Journal article
The Bühnenkunstwerk and the Book: Lothar Schreyer's Theater Notation
Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.), Vol.21(2), pp.407-428
04/01/2014
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2014.0035
Abstract
"A maid to the dead and living poets": this, according to Lothar Schreyer, was the condition of feminized artistic servitude to which the European theater had descended by the first decades of the twentieth century.1 Schreyer's name may be unfamiliar even to those acquainted with the German expressionist circles in which he worked, despite the fact that Walter Gropius appointed him to teach theater arts at the Weimar Bauhaus.2 However, his complaint that the modern stage had been unjustly subjugated by tyrannical, text-wielding playwrights will be known to anyone conversant with early twentieth-century theater theory and practice.3 As early as 1901, Georg Fuchs had protested that European drama had become too literary; in 1909, the title page of his Die Revolution des Theaters announced his campaign to "Retheatricalize the Theater!" by renouncing novelistic naturalist plays and poetic closet dramas and exploiting the material resources specific to the stage.4 In that same decade, Edward Gordon Craig gained international notoriety with his own essays, in which he called for the "art of the theatre" to liberate itself from literary domination by reducing or eliminating the words penned by dramatists.5 F. T. Marinetti and his fellow Italian Futurists were even less polite to playwrights.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The Bühnenkunstwerk and the Book: Lothar Schreyer's Theater Notation
- Creators
- Jennifer Buckley
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.), Vol.21(2), pp.407-428
- Publisher
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- DOI
- 10.1353/mod.2014.0035
- ISSN
- 1071-6068
- eISSN
- 1080-6601
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 04/01/2014
- Academic Unit
- Theatre Arts; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397928202771
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