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Course Reader: Reading #3

What is Design?

Excerpts from:

Adolph Appia, Lee Simon (from: “The Ideas of Adolphe Appia”),

Robert Edmund Jones, Leonard Pronko,

and Gaston Bachelard

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #1

r;;e: The American

s: 145-155. Harry N. Abrams

~ Chapter 3

Adolph Appia

ACTOR, SPACE, LIGHT,

PAINTING

T HE ART OF STAGE PRODUCTION is the art of projecting into Space what the original author was only able to project in Time. The temporal element is implicit within any text, with or without music . . . The first factor in staging is the interpreter: the actor himself. The actor carries the action. Without him there can be no action and hence no drama ... The body is alive, mobile and plastic; it exists in three dimensions. Space and the objects used by the body must most carefully take this fact into account. The overall arrangement of the setting comes just after the actor in importance; it is through it that the actor makes contact with and assumes reality within the scenic space.

Thus we already have two essential elements: the actor and the spatial arrangement of the setting, which must conform to his plastic form and his three-dimensionality.

What else is there? Light! Light, just like the actor, must become active; and in order to

grant to it the status of a medium of dramatic expression it must be placed in the service of ... the actor who is above it in the production hierarchy, and in the service of the dramatic and plastic expression of the actor.

... Light has an almost miraculous flexibility . . . it can cre ate shadows, make them living, and spread the harmony of their vibrations in space just as music does. In light we possess a most powerful means of expression through space, if this space is placed in the service of the actor.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #2

ACTOR, SPACE, LIGHT, PAINTING

So here we have our nonnal established hierarchy: ,

the actor presenting the drama; space in three dimensions, in the service of the actor's plastic fonn; liBht giving life to each.

But as you have inferred, there is a but what about painting? What do we understand about painting in terms of scenic art?

A collection of painted backcloths and flats arranged vertically on the stage, more or less parallel to one another, and extending upstage. These are covered with painted light, painted shadow, painted fonns, objects and architecture; all of it, of course, on a flat surface since that is the nature of painting ...

Our staging practice has reversed the hierarchical order: on the pretext of providing us with elements which are difficult or impossible to realize in solid form, it has developed painted decor to an absurd degree, and disgracefully subordinated the living body of the actor to it. Thus light illuminates the back cloths (which have to be seen), without a care for the actor, who endures the ultimate humiliation of moving between painted flats, standing on a horizontal floor.

All modern attempts at scenic reform touch upon this essential problem; namely, on how to give to light its fullest power, and through it, integral plastic value to the actor and the scenic space.

Our stage directors have, for a long time, sacrificed the physical and living rll"F'<P''''P of the actor to the dead illusion of painting. Under such a tyranny, it is

that the human body could never develop in any nonnal way its means of expression. This marvellous instrument, instead of sounding in freedom, exists only under severe constraints.

Everyone knows today that the return to the human body as an expressive element of the first rank is an idea that captures the mind, stimulates the imagination, and opens the way for experiments which may be diverse and no doubt of unequal value, but are all directed towards the same reform ... Yet our contemporary productions have forced us into such a despicably passive state that we conceal it carefully in the darkness of the house. But now, with the current attempt by the human body to rediscover itself, our feeling almost leads to the beginning of fraternal collaboration; we wish that we were ourselves the body that we observe: the social instinct awakens within us, though in the past we coldly suppressed it, and the division separating the stage and the auditorium becomes simply a distressing barbarism arising from our selfishness.

We have arrived at the crucial point for dramatic reform ... which must be boldly announced: the dramatic author will never liberate his vision so long as he believes it yoked by necessity to a barrier separating the action from the spectator ... The inevitable conclusion is that the usual arrangement of our theatres must evolve gradually towards a more liberal conception of dramatic art ...

\\-e sb.all anil cathedral of the fut the most Yaried c:x place for dramatic

Source

Appia, A. (1919, It

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Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #3

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ADOLPH APPIA

We shall arrive, eventually, at what will simply be called the House: a sort of cathedral of the future, which in a vast, open and changeable space will welcome the most varied expressions of our social and artistic life, and ""ill be the ideal place for dramatic art to flourish, with or without spectators.

Source

Appia, A. (1919, 1954, 1993) 'Actor, Space, Light, Painting', Adolphe Appia: Texts on Theatre, ed. R.C. Beacham, London: Routledge: 114-115.1

Adolph Appia (1862-1928)

Swiss designer and philosopher of theatre; the first to write about theatre as a visual art form, where light and shadow, form and space, are as important, if not sometimes more so, than the physical performer. Apia's life was spent writing about, and experi menting with, the technical properties of light and shadow, primarily because of the profound influence of Richard Wagner's cycle of music dramas, Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), for which he prepared detailed scenic and lighting scenarios which were summarily rejected by Wagner's family after the death of the composer in 1883. He wrote three books on theatre Music and the Stage (1897), The Staging of Wagnerian Drama (1895), and The Work of Living Art (1921) as well as numerous articles.

Appia's work has had a profound influence on modern stage design, and his stark blocks of shadow and light were instrumental in helping Wieland Wagner, Wagner's grandson, revive his grandfather's work at the theatre in Bayreuth following the profound and damaging embarrassments of the Nazi canonisation of the composer in the Second World War. Appia's collaboration with the Swiss choreographer Jaques Dalcroze at Hellerau in the 1910s produced and initiated a whole new approach to movement and scenography, culminating in his production of Gluck's Orpheus and Euridice (1913).2

This essay represents a good summary of his thinking, concentrating as it does on principles of staging that emphasise the actor within the stage space.

Compare this article with writings by the following authors in this reader

Copeau - a later admirer who also worked with Dalcroze Craig - similar concerns and explorations in England and Russia Foreman, Wilson and Lepage late twentieth-century examples of visual theatre Meyerhold - a concern to see the actor within a scenic frame

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #4

ACTOR, SPACE, LIGHT, PAINTING

Piscator - contemporary European view on the aesthetics of staging Schlemmer - theatre spatial experiments at the Bauhaus

Further reading

Beacham, R.C. (1987) Adolphe Appia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brockett, O.G. and Findlay, R.R. (1973) Century of Innovation, Englewood Cliffs,

N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Volbach, W. (1968) Adolph Appia, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Notes

1 Beacham (1993: 239): 'This is excerpted from an untitled manuscript Appia prepared for presentation on 3 April 1919 at the Olympic Institute in Lausanne, accompanied by slides illustrating his designs. The conference was entitled "the future of drama and stage production"; the title "Actor, space, light, painting" was given to an abbreviated version of Appia's essay after his death.'

2 David Thomas, at Warwick University in 1991, produced a reconstruction of Appia's work.

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Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #5

THE THEORY OF THE MODERN STAGE

analysis of French culture, shows how German music can arouse the religious nature of French musicians, how the French artist's sensitiveness to essential form can wean Germans from their instinctive dependence on realism. At Bayreuth, in an international poet's Elysium, the two nations are to conduct jointly a presumably endless cycle of music-dramas which will carry Wagner's original inspira tion to the expressionistic heights implicit in his music.

At the same time Appia shows a thoroughly Gallic capa city for objective analysis, which he uses to explain the aesthetic problems of the scene-designer and the technical means available for solving them. Here with amazing directness and clarity he dissects the plastic elements of the stage picture. In doing so he anticipates in detail the present technical basis of stage lighting and outlines precisely the way it has since been used. not onlv ~s.~.!1;'" ispensable means of unifying ood and atmos phere, but F • ng the dramatic values of a g our emotional response to t pia's volume are nothing less stage-craft that

~ gave it both \ _ ~ . its problems and a new solutil y.;.' ~

2. THE PLASTIC ELEMENTS

The aesthetic problem ofscenic design, as Appia made plain, is a plastic one. The designer'S task is to relate forms in space, some of which are static, some of which are mobile. The stage itself is an enclosed space. Organization must be actually three-dimensional. Therefore the canons of pictorial art are valueless. The painted illusion of the third dimension, valid in the painted picture where it can evoke both space and mass, is immediately negated when it is set on a stage where the third dimension is real.

The plastic elements involved in scenic design, as Appia analysed them, are four: perpendicular painted scenery, the horizontal floor, the moving actor, and the lighted space in

THE IDEAS OF ADOLPHE APPIA

which they are confined. The aesthetic problem, as he pointed out, is a single one: How are these four elements to be combined so as to produce an indubitable unity? For, like the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, he was aware that the plastic elements of a production remained irretrievably at odds if left to themselves. Looking at the stages about him he saw that the scene-painter of his day merely snipped his original picture into so many pieces which he stood about the stage, and then expected the actor to find his way among them as best he could. The painted back-drop was the only part of an ensemble of painted scenery that was not a ludicrous compromise. Naturally the scene-painter was in terested, being a painter, in presenting as many stretches of unbroken canvas as possible. Their centre of interest was about midway between the top of the stage and the stage floor at a point where, according to the line of sight of most of the audience, they attained their maximum pictorial effect. But the actor works on the stage floor at a point where painted decorations are least effective as painting. So long as the emphasis of stage setting is on painted decora tion, the inanimate picture is no more than a coloured illustration into which the text, animated by the actor, is brought. The two collide, they never meet nor establish any interaction of the slightest dramatic value, whereas, in Appia's phrase, they should be fused.

I Living feet tread these boards and their every step makes us aware of how meaningless and inadequate our settings are.' The better the scenery is as painting, the worse it is as a stage setting; the more completely it creates an illusion of the third dimension by the pictorial conventions of painting, the more completely an actually three-dimensional actor destroys that illusion by every movement he makes. 'For no movement on the actor's part can be brought into vital relation with objects painted on a piece of canvas.' Painteq decorations are not only at odds with the actor but also with the light that illuminates them. 'Light and vertical painted surfaces nullify rather than reinforce each other.... There is an irreconcilable conflict between these two scenic

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Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #6

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elements. For the perpendicular, painted flat in order to be seen, needs to be set so as to catch a maximum amount of light.' The more brilliantly it is lighted, the more apparent the lack of unity between it and the actor becomes. 'If the setting is so placed as to refract some of the light thrown on it its importance as a painted picture is diminished to that extent.'

For Appia there was no possibility of compromise by keeping actors away from perspective back-drops where doors reached only to their elbows, or by warning them not to lean on flimsy canvas cut-outs down stage. He denied painted simulation of the third dimension a place in the theatre with a finality that gave his analysis the air of a revolutionary manifesto. He was the first to banish the scenic painter and his painted architecture from the modern stage. To Appia the actor was massgebend - the unit of measurement. Unity could be created only by relating every part of a setting to him. He was three-dimensional, therefore the entire setting would have to be made consistently three dimensional. The stage setting could have no true aesthetic

!:l organization unless it was coherently plastic throughout. Appia's importance as a theorist is due to the consistency and the practicability of the methods he outlined for achieving this result.

One began to set a stage not in mid-air on hanging back drops, but on the stage floor where the actor moved and worked. It should be broken up into levels, hummocks, slopes, and planes that supported and enhanced his move ments. And these were again not to be isolated - a wooden platform draped with canvas here, a block or rock there, planted on a bare board floor, a 'chaise-longue made of grass mats'. The. stage floor was to be a completely fused, plastic unit. Appia in this connexion thinks in terms of sculpture. In order to make a model of a stage floor as he described it one would have to use clay. He considered the entire space occupied by a stage setting as a sculpturesque unit. The solidity achieved by setting wings at right angles to each other to imitate the corner of a building

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seemed.to him feebly mechanical. He conceived much freer stage compositions where the entire area could be modelled as a balance of asymmetrical, spatial forms, a composition in three dimensions, that merged imperceptibly with the confining planes that bounded the setting as a whole.

Appia expressed in dogmatic form much of what the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen had demonstrated pragmatically. But in promulgating his theory of a stage setting he com pleted its unification by insisting on the plasticity of light itself, which no one before him had conceived. He demon strated in detail, both as a theorist and as a draftsman, how stage lighting could be used and controlled so as to establish a completely unified three-dimensional world on the stage. Appia distinguishes carefully between light that is empty, diffuse radiance, a medium in which things become visible, as fish do in a bowl of water, and concentrated light striking an object in a way that defines its essential form. Diffused light produces blank visibility, in which we recognize objects without emotion. But the light that is blocked by an object and casts shadows has a sculpturesque quality that by the vehemence of its definition, by the balance of light and shade, can carve an object before our eyes. It is capable of arousing us emotionally because it can so emphasize and accent forms as to give them new force and meaning. In Appia's theories, as well as in his drawings, the light which in paintings had already been called dramatic was for the first time brought into the theatre, where its dramatic values could be utilized. Chiaroscuro, so controlled as to reveal essential or significant form, with which painters had been preoccupied for three centuries, became, as Appia described it, an expressive medium for the scene-designer. The light that is important in the theatre, Appia declares, is the light that casts shadows. It alone defines and reveals. The unifying power of light creates the desired fusion that can rpake stage floor, scenery, and actor one.

