Content area
Full Text
In 1913 Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a director of the Russian Imperial Ballet, published two books based on Delsarte's principles which had considerable impact on the Russian modernist theatre. Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, all explored the semiology of emotional expression, as did the Russian physiologists Sechenov and Pavlov. Mikhail Chekhov, in particular, developed principles of physical acting, and the article concludes with a comparison between his work and that of Delsarte.
As theatre practitioners both authors of this paper have found the exercises of Mikhail Chekhov extremely valuable when directing and training young actors, and as theatre historians we have been intrigued by the influence Francois Delsarte had on many late nineteenth and early twentieth century modernist directors. We therefore decided to research whether a direct influence could be found between the theories of Delsarte and the practice of Chekhov, as it seemed that they shared a number of similarities in both analysis and philosophy. For both men gesture was not just a means of semiotic communication or oratorical embellishment but involved an interaction between physical movement, emotional involvement and creative imagination that they both described in spiritual terms.
In this paper, after considering some of the philosophical implications of Delsarte's work, we describe how both his ideas and his practice were translated into Russian by Prince Sergei Volkonsky (1860-1937), and how these ideas were received by practitioners in the Russian theatre. In particular, we examine the similarities and differences between Delsarte's principles and the creative system of acting developed by Mikhail Chekhov (1891-1955). In some cases it seems as though Chekhov took directly from Delsarte, via Volkonsky; in others the influence of theatre directors Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and Evgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1922) and the philosopher/educationalist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is more obvious, though each of these may themselves have been influenced by Delsarte. Finally, by looking in some detail at Chekhov's concept of the Psychological Gesture, we suggest that he, far more than these others, recognized a special connection between physical gesture and internal creativity that is particularly Delsartean.
Francois Delsarte (1811-1871)
Delsarte believed not only that he had discovered the scientific principles of physical expression, but that he had integrated them into a comprehensive philosophy of Being, accounting for its corporal, mental and spiritual...