Awakening

by August Stramm

The poet August Stramm wrote six plays. Why August Stramm today? A year ago, by chance, I came across Awakening in a book on the German Expressionists. My first impression was that it resembled one of Harold Pinter’s scripts. The exchange of lines in the dialogue is very swift and the presence of the words just the tip of an iceberg without the weight of a story.

Theater is not literature. We also find this movement in the artists of the Bauhaus, of Dadaism, etc. Right up to the present day.

László Moholy-Nagy (on August Stramm): “August Stramm’s theater does not tell stories, but presents sudden clashes of energy, explosions of impulses and passions. The movement and sound are the result of the collision of the energies of the characters, of their passions.”

At a time in which the old world is collapsing, I would like to find something inward-looking. That moment of twilight may be like our time…

I recall the garden of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto. Between the stones, white gravel. Silence, emptiness…

from the presentation by Kuniaki Ida