Small theatre troupes emerging in the early 20th century used to name themselves ‘studio' when they regarded the creative process to be more important than its outcome. There were studios whose activities extended beyond strictly artistic projects, and theatre laboratories that focused on experimentation. In Latin, the core meanings of the words ‘studeo' and ‘labor' refer to, in the first case, pursuit, partisanship, fancy or passion, and work, strenuous activity or effort in the second. Konstantin Stanislavski, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, who created the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov with his own Studio, tried to use studios as groundwork for small communities which manifested certain characteristics of Victor Turner's communitas. While applying Stanislavsky's “system”, they also believed that an actor's quality was determined by an omnifaceted develepment of his personality. Thus, artistic tasks were associated with high moral standards, with the nurturing of interpersonal relations within the team, and with some degree of isolation from the external environment. The studios' leaders utilized such borrowed concepts as monastery, hermitage, commune, phalanstery, utopia or sect. Theatre laboratories initiated by Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with new rules for the actor's development. Meyerhold's actor was supposed to operate like a well-tuned instrument and, therefore, physical exercises and acting techniques, which helped develop specific skills and habits, were the base of the activities at his Borodinskaya Studio in Petersburg. The results of these experiments were subsequently used to implement the director's program on major stages.

The paper focuses on a method developed by the Russian actress and teacher Nadezhda Skarskaya and her husband — the famous actor and director Pavel Gaideburov. Skarskaya and Gaideburov became well known as co-founders of a theatre at the Ligovsky People's House (1903) and of the Mobile-Popular theatre (1905). But their work with the studios which were established shortly after the October revolution (some of them were created specifically for workers) still remains relatively unknown. The same is true of their approaches and methods of teaching instructors of amateur theatre in villages and the Red Army. The “Skarskaya method” (as the authors labelled it) was developed for amateurs without any acting experience, and it provided them with the instruments to express themselves through improvisation. Later, it played a significant role in the development of both amateur and agitation theatres in early Soviet Russia. Colleagues and followers of Skarskaya and Gaideburov — directors Nikolai Vinogradov, Dmitry Shcheglov and others — became prominent figures in the amateur theatre movement of the 1920s. The “Skarskaya method” was the instrument many of them used in their work. Analysis of the method (itself heavily influenced by Stanislavsky's approaches to actors' training) and the ways it was used by Skarskaya, Gaideburov and their followers provide a new perspective on the development of applied theatre in early Soviet Russia and the ways it described itself.

The Arbuzov Studio (known formally as the State Moscow Theatre Studio led by Alexey Arbuzov and Valentin Pluchek) is a phenomenon in the history of Soviet theatre. It came into being in 1938, at the height of the Great Purge, when theatres were liquidated on a massive scale. The play “The Town at Dawn”, which dealt with the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, had been created by a group of students through scene studies — a system that traced its origin to the improvisational theatres of the first decades of the 20th century, above all the Mobile-Popular Theatre of P. P. Gaideburov and N. F. Skarskaya and their drama studio “Palaestra”. Arbuzov and Pluchek were consistent in their striving to meld the Stanislavsky Method of acting with the aesthetic heritage of Vsevolod Meyerhold, by then out of favor. Today, the Arbuzov Studio's files, kept for almost eighty years in the home of Isai Kuznetsov, a playwright and screenwriter, let us retrace the history of the play and its performance, and also provide new insights into the ambience of the late 1930s. They also allow us to try to understand why that very stage production resulted in the most intense emotional theatre experience for the youngsters who shortly before the war left schools and entered institutes and then in 1941 went off to war. Furthermore, the documents let us draw a line between a multi-author play about a Komsomol construction site and key theatre productions of the Thaw period, notably those of the studio theatre “Sovremennik” (The Contemporary) and those directed by Anatoly Efros at the Central Children's Theatre. The article includes excerpts from unedited files in Kuznetsov's archive.

