ОТ ГОРДОНА КРЭГА К МАРКУ МОРРИСУ И САШЕ ВАЛЬЦ: СЦЕНИЧЕСКОЕ РЕШЕНИЕ ОПЕРЫ / БАЛЕТА «ДИДОНА И ЭНЕЙ»

Abstract

The article deals with the impact of the English theatre director Edward Gordon Craig’s innovations in the dance theatre of the end of the 20th to the beginning of the 21st century. We consider one of Craig’s earliest performances in the opera “Dido and Aeneas” by the well-known English composer of the 17th century Henry Purcell., This was first staged in 1900 in London, and we focus on the selected methods and techniques associated with the reforming of theatre language, which were used by choreographers, such as the American Mark Morris and the German Sasha Waltz several decades later. Dance-operas by Morris (staged in 1989 in Belgium), and by Waltz (staged in 2005 in Berlin), despite their completely different approaches to the material, undoubtedly used Craig’s inventions, consciously or unconsciously entering into a dialogue with his experimental performance. Both Morris’s minimalism and Waltz’s baroque abundance stem from English director’s work, although the choreographers do not refer to it directly, since Craig’s innovations have become an inalienable part of theatrical practice in the 20th century. Comparative analysis allows us to discover how the English director’s ideas aimed at the creation of a theatre based on such components as motion, line, colour and rhythm and of a powerful affect on the audience, similar to how it was in ancient theatre, and how this was successfully realized in the work of postmodern choreographers. Special attention is paid to the stage design of performances and to the formation of a visual image and atmosphere of the performance