Light is the most important plastic medium on the stage. . •• Without its unifying power our eyes would be able to perceive what objects were but not what they expressed ••.• What can give us

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #7

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THE THEORY OF THE MODERN STAGE

this sublime unity which is capable of uplifting us? Light! ..• Light and light alone, quite apart from its subsidiary importance in illuminating a dark stage, has the greatest plastic power, for it is subject to a minimum of conventions and so is able to reveal vividly in its most expressive form the eternally fluctuating appear ance of a phenomenal world.

The light and shade of Rembrandt, Piranesi, Daumier, and Meryon was finally brought into the theatre as an interpre tative medium, not splashed on a back-drop, as romantic scene-painters had used it, but as an ambient medium actually filling space and possessing actual volume; it was an impalpable bond which fused the actor, wherever and however he moved, with everything around him. The plastic unity of the stage picture was made continuous.

Ifone looks at reproductions of stage settings before Appia _ and the history of stage setting might almost be divided by B.A. as history in general is divided by B.C. - they are filled with even radiance; everything is of equal importance. The stage is like a photograph of a toy theatre; the actors might be cardboard dolls. In Appia's drawings for the first time the stage is a microcosm of the world. It seems to move from

:if 'mom to noon, from noon to dewy eve,' and on through all the watches of the night. And the actors in it seem living beings who move as we do from sunlight or moonlight into shadow. Beneath their feet there is not a floor but the surface of the earth, over their heads not a back-drop but the heavens as we see them, enveloping and remote. There is depth here that seems hewn and distance that recedes in finitely farther than the painted lines converging at a mathe matical vanishing point. In attacking the conventions of scene-painting Appia created an ultimate convention. For the transparent trickery of painted illusions of form he sub stituted the illusion of space built up by the transfiguration that light, directed and controlled, can give to the transient structures of the stage-carpenter. The third dimension, incessant preoccupation of the Occidental mind for four centuries, defined by metaphysicians, explored by scientists, simulated by painters, was re-created in terms of the theatre,

THE IDEAS OF ADOLPHE APPIA

made actual. The stage more completely than ever before became a world that we could vicariously inhabit; stage settings acquired a new reality. The light in Appia's first drawings, if one compares them to the designs that had preceded his, seems the night and morning of a First Day.

3. LIGHT AS THE SCENE-PAINTER

Light was to Appia the supreme scene-painter. 'The poet musician,' he declared, 'paints his picture with light.' Although at one moment Appia announces that his book is dedicated to the service of the goddess of music, at another he says:' It is precisely the misuse of stage lighting with all its far-reaching consequences which has been the chief reason for writing this book in the first place ..•• '

Only light and music can express' the inner nature of all appear ance'. Even if their relative importance in music-drama is not always the same, their effect is very similar. Both require an object to whose purely superficial aspect they can give creative form. The poet provides the object for music, the actor, in the stage setting, that for light.

In the manipulations of light Appia found the same free dom that, in his eyes, music gave the poet. Light controlled and directed was the counterpart of a musical score; its flexibility, fluidity, and shifting emphasis provided the same opportunity for evoking the emotional values of a perfor mance rather than the factual ones. As music released the mood of a scene, projecting the deepest emotional meaning of an event as well as its apparent action, so the fluctuating intensities of light could transfigure an object and clothe it with all its emotional implications.

Light with its infinite capacity for varying nuances was valuable to Appia for its power of suggestion, which has become for us the distinguishing mark of everything artistic. He points out how in Das Rheingold one can give the impression of water through the sensation of depth by

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #8

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keeping the stage dim, filling the scene with 'a vague ob scurity' where contours are not defined. For Die Walkiire the open air will be felt only if the summit of a mountain detaches itself clearly against misty distances. The flames of the Feuerzauber are not to be continued an instant beyond the time allotted to them in the score. Their intensity will be emphasized by contrasting them with' a limpid night sky vaguely pierced by stars'. The light in Alberich's cavern, which is illuminated by his forge, is to have an entirely different quality: 'The general feeling given will be one of oppression and a la<:k of light. The proportions of the setting will contribute to this sense of oppressive weight. Reflections of spurts of flame will intermittently illuminate now this detail of the setting, now that one; and the setting itself, in blocking the source of light, will cast shadows that produce an ensemble chaotic in effect of which, it goes with out saying, the personages in the scene will be a part.' The Waldweben in Siegfried is to be accompanied by a wavering play of fluttering sunlight and leaf shadows. The forest is to be made with the barest indication of a few tree trunks and branches. Siegfried will seem to be in a forest because he is tinged in the vaguely green suffusion of light filtering through leaves and bespattered with an occasional sun-spot. The audience will then see a wood even though it does not see all the trees.

The flexibility of stage lighting, as Appia envisaged it, relates it fundamentally to every movement that an actor makes; the whole setting by fluctuations of light and shade moves with him and follows the shifting dramatic emphasis of a particular scene or sequence of scenes. Appia shows how, in the first act of Siegfried, Hunding and Siegfried are to be alternately in light and shadow as their respective roles become more or less important. And he points out also that any portion of a setting - a building, a tree, the background of a room - can actually be brought forth or wiped out as its dramatic importance in the scene increases or diminishes.

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4. LIGHT AS INTERPRETER

Light in Appia's hands became a guiding principle for the designer, enabling him to give to a setting as the audience sees it the same reality that it is supposed to have for the actors in it. In an appendix to Music and Stage-Setting he shows in detail how the control of stage lighting makes this possible for a production of Tristan and Isolde.

Act II: As Isolde enters she sees only two things: the burning torch set as a signal for Tristan and enveloping darkness. She does not see the castle park, the luminous distance of the night For her it is only horrible emptiness that separates her from Tristan. Only the torch remains irrefutably just what it is: a signal separating her from ,the man she loves. Finally she extinguishes it. Time stands still. Time, space, the echoes of the natural world, the threatening torch - everything is wiped out. Nothing exists, for Tristan is in her arms.

How is this to be scenically realized so that the spectator, with out resorting to logical reasoning, without conscious mental effort, identifies himself unreservedly with the inner meaning of these events?

At the rise of the curtain a large torch, stage centre. The stage is bright enough so that one can recognize the actors clearly but not bright enough to dim the torch's Bare. The forms that bound the stage are barely visible. A few barely perceptible lines indicate trees.

By degrees the eye grows accustomed to the scene. Gradually it becomes aware of the more or less distinct mass of a building ad· joining the terrace. During the entire first scene Isolde and Brangane remain on this terrace, and between them and the fore· ground one senses a declivity but one cannot determine its precis< character. When Isolde extinguishes the torch the setting i shrouded in a half-light in which the eye loses itself.

Isolde is submerged in this whispering darkness as she rushes 14 Tristan. During the first ecstasy of their meeting they remain 0] the terrace. At its climax they approach [the audience]. Byalmoo

I imperceptible degrees· they leave the terrace and by a barel visible Bight of steps reach a sort of platform near the foregrounc Theri, as their desire appeases itself somewhat and only one ide unites them, as we grow more and more aware of the Death (

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THE THEORY OF THE MODERN STAGE

Time, they finally reach the extreme foreground, where - we notice it for the first time - a bench awaits them. The tone of the whole secret, shadowy space surrounding them grows even more uniform; the forms of the terrace and the castle are submerged, even the different levels of the stage floor are hardly perceptible.

Whether because of the contrast of deepened darkness induced by extinguishing the torch, or perhaps because our eye has followed the path that Tristan and Isolde have just trod - however that may be, in any case we feel how softly they are cradled by every object about them. During Brangane's song the light grows still dimmer; the bodily forms of the people themselves no longer have a distinct outline. Then (page 162, firstif, of the orchestra) sudden· ly a pale glimmer of light stl:ikes the right side of stage rear: King Mark and his men-at-arms break in. Slowly the cold colourless light of day increases. The eye begins to recognize the main outlines ofthe stage setting and its colour begins to reg ister in all its harshness. Then as Tristan with the greatest effort at self-mastery realizes that he is after all among the living, he challenges Melot to a duel.

in the setting, cold in colour, hard as bone, only one spot is shaded from the daWJling day and remains soft and shadowy, the

bench at the foot of the terrace.

This was written in 1899 1 ~ I know of no single document in the theatre's history that

reveals more completely the role that creative imagination plays in staging a play nor one that demonstrates better how inevitably the imagination of a creative artist is specific and concrete. The passage, as well as its continuation and the similar analyses that follow it for the production of the Ring of the Nibelung, are the measure of Appia's genius. In comparison Craig's dark hints and his windy pretensions show him, more than ever, to be an inflated talent. Appia can himself be windy in prognosticating the future of German and French music. But once he focuses upon the theatre he is the master and the master craftsman, com pletely aware of his methods and materials, certain of how they can be organized, certain too of their effect to the last detaiL The semi-obscurity of this second act of Tristan is dictated by a vision where, as in the words of the stage manager of Mons, all is clarity and light.

THE IDEAS OF ADOLPHE APPIA

The chiaroscuro of Appia's drawings is shadowy like Craig's; its misty envelopments, its dissolving silhouettes and vaporous distances, are characteristically romantic. But this picturesque atmosphere is made an integral part of stage pictures that, instead of dwarfing the actor, are directly related to him as a human being. Despite the shadowy shapes around him the actor remains the centre of our interest, the focus of dramatic emphasis. Appia's stage pictures are not conceived as effects into which the actor is put; they spring from the actor and are complete expressions of his assumed personality and passions. Appia, designing for the opera, evolved a type of stage setting so compact, so directly related to the emotional flux of drama, that he anti cipated the development of scenic design in the theatre. Craig, designing for the theatre of the future, made settings so emptily grandiose that they have no future place except in grand opera. Appia staged even fewer productions than Craig did. His contacts with the actual theatre were less frequent. But his sense of the theatre was so concrete, so technically true, that his drawings, like his stage-directions, were capable of being translated to a stage as soon as he had made them.

Light fluctuates in Appia's drawings as it does on the stage of a theatre; it fluctuates on stage settings today as it did in Appia's drawings, and gives to canvas forms just such simpli fications of mass and outline as Appia indicated. At one moment or another the lighting of any modern production, whether Jones's Richard III or Geddes's Hamlet, Reinhardes Danton's Death orJessner's Othello (and I could add the names of a hundred others that I have seen as well as my own), are dramatized with light and shadow in ways that repeat, however much they may amplity, Appia's original methods and effects - the same use of shadows. to dignify and to envelop form, to translate emotion into atmospheric moods, to d.efine by suggesting. The modern stage is filled with the light that was always to be seen on land and Sea but never in the theatre until Appia brought it there. Craig'S belated attempt to emphasize the actor with light against an

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #10

- ~ '~ -~-,- THE THEORY OF THE MODERN STAGE

ambiguous neutral screen, the declaration ofArthur Kahane, Reinhardt's assistant, in 1919, 'Lighting is the real source of decoration, its single aim being only to bring the important into)ight and leave the unimportant in shadow,' do nothing more than paraphrase the ideas and the doctrines of Adolphe Appia.

Appia's light-plot is now an accepted part ofevery modern production. It parallels the plot of a play and is a visual comment upon it as continuous as a musical score. It is separately rehearsed, memorized by the stage-electrician, and is part of the stage-manager's prompt-book. The fewest of its changes are dictated by actual stage-directions, such as the extinguishing' of a torch; the vast majority are an accompaniment to action and aim to emphasize the atmos pheric qualities of a stage setting in a way that can project variations of dramatic mood and thereby intensify the emotional reaction of an audience.

Appia's supreme intuition was his recognition that light can playas directly upon our emotions as music does. We are more immediately affected by our sensitiveness to

~ variations of light in the theatre. than we are by our sensa tions of colour, shape, or sound. Our emotional reaction to light is more rapid than to any other theatrical means of expression, possibly because no other sensory stimulus moves with the speed of light, possibly because, our earliest in herited fear being a fear of the dark, we inherit with it a primitive worship of the sun. The association between light and joy, between sorrow and darkness, is deeply rooted and tinges the imagery of almost every literature and every religion. I t shows itself in such common couplings as ' merry and bright', 'sad and gloomy'. How much less lonely we feel walking along a country road in a pitch-black night when .the distant yellow patch of a farm-house window punctures the darkness! The flare of a camp-fire in a black pine forest at night cheers us even though we are not near enough to warm our hands at it. The warmth of the sun or of a flame does of course playa large share in provoking the feeling of elation that light gives us. But the quality of light

THE IDEAS 01" AlJVLorn", ..... ~ ~ ~._

itself can suggest this warmth effectively enough to arouse almost the same mood of comfort and release, as when, after a dingy day of rain and mist, sunlight strikes our window curtains and dapples the floor of our room.

