Elsa Schiaparelli

Elsa Schiaparelli (September 10, 1890 – November 13, 1973) was a Italian fashion designer of the 1920s and 1930s. She was born in Rome, Italy, of Italian and Egyptian heritage. She was a great-niece of Giovanni Schiaparelli, who discovered the canals of Mars.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917, Kiev – October 13, 1961, New York City), born Eleanora Derenkowsky, was an Americanavant-garde filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer.

Antonin Artaud

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (born September 4, 1896, in Marseille; died March 4, 1948 in Paris) was a French playwright, poet, actor and director. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine (little Anthony), and was among a long list of names which Artaud went by throughout his life.

Bertolt Brecht

February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956) He was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director. A seminal theatre practitioner of the twentieth century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the Berliner Ensemble—the post-war theatre company operated by Brecht and his wife and long-time collaborator, the actress Helene Weigel—with its internationally acclaimed productions.

From his late twenties Brecht remained a life-long committed Marxist who, in developing the combined theory and practice of his 'epic theatre', synthesized and extended the experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold to explore the theatre as a forum for political ideas and the creation of a critical aesthetics of dialectical materialism. Brecht'smodernist concern with drama-as-a-medium led to his refinement of the 'epic form' of the drama (which constitutes that medium's rendering of 'autonomization' or the 'non-organic work of art'—related in kind to the strategy of divergent chapters in Joyce's novel Ulysses, to Eisenstein's evolution of a constructivist 'montage' in the cinema, and toPicasso's introduction of cubist 'collage' in the visual arts). In contrast to many other avant-garde approaches, however, Brecht had no desire to destroy art as an institution; rather, he hoped to 're-function' the apparatus of theatrical production to a new social use. In this regard he was a vital participant in the aesthetic debates of his era—particularly over the 'high art/popular culture' dichotomy—vying with the likes of Adorno, Lukács, Bloch, and developing a close friendship with Benjamin. Brechtian theatre articulated popular themes and forms with avant-garde formal experimentation to create a modernist realism that stood in sharp contrast both to its psychological andsocialist varieties. "Brecht's work is the most important and original in European drama since Ibsen and Strindberg,"Raymond Williams argues, while Peter Bürger insists that he is "the most important materialist writer of our time." 

As Jameson among others has stressed, "Brecht is also ‘Brecht’"—collective and collaborative working methods were inherent to his approach. This 'Brecht' was a collective subject that "certainly seemed to have a distinctive style (the one we now call 'Brechtian') but was no longer personal in the bourgeois or individualistic sense." During the course of his career, Brecht sustained many long-lasting creative relationships with other writers, composers, scenographers, directors, dramaturgs and actors; the list includes: Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margarete Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Slatan Dudow, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Paul Dessau, Caspar Neher, Teo Otto, Karl von Appen, Ernst Busch,Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Therese Giehse, Angelika Hurwicz, and Helene Weigel herself. This is "theatre as collective experiment [...] as something radically different from theatre as expression or as experience."

There are few areas of modern theatrical culture that have not felt the impact or influence of Brecht's ideas and practices; dramatists and directors in whom one may trace a clear Brechtian legacy include: Dario Fo, Augusto Boal,Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook, Peter Weiss, Heiner Müller, Pina Bausch, Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill. In addition to the theatre, Brechtian theories and techniques have exerted considerable sway over certain strands of film theory and cinematic practice; Brecht's influence may be detected in the films of Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Lindsay Anderson, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nagisa Oshima, Ritwik Ghatak, Lars von Trier, Jan Bucquoy  and Hal Hartley.

Kurt Weill

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950), was a German, and in his later years German-American, composer active from the 1920s until his death. He was a leading composer for the stage, as well as writing a number of concert works.

Andre Breton

André Breton (in French pronounced [ɑ̃dʀe bʀəˈtɔ̃]) (February 19, 1896 – September 28, 1966) was a French writer, poet, and surrealisttheorist, and is best known as the main founder of surrealism. His writings include the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as pure psychic automatism.

Luis Bunuel

Luis Buñuel Portolés (February 22, 1900 – July 29, 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked mainly in Mexico andFrance, but also in his native country and the United States. He is considered one of the most important directors in the history of cinema.

Herbert Meyer

Herbert E. Meyer is a leading authority on the strategic use of intelligence. He is founder and President of Real-World Intelligence Inc., the world's leading designer of Intelligence Systems for business worldwide. During the Reagan Administration Mr. Meyer served as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for the President and his national security advisers. Mr. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse. He later was awarded the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, which is the Intelligence Community's highest honor.

As an acknowledged authority on the process and techniques of writing, Mr. Meyer's career includes his being a journalist, an author, and a business entrepreneur.

Oskar Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer (September 4, 1888 – April 13, 1943) was a German painter, sculptor and designer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is "Triadisches Ballett," in which the actors are transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. Also in Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, the performers' costumes make them into living sculpture, as if part of the scenery.

Schlemmer's private letters to, in particular, Otto Meyer and Willi Baumeister, and his personal diary have given valuable insight on what happened at the Bauhaus. Especially, he talks of how the staff and students respond to the many changes to and developments at the school. In 1920 Schlemmer went to work as a teacher at the Bauhaus where he remained for nine years. His complex ideas were influential, making him one of the most important teachers working at the school at that time. However, with the rise of the Nazis at the end of the Twenties, Schlemmer's work was seen as degenerate and he was dismissed from his post. After using Cubism as a springboard for his structural studies,

Schlemmer's work became intrigued with the possibilities of figures and their relationship to the space around them, for example 'Egocentric Space Lines' (1924). Schlemmer's characteristic forms can be seen in his sculptures as well as his paintings. Yet he also turned his attention to stage design, first getting involved with this in 1929, executing settings for the opera 'Nightingale' and the ballet 'Renard' by Igor Stravinsky.

Schlemmer's ideas on art were complex and challenging even for the progressive Bauhaus movement. His work, nevertheless, was widely exhibited in both Germany and outside the country. His work was a rejection of pure abstraction, instead retaining a sense of the human, though not in the emotional sense but in view of the physical structure of the human. He represented bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces, and he was fascinated in every movement the body could make, trying to capture it in his work. As well as leaving a large body of work, Schlemmer has also had his theories on art published and a comprehensive book of his letters and diary entries from 1910 to 1943 is also available