MODERNISM & THE CONDITIONS OF MODERNITY Political Theatre 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 Otto Dix, Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas 1924

Edvard Munch The Scream 1893

Van Gogh The Starry Night 1889 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). “Jarry’s toying with genre and aesthetics in un- established territory leaves Ubu Roi’s humour largely dependent on conventional modes of comedy..”

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/ Theatre & The Avant Garde

Symbolism Dadaism Futurism Surrealism

Absurdism

Theatre of Cruelty

Theatre of The Oppressed

Post Modern Theatre Ubu Roi (1965- in French)

https://youtu.be/MF_PO0N0iOQ

Ubu Roi (2013-2015) Cheek By Jowl

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhPJhQ09yTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsbgBUOint4&t=9s

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