IB Theatre - Solo Theatre Piece (last assessment 2023): Theorists

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was one of the 20th century's most important theoreticians of the drama. He developed the theory of the Theater of Cruelty, which has influenced playwrights from Beckett to Genet, from Albee to Gelber.

The German choreographer Pina Bausch (1940 - 2009) is credited with reviving modern dance in postwar Germany. Her works are noted for their episodic structure, repetition, haunting quality of dances, and absence of sustainable plot. Bausch used all theatrical and dramaturgic means to enforce an idea, and opened the way for a new movement quality on stage, greatly influencing theatre in Europe .

Steven Berkoff (b. 1937, East London, UK) is an actor and theatre director as well as a playwright. His reputation was founded on his adaptations from Kafka - The Trial, Metamorphosis, and In the Penal Colony - after which his first original stage play, East, won critical acclaim in 1975 for its originality and eclectic concoction of Elizabethan verse and punk poetry with Cockney slang. Berkoff is best known for his acting on stage and in films, alongside a parallel career as a director and author.

Cicely Berry (1926-2018) was the Voice Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company for nearly five decades.  Berry used unorthodox methods to help performers feel the beats of Shakespeare's rhythms such as tossing chairs and kicking beer cans while reciting To Be or Not to Be, or bouncing up and down on the floor while reading Macbeth.

Augusto Boal (1931-2009), Brazilian theatre director and author, created a unique set of democratically oriented innovations in the basic form of stage drama.  He called these innovations the Theatre of the Oppressed.

The German author Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) is probably the greatest German playwright of the first half of the 20th century. His works were often considered controversial because of his revolutionary dramatic theory and his political beliefs.

Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was an important actor, designer, director, and theoretician of the early 20th century European stage.

Italian playwright Dario Fo (1926-2016) was known for his satirical and often controversial works. He was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Jacques Lecoq (1921-1999) was an actor, director and extremely influential theatre teacher. He started a theatre school in Paris in 1956 that continues to operate today as L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq is famous for creating an approach that uses movement analysis, improvisation and collective creation to teach theatre.

Robert Lepage (born 1957) is a Canadian director, playwright, actor and film director. He founded the multidisciplinary production company, Ex Machina, in 1994.

Kristin Linklater (1936-2020) was a Scottish vocal coach, acting teacher, actor, theatre director, and author. After retiring from Columbia University as professor emerita she returned to Scotland where she founded a retreat-style, residential, voice centre in the Orkney Islands.

Patsy Rodenburg (1953- ) is a British voice coach, author, and theatre director. She is the Head of Voice at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and has also worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre.

Tadashi Suzuki (1939- ) is a Japanese experimental director, writer, and acting coach. He is the founder and director of the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) based in Toga Village, located in the mountains of Toyama prefecture in Japan. In 1992, with Anne Bogart, he co-founded the Saratoga International Theatre Institute in Saratoga Springs, New York. He is the organizer of Japan’s first international theatre festival (Toga Festival) and the creator of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training.

American theatre director and designer Robert Wilson (born 1941) has collaborated with contemporary composers in the creation of musical theater pieces Wilson's interest, like that of Gertrude Stein, is in the use of components of syntax and sound to create a new form of language.