Symbolist Theatre Research Articles

The Studio on Povarskaia 1905: “Young Theatre of Searching”

ABSTRACT The emergence of Symbolism in Russian theatre was a turning point for both Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold, prompting the former to set up a studio in 1905 to experiment with the new drama. Accounts in English of the Studio on Povarskaia, as it was to be called, have tended to view it largely as a failure. On the contrary, the Studio process was important not only as an experiment with Russian Symbolist theatre but as a catalyst for both Stanislavsky in the development of the System and for Meyerhold in the development of his method, eventually to be termed Biomechanics. This essay makes use of Russian sources and archival materials to examine comprehensively, for the first time, the Studio’s importance as the starting point for both Stanislavsky’s and Meyerhold’s methods of actor education. The discussion also clarifies widespread misunderstandings of the work of both directors, which continues to be highly significant today.

The Wagnerian Layer in I. Annensky’s Poetry

Passion for R. Wagner’s music and aesthetic ideas was characteristic of the Art Nouveau culture. At the turn of the XIX–XX centuries, it affected the Symbolist theater and shaped the aesthetic and artistic worlds of many Russian authors. Innokentii Annensky stood apart from the Russian mainstream symbolism. In his letter to E. M. Mukhina, he defined himself as a Wagnerian. The role of Wagner's aesthetics in the symbolist drama has received a lot of scientific attention, whereas its effect on the Russian modernist poetry remains largely understudied. This article introduces the Wagnerian layer in I. Annensky’s poetry. His Quiet Songs and The Cypress Chest appeared to have numerous references to such Wagner’s works as The Ring of the Nibelung, Parsifal, Tristan and Isolde, and Faust. The author analyzed I. Annensky’s poetry and correspondence. The analysis showed that the method of leitmotif composition helped the poet to structure his poetic ensembles. I. Annensky adopted Wagner's experience of combining operas into a tetralogy and used it to unite his own poetry into cycles. This device is especially obvious in the themes of secret love, the God sense, and the search for the ideal in his stand-alone cycles and poetry books.

Stevens and the Necessity of Distance: International Influence and the Theater Auditorium

Stevens and the Necessity of Distance: International Influence and the Theater Auditorium Hannah Simpson J. HILLIS MILLER described seeing Wallace Stevens perform at a poetry reading at Harvard University around 1950: As the hour went on, Stevens got more and more carried away by his own poetry. His voice got softer and softer, more and more inward, until only those in the first two or three rows, where I happened to be, could hear him. People in the back started leaving, but he paid no attention. Nor did he pay any attention to the loud ambulances and fire engines going by on Mount Auburn Street behind him, bells clanging and sirens wailing. He went right on reading, more and more quietly, absorbed in the sound of his own words. (23) By most measures of what constitutes a “good” public performance, Stevens offered a very poor one, apparently seeking to please only the small world of his own self and a few favored intimates rather than to engage the larger world of the auditorium, or to acknowledge the still larger and encroaching outside world. Miller’s experience echoes Stevens’s own avowed resistance to publicly performing his work: this is, after all, the man who declared, “I am not a troubadour and I think the public reading of poetry is something particularly ghastly” (qtd. in Richardson 225).1 Yet prior to this late-career aversion, Stevens had engaged rather more enthusiastically with the public world of performance: he wrote three plays for the theatrical stage between 1916 and 1917, entitled Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, Carlos Among the Candles, and Bowl, Cat and Broomstick . None of these plays achieved any critical or commercial success in performance, and Stevens would quickly abandon his attempts to write for the stage. Nevertheless, examining Stevens’s early engagement with the theater medium throws new light not only on his later resistance to public performance, but also on Stevens’s careful distancing of larger international “worlds” from his work, and the question of the ideal relation between reality and the imagination that recurs across his subsequent writing. [End Page 82] Here, I trace first the vexed question of the lines of international influence that shaped Stevens’s plays—with particular attention to Japanese noh and French symbolist theater—and, second, how the crowded material world of the theater medium troubled Stevens’s vision of his work. In both instances, the concept of distance is a crucial defining element. As we will see, Stevens self-consciously distanced himself (geographically and otherwise) from the international theater movements and models that seemed to influence his own playscripts. In turn, Stevens’s unhappy experience of the theater medium—specifically, the inflexible material reality of the stage space itself, and the too-close presence of the audience in the auditorium—would reinforce his sense of the necessity of imaginative distance between the individual and material reality, and of a more literal distance between artist and public. This idea of a necessary distance would crucially inform his conception of the relationship between self and surrounding environment in his later poetry and prose. Stevens as Playwright: French Symbolism and Japanese noh Stevens showed early promise as a playwright. His first completed play-script, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, was awarded the $100 first prize for the best one-act verse play by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in May 1916. The panel of judges praised its “extraordinary poetic beauty,” but expressed concerns as to “its actability,” admitting that “most of the judges doubt if it would ‘get across’ to more than a fraction of the audience” (“Prize Announcement” 160)—prefiguring Miller’s later description of Stevens’s failure to more literally “get his reading across” to more than a fraction of his Harvard audience. The more pessimistic members of the Poetry panel were proved correct. Despite Stevens’s subsequent revisions attempting to make “the play a play and not merely a poem” (L 194), his playwriting career had already peaked. By the time the Provincetown Players eventually staged Three Travelers in 1920, Stevens was so disillusioned with the public response to his plays that he was not even...

Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality by Adrian Curtin

Reviewed by: Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality by Adrian Curtin Julia A. Walker DEATH IN MODERN THEATRE: STAGES OF MORTALITY. By Adrian Curtin. Theatre: Theory, Practice, Performance series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019; pp. 268. As Adrian Curtin observes in the introduction to his new book Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality, the topic of "liveness" has long defined contemporary theories of theatre and performance. Discussions about the so-called ontology of performance typically concern the paired ideas of presence and disappearance, recording technologies and documentation, trace and memory—all of which posit in some way the living, breathing body of an actor often co-present with those in the audience. Focusing on the work of Herbert Blau, Marvin Carlson, Alice Rayner, and Linda and Michael Hutcheon, Curtin briefly surveys theories of theatrical embodiment as a way of framing his study of how death and dying have been represented on the modern stage, proposing that "[t]heatrical deathliness may be thought to shadow theatrical liveliness" (12). Shifting his focus from theory to practice, Curtin surveys the history of such representations in the modern theatre, analyzing various aesthetic strategies used in five distinct periods to assess changing cultural attitudes toward death in the Western hemisphere. His temporal scope of "modernity" and his geographical parameter of the "West" are best explained with reference to French social historian Philippe Ariès's seminal study Western Attitudes Toward Death (1976), which Curtin uses to anchor his discussion. Just as Ariès analyzed culturally specific rituals of death to assess how social attitudes toward this universal existential experience have changed over time, so does Curtin use a comparative method in his study of theatrical representations of death in the modern period. But where Ariès's expansive study typified "modern" attitudes in the "West" according to a single logic, Curtin explores variability within Ariès's dominant narrative of the period, using the history of the stage to chart changes in secular rituals for understanding death. The book's subtitle alludes to the "stages" of grief outlined by psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her landmark study On Death and Dying (1970), providing Curtin with a model of progressive but overlapping temporalities by which the book's five chapters unfold. The first chapter begins at the end of the nineteenth century with the symbolists, who innovated a multisensory, proto-immersive experience for their audiences in order to invite them to imaginatively inhabit a metaphysical realm beyond the material world. To do that, they cultivated a charged atmosphere of heightened sensory stimulation, using color, light, sound, and even scent to suffuse the space of the audience and blur its distinction from the fictional world of the stage. Curtin offers a fascinating history of symbolist theatre practice that is most compelling when he brings affect theory to bear on his analysis of these largely neglected because misunderstood plays. As he suggests, the charged energy that creates the shared atmosphere of a performance is nebulous, paradoxically manifesting as something both perceptible and unknowable that, in its effects, erases the felt distinction between subject and object. Examining Rachilde's Madame La Mort, Charles van Lerberghe's The Night-Comers, Maurice Maeterlinck's The Intruder, Leonid Andreyev's Requiem, and W. B. Yeats's Purgatory, Curtin demonstrates a range of techniques these playwrights used to conjure the experience of death for their audiences, along with the different conclusions each presented about this state of existence and its ultimate knowability. Chapter 2 looks at fantastical allegories of death that appeared on stage after the Great War. These include Satan the Waster by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), The Transfiguration by Ernst Toller, and The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Krauss, allowing Curtin to explore different kinds of modernist abstraction that set theatrical elements of music, movement, light, and sound in expressionistic counterpoint to capture the shock of death by war. Chapter 3 examines the phenomenon of "death denial" in plays appearing after World War II by way of existentialist concerns expressed in Dino Buzzati's A Clinical Case, the Open Theater's Terminal (text by Susan Yankowitz), and Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King and Amédée...

