Erwin Piscator

1919 steht für einen politischen Neuanfang und gleichzeitig für ein krisenhaftes, immer wieder scheiterndes Ringen um Demokratie und eine liberale Gesellschaft. Vor diesem
Horizont entsteht ein politisches Theater, das sich einmischt und sich als Reflexionsraum von Machverhältnissen versteht.
Macht| Spiele beschreibt anhand markanter Stationen die Geschichte dieses politischen Theaters von 1919 bis in die Gegenwart. Dabei werden so unterschiedliche Formen beleuchtet wie die Shakespeare’schen Königsdramen, etwa am Beispiel der Inszenierungen von Leopold Jessner, Jürgen Fehling, Saladin Schmitt, Peter Palitzsch oder Peter Zadek, Schillers »Räuber« (in ikonischen Inszenierungen von Erwin Piscator und Hansgünter Heyme) oder die Orestie-Inszenierung von Peter Stein.
Mit Arbeiten von Karin Beier, William Kentridge, Brigitte Maria Mayer, Luk Perceval, Maya Krishna Rao und Robert Wilson zieht sich die Perspektive bis in die Gegenwart.

U našem razmišljanju o taktikama političkog i politizovanog pozorišta u drugoj polovini dvadesetog veka uporedo ćemo se baviti teorijom i istorijom. Najpre slovenačkog prostora, u kojem uprkos globalizaciji još uvek najočiglednije živimo, zatim primarno umetnošću drugog sveta (Aleš Erjavec)5 u vreme socijalizma i postsocijalizma,
sekundarno pak umetnošću prvog, zapadnog sveta. Najviše Evrope, onda Sjedinjenih Država i Kanade. Poći ćemo od činjenice da danas, barem u prvom i drugom svetu, više ne možemo da govorimo o klasičnim oblicima političkog pozorišta, kao što su ih, na primer, unutar koncepta epskog pozorišta praktikovali Ervin Piskator (Piscator) i, malo kasnije, Bertolt Breht (Brecht), u isto vreme, u ranim dvadesetim najpre ruska avangarda (s ponovnim izvođenjem revolucionarnih događaja), a posle njenog staljinističkog zatiranja – socrealistička agit-drama i agitprop. Isto tako postaje utopističko i revidirano političko pozorište Augusta Boala, koje namerno izlazi iz polja tradicije evropskog pozorišta s akcentom na dualizmu pozorište-predstava i tako nastoji da prevaziđe raskorak između scene i publike, sâmo pozorište postaje proces pomoću kojeg društvo objektivizuje oblike represije da bi ih prevazišlo. Ono što ostaje samo su još politizovana umetnost i politizovano pozorište u različitim inkarnacijama

Studies in epic cinema have flourished in the past decade, but one senses that
scholars take the term to be self-explanatory,
without considering its literary
origins and the variety of films that can be placed under the rubric of the
epic. Furthermore, the question of epic style has received less scholarly attention.
In this article, I propose that in order to define epic cinema we need to
look at literary, philosophical, and film theoretical discussions of the epic. In
doing so, we will be able to appreciate that epic cinema is an exceptionally
expansive umbrella term that covers many and diverse film practices, including
films (1) with epic subject matter but not epic style, (2) with epic subject
matter and epic style, (3) with epic style but not epic subject matter, and (4)
films which can be placed under the rubric of the modernist epic.

A History of Collective Creation examines collective and devised theatre practices in Europe and North America, beginning in 1900. Long associated with U.S., British and French theatre collectives of the 1960s, collective creation in fact has its roots in the theatrical experiments of the early 20th century, emerging just after the rise of the modern director.  Tracing a lineage from explorations of collective creation in the work of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Copeau, St. Denis, Piscator, Reduta, Grotowski, and early documentary theatre, through mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, A History of Collective Creation proposes that collective creation played a pivotal role in the evolution of the modern theatre.

The work of Erwin Piscator as a theatre director is marked by attempts to introduce communist ideology into theatre, which was reflected in various aspects of his theatrical practice. This paper focuses on the agitprop productions staged by his Proletarian Theatre , which propagated the communist narrative of class struggle by the use of an irrational aesthetics. These performances embodied the contradiction that can be found in communist practice, which appealed to the scientifically rational analysis of history as class struggle, but in practice abolished criticism and transformed class struggle into a myth. Piscator's production of Russia's Day staged the conflict between the capitalist and the proletarian class according to the scientific analysis of history as class struggle, but the irrational aesthetics of the performance immersed the audience into the staged history, transforming the communist narrative into a myth.

This essay carries out a brief and yet thorough analysis on the relationship between Epic Theatre (Piscator and Brecht, with references to Szondi's work) and British Drama (with particular reference to Shelagh Delaney, Edward Bond and Sarah Kane). It is possible to see an evolution in this relationship: from a complete adhesion to Brecht's principles to the creation of a very large gap with the German author. This study is in Italian but can be translated, if asked.

