ABSTRACT
The Great Unknown and the Experience of Beauty and Bearers of the Flame, border, as their titles suggest, on mysticism and the ineffable, while yet conveying through their sometimes extravagant imagination a sublime and inspiring vision. In confronting the crisis of art in society, and suggesting a solution, Appia once again places the actor at the very centre of his concept of theatre. Appias analysis of the basis of theatrical art, which he had come to believe lay not in the enactment of fictive stories, but in the immediate physical activity of living, moving bodies, motivated by light and music. Appia writes enthusiastically and at length about the social implications of this new collaborative art, the benefits it may bring and the need to begin exploration of the various forms it might take. In order to kindle the flame of aesthetic truth we have had to extinguish along our path the deceitful torches of a deceitful artistic culture.