THE THEATER OF M. MAETERLINCK AND UKRAINIAN DRAMATIC ART OF THE EARLY XX CENTURY

The topicality of the article is determined by the lack of works in the modern literary criticism devoted to the illumination of the typological links of the dramatic editions of M. Maeterlinck and O. Oles, the need for the development of the Ukrainian discourse in Maeterlinck studies.The aim of the article is to study the typological affinity of symbolist dramatic works “The Blind” by M. Maeterlinck and “Dance the Life” by O. Oles, to reveal basic changes in the structure of dramatic art of the early twentieth century.Was done the attempt to compare Les Aveugles (“The Blind”) by M. Maeterlinck and “Dance the life” by O. Oles on the axis of the specifics of their ideological and aesthetic concepts. The basic changes in the genre structure of the XIX - XX centuries dramatic work are outlined, and the general European and national colours of the development of the symbolist theatre is revealed. It was stated that the concentration of writers’ attention on the disclosure of the internal picture of the world, the movement of the dynamics of development from the actions into the field of psychology, created conditions for a new type of structure of the text, where the ideological, cognitive structure, or the inner plot, is important.It was emphasized that the use by artists of elements of symbolist drama (pessimism, mysticism, irrationalism, conditional chronotope, internal action, analytical composition, subtext, expanded the system of symbols, meta-language, etc.) due not to personal preferences, but above all to their intentions on intellectualism of dramatic art.In order to cover the concept of the symbolist theatre while conducting the comparative analysis the theoretical work of the Belgian writer was involved in the problem field of the study.The article also outlined the fundamental changes in the genre structure of the dramatic work of the late XIX – early XX century, identifies the European and national features of its development. The author underlines the emphasis the writers put on revealing the inner picture of the world, the ways the actions are transformed into the sphere of psychology. All these facts advance the creation of a new fiction in which alongside the ideological and cognitive aspect there is an inner plot.

Russian symbolist drama and theater in the Chinese scientific context

The article is based on the material, presented by the authors at the International Scientific Conference “Russia and China: History and Prospects of Cooperation”. It summarizes the experience of studying drama and theater of Russian symbolism in modern Chinese philological science, and discusses the promise of translating and presenting these dramas on the Chinese stage. One of the authors of this article is a translator and publisher with a number of plays by Russian symbolists, so the article focuses on problems, which concern about adaptation and reception of Russian symbolist drama in the modern Chinese context. We can make the conclusion about Chinese researchers’ growing interest is not only to the phenomenon of the new drama by recent decades, but also to the artistic innovations in drama and theater at the turn of 19 and 20 centuries, where can be found the influence of traditional Chinese theatre and fine arts.

The poetic drama of Fernando Pessoa and W.B. Yeats and the Symbolist Theatre Tradition

The poetic drama of Fernando Pessoa and W.B. Yeats and the Symbolist Theatre Tradition

Film, History and Memory eds. Jennie M. Carlsten, Fearghal McGarry (review)

