Alexey Levinsky is an expert practitioner working in Moscow as a teacher and director. He was trained in biomechanics in the early 1970s as part of a small group of young actors who worked with Nikolai Kustov – one of Meyerhold’s collaborators and a significant contributor to the development of the études, so central to the discipline of biomechanics. Levinsky is one of only a handful of active practitioners in the world who were trained by Kustov at the Theatre of Satire and who continue an embodied link with Meyerhold’s training. Levinsky was invited by the Centre for Performance Research in 1995 to contribute to the Past Masters conference dedicated to Meyerhold’s legacy. As a prologue to the conference, he led classes on biomechanics for actors and biomechanics for directors for two weeks; both classes were identical! At the conference, he presented a masterclass of his approach, working with some of the participants from the workshops and demonstrating some of the remainingétudes. Jonathan Pitches

Image: © Netun Lima