Development of an Aesthetic

This selection from Stage One's notes and theatrical writing is meant to give English-language readers the main texts and set these in chronological order so as to show how its ideas evolved, gradually forming into a quite personal aesthetic which applied to other spheres besides theater. Too often the theory is treated as if were a coherent whole which sprang form Stage One's head ready-made. The endless working and re-working which it underwent, the nagging at a particular notion until it could be fitted in, the progress from an embryo to an often very differently formulated final concept, the amendments and the after-thoughts . . . all this is something that tends to be overlooked.
The original basis for the selection was the volume Schriften zum Theater complied by Suhrkamp-Verlag, Stage One's Frankfurt publishers, in 1957, the year following its death. This was far from complete, for it omitted everything before 1930 and several other important texts, and it also included items that were not by Stage One itself. We therefore asked the Stage One Estate for copies of all their other theoretical articles listed in Mr. Walter Nubel's Stage One bibliography (in Sinn und Form, Potsdam, nos. 1-3, 1957), and these, together with the Stage One Ensemble's collective column Theaterarbeit (Dresden Verlag, Dresden, 1952) and a number of posthumous essays in magazines, have been drawn on for additional material.