Chapter 9: 20th Century Movements
The end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw an explosion of artistic movements attempting to throw off the confining rules of classical and realistic ideology. Classicism, Neo-Classicism, and Realism did not satisfy the artists’ needs for fuller expression. Technological advances and advances in our understanding of the human psyche allowed artists to move in new and intriguing ways. The resulting artistic movements covered a continuum of artistic expression and ideology. But for our purposes, we will take a closer look at five such movements: Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism.
Symbolism
Following in the path of Romanticism, Symbolism turned away from the hard objectivity of science and realism. Symbolism was a philosophical movement which impacted theatre through its emphasis on the mythological and unconscious.
The philosophy/movement would foreshadow the work of psychologist Karl Jung and his emphasis on archetypes.
As a theatrical movement, Symbolism sought to provoke an almost religious experience within the audience. Stripping away the audience’s ability to rationalize, Symbolist drama sought to force the audience to feel, to engage the mystery of life and the universe. It did not seek to explain reality because reality is merely the illusion of what we want to perceive. Symbolism sought to draw from the same essentially feelings and emotions which created the mythologies of the ancient world.
Symbolism in the theatre was predominantly a directorial approach. Poetry, plays by Shakespeare and others, and portions of the Bible were produced using the production ideals of symbolism. However, there were some playwrights who wrote works specifically in the vein of symbolism. The most noted symbolist playwright was Maurice Maeterlinck who wrote such works as The Intruder (1890), The Blind (1890), Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), and The Death of Tintagiles (1894).
The Intruder – The Grandfather, Father, Uncle, and Three Daughters are waiting in a room together. To one side, there is a room in which the Mother is lying, very ill. To the other side, there is a room in which her newborn child is lying quietly. The back wall has a large stained glass window and a door leading outside. It is night. They have been waiting for quite a while. There are sounds of someone moving through the garden toward the house. There is the sound of someone entering the house through the basement door. The servant is called, but she reports closing the basement door which she found open. The lamp burns out. Moonlight streams through the stained glass window. The Grandfather, in his old age, is nearly blind and nearly deaf. Then the child screams out in horror in the adjacent room. The door to the Mother’s room is opened by a Sister of Mercy who crosses herself, signifying the death of the Mother.
Symbolism is just that, the use, the emphasis of symbolic language and events to establish a mood. In The Intruder, there is the use of silence and sounds to increase the family’s apprehension. The eldest daughter looks through the window into the garden and reports seeing the ducks move away from the pond as if someone were walking through the garden – though she sees no one. When the Father opens the door to speak to the servant, he feels someone pushing against the door, to gain entrance – though the servant remains several feet away, not moving. The Grandfather’s blindness is echoed in the blindness of the others as the lamp burns out. The Grandfather senses that someone else has come into the room – though no one is there. You can see how a good production of this script could easily produce an eerie sense of terror in the audience.
Futurism
As an artistic movement, Futurism began in 1909, in Italy, with the writings of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The Futurists were upset by the art world’s reluctance to embrace the advances of technology and science, their unwillingness to move into the twentieth century. They were anxious for war.
Closely related to the Cubist movement in visual art, Futurism sought to abolish the past and encourage the human passion for technology and machines. The Futurists felt that human civilization was not moving fast enough toward the future because humans still romanticized and memorialized the past. They wanted to do away with libraries and museums because they felt that such institutions only chained humanity to the past.
From a treatise on Futurism, the following four points can be made. First, Futurist theatre needed to be brief. Why write a book when a sentence will do? Second, Futurist theatre needed to be atechnical. That is, Futurists needed to reject the conventions of playwrighting (exposition, complications, climax, denouement, etc.) which we’ve studied in an earlier chapter. Third, Futurist theatre needed to by dynamic, with events taking place on stage simultaneously. And fourth, Futurist theatre needed to be alogical. It needed to reject the ideas of logical development (beginning, middle, and end) and strive for chaos and irrelevancy.
In their theatrical productions, Futurists sought to violate the audience’s level of comfort through the use of multimedia presentations and split focus. Futurist artists were opposed to the logic and reason of Classical and Neo-classical precepts because they viewed such ideas relics of the past. Indeed, Futurists opposed the “rules” of Realism entirely. Their dramatic performances were very short in duration, required the audience to observe different things happening on stage at the same time, and utilized human and non-human actors and puppetry.
Futurist plays typically went unscripted, since scripting was itself an idea to be rejected. However, some of the futurists’ scripts have survived. One such artist was Paolo Buzzi who wrote such Futurist works as The Futurist Prize.
The Futurist Prize – The action takes place in a large auditorium in the Academy, where the delegates have gathered to determine the winner of the Futurist Prize. The prize is an airplane of sorts, which will allow the winner to soar through the skies. The delegates debate whether such a prize should go to a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, or an architect. Their deliberations are interrupted by a Futurist, who calls himself an Artificial Man. He has blown himself up in a laboratory, and he now has a false leg, a rope arm, a glass eye, a rubber ear, and a wig. The delegates immediately declare him the winner of the prize.