"Verweltlichung der Bühne? Zur Mediologie des Theaters der Moderne" – der Titel dieses Buches nimmt denjenigen der früheren Studie "Die Entweltlichung der Bühne. Zur Mediologie des Theaters der klassischen Episteme" (2015) auf und führt die dort entfaltete Argumentation fort. Versucht die frühere Studie nachzuzeichnen, wie es im Laufe des 18. Jahrhunderts zu einer Verschließung der Bühne gegenüber dem weltlichen Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum oder – semiologisch formuliert – wie es zu einer Etablierung des Repräsentationsmodells im Theater kommt, so geht es im vorliegenden Anschlussband um die Analyse und Diskussion jener sich seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts manifestierenden Versuche, den im Horizont der klassischen Episteme aufgespannten Rahmen des Repräsentationsmodells zu sprengen, d.h. die Verschließung des Bühnenraums zu revidieren und mittels dieser 'Verweltlichung' der Bühne die Kommunikationssituation Theater auf eine veränderte, spezifisch 'moderne' Episteme neu auszurichten.
Zur Sprache kommen dabei die das Feld absteckenden Theatermodelle des 20. Jahrhunderts: der Bühnennaturalismus der 1890er Jahre, die über Jahrzehnte und verschiedene Theatermodelle sich erstreckende Zusammenarbeit Max Reinhardts und Hugo von Hofmannsthals, Erwin Piscators Agitprop-Theater, Bertolt Brechts Episches Theater, das Dokumentarische Theater Peter Weiss' und Heinar Kipphardts sowie Peter Handkes auf das politisch engagierte Theater antwortende Theatertheater und schließlich Botho Strauß' Vision eines Theaters der Anwesenheit.
Rekonstruiert werden indes nicht nur die Strategien, mittels derer die Theater-Avantgarden das Repräsentationsparadigma zu überwinden und durch Formen einer Wiedereingliederung des Zeichenraums Bühne in das weltliche Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum zu ersetzen versuchen. Vielmehr geht es darum, die jeweiligen Punkte auszuweisen, an denen diese Strategien fehlschlagen und sich im jeweiligen Theatermodell der Bühnenraum gegenüber dem weltlichen Raum-Zeit-Kontinuum verschließt. Mit anderen Worten: In der vorliegenden Studie geht es um die Fortdauer des Repräsentationsmodells im Theater der Moderne.

Der Erste Weltkrieg in der Dramatik. Deutsche und australische Perspektiven / The First World War in Drama. German and Australian Perspectives, hg. von/ed. by Franz-Josef Deiters/Christian Klein, Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2018, 101-117.

The following article comparatively analyzes the theatrical theories of
Erwin Piscator (Das politische Theater, 1968) and César Vallejo (El arte y la revolución, 1973)
and their practical applications. It also attempts to locate César Vallejo’s theater within the
parameters of political theater. Piscator, Vallejo and other authors of revolutionary drama
present an ideological and aesthetic model in which the “new” proletarian aesthetics
overcomes that of the bourgeoisie. This aesthetics lie in the utilization of the cinematograph,
the interpretative techniques of collective characters, and the use of documentation from a
proletariat perspective.

ABSTRACT: Political theater was born when left-wing director Erwin Piscator began to exhibit plays invol-ving revolutionary postulas using his own demonstrative approach. In the face of the devastation, misery, and capitalist financial impositions that exploited the peoples of the world following the First World War, public mind has been the grist for this politics instead of resisting the global liberal attack of the period. Subsequ-ently, the rebellion of the masses- nonchalance – deterritorialization has manifested. While massive political actions pulled peoples from central political movements and dragged them to center-right alternatives, the rising new ideology socialism gained appeal for the working class, especially with some of the petty bourgeo-isie faced with the threat of losing its class positions.  Havel, who placed his three plays " Audience- Unveiling- Protest", "Temptation", "Largo Desalato" as a fixture for the non-socialist regime and daily life criticism of the political theater, was among the three most powerful theater writers in the world of his period. In the surveys organized by the American foreign Policy and British Prospect magazines to determine the global intellectuals of the year, Havel was ranked 4th in 2005 and 26th in 2008 by participants. And so, Havel is a well-known theatre man in Turkey. Havel, which was shown as rival to Brecht with his expressive power in his works, and who was superior to Gorky by some theater critics, made a difference from other critical writers in his printing regimes, when he put the problems of the marginal currents and political impotence on the basis of his charac-ters and opened them up for discussion.

Railway travel has had a significant influence on modern theatre’s sense of space and time. Early in the 20th century, breakthroughs—ranging from F.T. Marinetti’s futurist manifestos to epic theatre’s use of the treadmill—explored the mechanical rhythms and perceptual effects of railway travel to investigate history, technology, and motion. After World War II, some playwrights and auteur directors, from Armand Gatti to Robert Wilson to Amiri Baraka, looked to locomotion not as a radically new space and time but as a reminder of obsolescence, complicity in the Holocaust, and its role in uprooting people from their communities. By analyzing theatrical representations of railway travel, this book argues that modern theatre’s perceptual, historical and social productions of space and time were stretched by theatre’s attempts to stage the locomotive.

The article discusses the background of Eleonora Kalkowska’s best-known play, Sprawa Jakubowskiego [The Case of Jakubowski], 1929. It is also a reconstruction of the work’s reception in Poland and Germany. The diplomatic materials uncovered in the archives, which shed a new light on the trial of a Polish farm labourer sentenced to death in the Weimar Republic, draw out a broader context and the political tensions surrounding the writer’s stage debut. The author of the article also analyzes the diametrically different modes of reading the drama at Berlin’s Volksbühne and Warsaw’s Ateneum, which led to its becoming the subject of national appropriations, particularly in the case of the play’s Polish reception.

Abstract: Over a century after railway travel began to change the ways in which communities, identities, and space interacted, certain influential playwrights and directors explored the theater's relationship to space and time by staging railway travel. Theater studies has analyzed ...