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[UNIT 2 – OUTCOME 1: MODERN THEATRE STYLES]
YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
Year 11 Theatre Studies
Unit 2
Outcome 1: Modern Theatre Styles
NON-NATURALISM
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_non-naturalistic_drama
Non-naturalistic Drama is acting away from the norm, for example you would walk in a bizarre way, it
can be a way of showing something is changing. its used a lot in drama to show a persons state of mind
etc.
This is the modern understanding of Non-naturalistic Drama, which began as something of a revolt
against Naturalistic Drama / Theatre, a style made very popular by Konstantin Stanislavsky and later by
Strasberg and others who adopted and adapted his principles into what has come to be called, The
Method or Method Acting. Naturalistic Drama developed as recently as the late 19th to early 20th
century.
The most famous opponent of Naturalistic Drama was Bertolt Brecht, who put forth the style or
technique of Alienation, which shatters the illusion of Realism in a performance at various points in
order to get the audience to forget the performance and re-focus on the message / issues that the play
addresses.
Since Naturalistic Drama developed so late in the theatre time-line, however, every form of theatre
before it is thus, by definition, Non-naturalistic.
From the time humans first began performing for an audience of more than one, the constraints of
having to be visible and audible to many have dictated that theatrical actions be loud and exaggerated.
Arms are swung dramatically, the voice is projected many decibels above normal speech, etc. In some
forms, costumes are colourful and far removed from normal, everyday clothes. Performances may be
stylised and incorporate music, song and dance. A couple of examples are Japanese Kabuki and Indian
Kathakali. All these can be said to be Non-naturalistic Drama or Theatre.
Writers & Contributors of Non-Naturalism, Uncanny, Physical Theatre & Absurdism
 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
 Meyerhold (1874-1940)
 Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994)
 Viewpoints
 Biomechanics & Etudes
1 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]
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YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
MEYERHOLD (1874-1940)
Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold
was a Russian director, actor and producer whose provocative
experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him
one of the seminal forces in modern theatre.
Life and work
Vsevolod Meyerhold was born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold in Penza on 28 January (10 February)
1874 into the family of a Russian-German wine manufacturer Emil Meyerhold. Though he was by no
means from a poor family, he was the last of many children.
Meyerhold continued his search for theatrical innovation during the decade 1907-1917, while working
with imperial theatres in St. Petersburg, introducing classical plays in an innovative manner, and staging
works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Alexander Blok.
He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and became an official of the Theatre Division (TEO) of the
Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment, forming an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the
Division in 1918-1919.
After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1922, which was known as The
Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold fiercely confronted the principles of theatrical academism,
claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. Meyerhold’s
methods of scenic constructivism and circus-style effects were used in his most successful works of the
time: Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's
The Magnanimous Cuckold, and Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s Tarelkin’s Death.
Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with
the American method actor's conception. Where method acting
melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to
create the character’s internal motivation, Meyerhold connected
psychological and physiological processes and focused on learning
gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion outwardly.
Following Stanislavski's lead, he argued that the emotional state of an
actor was inextricably linked to his physical state (and vice versa), and that one could call up emotions in
performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of
body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters.
Constantin Stanislavski died in August 1938; Meyerhold directed his opera for nearly a year until his
arrest in Leningrad June 20, 1939. His wife, actress Zinaida Raikh, was found dead in their Moscow
apartment on 15 July 1939.
He was sentenced to death by firing squad on February 1, 1940. The date of his death is unclear; some
sources say he was executed on February 2, 1940. The Soviet government cleared him of all charges in
1955, during the first wave of de stalinization.
2 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]
[UNIT 2 – OUTCOME 1: MODERN THEATRE STYLES]
YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
Meyerhold’s Biomechanics Etudes
Meyerhold proposes „1 – 2 – 3“ structure as a composition of action. VOCABULARY OF MOVEMENT in
his own words bigins with Excitability. An actor must possess the capacity for Reflex Excitablity. Nobody
can become an actor without it.
Excitability
Excitability is the ability to realize in feeling, movements
and words a task which is prescribed externally.
The manifistation of excitability
The coordinated manifistations of excitability together
constitute the actor's performance. Each separate
manifistation comprises an acting cycle.
