Political Theatre

MODERNISM & THE CONDITIONS OF MODERNITY

Late 19th Century

• Industrial Revolution

• Individual Alienation

• Psychological States/Analysis

Late 19th century

• the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only means of obtaining social progress.

• The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts

https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/art_philosophy/Humanities/history_of_modernism.htm

Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Futurism

• The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded like.https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/art_philosophy/Humanities/history_of_modernism.htm

Van Gogh The Starry Night 1889

Edvard Munch The Scream 1893

Otto Dix, Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas 1924

Kathe Kollwitz Weavers on the March 1897

In short, Modernism was in most countries an extraordinary compound of the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the naturalistic and the symbolistic, the romantic

and the classical. It was a celebration of a technological age and a condemnation of it; an

excited acceptance of the belief that the old regimes of culture were over, and a deep

despairing in the face of that fear; a mixture of convictions that the new forms were escapes from

historicism and the pressures of the time with convictions that they were precisely the living

expressions of these things. And in most countries the fermenting decade was the eighteen nineties.

Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (Harvester Press, 1978).

What are the causes of Modernism?Consider Nietzsche—art imposes order; it transcends the real

The Anglo-European Viewpoint: • Virginia Woolf—modern style comes from the opportunity for change in

human relationships and human character •Wallace Stevens—art abstracts reality and gives it substance and

meaning Modernism is the one art that responds to the scenario of our chaos—

resulting from: 1) the destruction and demoralization of WW I

2) the reinterpretation of the world by Marx, Darwin, and Freud 3) the changes wrought by capitalism and constant industrial

acceleration 4) existential exposure to absurdity or meaninglessness

5) it is the literature of technology 6) it is the art consequent on the dis-establishment of communal reality

Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (Harvester Press, 1978).

Modernism is not an irrational swing away from the ordered world of Realism or a continuation of individual assertions

inherent in Romanticism. It is founded on a tension between “reason and unreason, intellect and emotion, subjective and

objective.”

Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (Harvester Press, 1978).

The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term "avant-garde", with which the movement

was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in

its original military and political context). Surrealism gained fame among the public as

being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".

Malcolm Bradbury and James Walter McFarlane, Modernism, 1890-1930 (Harvester Press, 1978).

https://floatinonaturnip.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/alfred-jarrys-ubu-roi-how-comic-amusement-is-generated-from-texts-that-set-out-to-challenge-or-

disrupt-logical-thought/

“Jarry’s toying with genre and aesthetics in un-established territory leaves Ubu Roi’s humour largely dependent on conventional modes of

comedy..”

Symbolism

Dadaism

SurrealismFuturism

Absurdism

Theatre & The Avant Garde

Theatre of The Oppressed

Theatre of Cruelty

Post Modern Theatre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx2qHHFS5Yk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQG0m1cnYm0&list=PLUnSK-qxi6iMjtoX1wQaFGweo3I1Krn31

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuKd0IJziB0&list=PLW32gj3GlFc0uAlHPt_a9v43vxT8Pwp5p

&index=8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuDiZPNryW4&index=4&list=PLW32gj3GlFc0uAlHPt_a9v43

vxT8Pwp5p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQIJiIQjoRU

Ubu Roi (1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggFGDzCxLEk

Ubu Roi (2013-2015) Cheek By Jowl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhPJhQ09yTI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsbgBUOint4&t=9s