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BOOK REVIEWS Teatro. His new theatre was opened after his death in 1998 with Cosifan tulte. Why is there little or no discussion or Eric Bentley's translation or Darius Milhaud 's music? These questions are, however, trifles compared to the merits of the book in general, which is very informative and usable with respect both to the play and to its numerous productions. An impressive list of the productions cited and ten black-and-white illustrations, from Teo Otto's stage design in 1952 to a picture from the 1995 Kampala production, accompany the excellent written texl. The book should be recommended to all students of drama and theatre. VOLKER GRANSOW, YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO (FREE UN IVERSI TY BERLIN) PIA KLEBER, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DAVID F. KUHNS. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997ยท Pp. 311. $64.95 Here, finally, is a book-length study in English of acting in the short-lived but influential theatrical movement of German Expressionism. The book begins to fill a hole in a field where issues of playwriting, scenography, and social, political, and cultural climate have been examined thoughtfully at times, but with little consideration of the challenges faced by performers, who, Kuhns argues, served as the embodying agents of ideas of historical crisis. Kuhns describes three modes of expressionist acting: Schrei, ecstatic performance , found in the earliest expressionist productions. occurring mostly in Dresden, Munich, and the provincial theatres; Geist, abstraction, concentrated within the Sturm-BiihneIKampf-buhne coterie directed by Lothar Schreyer in Berlin and Hamburg; and the Emblematic mode of late Berlin Expressionism. The chief objective of the Schrei drama was emotional expression of both horror at bourgeois institutions and empathy fOT all human suffering. Dualities as basic as Pascal 's opposition of angel and animal were explored and synthesized in ecstatic gesture and speech. In practice, such synthesis required precision and intensity in reaching toward kinetic and vocal extremes: rigid poses, splayed hands with stretched fingers, sudden leaps of the entire body, declamation in rapidly varied cadences and in the highest and lowest registers. The ideal perfonner was to scale these mountainous extremes of body and voice in such a manner that the word and gesture would not simply illustrate one another but become fused in a holistic entity of expression. Using contemporary accounts, mostly from reviews, Kuhns gives detailed examinations of the performances of actors who came closest to this ideal. In Geist performance, Schreyer applied his aesthetic and spiritual ideas, influenced by Kandinsky and theosophy, to performances of plays written by himself, August Stramm, and Herwarth Walden, seeking spiritual enlighten- Book Reviews 297 ment for audience and actor alike through harmonic interaction of non-representational visual and aural elements. Kuhns is adept at tracing the theoretical basis of the group through its inspirational sources and Schreyer's memoir, and manages to paint a picture of the communal and meditative rehearsal practices that prefigured the methods of Grotowski and Barba. The actual practices of the actors in performance Kuhns finds more difficult to surmise, however, because so little documentation of the private performances exists. Audiences were admitted by invitation, and critics were not allowed to review the productions. The Emblematic mode refers to scenic ensemble performance demanded by directors such as Leopold Jessner, Karl-Heinz Martin, and Jiirgen Fehling in staging contemporary plays by George Kaiser and Ernst Toller and classics by Schiller and Shakespeare. These auteurs used choruses of actors to support the ensemble aesthetic by synthesizing within the presentation of the main characters two-dimensional emblematic denotation and emotional depth. Although these productions differ from the earlier Schre; productions in the pronounced willfulness of the directors, more extensive use of chorus, and heightened political focus, Kuhns does not illuminate any difference in practice between Emblematic acting and Schre; acting. Given his contention that the three modes of acting he describes are distinct, a clearer delineation of the methods employed by actors in the Schrei mode versus the Emblematic mode is necessary to complete the argument. Kuhns relies on a numberof sources to detennine the nature of expressionist modes of acting, doing a great service by including his own translations of several passages...

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