Theatre Appreciation Exam 4

Symbolism

The art of practice of using symbols, especially by investing things with a symbolic meaning or by expressing the invisible or intangible through visible or sensuous representation.

• emerged in the 1860s and 1870s, primarily among poets

• was formally announced in the 1886 Manifesto, published in the French paper Le Figaro

• had no interest in the everyday goings on of people

• It wanted to investigate the profound mystery of human existence

Basic tenets of symbolism

• Truth in excess and extravagance

• Truth in apparent chaos and insanity

• Truth in subjective experience

• Platitudes and natural banality are dangerous

• The need to be constantly taking bigger risks

The first Symbolist theatre

Theatre D’Art

Theatre D’Art

founded by 18-year-old Paul Fort

expelled from high school for it

Later became Theatre de l’Oeuvre

The theatre was big on non-representational sets, acting that looked like sleepwalking, and lines that were chanted rather than spoken

Maurice Maeterlinck

A Belgian playwright and a main proponent of symbolism as a movement in theater

He states that symbolism argues that poetry is superior to reality and that, out of chaos of human life, a quieter and more lasting truth can be discerned.

Futurism

Began in 1909 when the Italian nationalist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto on Le Figaro’s front page in France.

A rare art movement that embraced war, violence, and domination while pushing their ideas of brutish masculinity and opposing feminity

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Called for art that was as fast, mechanical, masculine, and violent - he later called  this automobilism.

As a futurist, he disdained old traditions and ideas, arguing society should have a total break from the past 

Co-wrote the original Italian Fascist Manifesto

Founded the Futurist Political Party which later was absorbed by the National Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini (The Italian Dictator from 1922 to 1943)

Sintesi

A style of plays that was short and fast-paced

Marinetti’s ways of involving the audience

• glue on the seats

• sell the same ticket to ten people to cause traffic jam, bickering, and wrangling

• offer free tickets to people who are unbalanced and irritable, to provoke uproar

• sprinkle seats with dusk to make people itch and sneeze

Dadaism

A movement developed in 1915 and emerged in the cabaret of Zurich, Switzerland, at the end of WW1 (1914-1918)

The idea was that if logic can lead to a global war, then art should abandon logic and reason. It should instead embrace nonsense, intuition, and anarchy

In some languages, Dada means: “yes, yes.”

It was common in performances for many things to happen simultaneously. This could include a poem in a made-up language, a song and dance in weird costumes, and anything that could get you attention.

aleatory

the thing left up to chance, it embraces randomness

Tristan Tzara

a former symbolist and spokesperson for Dadaism

in 1916 he created what may be the first Dada performance at the Cabaret Voltaire

First Dada performance

it was a work featuring clowns and stilt walkers that features Tzara distributing balled-up pieces of paper to onlookers while he sang a song

one of Tzara’s acts was cutting out a ton of words from the newspaper and putting them in a hat, and picking them out at random to make a poem.

Surrealism

looked back toward symbolism to create a form that would unlock some greater truth of existence

It was a term taken from Guillaume Apollinarie

The basic idea was to merge the internal subjective world and external reality into one super reality

Andre Breton

Broke with Dadaism because he thought the movement was too silly and started Surrealism

The movement was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud, with an emphasis on the unconscious as well as the world of dreams

His surrealist works were influenced by his time as a 19-year-old medic during WW1, where he witnessed horrific violence, disease, and death

Automatism

The idea that the artist should just write or do whatever comes into their head

They felt this would allow the artist to tap into something powerful, elemental, and fundamentally human

The Beasts of Tiresias

Written by Guillaume Apollinarie

considered one of the most famous surrealist plays

Plot: Therese, a Frenchwomen, is tired of being a women, and her breasts become balloons and she floats away. She becomes and men by the name of Tiresias, and she then makes her husband dress like a women. She becomes a general and works in Parliment, and sets off to conquer the world and campaigns against childbirth. Her husband finds out how to give birth and has 40,000 babies.

What Symbolism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism have in common

they were interested in the way that realism fails to convey the truth of human existence.