Piscator stage
Piscator stage was the name given to various avant-garde theaters operated by the artistic director and director Erwin Piscator between 1927 and 1931 in Berlin .
On September 3, 1927, Erwin Piscator opened the Piscator stage in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz with the production of Ernst Toller's time piece Oops, we live! The wealthy third husband of the actress Tilla Durieux , the Berlin industrialist Ludwig Katzenellenbogen , made it possible for him to take over the management of the theater on Nollendorfplatz. As a result of the takeover of the Lessing Theater as a second venue, the Piscator stage collapsed financially in 1928.
On September 6, 1929, Piscator opened a second Piscator stage in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz. The premiere of Walter Mehring's inflation drama Der Kaufmann von Berlin marks the beginning and the end of this second endeavor. From 1930 the director ran a third Piscator stage in the Wallner Theater and the Lessing Theater, which closed in 1931 after Piscator accepted a film contract from the Russian film company Meschrabpom due to financial difficulties .
Avant-garde theater and Piscator collective
The Piscator stage became the epitome of avant-garde theater of the twenties. Piscator put all means of technology into the service of the stage: he used moving belts, multi-storey and globe stages ( simultaneous stages ), turntables and motorized bridges. Image projections and, from 1925, numerous documentaries were used to update the events.
Between 1927 and 1931, the Piscator collective and the Piscator theaters temporarily owned Sybille Binder , Viktor Blum , Ernst Busch , Ernst Deutsch , Tilla Durieux , Gustav Fröhlich , Paul Graetz , George Grosz , John Heartfield , Erwin Kalser , Fritz Kortner , Moshe Lifshits , Edmund Meisel , Erich Mühsam , Max Pallenberg , Leonard Steckel , Hermann Vallentin and Helene Weigel . For a time, Bertolt Brecht , Leo Lania , Walter Mehring and Ernst Toller worked as dramaturges on the Piscator stage.
Productions
- 1927 : Ernst Toller : Oops, we're alive! (Piscator stage Berlin, September 3, 1927)
- 1928 : Max Brod / Hans Reimann , The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk (Piscator stage, 23 January 1928)
- 1929 : Walter Mehring , The Merchant of Berlin (Second Piscator Stage, September 6, 1929)
literature
- Friedrich Wolfgang Knellessen: Agitation on the stage. The political theater of the Weimar Republic . Emsdetten 1970.
- Erwin Piscator: A working biography in 2 volumes. Edited by Knut Boeser, Renata Vatková. Volume 1, Berlin 1916-1931 . Berlin: Edition Hentrich 1986 (Sites of the History of Berlin, 11).
- Erwin Piscator: The letters. Volume 1: Berlin - Moscow (1909-1936) . Edited by Peter Diezel. Berlin: Bostelmann and Siebenhaar 2005 (Erwin Piscator, Berlin edition).
- Erwin Piscator: The Political Theater . Berlin: Adalbert Schultz 1929 (translations into 16 languages).
- Erwin Piscator: The political theater. A comment by Peter Jung . Berlin: Nora 2007.
- John Willett : Erwin Piscator: The Opening of the Political Age on the Theater . Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1982 (es 924).
Coordinates: 52 ° 29 '56 " N , 13 ° 21' 9.6" E