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After the 1917 revolution, Russian and Soviet avant-garde
theatre attempted to create a new art for post-revolutionary
society. This reconsideration of the Russian avant-garde theatre
investigates the burgeoning new drama/theatre forms of the period.
Kleberg considers assumptions made about the audience and by the
audience, and seeks to determine whether discrepancies existed
between the two. Offering fresh insights into the modernist period
of Russian theatre, Theatre as Action provides a new typology of
the stage/audience relationship in modernist Russian theatre.
Constructivism of the 1920's is discussed on light of the plays of
Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Treytykov. The relation of the Soviet
Russian avant-garde to the aesthetics of Bertold Brecht is also
examined. This original, comprehensive work is a major contribution
to our understanding of the confrontation of the ideal and the
reality of Soviet 1920's, revealing the Wagnerian and Symbolist
utopia beneath, and its crisis. It will be of particular interest
to students of literature and drama.
An imaginative tour de force, Starfall consists of three dramatic
dialogues among real people in imagined settings. Anchoring each of
the dialogues is the great Russian film director and theoretician
Sergei Eisenstein, whose artistic theories (in all their formations
and reformations) run throughout the book, illustrating the
influences that affected the Soviet art world in the period between
the two world wars. In The Aquarians Eisenstein meets Bertolt
Brecht in the first-class compartment of a train heading from
Berlin to Moscow in 1932. They spend the night discussing and
arguing about everything from the use of Renaissance magic in art
tosome kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which everything in
art is connected. The Sorcerer's Apprentices takes place at a
meeting held in Moscow on April 14, 1935, on the occasion of
performances given during a visit by a noted Chinese actor, Mei
Lan-Fang, and his troupe, the prime representatives of early
twentieth-century classical Chinese theater. Conceived as a series
of speeches by noted members of the Soviet theater and film circles
(Eisenstein again), The Sorcerer's Apprentices contrasts the
Russian theater with that of the Chinese, the German (antifascist,
emigre theater of Brecht and Erwin Piscator), and even the
avant-garde British drama (as represented by Gordon Craig). Ash
Wednesday has Eisenstein engaged in a dialogue with Mikhail
Bakhtin. They speak about German culture -- in particular
Eisenstein's desire to stage Wagner's The Valkyrie, which Bakhtin
appears to object to on both political and artistic grounds; the
influence of astrology in Soviet literary circles; and jazz music
as a symbol of pure art. Filledwith references familiar and arcane,
biographical and political, steeped in literary history from the
mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and peppered with
references to the writings of such dissimilar thinkers as Giordano
Bruno, Rabelais, Goethe, and Antonin Artaud, Starfall will appeal
to all readers interested in the developments of twentieth-century
dramatic art.
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