Pavel Urbanovich, Teacher of Biomechanics

Unlike Garin, Pavel Urbanovich was not a native of Ryazan, as his childhood was spent in Grodno province. He was born on January 10 (old Russian calendar), 1898 in the town of Slonim, located to the south-west of Minsk, which became part of the Russian Empire at the end of the XVIII century. His father, Vladimir Antonovich, was a peasant and served as an excise officer, and his mother Elena Adamovna (born Fyodorova) was a housewife. From 1907 to 1914, Urbanovich studied in Brest-Litovsk (in what is now Belarus), and with the beginning of the war he was evacuated with his parents to Ryazan, where he graduated from a commercial school. In 1918 he was drafted into the Red Army and served as “instructor” at the Military Political Department engaged in organizing the work of garrison clubs, where he first encountered amateur theatricals. Soon thereafter he was put in charge of the Ryazan City Theater Studio. In the spring 1920 the studio merged with the Red Army Theatre Workshop, the garrison amateur theater. The new association was attached to the Ryazan Military District, and a colleague of Urbanovich, Vitaly Zhemchuzhny, was appointed its head.

Meanwhile, in September 1920, Meyerhold came back from the South and was appointed, though for a brief period, head of the Theatre Department of Narkompros (the Soviet Ministry of Enlightenment), in charge Moscow theatres, which he intended to revolutionize. The head of OSTKA, Vitaly Zhemchyzhny^ⓘ, of the radical left, attracted his attention. Meyerhold was eager to support Red Army studios who played for the masses as opposed to the ‘bourgeois’ public. It might be with his recommendation that, in October 1920, the garrison theatre was summoned to Moscow (Grishina 1987: 26)^ⓘ.

In his memoirs, Erast Garin described the trip and the following months during which the troupe settled in Moscow and was renamed the First Amateur Theater of the Red Army, then the District Amateur Theater of the Red Army (OSTKA). With the end of the civil war, in 1921, the OSTKA was disbanded due to the demobilization of a large number of members of the group. In the same year, several of its former actors, including Urbanovich, Garin, Nikolay Bogolyubov and others, enrolled in the Higher State Workshops for Theatre Directors (Gvyrm) which had been just opened by Meyerhold. In the autumn of 1922, Gvyrm was merged with the newly founded State College of Theatre Art (GITIS), and, together with other students, Urbanovich was enrolled in the class of the second year. Yet, after Meyerhold broke with the College in 1923, he rejoined his workshop (which had changed name to the State Experimental Workshops - Gektemas) and studied there until 1925.

From the first months with Meyerhold, Urbanovich was intensely involved in biomechanical training. Strong, athletic and agile, he appears to have excelled in biomechanics, succeeding better than other students. Not long after the beginning of his studies, he was promoted teacher of biomechanics in various Moscow studios that were under the care of Meyerhold^ⓘ. He also taught biomechanics to his fellow students in Meyerhold’s workshops. In the autumn of 1924, the Biomechanical Laboratory, led by Urbanovich and two other Meyerhold students and actors, Mikhail Korenev and Zosima Zlobin (February 1976: 270), was established in Gektemas (Feldman 2017: 328).

Having accumulated teaching experience, Urbanovich became Meyerhold's right hand in his project to turn disparate movement sketches into a methodically organized exercise. It is known that some etudes of future biomechanics, such as "Jump on the chest of the opponent" or "Strike with a dagger”, were practiced by Meyerhold back in 1915-1916, in the studio at Borodinskaya (Smirnova-Iskander 1978: 236); in the early 1920 they were became part of the routine training. At that time, Meyerhold conceived "biomechanics" as a project that would distinguish his own method of actor training from other systems, primarily from the “system” of Konstantin Stanislavsky^ⓘ. In the curriculum for the 1922 academic year, Meyerhold contrasted the “three systems of play: 'gut’, ‘experience’, and ‘motor’, or ‘biomechanical’”. He first wrote the word, "motor", but crossed it out and replaced it with "biomechanical" (Meyerhold 1998: 26). The idea was to focus on gesture and movement rather than on "psychology", "gut" or "experience" in the actor's training. And if Stanislavsky proposed a number of "psychological" tasks for the actor, Meyerhold wanted, by contrast, to develop a system of exercises of "motor" or "biomechanical" character.