Between these two extremes of flaming sun and darkness an immense range of emotion fluctuates almost instantly in response to variations in the intensity of light. The key of our emotions can be set, the quality of our response dictated, almost at the rise of the curtain by the degree and quality of light that pervades a scene. It requires many more moments for the words of the players or their actions to ac cumulate momentum and to gather enough import for them to awaken as intense and direct an emotional response. And as the action progresses our emotions can be similarly played upon. It was the singular limitation of Appia's temperament that he could find no basis for the interpre tation of drama except that dictated by the tempo and timbre of a musical score. His imagination could be stimu lated in no other way. But in indicating both theoretically and graphically the complete mobility of stage lighting he has made it possible for any play to be accompanied by a light-score that is almost as directly expressive as a musical accompaniment and can be made as integrally a part of drama as music was in Wagner's music-dramas.

~ D The amaZing~ vision is again made appare ted the present technical set- l. With nothing more to guide items of his day he understood\ :d light-sources on the stagei . general light, which merely __ --o~ •• ~~. ",u even radiance, ca,lled flood-lighting today, and focused, mobile light, now known as spot-lighting. It was this almost neglected source of light which Appia pointed to as the important one.

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USED 112

D8424 JONES

:hi!ltnry is more is solidly

dedication to your loul.

to a(toU in are "lumi· designer.,

N.Y.

DRAMA TIc IMAGINA TION

~/II'Iflll/IH ..""n878305925

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #12

It' ~HE

:DRi\MATIC IMAGINA.TION··

REfl;ECTJ:ONS AND SPJ:i,CULATIONS

.ON

THE ART Of lHB THliAtRJi

ROBERTEDMONDlONES

Theatre Arts Books

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #13

ROBERT EDMOND JONES

All rigMs reserved, ......11l.ding. 'he riglll 10 reprod..ce lhi~ book Dr portiotos lhorecf in any form.

To My WIFE

EIghteenth Printing, 1990

ISBN o-87830'5g8-o

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the Yale Review,

Theatre Arts, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica for permission to reprint

parts of this book.

Theatre Arts Books 29 West 35 Street, New York, NY 10001

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION by John Mason Brown 5

I. A NEW KIND OF DRAMA 15

II. ART IN THE THEATRE 23

III. THE THEATRE AUT WAS AND AS IT IS 45

IV. TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 69

V. SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 87

VI. LIGHT AND SHADOW IN THEATRE I II

VII. TOWARD A NEW STAGE 13 1

VIII. BEHIND THE SCENES 151

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #14

ART IN THE THEATRE

Art • • • teaches to convey a larger sense by sim pler symbols. .

-EMERSON

hERE seems to be a wide divergence of opin ion today as to what the theatre really is. Some people say it is a temple, .some say it is a brothel, some say it is a laboratory, or a workshop, or it may be an art, or a plaything, or a corporation. But whatever it is, one thing is true about it. There is not enough fine workmanship in it. There is too much incompetence in it. The thea tre demands of its craftsmen that they know their jobs. The theatre is a school. We shall never have done with studying and learning. In the theatre, as in life, we try first of all to free ourselves, as far as we can, from our own limitations. Then we can begin to practice "this noble and magicall art." Then we may begin to dream.

When the curtain rises, it is the scenery that sets the key of the play. A stage setting is not a

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #15

25 24 TIlE DRAMATIC IMAGlNA nON background; it is an environment. Players act in

a setting, not against it. We say, in the audience, when we look at what the designer has made, be

fore anyone on the stage has time to move or

speak, "Aha, I seel It's going to he like that I Aha!" This is. true no matter whether we ~re looking at a realistic representation of Eliza croSg.;. ing the ice or at the setting for· one of Yeats'

Plays fot Dancers, carried to the limit of abstract symbolism. When Igo to the theatre, I want to

get an eyefuL Why not? I· do not want to have to look at one of the so-called "suggestive" set.:

tings, in whiCh a single Gothic column is made

to do duty for a cathedral; it makes me feel as if I had been invited to some important ceremony and had been given a pOor seat behind a post. I

do not want to see any more "skeleton stages" in which a few· architectural elements are com

bined and re<ombined . for the various scenes of

a play, for after the first haH hour I invariably discover that I have lost· the thread of the drama.

In spite of myself, I have become fascinated,

wondering whether the. castle door I have seen

in the first act is going to· tum into a refectory

table in the second act or a hope-chest in the

last act. No, I don't like these dever, falselyeco-

ART IN TIlE'TIJEATRE

nomical contraptions. And '. I, do not want to look

at a . setting th~t is merely smar~ or novel or chic. a setting that teUs me that it ,is'. the latest fashion. as .dlough itSd,esigner. had take!la'~yiI1g p-ip like a spring buyer and brought back a trtmk full of the.1atcst ~tyles in scenery. ',' .....,

I want my imagination tobestitnulatedby

wh~tlsee on thesta~. But the mo~entI get a senseofingenuity,a. ~se .of effort, my imagina tion is not stimulated; .it is! starved, That play is finished· as far as Iamcon£<ii~ed, ForI.have com~ to the theatre .to see a play. not to see the work

done on a play. A good scene shouldb~1 ·nq~ a picture, but an

image. Scene-designing i~ not what m()~t. people

imagi~e it. is-a branch' of interior decorating. There

,. is no more reason for a room on . a stage to

be .a .I:'eproduccion of an actuaLroomthan for an actor who plays the part ofNapoleon to .be Na

poleon or for all actor who. plays' Death. in the old mora~ity play to he dead. Everything that. is ac tual must undergo a strange metamorphosis. a

kind of sea-change, before.it can become truth in

the theatre. ,There is a curious mystety in this.

You will remember the quotation from Hamlet:

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26 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

My fatherl-methinks I see my father. o where, my lord? In my mind's eye. Horatio.

Stage..designing should be addressed to this eye of the mind. There is an outer eye that observes,

~"" .. ~ ........... and there is an inner eye that sees. A setting ~~"----..,~' "'" ~--~ should not be atlimg'rolOoK at In Itself; It can, of course, be made so' powerful, so expressive,' so dramatic,thaa;. the actors have nothing to do after the curtain rises but to embroider variations on

the theme the scene hasaiteady given away. The designer must always be on his guard against be ing too explicit. A good scene, I repeat, is not· a picture. It is something seen, but it is something conveyed as well: a feeling, an evocation. Plato says somewhere, "It is beauty I seek, not beautiful

things." This is what I mean. ~g is not just a beautiful thing, a collection of beautiful

things. It.i:_:E~~d.!1l_~¥E1.~indJ~n I1i~£, the dr~ma to Hame:. It echoes, it enhances, it ani;;ates:" Itls-an-~exp~ca;ancy, a foreboding, a tension. It says nothing, but it gives everything.

Do not think for a moment that I am advising the designer to do away with· actual objects on the stage. There is no such thing as a symbolic

ART IN THE THEATRE 27

chair. A chair is a chair. It is in the arrangement of the chairs that the magic lies. Moliere,Gordon Craig said, knew how to place the chairs on his stage so they almost seemed to speak. In the bal cony scene from Romeo and Juliet there must be a balcony, and there must be moonlight. But it is not so important that the' moon be the kind of moon that shines down on Verona as that Juliet may say of it:

O. swear not by the moon • .the inconstant moon' • •. Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

The point is this: it is not the knowledge 9£ the armosphericconditions prevailing in. north"': ern Italy which counts, but the response to the lyric, . soaring. quality of Shakespeare's. verse.

The ·d~i~~~::.:~_~~!i~~~.~.,,~~. w~~h ~ble ·eII?:~~or:~c::.."e.9.~~Je. Then he retires. The actor enters .. If the designer's work has been good, it disappears from our consciousness at that moment. We do not notice it anymore. It has apparently ceased to exist. The actor has taken the stage; and the deSigner's only reward lies in the praise bestowed on the actor.

Well, now the curtain is up and the play has begun.

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32 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

designer creates with inanimate materials: canvas, wood. doth, light. The actor creates in his living self. And just as the good designer retires in favor of the actor, so does the good actor withdraw his personal self in favor of the character he is play ing. He steps aside. The character lives in him. You are to play Hamlet. let us say-·not narrate Hamlet. but play Hamlet. Then y~ become his host. You invite him into yourself.(You lend him

'..-- ~ ~- your ~?dl'J"?2£..!.?l5=~2~. tl~ but itjs 1i.'amlet's voice that s eaks mlet's im Ises

~I1!loveyo~We may be grateful to Pirandello for sh~ii1gus, in his Six Characters in Search of an A uthor~ the strange reality of the creations of the playwright's mind. Hamlet is as real as you or I. To watch a character develop from the first Rashes of COntact in the actor's mind to the final moment when the character steps on the stage in full possession of the actor. whose personal self looks on from. somewhere in the background, is to be present at a great mystery. No wonder the an cient dramas were initiation-ceremonies; all act ing is an initiation, if one can see it so, an initia tion into what Emerson calls "the empire of the real. " To spend a lifetime in practicing and per fecting this art of speaking with tongues other

ART IN THE THEATRE 33 than one's own is to live as greatly as one can live.

But the curtain is up. and the play has begun. We look into a scene that is filled with excite..; ment. See. That man is playing the part of a beg gar.We know he is not a real beggar. Why not? How do we know? We cannot say; But we know he is not a beggar. When. we look at him we re-. call. nOt any particular beggar we may happen to have seen that day. but all beggars we have ever seen or read about. And all our ideas of misery and helplessness and loneliness rush up in ourim aginations to touch us and hun us. The man is acting.

How is he dressed? (And. now I am speaking as a costume-designer.) The man is in rags. Just rags. But why do we look at him with such in terest? If he wore ordinary rags we wouldn't look at him twice. He is dressed, not like a real beggar. but like a painting of a beggar. No, that's not quite it. But as he stands there or moves about we are continually reminded of great paintings paintings like those of Manet. for instance. There is a curious importance about this figure. We· shall remember it. Why? We cannot tell. We are look ing at something theatrical. These rags have been arranged-"composed" the painters call it-by

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34 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

the hand of an artist. We£eel, rather than see, an indescribable difference. These tags have some how ceased to be rags. They have .been trans.. formed into moving sculpture.

. I am indebted to the .greatMadatne Fteisinger for teaclling,me the value. of simplicity in the theatre. I lea.rned from hernotto~rture materials into mean~ngless folds, . but . to preserve the long flowing . line, the noble sweep. ~'Let uskeep.this production noble," she would say to me. thec~s.. tumecelesigner should isteer deat: .of fashionable~. ness; That was the only fault. of . the admirable production of Hamlet in modern dress. kwas .so chic that it simpered. I remember that in. the closet scene, .as the Queen .cried Out:

o Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart In twain. and her son answered:

0.. throwaway the worser part of it:> And live th~ purer with tbe other half:>

a voice near me whispered, "I wonder. if she got that negligee at Bendel's?" And the program told us all that' Queen Gertrude of Denmark did. in deed. get that negligee at Bendel's. And, further more, thatQueen Gertrude's shoes came from the:

ART IN THE THEATRE 35

firm of L Miller, Inc., and that her hats were furnished.by Blank and her jewels by Dash, and SOOfh Thinkofiit. Two worlds ,are meeting in this play, in this scene-in the night, in Elsinon; . And we are 'reminded of shoes and frCKksl

Many of the costumes I design are intention allysome\vhatdndefiniteand ahstract.A colot,a shimmer, a' richness, a sweerandtlle actor's presened I often think of a'phrase Ioncefoun'd in an old drama. that describes . the . first. entrance o£ the heroine. kdoesnotsaYl "She wore a ~ety petticoat or a point lace':'J:'Uff ora.£arthi~gale'~~:i~ says, '~.'She came in like starlight, hidih ·jewels~u There she is inthatphr:ase;n.ot just .~. beau#£ul girl dressed up in a beautiful dress, but a presence --arresting, ready toact~ enfolded in light. It . isn't just light, it is a stillness, an awareness, a kindof breathlessness..Weought to look at the actors and say, Whyl I never saw people like that beforeI I didn't know people looked like. thatl

The subtlet;yof stage lighting,· the far~flung magic of it! When a single 1ight~~ulb wrongly placed may reveal, as Yeats said, the proud £ra.:.. gilit;yofdreamsl

Shakespeare knew mote than all of us. H9W he uses sunlight, moonligh~, caJ1dlelight. torchlight,

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36 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

starlight! Imagine Hamlet as he stands with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the fotestage of the Globe . Theatre, under the open sky, looking up at the stars, saying:

• • • this brave 0'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.

