Tony De Maeyer

Actor, choreographer, specialist in biomechanics according to W. Meyerhold

The Belgian film and theatre actor was born in Brussels and studied at the Koninklijk Vlaams Conservatorium in Antwerp (B) with Ivo Van Hove. He then continued his training for years in workshops with Luk Perceval, Minako Seki, Enrique Vargas, Thierry Salmon and many others.

In 1996 he met Gennadi N. Bogdanov in Berlin (lecturer in biomechanics at the former GITIS in Moscow). This was the beginning of an extremely intensive collaboration that enabled him to make Meyerhold’s biomechanics his own in practice.

De Maeyer is probably one of few actors in the world who has achieved the perfect assimilation to biomechanical principles in his acting, both on stage and in film. For many years, De Maeyer has taught and given workshops in biomechanics at theatre schools in Germany and abroad, such as the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, the University of the Arts (UdK), the Academy of Performing Arts Baden-Württemberg (AdK) or the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz, as well as at private acting schools in Germany.

As a biomechanics expert, he has been working as a choreographer at state theatres for many years (Theater Weimar, Volksbühne Berlin, Theater Bonn, Theater Aachen…) as well as in theatre ensembles to artistically supervise theatre productions by training the actors, familiarising them with the principles of biomechanics and staging bodies in motion. He has worked with Luise Voigt, Christian von Treskow, Dimiter Gottschef and Darijan Mihajlovic, among others.

De Maeyer has set himself the task of freeing Meyerhold’s biomechanics from its overly dogmatic historical context and developing it further as a modern acting method. Alongside the work of K. Stanislavski, he considers biomechanics to be extremely relevant and indispensable for craft of acting.

From 2006 to 2020 he worked as a biomechanics teacher at the Mime Centrum Berlin. As an actor, De Maeyer received the award for Best Actor at the Brussels International Film Festival in 1993.