Realism

Realism is a nineteenth century invention. It had to overcome Aristotle's observation that it was a fairly poor artist who merely copied nature. Aristotle's mimesis originally was about achieving a certain emotional veracity in a stage production. In other words, he is the first to point out that over-acting bleeds a dramatic performance of a certain natural emotional truth and power. It took another couple of millennia before Grotowski and the Method, respectively, created the polar foundations of modern theatre. Grotowski, through stripped-down staging and an intensely artificial technique achieved a heightened sense of emotional truth, very unlike "reality TV", which uses real people to produce an incredibly artificial surface effect; an artificiality with its own queasy addictive quality--like bad chocolate.