Viacheslav Spesivtsev's unorthodox stagings of amateur productions in Moscow in the 1970s are examined here in terms of Richard Schechner's theories of “environmental theater.” The relevant features of environmental theater include inventive uses of theatrical space as well as total abandonment of conventional stages and theatrical spaces. It also recognizes that the theatrical experience for spectators begins long before the performance and ends long after it. Although this idea echoes Stanislavskii's maxim that theater begins in the cloakroom, Schechner rejected many of Stanislavskii's principles, especially the importance of “the fourth wall” dividing spectators and performers. Schechner believed that theatergoers became passive observers in such arrangements, and he sought to undermine what he called the status of theater. Spesivtsev incorporated these strategies into some of his works, although he would have known little about Schechner's ideas. In addition, Spesivtsev integrated aspects of his rehearsals with amateurs, and, therefore, drew more attention to the theatricality of performance. The productions discussed here include Timur and his team, Romeo and Juliet, Does it hurt? and The Train of my memory. Spesivtsev's efforts were part of a broad trend among amateur theaters of the time to develop new relationships with spectators by breaching the fourth wall.

The article is devoted to the description of the laboratory aspect оf Klim's Workshop's activity at VOTM (All-Russian Association of Creative Workshops). The first part of the article describes the difference between a studio, a laboratory and a workshop as forms of theatre activity at the time when A. Vasiliev's SHDI (“School of Dramatic Art”) and VOTM (“All-Russian Association of Creative Workshops”) were formed. The second part of the article discusses the reason for choosing “Workshop” as a name for VOTM, describes the basic principles of VOTM's work, and the beginning of Klim's work in VOTM, focuses on the research (i. e. laboratory) aspect оf Klim's Workshop activity. The author discusses the main research strategies used at Klim's Workshop, the methods of working on a play and the forms of maintenance of the completed project. Since the 1960s, the concept of a Laboratory Theatre was associated with Grotowski's theatre. At the very beginning of his theatrical career Klim was inspired by the ideas drawn from Grotowski's work, but, in fact, he interpreted many of these ideas in his own way. The last part of the article is devoted to an analysis of these differences.

The article is devoted to the history of pantomime theater in the second half of the 20th century in the USSR/Russia and its highpoint during the 1970s, when Giedrius Mackevičius, an outstanding theater director, created the Ensemble of Pantomime in Moscow. The group became famous following the first performance “Overcoming” (1975), which was devoted to the Renaissance artist and sculptor Michelangelo. This wasn't just a pantomime — it was a mix of different dance and movement styles united by the plot and the characters. Then the ensemble was transformed into the professional Moscow Theater of Plastic Drama, which had successful tours all over the USSR and which was loved by audiences tired of state-supported, boring, socialist realist plays, formalistic classical ballet, and pseudo-folk dance, The term “plastic drama” was first used in 1915 by the theater critic Yulia Slonimskaya, who wrote about the French balletmaster Jean-Georges Noverre. In the 1970s, Mackevičius formulated a full-fledged conception of such a theater, which used “the expressive means of drama, dance, pantomime, circus and variety”, but not words, “because the language of the body is so rich that the need for words disappears”. Mackevičius repeatedly emphasized his striving for the creation of a highly spiritual art, directed towards the life of the human soul and spirit. The complicated body language, based on pantomime, allowed him and his actors to turn away from everyday life to eternal issues. After perestroika, new trends pushed aside plastic theater, which, in essence, was forgotten until the beginning of the new, 21st century.

The state of the spectator has been a significant point at issue in theatre studies. In The Emancipated Spectator, the French philosopher Jacques Ranci?re argues that we should stop describing it in terms of “passivity and activity,” and that there is no reason we have to privilege the active state. The controversy over the “passivity and activity” of the theatre spectator already existed in 1920s Russia, and it survives until today. To overcome the passive/active paradigm, we need to discard its premise —that the spectator is one who only watches a work of art created by the artist. The concept of “laboratory” enables us to consider another kind of spectator. In the 1930s, assistants in the Scientific Research Laboratory (SRL) affiliated with Meyerhold's Theatre researched the reaction of the spectator in each scene and made a “score of the spectator.” The laboratory assistant here exists outside the traditional relationship of work of art and spectator. He watches not only the stage, but also the structure of the relationship between the stage (the work of art) and the auditorium itself. What he watches is the whole situation. The work of art and the state of the auditorium both offer materials for laboratory research. By studying documents of the SRL, we can recognize an alternative possibility for the spectator: the spectator as a laboratory assistant who exists outside the work of art / spectator relationship. Such an approach opens up a new perspective for discussions of the politics of spectatorship.

