SPIRITUAL THEATRICALITY: THE DISTINGTIVENESS OF GEIST EXPRESSIONISM

Even as the Schrei productions I have just discussed were being mounted, another kind of “Expressionist” performance was developing under the auspices of Herwarth Walden's Sturm circle in Berlin. Directed by Lothar Schreyer, the “Sturm-Bühne” ensemble – later renamed the “Kampfbühne” – created its Bühnenkunstwerke [“stage works of art”] based on plays such as those of August Stramm. These abstractionist scripts experimented radically with language and deliberately avoided the use of conventional characterization and narrative plot structure. However, the most comprehensive source of information about how they were produced by the Sturm-Bühne/Kampfbühne ensemble is Schreyer's own elaborate polemical account published in 1948 under the title Expressionistisches Theater. Despite the subjectivity of this memoir, written at three decades' distance from the fact, the theoretical principles Schreyer sets forth therein as the basis of his work with Sturm-Bühne/ Kampfbühne actors are worth examining. One reason is that they bear close relationship to the writings of Vassily Kandinsky, of all the artists associated with the Sturm circle the most significant early theorist of Expressionist abstractionism.

Whether Schreyer was successful in realizing the performance principles he derived from Kandinsky's theoretical work is questionable. The one disinterested account of a Sturm-Bühne production that I have been able to find, Herbert Ihering's review of a mounting of Stramm's Sancta Susanna, is highly critical both of the performance and of Schreyer's theoretical remarks preceding the performance.