THE EMBLEMATIC ACTOR

The acting of Expressionist performers such as those in Schreyer's Kampfbühne ensemble resembled the evocative art of the French Symbolists. It created images which signaled such a multiplicity of possible meanings that audience reading of the performances was unavoidably idiosyncratic. For the purposes of this final chapter, therefore, I should like to draw a theoretical distinction between this kind of Expressionist performance and yet a third type which I shall call “emblematic stage Expressionism.” The typically denotative imagery mobilized in this mode drastically curtailed ambiguity by reinforcing a single dominant idea. Denotative signification is most clearly operative in allegorical representation. The actors in the medieval morality play Everyman, for instance, do not play characters but rather abstract moral ideas. Assuming a production which stresses the play's allegorical quality, the actors must create images which denote those ideas. The images thus created become emblems of these ideas; and the aggregate of such images becomes a macroemblem of the whole production – the composite emblem, that is, of the production's dominant idea. In Everyman, the embodiment of the title character himself could most readily function as the macroemblem, into which all the other emblematic significations – such as those denoting the Seven Deadly Sins, Death, and so forth – are subsumed.

The abstractionism of the late Expressionist theatre in Berlin utilized this allegorical method of reinforcing a predominant idea through the emphatic coordination of all production elements.