The article discusses the values and motivations of interactions at home seminars and their relationship with theater laboratories in the USSR during the 1970s–1990s. The case study focuses on the Laboratory of Directors and Artists of Puppet Theaters under the guidance of the Candidate of Art History I. P. Uvarova and the Laboratory of the School of Dramatic Art of Anatoly Vasiliev. Anatoly Vasiliev's “laboratory revolution” can be placed not only in the context of changing theatrical forms in experimental theater, but also in the context of the sociology of intellectual communities in the USSR in the second half of the 20th century. The theory of the author as producer, put forward by Walter Benjamin, allows us to consider home workshops and studio theater in the USSR of the 1970s as laboratories of new means of intellectual production for the community of producers. The experience of collective thinking was aestheticized by both the community of scientific intelligentsia and the community of theatrical practitioners. Unofficial theater and scientific communities in the USSR were held only by shared values and motivations, and not by common goals. The disappearance of the Soviet scientific and artistic nomenklatura entailed the disappearance and oblivion of practices of intellectual amateur activity.

The aim of the text is to analyze Gertrud Eysoldt's role in the formation of Max Reinhardt's theatre. His cabaret “Schall und Rauch” emerged from a kind of “men's club” (1901), but in the first productions of the theatre which was born out of this cabaret (plays by Strindberg, Wilde, Wedekind and Hofmannsthal) the female element dominated, and was embodied by Eysoldt. However, reviewers mainly stressed the corporeal weakness of her heroines and their incompatibility with the norms of “mature femininity”. Isn't this the cause of Eysoldt's closeness to Reinhardt's project? After all, his cabaret also presents “a performance of weakness”. In cabaret, a literary text ceases to be treated as material for “an ideal realization”; instead, it becomes the material for a theatrical game that often is based on overturning expectations. This “performance of weakness” empowers Eysoldt (previously “destined” to play naïve heroines or breeches roles) to play such characters as Salome or Lulu, with her intellectualism overcoming the dominant assumption that these roles were created to display seductiveness of female flesh. The performance of Hofmannsthal's Elektra (1903) represents an important turning point. Beginning with a sort of „rehabilitation” of such contemporary authors as Strindberg and Wedekind (which paradoxically didn't mean their glorification, but rather a polemical dialogue), in Elektra the theatre claims its right also to challenge classical antiquity and to unfold its own meanings through a sharp contrast to that image of antiquity which a tradition and previous theatrical experience dictated to the audience. Acknowledgements. The Research Project «Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Female Performers of His Work» is supported by Austrian Science Fund (grant M2330-G30).

This article provides an attempt to contextualize a significant participant in the Soviet and Russian theatrical field — the “Theater” studio, created by Alexei Levinsky in 1978. The studio “Theater” is treated as a unique phenomenon, determined by the biography of its creator, Alexey Levinsky, direct successor to the Vsevolod Meyerhold tradition. At the same time, the studio is considered as an important phenomenon in the context of the late Soviet era and the generational interaction problem. Without due attention to this “symbolic focus of solidarity” (as sociologist Boris Dubin defines this generation), it is difficult to describe the strategies of “Theater” and its place not only among other studios and laboratory theater groups, but also within a more complex system of sociocultural relations. The article reconstructs the system of coordinates and oppositions which is relevant for Levinsky and which influences the studio's methods of self-identification: official — unofficial, commercial — non-commercial, professional — non-professional. For Levinsky, a non-professional in the theater is determined first of all through the special quality of subjectivity and individuality and a particular purpose of performing stage art. Optics, in which the theater studio is seen as a subject's self-knowledge space, purposely separated from other ideologically or commercially charged spheres, makes it possible to compare the experience of Levinsky and of the Non-Official art of the 1970s–1980s. Using the concept of “Participatory Art”, introduced by the American researcher K. Bishop, we analyze Levinsky's amateur studio as a democratized form of collaboration in the Soviet context, in which collectivism is the norm imposed by the state.

