Genres

Question 1

Realism

Answer 1

movt in theatre and the arts

• depicted ordinary people in everyday life
• away from conventions of romanticism
• audience were able to empathize and relate to the characters
• details and precision about everything on stage
• imagined 4th wall
• Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian)
• Chekhov (Russian)
• Stanislavsky (Russian)
• Gorky (Russian)

Question 2

Naturalism

Answer 2

movt that was heightened realism with a scientific approach to examining everyday life “dissect human nature”

• a 3 hour situation was a 3 hour play
• details to everything on stage
• imagined 4th wall
• Emile Zola (french)
• quintessential Naturalist play “Therese Raquin”

Jean Julien (french)

• “slice of life put on stage with art”
• The serenade
• make audience think

Andrea Antoine

• staged banned plays
• famous for creating real-life “box sets” (like whole beef carcases etc)

Ivan Turgenev
- first Russian Naturalist play “A Month in the Country”

Question 3

Expressionism

Answer 3

• early 20th C
• reject idea that art was a mirror of reality
• art is to confront dark aspects of reality and create emotional effect
• Benjamin Franklin Wedekind
• Spring Awakening
• Brecht
• Eugene O’Neill

Question 4

Surrealism

Answer 4

1916 - 1930 (between the 2 wars)

• Andre Breton (poet and critic) published The Surrealist Manifesto
• join consciousness and unconsciousness to create an “absolute reality, surreality”
• dream-like, drew a lot from Sigmund Freud
• Alfred Jarry (poet and playwright)
• a founder of surrealist theatre
• Ubu Roi (trilogy)

Antoin Artaud (actor, writer, director )

• started as a surrealist but left when surrealists gave support to communism
• absurdist

Question 5

Dadaism

Answer 5

• 1920s
• anti establishment
• criticized nationalism and the bourgeoise
• influenced by French Poets and Italian Futurists
• declared themselves “non artists” creating non-art
• irrational, nihilistic, anarchic
• meaninglessness in the modern world
• paved way for absurdism

Two schools of thought for dadaism (Tzara’s and Breton…Brenton went onto establish Surrealism)

founder of dadaist theatre

• Tristan Tzara (Romanian French)
• manifesto (1918) = art is meaningless and anti-futurism
• The Gas Heart
• anti fascist

Marcel Duchamp (1913)
Hugo Ball - Dada Manifesto, 1916 (sound poetry)
- manifesto disagreed with dada becoming an artist movt
Andre Breton

Question 6

Absurdism

Answer 6

• rejection of Brecht
• anti-political form of theatre
• 1950s
• influenced by dada, surrealism and Kakfa, Absurdism is “nihilist in its outlook” = existentialism (human existence has no meaning or purpose)
  EXAMINATION OF existentialism
• clever language play, language to the point of non-meaning, exposing language’s inability and betrayal
• humans being trapped
• Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Artaud