A ‘choréographie’ of light and space: Adolphe Appia and the first scenographic turn

Abstract

While the significance and influence of Appia's writings and his storyboard scenarios of Wagnerian operas are uncontested, their origin has been explained almost universally as instigated by a combination of his musical inspiration and the technological development of electric stage lighting. While light was clearly at the heart of this new scenography, it was not as a result of the new electrical, incandescent lamps of Edison and Swan that had begun to populate the theatres of Europe and North America from the early 1880s as most commentators would suggest, but rather due to an older, pre-existing lighting technology with which Appia was acquainted. In 1886, at the age of 24, Appia embarked on a four-year period during which he was primarily resident in Dresden. It was a formative time in his education, which despite being instrumental in the development of a new scenic art, has received surprisingly little critical attention. Appia's writings and drawings for the staging of Wagnerian drama first conceived in this German city were to revolutionise thinking about stage space, scenery and, perhaps most importantly, the use of light as an expressive material in the theatre. This article therefore seeks to explain how a specific combination of circumstances converged, in a particular place and time, to provoke a paradigm shift in theatre practice – what we should consider to be the first scenographic turn of the modern theatre. It argues for a reappraisal of Appia as not simply an idealist or theatre theorist, but as a practitioner whose scenographic understanding was rooted in the craft of theatre production. It also suggests that we need to revisit perceived histories of theatre practice that have been established and subsequently re-enforced on the basis of linguistic translations that may lack a scenographic sensibility.