Figures of Scenography
Scenography is the art of creating performance environment. It can be composed of sound, clothing, performance, structure and space. Regarding www.answer.com scenography is the art representing objects in perspective, especially as applied in the design and painting of theatrical scenery.
Adolphe Appia (1862-1928)
Adolphe Appia was born in 1862 in Geneva, Switzerland. His father, Doctor Louis Paul Amedee Appia, was a highly respected physician. Little is known about Adolphe's mother, Anna, who died when he was 24 years old. Appia's father was a stern Calvinist who was aloof and forbidding to his children, factors that contributed to the young Appia's shyness and introverted nature. The fact that the young Appia suffered from a stutter also must have made him more withdrawn. From an early age Appia had an inclination for the theater, but he grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged such interests. Appia, however, gained his father's permission to study music and in that way was able to pursue his love of the theater.
Appia was especially drawn to Wagner's operas and his theories of staging them. Although he admired the operas, Appia had no love for the use of the proscenium stage, elaborate costumes, or painted sets. Instead, he favored powerful, suggestive stagings that would create an artistic unity, a blending of actor, stage, lighting, and music. After a long study of the operas, Appia concluded that there was disunity because of certain jarring visual elements. The moving actor, the perpendicular settings, and the horizontal floor were in conflict with one another. He theorized that the scenery should be replaced with steps, ramps, platforms, and drapes that blended with the actor's movements and the horizontal floor. In this way the human presence and its beauty would be accented and enhanced. For Appia, space was a dynamic area that attracted both actor and spectator and brought about their interaction. Complementing his concept of space was his belief that lighting should be used to bring together the visual elements of the drama.
Appia, to gain his effect, studied every scene of the opera and worked out how the relationship of actor, scene, dialogue, music, and lighting combined to create a unified harmony. In 1906 he met and was influenced by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (1865-1960). Dalcroze was the inventor of Eurythmics, a system in which his students responded rhythmically to musical scores. Working with Dalcroze, Appia evolved his own theory that the rhythm inherent in a text is the key to every gesture and movement an actor uses during a performance. He concluded that the mastery of rhythm could unify the spatial and other elements of an opera into a harmonious synthesis.
For most of his life Appia worked alone sketching and writing books and essays regarding his theories. Other innovators such as Gordan Craig (1872-1966) and Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) recognized his genius. Among Appia's important publications were The Staging of Wagner's Musical Dramas (1895), Music and Stage Setting (1899), and The Work of Living Art (1921).
Late in his life, in the 1920s, Appia began to receive the recognition he merited. In 1923 he staged Tristan and Isolde for Arturo Toscanini, then artistic director of La Scala. In 1924 he designed the staging for two parts of the Ring cycle in Basel. In 1925 he designed the settings and costumes for a production of Prometheus, also staged in Basel. The productions were not praised universally. Indeed, the conservative critics who chose to see Wagner as he had always been performed with traditional staging found Appia too "Calvinistic" for their tastes. Nevertheless, Appia's genius was finally recognized and his theories prevailed in spite of the critics. His theories of staging, use of space, and lighting have had a lasting influence on modern stagecraft.
When Appia died on February 29, 1928, his friend and follower Jacques Copeau wrote a tribute in which he accurately summed up the "Master's" radical reform of the stage: "For him, the art of stage production in its pure sense was nothing other than the embodiment of a text or a musical composition, made sensible by the living action of the human body and its reaction to spaces and masses set against it."
set of King Lear 1926
Book of Adolphe Appia
Gordon Craig (1872-1966)
Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was an important actor, designer, director, and theoretician of the early 20th century European stage.
Edward Gordon Craig was born in 1872. He was the son of Edward Godwin, an architect who also did stage designs, and Ellen Terry, one of the most revered actresses of the English stage. Craig's own stage career began at the age of 12 when he appeared as a gardener's boy with his mother at Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre. At 17 he was accepted into the Irving company, and for the next ten years Craig's primary interest was in acting.
Despite Craig's successes as an actor, he ended that career at the age of 25. Part of the reason for this early retirement was Craig's belief that his idol, Henry Irving, personified the best in acting and that he, Craig, could contribute nothing more to the stage than a copy of Irving's style. From his mentor Craig had learned valuable theater lessons such as strict discipline in rehearsal; thorough rehearsal for a production including the actors, the lighting, and the technical elements; and attention to detail. Although these things seem standard today, they were innovations to early 20th-century theater.
Another reason that Craig left acting was his distaste for realism--the imitation of life--which was the predominant style of the period. As early as 1893 Craig had begun to experiment with music and woodcuts retaining only dominant forms and masses. He believed that art was not an imitation of life but rather an expression of the inexpressible.
Surprisingly, Craig's first work as a director, No Trifling with Love (1893), at the Uxbridge Town Hall, was executed in the style of historical realism. However, by 1899 he had developed his own form of theater which he displayed in his first major work, a production of Dido and Aeneas. This innovative production took eight months of rehearsal, included a cast of 80, introduced totally new lighting techniques, and completely broke from the realistic tradition. Designed, directed, and choreographed by Craig, the production evoked atmosphere and emotion rather than simply revealing time and place.
In Craig's next production, The Masque of Love (1901), he continued to develop his style, using three large cloths as the basis of the entire set and sacks stitched together for the costumes--again simplicity and mass created the entire illusion.
Edward Gordon Craig's practical work was not extensive, yet it helped to revolutionize the theater's growth in this century. In 1902 he directed and designed Handel's Acis and Galatea; in 1903 he presented Bethlehem and two productions which his mother acted in and produced, The Vikings and Much Ado about Nothing.
