Set design for Ludwig Tieck’s "Puss in Boots," a student work

Eisenstein became bored with the workers’ plays in Proletkult and wrote to his mother on 4 January 1921: ‘There are two specific tendencies here that I physically cannot stand: first, proletarian art, and second, the Stanislavsky method.’ In 1921 he enrolled as a student at the State Higher Theatre Directors' Workshop (GVYRM) headed by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who just developed biomechanics, a new technique for acting and controlling the motions of one’s own body.
In his experimental productions, Meyerhold kept reversing the audience’s conventional illusionistic perspective and exposed the rear of the set. Eisenstein captured the spirit of the radical theatre innovations of Meyerhold and did the same for the play of a German Romantic Ludwig Tieck.