Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva - Co-Artistic Director

CURRICULUM VITAE

Bio

A specialist in collaboratively devised transdisciplinary theatre, New Media, Russian Silver Age aesthetics (including Meyerhold’s biomechanics), and Russian and American approaches to psychological realism, Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva has directed, choreographed, and performed in the US, France, and Russia. Her work has been seen in Saint Petersburg, Russia at New Holland Island Pavilion; in Poland at the 2021 Sopot Festival; in the San Francisco Bay Area at Circus Center, the San Francisco Fringe Festival, Bindelstiff Studios, Thick House, Galería de la Raza, Off-Market Theater, City Solo, and Franconia Performance Salon; in New York at Cloud City; in New England at Maine's Barn Arts Collective, the Portland Fringe, and the Providence Fringe; in Utah at Kayenta Center for the Arts; and internationally via online streaming. Dr. Syssoyeva is the recipient of multiple grants and residencies for her scholarship and artistic work, including grants from the Fulbright Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and residencies from CEC Arts Link, Barn Arts Collective, and the Colby College Irving D. Suss Visiting Artist fund.

In addition to her devised work, Dr. Syssoyeva has worked extensively in twentieth century and contemporary drama, staging works by Beckett, Shepard, Churchill, Nottage, Naomi Iizuka, Simon Stephens and others.

Dr. Syssoyeva is the recipient of multiple grants and residencies for her scholarship and artistic work, including grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Stanford Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies, and residencies from CEC Arts Link, Barn Arts Collective, and Colby College Irving D. Suss Visiting Artist fund.

Scholarship

A scholar and teacher as well as practitioner, she holds a joint-PhD from Stanford University in Theatre and Interdisciplinary Humanities, and is the She is the editor of a three-volume study of collective creation and devised theatre practices: A History of Collective Creation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Her monograph Meyerhold and Stanislavsky at Povarskaia Street: Art, Money, Politics, and the Birth of Laboratory Theatre is under development. She has taught theatre across the US: at Stanford University, Florida State University School of Theatre, Bowdoin College, Dixie State University of Southern Utah, Colby College, and Yale School of Drama.

Teaching

As a teaching artist, Dr. Syssoyeva has worked all across the US, including at Yale School of Drama, Stanford University, Colby College, Florida State University, and Bowdoin College, where she has taught, variously Russian Expressive Movement, Theatrical Biomechanics, Directing, Interdisciplinary Performance-Making, The Theatrical Avant-Garde, and Theatre for Social Justice. Her teaching emphasizes a collaborative, project-based approach to the artistic development and intellectual growth of students in the performing arts. She has worked with a broad range of students: in conservatory programs, liberal arts divisions, and theatre-studios; in state schools and private colleges and universities; with majors and non-majors; with doctoral candidates, MFAs, BFAs, and BAs. Where applicable she teaches traditionally: academic and artistic courses presented as discreet subjects. Where feasible, she teaches an integrated approach to theatre-making, bringing together students with varied interests and backgrounds (design, directing, writing, performance, choreography, dramaturgy, stage management, etc), and incorporating both seminar and practicum.

Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Dixie State University, where she teaches Directing, Interdisciplinary Devising, the History of Theatre and Dramatic Literature, Script Analysis, Theatre and Society, and Dramaturgy. Since arriving at Dixie State in 2015, she has contributed a number of curricular changes to the existing theatre program, including creation of a Devised Physical Theatre sequence, a staged reading series in contemporary drama, and opportunities for training and performance in Aerial-Dance. In 2016 she established Classrooms Without Borders, a series of classes, field research trips, collaborative encounters with students from other regions, and performance-making projects focusing on Theatre for Social Justice.

Dr. Syssoyeva approaches teaching from two, intersecting vantage points: as an artist, and as an educator in the university system. As a theatre-artist, she is committed to the potential of academia to nurture artistic experiment,and foster the integration of intellectual and aesthetic creativity. She seeks to develop “actor-creators”, directors open to the generative capacity of performers and sensitive to the individuality of each actor’s process, and theatre-makers who place no preconceived parameters on their creative contribution to the theatrical event. She strives to foster thinking theatre artists: socially conscious, politically informed, historically literate. And she teaches that the art “of the future” is created in conversation with the art of the past; that theatre history is, in one of its aspects, a language of forms, to be studied, broken apart, reconfigured and transformed in present practice.

Her directorial work with students is rooted in traditions of physical theatre, applied to both traditional drama and devised work. Her approach to actor training is a synthesis of internal and external methodologies: aspects of American method and Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis, and of Russian Movement (corporeal expression) and Biomechanics. Her teaching is further inflected by notions of social mask (Meyerhold), gestus (Brecht), archetype and drag, by Michel Saint-Denis’ approach to development of imagination, and by Viola Spolin’s approach to inculcating a sense of play and spontaneity. She approaches “physical theatre” as an aesthetic emphasis rather than genre - with applicability to traditional dramaturgy, as well as to avant-garde and experimental playwriting, devised work, and non-text based performance.

As an educator, Dr. Syssoyeva is committed to fostering the role of theatre practice in the liberal arts curriculum, as a nexus of interdisciplinary learning (visual, literary and embodied practices, cultural history, and social awareness), and as a site of interdepartmental cooperation. She believes that, in an educational environment, theatre-making – practiced with rigor and commitment – constitutes a method of thinking through doing. In this context, she has a particular interest in collective creation and documentary theatre. Her experience has demonstrated that collective creation inculcates creative autonomy, mutual responsibility, and collaboration; and that documentary theatre-making has deep potential as critical pedagogy, fostering social awareness and civic engagement, investigation, curiosity, discussion, debate.

Meyerhold’s Biomechanics

A specialist in Meyerhold’s Biomechanics and Russian traditions of Stage Movement, Dr. Syssoyeva has taught and researched these practices for over two decades. She organized the first U.S. biomechanics workshops taught by Russian practitioners, bringing master teachers Gennadi Bogdanov and Nikolai Karpov (then director of Corporeal Arts at GITIS) to Tufts and Syracuse in the mid-'90's for intensive summer training institutes. These events spawned a series of biomechanics workshops in the US, contributing significantly to the rise of interest in the technique. She continued this work in program development during her graduate studies, creating opportunities for American theatre students to train with Russian and Polish theatre artists, in the US and overseas.

Dr. Syssoyeva trained with Mr. Bogdanov (in the US, Russia, and Germany), and served as his interpreter and teaching assistant over a period of two years, at workshops throughout the US, before beginning to teach the work herself. Gennadi Bogdanov received his own training from Nikolai Kustov, a former actor and teacher with Meyerhold’s company (it was Kustov who posed for the oft-published photos of biomechanical études imported to the US by Lee Strasberg in the 1930’s). It was this practical work that led to her scholarly research into the links between Meyerhold’s pedagogical and directorial practices.