YURI RAKITIN'S WORK IN THE FIELD OF ACTING PEDAGOGY

Abstract

For almost three decades, Yuri Rakitin worked as a drama and opera director in Serbia, building a fruitful and artistically relevant career. He also had considerable success as an acting pedagogue, which has not been written about enough, engaging devotedly in the work of four acting schools for over fifteen years. He taught six practical and theoretical subjects: in Belgrade, he taught Psychology of Acting with practical exercises at the Acting and Ballet School (1922–1927), Acting Technique and Theater History at the Acting School of the National Theater (1934–1936), and Acting at the Department of Theater Arts at the Academy of Music (for some time during the Second World War), and in Novi Sad, he taught Basic Elements of Acting and Practical Acting at the Drama Studio of Vojvodina and the State Theater School (1947–1952). In addition, he also prepared public exam performances with his students, primarily based on the works of great world dramatists (Molière, Ibsen, Chekhov, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck ...). His students were some of the most prominent Serbian inter-war and post-war actors, such as Mata Milošević and Mira Banjac. He permanently enriched the tradition of Serbian acting pedagogy by incorporating
elements of Russian methodology and theory of acting, embodied in Stanislavski's "System", and especially by introducing preparatory acting exercises into the teaching and applying the analytical-synthetic method in understanding the structure of the acting process. Students and co-workers left testimony about him as a caring and dedicated pedagogue who simply and interestingly managed to transfer knowledge and motivate students for school work, but also as a man whose fatigue or depression occasionally prevented him from fully concentrating on work and giving his best. In the essay titled "Theater Experiments and Ideas" from 1923, he expertly presented Stanislavski's "System" to the Serbian cultural public, singling out those aspects of the "System" that he considered the most important and supplementing them with his observations from theater practice. In the part of the essay dedicated to the actor's preparatory work, he demonstrated, among other things, his skill in conceptual articulation and plastic representation of the complex issues of acting pedagogy. When his pedagogic oeuvre is viewed in its entirety - bearing in mind the education program, methodology, results, writings and influence - and when that
oeuvre is placed in the context of the development of Serbian acting pedagogy, it is justified to conclude that in the first half of the 20th century in Serbia there was no more important acting pedagogue than Yuri Rakitin.