In the new concept of the theater school, which Meyerhold and Leonid Vivien developed immediately after the revolution and embodied in the Courses for the Art of Stage Directing (Kurmastsep) founded in 1918 in Petrograd, physical training was given a big place. The actor of the revolutionary theater had to be agile, athletic, and able to play on city streets and squares, in mass action. After moving to Moscow in September 1920, Meyerhold became closer to Nikolai Podvoisky, the head of the Military Training Department, Vsevobuch, and together they conceived the project of Tefizcult, the theatricalization of physical culture (Sirotkina 2014). Planning to open theater courses in Moscow, Meyerhold included in the curriculum a year-and-a-half long course of gymnastics. The training of the “actor-citizen”, in his own words, required "the production of normal movement, gymnastics, biomechanics" and was to include "gymnastic games, fencing, dance, military movements, strengthening of rhythmic consciousness (the Dalcroze system), the laws of stage movement, the alignment of movement with the size and shape of the stage, and pantomime" (RGALI 998-1-2922-24-25).

In its early period, biomechanics appeared as a practice on the border between physical education, actor training and the art of stage movement, and it developed simultaneously in all three directions. Pavel Urbanovich became one of Meyerhold’s main assistants in its creation – or, at least, he saw himself as such during his years of study with Meyerhold and parallel teaching of biomechanics. In a letter to Meyerhold in December, 1924 (see Appendix 2), Urbanovich called himself the Master’s "closest collaborator" in the field of biomechanics. His letter contained a work plan that goes far beyond the purely practical exercises in biomechanics and acrobatics with students that he invariably conducted. This work concerned, on the one hand, the development and systematization of a common teaching method and, on the other hand, the archiving of biomechanics as a system; in this regard, the prospect of cooperation with the Museum of the State Meyerhold’s Theater (GosTIM)^ⓘ was outlined. The photographs in Urbanovich's archive were not just memorial evidence of his first years in the theater - they were materials for teaching biomechanics and could serve for learning exercises.

His fellow student, Sergey Eisenstein, blamed Urbanovich for conceiving biomechanics as solely a system of physical culture exercises. “There is also Urbanovich, who made biomechanics purely physical exercises and a form of drill back in the period when we all together studied with Meyerhold”, he said at a lecture about biomechanics in 1935. “He had such a tendency even at that time, and when he took his own road, if he was then a lumberjack, now he became a bricklayer in the field of biomechanics" (Eisenstein 2000: 725). This small memoir, in which irony borders on arrogance, reflects well the divergences in the approach to biomechanics that existed in Meyerhold’s circles^ⓘ. Urbanovich's own approach, at least in the early 1920s, was characterized by: 1) a bias toward practical work; 2) a close approach to physical education and acrobatics, and to a much lesser extent, to systems for the development of acting skills; and 3) a relatively low content of theory^ⓘ. It contrasted, for instance, with Eisenstein’s view of biomechanics, where descriptions of exercises are analytical, theoretical and even, at times, poetic^ⓘ, or with the work of Mikhail Korenev, who thoroughly recorded every word by Meyerhold on the “principles of biomechanics”.

What was new for theater and symptomatic of the period is the attention Urbanovich gave to the two media, photography and film, as instruments to record exercises and preserve them for future students. Photography turned the movement into a chain of "sequentially-static moments of main exercises", as he wrote in a letter to Meyerhold (see Appendix 2). This required preliminary analysis of the exercises, which were either separate complex movements (such as a shot from a bow or a throw of a stone) or small theater scenes, etudes. As an instrument of recording exercises, photography was congenial to biomechanical exercises, which themselves constituted of a number of elementary movements, were inherently analytical. Each exercise was divided into parts, or “moments”, and a description of consecutive parts formed the so-called "title" (titul, in Russian), like the content page of a book. The photographs corresponded to the list of movements in the “title”. Together with actor and photographer, Aleksey Temerin, in the early 1920s Urbanovich worked on shooting biomechanical exercises, and thus he created an archive of the earliest photo evidence of Meyerhold’s method.