The article is focused on Russian documentary theatre during the 2000s and those aspects which involve the laboratory as a model or way of living for these projects. The laboratory was the most convenient form for experimental research practices in the field of documentary theatre. Those who created documentary projects in Russia borrowed the technology from British colleagues, in particular, the Royal Court theatre. The first verbatim workshops were held by playwrights and directors from Royal Court who trained in this method before and achieved much success with it. From the start, British documentary theatre and verbatim theatre as a particular form of it faced hot social and political issues such as war, social inequality, violations of human rights, etc. But when documentary theatre came to Russia at the beginning of the 2000s, it was transformed and developed in a very unique way. Russian documentary projects dealt with marginal or closed communities, with political issues, but also they were focused on discovering hidden sides of ordinary life. These projects were based on so-called deep interviews and actors' technique of imitation of physical behavior. This process of creating performance was provided by the laboratory movement. How it was, and how this experience changed Russian theatre in general is one of the most important issues since the documentary trend still exists. The article is based on materials of documentary projects which were conducted in different Russian cities and theatres.

The author reflects on the potential and strategies of using anthropological optics (namely, the concept of “thick description” by Clifford Geertz) to analyze the independent theatre project “The Apartment”, which was founded in St. Petersburg in 2017 and continued to work into 2019. The project combines immersive and site-specific components. In addition to the artistic tasks, this long-term project is also a theatre laboratory which also has habilitation tasks: it includes neuro-diverse participants with special needs (Autism Spectrum Disorders and Down Syndrome). The article proposes to view the processes taking place in “The Apartment” as a system of rituals peculiar to the discourse of the group. It is assumed that Geertz's anthropological approach may also be applied while analyzing a classical performance. This makes it difficult to use the opposition of “performance” and “process”, the traditional approach adopted by the St. Petersburg Theatre School, to which the author of the article belongs. The annex to the main text includes an attempt at a letter about “The Apartment”, which gives some insight into this case: names of participants, workflow dynamics of the group during a period of two years, the structure of the trainings, etc. Acknowledgements. The article was prepared as part of work on the issue “Verbal communication production in the performance as an object being analyzed within the performance”. The research is supported by the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation (Karamzine scholarships — 2019).

The article discusses the work of several circles and laboratories based at the House of Culture of the Rose (St. Petersburg) during 2015–2018. The idea of the DK Rozy as a place of collective cultural production is a kind of challenge to the state-corporate reality existing in Russia today, in a situation of almost complete discredit and lack of collectivity. On the one hand, the DK Rozy revises the legacy of early Soviet houses of culture, and, on the other, is based on the experience of European and American self-managed community centers. As an independent self-organized initiative, the DK Rozy represents a new type of institution, in which a “circle” is a unit of creative interaction and production. The form of the circle blurs institutional hierarchies and distances between creator and consumer, teacher and student, professional and amateur. Circles can be applied, or can work as laboratories, but they include on equal terms participants from different creative professions, as well as a wide range of activists from different sociocultural spheres. The basis of ethics of this type of creative laboratories is a long-term search for a dialogue of equals, and “non-toxic” and “attentive” communication of all participants with each other. Thus, the entire life activity of the DK Rozy becomes a social performance — a laboratory for the production of alternative forms of collectivity in conditions of the extremely individualized Russian society.

This article explores the innovative field of ‘research-creation', on the threshold of multiple disciplines, between the arts and humanities. It focuses in on the artistic laboratory, as an evolving concept, format, space and processual zone dedicated to trans-disciplinary artistic, micro-political and social experimentation. In this time-space a group engages in a philosophy in action, shifting beyond the dualistic paradigms that persist both in relation to the body and in relation to thought, language, knowledge and culture. This article zooms into and offers a theoretical foundation for a practice-based nomadic performing arts laboratory that we have been developing, where we investigate dance, performance and physical theatre as complementary tools for activating collective practices and open artistic processes. The intention is to activate a field of exchange where subjectivity and corporeality is co-produced, in their singularity, during the artistic process. Artistic laboratories are part a larger phenomenon of the engagement of experimental artistic languages in social, collaborative and collective practices in the contemporary art world. These tendencies are in resonance with the broadening notions of (co) authorship, the politics of perception and spectatorship, which all work towards cultivating the creative agency of a new protagonist-participant, shifting away from traditional notions of the passive spectator.

