User:DoctorMabuse/Piscator

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Erwin Piscator
Erwin Piscator, circa. 1927.
Erwin Piscator, circa. 1927.
OccupationTheatre director
NationalityGerman
GenreEpic theatre • Agitprop revue • Mass spectacle • Documentary theatre • Multimedia theatre
Notable worksThe 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
SpouseMaria Ley-Piscator
Signature

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.

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 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 [...].

Biography[edit]

The graves of Piscator and his wife, Maria Ley-Piscator, in the Waldfriedhof Zehlendorf cemetery in Berlin.

Piscator came from a middle-class family in Hesse-Nassau; he was descended from Johannes Piscator, a protestant theologian who produced an important translation of the Bible in 1600.[17] In 1913 he studied theatre history with Arthur Kutscher in his famous seminar at Munich University (which Bertolt Brecht was also later to attend).[18] He began his acting career that same year, working on small roles as an unpaid actor at the Bavarian Court Theatre, under the directorship of Ernst von Possart. It was during this time that Karl Lautenschläger installed one of the world's first revolving stages at that theatre.[19]

During the First World War Piscator was drafted into the German army, serving in a front-line infantry unit as a signaller from the spring of 1915. The experience inspired a hatred of militarism and war that lasted for the rest of his life, as well as a small number of bitter poems, which were published in 1915 and 1916 in the left-wing Expressionist literary magazine, Die Aktion. In the summer of 1917, having participated in the Second Battle of Ypres and suffered at least one hospitalization, he was eventually assigned to an army theatre unit. In November 1918, when the armistice was declared, Piscator gave a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldier's Council.[19]

Played Arkenhlolz in August Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata at the Tribunal Theatre in Königsberg.[20]

In Berlin in October 1920 he founded his "Proletarian Theatre" (Proletarisches Theater) with the writer and Communist Youth leader Hermann Schüller (who had been a member of the League for Proletarian Culture).[21]

In collaboration with the playwright Hans Rehfisch, he formed a "proletarian Volksbühne" in Berlin (a rival to the Volksbühne) at the Comedy-Theater on Alte Jacob Strasse, where, in 1922-1923, they staged works by Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Leo Tolstoy.[22]

Theory and practice of theatre[edit]

In lieu of private themes we had generalisation, in lieu of what was special the typical, in lieu of accident causality. Decorativeness gave way to constructedness, Reason was put on a par with Emotion, while sensuality was replaced by didacticism and fantasy by documentary reality.
Erwin Piscator, 1929.[23]

Piscator attributed his repudiation of his middle-class background to his early literary encounters with "all those in the last fifty years who ironized, attacked or interpreted this morbid bourgeois society"; he identified the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde as having been particularly influential for him.[24]

Piscator relates a story from his experience in the trenches at Ypres to explain the profound impact of the First World War on his thinking about the art of the theatre. An N.C.O. crawled over to him when he was unable to dig a shelter under a hail of shellfire and demanded to know what Piscator did for a living:


In 1929 Piscator published his only work of theatre theory, The Political Theatre.[27] In the preface to its 1963 edition, Piscator wrote that the book was "assembled in hectic sessions during rehearsals for The Merchant of Berlin" by Walter Mehring, which had opened on 6 September 1929 at the second Piscator-Bühne.[28] The book was intended to provide "a definitive explanation and elucidation of the basic facts of epic, i.e., political theater", which, at that time, "was still meeting with widespread rejection and misapprehension."[28] Three decades later, Piscator felt that:

Criticism of Stanislavski's circle of attention: "It is not true that your centre of attention lies in the middle of the stage. When you play before a public, the public must be the centre of your attention."[30]

Productions[edit]

Königsberg Tribunal[edit]

Proletarian Theatre[edit]

Programme sheet for Piscator's 1922 production of Romain Rolland's drama The Time Will Come.

Central-Theater[edit]

Volksbühne[edit]

Other work in Berlin[edit]

See also[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Erwin Piscator.

