Contemporary Theatre
“Emergence of Alternative Theatre and effect on Conventional Theatre ”
Introduction:
Evaluating the existence and relevance of Alternative Theatre has
remained a central issue in the world of Theatre. Central to appraising the
evaluation of the existence of Alternative Theatre is the change in the theatrical
expressions of the social issues since the 19th & 20th century.
Our research topic derives inspiration from the work done by the researchers
Adolphe Appia, Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, Peter Brook,
Edward Gordon Craig, Jerzy Grotowski, Rudolf Laban, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin
Piscator, Viola Spolin, Constantin Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, Emile Zola
We will focus on scrutinising the changes that took place during the 19th & 20th century theatrical expressions. The research on this topic will also yield useful insights about the behavioural pattern of the spectators and their expectation of the medium.
Research Methodology:
# The research is based on the definition of Alternative Theatre.
# The forms of Alternative Theatre
# The origin of the Alternative theatre
# The difference conventional theatre and the effect on the conventional theatre
# The co-existence of the two forms of theatre.
# Alternative Theatre since World War II
Alternative Theatre & Forms
The achievements of Realism at the end of the 19th century have continued
to the present day, but the most influential innovations in early 20th-century
theatre came from a vigorous reaction against Realism. Just as the visual
arts exploded into a chaos of experiment and revolt, generating numerous styles
and “isms,” so the theatre seized upon anything that came to hand
in an effort to express the contradictions of the new age. Inspiration was
sought in machines and technology, in Oriental theatre, Cubism, Dada, the
psychoanalysis of Freud, and the shock of a world war that spawned widespread
disillusionment and alienation. The results of this eclecticism were often
anarchic and exhilarating: designers and directors were as influential as
playwrights, though relatively little theatre of lasting value was produced.
Nevertheless, such early experiments set the tone and widened the theatrical
vocabulary for all the innovations that have followed. The beginnings of the
revolt against Realism were already hinted at before the 19th century was
over, sometimes in the works of the Realist writers themselves.
1) Theatre of Fact
A more uncompromising method of bringing social issues to the stage has been
Documentary Theatre, or the Theatre of Fact. In this case, the presentation
of factual information usually takes precedence over aesthetic considerations.
Out of the social protest movement that arose during the years of depression
in the 1930s, a unit of the WPA Federal Theatre Project in the United States
(see above) adopted what it called a Living Newspaper technique, taking inspiration
from motion pictures (especially in the use of short scenes) to present highlighted
versions of contemporary problems. The technique has since had varying degrees
of success on stage. Real events are reconstructed and interpreted, either
through fictional revisions or through the use of authentic documentary materials
(e.g., transcripts of trials, official reports, and lists of statistics).
The form became popular in the 1960s through works such as Rolf Hochhuth's
Stellvertreter (1963; The Representative), Peter Weiss's Ermittlung (1965;
The Investigation), Heinar Kipphardt's In der Sache J.R. Oppenheimer (1964;
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer), and in the Royal Shakespeare Company's
US (1967). John McGrath’s group called 7:84 has used it in Scotland
in the 1980s.
2) The Theatre of Absurd
The post-war mood of disillusionment and scepticism was expressed
in bizarre terms by a number of foreign playwrights living in Paris. Although
they did not consider themselves as belonging to a formal movement, they shared
a belief that human life was essentially without meaning or purpose and that
valid communication was no longer possible. The human condition, they felt,
had sunk to a state of absurdity (the term was coined by the French Existentialist
novelist and philosopher Albert Camus). Some of the first plays of the Theatre
of the Absurd, as the school came to be called, were concerned with the devaluation
of language. The spirit of Absurdism, however, can be traced back to Alfred
Jarry's anarchic Ubu roi, produced in 1896. Logical construction and rationalism
were abandoned in the Absurd school to create a world of uncertainty, where
chairs could multiply for no apparent reason or humans turn inexplicably into
rhinoceroses. Later Absurdist writers included Harold Pinter of Great Britain
and Edward Albee of the United States, though by the 1960s the movement had
nearly burned itself out.
.
The origins of the Theatre of the Absurd are rooted in the avant-garde experiments
in art of the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, it was undoubtedly strongly
influenced by the traumatic experience of the horrors of the Second World
War, which showed the total impermanence of any values, shook the validity
of any conventions and highlighted the precariousness of human life and its
fundamental meaninglessness and arbitrariness. The trauma of living from 1945
under threat of nuclear annihilation also seems to have been an important
factor in the rise of the new theatre.
At the same time, the Theatre of the Absurd also seems to have been a reaction
to the disappearance of the religious dimension form contemporary life. The
Absurd Theatre can be seen as an attempt to restore the importance of myth
and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his
condition, by instilling in him again the lost sense of cosmic wonder and
primeval anguish. The Absurd Theatre hopes to achieve this by shocking man
out of an existence that has become trite, mechanical and complacent. It is
felt that there is mystical experience in confronting the limits of human
condition.
As a result, absurd plays assumed a highly unusual, innovative form, directly
aiming to startle the viewer, shaking him out of this comfortable, conventional
life of everyday concerns. In the meaningless and Godless post-Second-World-War
world, it was no longer possible to keep using such traditional art forms
and standards that had ceased being convincing and lost their validity. The
Theatre of the Absurd openly rebelled against conventional theatre. Indeed,
it was anti-theatre. It was surreal, illogical, conflictless and plotless.
Not unexpectedly, the Theatre of the Absurd first met with incomprehension
and rejection.
One of the most important aspects of absurd drama was its distrust of language
as a means of communication. Language had become a vehicle of conventionalised,
stereotyped, meaningless exchanges. Words failed to express the essence of
human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface.
