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SYMBOLISM V EXPRESSIONISM
SYMBOLISM:
Symbolism is a basic feature in most art, since
artists commonly employ language and
representations of objects, both real and imagined,
as signs of something else, that is, as symbols.
They are designed to evoke some concept or
emotion in the mind of a receiver while also
having a real existence themselves – a rose is a
rose but can also stand for love. As a movement,
symbolism is very close to romanticism. A desire
to contact a reality beneath or beyond that
accessible to reason and everyday observation
leads to an art of indirection, suggestion,
ambiguity and elusiveness. Drama’s traditional
emphasis upon action rather than contemplation,
and its physical embodiment on the stage,
presented formidable obstacles to the spiritual
orientation of symbolism. Nevertheless, the
symbolists had an enormous influence on theatre.
It was symbolism that provided the first clear
alternative to the triumphant realist drama, and in
its theatres, its dramatists and its search for
alternative styles of acting and production,
symbolism created the first avant-garde in the
modern theatre and the model for all those that
followed. The late plays of Ibsen and Strindberg,
strongly influenced by symbolism, continue to
provide a challenging alternative to the earlier
realistic works, and if Maeterlinck’s dramas of
internal action are rarely seen on the international
stage, the spiritual heirs of this vision, from W. B.
Yeats and Hugo von Hofmannsthal to García
Lorca and Samuel Beckett, continue to exercise an
enormous influence in the modern theatre. In the
area of scenic design also, symbolism’s impact
was very great. Applying its concerns with
abstraction and evocation to the visual world of
the theatre, Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon
Craig, among the most influential designers of the
twentieth century, provided an alternative vision
to the heavy and detailed realistic settings of the
early twentieth century, a vision so striking and
effective that scarcely any subsequent theatre
designer has escaped its influence entirely.
from Marvin Carlson, The Continuum Companion
to Twentieth-Century Theatre, ed. Colin
Chambers (London, 2002).
Symbolism · July 8, 2006
When symbol is weaved successfully into either
classroom drama or professional theatre, it adds
sophistication that places the show on a whole
new level. A symbol implies a greater meaning
than the literal suggestion and is usually used
to represent something other than what it is at
face value. Symbolism in the theatre can be
achieved via characters, colour, movement,
costume and props.
Symbolism began with a group of French poets in
the late 19th Century and soon spread to the
visual arts and theatre, finding its peak between
about 1885 and 1910. French poet Jean Moreas
published the Symbolist Manifesto in 1886 that
greatly influenced the entire movement in the
visual and performing arts.
Symbolism in art implied a higher, more
spiritual existence and aimed to express
emotional experiences by visual means. In the
theatre, symbolism was considered to be a
reaction against the plays that embodied
naturalism and realism at the turn of the 20th
Century. The dialogue and style of acting in
symbolist plays was highly stylised and anti
realistic/non-naturalistic. As theatre is often a
blend of the visual and performing arts working in
harmony, many of the sets and props in
symbolist plays were also anti realistic/nonnaturalistic and were often used to symbolise
emotions or values in society. A huge throne
could symbolise power, a window placed in a set
could symbolise freedom in the outside world or a
simple action by a character could symbolise a
greater ideal in the context of the play. In 1890
French poet Paul Fort opened the Theatre d’Art
where many symbolist plays were performed. The
primary symbolist playwrights included Belgian
Maurice Maeterlinck and Frenchmen Auguste
Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Paul Claudel. Other
playwrights who dabbled in the form included
Swede August Strindberg (most closely
associated with expressionism in the theatre),
Irishman W.B. Yeats and American Eugene
O’Neill. - See more at:
http://www.thedramateacher.com/symbolism/#sth
ash.hEgBrUTy.dpuf
SYMBOLISM V EXPRESSIONISM
EXPRESSIONISM:
The term originally referred to painting. Used very
occasionally during the nineteenth century, it was
popularized in 1901 by the French painter J. A.
Hervé. The German art dealer and publicist
Herwarth Walden took it up from 1910 onwards
and applied it to the German revolt against
academicism and naturalism in all the arts. But,
unlike the parallel movements of futurism and
surrealism, expressionism was never a single
school guided by an intellectual leader. Hence the
work of very different artists, including
playwrights, has been called expressionist – united
by common characteristics rather than a strict
programme.
In a narrow sense, expressionism was a
specifically German phenomenon. Prefigured by
Wedekind, its theatrical history was brief…
dramatizing the conflict of the generations,
violently rejecting the father figure and expressing
a faith in youth in messianic terms.
Military defeat and the collapse of the old order in
1918 gave expressionist drama a more overtly
political thrust, as in Fritz Von Unruh’s A Family
and Ernst Toller’s Transfiguration, both first
staged in 1919.
Expressionist drama felt no commitment to the
depiction of everyday reality; it was subjective
and arbitrary. In the wake of Strindberg’s A
Dream Play (1907), it often featured dream
imagery. Action as well as language throbbed
with nervous energy. The unities were
discarded, the narrative line frequently being a
series of ‘stations’ rather than a well-knit plot –
an approach which, through the work of Piscator
and Brecht, gave rise to epic theatre. Diction, too,
became fragmented: grammar was violated
and sentences collapsed; there were sudden
lyrical outbursts; speech became a cry. These
new demands called for a new acting style. The
playwright Paul Kornfeld advised: ‘Let not the
actor... behave as though the thoughts and
words he has to express have only arisen in him
at the very moment in which he recites them...
Let him dare to stretch his arms out wide and
with a sense of soaring speak as he has never
spoken in life; let him not be an imitator or
seek his model in a world alien to the actor.’
Such plays could not be staged by conventional
methods. A new approach to stage design revealed
the close links between expressionism in drama
and the visual arts. Sets became simplified,
angled, distorted, fantasticated. The stage was
conceived as a space rather than a picture.
Spotlights – as in Jürgen Fehling’s notable
production in 1921 of Toller’s Masses and Man
created the acting areas and shifted the focus from
one spot to another; some expressionist lighting
techniques had an impact on the cinema of the
period.
By the mid-1920s inflation was over and stability
returned. The expressionist wave passed. The
playwrights mentioned above, as well as Werfel,
Wolf, Johst and others, adapted their style to a less
ecstatic idiom. The nebulous unity of the
expressionist camp fragmented into different
ideologies. But expressionism in the wider sense –
a technique rather than a specifically German
sense of life – can be traced in other countries too.
In the 1920s, American theatre was open to
experimentation. Elmer Rice’s The Adding
Machine (1922) mocked the depersonalized
drudges of capitalism.
The most notable American exponent of
expressionism – in some of his work – was
Eugene O’Neill. In The Emperor Jones (1920) he
put subjective visions on the stage; in The Hairy
Ape (1922) he turned both oppressors and
oppressed in a class society into puppets; in All
God’s Chillun Got Wings (1924) he portrayed
racial conflict in boldly two-dimensional imagery.
English playwrights failed to respond to
continental example, but some Irish writers took
to it more readily. Denis Johnston’s The Old Lady
Says ‘No!’ (1929) was – among other things –
expressionistic. Seán O’Casey made the third act
of The Silver Tassie (1929) one of the peak
achievements of expressionist writing.
Political Theatre from the 1960s on rediscovered
elements of expressionism and in the 1980s
theatre design borrowed heavily from it. But its
increasingly loose definition, while a tribute to its
influence, made it a less and less useful term for
critical debate.
from George Brandt, The Continuum Companion
to Twentieth-Century Theatre, ed. Colin
Chambers (London, 2002).