Reviewed by: Film, History and Memory eds. Jennie M. Carlsten, Fearghal McGarry Frans Weiser and Paul Cohen Film, History and Memory Carlsten, Jennie M., Fearghal McGarry, eds. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2015, Print Editors Jennie Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry explain in their introduction to Film, History and Memory that the project emerged out of collaboration between historian McGarry and a documentary team using his research to make a film about an Irish republican activist. In addition to cooperating on the film, the two groups also launched an interactive website and organized an academic conference with Carlsten that included film scholars, setting the stage for the interdisciplinary nature of the current volume of essays. Building on the ground made by similar multidisciplinary projects, such as the Blackwell Companion to the Historical Film (2013), edited by historian Robert Rosenstone and film studies scholar Constantin Parvulescu, Carlsten and McGarry purposefully avoid rehearsing the familiar debates about academic distrust of the legitimacy of historical cinema and instead take as a given that that films about the past can "embody historical thinking" (2). To that end, they present several principles designed to guide future research on the subject, from recognizing that both filmmaking and viewing are collaborative processes—and suggesting broader recognition of what constitutes historical sources and stories—to advocating greater attention for emotional responses, film reception and context(s) of production. One of the collection's most notable features is signaled by its title, for it augments theory in this burgeoning field by focusing on the role of memory as a form of social identity within evaluations of history. Additionally, the volume features a striking geographical diversity. Given the origin of the project, it is not surprising to see various chapters dedicated to questions of British and Irish cinema, yet several are also transnational in scope, and in two cases, scholars move away from Europe to examine the transmission of memory in Latin America and South Africa. The volume's eleven chapters are not divided into sections, though the text is effectively bookended by two theoretical interventions, with the chapters in between exploring case studies through a variety of different methodologies. In Chapter One, for example, Gianluca Fantoni provides a particularly informative and concise overview of the "symbiotic if problematic relationship between historians and film" (26), chronologically tracing the question of historical representation from the beginning of cinema through its halting, uncertain acceptance into historiographical scholarship over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Coauthored by three scholars, Chapter Two begins the series of case studies by expanding traditional definitions of "heritage film," once associated with British period pieces of the 1980s, to instead examine its current practice as a hybrid genre that has been used to markedly different ends in the Basque Country, Denmark, and Germany. As the authors convincingly argue, the continued prominence of heritage films reveals as much about national memory as it does about transnational coproduction, and such films' "economic impact cannot be measured by box-office figures alone, but also by how they foster heritage tourism, locally and regionally" (45). Chapters Three and Four respectively explore Spanish and Portuguese responses to national trauma, the former reconsidering the [End Page 59] frequent artistic preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War by examining how films that creatively use intergenerational perspectives to illustrate multiple perspectives can mediate the contradictory ways an event has been remembered at different historical moments. The latter essay by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes explores the "affective turn" in cultural studies by highlighting the strategies that two recent Portuguese documentarians use in appropriating historical footage from earlier documentaries in the dictatorship as a means of testing the limits of representation in the documentary genre. Chapter Five once again returns to transnational comparison, as Mercedes Camino analyzes the distinct ways that filmmakers from Italy, France, Yugoslavia, and Belarus have both shaped and complicated images of resistance and collaboration relating to World War Two. In Chapter Six, Andrew Hennlich examines how a 1997 film by South African animator William Kentridge draws upon French symbolist theater and Soviet director Dziga Vertov's silent documentary Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Kentridge's purpose, however, is to interrogate the thorny...

Sensory Landscapes in Harold Pinter: A Study in Ecocriticism and Symbolist Aesthetics

