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"Father's of Modern Design"
- Adolphe Appia
- Edward Gordon Craig
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Adolphe Appia
- Rejected realism
- Pure beauty/abstract rather than ideal
- Interpreter of the script
- Hierarchy of design
- Successive setting shifts
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Edward Gordon Craig
- Rejected realism
- Pure beauty/abstract rahter than ideal
- Autonomous artist
- Doesn't how close to the script you are
- Equal emphasis of all elements
- Single setting
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Vsevolod Meyerhold
- Symbolism
- Highly experimental, theatrical revolution
- Conflicted with Stanislavsky
- spectator must never forget they are in the theatre
- Subordination of actors
- A director's theatre
- Director's right to re-shape the script
- Sought alternate forms, new spatial relationships, speech, movement, and rhythm
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Ballets Russes
- Short ballet works
- Innovative choreography
- Stylized scenery
- Unusual colorization, compostion, and forced perpective
- Careful integration of realism and nonrealism
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Friedrich Nietzsche
- The Birth of Tragedy
- Apollonian VS Dionysian
- reason vs instinct
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Benjamin Franklin Wedekind
- Spring AwakeningMix between naturalism, symbolism, and grotesque subject
- Strong influence on expressionism and epic theatre
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Max Reinhardt
- Integration of realism and nonrealism
- Ensemble playing, respect for script, production detail
- Eclectic approach
- every play creates its own problem and requires its own unique approach
- Established a community among spectators
- Working method: delegation while maintaining control, care for detail, integrated elements, PROMPT BOOKS
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Alfred Jarry
- Ubu Roi
- grotesque and bitter comedy
- initially written for puppets
- Performance at the Theatre de l'Oeuvre
- violently divided audience
- Legacy - some say he's the first absurdist
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Commercial Theatre - Italy
- Itailian opera dominated
- Itailian touring theatre
- Eleanor Duse
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Eleanor Duse
- Known for playing characters in Ibsen's plays
- Praised for her realistic acting style
- Mounted her own productions
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Commercial Theatre - Spain
Plays were primarily centimental and melodramatic
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Commercial Theatre - France
- Began to take on nonrealism
- Edmond Rostand
- Georges Feydeau
- Constant-Benoit Coquelin
- Sarah Bernhardt
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Edmond Rostand
The Romancers (The Fantastics)
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Georges Feydeau
- Extracts the greatest humor by masterful misunderstandings
- A Flea in her Ear
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Constant-Benoit Coquelin
Noted for his technical acting
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Sarah Bernhardt
- Particularly know for playing Phadrea
- Plays were written for her
- Most famous actress of her time
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Commercial theatre - England
- Mostly commercial theatre (well made play, melodrama)
- Henry Irving
- Herbert Beerbohm
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Henry Irving
- Considered England's best actor
- First actor to be knighted
- Followed teachings of Saxe Meiningin
- Concerned with historical accuracy
- Designed 3dimensional elements
- Said to be first English director to make art of lighting
- Relied on stars
- Scripts were reshaped to focus on the stars
- Put less time into rehearsals
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Herbert Beerbohm
- Spectacular realism reached its peak
- Very popular production of Midsummer Nights Dream
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Nonrealistic Production - England
William Poel
- Staging of Shakespeare
- Recreated Renaissance theatre
- Continuity of action
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Nonrealistic Production - England
Harley Granville Barker
- Established/produced Shaw successfully
- Royal Court Theatre
- Synthesized Shakespearian experimentaion
- Created a new interpretation for modern theatre
- Less realistic, more stylized
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Commercial Theatre - United States
- Many playwrights took on realistic dialogue but remained melodramtic and centimental
- Touring companies underminded resident companies
- The mass move to New York begins
- The Syndicate
- David Belasco
- The Shuberts
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The Syndicate
- 3 booking industries in NY merged
- Offered a company an entire season
- Developed exclusive contracts
- Best plays went to this company, theatres that didn't began to close up
- Formed/built a monopoly on theatre
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David Belasco
- Very popular producer
- Resisted the syndicate
- Took naturalistic staging of melodrama to its limit
- Very innovative lighting - Louis Hartman
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The Shuberts
- Producers
- Competed and beat out the Syndicate
- Bought or built theatres
- Developed a "top-down" monopoly
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1910-1925 New Modes of Perception
- Expressionism
- Surrealism
- Futurism
- Dada
- Carl Jung
- Anthropological studies
- Albert Einstein
- Discontinuity of time
- Disconnection of elements
- Juxteposition of elements that are uncertain
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Carl Jung
- Friend/follower of Freud
- Collective unconcious
- Introverted art - personal
- Extroverted art - collective (more powerful)
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Albert Einstein
- Idea of Relativity
- For most came to mean that all perceptions are subjective
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Expressionism
- Truth and beauty reside in the mind
- Opposed to naturalism and symbolism
- Truth within humanity
- Organization between idea, theme, and motive
- Sacrifice of central character - to materialism, society, etc.