I have often wondered whether the Globe Theatre and the Swan· Theatre were· not oriented towards the east as ancient temples are, in order to take advantage of the lighting' effects of na ture. Think of the playof Macbeth. It begins on a foggy afternoon before sundown. The day goes. The sun sets. Torches are brought in. We enter deeper and deeper with the play into an extrava. gant and lurid night of the soul. Or take the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice. The scene is played by torchlight. The auditorium is dark. We see the sky overhead. The trial draws to an end. Shylock is defeated. There is a gay little in terlude, the byplay with the rings. The stage grows lighter. The torches are carried off. Now the scene is finished. Portia, Nerissa, and Gra tiano go away.... The full moon rises over the wall of the theatre and touches the stage with silver. Lorenzo and Jessica enter, hand in hand..

ART IN THETHEATRB 37

. on such a night Did T hisbe fearfullyo' ertrip. the dew.

The sole aim oithe arts of scene.-designing, costuming, lighting, is, as I have already said, to enhance the natural powers of the actor. It is for the director to call forth these powers and urge them into the pattern of the play. .

The director rilUst never make the· mistake of imposing his own ideas upon the actors. Acting is not an imitation of what a director thinks about a character; it is.a gradual, half-conscious unfold ing and flowering of the self into a new person ... ality. This process of growth should be sacred to the director. He must be humble .before it. He must nourish it, stimulate it,. foster it in a thou sand ways. Once the actors have been engaged, he should address himself to their highest powers. There is nothing they cannot accomplish. In this mood, ignoring every limitation, he fuses them into a white energy. The director energizes; he animates. That is what Max Reinhardt under stands so well how to do. He is an animator. A curious thing, the animating quality. Stanislav sky had it; Belasco had it; Arthur Hopkins has it. One feels it instantly when one meets these

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TO A YOUNG. STAGE DESIGNER

Beauty· is the purgation of superfluities. -MICHELANGELO

Behind the words· and movements, imperturbable. withdrawn, slumbered astl'ange smoldering p()wel'.

,---::-HENRY..8ROCKEN

A STAGE DESIGNER is, in 3 very real senSef 3 jac~~!:3.lhtta4es~ He can make blueprints and murals and patterns and light-plots. He can de sign fireplaces and b()dices and bridges and wigs. He understands architecture, but is not an archi tect: can paint a portrait, but is not a painter: creates costum~sl but is not a couturier. Although he is able to call upon any or all of these varied gifts at will. he is not concerned with anyone of them to the exclusion of the others. nor is he jn-,

. . -----.~,...-...-.-~'.-.-.

terestc:4_j!! anyone of them foritsown sake. ~fh;e talen~" a~~~~;;iy-ili~~'to~Tso{hi~tt;de:"His real calling is something quite different. He is lin Ilrtist of occasions.

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70 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION Every play~r rather, every performance of a

play-is an occasion, and this occasion has its own

characteri~i~t::; ." quality, its own atmosphere, so to sp~~k. It is the~tas.k "oLdle.s'.tagc..d~~ign~~~!O_~: hancea~d i11:t~$jfy"thi~.~c;h~"~'~risJ:l<;~1J~E9'.. by: every tn.~~~~)~ Iljs . .E9~(!~·. The mastery of this' speCial art demands not onlY:1 mastery of frtany diverse techniques hut a temperament that is peculiarly sensitiv~ to the atmosphere:) of a given occasion, Just as the temperament of.a musician is peculiarly sensitive to the characteristic. quali~ ties of a musical composition. Stage: designers, like musicians, are born and not made. One is aware of atmospheres or one isn't, just as one has

a musical ear or one hasn't. A .§_~ge.setting has no independent . life of its

own. Its emphasis is dire~~~.4.!<:'~~td,.~~p~~f()~.;. ance. In the absenceo£ the actor it does not exist.

«~-. '''" . , .

Strange as it may seem, this simple and funda~ mental principle of stage design' still seems to be widely misunderstood. How. often in critics' re~

views one comes upon the phra.se "the' settings were gorgeous!" Such a statement, .of course, can mean only one thing, that no one concetnedwith

. producing the drama has thought of it as atl:.c:l~ ganic whole. I quote from a review recently pub-

TO A YOUNG STAGE .DESIGNER 71

fished in one .of O1,lr leading newspapers, "Of all the sets of the >season, the only true scenic sur

ptis.e Was . . ." The only true scenic surprise, indeed.! 'Every ~tage designer worth his salt out grew the idea of scenic surpriSes years ago. If the . cdticsonly . knew. how easy it is. to make a scenic surprise in the .theatrel ,Take two turntaples,a'

great deal of~ Butl no. Why give awayili6 for~ula?,,!!__~:.,.9pL.5Urprise...that,~J$._}Y~~~~L~m the' audience; .it· is de1ighte~ •~!!~.try/iti!lg.a'.c,<:pt:! .. ~~E~~"The1Utp~se'1iihe~~t~i~.a stage setting;is only a.part Q£the greater surprise inherent in the event itself. .

Arid yet a stage setting holds ,a curious kind of suspense.. Go, for instance, into <\n ordinary empty drawing-room as it' exists . ri:orm~l1y. There" is. no particular suspense about this room. It is just empty. Now.imagine the same drawing-room ar ranged and decorated for a particular function"""':'":1 Christmas party for children, let us say. It is not completed as a room, now, until the children are

in it. And if we wish to visualize for ourselves how important a part the sense of . expectancy plays in such a room, Jet us imagine that there is . a storm and that the children c.annot come. A scene on the stage is filled with the same feeling

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #23

72 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION of expectancy. It is like a mixture of chemical elements held in solution. The actor adds the 00.0

element that releasesth<F144~ ~~gy .. of..th~. ~liole·;";"Meanwha~;·~wan·ting the actor, the vari ~:UseIements which go to make up the setting remain suspended, as it were. in all indefinable

tension. r~. crea~~this slls.Ee~~thi!~=-~ion,._~~ ~~..,~~~:.jl~;2E9~}~_~r~~~~~~g.

The designer must strive to achieve in his set tings what I can only call a high potential. The walls,· the furniture, the properties, are only the facts of a setting, only .the outline. The truth is in everything but these objects,in the space they enclose, in the intense vibration they create. They are fused into a kind of em bodied impulse. When the. curtain rises we feel a frenzy of excitement focused like a burning-glass upon the actors. Everything on the stage becomes a part of the life of the instant. The play becomes a voice out of a whirlwind. The terrible and won derful dynamis of the theatre pours over the foot lights,

A strange, paradoxical calling, to work always behind and around, to bring into being a. power ful non-being. How far removed it aU is from the sense of display r One is reminded of the portraits

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 73 o£the Spanish noblemen painted byEI Greco in. the Prado in Madrid, whose· faces, as Arthur .

Symons said, are a!Lg~c:~,.· distinguished nerves, . quiete~~.l'.(1f:l,~~irt..Wha;';p~;;'£~r"sC;g~ ·d~;. ~gners to remember! Quieted by an effort. , , .,

Itis .to the credit o~our de=i~~~~.. ~at they,~ :S:~>I have almost made a fetish of.~atl0~:1But·let()pJ'\~' me remark parenthetically that it· is sometimes difficult to go into the background when there is

nothing in front of you. These· pages are hardly the place inwhich to perpetuate the centurie~ old squabble between playwrights and stage de ...

signers begun. by peevish old Ben: Jonson, who scolded Inigo Jones so roundly for daring to make his productions beautiful and exciting to look at. . This kind of petty jealousy makes sorry reading even when recorded in verse by the great Ben

himself. It is enough to say that the jealousy still persists and is as corroding in the twentieth cen tury as it was in the seventeenth. The error lies in our conception of the theatre as something set aside for talents that are pl:1tely literary. As if the

experience of the theatre had' only to do with

words lOur playwrights need to learn that plays

are wrought, not written. There is some~~~ to

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74 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

,b~,,~:i~,.,~~~~,,~~,~~:,~l];,!~rm~",Q{J9:tnL~<;Lcolor ~n~Jight..that5=~,,~t.~~!e.mJ!~u:_~~r .way.

The designer must learn'. to. sense iheatmos. phere of a play with unusualdeamess and,exac~~ ness. He must actually live in it fiJI-a time,. irn. merse hihlsel£'il1 it, be baptized by k'This' processisbY1'lO means soeasy .. asitseems.We.are all, too apt ,tosubstitutc:! ingenuity for clairvoy. ance. The temptation toin~ent isalwayspreserit. I was.once asked to be ()ne ofthej.udgesof'a cOrn: petition. Of stage designs· held by th6 Department of Drarnaof one of our,wel1-knowl1 universities. All the' designers' had· made sket~hes£orthesal:Ile play. The setting was the interior of ~.' peasant hut on the west coast of Ireland. It turned out

thai: these twenty or .thirty young designers had mastered the', technique of using dimmers and sliding stages and projected' scenery. They had

also acquired a considerable amount of informa cion concerning the latest European developments of' stagecraft. Their drawings were full of expres sionism from Gennany, constJ:uccivism from Rus

sia, every kind of modernism. They werecom~ pilacions,of everything that had been said and . done in the world of scenery in.the last twenty

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 75

yearsJ But not one of the designers had sensed,_t.he a~~§~!e of theparcicular playi11q-~s.d;.. .

I recalled for them my memory of the setting for the same.. playas. 'produced .bythe.Abbey Theatre 011. its first visit to America~ This set,;ting was verysitnple,far simpler and farless.sclf-reori,.. scious than any~f theiidesigns.Neutral.;,til1ted walls,aHreplace;a. door,a.window, a table~'a..few chairst .. the red~omespun.skirts ·and bare·~eet·.pf . the peasa.nt girls. A fisher' s net, perhaps.Noth.. ing more .. But.through the little window!~tthe back Ol1e saw askyofenchantment~.All. th.~ . poetty ..·.of ..·Itdandshone.in: that' little "squareiof light, moody, haunting, full of dreams, calling us to follow on, follow on. . . .. By this oneges.; ture of excelling simplicity the setting was en-. larged iritotheregion of great theatre art. '.

Now here is a.strangething, l.said to the. de- .

signers. If wecans~cceed in seeing ,~?e.~~#4:~\! j!1alif.Y.,~f~~:.e!.~Y:5~~~S~i,!I..~~~}E~:.t.~..•Weki:'w. y "\ thettuthwhen we see, it, Emerson said, from.' opinion, as we know tha'twe are awake when we are awake. For example: you have never been in Heaven, .and you ,have never seen an angel. But if someone .prodllces a playabout··angels whose scenes are laid in Heaven you will know at a

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77 76 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

glance whether his work is right or wrong. Some curious intuition will tell you. The sense of recog nition is the highest experience the theatre can give. As we work we must seek not for self expression or for performance for its own sake, but only to establish the dramatist's intention,

knowing that when we have succeeded in doing so audiences will say to themselves, not, This is beautiful, This is charming, This is splendid, but -This is true. This is the way it is. So it is, and

notOilierWise. . . . There is nothing esoteric in the search for truth in the theatre. On the con trary, it is a part of the honest everyday life of the theatre.

The energy of a p;3.rticuiar play, its emotional content, its' aura, so to speak, has its own definite

physical dimensions. It extends just so far in space and no farther. The walls of the setting must be

placed at precisely this point. If the setting is larger than it should be, the audience gets a feel ing of meagerness and hollowness; if smaller, a feeling of confusion and pressure. It is often very difficult to adjust the physical limits of a setting

to its emotional limitations. But great plays exist outside the categories of dimension. Their bounty

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER

is as boundless as the air. Accordingly we need not think of a stage-setting, in a larger sense, as a matter of establishing space relations. Great plays have nothing to do with space. The setting for a great play is no more subject to the laws of space composition than music is. We may put aside once and for all the idea of a stage-setting as. a glorified show-window in which actors are to be exhibited and think of it instead as a kind of

symphonic accon;tpaniment or obbligato to the play, as evocative and intangible as music itself.. Indeed, music may playa more important role than we now realize in the scenic evocations of

the future. In the last analysis the designing of stage scen

ery is not the problem of an architect or a painter or a sculptor or even a musician, but of a poet. By a poet I do not mean, of course, an artist who is concerned only with the writing of verse. I am speaking of the poetic attitude. The recognized

poet, Stedman says, is one who gives voice in expressive language to the common thought and'

feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. I will give you a very simple illustration. Here is a fragment of ordinary speech, a paraphrase of

part of Hamlet's soliloquy, To be or not to be:

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #26

78 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

I wish I were dead I I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up! But I'm afraid of what might happen afterward. Do people dream after they are dead? ... But Hamlet does not express himself in this way. He says, To die, to sleep; to

, sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come.