The apparatus is vigorous. The scope broad. The argument provocative. Readers will find here a solid review of Pinter criticism blended with an insistent nudge to look at Pinter in new ways. That insistent nudge leads to an “in-depth study that relates Pinter's dramatic images and sensory landscapes to Symbolist theatre and theory” (11). Interdisciplinary in approach, Corrêa's work blends such concepts as micropolitics, synthesia, and sensory scapes.In addition to a very helpful introduction and conclusion, the book divides into five substantial chapters: “Landscape Theory,” “Pinter's Dramatic Landscapes,” “Space Becomes Air,” “Apocalyptic Landscapes,” and “Unsustainable Homescapes.” In each chapter, the author closely analyzes several Pinter dramas. Further, she relies on a wide body of scholarship as she joins the conversation. Ample and discursive footnotes carry her arguments beyond her already dense prose. She includes a list of Pinter's dramas to include the year of first performance, a handy reference. The wide-ranging, thorough bibliography is subdivided into useful categories.Dispensing with Martin Esslin's frequently misapplied categorizations, the author moves Pinter's plays from Absurdist to Symbolist. She argues that our decades-old insistence on viewing plays as scripts rather than texts has led us astray. By focusing on performance rather than drama, Corrêa asserts, scholars have missed Pinter's rich imagery and evocative space. For example, when Corrêa applies landscape theory to Pinter's written works, rather than to a given production, she's attempting to activate “new areas for the critical imagination” (329). She views nature as text, not context. Characters are environmental and therefore able to be read ecologically. Current criticism that stresses performance, almost to the exclusion of all else, ignores the function of environment within a playtext. In a perhaps unintentional echo of Chaplin's Modern Times, Corrêa highlights deadening external environments that thwart and harm internal ones. Pinter's plays, in this view, warn of the lethal effects of losing our connection with the natural world.When she turns to the Symbolist legacy, Corrêa's approach is far from monolithic. With The Room, A Slight Ache, The Caretaker, The Basement, No Man's Land, and A Kind of Alaska as a backdrop, she explores, among other topics, the monodramatic space of the stage; stasis; the double; ghostscapes and deathscapes. She builds layer upon layer of analysis into her examination of the texts. Since the “Symbolist aesthetic view is also a theoretical perspective,” Corrêa argues for an interactive process of image production between the beholder and the object” (326).Of particular interest is the idea that space, expressive and prominent, lives in and around us. We co-create our environments. Our energies emanate in our space and that same space produces a material effect on our bodies and spirits.Throughout, the author insists that we've missed key features of Pinter's plays. More than once she suggests our focus on performance, on script, can mislead. She argues, as a case in point, that Pinter's plays have always been political. He did not turn to the body politic only in the last third of his career, as others suggest. She “reveals the presence of political concerns throughout his oeuvre, thereby indicating a previously undetected consistency of his approach.” (15)This book offers some starting points for a new look at Pinter's drama. An idea here, a concept there, when parsed and held up to the light, offer an intriguing opening into the plays.

ALMADA NEGREIROS E O TEATRO SENSACIONISTA REFLEXÕES SOBRE AS PEÇAS “ANTES DE COMEÇAR” E “O PÚBLICO EM CENA” DE ALMADA NEGREIROS

Neste artigo buscamos tecer algumas considerações acerca do teatro sensacionista de Almada Negreiros, com destaque para as peças “Antes de Começar” e “O Público em Cena”. Buscamos demonstrar as características que determinam o Sensacionismo, conquanto conceito literário-artístico desenvolvido por Fernando Pessoa, e o modo como Almada Negreiros se apropria deste conceito e o aplica na construção de suas peças. Demonstramos ainda os aspectos metateatrais das duas peças em questão. Apontamos as relações do teatro sensacionista com o teatro simbolista e destacamos os aspectos de experimentalismo do teatro almadiano que o caracterizaria na condição da modernidade e da vanguarda do início do século XX.

Roberto Gomes e as tentativas de modernização do teatro brasileiro: convergências e desencontros com a dramaturgia da (in)ação de Maurice Maeterlinck

<div class="page" title="Page 2"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>O artigo analisa alguns elementos fundamentais da dramaturgia simbolista de Maurice Maeterlinck e seus reflexos na obra do dramaturgo brasileiro Roberto Gomes. A partir de uma investigação breve, que se debruça principalmente sobre as características do silêncio e do esvaziamento da ação, busca-se catalisar a discussão sobre a ideia de modernização do teatro brasileiro, além de refletir sobre alguns aspectos inovadores que se desdobrariam nas novas formas artísticas da encenação contemporânea. </span></p></div></div></div>

