Answer:
The development of the modern theatre and its staging techniques took place during a period when even more radical changes were taking place within the fine arts. In fact, it would be true to say that many of the developments in staging arose primarily out of innovations in painting. Much of Craig’s work is influenced heavily by the work of William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Symbolist theatres in Paris enlisted many of the innovative painters of the time, such as Denis, Vuillard, Bonnard, Sérusier, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Concurrently with developments in the arts, and often underlying them, innovations in technology were radically altering human perception of the world. The advent of photography, and subsequently motion pictures, created new ways of seeing and new perceptions of movement and time. These perceptions were also being altered by the development of motorized transport, through the coming of the railways, the automobile, and the airplane. In a related context, the growth of colonial empires and improvements in transportation brought Europe into contact with many disparate cultures and their aesthetic traditions. Developments in psychology led in the first decades of the 20th century to increased understanding of the communicative power of design and thus to the principles of modern advertising.
For the theatre, these developments had several profound effects. The first was the new scenography of the Symbolists, of Appia, Craig, and others. Scenic art ceased to depict natural settings or specific locales and became more suggestive, seeking to arouse the imagination and the emotions. Along with the experiments in painting that emphasized the sensory, affective properties of the art over its imitative functions, it followed that artists in the theatre would investigate its affective potential.
The Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky, who is credited with producing the first purely abstract painting, created several theatre pieces on his way to full abstraction. These productions employed sound (even an offstage choir), light, moving structures, and human action, but this latter was purely functional and had no narrative or interactive significance. Kandinsky revised the Wagnerian concept of the integrated work of art, pointing out that it was based on the assumption that all the various elements of theatre brought together simultaneously in concert would produce an effect that was greater than the sum of the parts. Kandinsky’s thesis was that this was a superficial conglomeration in which, no matter what the theoretical position might be, the elements alternated in supremacy. Appia had criticized Wagner for keeping conventional representational sets, and Craig had criticized Appia for being under the thrall first of the music and then of the dance. Kandinsky went further than even Craig and proposed that the theatre of the future would comprise three elements: musical movement, colour movement, and dance movement—i.e., sound, colour, and mobile forms. All of these elements wereof equal value. In his longer essay “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1914), Kandinsky set out in complex intellectual terms how this new theatre, based on spirituality rather than materiality, could be constructed.
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