"Ich fordere die Merzbühne"

Theatre in Kurt Schwitters' idea of total art.

Abstract

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) was one of the most eclectic artists in the already very eclectic panorama of the historic German avant-garde: painter, graphic artist, performer and installation artist, poet, he was also involved in theatre, inserting his most revolutionary projects into an idea of total art that makes space, materials, actors and audience elements of a composition that breaks all the moulds. From the Merzbühne, the stage project in which each element of the theatre construction is confronted with the others in an excessive but only apparently chaotic whole, to the Normal Merzbühne, a dry and functional scenography, which was supposed to allow the staging of any opera, his reflection confronts and intertwines both with the revolutionary demands of the avant-gardes and with the functionalist impulses of the Bauhaus. Through the comparison of his theoretical reflections with his dramaturgical works, then mostly not performed, but re-evaluated starting from the 70s, this article traces a picture of the theatrical thought of an experimenter that escapes any approximation.