Each acting cycle comprises three invariable stages:
1. INTENTION - The intention is the intellectual
assimilation of a task prescribed externally by the dramatist, the director, or the initiative of the
performer.
2. REALISATION - The realisation is the cycle of volitional, mimetic3 and vocal reflexes.
3. REACTION - The reaction is the reflex as it is realised mimetically and vocally for the reception of
a new intention (the transition to a new acting cycle)...
Basic composition of movement consists (as any other
composition) of exposition (intention), middle (realization)
and resolution (reaction). Again, acting as reacting. By
reacting to imaginary event we creat this event –
visualization. (Pantomime is based on this phenomena). By
reacting to space, we create space. Distance gives us a
tool to contrast the space. The intention (preparation)
gives us not only a sense of distance, but a direction as
well. That's how space dimension becomes dramatic.
PAUL GALLOWAY
Paul Galloway has worked as a copy-writer, journalist, publicist, dramaturg and playwright. He currently
writes and edits Melbourne Theatre Company publications. From 1995 to 2002, he wrote a weekly
theatre column for Brisbane News. He has also written for the Bulletin, the Courier-Mail and the Age. His
play Great Leaders of the Twentieth Century won the 2001 QTC/Courier-Mail George Landan Dann
Award and was subsequently presented in a rehearsed reading at the 2001 Brisbane Writer’s Festival.
In 2002, his play, Low Sunday, about the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was presented as part
of Brisbane’s Cathedrals Week. Realism was short-listed for the 2007 Patrick White Award and won the
Wal Cherry Award in 2008. Galloway was co-founder of ACRONYM Theatre Company and directed their
productions of The Visit, King Lear, Too Clever by Half, As You Like It, Teechers, Cyrano de Bergerac, A
Place with the Pigs and Bent.
3 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]
[UNIT 2 – OUTCOME 1: MODERN THEATRE STYLES]
YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
EUGENE IONESCO (November 26, 1909 – March 28, 1994)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco was a Romanian and French playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights
of the Theatre of the Absurd. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict in a
tangible way the solitude and insignificance of human existence.
Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania to a Romanian father of the Orthodox religion and a mother of
French and Greek-Romanian heritage, whose religion was Protestant (the religion into which her father
was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox mother had converted. Eugène himself was
baptized into the Romanian Orthodox religion. Many sources cite his birthdate as 1912, this error being
due to vanity on the part of Ionesco himself.
He spent most of his childhood in France, and, while there, had an experience he claimed affected his
perception of the world more significantly than any other. As Deborah B. Gaensbauer describes in
Eugene Ionesco Revisited, "Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an
intense blue sky, [Ionesco] was profoundly altered by the light. He was struck very suddenly with a
feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an overwhelming feeling of wellbeing. When he "floated" back to the ground and the "light" left him, he saw that the real world in
comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action. This also coincided with the
revelation that death takes everyone in the end. Much of his later work, reflecting this new perception,
demonstrates a disgust for the tangible world, a distrust of communication, and the subtle sense that a
better world lies just beyond our reach. Echoes of this experience can also be seen in references and
themes in many of his important works: characters pining for an unattainable "city of lights" (The Killer,
The Chairs) or perceiving a world beyond (A Stroll in the Air); characters granted the ability to fly (A Stroll
in the Air, Amédée); the banality of the world which often leads to depression (the Bérenger character);
ecstatic revelations of beauty within a pessimistic framework (Amédée, The Chairs, the Bérenger
character); and the inevitability of death (Exit the King).
He returned to Romania with his father and mother in 1925 after his parents divorced. There he
attended Saint Sava National College, after which he studied French Literature at the University of
Bucharest from 1928 to 1933 and qualified as a teacher of French. While there he met Emil Cioran and
Mircea Eliade, and the three became lifelong friends.
In 1936 Ionesco married Rodica Burileanu. Together they had one daughter for whom he wrote a
number of unconventional children's stories. He and his family returned to France in 1938 for him to
complete his Doctoral Thesis. Caught by the outbreak of World War II in 1939, he remained there, living
in Marseille during the war before moving with his family to Paris after its liberation in 1944.