- Reduction of elements - characters named by their role in society
- Use of distortion
- Sharp contrast - realism/dream world, poetry/obcenity
- Fantasy and magic
- Primarily a German movement
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Expressionistic Production
- Simplification
- Distortion
- Emphasis on lighting
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Futurism
- Glorified the machine age and war
- Confrontation of the audience - sell same ticket twice
- Innovative techniques - brevity, compression, simultaneous events
- Centered in Italy
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Enrico Prampolini
(Futurism)
- Believed painted scenery should be replaced with dynamic architectual moving flats
- Human actors will no longer be tolerated
- In production, people look very mechanical
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Dada
- Name chosen at random
- Calculated madness
- Disgusted that the world could produce a World War
- Replaced normal convention with spontenaity, all inclusiveness
- Borrowed techniques from Futurism
- Bruitisme: similar to art of noises
- Simutaneity and Collage
- Direct confrontation
- It's spirit and attitude questions everything
- Very similar to the attitude of the 60's
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Surrealism
- Concentrated on the ability of the human mind and the unconscious
- Unconscious is key
- Unified opposites
- Think metaphorically
- Familiar character put in unusual settings
- Scenes that don't seem related to one another
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Guillame Apollinaire
(Surrealism)
- The Breast of Tiresius
- Ideal stage - circular, two stages
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Jean Cocteau
(Surrealism)
The Infernal Machine
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Frederico Garcia Lorca
(Surrealism)
Blood Wedding
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Epic Theatre
- Grew out of high political awareness of the time
- About making change
- Workers Political League
- Political drama
- Karlheinz Martin
- Erwin Piscator
- Bertolt Brecht
Primarily a German movement
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Workers Political League
- Performed political skits
- Desired to make the spectator think and act in the world
- The purpose was to influence/motivate what the audience members do when they leave the theatre
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Karlheinz Martin
- The Tribune (Theatre Company)
- The Proletarian Theatre
- "We do not ask for an audience, but a community.
- Not a stage, but a pulpit."
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Erwin Piscator
- "Drama must be subordinated to revolutionary ends."
- The theatre had little money
- Eventually the "poor theatre" look became a style
- Projection - incorporation of projections of news reel clips, movies, etc
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Bertolt Brecht
- Developed the sense of epic theatre into a theory
- Spectator is vital and active
- Engaged the spectator through alienation
- Audiences must always be aware they are watching a play
- Episodic - alternates between dialogue and narration
- Rapid shifts in time and place
- Dialectic
- Flaunted stage technology
- Antirealistic acting
- Un-unified production
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Bauhaus
- A school/organization
- Combined the study of craft with fine arts
- Reconnection of craft to art
- Questioned what is art in a mechanistic world
- Lothar Schreyer
- Studied the human shape and figure in space
- Created 3dimensional costumes, geometric shapes
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - light in motion
- Architecture - Gropius
- Designed a theatre for Piscator
- circular stage, middle turntable
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