User:DoctorMabuse/Piscator
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Erwin Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was an influential 20th-century German theatre director who is considered one of modernism's most important theatre practitioners. His innovative, experimental productions during the 1920s in Weimar Berlin expanded the resources of the theatrical medium and spawned several new theatrical genres.
Erwin Piscator | |
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![]() Erwin Piscator, circa. 1927. | |
Occupation | Theatre director |
Nationality | German |
Genre | Epic theatre • Agitprop revue • Mass spectacle • Documentary theatre • Multimedia theatre |
Notable works | The Political Theatre • Red Revue • Flags • In Spite of Everything! • The Robbers • Tidal Wave • Storm over Gottland • Hoppla, We're Alive! • Rasputin • The Good Soldier Schweik |
Spouse | Maria Ley-Piscator |
Signature | |
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Most significantly, his contribution to the development of the theory and practice of epic theatre [...] [1]
In his only work of theatre theory—the manifesto and "manual for instruction" The Political Theatre (1929)—Piscator places his form of epic theatre within its broader social and historical context and offers his contribution to the contemporary debates on the functions and aesthetics of political theatre.[2] His work forms part of the post-expressionist "new sobriety" (Neue Sachlichkeit) in the arts in Germany. John Willett describes the movement as a "new realism" that pursued "methods of dealing both with real subjects and with real human needs, a sharply critical view of existing society and individuals, and a determination to master new media and discover new collective approaches to the communication of artistic concepts."[3] Out of Berlin Dada, shares social criticism etc. of Dix, Grosz, Heartfield. Piscator's uniqueness. "For us," Piscator explained in it, "man portrayed on the stage is significant as a social function. It is not his relationship to himself, nor his relationship to God, but his relationship to society which is central."[4] Piscator's theatre is part of a parallel development of similar innovations in the function and aesthetics of the theatre in Soviet Moscow and Weimar Berlin that forms an influential core axis of theatrical modernism.[5] Relationship to Vsevolod Meyerhold and the Russian avant-garde;[6] Similar purpose in their attempts to articulate dialectical materialism with the theory and practice of theatre.[7] Contribution to debates about Marxist aesthetics being conducted largely between Moscow and Berlin.[8] The "question of eternal values in art," Piscator wrote, is one which "Marxists should not even pose."[9] Parallel innovations in multimedia theatre.[10] Biomechanics and epic acting. Similar contributions to a wider modernist re-appraisal and re-functioning of forms of popular culture. Attempt to reach a popular audience. Politically-grounded. Intelligibility and accessibility. Not merely formal innovation, but attempt to shift the social basis of the arts.[11] His early agitprop revues provided a standard of quality and a model to emulate for the workers' theatre movement, which experienced an explosive growth across Germany and Europe at the time.[12] The revue-form, a kind of theatrical "montage", offered [...]; modernist fragmentation and autonomisation.[13]
- He pioneered a collaborative approach to artistic production with the dramaturgical collectives he assembled for his theatre.[14]
He collaborated with a wide range of significant creative artists during the course of his career, including John Heartfield, George Grosz, László Moholy-Nagy, Edmund Meisel, Felix Gasbarra, and Traugott Müller.
As well as the many contemporary plays and devised productions that he staged, Piscator directed dramas by Frank Wedekind, Maxim Gorky, Gerhart Hauptmann, Friedrich Schiller, and August Strindberg.
In 1938 he founded the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he taught Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Judith Malina, Walter Matthau, Harry Belafonte, Elaine Stritch and Tennessee Williams.[15]
Piscator's experience as a conscript in the First World War inspired a hatred of militarism and war and a commitment to communism, all of which lasted for the rest of his life.[16] Anti-capitalism, Marxism, Leninism.
Piscator's achievement to have shown how stage used for historicisation of the drama [...].