Marianne Kubik

Marianne Kubik is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where she heads the movement division of the graduate acting program. Ms. Kubik trained in biomechanics with Gennadi Bogdanov and Nikolai Karpov in the U.S. and Russia. She has taught master classes and courses in biomechanics throughout the U.S. and has developed projects that use it in performance. Her book chapter on the subject can be found in Movement for Actors published by Allworth Press. Ms. Kubik is an Advanced Actor/Combatant recognized by the Society of American Fight Directors, and she uses biomechanics as the foundation for stage combat as well as her other specialties in mask and dance.

Workshop Overview

Vsevelod Meyerhold developed his approach to actor training, which he coined biomechanics, in the early part of the 20th Century. Biomechanics, like neutral mask, was intended as a training tool, not a specific performance style. Because of this, and because his work suffered erasure by the Soviet government, biomechanics is often little understood in terms of its usefulness to the contemporary process of creating theater. Since its re-emergence at the end of the 20th Century, it has re-surfaced as an exciting technique for training the physical instrument of the actor. The questions still arises: What is its significance to the actual performance? How can it instruct the actor and director in their communication of character and idea? With an exciting new focus in contemporary theater on movement-based performance, how can it assist a company devoted to the development of new and original work? This workshop will examine hands on the basic principles behind biomechanics, using both original exercises as taught to me by descendents of the technique and my own exercises that I've developed with American acting students. We will then explore how this training can become the essential foundation in the work of mask, commedia, stage combat and other forms of movement-based theater.

Performance fragment

A performance fragment will be presented based on creative work that has come out of the remaining canonical etudes Meyerhold developed as part of biomechanics, to provide an illustration of how this traditional (and nearly forgotten) method of actor training can be used in contemporary performance.