Special Issue Editors: Franc Chamberlain and Andrei Kirillov
It is fair to say that this Special Issue of TDPT, dedicated to the work of Michael Chekhov, has been a long time in the making, and so it is particularly gratifying to be writing this editorial today, seeing the fruits of many individual and collaborative labours being fully realised (or should it be harvested?). It was a long time before this journal had even been conceived that Sarah Kane and Graham Dixon raised the possibility of translating new materials from the two volumes of Chekhov's Literary Heritage published in Moscow in 1995. They told me that they knew of a rich record or source, focusing on Chekhov's directorial and training processes before he left Russia, which could significantly add to the understandings of his practice in English-speaking countries. With the help of Rose Whyman and Andrei Kirillov, we identified the precise source and a literal translation by Nicky Brown was commissioned and completed over two years ago. Since then Franc Chamberlain and Andrei Kirillov have been revising and editing the material for our TDPT readership.
Viewed from outside, this process was both frustrating and enlightening. There would be flurries of emails often late at night as both academics exchanged the latest edits of the Hamlet ‘protocols’ (appearing here as a double Source document for the first time in English). Then they would stop, sometimes for months – a pause in activity which, from my viewpoint, could equally be interpreted as a period of reflective contemplation or a stand-off! As the bystander with another agenda pursuing publishing deadlines, I wondered why all the protocols (some 26,000 words) were being dealt with in the same detail, given the fact that we were never going to be able to publish many more than half of them. Why not simply do a rough cut and then revise and edit? On reflection, and without the deadening hand of pragmatism on my shoulder, I learnt that such a drawn-out and fragmented editorial process, played out in the cyberspace between Cork, Huddersfield and St Petersburg, would ultimately lead to the production of a far more robust Source for this Special Issue; more robust because, as both special editors identify in their own introduction, an awareness of the wider context of the protocols helps justify and explain what has been excised and why. It helps illuminate how the ‘complete’ set of protocols published in Russia is itself just a fragment of a much longer rehearsal period, culminating in 1924 with the MAT2 production of Hamlet. Perhaps ultimately it may encourage the reader to consider the wider connections, beyond the protocols themselves, and relating to the later training practices and publications of Michael Chekhov. Let me, then, reflect briefly on these wider connections by summarising the rest of this edition's contents, positioned around this important Source document.
As is customary with our Special Issues, we do not follow the usual rubric of TDPT and Training Grounds develops its own particular character for each edition. Here, there is space for Postcards, for an intergenerational interview with Kane and Dixon, a personalised review of To The Actor by Phelim McDermott and expanded Essais from Sinéad Rushe, Hugh O'Gorman, David Zinder and Joanna Merlin. Each of these Essais offers a particularly inflected examination of the efficacy of Chekhov's work in the studio, with a strong emphasis on what his ideas lend the director. Dick McCaw offers a fuller contextualisation of the work in his Training Grounds editorial, but in the current context I want to consider one simple example of the connections evident here and which circle around the protocols at the centre of this issue. Merlin, the last practitioner alive to have worked directly with Chekhov, opens her elucidation of the work she now does on the Psychological Gesture with a sentence or two about ball work: ‘we create a circle and throw a juggling ball, in a broad under-arm throw, saying our names as we throw. After a few minutes, I introduce Michael Chekhov's “four brothers” that apply to every work of art, which we then incorporate in the throw, one by one’. Many of us have done similar work with balls and there are countless and diverse roots to such exercises. But the fact that, as Kirillov and Chamberlain state in their introduction to the protocols, Chekhov himself was first recording his use of ‘the “Throwing Balls” exercise’, 90 years earlier during his work on Hamlet, is a rather tantalising example of the connectivity performer training histories often throw up – a radical shortening of the otherwise enormous cultural, geographical and ideological distance between a Muscovite theatre laboratory in 1923 and a drama studio in New York in 2013.
For Amanda Brennan, the shortening between Chekhov's period in history and today comes through science. Identifying a synergy between Chekhov's ideas of radiation and James Oschman's concept of ‘the living matrix’, Brennan argues for a post-quantum view of the practitioner's contribution to theatre practice. Control of the energy field of the body, a fundamental aim of Chekhov's fire-related understanding of radiation, she suggests, may be understood through a combination of ancient practices (Chi Kung) and modern electromagnetic science. Leslie Bennett and Suzanne Bennett also pursue an interdisciplinary perspective on Chekhov, but focus on artistic meeting points with him – through music and dance respectively. Leslie develops an appreciation of Chekhov's gestural work for the musical actor, where Qualities of Action and Atmosphere can, in her words, act as a ‘portal’ to the creativity of the ‘intelligent singer’. Suzanne, in an ethnographic account of her own teaching of Dance with post-secondary students in Toronto, looks at the Chekhov Technique as a potentially transformative ‘cross-training’, in which, she says: ‘Chekhov's power as a unifying idiom, [is] inherently congruent with the language of contemporary choreography’. Jane Gilmer explores Chekhov's own well-known disposition towards interdisciplinarity – his fascination with Steiner, anthroposophy and Eurythmy. Drawing on her own experience as a Steiner teacher and performer, and from her training at the Alan Harkness Studio in Sydney in the 1980s, Gilmer proposes a direct set of integrative mechanisms for bringing Steiner's Creative Speech together with the Chekhov Technique. She concludes with a call for contemporary conservatoires and laboratories to revisit their aims as training institutions and to include ‘more layered philosophical experiences of theatre’, drawing on Steiner and Jung. Whilst the final two essays in the main section of this issue, Tom Cornford's and my own, are historical investigations, drawing on archival evidence from Chekhov's time at Dartington in Devon, the theme of interdisciplinarity remains. For Cornford it is evident in the idea of the ‘alternative modernity’ of Craft, which, mobilised as a lens to examine Chekhov's work, reveals what he observes as ‘technique as a habit of action, born of repetitive but evolving practice and on its conjunction of materiality and imagination’. My own parallel paper, again indebted to the unique resources in the Dartington archives, examines one case study of the holistic approach to craft – the Fisher's scene of 1937 – arguing that the model of pedagogy expressed in this instance was redolent of wider examples of inter-war radicalism in teaching practices both in the UK and the US.
This suite of new essays on Chekhov, coupled with the rich pickings of Training Grounds, goes some way to explaining Chekhov's enduring appeal as a practitioner. Taught all over the world and with satellite centres of hybrid practices as complex as those inspired by his teacher, Stanislavsky, Chekhov's work continues to resonate in a context radically changed since his emigration from Soviet Russia. In part this is due to his emphasis on creativity and imagination. In part it is due to the fascinating weave of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, so evident in the Hamlet protocols and in his later work across Europe and the United States. In part it is evident in the openness of his work (and of his second-, third- and fourth-generation teachers) to explore innovative meeting points with other practices. But perhaps ultimately, it is due to the consistent emphasis he placed on the individual creative autonomy of the actor and her dynamic relationship to the ensemble.
Viewed as a whole, we believe, this very full Special Issue constitutes the most important journal-based examination of Chekhov's practice, since the TDR special edition on Chekhov exactly 30 years ago (1983). We hope it is of as much use in the studio as it is in the seminar room and that in either case a few balls are thrown to celebrate the creative vision of Michael Chekhov. Please let us know what you think.