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ In 1927 Brecht was part of the 'dramaturgical collective' of Piscator's first company, which sought to address the problem of finding suitable new plays for its "epic, political, confrontational, documentary theatre". See Willett (1998, 103) and (1978a, 72). In 1963, Piscator described his productions and the theoretical conclusions and aesthetic principles he had drawn from them as an attempt to answer a question that Brecht formulated as: "How can the theater be entertaining and instructive at the same time? How can it be taken out of the hands of intellectual drug traffic and become a place offering real experiences rather than illusions? How can the unliberated and unknowing man of our century with his thirst for knowledge and freedom, the tortured and heroic, misused and inventive man of our terrible and great century, himself changeable and yet able to change the world, how can he be given a theater which will help him to be master of his world?" Bertolt Brecht quoted by Piscator in the foreword to the 1963 edition of The Political Theatre (1980, vii).
  2. ^ For an English-language translation, see Piscator (1980). Writing in its 1963 edition preface, Piscator asks "is this book, once a manifesto and a manual for instruction, now an historical document?" (1980, vii).
  3. ^ Willett (1978b, 11).
  4. ^ Piscator (1980, 243).
  5. ^ Willett (1978b, 156-158).
  6. ^ Piscator (1980, 16). Ilya Ehrenburg remembers a conversation between Piscator and the Soviet playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, who visited Berlin in 19xx, about Meyerhold's theatre in Moscow; see Willett (1978b, 86).
  7. ^ "Piscator's greatest achievement," Edward Braun writes, "was a Marxist achievement: he demonstrated how theatre can create a dialectical relationship with its audience in order to accelerate the transformation of society." (1982, 161).
  8. ^ Piscator identifies this Soviet-German axis of modernist, materialist aesthetics
  9. ^ Piscator (1980, 51).
  10. ^ Willett (1978b, 104).
  11. ^ Willett (1978b, 110).
  12. ^ Piscator (1980, 78-84), Willett (1978b, 110), Bradby & McCormick (1978), and Stourac and McCreery (1986). Hugh Rorrison stresses the equally-important example that the Soviet Blue Blouse agitprop troupe provided when they toured Germany in 1927; see Rorrison (1980, 84), though he gives the year of the tour as 1926 when all other sources give 1927. The troupe began its tour with a performance in Piscator's theatre in Berlin.
  13. ^ Willett (1978b, 110); need to reference Jameson, Szondi, etc.
  14. ^ Willett (1978b, 106-107).
  15. ^ Evans (1968).
  16. ^ Willett (1978a, 43) and (1978b, 20).
  17. ^ Willett (1978a, 42) and Piscator (1980, 9).
  18. ^ Willett (1978a, 43) and Thomson (1994, 24).
  19. ^ a b Willett (1978a, 43).
  20. ^ Braun (1982, 145).
  21. ^ Braun (1982, 145) and Rorrison (1980, 37).
  22. ^ Piscator (1980, 55-58) and Willett (1978a, 15-16, 46-47). Hans José Rehfisch (1891-1960) was also a screenwriter (see Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)), lawyer and judge. He was imprisoned by the Nazis from 1933-1936, after which he worked for the BBC in Britain. He moved to the USA in 1945 and taught the director's course at Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at The New School for Social Research in New York; see Rorrison (1980, 55).
  23. ^ From a speech given on 25th March, 1929, and reproduced in Schriften 2 p.50; Quoted by Willett (1978a, 107).
  24. ^ Piscator (1980, 9). Piscator goes on to enumerate a long list of writers important to him at the time, which includes Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Georg Heym, Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bernard von Brentano, Klabund, August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, August Messer, Wilhelm Wundt, Wilhelm Windelband, Gustav Fechner, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto Ernst, and Arthur Conan Doyle; see Piscator (1980, 10).
  25. ^ Piscator (1980, 14, 16).
  26. ^ Piscator (1980, 49).
  27. ^ Piscator (1980).
  28. ^ a b Piscator (1980, vi).
  29. ^ Piscator (1980, vii).
  30. ^ Quoted by Innes (1972, 118).

Sources[edit]

  • Beutin, Wolfgang, et al. 1979. A History of German Literature: From the Beginnings to the Present Day. 4th edition. London: Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0415060346.
  • Bradby, David, and John McCormick. 1978. People's Theatre. London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield. ISBN 085664501X.
  • Braun, Edward. 1982. The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413463001.
  • Evans, Thomas George. 1968. Piscator in the American Theatre: New York, 1939-1951. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1968. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1972.
  • Innes, Christopher. 1972. Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama. New edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. ISBN 0521291968.
  • Ley-Piscator, Maria. 1967. The Piscator Experiment: The Political Theatre. New York: J.H. Heineman. Revised edition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1970. ISBN 0809304589.
  • Piscator, Erwin. 1980. The Political Theatre. Trans. Hugh Rorrison. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413335003. Originally published in 1929; revised edition 1963.
  • Rorrison, Hugh. 1980. Editorial notes. In Piscator (1980).
  • Schechter, Joel, ed. 2003. Popular Theatre: A Sourcebook. Worlds of Performance Ser. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415258308.
  • Stourac, Richard, and Kathleen McCreery. 1986. Theatre as a Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-1934. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0710097700.
  • Thomson, Peter. 1994. "Brecht's Lives". In Thomson and Sacks (1994, 22–39).
  • Thomson, Peter and Glendyr Sacks, eds. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Cambridge Companions to Literature Ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521414466.
  • Willett, John. 1967. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: A Study from Eight Aspects. Third rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1977. ISBN 041334360X.
  • ---. 1978a. The Theatre of Erwin Piscator: Half a Century of Politics in the Theatre. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413378101.
  • ---. 1978b. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917-1933. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. ISBN 0306807246.
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