HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Experimental theatre (also known as avant-garde theatre), inspired largely by
Wagner Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
's concept of
Gesamtkunstwerk A ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' (, literally 'total artwork', translated as 'total work of art', 'ideal work of art', 'universal artwork', 'synthesis of the arts', 'comprehensive artwork', or 'all-embracing art form') is a work of art that makes use of al ...
, began in Western
theatre Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The perform ...
in the late 19th century with
Alfred Jarry Alfred Jarry (; 8 September 1873 – 1 November 1907) was a French symbolist writer who is best known for his play ''Ubu Roi'' (1896). He also coined the term and philosophical concept of 'pataphysics. Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, France, ...
and his Ubu plays as a rejection of both the age in particular and, in general, the dominant ways of writing and producing plays. The term has shifted over time as the mainstream theatre world has adopted many forms that were once considered radical. Like other forms of the
avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...
, it was created as a response to a perceived general cultural crisis. Despite different political and formal approaches, all avant-garde theatre opposes bourgeois theatre. It tries to introduce a different use of
language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
and the
body Body may refer to: In science * Physical body, an object in physics that represents a large amount, has mass or takes up space * Body (biology), the physical material of an organism * Body plan, the physical features shared by a group of anima ...
to change the mode of
perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system ...
and to create a new, more active relation with the audience.


Relationships to audience

Famed experimental theatre director and playwright Peter Brook describes his task as building "… a necessary theatre, one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one." Traditionally audiences are seen as passive observers. Many practitioners of experimental theatre have wanted to challenge this. For example,
Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...
wanted to mobilise his audiences by having a character in a play break through the invisible "fourth wall," directly ask the audience questions, not giving them answers, thereby getting them to think for themselves;
Augusto Boal Augusto Boal (16 March 1931 – 2 May 2009) was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movemen ...
wanted his audiences to react directly to the action; and
Antonin Artaud Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the E ...
wanted to affect them directly on a subconscious level. Peter Brook has identified a triangle of relationships within a performance: the performers' internal relationships, the performers' relationships to each other on stage, and their relationship with the audience. The British experimental theatre group
Welfare State International Welfare State International was a British experimental theatre group formed in 1968 by John Fox and Sue Gill, Roger Coleman and others. It became "A collective of radical artists and thinkers who explored ideas of celebratory art and spectacle betw ...
has spoken of a ceremonial circle during performance, the cast providing one half, the audience providing another, and the energy in the middle. Aside from ideological implications of the role of the audience, theatres and performances have addressed or involved the audience in a variety of ways. The
proscenium arch A proscenium ( grc-gre, προσκήνιον, ) is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch (whether or not truly "arched") and on the bottom by the stage floor ...
has been called into question, with performances venturing into non-theatrical spaces. Audiences have been engaged differently, often as active participants in the action on a highly practical level. When a proscenium arch has been used, its usual use has often been subverted. Audience participation can range from asking for volunteers to go onstage to having actors scream in audience members' faces. By using audience participation, the performer invites the audience to feel a certain way and by doing so they may change their attitudes, values and beliefs in regard to the performance's topic. For example, in a performance on bullying the character may approach an audience member, size them up and challenge them to a fight on the spot. The terrified look on the audience member's face will strongly embody the message of bullying to the member and the rest of the audience. Physically, theatre spaces took on different shapes, and practitioners re-explored different ways of staging performance and a lot of research was done into Elizabethan and Greek theatre spaces. This was integrated into the mainstream, the National Theatre in
London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, for example, has a highly flexible, somewhat Elizabethan traverse space (the Dorfman), a proscenium space (the Lyttelton) and an amphitheatre space (the Olivier) and the directors and architects consciously wanted to break away from the primacy of the proscenium arch.
Jacques Copeau Jacques Copeau (; 4 February 1879 – 20 October 1949) was a French theatre director, producer, actor, and dramatist. Before he founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, he wrote theatre reviews for several Parisian journals, work ...
was an important figure in terms of stage design, and was very keen to break away from the excesses of naturalism to get to a more pared down, representational way of looking at the stage.