Paul Claudel 'LLannonce Faite A Marie': A Study of Genre

The paper looks at the singular genre of Paul Claudel’s 1911 drama, which the author himself defined as a mystery play. This work is studied as a sort of genre experiment, which became possible in the early 20th century, owing to the blurring of borders typical for Symbolist theatre. One can define two specific levels in the subject matter of the piece: the dramatic one, the actual story and the one reminding us of a mystery play, which shows the events in a universal light, symbolically reflecting the principal episodes of sacred history. A detailed analysis of the interaction between these two planes covers the list of personages and their character, the symbolic meaning of different images and developments of the story, spatial and temporal relations, as well as the influence of liturgy. The author comes to the conclusion that Claudel in «L’Annonce faite a Marie» achieves a unique synthesis of genres, reanimating certain features of a Medieval mystery, and in this way continues with his Symbolist drama the centuries-old tradition of Catholic theatre.

VERGA AND DUSE: TRANSPOSING SILENCE FROM ‘IL CANARINO DEL N. 15’ TO IN PORTINERIA. A PRELUDE TO SYMBOLISM?

This article offers a thorough examination of the central hypothesis that Verga’s In portineria (1885), based on the short story ‘Il canarino del n. 15’ (1883), anticipates the French Symbolist theatre of silence. Through a textual analysis of the way in which Verga transposes the unspoken in the passage from page to stage, the article illustrates how In portineria can be considered a ‘pre-intimist’ work — the antithesis of his first play, Cavalleria rusticana (1884). Despite the remarkable similarities, however, the ideas underlying the Symbolist literary movement remain different from Verga’s desire to reflect reality, thus it is suggested in conclusion that what actually inspired his ‘intimist’ approach was Eleonora Duse, the grande attrice instrumental in transposing this silent voice onto the stage.

Une leçon clinique à la Salpetriere, 1887: trois conceptions de la mise en scene theatrale

Our premise is that the method of teaching at the bedside at the Salpetriere hospital – about hysteric disease – at the end of the nineteenth century and all the various conceptions of staging and direction in theatre at the same period partake of the same cultural juncture, characterized by a circulation ‒ transfers through contact, shifts and superpositions ‒ of different experiences in the act of looking. This paper examines three of such experiences, which were particularly common in theatres in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century: the clinical experience of looking, developed by Andre Antoine at the Theâtre-Libre; the haptic experience found in spectacular shows, with the Grand Guignol as one of its prime examples, and the hypnotic experience in the staging of symbolist theatre.

Некоторые вопросы преемственности символистского и авангардного театра. На материале постановки оперы «Победа над Солнцем»

Kazimir Malevich’s work on the scenery for the opera Victory over the Sun became a unique kind of art laboratory in which Suprematism originated. This work is crucial to his future creativity: on the one hand, it is during the process of painting the scenery of Victory that the painter is gradually moving toward creation of the first Suprematist forms; on the other hand, his work on the decoration is the key to his understanding of the problem of synthesis of the arts. Analyzing his work on the opera in the light of the “Silver Age” theatrical concepts, the line of continuity between the Symbolist and Avant-garde theatres becomes clear. In a sense we can say that the Symbolist theatre became a preliminary stage of the Russian Avant-garde theatre. In this article, the restoration of the Symbolist theatrical concepts discussing the question of synthesis of the arts will help us to elaborate on Malevich’s views and will also contribute to the restoration of the cultural milieu of the Russian theatre at the t...

Reconsideració d'un dramaturg català: el teatre ideològic d'Henrik Ibsen a Llibertat! de Santiago Rusiñol

In this article I suggest that Santiago Rusiñol's Llibertat! explores a theatre of ideas and current affairs which resonates with Henrik Ibsen's. Through it, the conflicts and the message of Rusiñol's play denounce the mediocrity and bourgeois intolerance of his society. It is not correct to frame Rusiñol's theatrical aesthetics solely within symbolist theatre, as many critics do; instead, it must be seen as an appropriation of Ibsen's ideology in order to rethink how Rusiñol's play has been categorized by the critics in the last few decades. The stress on ironical distancing, the individualization of the characters and the specificity of the kind of society portrayed are the characteristics that reveal the influence of the aesthetics of Ibsen's theatre of ideas. Rusiñol uses irony and parody in order to show the status of Ibsen's man: from man to the universe and society, like a divided soul. Rusiñol's is a social drama that fulfils the expectations people had of him that he would renew Catalan theatre.

