Transcript Theatre History

Early Alternatives to Realism
(Appia and Craig)
* Adolphe Appia (1862-1928) first learned about
theatre through his musical studies.
* He was heavily influenced by Wagner’s music-
dramas and theoretical writings.
* He recognized that the way Wagner’s (and other’s)
productions were created did not actually embody
Wagner’s own theories.
* He published three books between 1895 and 1921
which put forth ideas about theatrical production
that were eventually accepted almost
everywhere.
* Appia began with the assumption that artistic
unity is the fundamental goal of theatrical
production.
* He then sought to analyze failures to achieve it.
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Adolphe Appia.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Appia
Early Alternatives to Realism
(Appia and Craig)
* Appia concluded that stage presentation
involves three conflicting visual elements:
* The moving 3D actor
* The perpendicular scenery
* The horizontal stage
* He considered 2D painted settings to be one of
the major causes of disunity in a play.
* Above all, Appia emphasized the role of light in
fusing all visual elements into a unified whole.
* To him, light was the visual counterpart to
music ( a la Wagner), which changes from
moment to moment in response to moods,
emotions, and actions.
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* He wanted to manipulate light as carefully as a
musical score.
Appia’s design for the Sacred Grove in
Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal.
Image: http://socks-studio.com/2013/12/13/a-revolution-in-stage-design-drawingsand-productions-of-adolphe-appia/
Early Alternatives to Realism
(Appia and Craig)
* Appia came to believe that rhythm in a text
provided the key to every gesture and
movement on stage.
* Proper mastery of rhythm will unify all spatial
and temporal (time) elements of a production.
* This is in response to “eurythmics,” a system in
which a person experiences music by
responding physically to the rhythm of a piece.
* Appia designed the first theatre of modern
times to be built without a proscenium arch.
* Appia saw the theatre artist as an interpreter of
the composer-dramatist’s work.
* He assigned a hierarchy to theatrical elements.
* He created sets in terms of one setting for every
location.
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Appia considered light to be the unifying element in
a production.
Image: http://socks-studio.com/img/blog/appia-10-800x771.jpg
Early Alternatives to Realism
(Appia and Craig)
* Gordon Craig began his career as an actor, before
becoming a designer and director.
* His career is fraught with controversy due to his
ideas about theatrical production.
* He considered theatre an independent art,
arguing that a true theatre artists uses actions,
words, line, color, and rhythm to create a
product as pure as anything made by a painter,
sculptor, or composer.
* Theatre is art itself, not a combination of other
arts.
* Therefore, the theatre artist is an artist in his
own right, not simply an interpreter.
* Craig proposed that a master-artist did not need
a literary text to create a wholly autonomous art
form.
* His influence is most heavily felt in design.
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Edward Gordon Craig. He’s known by “Gordon.”
Image: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Gordon-Craig
Early Alternatives to Realism
(Appia and Craig)
* Craig argued that the public goes to see a play,
not hear a play.
* He thought of theatre in purely visual terms.
* His designs show a preference for right angles,
an obsession with parallelism, and grandiose
height.
* He sought a single set capable of expressing
the spirit of the entire work.
* He refused to assign a hierarchy to technical
elements and blamed faults of the past on the
dominance of one element over others.
* He denounced actors for interjecting their own
conceptions between those of the director and
the public.
* He suggested the use of a “superpuppet”
without any ego but capable of carrying out
all demands.
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Craig’s set design for the 1911 production of
Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre.
Image: http://flavorwire.com/490694/45-transgressive-spins-on-shakespeare-past-andpresent/view-all