Abstract
Strongly influenced by the aesthetic and philosophy both of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” and of Beckett’s minimalist writing and following course on the early-twentieth-century experiments in technique as well as form, directors from the 1960s onward responded to what Hungarian literary critic Péter Szondi described as “the crisis of drama,” which manifested itself in an “increasing tension between the formal requirements of Aristotelian drama and the demands of modern ‘epic’ social themes which could no longer be contained by this form” (quoted in Lehmann 2006, 2). It is worth examining the different ways in which auteurs, especially from the mid-1980s on, furthered and perfected the methods and discoveries of pioneers such as Jarry, Craig, Meyerhold, Appia, Stanislavski, Piscator, and Brecht, conscious that a more abstract type of theatre, in relation to the performance’s conception, design, and acting style, was gradually becoming a valid reality, almost a necessity in itself. Having acquired confidence in this shifting of emphasis from mimetic, plot-driven drama to an ever- fluid image-based performance where various media, textualities, cultures, and styles combine and collide, avant-garde directors in the West have been developing their own singular methods and stage idioms, contributing to the resolute establishment of auteur theatre, which is more than ever present in the wake of the twenty-first century.
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Notes
For more on directors’ control of the performer’s significatory presence, see also Ch. 6. Also, Martin Puchner’s work Stage Fright: Modernism, AntiTheatricality, and Drama (2002) traces this duality by describing how theatre, being a performing art like music and ballet, “depends on the artistry of human performers on stage.” Being, however, also a mimetic art like painting and cinema, “it must utilize these human performers as signifying material in the service of a mimetic project”: Once the nature of mimesis is subject to scrutiny and attacks, as it is in modernism, this double affiliation of the theatre becomes a problem, because, unlike painting or cinema, the theatre remains tied to human performers, no matter how estranged their acting might be. The theatre thus comes to be fundamentally at odds with a more widespread critique, or complication, of mimesis because this critique requires that the material used in the artwork be capable of abstraction and estrangement. Directors may try to estrange or depersonalize these performing humans…an actor’s impersonation remains nonetheless fundamentally stuck in an unmediated type of mimesis that keeps the work of art from achieving complex internal structures, distanced reflectivity, and formal constructedness. (5)
David Williams. “Remembering the Others that are US: Transculturalism and myth in the theater of Peter Brook” (in Pavis 1996, 68).
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© 2011 Avra Sidiropoulou
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Sidiropoulou, A. (2011). Auteur on the Road. In: Authoring Performance. What is Theatre?. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001788_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137001788_5
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