Ionesco was made a member of the Académie française in 1970. He also received numerous awards
including Tours Festival Prize for film, 1959; Prix Italia, 1963; Society of Authors Theatre Prize, 1966;
Grand Prix National for theatre, 1969; Monaco Grand Prix, 1969; Austrian State Prize for European
Literature, 1970; Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and honorary Doctoral Degrees from New York University and
the Universities of Leuven, Warwick and Tel Aviv. Eugène Ionesco died at age 84 on March 28, 1994, and
is buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
Like Samuel Beckett, Ionesco came to the theatre late: he did not write his first play until 1948 (La
Cantatrice chauve, first performed in 1950 with the English title The Bald Soprano). At the age of 40 he
decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to
4 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]
[UNIT 2 – OUTCOME 1: MODERN THEATRE STYLES]
YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was
discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling
is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew, but which suddenly struck him as being as
stupefying as they were indisputably true.
This feeling only intensified with the introduction in later lessons of the characters known as "Mr. and
Mrs. Smith". To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that
they lived in the vicinity of London, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, that they had
a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought,
was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of
the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating
into disjointed fragments of words. Ionesco set about translating this experience into a play, La
Cantatrice Chauve, which was performed for the first time in 1950 under the direction of Nicolas
Bataille. It was far from a success and went unnoticed until a few established writers and critics, among
them Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau, championed the play.
Plays
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The Bald Soprano (1950, La Cantatrice Chauve)
Salutations (1950, Les Salutations)
The Lesson (1951, La Leçon)
The Chairs (1952, Les Chaises)
The Leader (1953, Le Maître)
Victims of Duty (1953 Victimes du devoir)
Maid to Marry (1953, La Jeune Fille à marier)
Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It (1954, Amédée ou comment s'en débarrasser)
Jack, or The Submission (1955, Jacques ou la soumission)
The New Tenant (1955, Le Nouveau Locataire)
The Picture (1955, Le Tableau)
Improvisation, or The Shepherd's Chameleon (1956, L'Impromptu de l'Alma)
The Future is in Eggs (1957, L'avenir est dans les œufs)
The Killer (1958, Tueur sans gages)
Foursome (1959, Scène à quatre)
Apprendre à marcher (1960)
Rhinocéros (1959, Rhinoceros)
Frenzy for Two or More (1962, Délire à deux)
Exit the King (1962, Le Roi se meurt)
A Stroll in the Air (1963, Le Piéton de l'air)
Hunger and Thirst (1964, La Soif et la faim)
La Lacune (1966)
Killing Game (1970, Jeux de massacre)
Macbett (1972)
Productions, 1972 to present (in French)
Man With Bags (1977, L'Homme aux valises)
Journeys among the Dead (1980, Voyage chez les morts)
Le Vicomte (Unfinished, The Viscount)
5 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]
[UNIT 2 – OUTCOME 1: MODERN THEATRE STYLES]
YEAR 11 THEATRE STUDIES NON-NATURALISM INFORMATION
CAMPION DECENT
Campion attended the NIDA Playwrights Studio in 1991. Since then his writing for performance includes
Shootings (ABC Radio), Baby X (Mardi Gras, CDP, Playbox & published by Currency Press), Three Winters
Green (Mardi Gras), Short Circuits (Sydney Festival) and the Judi Connelli cabaret Back to Before (New
York/Australian tour).
Campion holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and a Master of Arts
(Theatre Studies) from the University of NSW. Appointments since include Literary Manager at Sydney
Theatre Company, Artistic Director of Next Wave Festival, Festival Director for Sydney Gay & Lesbian
Mardi Gras and Chair of the Australian National Playwrights’ Centre.
Campion has had a long association with HotHouse Theatre as an Artisitic Directorate member since
2003 and as writer of the play Embers, commissioned by HotHouse Theatre and produced in 2006 with
Sydney Theatre Company. Embers won an AWGIE Award and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award
for Stage (Drama) Script in 2007; and was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Award.
Campion was appointed Artistic Manager of HotHouse Theatre in July 2007.
Plays
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Baby X (2000)
Collar of Thistles
Three Winters Green
Short Circuits
Back to Before
6 Miss Kat Cusworth | [email protected]