An Ideal Theater

An inspiring collection of the dreams and visions of the founders of the American theatre movement.

"In 1959 the Ford Foundation Program for Theater Design funded eight projects that toured American art museums and universities from January 1961 through December 1962. The American Federation of Arts prepared the theater concepts for touring. The eight projects included: 1) Ralph Alswang and Paul Rudolph, "Theater for Simultaneous Film-Projection and Live Stage Action"; 2) Eldon Elder and Edward Durell Stone, "Two Thousand Seat Open-Air Theater" ; 3) Barrie Greenbie and Elizabeth Harris, "Theater for Modern Dance" ; 4) David Hays and Peter Blake, "Flexible Open-Stage Theater" ; 5) Goerge C. Izenour and Paul Schwikher, "Drama School Complex"; 6) Frederick J. Kiesler, "The Universal: An Urban Theater Center" ; 7) Jo Mielziner and Edward L. Barnes, "Theater for Intimate Music-Drama" ; and 8) Ben Schlanger and Donald Oenslager, "Form-and-Space Studies for Proscenium and Non-Prescenium Theaters." --

The relationship between philosophy and theatre is a central theme in the writings of Plato and Aristotle and of dramatists from Aristophanes to Stoppard. Where Plato argued that playwrights and actors should be banished from the ideal city for their suspect imitations of reality, Aristotle argued that theatre, particularly tragedy, was vital for stimulating our emotions and helping us to understanding ourselves. Despite this rich history the study of philosophy and theatre has been largely overlooked in contemporary philosophy. This is the first book to introduce philosophy and theatre. It covers key topics and debates, presenting the contributions of major figures in the history of philosophy, including: what is theatre? How does theatre compare with other arts? theatre as imitation, including Plato on mimesis truth and illusion in the theatre, including Nietzsche on tragedy theatre as history theatre and morality, including Rousseau’s criticisms of theatre audience and emotion, including Aristotle on catharsis theatre and politics, including Brecht’s Epic Theatre. Including annotated further reading and summaries at the end of each chapter, Philosophy and Theatre is an ideal starting point for those studying philosophy, theatre studies and related subjects in the arts and humanities.

This book offers provocative readings of canonical Enlightenment dramas that reflect and shape the period’s changing understanding of error. With striking interdisciplinary connections to theater treatises as well as works from the philosophical, legal, and medical discourses, it tracks the relocation of error from the moral to the physical realm, a movement that begins with Lessing and continues through the turn of the nineteenth century. Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot’s Le Fils naturel, Schiller’s Die Räuber, and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.

During the twentieth century, an increasingly diverse range of buildings and spaces was used for theatre. Theatre architecture was re-formed by new approaches to staging and performance, while theatre was often thought to have a reforming role in society. Innovation was accompanied by the revival and reinterpretation of older ideas. The contributors to this volume explore these ideas in a variety of contexts, from detailed discussions of key architects’ work (including Denys Lasdun, Peter Moro, Cedric Price and Heinrich Tessenow) to broader surveys of theatre in West Germany and Japan. Other contributions examine the Malmö Stadsteater, ’ideal’ theatres in post-war North America, ’found space’ in 1960s New York, and Postmodernity in 1980s East Germany. Together these essays shed new light on this complex building type and also contribute to the wider architectural history of the twentieth century.

Yiddish melodramas about the tribulations of immigration. German plays about alpine tourism. Italian vaudeville performances. Rubbernecking tours of Chinatown. In the New York City of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these seemingly disparate leisure activities played similar roles: mediating the vast cultural, demographic, and social changes that were sweeping the nation's largest city. In The Immigrant Scene, Sabine Haenni reveals how theaters in New York created ethnic entertainment that shaped the culture of the United States in the early twentieth century. Considering the relationship between leisure and mass culture, The Immigrant Scene develops a new picture of the metropolis in which the movement of people, objects, and images on-screen and in the street helped residents negotiate the complexities of modern times. In analyzing how communities engaged with immigrant theaters and the nascent film culture in New York City, Haenni traces the ways in which performance and cinema provided virtual mobility--ways of navigating the socially complex metropolis--and influenced national ideas of immigration, culture, and diversity in surprising and lasting ways.

"Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is an original, the most controversial of all the New German directors and a figure who has long been at the vanguard of the resurgence of experimental filmmaking in his homeland. Syberberg’s most characteristic films examine recent German history: a documentary, for example, about Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who was a close friend of Hitler (The Confessions of Winifred Wagner [1975]). But especially “historical” is his trilogy covering one hundred years of Germany’s past, including, most famously, Hitler—A Film from Germany, also known as Our Hitler (1977). In this film and other works, Syberberg unites fictional narrative and documentary footage in a style that is at once cinematic and theatrical, mystical and magical. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the Film Director as Critical Thinker: Essays and Interviews is the first edited book in English devoted to this director’s work, and includes his most important English-language interviews as well as some of the best English-language essays on his work. In sum, this book is a significant contribution not only to the study of Syberberg’s oeuvre, but also to the study of German history and politics in the second half of the twentieth century."