How does expressionism manifest itself in drama

These ideas fueled a German utopian spirit that had been gaining momentum since World War I, the abdication of Wilhelm II, and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Architects saw themselves as demiurges of a new society and future. Disguized by pseudonyms, twelve artists and architects exchanged thoughts, visions, and drawings in a search for the roots of creativity, the origins of architecture, and the relationship between architecture and the cosmos.

They were among numerous revolutionary organizations initiated by workers and artists all over Germany to watch over the provisional government of November Here, ideas of combining art and architecture to create a Gesamtkunstwerk total work of art , relating back to the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, resurfaced in both publications.

The majority of efforts by the Arbeitsrat related to architecture, demanding the abolition and replacement of established institutions such as building authorities, insisting upon an art for the people, and advocating the transformation of existing teaching systems Washton Long, , and Pehnt, The idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and the reformation of teaching institutions were also essential to the Bauhaus in Weimar in the years between and The Bauhaus program aimed to unify art and architecture, echoing the writings of the Arbeitsrat and Taut.

In contrast to the formal and classical work before the war, this building did not adhere to the same rules of symmetry and serial arrangement as previously, but incorporated romantic and dramatic elements. Expressionist film emerged during the Weimar Republic era , and was most pronounced in a number of films from the early s.

The stylistic and thematic concerns of Expressionism are most fully on display in The Cabinet of Dr. These elements, in addition to its fantastical plot and macabre themes, make Caligari the archetypal expressionist film. In the aftermath of World War I, as the laws and traditions of the Prussian monarchs gave way to newfound freedoms, much of German society was undergoing a sexual, artistic, and political reawakening.

At the same time, the economic and bodily wreckage of the Great War had a profound impact on the German psyche. New ways of thinking, perceiving, and creating had to be devised. During this time, directors such as Fritz Lang, F. Murnau, Robert Wiene, Paul Leni, and Karl Heinz Martin drew inspiration from painting, literature, architecture, and theater associated with Expressionism, which sought to depict the internal and imaginative reality of things rather than their external, "objective" appearance.

Expressionist filmmakers also sampled from German fairy tales and Gothic art to realise their fantastical worlds and the doppelgangers, monsters, madmen, and strange visitors to populate them. In the vast majority of movies made before , naturalism was the rule. German Expressionism arrived as the first major anti-realist movement in film.

Beyond their extreme styles, these films depict stories within stories, performers and spectators, magic and confabulation, mirrors and doubles in a way that thematises spectacle itself, and reminds viewers that they are watching a film. Their overtly synthetic character has led some critics to accuse expressionist films of being "embarrassingly fake" Arnheim, , and others to see them as reflexive, ironic, and theatrical Elsaesser, , , Telotte, Such a view of Expressionism as self-referential and purposefully unstable aligns it with the project of modernism generally.

At the same time, there were undoubtedly economic, industrial, and ideological issues at play in the production of these films. Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft Ufa , originally intended by the government as a production studio for WWI-related propaganda, became a major player in Weimar cinema.

Erich Pommer of Decla-Film which eventually merged with Ufa produced Caligari believing it could become both an artistic and box office success. Each of these books draws a conceptual link between expressionist cinema and the rise of National Socialism in its own way.

Both Eisner and Kracauer were exiled German Jews writing in the decade following World War II, and it is important to bear this fact in mind when accounting for their views of expressionist cinema as a foreshadowing of Nazism. However much truth one might find in any claim about its historical premonitions, Expressionism undeniably anticipated and fundamentally shaped the future of cinema.

The influence of Expressionism appears in the fundamental elements of genres such as film noir and horror, and reaches even further, into the films of Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch, for instance, or the science fiction noirs Blade Runner and Dark City In its relation to dance, Expressionism must be approached through diverse but related histories in the realms of theater, dance, and the visual arts.

These histories trace a tendency from the nineteenth century through the s toward the exploration of movement and gesture as a primary language and communicator of inner life. In fact, the dance and art-historical histories are deeply entwined. Expressionist practitioners in both art and dance emphasized shared inner necessity and eternal principles over form, and helped forge the watershed modernist development of abstraction.

For expressionist painters, dance was a model for how the individual self might communicate universal or absolute content. For Delsarte, movement and gesture were the link between life, soul, and spirit, and the most direct communicators of emotional truth.

Denis serve as early examples of the expressionist impulse in dance. The impulse also took root from early-twentieth-century German body culture and the life reform movement. A painter himself, Laban admired the innovations of Kandinsky as well as the dancing of Clotilde and Alexander Sakharoff. In Ascona, Laban and his followers developed the theories and eventually the notation for a new dance.

As with expressionist literature, visual art, and architecture, expressionist dance was greatly influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave to dance the role of uniting man and nature. Three Dance Congresses held in Germany between and gave Laban and Wigman a pulpit to promote the establishment of a German Dance Academy, and allowed for wide-ranging discussion on the new modern dance movement, later known as Ausdruckstanz.

The movement may be generally conceived as a proprioceptive or kinesthetic experience of both dancer and viewer, and as the abstract form of psychological interiority. Laban and Wigman taught movement based in natural states of tension and relaxation, involving an intuitive use of the entire body from head to fingers. Her mask and tightly woven and patterned robe separate her body in time and space to suggest pure physicality and emotion.

Under the National Socialist state from to , Ausdruckstanz became known simply as "German Dance. In the s and s, as German visual artists revisited expressionist painting as a source for painterly innovation, so too did German choreographers, notably Pina Bausch, revisit the work of her mentor Kurt Jooss and his generation of Ausdruckstanz artists.

