Alisa Ballard Lin Theatrical Consciousness (Paperback)

Theatrical ConsciousnessAlisa Ballard LinLabel: Northwestern University PressDescription: Investigating late imperial Russian and early Soviet modernism's reinvention of the actor In this wide-ranging study Alisa Ballard Lin argues that Russian theatrical theory and practice contributed to a broad pre- and postrevolutionary discourse about the mind profoundly reshaping concepts of consciousness perception identity and the constitution of the subject. Theatrical Consciousness: The Actor's Mind in Russian Modernism examines efforts in Russian theater- from around the turn of the century through the mid- 1930s- to stimulate train imagine and ultimately understand the actor's as well as the spectator's mind. Discussing key figures of the period including Nikolai Evreinov Konstantin Stanislavsky Vsevolod Meyerhold and Alexander Tairov Lin identifies an underappreciated dimension of humanism within Russian modernism: a humanism that resisted the pressures of an increasingly technologized industrialized and politicized modernity that challenged the place of the human within it.