The Expressionists

August Strindberg

 

Realistic scene from "The Road to Damascus" by Strindberg.

Expressionistic scene from "The Road to Damascus," sketch by Knut Strom (1922). The scene design is pared down to represent the dehumanized asethetic ideal of expressionist drama, where the human is only a leitmotif for a larger idea.

Oskar Kokoshka

Scene from "Murderer the Women's Hope" -- a play about the savage relationship between the sexes. In the Greek setting of this work, Man attackes Woman and she returns the attack, only to have it eventually disclosed that she is his wife.

Scene from "Murderer the Women's Hope," Dresden 1917.

Georg Kaiser

Scene from "Morn to Midnight," Berlin, 1912.

Ernst Toller

Scene from "Transformation," Berlin, 1919.

This image represents one of the play's more grotesque scenes, the "Dance of the Skeletons."

Scene from "Man and Masses" by Toller, Berlin, 1921. This play presents the enlightened, idealistic hero leading the masses, who come finally to be aware of their crude materialism. The play confronts the problem of force being utilized in the establishment of a community of love.

Alban Berg

 

Scenes from "Wozzeck," the opera written by Alban Berg based on the play "Woyzeck" by George Buchner.

 

 

Bauhaus and Oskar Schlemmer

The Bauhaus, as a teaching institution for the arts, was established in 1919, in an attempt to unify all of the arts in, as its founder Walter Gropius expressed it, a "cathedral of Socialism." Oskar Schlemmer, a leading practitioner of Bauhaus, viewed three elements of the theater: man in space; light in motion; and architecture. He was not interested in a representational theater, but a theater of abstraction. He saw the life of our time as a product of mechanization, and that impulse explains his insistence upon reducing form and motion to the smallest number of shapes and movements.

<< "Figure in Space with Plane Geometry and Spatial Delineations."

 

"Man as Dancer.">>>

"Means of Transforming the Human Body by the Use of Costume" sketches by Oscar Schlemmer

These four illustrations are concerned with the transformation of the human body by means of the disguise known as costume. The function of costume is to emphasize the identity of the body or to change it. Costume expresses the body's nature or it purposely misleads us regarding it.

Abstract of "The Triadic Ballet" by Oskar Schlemmer, 1922. He called the work triadic because it utilized three dancers, the piece was divided into three muscial movements, and the ballet as a whole reflected a fusion of the three elements of dance, costume, and music.

Study for "The Triadic Ballet." Note how geometry dominates all elements of this study.

Costumes for "The Triadic Ballet"

1) The Wire Costume

2) The Golden Sphere Costume

3) The Disk Dancer Costume

Scene from "The King Stag" by Carlo Gozzi. Designed by Schlemmer to emphasize mechanization and abstraction.

Masks from the Bauhaus Stage Workshop. Designed by Schlemmer.

 

"Space Dance" by Oskar Schlemmer. In his preoccupation with space, abstraction, movement, and light, Schlemmer staged a series of experiments that dealt with the "stereometry of space," and the effect of the abstracted human figure on that space.

"Slat Dance" by Oskar Schlemmer. The function of the slats, strapped to the body of the dancer, was to outline the geometrical division of the space occupied by the dancer and emphasize the perspective view for the audience.

Scene from the pantomime "Stair Joke" by Schlemmer.

Scene from "Metal Dance" by Schlemmer. Described by one critic in Basel" "The curtain rises. Black backdrop and black stage floor. Deep down stage, a cave lights up, not much larger than a door. The cave is made of highly reflecting corrugated tin plate set on edge. A female figure steps out from inside. She is wearing white tights. Head and hands are enclosed by shiny silver spheres. Metallically crisp movements . . . the whole thing is very brief, fading away like an apparition."

Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theater

Brecht's second play, Drums in the Night, borrowed heavily from the technique of the expressionsits, both in language and style of set design. Note how the walls, doors and windowns leans at odd angles to demosntrate the distorition in the social structure. This scene, from Act Two, takes place in the Piccadilly Bar, where Kragler argues with the parents and new fiance of his former fiancee, Anna, while the sounds of the Sparacist revolt are heard outside.

Selective realism is a term that best describes Brecht's style of production. From his earliest times, he insisted on carefully constrcuted stage properties, so that they might function equally well in a real-life situation. This scene is from "A Man's a Man," a play that follows the transformation of a simple docker into a perfect soldier, aggressive, willful, unfeeling, and indentity-less. It is a comic but bitter criticism on how industrial society defaces its citizens and turns them into an undifferentiated mob.

Scene from "The Ocean Flight." The play, originally a radio play called "Lindberg's Flight," is about the fascination and glorification of human's power to harness and overcome the power of nature.

Sketch for Scene 11 of "Mother Courage and Her Children." Decor is by Ted Otto who successfully translated the epic nature of Brecht's plays to the stage. Set pieces consist only of what is needed to establish place, and the background is a cyclorama. The scene depicted here is Katrin's death scene.

Scene 9 from "Mother Courage and Her Children." Decor by Ted Otto. Visible in this photograph is the half-curtain and the wire pulley device used to draw it. No attempt is made to disguise it; rather, it is constructed of highly polished metal so that it will shine in full view.A loud rattle of metal passing over metal is heard when this curtain is drawn closed in an attempt to rouse the spectator from an position of passive entertainment. Brecht frequently called attention to the devices of the theater in order to remine the audience to think about the play critically and objectively.

Scene 9 from "Mother Courage and Her Children." In order to dress his stage presentationally, Brecht used highly decorative elements, as seen in this photograph of the 1950 production in Munich where posthorns, muskets, helmets, and other instruments of war and the military added their presence to the stage. Here, Mother Courage and the Cook stand outside a presbytery in the dead of winter to sing the "Solomon Song." The song says that the honest, the brave, and the kind (as represented by Courage's three children) are the ones who are killed without reason, and that futility is the reward of attempted virtue.

Final scene from "The Good Person of Setzuan." Decor by Caspar Neher. In this scene, the Three Gods, who must justify their existence by producing just one good person as evidence of their salutary influence on humankind, descend to hear Shen Te's impassioned plea for an answer to the question: how is it possible to be good and to survive at the same time?

Set design for "The Good Person of Setzuan." The particular interest in this set design lies in its presentation of all scenic locations called for in the play simultaneoulsy. The lightness of the bridge rising from the stage floor is what gives continuity to the design concept.

Final scene from "The Caucasian Chalk Circle." Decor by Karl von Appen. The Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's acting company, produced costumes that were solid, substantial clothes, constructed of historically accurate materials. The same care was taken with set pieces. They were made not of stage materials such as frame and canvas, but of real wood, rough, crude and primitive looking as seen here.