Living Organisms

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edward Gordon Craig proclaimed that the human body should be entirely removed from the stage. He argued that the human body cannot be regarded as material to be formed, shaped and changed at will; that it can never be controlled completely. It is therefore unsuitable to serve as material for a work of art.
Craig’s conclusion seems controversial.

However, his insights into a particular mode of being of the human body seem to be perfectly right, despite the fact that some stage directors from the historical avant-garde movement made similar claims and tried to use the human body as material which can be shaped at will and completely controlled.
In the 1920s Hellmuth Plessner developed a system of anthropology that defined the human condition as being determined by an “eccentric position:” Man places his self in confrontation with another in order to form an image of his self as another which he reflects through the eyes of another, or sees reflected in the eyes of another. Or, to put it another way, man finds himself via the detour of another. He seeks to appear in a distancing and distanced relationship to himself and to observe and watch ...