For several years Craig collaborated with other theater innovators, including Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, and Eleanora Duse. One of his most famous projects was a co-production with Stanislavsky (perhaps the most influential theater director/actor of the 20th century) of Hamlet (1912). This production, known primarily for its revolutionary setting of large moving panels, perhaps reveals the reasons that Craig left the practical theater world.
Aside from his difficulties with personality conflicts (Craig was known as an eccentric), his ideas were far ahead of his time. He believed in the director as the ultimate creator, one who must initiate all ideas and bring unity to a production. He created the idea of the actor as "ubermarionette," whose movement was not psychologically motivated or naturalistic, but rather symbolic. The actor should be like a mask for the audience to interpret. Finally, he introduced a new stagecraft--one based on the magic of imagination rather than on everyday details.
If Craig's actual work was limited, and sometimes impractical because of technical limitations, his writing was prolific. In 1898 he launched the theater journal The Page; in 1908 The Mask (until 1929); and from 1918 to 1919 he wrote The Marionette. He also published The Art of the Theatre (1905), On the Art of the Stage, Towards a New Theatre, Scene, The Theatre Advancing, and Books and Theatres, as well as biographies of Henry Irving and his mother.
Craig's work in the theater and his writings have influenced many of the 20th century's innovators, including Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Brecht. He continued to be a source of inspiration for many years--many of the ideas that he developed in the early part of the 20th century were not realized on the stage until the 1980s. Edward Gordon Craig died at the age of 94 in 1966.
Design for Hemlet (1908)
Gordon Craig bookRobert Wilson
Of Wilson's artistic career, Susan Sontag has added “it has the signature of a major artistic creation. I can't think of any body of work as large or as influential.” A native of Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and arrived in New York in 1963 to attend Brooklyn's Pratt Institute. Soon thereafter, Wilson set to work with his Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds and, together with his company, developed his first signature works including King of Spain (1969), Deafman Glance (1970), The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin (1973), and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). Regarded as a leader of Manhattan's then-burgeoning downtown art scene, Wilson turned his attention to large-scale opera and, with Philip Glass, created the monumental Einstein on the Beach (1976), which achieved worldwide acclaim and altered conventional notions of a moribund form.
Following Einstein, Wilson worked increasingly with major European theaters and opera houses. In collaboration with internationally renowned writers and performers, Wilson created landmark original works that were featured regularly at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Der Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne in Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the Salzburg Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. At the Schaubühne he created Death, Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death, Destruction & Detroit II (1987); and at the Thalia he presented the groundbreaking musical works The Black Rider (1991) and Alice (1992). He has also applied his striking formal language to the operatic repertoire, including Parsifal in Hamburg (1991), Houston (1992), and Los Angeles (2005); The Magic Flute (1991) and Madame Butterfly (1993); and Lohengrin at the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1998 & 2006). Wilson recently completed an entirely new production, based on an epic poem from Indonesia, entitled I La Galigo, which toured extensively and appeared at the Lincoln Center Festival in the summer of 2005. Wilson continues to direct revivals of his most celebrated productions, including The Black Rider in London, San Francisco, Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles; The Temptation of St. Anthony in New York and Barcelona; Erwartung in Berlin; Madama Butterfly at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow; and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at Le Châtelet in Paris.
Wilson's practice is firmly rooted in the fine arts and his drawings, furniture designs, and installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Extensive retrospectives have been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He has mounted installations at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, London's Clink Street Vaults, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao. His extraordinary tribute to Isamu Noguchi has been exhibited recently at the Seattle Art Museum, and his installations of the Guggenheim's Giorgio Armani retrospective have traveled to London, Rome, and Tokyo.
Each summer Wilson decamps to the Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities in eastern Long Island. The Watermill Center brings together students and experienced professionals in a multi-disciplinary environment dedicated to creative collaboration. A gala benefit and re-dedication of the reconstructed main building takes place every summer.
Wilson's numerous awards and honors include an Obie award for direction, the Golden Lion for sculpture from the Venice Biennale, the 3rd Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement, the Premio Europa award from Taormina Arte, two Guggenheim Fellowship awards, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship award, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the Golden Lion for Sculpture from the Venice Biennale, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has been named a "Commandeur des arts et des letters" by the French Minister of Culture.
Josef Svoboda
Training at the Central School of Housing Industry in Prague. Shortly after World War II took scenography courses at the Prague Conservatory and studied architecture at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague; participated in the founding of the Grand Opera of the May 5 Theater. He became the theater´s chief stage designer; as well as collaborating with the Theatre of Satire and the Studio of the National Theatre. In 1948, he joined the staff of the National Theatre; initially as stage designer and, as of 1951, as the head of its artistic and technical operations. Until, he remained loyal to the National Theatre; in 1992, managing director of the independentLantern Magic Theater, where he had also served as artistic director since 1973.In the May 5 Theatre with the director Alfréd Radok he began a series of experimentations, the result of which was the founding of the Magic Lantern, the creation of the «polyekran» (multiple screens), and other audiovisual forms. During the second half of the 20th century, hardly any prominent director could be found worldwide with whom Svoboda would not have collaborated. These particular artists include A. Delcampe, J. Dexter, C.H. Drese, A. Everding, G. Friedrich, G. Strehler, L. Olivier, R. Petit, J.-C. Riber, and others. Yet he was honoured more abroad than in his home country.
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