyerhold and GITIS — a great man and the oldest theatre institute. They are connected by history itself: Meyerhold graduated from the Music and Drama School at the Moscow Philharmonic Community. It was that famous course that inspired Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko to think and dream about a new theatre. Both Olga Knipper and Vsevolod Meyerhold were in this graduating course. Right after the graduation, the card was sent to Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseev-Stanislavsky with a suggestion to meet. And after working with him, Meyerhold realized the need for professional education for theatre directors, which he himself lacked. His directing school was inside the Moscow Art Theatre and then followed the decades of independent search. And when Meyerhold realized the need for a systematic education of theatre directors, he came to GITIS to teach the creators of future theatre there.

It was then, in 1921–1922, that the idea of creative workshops was implemented. Each master had his own group of students, his own set of subjects, his own team of teachers-associates. And so we do teach directors for a hundred years. Meyerhold, as we now understand, consider this as the theatre's aspiration for the future, this was the embodiment of his dreams of the theatre productions of other times. He formulated mottos that inspired other theatre people to move forward to a new theatre. Meyerhold became a source of inspiration for many generations of directors thinking about how the theatre should develop and how to turn a written text into a unique performance.

Even the abbreviation GITIS itself (we are sure of this fact as we have found the confirmation of it) was created by Vsevolod Emilievich. It was with his brilliant suggestion and in August, 1922 that the well-known combination of letters of the State Institute of Theatre Arts appeared for the first time in the documents of the People's Commissariat of Education.

It is therefore not surprising that it is so important for us to pay tribute to the memory of Vsevolod Emilievich and to devote special attention to his work in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth, not only within the practical laboratories based on his unique methodology, but in the new studies of his tragically short life, his achievements and the immeasurable influence that Meyerhold had on the development of the entire world theatre.