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Return
to First Principles: For those of us lucky enough mostly to be only
tangentially affected by the pandemic, what better chance has the
shutdown given us than to reflect and re-evaluate. In my case, I
welcome every chance to feel again the force of my affinities for
Kandinsky's writings, teachings, poetry, and stage
experiments—affinities that have endured since 1984.
The following is a column I wrote for Scene4 in 2000—perhaps, without my knowing it, a seed that grew into this current Kandinsky Anew Series in 2019. At the time, I had been deeply engaged in training actors for a long time and, with the benefit of my own long Acting Life, I was continually re-considering my own approach to teaching. In the column, I recounted the train of thought that found such resonance in Kandinsky.
Kandinsky, so important in art history
as a painter, was far from an obvious source to draw on for training
actors. In the extended heyday of the actor training studios—now
passed—there were celebrity teachers whose blueprints or
"methods," both contemporary and historical, circulated and
lent credibility to their students; Kandinsky's name was not among
them! Nevertheless, his thinking was a focus of mine and has given my
countless students an unusual, and unusually grounded and flexible,
creative approach to acting. Looking back on all that in this column
is a happy return to first principles.
Kandinsky:
Dramatist, Dramaturg and Demiurge of the Theatre
Most people know Vasily Kandinsky as
the painter who painted the earliest entirely abstract painting (art
historians do argue about whose was *really* the first, but we
won't). In fact Kandinsky, independently of his revolutionary
contributions to painting, also wrote on and for the theatre from
1908 until his death in 1944. In his day, his theories of
dramatic art, as well as his own plays, were hailed by
great theatrical innovators such as Hugo Ball and
Oskar Schlemmer. He also came into
contact with important theatrical figures such as
Stanislavski, Massine, Diaghilev and Andre Breton. Today,
although his writings offer an important link between traditional and
experimental values in the theatre, they have been almost entirely
neglected.
So not much has been written about Kandinsky's
theatre-related work--and what little there is has represented him as
a precursor of Happenings and performance art. But when we
compare his writings with those of major dramatic thinkers from Plato
to today, we can see that 1) Kandinsky's vision of the theatre was
essentially classically informed, and 2) that the innovations he
suggested had a profoundly spiritual emphasis. These mean that in fact
his considerations were altogether different from those of our own
fragmented contemporary experimental theatre. In any case, when
we want to know Kandinsky's work, we start out by examining his
theatre criticism and plays in relation to pivotal figures from
classical to contemporary drama.
At
the foundation of Kandinsky's theories was the
concept of synthesis. He believed that the theatre of the
future would fully synthesize the arts of architecture, painting,
sculpture, music, dance and poetry. This synthesis could not
be realized, however, without some basis for mutual understanding
between artists of these disciplines. To this
end, Kandinsky mapped out a conceptual
and practical vocabulary that would reflect the inter-relatedness
of their arts. So to know Kandinsky further, we would explore his
principles of theatrical collaboration, and the two extraordinary
programs that Kandinsky outlined for the training of the
collaborative theatre artist: the first program was designed for
professional artists, the second for students just beginning
their training.
My doctoral thesis on this subject (1987, UCB)
talked about these things and also included an Appendix of pictures,
with commentary:
1) Kandinsky's designs for furniture, clothing, dishes and rooms,
2) Instances of theatrical images in his paintings, and
3) The texts of his plays along with his stage and costume
designs for them. What I couldn't include there was his striking
poetry, most of which is published now in a separate volume entitled
SOUNDS.
I was very much struck over twenty years ago when I
came across a remark made by Chaliapin (d. 1938), the great Russian
basso. He said that he had learned more about acting from his friends
who were painters than he ever did from stage actors.
Around
the same time I also stumbled on an anecdote that seemed to me to be
related: when a young Martha Graham saw a non-figurative painting of
Kandinsky's in 1922 she is said to have said, "I will dance
like that."
Comments such as these seem to me to be
fruitful areas of inquiry here; clearly the fine arts have something
to say to the performing arts. Here in the early 21st century I am
still hoping to understand fully what Chaliapin and Graham meant by
these when they said them early in the 20th century. And
Kandinsky's work has gotten me closer to that than anyone
else's work has. And that piece of information--more than anything
else I can think of--serves as an authentic way of introducing myself
to you.
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