German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage considers the powerfully stylized, anti-realistic styles of acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921. It relates this striking departure from the dominant European acting tradition of realism to the specific cultural crises that enveloped the German nation during the course of its involvement in World War I. This book describes three distinct Expressionist acting styles, all of which in their own ways attempted to show how symbolic stage performance could be a powerful rhetorical resource for a culture struggling to come to terms with the crises of historical change. The examination of Expressionist script and actor memoirs allows for an unprecedented focus on description and analysis of acting itself.
Frank Wedekind's theatre art is usually approached through his dramatic writing: but the argument of this article is that the clearest understanding of the dramatist's career is to be gained through an encounter with his work as a performer. The stage was for Wedekind always a deeply personal and reflexive arena: as he once wrote, ‘the critics have often reproached me that my dramas are about myself. I would like to show that it's worth the trouble to bring myself onto the stage.’ In the following article, David Kuhns seeks to demonstrate the complicated nature of ‘performance’ as the term is applied to Wedekind – for his controversial plays and essays, scandalous satirical poems, cabaret appearances, and acting for the legitimate stage were all eclipsed by the notorious public persona which they constituted. This persona, Kuhns argues, became, even for Wedekind himself, inseparable from his self-perceived identity: it was both the real subject of his dramatic art and the essential character he performed. In short, Wedekind's career from beginning to end pursued a performative autobiographical dialectic of self-inscription and self-revision. The author, David Kuhns, teaches theatre history, dramatic literature, and performance theory at Washington University in St. Louis.
According to his good friend and first biographer, Artur Kutscher, Frank Wedekind decided to become a professional actor because he felt that his plays were being misrepresented to the public by actors who didn't understand the characters he had created. Specifically, the failure of the first performances of Der Marquis von Keith [1899] in 1901 spurred Wedekind, the chagrined playwright, to brush aside any hesitations that had previously deterred Wedekind, the amateur and occasional actor. Wedekind was a man of intense contradictions. He increasingly would aspire to the respectability of middle-class family life; yet his self-assumed, dogged notoriety as a bohemian was to frustrate this ambition to the end of his life. He was a playwright who both celebrated the awakening of human sexual vitality and at the same time probed its inherent life-destroying potential. In rendering his own unique understanding of human nature, the totality of expression to which he aspired as a playwright hurtled him, as an actor, right into the torrid center of the dramatic world he had created.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.