Gesticulation is one of the most important distinguishing features of Indian expressiveness in general, and performing culture in particular. Expressiveness is characteristic of all Indian public life, and it is most clearly manifested in rituals, performances, demonstrations, in public actions of both one person and whole groups. The article explores the gesture as a complex cultural category in Indian culture, connecting the area of bodily postures, movements with the domain of meanings. The focus is on gesturing systems, above all, hand gestures, in which there are a kind of “dictionaries” or “glossaries” of symbolic gestures (hasta-mudra) and a “grammar” — the skills of using them (viniyoga) to create an artistic text, to implement a dramatic plot. Questions are posed regarding the origin and generation of meaning within the framework of Indian theatrical arts. The concepts of mudra and hasta are analyzed in the situation of ritual and performing arts, theater and dance. The author describes two ways of using hand gestures — as a sign, and as a symbol. The patterns underlying the practice of using gestures (viniyoga) appear to be the main point that prescribes the making of meaning. The author comes to the conclusion that the domain of mastering the art of gesture in Indian performing culture is an extremely old and well-structured discipline. It achieved the greatest integrity and harmony in Hindu rituals, primarily in Tantric rites. Here, the term mudra was formed and began to be applied systematically (along with such terms as tantra, yantra, mantra, which possessed special meaning in Tantric practices). It has two meanings — both the position of the whole body and the gesture of hands. At the same time, in many respects independently (although in some cases, apparently, not without interconnection), a “grammar” took shape in the field of theatrical-dramatic art — gestures of the actor and dancer, — and in iconography — canonical sculptural images of gods, heroes, etc. In theatrical expression, hand gestures were originally designated by the concept of hasta (literally “hand”), and the system of meaningful hand gestures was called hastabhinaya. Over time, in all these areas, as well as in various schools and areas of yoga, the term mudra began to be used actively. This, among other things, turned out to be a method of sanskritization, cultural elevation, social recognition, elevation of these areas of bodily action, raising them to a level close to the ritual. In scenic practice, however, not all the gestures of the hands of an actor and a dancer are wise signs; a kind of “emancipation of gesture” lies at the basis of the formation of all abstract compositions, the meanings of which the viewer himself can freely “read”. Acknowledgements. This article is a part of a research program of Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Science. The fieldwork material collected in frame of research project by Dr. Svetlana Ryzhakova “Possession, devotion, performance: borders and interconnections of personal self-possession, worship and artistic experience in Indian artistic traditions” supported by Russian Foundation for Fundamental Researches, grant № 18-09-00389.

The crossword, one of the notable phenomena of post-Soviet Russian culture, still remains largerly unnoticed by researchers. In this paper, we attempt to show the heuristic potential of the crossword as material for study of post-Soviet society. Proceeding from an interpretation offered by O. Shevchenko in his articles, the author proposes emphasizing the significance of studies in traditional culture and cognitive psychology when seeking to understand the nature of the crossword as a specific cultural phenomenon. Shevchenko has noted an increase in the consumption of crosswords in the 1990–2000s. She explains it by noting the special significance of puzzles to which an intellectual aura attached for the post-Soviet intelligentsia. In this paper an alternative view of crosswords is proposed. The crossword not only became more popular, but also was simplified. The transformed form became incorporated into the social and cultural context alongside phenomena of folklore. The crossword literally starts to perform functions similar to those carried out by riddles. Having appeared as an agent of transmission of uncritically accepted, “encyclopedic” knowledge, the crossword becomes a medium of transmission of everyday experience; it also naturally reflects and translates the norms and values of the community in which it appears. The author supports her conclusions by utilizing the results of research in other fields, that in one way or another are connected with crosswords. Acknowledgements. This paper was prepared as part of the project of the academic research group № 17–05–0003 within the scope of the “HSE Academic Fund Programme” in 2018 and within the scope of government support of the leading universities of Russian Federation “5-100”.I am very grateful to my scientific supervisor B. E. Stepanov, who put so much effort in supporting this study and encouraged me never to give up. I also want to thank the wonderful N. V. Samutina for help in editing and composing the article.

To cite this review: Mikhailova-Smolniakova, E. S. (2019). Show me how you dance, and I will tell you who you are. Shagi/Steps, 5(3), 260–266. (In Russian).