Expressionism started as a visual art form for an antidote to the beauty of impressionism. The point was to deny immediate perceptions of things, to analyse things then send them back as a pure but different view of that thing (it?s sometimes called ?anti-realism).
I can give you a very simple example of expressionism: If I showed an impressionist a vase of flowers, they might produce something akin to ?A Woman Seated beside a Vase of Flowers? by Edgar Degas. An expressionist might show you something like “Flowers in Vase” by Mary Lee Lombard or maybe something not at all like that.
The Expressionist theatre movement developed in Germany around 1905. It was characterised by attempts to dramatise subjective states through distortion. It used images that were intense and scenes were seen through the eyes of the main character. The plot was typically non-linear, and might travel to unrelated events in a distorted and dreamlike manner. In the same way that melodrama uses the characters description as their name, expressionist theatre used characters as representative, like: man, woman, mother, priest.
The theme of the plays politically featured left-wing causes like anti-war, de-humanisation by society and deterioration of the family. This was a strong motivation for playwrights.
The leader of expressionist theatre, George Kaiser was a German who introduced many new techniques to theatre, including; juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, rapidly shifting scenes and larger-than-life characters. Kaiser wrote a trilogy of plays called Coral Gas about a worker who works in a gas plant and tries to get his workmates to come to an outdoor farming job. His son finds the plant produces lethal gas and blows up the factory. He also wrote ?From Morn to Midnight? which pronounced the futility of modern society, showing disjointed scenes in a twisted world.
The Essay on Character Analysis of Okonkwo in “Things Fall Apart”
Okonkwo is portrayed as a tragic hero, in the novel Things Fall Apart. To uncover the source of Okonkwo's tragic flaw, a glimpse into his past is essential. At first, we see Okonkwo as an arrogant, hardworking, warrior. This is his cultures vision of a great citizen. His father, Unoka was thought of as a failure. He is lazy and does not provide for his family. His culture views him as an ...
The expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, born in Prussia was a strong political activist who was sentenced to five years imprisonment for his ideals. During this time, he wrote his major plays, which became very famous and were translated into 27 languages. Toller spent the rest of his life devoted to socialism and humanitarianism. He committed suicide after the defeat of the Spanish republic because of the loss of civil liberties. This short life-story sums up the more extreme rationale of an expressionist playwright.
Because expressionism was born during the war, supply was low and producers could not come up with adequate stage materials. Therefore, early expressionist theatre usually had around two small pieces of set, which held a strong symbolic meaning.
The traditional audiences for this kind of theatre were, to put it bluntly, socialist hippies. They were home in Germany during wartime and expressed their political ideals by attending and performing in these somewhat ?underground? playhouses.
After the war, materials became once more available to the arts and expressionist directors used large and elaborate sets which added extra dimensions to the genre, like screening images onto the stage or having moving sets.
Probably because of its abstract nature, Expressionist theatre was very stimulating but did not thrive artistically. It is widely believed that expressionist theatre was over by 1925. At this time epic theatre was born.
