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Modernism in the theatre

• Naturalism (theatre)
• Realism (theatre)
• Sandbox for Symbolism • Symbolism (theatre)
• Expressionism (theatre)

Sandbox for the Modernist drama, theatre, and performance article

The close interaction and historical interdependence of modernist drama, theatre, and performance renders their treatment together necessary. The different movements that comprise modernism in drama, theatre, and performance were not distinct entities—considerable overlap and mutual influence occurred.

Modernism

"Modernism" is a term used to describe a distinct cultural movement, particularly within the arts, that challenged traditional forms of art and thought, but whose exact contours are defined differently by different critics and historians, depending on what Raymond Williams calls their use of "the machinery of selective tradition".<ef>Williams (1989, 32-33, 43).</ref> Modernism was neither homogenous nor unified and a range of different methods and emphases competed with one another.

During the period identified as "modernist", the greatest changes in the media of cultural production occurred, particularly important among which for drama, theatre, and performance was the emergence of radio, cinema, and eventually television.

Features

Rise of the director

• The rise of the director. Relationship to Wagner - one artist with unifying vision (but not necessarily unifiying the arts). Responsibility for the whole production. Combined action of all its elements (including the work of the playwright). Not necessarily a rejection of team-work. See On the Art of the Theatre (1910). Proposes a National Theatre and a theatre studio/experimental laboratory. Talks about the MAT. More practical.

From the actor-manager to the theatre director.

Bablet argues that Craig's manifesto The Art of the Theatre (1905) inaugurated the era of the director.

Manifestoes and theory

Whereas previously dramatic theory and theatre criticism tended to be a by-product of artistic production, modernism gave theoretical reflection a far greater role. Many modernist movements promulgated their ideas by means of the manifesto. Each needed, Berghaus argues, to register a "claim of originality in a patent-like fashion so that one could beat the competition in the intellectual marketplace." innovation Marinetti making conscious use of techniques of advertising.

• Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1905 the English practitioner Edward Gordon Craig published his influential The Art of the Theatre, which like Bertolt Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues was written in the form of a dialogue.

In the mid-1930s, Konstantin Stanislavski adopted a messianic attitude towards promoting his 'system' as a universal approach to actor training and rehearsal.

Genre and modernism

What happens to the debates about genre--tragedy and comedy? The grotesque. Tragicomedy. "Drama" as a genre. Anti-tragic discourse (Brecht). Historical development of movements into genres. Szondi's "crisis of drama."

Rather than "theatre," Berghaus categorises as "experimental literature" those modernist texts that resisted realisation in performance, such as Gertrude Stein's Saints and Singing, Antonin Artaud's Jet of Blood, Raymond Roussel's Poussière de soleils, and Wyndham Lewis's Enemy of the Stars.

Anti-theatricalism and the actor/puppet debates

“ Playgoer: But are you not asking these intelligent actors almost to become puppets?
Director: A sensitive question, which one would expect from an actor who felt uncertain about his powers! ” — Edward Gordon Craig, The Art of the Theatre (1905).

Anti-theatricalism certainly describes an opposition to theatre as such and not just to some historically contingent theatre. At the same time, however, any such general attack on the theatre takes its point of departure from a critique of a historically specific theatre, from which a general understanding of theatre is then distilled. We must therefore examine, in each case, what kind of theatre stands in for this construction of the 'theatre as such', who personifies it, and what specific theatre practice defines its limits and excesses. For Naturalist theatre, for example, it is the melodrama that represents the theatre; while for the Symbolist theatre and opera, it is naturalism."

Relations with other arts and medium specificity

• Wagner and the Gesamtkunstwerk
• Autonomy of "theatre" as distinct from literature

Stanisavski. Craig: "as a creative art, and no longer as an interpretative craft."

• The notion of "performance" as an independent aesthetic activity is formed. Adoption of performance by the modernist avant-garde as a medium more resistant to commodification and institutionalisation; it also provided a forum for a direct confrontation with its public.

Modernist medium specificity and the pre-Revolutionary Russian directors' (Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai Evreinov, Alexander Tairov) formulation of the "theatre theatrical."

New artistic languages sought, to give expression to modern experience - leads to increased self-consciousness about nature of particular artistic medium. Problematisation of language.

Art and anti-art

Opposition and creation of new practices.

Stage—auditorium re-configurations

Use Kleberg's models as the basis. Some overlap with autonomy/engagement debates. Art/life relationships, and Burger's refunctioning argument.

Autonomy and engagement

Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs. Peter Burger. Berghaus (2005, 40-41).

Popular theatre

Tradition and experiment? Mass theatre, theatre for an exclusive elite.

Research and training

The emergence of theatre studios. Theatre anthropology?

Movements

Naturalism, Realism and Symbolism

Today critical usage of the terms "Realism" and "Naturalism" tends to blur any clear distinction between them. In the mid-19th century, the Realists rejected the idealist aesthetic values and subjectivism of the previous generation and analysed with a quasi-scientific objectivity the new features of their contemporary social and physical realities. Their works were based on a "close observation and immediate experience of reality" and sought to uncover the causal factors of society and humanity.

See Berghaus' description 45-46.

• August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Émile Zola
• John Galsworthy
• George Bernard Shaw
• Gerhart Hauptmann
• Arthur Schnitzler
• Maurice Maeterlinck, William Butler Yeats, Oscar Wilde

Cubism and Futurism

Pablo Picasso's Parade and Fernand Léger's Création du Monde.

Marinetti was an admirer of Alfred Jarry, who acted as something of a role-model for him.

• Gertrude Stein

Russian Futurism, Eccentricism, and Constructivism

• Vladimir Mayakovsky

Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, and Epic theatre

Expressionist drama was anticipated in the work of August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind.

The first fully-Expressionist play was Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, the Hope of Women, which received its première in Vienna on 4 July 1909. While several other plays were written shortly thereafter, the First World War] prevented their staging. A theory of acting emerged out of considerations as to how they might be staged. Unlike the Symbolists, who sought to evoke an inner reality, the Expressionists attempted a direct representation. They wanted to provoke an emotional, empathetic reaction in their audiences, rather than to encourage a rational understanding.

New Man; opposition to bourgeois society

• Ernst Toller
• Eugene O'Neill

Dada, Surrealism, and the Theatre of the absurd

It's too idiotic to be schizophrenic.

— Carl Jung on the Dada productions.

Dada performance began in Zurich in 1916 and came to an end in Paris in 1924. Its techniques and those of the Italian Futurists bear a striking resemblance to one another.

• The Gas Heart (1921) and Handkerchief of Clouds (1924).
• Alfred Jarry
• Antonin Artaud
• Roger Vitrac
• Federico García Lorca
• Luigi Pirandello
• Samuel Beckett

See also

• Épater la bourgeoisie

Notepad

Despite Berghaus' periodization that locates the start of modernism with the end of Symbolism, he does identify the connections between modernism and the principles of realism, arguing that modernism still attempts to represent reality, but reality understood in new ways. This is more amenable to Raymond Williams' narrative. But see Berghaus' concerns about including realism.

See also Berghaus' definition of avant-garde: he reserves it for those "outside" theatre; but all its features could easily describe Brecht - esp. as he defines difference as relation to institution.

Look at essays in Coyle.

Sources

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