There was all this great work and these great people that came together in the time and space and years just before the forming of First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. All that collective knowledge, all those collective ideas and all that collective experience was put into form and practice in the First Studio - compressed and intensified so to speak. And then following, from out of the First Studio came this explosion practically of more ideas, more influence and more work. The First Studio is like the hinge, the turning point ...no, sorry that metaphor is wrong...more like the stew pot where the best ingredients arrived and somehow this stew pot magically fed everyone and then led to a whole new series of recipes, nourishing and sustaining us even to this very day...theatrically speaking that is. OK, that's a little hokey, but that's how it worked. That's what it was. It's Los Alamos. It's Darwin's trip to the Galapagos. It's the New Deal. It's the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's the Jets winning the Super Bowl even! What came before it, leading to it, what it was in the moment, and what has come to be since as a result...
The First Studio is the single most important gathering of people and practice in modern western theatre culture. And Vakhtangov is the single most important person from within that particular gathering.
Prior to, leading up the First Studio, you have Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko forming the Moscow Art Theatre and achieving success with the plays of Chekhov, Gorky and others. You have Meyerhold first as an actor in the Art Theatre, then as a director/teacher in Stanislavsky's studio theatre (Not in the First Studio - a different studio theatre. Bear with the names, they are kind of like how I call animals...white dog, little cat, skinny cat, black dog, one fish, two fish, etc.) You have Stanislavsky working with Gordon Craig, Isadora Duncan and other international artists. You have Sulerzhitsky. You have Tolstoy hanging around. Artists, Poets, Designers, Musicians. You have revolution in the air. And that is but the tip of the ice-berg! There is a gathering of force if you will - work, ideas, influences, including the notion that theatre can literally and immediately combine them all, especially via the work of the actor.
So comes Stanislavsky and puts together a group of young theatre artists under the leadership of Sulerzhitsky, and this group comes to be known later as the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. I will leave aside their actual work and practice for now, except to say that now you have the idea of a "laboratory theatre." Now you have actor preparation that includes work in the realm of pre-expressive as well as the expressive. You have theatre dedicated to a specific idea. You have science and psychology and progressive ideas. You have nature and yoga and ancient ideas. You have a fusion of writer, actor, director and designers. You have ethics and spirituality. You have the question and idea of individual within a collective and vice versa. You have the question and challenge of form and content. None of these things were unique or entirely new in and of themselves. But being put completely and consciously together in totality - this was absolutely new. And it changed western theatre.
After the First Studio you have the work and ideas of Michael Chekhov, Vakhtangov's, and Stanislavsky's continuing work. You have numerous theatres under the influence of their example, including The Habima. You get Meyerhold full blown. You get Grotowski and his ideas. You get Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya. You get the Group Theatre and in turn Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, and others. You get Popov, Zavadsky, Knebel, and Brecht. And again this is but the tip of the ice-berg.
The sphere of knowledge and influence leading into the forming of the First Studio and the sphere of knowledge and influence coming out of the First Studio is completely unmatched on any level in the history of theatre. But how many people actually know of it, of its details, of the people who were the First Studio? How many people know of the details of Vakhtangov's work?
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