Social contexts

The increase of the production of experimental theaters during the 1950s through the 1960s has prompted some to cite the connection between theater groups and the socio-political contexts in which they operated. Some groups have been prominent in changing the social face of theatre, rather than its stylistic appearance. Performers have used their skills to engage in a form of cultural activism. This may be in the form of
didactic Didacticism is a philosophy that emphasizes instructional and informative qualities in literature, art, and design. In art, design, architecture, and landscape, didacticism is an emerging conceptual approach that is driven by the urgent need to ...
agit-prop Agitprop (; from rus, агитпроп, r=agitpróp, portmanteau of ''agitatsiya'', "agitation" and ''propaganda'', "propaganda") refers to an intentional, vigorous promulgation of ideas. The term originated in Soviet Russia where it referred to ...
theatre, or some (such as
Welfare State International Welfare State International was a British experimental theatre group formed in 1968 by John Fox and Sue Gill, Roger Coleman and others. It became "A collective of radical artists and thinkers who explored ideas of celebratory art and spectacle betw ...
) see a performance environment as being one in which a micro-society can emerge and can lead a way of life alternative to that of the broader society in which they are placed. For instance, in a study of South American theatrical developments during the 1960s, the Nuevo Teatro Popular materialized amid the change and innovations entailed in the social and political developments of the period. This theatrical initiative was organized around groups or collective driven by specific events and performed themes tied to class and cultural identity that empowered their audience and help create movements that spanned national and cultural borders. These included
Utopia A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book ''Utopia (book), Utopia'', describing a fictional ...
n projects, which sought to reconstruct social and cultural production, including their objectives.
Augusto Boal Augusto Boal (16 March 1931 – 2 May 2009) was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, drama theorist, and political activist. He was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a theatrical form originally used in radical left popular education movemen ...
used the Legislative Theatre on the people of Rio to find out what they wanted to change about their community, and he used the audience reaction to change legislation in his role as a councillor. In the United States, the tumultuous 1960s saw experimental theater emerging as a reaction to the state's policies on issues like nuclear armament, racial social injustice, homophobia, sexism and
military–industrial complex The expression military–industrial complex (MIC) describes the relationship between a country's military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the r ...
. The mainstream theater was increasingly seen from as a purveyor of lies, hence, theatrical performances were often seen as a means to expose what is real and this entails a focus on hypocrisy, inequality, discrimination, and repression. This is demonstrated in the case of
Grotowski Jerzy Marian Grotowski (; 11 August 1933 – 14 January 1999) was a Polish theatre director and theorist whose innovative approaches to acting, training and theatrical production have significantly influenced theatre today. He was born in Rzes ...
, who rejected the lies and contradictions of mainstream theater and pushed for what he called as truthful acting in the performances of his Poor Theater as well as his lectures and workshops. Experimental theatre encourages directors to make society, or our audience at least, change their attitudes, values, and beliefs on an issue and to do something about it. The distinction was explained in the conceptualization of experimentation that "goes much deeper and much beyond than merely a new form/or novel content" but "a light that illuminates one's work from within. And this light in the spirit of quest – not only aesthetic quest – it is an amalgam of so many quests – intellectual, aesthetic, but most of all, spiritual quest."


Methods of creation

Traditionally, there is a highly hierarchical method of creating theatre - a writer identifies a problem, a writer writes a script, a director interprets it for the stage together with the actors, the performers perform the director and writer's collective vision. Various practitioners started challenging this and started seeing the performers more and more as creative artists in their own right. This started with giving them more and more interpretive freedom and
devised theatre Devised theatre – frequently called collective creation – is a method of theatre-making in which the script or (if it is a predominantly physical work) performance score originates from collaborative, often improvisatory work by a performing ens ...
eventually emerged. This direction was aided by the advent of ensemble improvisational theater, as part of the experimental theatre movement, which did not need a writer to develop the material for a show or "theater piece." In this form the lines were devised by the actors or performers. Within this many different structures and possibilities exist for performance makers, and a large variety of different models are used by performers today. The primacy of the director and writer has been challenged directly, and the directors role can exist as an outside eye or a
facilitator A facilitator is a person who helps a group of people to work together better, understand their common objectives, and plan how to achieve these objectives, during meetings or discussions. In doing so, the facilitator remains "neutral", meaning t ...
rather than the supreme authority figure they once would have been able to assume. As well as hierarchies being challenged, performers have been challenging their individual roles. An inter-disciplinary approach becomes more and more common as performers have become less willing to be shoe-horned into specialist technical roles. Simultaneous to this, other disciplines have started breaking down their barriers.
Dance Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...
,
music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...
,
video art Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...
,
visual art The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts ...
,
new media art New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of new media, electronic media technology, technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video g ...
and
writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically Epigraphy, inscribed, Printing press, mechanically transferred, or Word processor, digitally represented Symbols (semiot ...
become blurred in many cases, and artists with completely separate trainings and backgrounds collaborate very comfortably.


