regietheater means the modern practice of allowing a director freedom to diverge from the original intentions of the playwright or operatist, for example by changing the geographical and chronological setting, or by adapting the work to highlight issues of race and gender. It carries an Arena rating of 1213, earned across 29 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, regietheater ranks #926 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #1,568 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #1,734 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words, #2,427 of 17,104 for Most Storied Words.
Why “regietheater” is a great word
REGIETHEATER — [Noun] A modern theatrical and operatic practice granting directors significant interpretive freedom, often radically updating a work's setting or subverting its original intentions to serve a contemporary argument. Borrowed from German Regietheater, from Regie ("direction, management") + Theater ("theater"), literally meaning "director's theater". Unlike Werktreue, which enshrines fidelity to the creator's perceived intentions, or traditional staging, which seeks to faithfully recreate a historical world, Regietheater treats the canonical script or score as raw, mutable material. It is Wagner's Valkyries descending in a hail of helicopter blades, Don Giovanni's statue erected from surveillance cameras, and Chekhov's cherry orchard cleared for a concrete mall—a deliberate collision between text and context that asks not what a work was, but what it might yet become.
Etymology
Borrowed from German Regietheater (“director's theater”).
noun
- The modern practice of allowing a director freedom to diverge from the original intentions of the playwright or operatist, for example by changing the geographical and chronological setting, or by adapting the work to highlight issues of race and gender.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.