Thoughts on Futurism

While Expressionism was being born in Austria and Germany, a very different non-realistic style was getting started in Italy. In 1909, the same year Oskar Kokoschka premiered Murderer, Hope of Women, the Italian poet and playwright Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published a manifesto for a new movement he called Futurism.

"We wish to sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and audacity," Marinetti wrote, adding: "There is not beauty except in strife." Indeed, Futurism embraced violence and warfare, along with anything that could be considered modern: airplanes, motorcars, radios, bombs, and machine guns. Anyone who failed to revere the modern they considered passé and condemned as a "passatista," a term they used to ridicule old-fashioned critics and artists who did not agree with them.

The Futurists made bold claims that libraries and museums should be destroyed to make way for new, modern art forms. Though they might never have wanted to actually destroy Italy's artistic heritage, they claimed this as a goal in order to provoke outrage and controversy. The Futurists would read aloud manifestos by Marinetti and others in theatres, and then celebrate when audiences pelted them with vegetables.

Controversy was exactly what they wanted, and on at least one occasion the Futurist performers hurled the vegetables the audience had thrown right back at them. Marinetti would also insult audiences to their faces, for instance telling them that it would take a microscope to see their souls. Artists carried Futurist paintings onstage to exhibit them, and actors engaged in outrageous behavior just to provoke a response.

In 1913, Marinetti wrote a manifesto that dealt specifically with theatre. He called for a new type of drama that like the performances in variety theatres did not have to mean anything. The performance would be valued as a thing in and of itself, rather than creating an illusion of another world. He railed against the erection of an imaginary fourth wall and called for the performer and audience to relate directly to one another. He also called for the integration of film and other modern technologies into theatrical performance.

Like Expressionism, Futurism attracted figures interested in both drama and material arts like painting and sculpture. Umberto Boccioni, for instance, is mostly known today as a painter and sculptor, but he also wrote a number of short Futurist dramas known as "sintesi," or synthetic works. These were meant to be performed in rapid succession, shocking the audience out of their complacency. Boccioni's plays could deal frankly with sexuality, as was the case with Bachelor Apartment, make fun of critics, as with Genius and Culture, or sometimes be entirely surreal, as in The Body That Ascends.

When Italy entered the First World War, both Marinetti and Boccioni volunteered to fight. Boccioni was tragically killed during the war. Marinetti survived it, and after the war was over, started his own political party, which later merged with the Fascist party of Benito Mussolini. Though the Fascists and Futurists later turned on one another, Futurism's relationship with totalitarianism ultimately sullied the movement's reputation.

Thoughts on Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka is a rare case in the theatre--a groundbreaking playwright who is actually better known as a painter. Shortly after his birth, a fire broke out in Kokoschka's hometown in Austria. As a young man, he took the story of that fire as an omen. Perhaps he should have, for Kokoschka would soon set fire to the arts throughout Austria and in fact across all of Europe.

Growing up in the late nineteenth century, Kokoschka attended schools that emphasized science and the modern world, but he found himself instead reading classics and experimenting in art. Against his father's wishes, he enrolled in the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna. This was the avant-garde art school in Vienna, standing out in opposition to the traditional Academy of Fine Art. It also emphasized more practical arts, including architecture, design, and furniture-making. Both the cutting-edge style and more practical bent of the institution served Kokoschka well when he debuted his short play Murderer, Hope of Women, designing the show and the publicity posters himself.

Kokoschka wrote the play in 1907, while he was still a student at the School of Arts and Crafts. It premiered in 1909 at the Kunstschau Theatre. This was an outdoor summer stage that was part of a temporary arts complex erected to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Emperor Franz Joseph I. During the premiere, soldiers watching from a nearby barracks saw the scene where a woman is branded onstage. They rushed in, provoking a riot. Police were called in, and the performance had to be broken off in the middle of the play.

Had the soldiers waited, they would have seen even more shocking events onstage. The play calls for the woman to then stab the man in his side and have her female companions imprison him in a tower. The man cannot live, yet cannot die, and the woman desperately tries to get into the tower to be with him. The woman finally opens the gate to the tower, and the man comes forth to murder her. In the last moments of the play, the man kills "like flies" both his own warriors and the maidens who accompanied the woman. He then exits through flames that have ripped open the tower "from top to bottom."