Interculturalism and Orientalism in Experimental Theatre

In their efforts to challenge the realism of western drama, many modernists looked to other cultures for inspiration. Indeed,
Artaud Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the E ...
has often credited the Balinese dance traditions as a strong influence on his experimental theories: his call for a departure from language in the theatre, he says, partially came to him as a concept after having seen the Balinese Theatre's performance at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931. He was particularly interested in the symbolic gestures performed by the dancers and their intimate connection to the music; in his ''Notes on Oriental, Greek and Indian Cultures,'' we find a curiosity as to what the French theatre scene could become if it pulled from traditions such as
Noh is a major form of classical Japanese dance-drama that has been performed since the 14th century. Developed by Kan'ami and his son Zeami, it is the oldest major theatre art that is still regularly performed today. Although the terms Noh and ' ...
and
Balinese dance Balinese dance ( id, Tarian Bali; ban, ᬇᬕᬾᬮᬦ᭄​ᬩᬮᬶ) is an ancient dance tradition that is part of the religious and artistic expression among the Balinese people of Bali island, Indonesia. Balinese dance is dynamic, angula ...
. Similarly, it is in his essay on Chinese acting that
Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...
used the term Verfremdungseffekt for the first time. Brecht's essay, written shortly after having witnessed performer Mei Langfang's demonstration of a few Peking Opera performance practices in 1935 Moscow, elaborates on his experience on his experience feeling “alienated” by Mei's performance: Brecht notably mentions the absence of a fourth wall in the demonstration, which later on became a staple in Brechtian theatre, and the “stylistic” nature of the performance; another key concept which would find its way into Brecht's later theories. In fact, three of Brecht's plays are set in China (''The Measures Taken'', ''The Good Person of Szechwan'', and ''Turandot'')
Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...
, pioneer of the modernist and symbolist movement, discovered Noh drama in 1916, as detailed in his essay ''Certain Noble Plays of Japan'', which reveals a strong interest in the musicality and stillness of the Noh performance. His production of the same year, ''At the Hawk's Well'' was created by loosely following the rules of a Noh Play: Yeats' attempt at exploring Noh's spiritual power, its lyrical tone and its synthesis of dance, music and verse. Additionally, Gordon Craig repeatedly theorized about "the idea of danger in the Indian theatre", as a potential solution to the lack of risk-taking in the western theatre, and some might argue his theories about an über-marionette actor could be compared to the
kathakali Kathakali ( ml, കഥകളി) is a major form of classical Indian dance. It is a "story play" genre of art, but one distinguished by the elaborately colourful make-up and costumes of the traditional male actor-dancers. It is native to the M ...
training. In 1956, Grotowski too found himself an interest for Eastern performance practices, and experimented with using some aspects of Kathakali in his actor training program. He had studied the South-Indian tradition in Kerala, at the Kalamandalam. In many cases, these practitioners' pulling of theatrical conventions from the East came from their desire to explore unexpected or novel approaches to theatre-making. Audiences at the time were not often exposed to Eastern theatre practices, and the latter were hence a powerful tool for modernists: Brecht could easily generate the alienation of his western audiences by presenting them with these supposedly "strange" and "foreign" theatrical conventions they were simply not familiar with. Artaud and Yeats could experiment with the musicality and ritualistic nature of Eastern dance traditions as a means to reconnect the western theatre to the mystical and to the universe; and both Grotowski and Craig could draw from the kathakali performers' training as a means to challenge the western theatre's sole focus on psychological truth and truthful behavior. However, their exposure to these theatre traditions was extremely limited: these theatre-makers's understandings of the Eastern traditions they were pulling from were often limited to a few readings, translations of Chinese and Japanese works, and, in the case of Brecht and Artaud, the witnessing of an out-of-context demonstration of Balinese Theatre Dance and Peking Opera conventions. Remaining geographically distant, for the most part, of the traditions they wrote about, the "oriental theatre" could hence be argued to be more of a construct than a true practice for these theatre-makers. While they do pull from Eastern traditions, Brecht, Artaud, Yeats, Craig and Artaud's respective articulations of their vision for theatre predate their exposure to these practices: their approach to Eastern theatre traditions were filtered "through a personal agenda", and the absence of earnest curiosity for the oriental theatre could be argued to have led to its misinterpretation and distortion in the modernist movement. Furthermore, Eastern theatre was repeatedly reduced by these western practitioners to an exotic, mystical form. It is important here to acknowledge the importance of cultural context in theatre-making: these practitioners' isolating of a particular ritual or convention from its broader cultural significance and social context shows perhaps that this "questionable exoticization" was customarily used to push their own preconceived notions about the theatre, rather than to explore the culture they were borrowing from.


Physical effects

Experimental theatre alters traditional conventions of space (
black box theater A black box theater is a simple performance space, typically a square room with black walls and a flat floor. The simplicity of the space allows it to be used to create a variety of configurations of stage and audience interaction. The black ...
), theme, movement, mood, tension, language, symbolism, conventional rules and other elements.


See also

*
Performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
*
Physical theatre Physical theatre is a genre of theatrical performance that encompasses storytelling primarily through physical movement. Although several performance theatre disciplines are often described as "physical theatre," the genre's characteristic aspe ...
*
Improvisational theatre Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted: created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, a ...
*
Postdramatic theatre The notion of postdramatic theatre was established by German theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann in his book ''Postdramatic Theatre'', summarising a number of tendencies and stylistic traits occurring in avant-garde theatre since the end of the ...
*
Experimental theatre in the Arab world Experimental theatre in the Arab world emerged in the post-colonial era as a fusion of Western theatrical traditions with local performance cultures such as music and dance. It is characterized by hybridity as it transposes Arabic traditional perfor ...
*
Fringe theatre Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of the main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.Kemp, Robert, ''More that is Fre ...
*
Music theatre Music theatre is a performance genre that emerged over the course of the 20th century, in opposition to more conventional genres like opera and musical theatre. The term came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s to describe an avant-garde approach ...


References


Further reading

* Arnold Aronson: ''American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History (Theatre Production Studies)''. Routledge, 2000, * Günter Berghaus: ''Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde''. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2005, * Squiers, Anthony
An Introduction to the Social and Political Philosophy of Bertolt Brecht: Revolution and Aesthetics
2014. {{Authority control Acting techniques Modernist theatre Alternative theatre Contemporary art