Le Symbolisme (review)

Reviewed by: Le Symbolisme Marshall C. Olds Illouz, Jean-Nicolas. Le Symbolisme. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, Références, 2004. ISBN2-253-10799-9 As emphases in literary studies have shifted away from structuralist, semiotic, and other modes of reading informed by theory toward historically-oriented esthetic and cultural analysis, we have needed a new examination of Symbolism that would account for its complexities both as a literary and artistic movement and as a "compound moment" in literary and cultural history. Jean-Nicolas Illouz has provided the foundation for such a reexamination. His study is, to my knowledge, the most complete and nuanced overview of the movement that we have, bringing together in a historically informed and carefully researched reading of Symbolism as both the point de rencontre for a multitude of literary, artistic and cultural currents of the French and Belgian fin-de-siècle and also as a decisive moment in the founding of literary Modernism. Literary histories have usually made the distinction between the Symbolist movement of 1885-1900, and the poetry of the four great precursors of that movement – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud – who have been so associated with it that they have acquired (or we have endowed them with) the titres de noblesse of a literary movement. It is perhaps a unique case in literary history (there may be other examples of which I'm unaware) where not only are the forerunners of a movement seen as more significant than the movement they announce but where they have come to stand for the movement, forerunners of themselves, as it were. The reason for this reversal was that – and this was remarked upon as the movement drew to a close after 1895 – the activity of the young poets baptized as Symbolists by Jean Moréas in 1886 simply had produced no works that could rival "Correspondances," "L'Après-midi d'un faune," or "Le Bâteau ivre." Neglect has been the result. Aside from scholars of the Belgian side of the movement, such as Patrick Laude, who refuse to let us to lose sight of Maeterlinck and Verhearen, or students of the obverse of canonical histories, such as Michel Pierssens (NCFS 32.3-4: 345-55), in recent decades scant attention has been paid to the generation of writers (principally, though not exclusively, poets) following Verlaine and Mallarmé, with the prominent exceptions of Valéry and, though not recently, Claudel. Jean-Nicolas Illouz convinces us of the inaccuracy of the received view. In a series of chapters that are as attentive to the nuances of literary meaning as to those of the contemporary scene, Jean-Nicolas Illouz offers a virtually complete genealogy of the Symbolist movement of 1885-1900: its debts to its precursors, its commingled destiny with that of the Decadent movement – which Illouz argues as being but another branch of a common literary and cultural modernism expressed institutionally by Verlaine's left bank café gatherings and Mallarmé's right bank Tuesday evenings – , and through affiliation with the Decadents, Symbolism's second parentage [End Page 168] of literary Naturalism and Realism. Not content to present a literary history only, Illouz argues that the importance of the Symbolist movement lies in large measure in the cross-fertilization among the arts. He stresses the close associations between writers and painters (Gauguin, Redon, Moreau, Beardsley), between writers, or their writings, and musicians (Debussy, Strauss). Venturing beyond a strictly formalist understanding of Symbolism in order to show a pervasive mentalité, Illouz points also to the dream motifs of architecture (Art Nouveau) and, through the understanding of Wagner afforded by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, to the presence of a Symbolist theater and opera. Illouz is especially informative in his discussion of esthetic elements that unite cultural production during the fin-de-siècle: not only motifs of dream and decay, symbol as allegory, but the singularly tenacious reappearance of what he labels the two principal myths: Salomé and Narcissus. Interesting pages are devoted to the writers who helped shape the different facets of this post-Mallarméan esthetic: Ghil, Saint-Pol-Roux, Laforgue. Infinitely helpful are the descriptive analyses of the myriad journals that flourished during the...

Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist Spectacle

The 1890s in Paris were a period of intense terrorism. There were more than a dozen bombings in city between 1892 and 1894, attributed to a score of perpetrators, either identified as or assumed to be anarchists. The period of violent activity, known as propaganda by deed, both stoked hysteria about every shady malingerer on city streets and sparked popular support for--even idealizations of--the dynamiters in revolt against a corrupt political and social order. Ravachol (Francois Koenigstein), for instance, first bomb-thrower to meet fate of guillotine, was immortalized in as a martyr, in song and dance as a popular hero: Dansons la Ravachole! Among literary and artistic avant-garde, there was enthusiastic support for anarchism's critique of pere, patron et patrie, not only in spite of anarchism's tactics of terror but because of them. Symbolists and decadents were equated with in period press, not merely because of an analogous rebelliousness, but because symbolist and decadent litterateurs were making destruction of old mold both an artistic and a political principle (Montorgueil 1). In such a climate, Symbolist theater house Theatre de l'OEuvre put on productions of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of People in 1893 and Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi in 1896. Staged during and after apogee of anarchist terror, press characterized both productions as attentats ([bomb] attacks), their authors as anarchists of art who were exercising a veritable terror over public (Fouquier 87). Ibsen's An Enemy of People opened initial season in 1893, and Theatre de l'OEuvre presented it as a sort of anarchist manifesto: poet Laurent Tailhade introduced with a thirty-minute discussion declaring virtues of revolt, which as a result brought theater under police surveillance. As Richard Sonn notes with regard to Jarry's Ubu: the play resembled an anarchist attentat in its violent assault upon sensibilities of audience, upsetting their expectations of theatrical decorum and dramatically involving them in performance (Sonn 77). Some have argued that such characterizations are due more to political climate than to content of works (e.g., Weir 207-210), but I would suggest otherwise. Both Jarry and Ibsen attest to markedly anarchist sympathies, and their plays--while stylistically wildly different--make scathing critiques of corrupt authority and illegitimacy of state power. In addition, part of what Ibsen's play dramatizes is marginalization of intellectual and inefficacy of speech; hero, who wants his words to have power of dynamite, is utterly ignored and ultimately silenced. Jarry's Ubu has given up on speech altogether, bearing a destructive relationship to language, and relies on a theater of action and of violent gesture in a mode of confrontation with public. The trajectory between two plays and their productions at Theatre de l'OEuvre reveals a shift in Symbolist theater from an emphasis on word to a focus on gesture, which I will argue is tied to Symbolist fascination for anarchist theories of action. The attentat became Symbolist spectacle par excellence, an act whose polysemic eclat made it model for a kind of theatrical terror. I IBSEN AND SYMBOLIST THEATER The 1890s saw foundation of earliest examples of avant-garde theater houses in Paris: naturalist Theatre Libre (1887), followed by symbolist Theatre d'Art (1890-1892), which gave way to Theatre de l'OEuvre (1893), most prominent site of symbolist theatrical productions. (1) Symbolist theories of theatrical representation sought to eliminate many aspects of traditional staging in order to let language evoke decor and scene rather than materially executing them, achieving a scenic representation of Idea through voice, stylized gesture, and radically nonnaturalistic set design. …

Face to Face with Denis Marleau/ Face à Face avec Denis Marleau, Ottawa, 29 November, 2000

In the Spring of 2001, Denis Marleau, artistic director and founder of the Théâtre Ubu (Montreal), became artistic director of French theatre at the National Arts Centre, after performing his plays on all the most important European stages. This interview, the first one he gave upon assuming his new position in Ottawa, tries to establish the general orientation of Marleau's future artistic choices in relation to his own creative work and the programmes he will present at the National Arts Centre (NAC). The interview moves towards Marleau's own research on Modernity through theatre practice, especially as it appears in Maeterlinck's symbolist theatre. He also discusses his staging of Catoblépas, a performance based on a text by Gaëtan Soucy that was presented at the "Theatre Festival of the Americas" in Montreal, May 2001.

Ionesco and Symbolist Theatre: Revolution and Restitution in the Avant-Garde

Analyse croisee des theories dramatiques de Maeterlinck et Ionesco telles qu'elles apparaissent dans les prises de position theoriques et lors de realisations sceniques, dans laquelle l'A. etudie egalement les rapports entretenus par Ionesco avec les courants Symboliste et Post-symboliste, puis avec les avants-gardes contemporaines a l'ecriture de son oeuvre