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Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Theatre History

Two Unknown Essays By Craig On The Production Of Shakespeare's Plays, Patrick Le Boeuf Feb 2017

Two Unknown Essays By Craig On The Production Of Shakespeare's Plays, Patrick Le Boeuf

Mime Journal

In the 1920s and 1930s, Craig drafted two essays on Shakespeare, neither of which was completed nor published. Although they cannot be ranked among Craig’s most inspired writings, these two unfinished essays are of great interest, as they show that Craig, then in his fifties-sixties, was walking on a thin line dividing two most contrasted landscapes: on the one hand he was more attracted than ever to forms of radical modernity, on the other hand he was at risk of indulging in gratuitously archaeological reconstitutions, while being aware of that danger.


Dreaming Of Light: On Edward Gordon Craig, Peter Sellars Feb 2017

Dreaming Of Light: On Edward Gordon Craig, Peter Sellars

Mime Journal

Sellars reflects on Craig’s legacy, emphasizing Craig’s focus on “making theatre out of light,” and casting Craig as “John the Baptist to Bob Wilson.” Sellars highlights the importance of Craig’s “keeping the dream space open,” but he also criticizes Craig for not traveling to experience the predominantly Asian cultures whose performance traditions he appropriated. Craig and Sellars have a shared interest in the functions of Baroque opera in socially cataclysmic times; Sellars speaks about the influence of Craig upon his stagings of Purcell and the St. Matthew Passion (first staged in 2010). Sellars celebrates Craig’s attempt to rescue the voice …


The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou Feb 2017

The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou

Mime Journal

Olga Taxidou analyzes the ambiguous concept for which Edward Gordon Craig is best known—the “übermarionette”—alongside Isadora Duncan’s discussions of the liberated dancer. Highlighting the emphasis on futurity in Craig’s and Duncan’s manifestos and theories, she contends that this pairing works to undo the binaries between Hellenism and modernism, and between mechanistic and vitalistic aesthetics. Emphasizing the impact of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories upon Duncan’s theory and practice, Taxidou locates Duncan within an intellectual vanguard that includes Jane Harrison and her fellow Cambridge Ritualists as well as major modernist poets.


Nine Ways Of Opening Macbeth, Patrick Le Boeuf Feb 2017

Nine Ways Of Opening Macbeth, Patrick Le Boeuf

Mime Journal

A previously unpublished essay by Edward Gordon Craig in which Craig considers various directorial and casting choices for Shakespeare's Macbeth. Edited, with notes, by Patrick Le Boeuf.


Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt Feb 2017

Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt

Mime Journal

Holt focuses on Craig’s influential stage designs in relation to the performing body. Through costume design, Holt rethinks Craig’s relationship with the designs of the Ballets Russes, placing him in context with the experimentations of his contemporaries Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. Holt frames these designers’ historic opposition as a difference of opinion around the way that costumes can carry meaning. She argues that while all three designers used similar visual language and agreed that costumes should communicate with audiences, each artist used a different model for this communication – speech (Craig), music (Bakst) and writing (Picasso).


Picturing Robinson Crusoe: Edward Gordon Craig, Daniel Defoe And Image-Text Inquiry, Eric T. Haskell Feb 2017

Picturing Robinson Crusoe: Edward Gordon Craig, Daniel Defoe And Image-Text Inquiry, Eric T. Haskell

Mime Journal

Haskell focuses on Craig’s work with art books in this essay. He offers a wealth of visual images to investigate influences upon Craig’s engraved illustrations for an edition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a project planned for the Cranach Press, executed during the late 1930s, and published posthumously by the Basilisk Press in 1979. Haskell calls attention to the way that this fascinating edition—previously overshadowed by the Craig-Cranach Press Hamlet in the scholarly literature—adds to our understanding of Craig’s theories of print as performance. He also offers a nuanced reading of the way that Craig’s illustrations function as interpretation, providing …


A Note On Sanity In Stage Productions Of Shakespearean Plays, Patrick Le Boeuf Feb 2017

A Note On Sanity In Stage Productions Of Shakespearean Plays, Patrick Le Boeuf

Mime Journal

A previously unpublished essay by Edward Gordon Craig which elucidates his ideas about the “right” way to produce Shakespeare. Edited, with notes, by Patrick Le Boeuf.


