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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).