Abstract
This paper shows how the 'magic-box' aesthetics of nineteenth century stage technology were utilized by modern scenographic and technological approaches to realise Wassily Kandinsky's rarely performed abstract stage composition The Yellow Sound at Tate Modern in 2011. Performed in a glass room overlooking London, technology and scenographic approaches to space were successful in producing a complete version: with yellow giants, miniature people, flying heads, et al. This paper explores what the magic-box aesthetic was and how it was created by manipulating space through mechanical technologies in a proscenium-framed space. It explains how modern projection technologies and innovative scenographic approaches to performance in this case study can recreate its affect in a space that is very unlike a proscenium arch theatre but can still be magic.
Highlights
These three elements can be very clearly seen in The Yellow Sound, though the 'complex of inner experiences of the audience' during performance are a little harder to pin-point
The Yellow Sound is very precise in its textual demands - at times the text reads like an extended stage direction, at other moments it focuses very on choreographic or sonic nuances
Even when viewed as a kinetic painting or a study in synaesthesia, the content of that painting is unusual: figures in brightly coloured costumes, five yellow giants with indistinct faces, red flying creatures that flitter about the stage, shaking flowers that vibrate in sympathy with different shrill notes and tiny people who walk across a colour-changing hill
Summary
The English wood stage was, in many ways, the crowning theatrical achievement of the nineteenth-century theatre. The stage inside the proscenium arch as viewed by the audience is an ordinary thing, it is a commonplace object, and yet we know that under that object, or rather 'inside' that thing, there must be a mechanism at work which causes the commonplace wood stage to open up and produce fairies, daemons, choirs, graves, cauldrons and all the wonderful spectacles we have seen from trap doors and mechanisms of various sizes and shapes and ingenious contrivances If these things are contained inside the stage, the stage is similar to a closed chest or box, appearing commonplace from outside, but we know, as Gaston Bachelard says: 'it opens!' (1994: 85). The cabinet-like stage floor and what lies beneath it concealed in the sub-stage is ready to be reversed; the stage is invaded by an inside/outside space whenever a trap is used to make something appear or disappear
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