Hamlet's Last Act: Artist's Statement, Sam J. Gold Feb 2017

Hamlet's Last Act: Artist's Statement, Sam J. Gold

Mime Journal

Gold contextualizes his performance piece Hamlet’s Last Act (video will be available on the Action, Scene, and Voice website going live in Summer 2017). He reflects on his own journey and process in creating the show, and also offers some fascinating information about Craig’s relationship to Asian puppetry traditions. Gold’s innovative show turns Craig’s wood engravings for the Cranach Press Hamlet into Balinese wayang kulit shadow puppets; Gold later discovered that Craig actually knew of this genre and referenced it in certain works. Gold explains how in Hamlet’s Last Act, Craig’s published engravings literally become performers, breaking down the …


Edward Gordon Craig, Étienne Decroux, And The Rediscovery Of Mime, Harvey Grossman Feb 2017

Edward Gordon Craig, Étienne Decroux, And The Rediscovery Of Mime, Harvey Grossman

Mime Journal

In this edited transcription of his remarks at the 2013 Pomona College (California) conference “Action, Scene and Voice,” Harvey Grossman elucidates the theory and practice of his two most important teachers: Edward Gordon Craig and Étienne Decroux. Grossman elucidates Craig’s much-debated comments on the “Art of the Theatre,” as well as Craig’s influence upon the French corporeal mime Étienne Decroux. He relates in detail Craig’s positive response to seeing Decroux and his students (among them Jean-Louis Barrault and Éliane Guyon) perform in 1945.


The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor Feb 2017

The Shadow Puppets Of Elsinore: Edward Gordon Craig And The Cranach Press Hamlet, James P. Taylor

Mime Journal

Taylor considers the role that book arts may play in Craig’s theories of the new theatre, or the Art of the Future. He expands our understanding of Craig’s design work to include print culture, examining his engravings for the monumental editions of Hamlet published by Count Harry Kessler’s Cranach Press in 1929–30. Taylor explores the relationship of Craig’s designs for the 1912 Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet to his engravings for the German and English-language Cranach Press editions of the play. He suggests that it was only with this print publication that Craig finally achieved the absolute artistic control …


Edward Gordon Craig's Übermarionette And Étienne Decroux's "Actor Made Of Wood", Thomas Leabhart, Sally Leabhart Feb 2017

Edward Gordon Craig's Übermarionette And Étienne Decroux's "Actor Made Of Wood", Thomas Leabhart, Sally Leabhart

Mime Journal

Thomas Leabhart testifies to Edward Gordon Craig’s continuing influence on postmodern mime and movement. Leabhart discusses the influences that shaped Craig’s theory of acting. He then considers what the living actor and Craig’s “übermarionette” have to say to each other, putting pressure on the binary between human and non-human performers, especially in physical theater. Himself a student from 1968-72 of Étienne Decroux, the French corporeal mime and teacher whom the elderly Craig recognized as an “artist of the theatre,” Leabhart relates how he carries on Decroux’s pedagogy and legacy as a performer and teacher of corporeal mime.


Our Puppets, Our Selves: Puppetry's Changing Paradigms, Claudia Orenstein Feb 2017

Our Puppets, Our Selves: Puppetry's Changing Paradigms, Claudia Orenstein

Mime Journal

Taking up the topic of puppetry, Orenstein forges connections between Craig’s vision of the übermarionette and the rise of “New Puppetry” today. She examines the use of puppets to explore similarities and differences between the technological anxieties of modernists versus contemporary artists. In addition, she calls for a more careful and contextualized attention to Craig’s puppet theory, with a close reading of the übermarionette passage in "On the Art of the Theatre." Orenstein returns to some of the most well-known and much-studied passages and theories from Craig’s early work, but considers them from the fresh vantage point of contemporary puppetry …


Contents - Edward Gordon Craig Special Issue 2017, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt Feb 2017

Contents - Edward Gordon Craig Special Issue 2017, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

Cover, front matter, and contents for Mime Journal Special Issue, "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig." Guest editors: Jennifer Buckley and Annie Holt.


Appendix: Program, Edward Gordon Craig Conference 2013, Pomona College, Mime Journal Feb 2017

Appendix: Program, Edward Gordon Craig Conference 2013, Pomona College, Mime Journal

Mime Journal

Conference program for "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig," at Pomona College, Claremont, California, March 2013.


Editors' Note - Action, Scene, And Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues With Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt Feb 2017

Editors' Note - Action, Scene, And Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues With Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

A roadmap to this Special Issue of Mime Journal. This issue emphasizes the tissue of influences that shaped Craig’s own work and continue to impact contemporary theater and performance. By focusing on the historical contexts in which his ideas were developed and those in which they have been received, the essays counter the widely held perception of Craig as the solitary genius of the “Art of the Theatre.” His claims of originality and singularity have too often obscured the connections between his work and that of other artists—especially the dancer Isadora Duncan, upon whom two of the pieces included here …


The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove Feb 2017

The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove

Mime Journal

Jennifer Buckley interviews dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lori Belilove on Isadora Duncan’s practice and legacy. Belilove argues for Duncan’s modernism, and emphasizes her impact upon Edward Gordon Craig’s developing aesthetic and his career. This edited transcription of their conversation takes its point of departure from Craig’s portfolio of six drawings of Duncan in action, Isadora Duncan: Sechs Bewegungsstudien, Insel Verlag, 1906. Belilove sees both Craig and Duncan as poised between late Victorianism and modernism, and she contends they shared a modernist impulse toward abstraction. Belilove also comments on her own practice as a performer and as a teacher passing …