Humanism, Drama, and Performance by Hana Worthen

Author:Hana Worthen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030440664
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Public Ecstasy

As a contrapuntal response to the popular violence of the French Revolution, Schiller’s theatre humanism compensates for the over-arousal of the Terror by enlisting an experience of “ecstasy,” a regulating force for an alienated humanity and the spectators’ transcendent convergence. A somatic practice, Schiller’s theatre of Vergeistigung provides the instrument for sociopolitical reform by investing in an aesthetic activation of the body by way of the “living form” to rechannel the modern post-revolutionary estrangement of humanity from itself, from the social order, and so from its full potentiality, an estrangement sustained by economics (property), politics (despotism and tyranny), and the law (legal violence and punishment).43 Conceptualized to remedy these external alienating institutions, aesthetic experience brings the individual as a social being into balance and as a political being into true and thus just action through the immersive subjection to the living theatre. Schiller’s sensory aesthetic education (Greek aesthesis: sensation and perception) positions the spectator less to critique the “realness of reality,” as Lessing avers, than to engage a feeling of standing out from external circumstances, a feeling of returning to, and becoming one with, the “beautiful soul,” a feeling of “world-historical personality, living and acting lovingly in the simultaneity of eternity,” as William F. Wertz put it.44 As each person “carries in disposition and determination a pure ideal man within himself, with whose unalterable unity it is the great task of his existence, throughout all his vicissitudes, to harmonize,” the purpose of aesthetic education—and of theatrical catharsis—is to groom that inner ideal into a common socialized expression.45

Schiller, like Lessing, used print to co-create a socially responsive spectatorship; yet in distinction to Lessing’s appeal to the readers-spectators’ cognitive positioning, Schiller addressed the singers-spectators’ sensory experience. An early example actualizing the theatre’s commitment to the somatic regime—the public’s aesthetic mediation—that Schiller would explore over the next decade is the second, “improved” 1782 edition of Die Räuber (The Robbers). Augmented with “several songs … arranged for the pianoforte, which will enhance its value to the musical part of the public,” the printed play advances a performative practice from reading to singing, to a physical embodied doing and its experience through and beyond the text. At the same time, it embraces the potential of the ecstatic experience of singing as a catalyst motivating the contextual message of the drama outside its narrative temporality.46

While Augustine feared that the sensory appeal of theatre might render the audience’s conception of tragic suffering gratuitous, Schiller’s 1784–1802 “Die Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet” (“The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution”) situates the theatre’s sensual appeal as summoning an innately human, idealizing impulse that galvanizes an immediate and shared immersion “in a universal sympathy” that transcends the individual spectator’s modern alienation.The happy man is calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled, savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, men of all ranks, zones, and conditions, emancipated from the chains of conventionality and fashion, fraternize here in a universal sympathy, forget the world, and come nearer to their heavenly destination.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.