. . . Here are two ways of saying the same thing. The first is prose. The second is poetry. Both of them are true. But Shakespeare's way the poetic way-is somehow deeper and higher and truer and more universal. In this sense we

may fairly speak of the art of,.~~~_~esig':l.ing as poetic, in that it seeks to giy~. expre~slC;~ to ~e essential ql1ality()f_~ play rathertl1ao'i:o -itS'out ward characteristics.'"· -- ---., ..-.-.....

,,~ ", "." .' ~ " ...

Some time ago one of the younger stage de signers was working with me on the scenes for an historical play. In the course of the production we had to design a tapestry, which was to be decorated with figures of heraldic lions. I sent him to the library to hunt up old documents. He came back presently with many sketches, copies of originals. They were all interesting enough, but somehow they were not right. They lacked something that professionals call "good theatre."

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 79 They were not theatrical. They were accurate and -lifeless. I said as much to the designer. "Well, what shall we do about it?" he asked me. "We have got to stop copying," I said. "We must try something else. We must put our imaginations to work. Let us think now. Not about what this heraldic lion ought to look like, but what the de sign meant in the past, in the Middle Ages.

"Perhaps Richard, the Lion-Heart, carried this very device emblazoned on his banner as he marched across Europe on his way to the Holy Land. Richard, the Lion-Heart, Coeur de Lion . . . What memories of childhood this name con jures up, what images of chivalry! Knights in armor, ent~antedca~tles, magic cas<fents, peril ous seas, oriflammes\ and~()!l~~lons\ Hear the great battle-criesl See the b~~ners floating through the smoke! Coeur de Lion, the Cru sader, with his singing page Blondel. ... Do you remember Blondel's song, the song he sang for three long years while he sought his master in prison? '0 Richard, 0 mon Roil L'Univers t'abandonnel .. :

"And now your imagination is free to wander, if you will allow it to do so, among the great names of romance. Richard, the Lion-Heart,

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #27

80 mE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

King Arthur, Sir Percival and the mystery of the Holy Grail, the Song of Roland, the magic sword, Durandal, Tristan and Isolde, the love potion, the chant of the Cornish. sailors, the ship with the black sail; the Lady Nicolette of whom Aucassin said, Beauvcnir et bel aller, lovely when you come, lovely when you go; the demoiselle Aude, who died for love; the Lady Christabel; the Ancient Mariner with the Albatross hung about his neck; the Gd, Charlemagne, Barba rossa, the Tartar, Kubla Khan, who decreed the pleasure-dome in Xanadu, in the poem Coleridge heard in a dream. . . . And there are the leg endary cities, too, Carcassonne, Granada, T or cdlo; Samarkand, the Blue City, with its fa'rades of turquoise and lapis lazuli; Carthage, Isfahan, T rebizond; and there are the places which have never existed outside a. poet's imagination Hy Brasil, BroceIiande, the Land of Luthany, the region Elenore, the Isle of Avalon, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, where ever King Arthur lyethsleeping as in peace. . . . And there is the winged Lion of St. Mark in Venice with the device set forth fairly beneath it, Pax Tibi, Marce, Evangelista Meus;and there are the mounted knights in the windows of Chartres,

81TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER

riding on, riding on toward Our Lady as she bends above the high altar in her glory of rose.

"These images of romance have come to out .. minds-all of them-out of this one little symbol" of the heraldic lion. They are dear to us. They can never fade· from our hearts.

"Let your fancy dwell and move among them in a kind of revery. Now, in this mood, with these images bright in your mind, draw· your figure of the lion once more.

"This new drawing is different. Instead· of imitating, describing what the artists of the Mid dle Ages thought a lion looked like, it summons up'an image of medieval romance. Perhaps with out knowing it I have stumbled on a definition of art in the theatre; all art in the theatre s.hpJ.llc;l be,

_"~,,,,,.,,"~.~''''''.'''"''".''V'' ",,," "" ""'~'/'d,_';"

~.~:~~p~ti~.~j?"l,1;...evDCatixe. Not ~ description, hut an evocation. (A bad actor descnbes a charac,.. ....." .......................... t~!;he explains it.· He, e"pounds it.~·gooaac~or

~It~~e~,~42:::::;gi;P;~~:. SOmethf!;g-~b~ut it brings back memories of medieval love-songs and crusaders and high ad ventures. People will look at it without knowing why. In this drawing of a 'lion-onlya detail in a magnificent, elaborate setting-there will be a

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #28

82 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION quality which will attract them and disturb them and haunt them and make them dream. Your

feeling is in it. Your interest is in it. You have triumphed over the mechanics of the theatre and

for the time being you have become a poet."

The poetic conception of stage design bears little relation to the accepted convention of realis

tic scenery in the theatre. As a matter of fact it is

quite the opposite. Truth in the tlI~,atre, as the masters of the theatre have always known, stands

above and beyond mere a,<,:curacy to fact. In the

theatre the actual thing is never the exciting

thing. Unless life is turned into art on the stage it stops being alive and goes dead.

So much for the realistic theatre. The artist ,hould omit the details, the prose of nature aiid

give us only the spirit and splendor. When we 'p~t a star in asky, for example, it is not just a star in a sky, but a "supernal messenger, excel

lently bright." This is purely a question of our

point of view. A star is, after all, only an electric light. The point is, how the audience will see it, what images it will call to mind. We read of

Madame Pitoeff's Ophelia that in the Mad Scene

she handled the roses and the rosemary and the

rue as if she were in a Paradise of flowers.

TO A YOUNG STAGE DESIGNER 83 We must bring into the immediate life of the theatre-"the two hours' traffic of our stage"

images of a larger life. The stage we inhabit is a chamber of the House of Dreams. Our work on

this stage is to suggest the immanence of a vision

ary world all about us. In this world Hamlet dwells, and Oedipus, and great Juno, known by her immortal gait, and the three witches on the blasted heath. We must learn by a deliberate

effort of the will to walk in these enchanted re gions. We must imagine ourselves into their vast

ness. Here is the secret of the flame that bums in the

work of the great artists of the theatre. They

seem so much ~ore. aware than we are, . and so much. more awake, and so much more alive that

they make us feel that what we call living is not·

living at all, but a kind of sleep. Their knowl edge, their wealth of emotion, their wonder, their

elation,th!'!irswift clear seeing surrounds every occasion with a crowd of values that enriches it

beyond anything which we, in our. happy satis faction, had ever imagined. In their hands it be

comes not only a thing of beauty but a thing of

power. And we see it all-beauty and power

alike-as a part of the life of the theatre.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #29

r.tl ~

::> IV)

r.tl l?

~ V) :>

~ l? ::> 0 ::r: I-r.tl ~ 0 V)

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #30

SOME THOpGHfS ON STAGE COSTUME

Let HS have a glimpse pf incompl'chemibles:. and thoHghts of things, which thoughts bllttendel'ly tOHch •.

-SIR THOMAS' BROWNE

IN LEARNING how a costume for the stage isde..

signed and made. we have to go. through a cet: tain arnOllntof 'routine training. We must learn aboute:~~Ens~ ,and about E~s,W:ehave. ,to know what farthingales are, and wimples, and patches and calechesand parures 'and g()dets and .

appliques and passementerie. We J"tave to' .know the instant we see and touch a fabric what it will look like on the stage both. in movement and in repose. We have to develop the brains that are in

our fingers. We have to enhance out: feeling for

style in the theatre.. We have. to experiment end

Jessly until our work is as nearly perfect .as we can

make it, until we are, so to speak, released from

it. All this is a part of our apprenticeship. But there 'coines to every one of us a· time when the

problema{ cr~~~g~resen~.~L its.~lf. 87

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #31

88 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

If we are to accomplish anything in any art we must first see what our problem is before we can proceed to solve it. What we do in the theatre depends upon what we see. If we are to design for the theatre we must have the clearest possible

image in our minds of the nature and the purpose and the function of the theatre.

Now this theatre we are working in is a very strange place. It deals, not with logic, but with magic. It deals with witchcraft and demoniac possession and forebodings and ecstasies and mys

tical splendors and legends and playthings and parades and suspicions and mysteries and rages and jealousies and unleashed passions and thrill

ing intimations and austerity and elevation and luxury and ruin and woe and exaltation and se crets "too divinely precious not to be forbidden," -the shudder, the frisson, the shaft of chill

moonlight, the footfall on the stair, the knife in the heart, the face at the window, the boy's hand on the hill. . . . The air of the theatre is filled with extravagant and wheeling emotions, with

what H. L. Mencken calls "the grand crash and glitter of things."

In the theatre, the supernormal is the only norm and anything less is subnormal, devitalized.

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 89

If we try to bring the theatre down to our own level, it simply ceases to be. When we see Oedi pus Rex in the theatre, when we hear Pel/cas and Mclisande, when we examine a stage design by Adolphe Appia, we realize that great artists like Sophocles and Debussy and Appia create as they do, not only because they are more skilled, more experienced than the rest of us, but because

they think and feel differently from the way the rest of us do. Their orientation is different from our own. When we listen to what artists tell us

in their work-when we look at what they look at and try to see what they see-then, and only then, do we learn from them.

There is no formula for inspiration. But to ask ourselves, why did that artist do that thing in

that particular way instead of in some other way? is to take the first step toward true creation.

Nature has endowed us all with a special faculty called imagination, by means of which we can form mental images of things not present to our senses. T revisa, a seer of the late fourteenth

century, defined it as the faculty whereby "the soul beholds the likeness of things that be ab

sent." It is the most precious, the most powerful, and the most unused of all human faculties. Like

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #32

90 THE DRAMA TIC IMAGINATION

the mantle of rainbow feathers in the Japanese No drama, Hagarotno, it is a treasure not lightly giVen to mortals. Many people confuse imagina .. tion 'with . ingenuity, ,'with inventiveness.· But' im

agi:Mgo.~is not this thing at aU:}~)2"5!?:.~~~i~

po;wer of se:~g"'~'~~"'~~":Y~"~"'!!t~,!!!!!!~.Andit '1StIie'very" essence of the, theatre. ' " '"

Many of you are familiar with the region of the Ardennes, in Belgium .. Now thiscountryw. side, charming and poignant. though it is, may seem no more beautiful than many parts ·ofour own country, nearer and dearer to us. But Shake. speare once '\'Vent there. And in his drama, As You Like It, the familiar scene is, no longer the Ardennes we know, but the Forest of Arden, where.onevery enchanted tree hang the tongues that show the beauties of Orlando's Rosalind.

Atalanta's better part, sad Lucretia's modesty.

Shakespeare's imagination joins with our own to summon up an ideal land, an image of out lost paradise. Or let us take another example: King Lear had, I dare say, a life of his own outside the limits of Shakespeare's play. a daily life of routine very much like our own. He got up in the morn ing and put on his boots and ate his breakfist and

SOME THOUGl;ITS ON STAGE COSTUME 91

signed dull documents and yawned and grumbled and was bored like everyonedse in the world. But thedram.a ~loes" not give. us those, momentsi, It giveS ,usLeat· at his highest pitch' oflivi,ng. It shows him .. inJntimsest action, a wild old' man stonningatheavell,. bearinghi~ dadghterCor. delia, dead in' his arms,. , ,

I~.these··eiamples we may divine Jh*~$F~are:s:"" oWt.int(:ntion rowardthe' theatre. His atcitt;&de the trije dramatic~tti~ude, the mood, 'irid~d: in ~~~~~:~,~U:*'gi~~:~E~I~':~~~~J~.,JS,,;g~~11fi~t~se awareness. of infecclOusiexdtemellt,l£ we arc:' to .'_'~w",_<"'-M~ ...";.__ ... ,:~;;,,,,.t_·""":"':"" __~'~'''f,.~~''''_t'::1'.... ".;':'~"~".' .. ...,.~".:~~ ...:~.."'" " ' ' ,:~" ,', ';, ',"

create .inthe~heatre,. w~lIltist first leam taput on this creativ~ inte~ti6n1ike the 'mandeof rain· bow f~athers. We must learn, to feel the, drive and beat of th~ dramatic imagin~tionin its home. W ¢ must take the little gift we llave intQthe hall of the gods.

