Certain aspects of Kandinsky’s theories were capable of rigorous testing. The Bauhaus, a German school of design founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919, where Kandinsky was a teacher and Oskar Schlemmer was head of the theatre section, conducted a series of experiments on actors’ movements in space. Schlemmer and his colleagues devised elaborate costumes that transformed the actor-dancers into “moving architecture.” By treating the stage as a black box, the researchers created a laboratory in which to examine the perception of a wide range of movements. Craig’s concept of the Übermarionette became the subject of a series of experiments regarding the geometry of the human figure, the possible limits of the articulation of limbs, the extensions of movements into three-dimensional space, the restrictions placed on human movement by the force of gravity, and the ways in which dancers’ movements work against gravity and cooperate with it. A range of dances were conceived and performed under the title of The Triadic Ballet. This work was a fantasy in which the dancers’ costumes transformed them into “metaphysical anatomy.” The ballet achieved the dematerialization of the stage as contrasting shapes in contrasting colours appeared to propel themselves along a variety of paths in three-dimensional space. Experiments were also made in rhythmic movement, mechanical theatre, light theatre, and projection. The Bauhaus group laid down no prescriptive plans as to what direction theatre should take but opened up a variety of possibilities, which were then offered for other artists to follow.
When the Bauhaus was closed at the start of the Nazi period, several members of the staff moved to the United States. Out of seminars and teaching laboratories, a line of work developed, largely instigated by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, that explored the use of chance in creating works of theatre and broke free from the concept of an integral composition. Cunningham created a range of dance works that favoured the occurrence of chance (or aleatory) correspondences between the elements of the dance over the orchestration of effects by the choreographer. The U.S. choreographer and designer Alwin Nikolais also carried on work derived from the principles of the Bauhaus with his dance company.
During all this work, in its movement away from the depiction of nature, the position of the artist changed. In the anti-illusionist theatre, the artist became not only the means of putting across a message but to some extent the originator of it. At the heart of the Symbolist theatre was the old romantic concept of the artist as a creative genius with heightened perception and powers. Once this was linked to the idea of the work of art as a vehicle through which the artist could proselytize his views, the result was Expressionism. Production aspects of Expressionist theatre
Expressionism in the theatre arose out of the same impulse to rebel against the materialist values of the older middle-class generation that gave rise to both the reformist Naturalist theatre and the aestheticist Symbolist theatre. This opposition was clearly expressed through the themes and often the titles of such plays as Vatermord (“Patricide”). The forerunners of Expressionism are generally accepted to be the German actor and playwright Frank Wedekind, who criticized the reformist Ibsenite movement for failing to attack the morality of bourgeois society, and Strindberg. Wedekind sought in his plays to expose what lay beneath the surface of gentility and decorum; in the process, he often introduced roles that served more as emblems than as realistic characters.
Strindberg’s early plays are usually included in the Naturalist repertoire. After a period of personal crisis between 1894 and 1897, the form of Strindberg’s plays disintegrated into dream visions or confessional monodramas in which everything is seen through the eyes of the single protagonist. The single focus of these plays was taken over by the Expressionists, as was the use of stereotyped characters—the Son, the Stranger, etc.
In addition to Wedekind and Strindberg, the Austrian painter and writer Oskar Kokoschka must be mentioned; in fact, some authorities would date Kokoschka’s plays as the first truly Expressionist drama. His early plays, Murder Hope of Women (1909), Sphinx and Strawman (1911), and The Burning Bush (1913), seem to take Strindberg’s painful depictions of the destructive relationships between the sexes and liberate them from any dependence on articulate speech. The plays are episodic and have no clear narrative. They are constructed out of violent visual images. Kokoschka is not remotely concerned with giving any sign or resemblance of surface reality whatsoever. In his view, the theatre, like painting, should communicate through “a language of images, visible or tangible signs, graspable reflections of experience and knowing . . . .” In this, Kokoschka was the first to break completely with the literary tradition and to assert that the theatre communicates ultimately through a visual language.
The Expressionist period spanned the period of World War I, which changed the nature of the movement. Before the war Expressionism was largely concerned with screaming protests against rampant materialism and the loss of spirituality. In this period the coming war was seen as a necessary agent of purification for society. Many of the Expressionist dramatists died in the slaughter on the Western Front. Those who survived were transformed, and Expressionism took on a more overtly political complexion. The change from private protest to political argument was what made it possible to develop the techniques of the Expressionist theatre, and to extend them for wider use.
The major Expressionist theatre was Der Tribune, in Berlin. The Expressionist stage neither simulated reality nor suggested unreality. It existed in its own right as the platform from which direct statements could be made. Settings therefore tended to be abstract or, when specific, highly subjective. Techniques of distortion and incongruous juxtaposition expressed either the ideological position of the director or dramatist or the state of mind of the protagonist, or both. In Expressionist plays the walls of houses might lean at sharp angles, threatening to crush the protagonist; windows might light up like eyes spying on the secret and intimate; trees might take on the shape of the skeleton signifying Death. In this way, instead of simply forming the milieu for the action, the setting became a dramatic force. This aspect of Expressionism has been appropriated to great effect by the cinema, in which camera angles and special lenses can render the ordinary expressive. Leopold Jessner in his stage production of Richard III (1920) placed Richard at the height of his power at the top of a flight of steps. The steps below Richard were crowded with soldiers in red cloaks with white helmets. The effect when they knelt was of Richard sitting on top of a mound of skulls with a river of blood flowing through them.
The action of many Expressionist plays was fragmented into a series of small scenes or episodes. This style of theatre was called Stationendrama (“station drama”) and was clearly derived from the principles of the medieval mystery plays. This led to a consideration of the scene in the theatre as being self-contained. Significance and meaning derived from the juxtaposition or accumulation of scenes rather than from a continuous narrative progression from scene to scene, and from this it followed that there need be no consistency of setting. In Ernst Toller’s Man and the Masses (1920) the scenes alternated between reality and dream throughout the play.