In 1925, Urbanovich was still on the books as a member of the laboratory of stage directing attached to the GosTIM, and a student of Gektemas, but in the following years he worked at the Theater of Revolution^ⓘ. From 1924 to 1927 Urbanovich directed the Theater Juniors School, where he also taught acrobatics, biomechanics, mime and acting skills (Zolotnitsky 1976: 129), and then he became deputy director of the Technical School of the Theater. There he got closer to the director Aleksey Popov, with whom he later moved to work (from 1935 to 1943) at the Central Theater of the Red Army: Popov, as artistic director, and Urbanovich combined the duties of stage director, teacher and head of the theater school. In 1943, Urbanovich headed the Front Hospital Brigades organized by the Central House of Art Workers, and a year later he was sent to Yakutsk, in Eastern Siberia, to work at the Russian Drama Theater. For four years he worked as an artistic director and teacher of the theater, after which, in 1948, he was sent to Germany as a director of the army theater of the Soviet occupation troops, where he worked until February 1951. Later he taught at the Moscow Circus School and the Central Studio of Circus Art. Pavel Vladimirovich died in Moscow in 1955.

The photographs of biomechanics from Urbanovich's private archive (Appendix 1) consist of two series: (A) pictures of Urbanovich demonstrating the solo exercises, "Throwing a Stone" (fig. 1) and "Archery" (fig. 2-4), and pictures of the actor Konstantin Vasilyevich Sholmov (1903-? ) and himself performing an exercise in a couple, "Jump on the back and transfer of gravity" (fig. 5-6); (B) photos of group exercises, which are shown by pupils of Gvyrm both inside and outside the building (fig. 7-8) where the Meyerhold school was located in the very early 1920s (fig. 9-14). The first series dates back to 1923-1924, and the group photos were presumably taken earlier, in 1922. Both series are interesting because they appear to have been created as methodological material, a visual aid for those studying biomechanics. Thus, Urbanovich's performance of the exercise, "Archery" (Fig. 2-3), is broken down into stages, or "moments": "Lifting the bow", "Targeting", and the "Shot". Copies of some photos are in the Bakhrushin Museum (the GosTIM collection), and from the signatures on the back of the copies we learn that Figure 2 (which we identified as an exercise, "Throwing a stone") was a "trial of light” (for the photographer). This series includes two shots of the duo exercise, "Jump on the back and transfer of gravity". It was performed by Urbanovich and the actor, Konstantin Sholmov (Urbanovich sometimes wrote his name as "Sholomov"). The exercise is also known from the pictures where it is performed in a group of six or more actors, but a close-up photo of one pair of performers is unusual. Most likely, it was intended for the same didactic purpose, to serve as a model for students of theater biomechanics.

The second series (B) are photographs of group exercises in biomechanics. In part they were made in a hall in the building where Meyerhold’s school was located in the early 1920s. One of the photographs, apparently belonging to this series (taken in the same hall), was published by Vadim Shcherbakov as an illustration for an article by one of the authors (Sirotkina 2014). Like Series A, this series is not dated; yet, together with Shcherbakov, we tend to believe that the photos were taken in 1922, during the period of Gvytm (as evidenced by the Constructivist inscription on the wall). The workshops were then in a building located at 32, Novinsky Boulevard. (Meyerhold and his family lived in the same house, one floor above; the building was destroyed in the early 1950s during the construction of a residential building located at 18, building 1, Novinsky Boulevard.)

The life on Novinsky Boulevard was described by Tatyana Sergeevna Esenina^ⓘ (Esenina 1991) and some of Meyerhold’s students. The Dutch stove, which one can see in two photos, was mentioned in several memoirs, including by Garin:

Series B, 1922-1923, photographer A.A. Temerin (?)