Futurism affected later work in theatre by their use of different types of media and their multiple or simultaneous actions. Their glorification of the Machine seems pale in comparison to our position a century later, where we are always connected via our cell phones, our PDAs, our MP3 players, and our wireless Internet.
Dada
During and following World War I, a group of European artists joined together to protest the war and the way of thinking in the world that had produced the war. Their plan was to protest the “logical” thinking of the day by illustrating the “insane” thinking that led humanity into war.
The idea of “insanity” in art was represented through deliberately random acts. The best example of Dada is the found poem. An artist would take an article from the newspaper, cut out the individual words, and dump the words into a hat. He would then compose a found poem by writing down the words as he drew them, randomly, from the hat.
A found poem would then be performed on stage or in a café, accompanied by sounds and discordant musical eruptions. During the recitation of the poem, an unexpected gun shot would be heard, followed by a woman’s scream. The artists wanted to represent the insanity of a world at war through their insane art.
Their movement was hard to articulate because they opposed the very language structures necessary to describe their ideas. Even this short description is unworthy of the movement because it attempts to articulate their ideas using the very logic and language they opposed. Therefore:
Movement their attempts opposed
To unworthy was the articulate
Articulate of using necessary even
They opposed ideas hard
To short because
Their describe their
Because language movement
And language logic they
The description to very very
Is it this
The ideas structures
The key voice for Dada was Tristan Tzara (1896-1963). He wrote a number of essays to describe and delineate the philosophical underpinnings of the Dadaist movement.
Surrealism
The philosophy and practices of Symbolism and Dada found an expression in the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung. The artistic techniques, infused with Freudian psychoanalytic thought, developed into Surrealism.
Surrealism drew upon the illogical logic of the subconscious, upon the mind’s ability to structure random and symbolic images into a pattern which somehow informed the conscious mind at the unconscious level. Surrealistic artists assembled bits and pieces, images and dialogue, without concern for conveying (logical) meaning.
The intent was to overwhelm and completely dominate the conscious mind. By presenting illogical and irrational events and images, the Surrealistic artist attempted to knock the conscious mind off balance. In that moment of imbalance, the subconscious mind could be accessed directly.
The work of two playwrights formed the foundation of Surrealistic theatre: Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918). Alfred Jarry’s most famous work was Ubu Roi (1896). Guillaume Apollinaire’s most famous work was The Breasts of Tieresias (1917).
Ubu Roi – Mother Ubu tempts her husband to take the crown of Poland. They enlist the aid of Captain Bordure. As they prepare to meet the king, however, Ubu determines to betray his wife and friend (if need be). The King of Poland is killed, but his son and queen both escape under separate circumstances. Ubu declares himself king. Ubu is encouraged to give out gold and bread to the peasants, to win their support. He does so. But then he shocks everyone by having the nobles, the judges, and the bankers all executed. He even imprisons his fellow conspirator, Captain Bordure. The peasants revolt, and Ubu flees. Bordure escapes from prison and seeks an audience with the Emperor of Russia. Bordure is given an army with which to suppress Ubu’s revolt. In the battle, Bordure is killed and Ubu retreats. During the night, Ubu and his wife fight with each other. Then they learn that the prince who escaped has enlisted the royal guards to his support, and they’re tracking down the Ubus. In the final scene, the conspirators are sailing away to their next great adventure.
Surrealism has a logic of its own. Like dreams, the events of surrealistic drama seem logical when they’re unfolding. But when one wakes up, or after the curtain falls, one is left with a sense of having observed something absurd or unintelligible. This is the power of surrealism.
The scripts of surrealistic theatre provided only the foundation of a theatrical event which was meant to impress upon the audience the illogic and unrealness of a dream.
Expressionism
The philosophy of Romanticism eventually found a fuller expression, if you will, in Expressionism. The Expressionistic artist attempted to portray not the thing (or even the idea), but the feeling of the artist as she or he interacts with the time (or the idea).
The Expressionist artists observed a world where humanity had become enslaved by the machines of the industrial age (the desire of the Futurists), enslaved by their own creations. Rather than present a realistic, mirror-like image in their art, the Expressionist artists sought to convey the emotions, feelings, and frustrations which emerged when men and women realized their plight. They also wanted to express the realization that hundreds of thousands of workers around the world simply refused to realize their plight, in avoidance of the emotions, feelings, and frustrations that awaited them.
One playwright of Expressionism of note was Georg Kaiser (1878-1945). His first play to establish him as an expressionistic artist was From Morn to Midnight (1916). He also wrote an expressionistic trilogy: Coral (1917), Gas I (1918), and Gas II (1920).
Gas I – A huge gas processing plant begins to develop problems as a result of an engineering flaw. The problems increase until the plant is destroyed in a series of explosions. The Billionaire’s Son wants to lead the workers into a new way of thinking and perceiving of their work and their place in the world. The Engineer wants to lead them forward in rebuilding the processing plant. The Engineer wants to continue in the same flawed thinking that led to the plant’s destruction in the first place. The workers follow the Engineer because they are more familiar and more comfortable with his reasoning than with the strange new world the Billionaire’s Son proposes.
Expression differed from the other movements of Symbolism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism in its return to the text as the core value.