A stage costume isa creation of the theatre.

Its quality is purely theatrical and.E~,~outsid~ the theatre, it ..loses its magic at,gl1ce. It dies as a plant dies when uprooted; Why this should be so I do not know. But here! is one more proof of theetemal enchantment which every worker in the ,theatre knows and feels. The actual ma

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #33

92 THE· DRAMATIC· IMAGINATION

terials of which a stage costume is made count for

very little. Outwardly it may be ~()t,hingp~~e tkaE..;a_l!.~~~I:!~_~Q.~._9.! sh:~bQY~Y:kh:ets.and cheap glass "glits." I remember Graham-Robertson'sde ~;ipti~~C '~r a co.stume . worn· by Ellen T erty as Fair Rosamund:

She looked her loveliest in the rich gown of her first entrance, a wonderful Rosettian· effect of

soft gold and glowing color veiled in c blar:ther

masses of bright bair in a net ofgold and golden hearts embroidered on her robe. . .. Tbe foun

dation was an old pink gown, worn with stage

servic; and reprieved for the occasion from. the

rag-bag. The mysterious veiling was the coarsest

and cheapest black net, the glory of hair tbrough

golden meshes was· a bag of gold tinsel stuffed with crumpled paper, and the broidered . hearts

were cut out of gold paper and gummed on. The whole costume would have been dear at ten shil

lings and was one of the finest stage dresses that 1 have ·ever seen. .

The wardrobes of our costume-establishments are crammed with hundreds of just such cos tumes. I can see them now, with their gilt· and their fustian ,and their. tinsel and their .. bands· of

SOME· THOUGHTS ON .. STAGE COSTUME 93

sham ·ermine. You all know them-.the worn hems, the sleeves shortened and lengthened and shortened again, the seams tak,en in. and let out and taken in, the faded tights, the .embroidery hastily freshened with new bits from the stQ(:k room, the fashions ofyesterday gone Hat like stale champagne.... lW.t.in the theatre a miracle takes p. lace. The dramatic .imaO'ina.tion transforms

..~"...... ~, ...._-_.' .......;;.•.t.,,_...."'......_"'''''~,... __'"..:;,'''c.:,'''.'''.....''''h',''.........,..;.,''''~''"'___-:

_~em.:;_!~~r.~c:()m&... 4Xt:l~fP:~~.~.!h:.y~~~~3~~ a ~!l!.P!~~L~.!!._'.l~y~~e.. a ~~miIl:der. ()f .~mgs".we ?~c:(!...lill~~...~~,~r:?~.. ~~~~~E.. ~!m-jpy. The actors wearing them become ambassadors . from thathright other world behihd the footlights.

But a· stage costume has an added sigriificance . in the:: theatre in that it is created to enhance the particular quality of a special occasion. It is.-4e

:~g~~d for· a particular character in . a· particular scene in a particular play-.not just for a character in .a scene in a play. but forthfl.t ~h:Jt"'~J~~t..~in.Jkfl.t s~~~?, ..~t.I t}!'!~.play-·and accordingly it is an or g~nic and necess<\ry part of the drama in which it appears. One might say that an ordinary cos tume,an ordinary suit or· dress, . is an organkand necessary part of our everyday living. And so it is. But-and here is thepointl-dramaisnot

everyday living. Drallla and life are two verydif~ ·'~'~"",----,,,,,,"~c<c,ct,.,,,,,,,,,""""""'_"""'"

