Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

222 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
Robert Wilson (the director) and John Conklin (the costume designer) co-designed the scenery for this dreamlike
American Repertory Theatre production of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken in 1991. © Richard Feldman
to accommodate the new dramaturgies that surged into
the theatre. Realist directors such as Antoine and Stanislavsky
suddenly found themselves challenged by scores
of adversaries and renegades. A school of symbolist and
poetic directors rose in France, and a former disciple of
Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), broke
with the Russian master to create a nonrealist “biomechanical”
style of acting and directing. At first, Meyerhold’s
techniques stood in sharp contrast to the more
realistic styles established at Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art
Theatre, but by 1904 that theatre featured Stanislavsky
himself producing the symbolist plays of Maeterlinck.
The advent of electrical stage lighting created new
opportunities for stylization: the technology enabled
the modern director to create vivid stage effects, starkly
unrealistic in appearance, through the judicious use of
spotlighting, shadowing, and shading. Technology, plus
trends in modern art that were well established in Europe
by 1900, led to scenery and costume designs that departed
radically from realism. Exoticism, fantasy, sheer sensual
delight, and aesthetic purity became the prime objectives
of designers who joined the antirealist rebellion.
In some respects, the symbolist aim succeeded perhaps
beyond the dreams of its originators. Fort’s Théâtre
d’Art, although it lasted only two years, now has spiritual
descendants in every city in the Western world where
theatre is performed.
THE ERA OF ISMS
The symbolist movement itself was short-lived, at least
under that name. Symbolism, after all, was coined primarily
as a direct contradiction of realism, and movements
named for their oppositional qualities—called for