Working between dance and theater, Bausch and her cohort gave a new meaning to a term first used by Jooss in — Tanztheater dance theater. Not until the years after World War I did the term Ausdruckstanz dance of expression come into common usage to designate the German modern-dance movement between the two world wars. Kurt Pinthus, ed.

Ein Dokument des Expressionismus , Berlin: Rowohlt. Raytch, R. Ley and R. Walter Sokel, ed. Fritz Martini, ed. Arnheim, R. Barron, S. Benson, T. Benson, Timothy O.

Coates, P. Dabrowski, Magdalena ed. Donahue, Neil H. Eisner, L. Elsaesser, T. Gordon, D. Herbert, B. Howe, Dianne S. Junge, H. Kaes, A. Kandinsky, W. Kracauer, S. Lloyd, J. Lloyd, Jill ed. Long, R-C W. Hall; Berkeley: University of California Press. Macel, Christine and Emma Lavigne eds. Natter, Tobias G.

Preston-Dunlop, Valerie M. Pehnt, W. Prange, R. Bruno Taut and Paul Klee. Raabe, P. Metzlersche Verlag. Schroder, Klaus Albrecht and Johann Winkler eds. Sharp, D. Steffen, Barbara ed. Telotte, J. Badley, B. Palemr and S. Waissenberger, Robert ed. Washton Long, R. Weikop, C. West, S. Whyte, I. Wollenberg, H. Worringer, W. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie , trans. Kramer, Chicago: Elephant Books. Date Accessed 12 Nov.

Poppelreuter, T. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Retrieved 12 Nov. Subjects Movements Places. Teaching Video Audio. Back to top. This related thread may assist you.

Thanks Cash. As a drama teacher, i am wondering how to measure how successful expressionism is in terms of global spread and how enduring it has been as a theatre style.

Any suggestions? Thanks Sara. Make sure you check this post too: German Expressionism Theatre Conventions. Talking about the plot in expressionism, the play starts in a normal world and something happens to the character that inciting incident changes things drastically.

In this case, play may not return to normal. And usually plot is shorter than realistic play. It has series of short scenes and it is a quest of a character. Very helpful.

Brilliant — thank you. Thank you, this post is very useful and educational! I am writing a paper on German Expressionism, and I must make reference to a specific play throughout. Do you have any suggestions of specific pieces that embody this tradition well? Please i did not find a definition of expressionism in your piece. Can you help me out with a definition of Expressionism in drama? Please if you can answer this ASAP it would be much appreciated — who created or started expressionism please if you know please comment the answer.

School Student, Expressionism is a movement that began in the visual arts painting , finding its way into literature, cinema, theatre and other arts soon after. No one person started the movement, although Germany in the early s is largely credited as one major location for its origins. A simple Google search should help you.

There are also a couple of posts on Expressionism theatre on The Drama Teacher that you will find by using the search box on this website. I just happen to be in the process of drafting another post on Expressionism, which I will publish on The Drama Teacher some time in the next week.

So look out for this, as it will assist you with your solo. In the meantime, I would suggest you try to grab hold of one or more of the key films of s German expressionist cinema and look out for set design, costumes, actor movement, plot, themes, make-up — as these are all things you can research and incorporate in your solo performance. Murnau — The Golem directed by Carl Boese. Hey, I just found your article. My final solo is meant to be in the theatrical style of German Expressionism.

Your article has provided an awesome base to start, I was wondering if you could provide links or names of any other reference material I might be able to use. Thanks Raymond for your kind comments. I hope my website has some useful articles for you along your journey! Are there links to silent movie acting and psychoanalysis? If so- any references she could draw upon cheers. Skip to content My early days of teaching high school drama were somewhat saturated with a fascination of German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht many of my current students would probably suggest that same fascination is still alive and well!

Particular characteristics and techniques became associated with the early German expressionist play: Its atmosphere was often vivdly dreamlike and nightmarish. The mood was aided by shadowy, unrealistic lighting and visual distortions in the set. A characteristic use of pause and silence, carefully placed in counterpoint with speech and held for an abnormal length of time, also contributed to the dream effect.

Settings avoided reproducing the detail of naturalistic drama, and created only those starkly simplified images the theme of the play called for. The decor was often made up of bizarre shapes and sensational colours.

The plot and structure of the play tended to be disjointed and broken into episodes, incidents and tableaux, each making a point of its own. Instead of the dramatic conflict of the well made play, the emphasis was on a sequence of dramatic statements made by the dreamer, usually the author himself. At one time it might take the form of a long lyrical monologue, and at another, of staccato telegraphese — made up of phrases of one or two words or expletives.

The style of acting was a deliberate departure from the realism of Stanislavsky. Moreover, in avoiding the detail of human behaviour, a player might appear to be overacting, and adopting the broad, mechanical movements of a puppet.

Characteristics associated with German expressionism in its mature phase: Settings are virtually abstract and unlocalized, and the scene frequently appears angular and distorted, suggesting a bad dream. The properties are few and symbolic. The characters for the most part remain nameless and impersonal, often moving grotesquely … They always represent some general class or attitude, their characteristics being emphasized by costume, masks or make-up … Crowds are also impersonalized, and move with mass rhythmic movements, often mechanically.

The dialogue is increasingly clipped, fragmented and unreal. The style of acting is hard to reconstruct from the text, but expressionist films have established its general characteristics. Actors might erupt in sudden passion and attack each other physically. Speech was rapid, breathless and staccato, with gesture and movement urgent and energetic—eyes rolling, teetch bared, fingers and hands clutching like talons and claws. Post navigation Previous Previous.

Next Continue. Similar Posts. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.