This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre ...of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.
Revolution as Art Gerould, Daniel C.
PAJ (Baltimore, Md.),
05/2015, Volume:
37, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Adrian Piotrovsky, 1898-1938, taught at Meyerhold's Classes for the Mastery of Stage Productions and worked with his older friend Sergei Radlov, 1892-1958, at the People's Comedy Theatre in Petrograd ...from 1918 to 1919. Piotrovsky was committed to creating a new Soviet theatre and saw the mass spectacle as offering the best means of reaching a large audience. The Soviet mass spectacles often related the Bolshevik Revolution to the earlier history of world revolution, and the Paris Commune of 1871 was recognised as the most important precursor to 1917, as a true working class revolution, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, which was directed by bourgeois lawyers and favoured the middle class. Thus, the Paris Commune of 1871 was a subject perfectly suited to the new type of revolutionary theatrical performance that Piotrovsky and his colleagues envisaged. In 1924 he wrote and staged his major intsenirovka, "The Paris Commune". An intsenirovka or staging was a genre of mass spectacle that presented a broad fresco of an important historical event in the revolutionary history of the working classes, making use of historical figures, their speeches, and other documents of the time, in a mise en scene that featured rhythmic declamation, music, and primarily choral song. A translation of Piotrovsky's text by Daniel C. Gerould is presented.
This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre ...of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.
Known throughout the world as the author of Carmen, Prosper Merimee (1803-1870) also wrote the first French romantic dramas and has belatedly been recognized--at least in continental Europe and ...Russia, where his plays have from time to time been performed--as one of the truly innovative dramatists of the nineteenth century. The same cannot be said for England and America. The neglect of Merimee as a dramatist in the English-speaking world is in large part a consequence of his radical politics, atheism, and anti-clericalism, his unconventional dramaturgy, and his practice of artistic deception.
The anthologist of modern drama is a go-between who pairs off readers with playwrights. To be an anthologist one needs to join the creative sensibility of an artist to the analytical spirit of a ...critic. Whoever would anthologize modern drama must play the role of a proselytizer and prophet willing to take risks.
Sprawa Dantona(The Danton Case, 1929), a chronicle of the French Revolution, is the only dramatic work written in Polish by the Polish-born Stanisława Przybyszewska (1901–35). It echoes the tension ...Przybyszewska felt between her Polish heritage and the French literary history with which she had come to most identify. InThe Danton Case, she created a masterfully organized dramatic distillation of the chaotic events of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror. In a series of desperate letters to one of the most influential leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), which she wrote in tandem
Playwright, painter, photographer, novelist, and philosopher, Stanis³aw Ignacy Witkie wicz (pen name Witkacy, 1885–1939) was an idiosyncratic and multitalented artistic per sonality who, although ...unrecognized in his own lifetime, has emerged as a seminal figure of the interwar avant-garde. He brought to the theatre extraordinary visual sensibility, seismographic apprehension of the tremors of social change, and an intuitive grasp of the impact of scientific revolutions on the new century.
Endowed with a powerful scenic imagination, Witkacy created a dramatic universe full of hyperbolic characters, surprising configurations of events, inventivecoups de théâtre, and spectacular stage effects. His predilection was
