Expressionism In Theatre

Introduction

Expressionist theatre was a German theatre tradition that was first established in the 1900s, has had a huge influence on later theatre traditions all around the world. The stage craft of it, was particulary important, for which later German practitioners such as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Picator was strongly influenced, as well as the performance styles that they worked on, which is the Epic theatre and Physical theatre. Later on, this form was then spread from Europe to America, and impacted famous playwrights from Sean O’Casey to Eugene O’Neill, which they produced “The New Stagecraft” based on it. Expressionism in theatre contains a lot of various acting styles, symbolic performances “Not one Expressionism but a number of loosely

A protest against the growing naturalism in the arts that occurred in nineteenth century Germany, at its very root it is against naturalism. The original idea of Expressionism was to present the subjective perspective to the audience, which means the work is distorted to evoke moods or ideas from the audience. Expressionism plays had different context or story lines over time, but the idea was very similar, it was about the conflict between sexes, generations and classes. It was to show freedom against authority, after all the slaughter and killing after World War one, expressionism theatre became a way for people to express themselves. “Men screams from the depths of his soul” . Theatre was not the only art that was applied in Expressionism; in fact visual art was used first when a French painter called Julien-Auguste Hervé started to use it to distinguish his work from impressionism in 1911. However, theatre took a more important role in Germany’s culture than the visual arts, because theatre was active. What distinguishes expressionism in theatre with any other arts is that it is alive; it gave the audience the chance to “read” the performance as a text about the contemporary state of the German Culture. This distinction is very important for the understanding of what the theatrical expressionism attempted to do in its use of the stage and

“Light can play as directly upon our emotions as music does” Lighting in the 1900s was not very developed, but a whole set of techniques have been written by Appia. According to Appia light provided the same opportunity as music to evoke the emotional values of a performance rather than the reality. This is connected to Kandinsky’s first principle of the relationship between the actor and the audience, as music created the mood of the scene, the light can reveal the emotional implications of an object, projecting the emotional meaning of an action to the audience. In order to reveal the emotional side, Appia demonstrated himself how to use different lights. “He demonstrated in detail, both as a theorist and as a draftsman, how stage lighting could be used and controlled so as to establish a completely unified three dimensional world on the