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #34

94 THE. DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

ferent things. ~i!~, as we all'1ive it, is made up of troubles and blunders and dreams that are never'fulii-;~~1~~d~"Theeternal eyer~n~~~q~~~~;; William James' c.a1ledit.. We .go o~lfromday to . day, most of us, beset··by uncertainties and Eros", trations,and try to do the best we can, not seeing very clearly, not. understanding very welL And we say,' Life is like thad Butdcamatsnot in the least. like that. Drama isl~fe, to be surC!, b~tJ.iJe s~~l1._thXQ.~g~._~~~~~;;:;~~G:dramatistr.seen.:~ply . !iID~.~9g~lh~r:~ .·.~eA .. ~!~~.~..~RiJ:~ary,...£orin-..and order. We see ~~r.?wnlivesrefIected as.ina~~gic m!!i~r~_~!~~~:[il1d'"-~§lpn1ied'lna pattern,ve had not nercdvedbetore:"'Even,thing ort his sta!7e _""'~"_"''''''~' '~""~''''r'-''4~---'":''''"1"'''''~'''~'f .. ,,,,,",~,,,L'''''''''.''~''''t _,,_._, ,~,/,_, .. " '", ,/', ""',, ';; ':-P' " '~'" , '~·'"·,",,D'C:::·

~~~~~-.aLp.ru:.t.Qt.J:h~t._..~~qt:;r.order-.. the words, the situations, the actors, the. setting, the lights, the costwnes.Eaeh element has its own particu", lar relation to the drama and plays its_own partin . the drama. And each. element-·the word, the actor, the costume-has the exact sigl':lificance of a note in.a symphony. Each separate costume we create for a play must be exactly suited both to the character it helps to express and to the6cca sion it graces. We shall not array Lady Macbeth in pale blue organdie or Ariel in purple velvet. Mephistopheles will wear his scarlet and Hamlet

SOMETHOtJdHrS ON STAGE COSTUME 95 his solemn black as long as the theatre continues to exist. A Hamlet in real life may possess a wardrobe of various styles. and colors. But in the theatre it is simply not possible for Mr. John Gielgud or Mr~Maurice Evans to say. 'Tis not alone my tawny eloak,good mother, .norcustorrr

ary suits of tender green. • .

With these ~~_.~~~~!...als of stag~s.9..~e in mind-··.~~cality and apJ?~E!!!t~!Js:ss:-Iet us consider a partk~lar-rrrus"ttation of the problem of costume designing. I have purposely chosert:.n exam'plethat is as remote as possibleft6m. our everyday experience, in order that it may give more scope for our imaginations. Let us go back three hundred years in history, 'to another' theatre altogether. John Milton wrote a' poetic tragedy, Samson Agonistes, thought by many to be the most sublime example of drama in .this or any language. As we read. this tragedy, we presently come upon the following curiously evocative pas,. sage of description:

But who is this, what thing of Sea or Land;>.

Female of sex it seems, That so bedeckt, ornate, and gay,

Comes this way sailing

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #35

¢ THE DRAMATIC lMAGINATION Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound forth' Isles Of Tavanor Gadier

With all her' bravery on" 'and t4ckle trim .. Sails {iltd, and streamerswavingl

Courted by all the win;dsthlft hold them play~. An amber scent of odQroilsptrfume Her Harbinger . . •

Her~is an example of thedramatic4nagin~- . tion inaction, full hlown,at th~top of its bent;;. This Titan· among, dreamets;. the. man, who could write liQes like And now on earth the seventh evening (lrose in Edenj is describing a costume~ A! stage costume, if you .please. Let llS tty to visualize this costume.

Fortunately we all have-orat least we ought to have-a reasonably, clear idea of what a woman's costume looked like in Milton's day. We have all seen ,pictures of the, tight bodices and the full stiff skirts and the ruffs and the jewels. And we can find plenty of documents, if we need them, on the shelves of our libraries. But docu~ ~-=!l_ts will not help us here, or at most they will serve only as a starti1l.g::P2i~~ from which, to p~ ceed. What we are after at the momenfiinot" eru~" .•."..~-"' .

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 97 dition, hut. evocation. We are to evoke a.mental-,...~.,..-' -,-,,"',-,---,,""-"'~-;.""'-- ima~ ofthi~_~Q~twne.We are to_:ill:(:)wi~..!~ "'Pp~~r!~.~:~J>'!}tsel£~ to ~anifest, itself to us, to occ;ur to us, as itwere. W.eshall find this exercise a difficult . one, entirely ,outsideof,.our' usual rou., , tine, hut in the endstrangelyrewardilig..We shall discover that .ourim~ginationpQsse~ses a curious· focusing and proJecting pOwer. I have ofren inquired' in "am,as' to. tlreprec;ise nature of this. visioning faCulty. Does the costume. ~e are ahout'to, discussalreadY','e](ist',in 'some ideal'pla~ tOnic ,world of imag~$? Hav~' outimaginati()ns, bodieS? 1 do not: Know. I Qnlyknow. mattltis faculty ,of strong inward viewing functions in ac;cordance with an old, old law.1 cannot pretend toexpla:init. I canot1ly affirm it. It simply is so•.

Perhaps ',this iswh{ ~eOnardo daiy~:i had in nllndwhen he declared '-.~<l,~~~J:l,!:1!1:!~$;y~U:tQt

~~_lr_~~ve~~~~_p~jects.r~y:s of"l~~~~) , Our' first 'step is to ~!~!~~,.~i~_.~~~~. in

,,~~~!!~!!,.J~;LM.iltQn~s ' own ,'. ~jme.We ~ow that the costumes of any period in history are typical of that period. For example, let us think of' the costumes of today in relation ,to the ,life of today. Here are a few catchwords, chosen almost at ran.., dom out of the daily papers: '., television, airplane.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #36

http:ofthi~_~Q~twne.We

98 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

jitterbug, streamline, New Deal. A. F. of L. C.I.O.• C.C.C., P.W.A. And so on. As we read them we instantly .. get an itnpression-" broad, general, rough, to be sure. but still an impression -of the characteristic quality of'our own epoch. swift, direct, inclusive, brilliant. staccato. Now what could be more expressive . of this quality than the snappy chic nervous little tailored suits we see by the dozens in our fashion magazines and in our shop windows? Look at the tight little sweaters and coats· and skirts and the closely wrapped turbans, aU so simple and practical,all made, not to charm, but to surprise and excite, all like quick bold sketches, to be rubbed OUt to

morrow. They are _C..~~~2.~§._Q!~~~.~~~.~_~!:i~. unique Irl0ment in time. Seen in retrospect, they m~y give the histonans of the future as clear an idea of this particular era in the world's history as a sixteen..millimeter camera or the' Grand

Coulee Dam. They are an inseparable pan of our own special idiom.

In the same way a costume of Milton's own

time will inevitably ~?,pre~~~..~~_,"cll.jlractecistic 9:l!~H~!~s of life at that tin:te. Let us bring to mind '~hat ~;"k;,~;"-~rth~sequalities. Great names rise in the memory: England: Elizabeth the

SOME THOUGHTS ON' STAGE COSTUME 99

Queen, the sovereign who once said, I could have wept but that my face was made for the day: Sir Francis Drake, the defeat of the Spanish Armada. the streets of London all hung with blue, like the sea: William Shakespeare. author and player, the greatest master of. public art the world has ever known: Marlowe. with his Hmighty line" Kit Marlowe, stabbed in the Mermaid Tavern in Southwark oVer across the bridge; Sir Walter Raleigh, with his cloak and his sea-knowledge and his new colony, Virginia .• in the west, on the other side of the world; Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones; . Bacon, Leices ter,. Essex: Mary of Scotland, whose skin was so fair, men said, that when she drank red wine you could see .the red drops running down in her throat like fire. • . • These names out of history, stirring. blood-swept, passionate, mingle and blend in our minds in an overpowering sense of splendor and reckless adventure and incredible energy and high fantastical dreams. And then. we see John Bunyan's Christian, accompanied by Ignorance and Faith and Hope and Mistrust, on his way to the Celestial City. his soul intent on cherubim and seraphim. And Sir Thomas Browne admonishes us in his echoing cadences to be ready

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #37

100 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever~i\.nd we hear John Milton as he dictates the "So.Qnet 011 His Blindness"..,;...:God doth not need either man's wor4 orRis own gifts. The Reforn;tation is here, with its fetVorsandits exaltations aIldits solemn preoccupations. with mo.ral gtandeur.

As wec:lwell. upon '. these things, the dramatic imaginat~onbegins to sketch in our minds the first vague outlines ofa costume. It is bold and fantastic and elaborate and ceremonious and splendid, a typical expression oEthe Age oiDar.;.. ing~ So much we see.; LetuspauseJor a moment and considerthecostupe from another point of

view,th1stiiri~'Iil¥iation to ,~~":Sl!!~!!n',,~f,MiJ;. £~~'~-~<?~""P..~EiY·' The chief rlaitof,any given poet, WaltWhttman . reminds us, ·is alway~!!te

_~,~.?1l~_,?!.:~yh~sl.Lh~j;;2.~I~1!~es.. his .subjects; Milton's mood is mature, noble, grand~Hissea- son is autumn, splendid and serefie,a "season of mellow fruitfulness." And we find in his pOetry

a great elegance, a slightly rigid elegance perhaps, 'like the elegance whichis·at times almosta .. con straint in the music of Handel or PUl;celL It is often gay, jocund, buxom, one mightsay; hearty,

with a great natural health coursing through it; but it is never merely funny, as Will Shakespeare

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 101

is funny, for· instance, when . he, makes Joliees Nurse say, Now. afore Gad, la,mso vexed thl/.t every part aboHtmequlvers. Nothing so friv()... lous here. Milton's verse is all in· the noble heroic vein, in the. Dori~ mode. It is otdered"splertdid, a great· pavane, a gorgeous pageant, a concerto£ organ and orchestra ledhy a 'tn,asterof sound .. It is laid out like afonnalgarden, aU glowing hi autumn sunlight, along whose enchantied avenues w¢ may wander for hours. ,Until the tempeSt· comes, and lightning splits the. sky,andtheearth. reels, and we hear the .voices inh~avehlihanting, Of Man's first disobedience and tbeFruit.,

In the light of these "solemriphtnetaty' wheel-, ings~'ourimaginary costume takes onnew,quali ties. It is more triumphant, m6re aswniShing, than we had originally thought. Butthete is a certain elegant sobriety ahout it which we had not sensed at first. It is. a Miltonian. costume, the creation of an adult mind.

Let us imagine that wc:_~ejt.injtsown,prQper

~!l,!!.()~~~~gs.. It is a stage costume; let us see it on a stage, then-in' Whitehall, perhaps, or in

one of the theatres designed by Inigo Jones. A figure appears before us like something seen be tween sleeping and waking, or in a daydream,

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #38

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102 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

vague, arresting, unfamiliar. It moves in a quiver. ing amber twilight, a romantic dusk made by hundreds of tiny tapers placed about the pro. scenium. You will note that our imaginary Mil tonian theatre has not the benefit of our modem mechanisms for lighting the stage, our Leicas and Fresnels and interlocking dimmer-boxes. Yet the old theatre lighting, in spite of its crudeness, had a quality which our modem lighting sadly lacks, a quality which I can only describe as dreaminess. Our plays are case-histories, not dreams, and for the most part they are played in the pitiless light that beats down upon an operating table. But in that low shadowless amber radiance the unusual, the extraordinary, the fabulous, came into its own.

Accordingly the stage C()stllm~S .. ()£th().~.,£!!TIes ,,:~re rnadeto catcll and'drink up every~~~}'!yan derigg .,beam "ofl~g~t.. ~4 te.6ec;t itQa<;k.J;Q.~.the audience. They gleam and Rash and glitter. Glis ter is the real word. They sparkle and twinkle and blaze with gold and silver and color and spangles and jewels. They transform the actor into a being of legend.

We have examined our costume in the light figuratively speaking-of the wonderful period in

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 103

history we call the Reformation, and in the light of Milton's own solemn poetic imagery. We see that it has-indeed, \hat it must have-the quali ties of boldness, fantasy, dignity, formality. Now, as we look at it in the light of the theatre of that earlier day, we add to it the qualities of glamour and luster. Step by step it becomes clearer in our minds. It becomes iridescent, be comes radiant. It glows and shines.

And now let us be specific, ,and ask in Milton's own words, But who is this?

~-,'.-

It is Delilah, the wife of Samson, the woman whom he knew and loved in the valley of Sorek. This curious figure, this living shell, this incredi ble puppet encased in its elaborate dress, so stiff it almost stands alone, is Delilah. In the argu ment of the sixteenth chapter of Judges we may read her story:

Delilah. corrupted by the Philistines, enticeth Samson. Thrice she is deceived. At last she over cometh him. The Philistines take him and put out his eyes. His strength recovering. he pulleth down the house upon the Philistines, and dieth.

We are apt to look at such a story today too exclusively from an analytic point of view. We

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #39

104 THE DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

take the cue from our doctors·of psychology, with their Hair for definition, and· we call Delila.h···a vampire, orananima-6gure, it may be.. Or . we ta.ke the cue from Kipling and think sentimen tally of a fool and a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. Or we take . the .cuefroIll Hollywood and call Delilah simply "the menace."The fact' is. however, that in so doing we divest the story of the emoclonalvalues that have crowded aoout.it

ever since our infancy. We_'!'1:~}!..~e:j_~~"g~Ji!!!!!ij~-,· and dismiss. it froIIlc()'L!r.. mind.s",.Butjtj~Pr.~fS.!:Jy

cliese~·em~ti~nal. _~~~~~s...~_~~-,.~C?-Y!4.-_~~~re~~:.. ~~ .fI1IJ.~~~ Our·~ here is to ~~;~F~Y~...Qm.:~GhildhoQd mem0ties~,nct~~...mQ9d .they...bl'iag~ith_.:t:h~, the atmosphere of nobility.and betrayal and vengeance and divine justice that broods over them . like .a cloud. These· memories,still so com pelling, have become a part of the ·old story, in separable from it. One might almost say, they are Jh~ ..s.~«?!Y. In the mood of awe with whk};~ first pored over the pages of the Dore Bible-if we can but re-live it for an instant!-Delilah is no longer a figure £.amiliar to us, a human being like ourselves. She is Delilah herself, straight out of the pages of the Old Testament, the "Fury with the abhorred shears."

SOME rnOUGHTSON STAGE COSTUME lOS

Now the dramatic imagination invests our cos tum.e with wondetand awe and a kihd -0£ dark glory. It isa costuIrte for Delilah. She:..-Delilah theenchanttes5-'--is.to . wear • it. in/hermomeot of triumph over the husband whom she has b~ ttayedand blinded. Another light is thrown upon it,· the light of childhood tecoUecti0ll' Images.·of Circe and Hecate and "dark-veiled. C0o/tto" come thronging into our .mindsl withtheir:phil ters and their potions apd· th~irmagicspells.

Our exercise,dtawstoward' mend. Now; .,

6nally, let us',~:" what.:~~E.J:~n.t~slL~~~~..'!~' He co~patesthefigureof. Delilah to' a ship. A stately ship of Tarsus. Not an English ship,you will note, but Oriental, such a ship, perhaps, as the.one that. brought Shakespeare's Viola to the stormy coast of Illyria. And what should.1 do in lllyria? My brother•.he is in Elysium.. •. The ship of Milton's. dreams, sailing on, sailing on, toward the islands of myrrh and cinnamon-I This is not the only time we have seen a woman compared to a ship· in dramatic literature ..The comparisonisa happy one always. The image holds us, whether it is the . image of this stately galleon moving slowly athwart our fancy.orofthe brisk 'little pleasure-boat, . Mistress '" Millamant,

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #40

http:theenchanttes5-'--is.to

http:F~Y~...Qm

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J.06 THE - DRAMATIC IMAGINATION

sweeping in with all sails set and a shoal of fools for tenders. Or of the tight vessel, Mistress Frail. well-rigged an she were but as well manned. There is something feminine. as every man knows. about· all sailing-ships. with their bend ingsand glidings and swayings. Bow they set sail for an occasion and Boat and veer and turn and take the air and bow and hesitate and advance and dissemble! Beautiful ships. beloved .of mari ners, beautiful women, who charm our hearts away.••.

A costume of the Reformation:.a Miltonic cos-: tu~~:. ~.. gle~1ri;ng",q),S~l!!~:,~i3Jhl~~C~~"~~~e: a cos£ume f()r_ Q~Jilah;,_an9tjin!ljl-¥~.~ £()stul!lC:"that reminds us of ~".§t~ltd.y..s.hip. A strange mingling -~f i~ges.·:··--:. All at oncewe see it. The figure -I had almost said figurehead-draws near and in our imagination we watch its majestic progress across the stage. It towers above us on its high chopines. There is a gleam and a moving of rieh stuffs and shapes and above all a countenance~is it a mask?-topped by a high jeweled headdress and bent down ever and again to catch the lights from . below . We have. a sense of a thing all golden, a gilded galleon riding the waves. Golden,

SOME THOUGHTS ON STAGE COSTUME 107

carved, overlaid, crusted with gold on dark gold, so heavy it can move only with a gliding step, a slow, measured approach. The billowing folds of the stiff brocaded Oriental silks make a whisper ing sound like the sound of waves. breaking on the shore. There is a rippling of light and a soft rustling and a foam of lace on the purRed sleeves and a sheen of gems over all. a mirage of sapphires and moonstones and aquamarines and drops of crystaL Great triple ruffs Boat upon the air, and veils-uslow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn" droop and fall with the figure's stately dippings and fillings and careenings over the smooth Roor of the sea. We see it for an instant, plain and dear.

Now it has vanished. We saw it. And now we must make it.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #41

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #42

Theater EMt and West

PERSPECTIVES TOWARD A TOTAL THEATER

LEONARD CABELL PRONKO

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, Los ANGELES, LONDON

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #43

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PREss, LTD.

LONDON, ENGLAND

ISBN: 0-520-02622-5 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 67-221 76 DESIGNED BY DAVID PAULY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #44

Introduction A Theater of Feast

And you seriously ask: us to admit that we prefer a dull and mechanical theatre such as we have today to one where all the gayest, freshest theatrical art flourishes? It is preposterous!

E. G. CRAIG

The traveler who has feasted on the theaters of Japan, China, and Bali cannot repress the feeling, when he returns to the West, that the actors are exceedingly loquacious and singularly incapable of doing anything other than talking. Our hypertro phied rational faculties have led us in the past three hundred years, and particularly since the industrial revolution and the late nineteenth-century age of science, to a theater that is most often as small as life itself, a theater that requires careful listening and intelligent understanding. We sit in plush seats, fatigued after two or three hours of dialogue interspersed with a bit of movement, then disperse to discuss the "issues" of the play, if it was a drama of any "significance." Our serious theater is so sociology-psychology-philosophy centered that it begins to acquire (as Ionesco claims Brecht might wish) all the charm of a night-school course. Instead of a feast for all the senses and for the mind as well, weare given the intellectual scraps from the top of the table of theatrical history. As Genet has said, for us everything happens in the visible world.