Absurd drama subverts logic. It relishes the unexpected and the logically
impossible. According to Sigmund Freud, there is a feeling of freedom we can
enjoy when we are able to abandon the straitjacket of logic. In trying to
burst the bounds of logic and language the absurd theatre is trying to shatter
the enclosing walls of the human condition itself. Our individual identity
is defined by language, having a name is the source of our separateness -
the loss of logical language brings us towards a unity with living things.
In being illogical, the absurd theatre is anti-rationalist: it negates rationalism
because it feels that rationalist thought, like language, only deals with
the superficial aspects of things. Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a
glimpse of the infinite. It offers intoxicating freedom brings one into contact
with the essence of life and is a source of marvellous comedy.
3) Theatre of Cruelty
During the early 1930s, the French dramatist and actor Antonin Artaud put
forth a theory for a Surrealist theatre called the Theatre of Cruelty. Based
on ritual and fantasy, this form of theatre launches an attack on the spectators'
subconscious in an attempt to release deep-rooted fears and anxieties that
are normally suppressed, forcing people to view them and their natures without
the shield of civilization. In order to shock the audience and thus evoke
the necessary response, the extremes of human nature (often madness and perversion)
are graphically portrayed on stage. Essentially an ant literary revolt, the
Theatre of Cruelty usually minimizes the text by emphasizing screams, inarticulate
cries, and symbolic gestures. Antonin Artaud's theatre of cruelty is one of
the most vital forces in world theatre, yet the concept is one of the most
frequently misunderstood. In this incisive study, tracing the theatre of cruelty's
origins in earlier dramatic conventions, tribal rituals of cleansing, transfiguration
and exaltation, and in related arts such as film and dance. Artaud tried to
achieve these ideals in his production of Les Cenci (1935), but his real influence
lay in his theoretical writings, notably Le Théâtre et son double
(1938; The Theatre and Its Double). Only after World War II did the Theatre
of Cruelty achieve a more tangible form, first in the French director Jean-Louis
Barrault's adaptation of Franz Kafka's Prozess (The Trial), produced in 1947,
and later through the plays of Jean Genet and Fernando Arrabal. The movement
was particularly popular during the 1960s, in part due to the success of Peter
Brook's 1964 production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade for the Royal Shakespeare
Company.
The Theatre of Cruelty proposes to resort to mass theatre, thereby
rediscovering a little of the poetry in the ferment of great, agitated crowds
hurled against one another, sensations only too rare nowadays, when masses
of holiday crowds throng the streets.
If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything
in love, crime, war and madness. These subjects - love, crime, war and madness
- present human experience beyond the quotidian, and these are the subjects
which Artaud believes can expunge the lifeless Western theatre and its patrons
from the comfortable niche in which several centuries of practice have ensconced
them.
4) Poor Theatre
In terms of furthering the actor's technique, the Polish director
Jerzy Grotowski, together with Stanislavsky and Brecht (see above), are the
key figures of the 20th century. Grotowski first became internationally known
when his Laboratory Theatre, established in Opole, Pol., in 1959, triumphantly
toured Europe and the United States during the mid-1960s. His influence was
further enhanced by the publication of his theoretical pronouncements in Towards
a Poor Theatre (1968). Grotowski shared many ideas with Artaud (though the
connection was initially coincidental), especially in the conception of the
performer as a “holy actor” and the theatre as a “secular
religion.” Theatre was to go beyond mere entertainment or illustration;
it was to be an intense confrontation with the audience (usually limited to
fewer than 60). The actors sought spontaneity within a rigid discipline achieved
through the most rigorous physical training. Rejecting the paraphernalia of
the “rich theatre,” Grotowski stripped away all nonessential scenery,
costumes, and props to create the so-called poor theatre, where the only focus
was the unadorned actor. His productions included adaptations of Calderón's
Príncipe constante (1629; The Constant Prince) and the Polish writer
Stanislaw Wyspianski's Akropolis (1904; Acropolis ).
The poor theatre became a worldwide fashion during the late 1960s and early
1970s, even though most groups who attempted it produced only self-indulgent
imitations that tended to exclude the audience. Significantly, this sense
of reduction was evident in Grotowski's own work: from 1976 he excluded the
audience altogether, preferring to work behind closed doors. Peter Brook has
more theatrically conveyed the spirit of poor theatre. After leaving England
in 1968 to establish the International Centre of Theatre Research in Paris,
Brook created a series of vivid productions that included Ubu roi (1977),
a scaled-down version of Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (1982), and Le Mahabharata
(1985), a nine-hour version of the Hindu epic Mahabharata
5) Theatre of Grotesque
The theatre form came into existence in the late 19th century as a part of
the Theatre of the Absurd.A movement in the arts of the early 19th century
in which the force of human emotion was allowed to distort the presentation
of the external world. In theatre, the bright colours and distorted forms
of Grotesque foreshadow the proper expressions.
The work is characterized by the use of a non-naturalistic style (including distorted perspective, and extreme contrasts of light and shade) to convey disturbed or abnormal states of mind. The, expressionism emerged as a definite movement in the German theatre of the1880-1920. Alfred Jarry, an important predecessor of the Absurd Theatre introduced the Grotesque forms in the theatre with mythical figures set amidst a world of grotesque archetypal images. Ubu Roi is a caricature, a terrifying image of the animal nature of man and his cruelty. (Ubu Roi makes himself King of Poland and kills and tortures all and sundry. The work is a puppet play and its décor of childish naivety underlines the horror.) Jarry expressed man's psychological states by objectifying them on the stage through the Grotesque forms. The movement was carried forward by writers as George Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and the young Brecht experimented with non-realistic styles. In literature and music the term is used more loosely: the writings of Kafka and the early music of Berg and Schoenberg are often described as expressionist.
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