L A N T E R NSan Francisco 1995 Spring Digital Restaurant Guide
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"It is a dance, a theatre work, a hallucinogenic voyage through our newly developed psyche. The story is told in the form of accumulation and montage, a theatrical kaleidoscope - Scenes, movements and moments shift abruptly, at times manically, suddenly, lyrically. It condenses philosophical texts with emotional and visceral images in an intensely physical, meticulously choreographic form." "It offers distorted, fragmented, violent images of humanity and the world, and moved on towards an ever-increasing abstraction of reality. There are experiments with color, language, narrative structure and theatrical forms. There is a vision of rebirth, of imaginative freedom of spiritual and/or social transformation." These two vivid pictures could describe the same production. Both reveal an alive experience filled with memorable images. Yet, they are not two different reviews of the same theatrical event. In fact, they are observations separated by seventy years. The former deals with Anne Bogart's production of THE MEDIUM. The latter defines Expressionism, a theatrical movement from the early 1920s. A coincidence? Probably not.
The elements of the Expressionist movement that were practically abandoned by the 1930s are being reintroduced to American theatre goers by director Anne Bogart. She readily admits that she freely borrows ideas from any number of sources. With Expressionism, she seems to have not only borrowed theories that originated in early 1900s Germany but has made them her own. Anne Bogart, whether she wants to admit it or not, holds the legacy of Expressionism. By incorporating its ideas of structure and style with her own beliefs about what the theatre ought to be, she challenges the American stage in the same way that the early Expressionists did. Aspects of the movement that came to be known as Expressionism began in Germany around 1905, although the term wasn't used until 1911 in France. In 1905, a group of Dresden painters made up of Ernst Kirchner, Fritz Belyl, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others came together to form Die BrŸcke ("The Bridge"). The movement quickly spread to literature and drama, where writers such as Kurt Hiller, Ernest Toller, Vassily Kandinsky and George Grosz discovered that their need to express themselves, not only artistically but also politically, could be best achieved through new forms. These artists were concerned with expressing their internal sense of "dis-ease" with the external world and exploring what historian Sherrill Grace describes as "the renewal of the human spirit and brotherhood of man in the face of an increasingly industrialized, dehumanized, capitalist world." There is, in works labeled "Expressionist," an overwhelming need to respond to the quickly changing world, a world in which the individual loses his/her identity in the face of the masses. As the idea of Expressionism spread to the United States, it began to take on forms typical to this country. 1920s America was a time of profound contrasts, of rich and poor, of splash and squalor. The time was ripe for a new theatre that reflected these disturbing differences. The seeds of Expressionism had taken hold in native productions such as Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape" and imported productions like Georg Kaiser's "From Morn to Midnight". In the winter of 1926, a group of Americans formed The New Playwrights' Theatre. They issued a statement declaring that they wanted to create a theatre "where the spirit, the movement, the music of this age is carried on, accentuated, amplified, crystallized. A theatre which shocks, terrifies, matches wits with the audienceÉIn all, a theatre which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age."
This is where Anne Bogart steps in. Like those in The New Playwrights' Theatre, she asks her audiences to be terrified, to go with her into the unknown, to journey to long-denied places in the American psyche. Like the early Expressionists, Bogart believes there must be a way other than realism, or through the Stanislavsky method, for the artist to express him or herself and come to terms with the ever-changing world. This belief led her to develop her own system of creating theatre, known as the Viewpoints, which incorporates theories of dance, painting, and sculpture, vaudeville and Asian theatre.
In looking back at the Expressionist movement, one historian noted that it "celebrated the free exercise of human passion and imagination. It was much more a sense of a world-view than the object of artistic endeavor." Bogart describes the same issue in a similar way: "The global village is truly happening. We need to reflect this culturally, in the way our art is produced, whom it addresses, and what it's about."
For the early Expressionists, such a change in approach to creating art was revolutionary, and, in Germany, even illegal. For Anne Bogart, the ideas of the Expressionist movement offer her a way of revitalizing a theatre she feels is weakening by the minute. Her legacy, then, is to continue the bold choices of the Expressionists in the hope of creating an invigorated theatre not only for this generation, but for those which follow. * Michele Volansky
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