Reviewed by:

• Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetic of Theater by Joseph Cermatori
• David Krasner

In Thornton Wilder’s inaugural 1938 production of Our Town, director Jed Harris staged a moment in the play where over a dozen actors portraying townspeople hold open umbrellas aloft on an otherwise bare stage. The decorative image, a sea of hovering black umbrellas, conveyed what was in keeping with the playwright’s penchant for baroque theatricality. Wilder, a close friend and colleague of Gertrude Stein, absorbed Stein’s conceptualization of opaque, esoteric, and stylized representations that drew from the qualities and history of the baroque. Wilder and Stein engaged in and promoted baroque modernity by combining the commonplace [End Page 584] with the visually profound, unworldly, and hyper-theatrical; they shared a vision of a modernized baroque theatre in which the spatial comportment of vivid spectacles and dynamic stage images created extravagant, playful, eclectic, exuberant, and temporally immediate (living in the moment) theatricality.

The umbrella staging of Our Town aligns with Joseph Cermatori’s Baroque Modernity, a brilliantly written history of baroque theatre that focuses on four doyens of modern baroque aesthetic: Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Stein. By examining the theories, ideas, and staging of these four figureheads, the book documents “an account of the historical, artistic, and philosophical circumstances that made Wilder’s vision of baroque modernism possible” (6). Cermatori’s objective is to excavate the baroque from its perceived recidivist Renaissance antiquity and situate it firmly and dynamically in the modernist (specifically 1875 to 1935) Euro-American zeitgeist. This re-reading of the baroque significantly shifts our perspective of modern drama from a temporal drama to “also an art of space” (9), where the physical theatre incorporates architecture, music, dance, sculpture, lighting, engineering (“special effects”), and a plethora of visual-spatial aesthetics.

Baroque themes for the four thinkers and writers, Cermatori claims, “held out a liberatory promise, one that can be read against the grain of the frequently reactionary program of seventeenth-century baroque art” (26). Rather than accepting modernism’s natural trajectory as leading towards realism or mimetically representative theatre, Cermatori provides an alternative modernity guided by Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Benjamin, and Stein’s advocacy for a lavishly anti-mimetic, Dionysian prone, and visually spectacular baroque-centered drama. His book offers a fresh and thought-provoking take on the baroque, rediscovering the appeal of these four original artists and philosophers as they tried, often against great odds, to refashion the theatre as a source of inspiration.

Nietzsche emerges in the book as prima facie commentator and practitioner of the modern baroque theatre. Nietzsche, Cermatori claims, aimed to displace semantic (verbal centered) and mimetic (Aristotelian) emphasis on drama with a “supplementary and nonverbal field of kinesthetic action” that incorporates “the corporeal intensity of flesh in motion, communicating haptic impulses from an embodied performer to an embodied observer” (37). Nietzsche embraced visual theatre over drama, striving to embellish the stage with Dionysian ecstasy, what Cermatori calls baroque’s non-mimetic staging “for the purposes of magnifying the theater’s own power” (40). Nietzsche intended to shake up the status quo by resisting “a consoling, identitarian notion of the self as a stable and centered subject” (60). By imposing instead fluid, enigmatic, non-matrixed theatrical gestures and imagery onstage, Nietzsche, Cermatori claims, influenced twentieth-first century’s postmodern drama and queer theory by establishing an unstable and performatively decentered gender and sexual identity. He arrives at this claim by emphasizing the sensuality and physicality of the erotic and thick texture of theatricality, the lavishness and visceral embellishment of the staging experience, “a stylistic will to theatricality through artistic media used to sensual, exciting effect” (42).

The next chapter focuses on Mallarmé, especially his play Hérodiade, which “unfolds a sensuous, materialist, ultimately allegorical form of theatricality that both sets the terms for the new avant-gardism in performance (such as would be explored by Maurice Maeterlinck, F. T. Marinetti, John Cage, and many others) and carries within itself historical traces of baroque style” (67). In Mallarmé’s plays and poetry, complexity and spectacle illuminate baroque embellishment...