The apocalyptic fire that accompanied Kokoschka's birth seems to haunt the play. Also apparent is the artist's troubled relationship with women. Kokoschka already had problems when in 1912 he began an affair with Alma Mahler, widow of the famous composer Gustav Mahler and former lover of the architect Walter Gropius. While at the Museum Folkwang in Essen this summer, I saw this great double portrait he did of himself and Alma:

Check out the museum's Website here:

Museum Folkwang

http://www.museum-folkwang.de/

Ultimately, the two lovers went their different ways, with Kokoschka volunteering to join the Austrian cavalry in World War I. He never got over her, however. In 1918, he commissioned a life-sized doll to simulate Alma as he could no longer have the real thing. This is just depressing, and Kokoschka seems to have known it. He later destroyed the doll.

Alma went back to Gropius and married him, only to then have an affair with the writer Franz Werfel. Both of the Mahlers (along with Freud, Wittgenstein, Stalin, and others) are currently onstage in the Otho Eskin play Final Analysis playing off-Broadway. Eskin makes Alma out to be a sympathetic character, yet a very difficult woman to be with, both a passionate muse, and a dangerous adventuress. Like Kokoschka, Alma Mahler seemed to have enjoyed playing with fire.

Thoughts on German Expressionism

There have always been ties between theatrical movements and movements in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Those ties were particularly close in Expressionism, where the first Expressionist drama was actually written by the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. His short play Murderer, Hope of Women shows a woman being branded onstage. This is followed by the mass murder of nearly everyone in the cast. The play premiered in 1909 at an outdoor theatre in Vienna, but was interrupted when soldiers from a nearby barracks saw the branding scene from afar and rushed in to stop the performance. Kokoschka narrowly escaped being arrested for disturbing the peace.

Expressionism aimed to depict the subjective emotional experiences of characters rather than an objective reality. It deliberately distorted perspective for emotional effect. Both in painting and in acting style, it was harsh and angular. Actors frequently wore heavy make-up, and in the case of Murderer, Hope of Women, Kokoschka actually painted the bodies of actors to show the muscles beneath their skins. Expressionist writers railed against the dehumanizing effects of industrialization and the creation of massive, impersonal cities. Their work aimed to be universal and yet deeply personal at the same time.

In 1912, Reinhard Sorge won the prestigious Kleist Prize for his Expressionist drama The Beggar. The five-act play follows a young poet with a mentally disturbed father. As the poet tries to find his own voice, various friends and advisors attempt to counsel him, but he remains true to his himself, and the play ends with a hymn to the dramatic vistas of the future. As is typical of Expressionist drama, the characters are given generic designations such as "The Poet," "The Father," "The Girl," and "The Patron of the Arts." After writing The Beggar, Sorge converted to Catholicism following years of atheism and turned to writing religious dramas. Sadly, he died in the First World War at the age of 24 and was buried in a mass grave.

Also in 1912, Georg Kaiser wrote the Expressionist drama From Morn to Midnight, which was not performed until 1917. The play concerns a bank teller who steals money in order to run off with a mysterious and beautiful foreign woman whom he thinks is a criminal. When it turns out the woman is actually a respectable lady and not the con artist he took her for, the man realizes his life has been ruined for nothing. He spends the day wandering the streets and ultimately dies in a night that is both literal and metaphorical. Kaisar later explored themes of science fiction in his plays Gas I and II. Czeck playwright Karel Capek continued this trend in the play R.U.R., which first introduced the word "robot."

Not all Expressionist playwrights were dour. Carl Sternheim used Expressionism to lampoon the aspirations of the middle classes. His farce The Underpants is best known in the United States from an adaptation written by the comedian Steve Martin. In a later play, The Strongbox, a respectable professor actually locks himself in a chest to count securities rather than enjoy his beautiful young wife. Another comedy, Citizen Schippel, shows how a coarse lower-class clarinet player enters the ranks of society by helping a singing quartet win a crown of laurel leaves at a music festival. Sternheim's comedies are exaggerated distortions of daily life that are both hysterically funny and deeply disturbing.