The theater this book deals with treats at least to some degree the invisible world, and it treats that invisible world (as well as multiple facets of the visible, palpable, audible one) in a total way that makes of it a feast-a feast the audience enjoys on most occasions, not for a trifling two or

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #45

THEATER EAST AND WEST

three hours, but for five, six, seven hours and occasionally for the whole night through. It is a theater of the inner eye and of the outer eye at the same time. Like our great theaters of the past, it is both realistic and theatricalized, both illusionistic and presentational. It possesses at once reality and style, whereas we most often seem to embrace one or the other. One reason for this polyvalence is the stress laid upon spectacle, often to the detriment of words; we are accustomed to the converse, and anything else strikes us as heretical, since for us theater is above all dramatic literature. Working with im ages-that is to say, with a purely theatrical poetry which exists in space and time rather than in any abstract sense on the printed page-the Oriental theater can appeal, in different ways and to varying degrees, to that part of the human makeup which is refractory to intellectual and conscious stimu lation. Obviously, no generalization will hold true for all the theaters under discussion. Kabuki, for example, often uses dia logue extensively, while Balinese dance drama in many in stances uses no speech at all.

Parallels are no doubt as invidious as comparisons, but it is tempting to imagine the story of a class-B horror film of the supernatural, performed by some Bernhardt who would also be a Pavlova, choreographed by Petitpas or Massine, with music of, say, Stravinsky, and costumes by Bakst. If such a mixture could achieve harmony, and if the supernatural ele ment were somehow connected with our religious life, it might evoke in us a feeling similar to that experienced by the peas ants of Bali as they witness the fearful Rangda and Barong play, or the more sophisticated reactions of the Japanese as they view one of the Kabuki demon plays. The whole world of the supernatural, denied us by our intellectual proclivities, is summed up in these tremendous spectacles, and experienced in a very real way by the observer, who is more a participant than we usually manage to be in the theater. The dimension lacking in our hQrror films is here supplied by traditional religious and national themes, and a style imposed upon the whole which is capable of raising the meanest occurrence (a father scolding

his child, for i art.

Such a thea! watcher and ~ conscious wod While it depic nightmarish ff heroes and del great "indraug found sense of

Bred on the in films, we ha experience of ~ pered, small-mi to give ourselv ance of five or healthy, comple or the Elizabet; grain of truth i today is a "the grocers, antipo(

Prisoners of 1 of artistic ende bind us to our ( spirit that migh other levels of e has flown. Or heroic for us, to swallow. Prospt ing the stage to . up of nothing btl

Most of the debted to men Prospero, Calib reality; to men 'V contact with clal East. Directors

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #46

's and occasionally for )f the inner eye and of ~ great theaters of the Ized, both illusionistic Ice reality and style, one or the other. One

~s laid upon spectacle, lre accustomed to the , heretical, since for us "e. Working with im* leatrical poetry which ly abstract sense on the n appeal, in different t part of the human al and conscious stimu .1 hold true for aU the !CampIe, often uses dia :e drama in many in

> comparisons, but it is ,s-B horror film of the hardt who would also :pas or Massine, with $ by Bakst. If such a f the supernatural ele , religious life, it might perienced by the peas 11 Rangda and Barong Ins of the Japanese as rs. The whole world of :llectual proclivities, is les, and experienced in nore a participant than The dimension lacking 'aditional religious and >on the whole which is nee (a father scolding

INTRODUCTION

his child, for instance, in a Balinese Djanger) to the level of art.

Such a theater of magic and hallucination both engulfs the watcher and keeps its distance-for it is highly stylized, a conscious work of art. It is at once subjective and objective. While it depicts our personal dreams and aspirations, our nightmarish fears and feverish hopes, evokes our childhood heroes and demons, sweeps us up in what Artaud called its great "indraughts of metaphysical air'" it does so with a pro found sense of formal perfection.

Bred on the small world of television and domestic comedy in films, we have lost touch with the vital, full-blooded total experience of great ages of theater. We are cowardly, pam pered, small-minded; too timid, too lazy, too unadventurous to give ourselves from head to guts to a theatrical perform ance of five or six hours. What we like to think of as the healthy, complete, vigorous theatrical experience of the Greeks or the Elizabethans is beyond us. Perhaps there is more than a grain of truth in Artaud's violent contention that our theater today is a "theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets and positivists, i.e., Occidentals." 1

Prisoners of the self, we seem unable, at any significant level of artistic endeavor, to break loose from the moorings that bind us to our everyday existence, incapable of liberating the spirit that might allow us to enter other spheres, investigate other levels of experience. Caliban stalks the boards, and Ariel has flown. Or rather, no, not even Caliban-he is far too heroic for us, too imaginative and monstrous for most of us to swallow. Prospero, with his familiars, has disappeared, leav ing the stage to the purely human, as though reality were made up of nothing but Mirandas, Trinculos, and Stephanos.

Most of the rich feasts of theater in our century are in debted to men whose vision embraced both Trinculo and Prospero, Caliban and Ariel, visible and invisible forms of reality; to men who attempted to renew their vision through a contact with classical forms of theater, including those of the East. Directors like Reinhardt, Copeau, Dullin, and Barrault

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #47

THEATER EAST AND WEST

turned not only to Greece, the commedia dell' arte, and Shake speare for inspiration, but sought new air and new techniques in the theaters of Asia. Among dramatists, Claudel, Brecht, and Genet reflect significantly an acquaintance with Oriental theater forms.

Alan Pryce-Jones, writing in Theater Arts (Oct., 1963) about "The Plays That Never Get Written," suggests that, "if Brecht could take a hint or two from Noh drama, so, with greater logic, could one of our native dramatists. Or from the Chinese, the Indian, the early moralities." A hint, yes, but a well-informed hint. To employ a technique without under standing it is to defeat its purpose. The so-called invisible men on stage in certain popular American "Chinese" plays, or the black-clad invisibles used by Tennessee Williams in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, all of whom draw atten tion to themselves, quickly degenerate into the cuteness of false theatricality. Such distortion is widespread, for there is confusion and misunderstanding regarding Oriental theater, even by those who are theater specialists. Or rather, there is no mi~understanding, for there is no understanding at all, but total Ignorance. People who might discourse for fifteen min utes on the significance of the Morris dance as a predecessor to drama, or the role of the interludes in Elizabethan theater, are inca~able of distinguishing between Noh and Kabuki, to say nothmg of the finer differences between genres so utterly dis similar as Kabuki and Chinese opera.

But l' ~. The abyss that sep arates 1 •• 1 Noh, or Peking opera 1\ from K '{/\N''- distinguishes a Balinese dance d, rientals whom we dis obliging orant of' one another's drama a ranee was brought ford ?ly to m national theater meeting m Toky, ped by a presentation of several ~'-"'UC:i lCom a l\.aOUkl hIstory play at the Kabuki-za. A month later I encountered the delegate from China and asked her how she had enjoyed the performance. Her reaction was

that of any foreigner of Kabuki-surprise, I didn't know what to

Such ignorance is d at last we have reach ports are not only pos sary. Writing in 195 "throws open a door ~ people, customs and when the Kabuki the (which it did in 1961 visit would be "a grea But beyond that undet cal and artistic sense Sl can affer immense rich ern theater has alread

The happy blendin theaters of Asia (and action with its implical verbalization) deserv( ental theater has a nu not mean a vague less lessons in technique a problems. Most of lazy-and say that it i: the East, but we must Eastern playwrights. ~ offer us a rich repertOl seeking out Occidenta Not imitation, but re-c

Such a confrontatio one brought about by western Europe three literature and theater I need to bring forth j cross-fertilization of s ern Europe with classic

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #48

Larry

Line

Larry

Line

~ Gaston Bachelard

Translated from the French by Maria Jolas

With a new Foreword by John R. Stilgoe

Beacon Press, Boston

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #49

conlenls

Foreword to the 1994 Edition vii

Foreword to the 1964 Edition xi

Introduction xv

1 The House. From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut 3

2 House and Universe 38

Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes 3 74

4 90 Nests

Shells

6 Corners 136

5 105

Miniature

8 Intimate Immensity 183

9 The Dialectics of Outside and Inside 211

10 The Phenomenology of Roundness 23 2

7 148

Beacon Press 25 Beacon Street Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

First published as a Beacon paperback in 1969 by arrangement with Grossman Publishers, Inc.

All righ ts reserved

Printed in the United States of America

99 98 97 8 765

Text design by Wladislaw Finne

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bachelard, Gaston, 1884-1962. [Poetique de I'espace. English] The poetics of space I Gaston Bachelard ; translated from the

French by Mariajolas, with a new foreword by john R. Stilgoe. p. em.

Originally published: New York: Orion Press, 1964. Translation of: La poetique de I'espace.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8070-6473-4 1. Space and time. 2. Imagination. 3. Poetry. 1. jolas, M.

II. Title. B2430.B253P6313 1994 114-dc20 93-27874

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #50

6 the poetics of space

memorial things are. We live fixations. fixations of happi ness. 1 We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories. we add to our store, ~ ~-~~""C. "T"'~ll"'f! never real historians, butalways near poe! ~ nothing but an expressio'

Thus. ' break UI may hOf ticityof Througl we touc house.

B8ff(11

s with care not to ,imagination, we ychological elas

imaginable depth. lough recollections.

the space of the

--r-This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house. I should say: the house shelters day dreaming. the house protects the dreamer. the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming recon stitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as day dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time:,;)

Now my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past. present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere. at times opposing. at others, stimulating one another. In

:1 We should grant "fixation" its virtues, independently of psychoana lytical literature which, because of its therapeutic function, is obliged to record, principally, processes of defixation.

7 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hut

the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies,' its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being's first world. Before he is "cast into the world," as claimed by certain hasty meta physics, man is laid in the cradle of the house. And always, in our daydreams, the house is a large cradle. A concrete metaphysics cannot neglect this fact, this simple fact, all the more, since this fact is a value, an important value, to which we return in our daydreaming. Being is already a value. Ufe begins well, it begins enclosed. protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.

From my viewpoint, from the phenomenologist's view point, the conscious metaphysics that starts from' the mo ment when the being is "cast into the world" is a second ary metaphysics. It passes over the preliminaries, when being is being-well, when the human being is deposited in a being-well, in the well-being originally associated with being. To illustrate the metaphysics of consciousness we should have to wait for the experiences during which being is cast out, that is to say. thrown out. outside the being of the house. a circumstance in which the hostility o( men and of the universe accumulates. But a complete meta physics, englobing both the conscious and the unconscious, would leave the privilege of its values within. Within the being, in the being of within, an enveloping warmth wel comes being. Being reigns in a sort of earthly paradise of matter, dissolved in the comforts of an adequate matter. It is as though in this material paradise, the human being were bathed in nourishment, as though he were gratified with all the essential benefits.

When we dream of the house we were born in, in th~ utmost depths of revery, we participate in this original warmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material para dise. This is the environment in which the protective beings live. We shall come back to the maternal features of the house. For the moment, I should like to point out

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #51

Larry

Line

Larry

Line

Larry

Line

8 the poetics of space

the original fullness of the house's being. Our daydreams carry us back to i,!;JAnd the poet well knows that the house holds childhood motionless "in its arms"1:

Maison, pan de prairie, d lumiere du soir Soudain vow acquerez presque une face humaine Yousltes pres de now, embrQSsants, embrQSSes.

(House. patch of meadow, oh evening light Suddenly you acquire an almost human face You are very near us, embracing and embraced.)

Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of ourmem. ories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams. A psy_ choanalyst should, therefore, turn his attention to this sim ple localization of our memories. I should like to give the name of topoanalysis to this auxiliary of psychoanalysis. Topoanalysis. then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant r~les. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being's stability -a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to "suspend" its Hight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

And if we want to go beyond history, or even, while re maining in history, detach from our own history the always too contingent history of the persons who have encumbered it, we realize that the calendars of our lives can only be

1 Rainer Maria RiIke, translated into French by Claude Vig.!e, In L. Lettres, 4th year, Nos. 14-15-16, p. 11. Editors note: In this work. all of the RiIke references will be to the French translations that inspired Bachelard's comments.

9 the howe. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hut

established in its imagery. In order to analyze our being in the hierarchy of an ontology, or to psychoanalyze our unconscious entrenched in primitive abodes, it would be necessary, on the margin of normal psychoanalysis, to de socialize our important memories, and attain to the plane of the daydreams that we used to have in the places iden tified with our solitude. For investigations of this kind. day dreams are more useful than dreams. They show moreover that daydreams can be very different· from dreams.1

And so,· faced with these periods of· solitude, the topa analyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space. did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary day dreaming?

Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory-what a strange thing it isl-does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been de stroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long s0 journ, are to be found in and through space. The uncon scious abides. Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are. To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biog rapher and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But her meneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its con junctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy. localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

Psychoanalysis too often situates the passions "in the century." In reality, however. the passions simmer and re simmer in solitude: the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in this solitude. 1 I plan to study these differences in a future work.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #52

10 the poetics of space

And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is aIien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic. We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, ap proaching the immemorial. But in the daydream itself, the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like above all still to be possessed. In the past, the attic may have seemed too small, it may have seemed cold in winter and hot in summer. Now, however, in memory recaptured through daydreams, it is hard to say through what syn cretism the attic is at once small and large, warm and cool, always comforting.

III

This beit nuance at lier that t1 it is well a The norm:

~ troduce a slight pointed out ear ld be added that of its happiness. .e itself at home

everywhere ~he assistance of the ousted Is that has been roughly or _ _-o-~. .1JUl: psychoanalysis sets the human being in motion, rather than at rest. It calls on him to live outside the abodes of his unconscious, to enter into life's adventures, to come out of himself. And natu\

.' II

11 the house. from cellar to garret. the significance of the hu.t

rally, its action is a salutary one. Because we must also give an exterior destiny to the interior being. To accompany psychoanalysis in this salutary action, we should have to undertake a topoanalysis of all the space that has invited us to come out of ourselves.

Emmenez·moil chemins! •••

(Carry me along,.oh roads ... )

wrote Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, recalling .her native Flanders (Un ruissea1,l. de la Scti.rpe).

And what a dynamic, handsome object is a pathl How precise the familiar hillpatIJs remain for our Oluscular consciousnessl. A poet has expressed all this dytlamism in one single line:

0, mes ehemins et leu.r cadence

Jean Caubtre, Deserts

(Oh, my roads and their cadence.)

When I relive dynamically the road that "climbed" the hill, I am quite sure that the road it~l~had muscles, or rather, counter-muscles. In my room.in Paris, it is a good exercise for me to think of the road in this way. As I. write this page, I feel freed of my duty to take a walk: I am sure of having gone out of my house.

And indeed· we should find countless intermediaries be tween reality and symbols if we gave things all the move· ments they suggest. George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, saw life flowing by. "What is more beauti ful than a road?" she wrote. "It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life." (Consuelo. vol. II, p. 116).

Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, hi~ cross roads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.. And Jean Wahl once wrote:

Le moutonnement des haits C'est en moi que ie I'ai.

Intro to Theater: What is Design? Page #53

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