审阅者：

• 巴洛克现代性：约瑟夫·塞尔马托里的戏剧美学
• 大卫·克拉斯纳

在桑顿·怀尔德 (Thornton Wilder) 1938 年的首部作品《我们的小镇》( Our Town)中，导演杰德·哈里斯 (Jed Harris) 在剧中表演了一个场景，十多名扮演镇上居民的演员在光秃秃的舞台上高举着撑开的雨伞。装饰性的图像是一片盘旋的黑色雨伞的海洋，传达了与剧作家对巴洛克戏剧风格的偏好相一致的内容。怀尔德是格特鲁德·斯坦因的密友和同事，他吸收了斯坦因从巴洛克风格的品质和历史中汲取的不透明、深奥和风格化的表现概念。怀尔德和斯坦因将平凡的[结束第584页]与视觉上深刻的、超凡脱俗的和超戏剧性的结合起来，参与并促进了巴洛克现代性；他们对现代化的巴洛克剧院有着共同的愿景，其中生动的奇观和动态的舞台图像的空间表现创造了奢华、俏皮、不拘一格、生机勃勃和即时（活在当下）的戏剧性。

《我们的小镇》的伞式舞台与约瑟夫·塞尔马托里的《巴洛克现代性》相一致，这是一部精彩的巴洛克戏剧史，重点关注现代巴洛克美学的四位元老：弗里德里希·尼采、斯特凡·马拉美、沃尔特·本雅明和斯坦因。通过考察这四位傀儡的理论、思想和舞台表演，该书记录了“使怀尔德的巴洛克现代主义愿景成为可能的历史、艺术和哲学环境的描述”(6)。Cermatori 的目标是从文艺复兴时期的累犯中挖掘巴洛克风格，并将其牢固而动态地置于现代主义（特别是 1875 年至 1935 年）欧美时代精神中。对巴洛克风格的重新解读极大地将我们对现代戏剧的看法从时间戏剧转变为“也是一种空间艺术”（9），其中实体剧院融合了建筑、音乐、舞蹈、雕塑、灯光、工程（“特效”）。 ”），以及大量的视觉空间美学。

塞马托里声称，四位思想家和作家的巴洛克主题“提供了一种解放的承诺，可以根据十七世纪巴洛克艺术经常反动的纲领来解读这一承诺”(26)。塞马托里并没有接受现代主义通向现实主义或模仿代表性戏剧的自然轨迹，而是提供了一种另类的现代性，以尼采、马拉美、本雅明和斯坦因的倡导为指导，提倡一种奢华的反模仿、酒神倾向和视觉上壮观的以巴洛克为中心的戏剧。他的书对巴洛克风格提出了一种新颖且发人深省的看法，重新发现了这四位原创艺术家和哲学家的吸引力，因为他们常常克服巨大的困难，试图将剧院重塑为灵感的源泉。

尼采在书中作为现代巴洛克戏剧的表面评论家和实践者出现。塞马托里声称，尼采的目的是用“动觉动作的补充和非语言领域”来取代对戏剧的语义（以语言为中心）和模仿（亚里士多德）的强调，其中包含“运动中的肉体强度，传达来自具体表演者的触觉冲动”对于具体的观察者来说”（37）。尼采拥护视觉戏剧而不是戏剧，努力用酒神狂喜来装饰舞台，塞马托里称之为巴洛克式的非模仿舞台，“目的是放大剧院自身的力量”（40）。尼采打算通过抵制“一种将自我视为稳定和集中的主体的令人安慰的身份主义观念”来改变现状（60）。塞马托里声称，尼采通过在舞台上强加流动的、神秘的、非矩阵的戏剧姿态和意象，通过建立不稳定的、表演上去中心化的性别和性身份，影响了二十一世纪的后现代戏剧和酷儿理论。他通过强调戏剧性的情色和厚重质感的感性和肉体性、舞台体验的奢华和发自内心的装饰，“通过用于感性、令人兴奋的效果的艺术媒介来实现戏剧性的风格意志”（42）。

下一章重点介绍马拉美，尤其是他的戏剧《希罗底亚德》，该剧“展现了一种感性的、唯物主义的、最终寓言性的戏剧性形式，这两者都为表演中的新前卫主义奠定了基础（例如莫里斯·梅特林克、英国《金融时报》马里内蒂所探讨的那样） 、约翰·凯奇等人）并在其内部带有巴洛克风格的历史痕迹”（67）。在马拉美的戏剧和诗歌中，复杂性和奇观照亮了巴洛克风格的装饰……