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Introductory Note
What follows are my responses to questions posed to me by Kiril
Bolotnikov, the
most faithful tracker
of my involvement with
Kandinsky's
artistic life outside
of painting. Bolotnikov
had heard a brief
lecture I gave in the
important "Globus
Arts Lectures"
series hosted by Zarina
Zabrisky: it included
my overview of
Kandinsky's
multi-layered theatre
work, and the
first-ever known live
reading of his body of
poetry, including
several poems in
English for the first
time. That recorded
event appears in the Special Index for my "Kandinsky Anew" series, where you can see it—it follows the March 2021 entry—for context before or while reading below.
That event ended with a
Question & Answer
period, which
Bolotnikov's
engaged and cogent
questions here extend.
He posed five
questions; I've
answered two for this
month, and the others
follow. Ground rules: I
had to answer
conversationally (not
in academic-ese),
without using any
reference materials! I
imagine many other
readers will be glad
that Bolotnikov came
forward to draw out
more on what
they've wondered
about Kandinsky, a
theatre and poetry
innovator.
*
1.
You note that
Kandinsky seems
uncertain whether his
play worked as a vessel
for his ideas about
synthesis and
counterpoint, but asked
readers to ascribe that
to his ability as a
playwright, not to the
principles themselves
– do we know what
he thinks didn't
work? If not, care
to speculate?
Right. Before the play text of Yellow Sound,
Kandinsky included a
kind of explanatory
preface called "On
Stage
Composition"—it
ended with what you
just said, about his
concern.
[For readers wanting a feel for the play, Clay Gold talks you through it here.]
Well, "didn't
work" or….
didn't create a
world they were
interested to enter?
Certainly he
couldn't go wrong
imagining his readers
would need some extra
preparation for what
they were about to see.
Avant-garde colleagues
aside, audiences would
have been used to
something more
naturalistic or
realistic—maybe
Ibsen, Shaw,
Chekhov—these
three also experimented
with what was
"real" on the
stage, but at least
their plays had
recognizably human
characters, furniture,
costumes, some kind of
"story." You
could more or less
connect what you saw to
the world you lived in.
Kandinsky's Yellow Sound doesn't have any of those: it doesn't even pretend to have anything to do with your world as you see it. The character list, for example, starts with Five Giants, Indistinct Beings, a Tenor offstage, some human figures in long gowns and others in tights. There's a hill, colored light, strange music, strange singing, flowers and…
The play starts without
people or a
set—just a pale
blue light that gets
darker as a beam of
light gets brighter.
Some music, some
chanting. Actually, the
light, color, sound and
space are characters in
the play; they even
respond to one another.
The audience might be
waiting for
"action," but
this empty, chanting,
primordial space is a
character, too. The
figures here
communicate with
everything around
them—not with
each other, but with
their environment!
Everything around them
is alive and full of
sound.
From this play, we
might think of
Kandinsky as the first
"environmental"
playwright. The world
of the play is the
world as a living
organism—changing,
growing larger and
smaller, louder and
softer, brighter and
darker, even less or
more threatening or
hopeful. Alive!
2.
Does Kandinsky
intend his theories to
be applicable to the
staging of any play, or
would a play have to be
written specifically
with his principles in
mind for them to be
applicable?
First, some context
. The conventional
stage of the day was
called the
"picture
stage." The
proscenium arch, made
up of the border along
the top and on the
sides, along with the
floor of the stage,
made a frame around the
stage opening where you
saw the play. Then the
play would look
something like a
conventional
painting—maybe a
room, a garden, a
battlefield.
Kandinsky wasn't so
interested in things we
can see; as we just
said, he was interested
in what was between
them, or in and around
them, their forces and
emanations, the
intuitions that
foretold them, or
lingered after them.
There is a reality to
these in our own lives:
if we have an
interesting dinner with
someone in a
restaurant, we might
not be aware of the
dishes on the table, or
the light fixtures in
the room, or even what
we are eating—the
"things"—but
there is a… something there at the time, and which lingers, too. I'm always struck that if we change places at the table, there is something else that changes, too. There's a well-known small painting Kandinsky did after talking to his future wife on the phone for the first time, before ever seeing her. The image is of a disembodied voice, a moment, something both imploding and exploding, a whole complex of responses. How to express essences like that?
That's what
"abstraction"
did for Kandinsky. Or
he sometimes called it
"concrete
art," as if he
were making the unseen
concrete, tangible,
actual. (Translators
try to capture this
idea with various
terms, such as
"non-objective."
Or
"non-material.")
On a canvas, he put an
abstracted image—and now we come to it:
on a picture stage, he
put an abstracted
reality or event or
even some kind of
dynamic. We might think
of all his plays,
including Yellow Sound—note
that all his plays are
for a picture
stage—as
theatrical or stage
abstractions.
Directly to the second parts of your question:
Is all this the way every play has to be written, or staged? Well, does every painting everywhere, for all time, have to be abstract? Nah. And Kandinsky himself emphasized the notion of "inner necessity," his injunction for an artist to paint only what he feels he has to paint (or a writer-playwright to write, or a composer to compose, and so on)—not to follow trends, or what will sell, or the expectations of other people. Kandinsky himself felt he had to
express
his—what?—life,
experiences,
premonitions, ideas,
and so on, through
plays, paintings, and
poems without depending
on "the real
world" to do it.
But other people will
do what they do another
way. For example, I
love lots of paintings
of all kinds, and as
inspiring and original
as I find Yellow Sound and Kandinsky's other plays, and even his poetry, I wouldn't want to live without Shakespeare or Chekhov! Or so many others!
Kandinsky was creating
his own kind of stage
event, and didn't
think every play was
going to be like this.
At the same time,
wouldn't it be fun,
just once, to see a
conventional play done
this way?
The first part of your question
is about whether Kandinsky's innovations can serve any play. I love this, and it gets to the heart of my thinking, the crux of my approach to teaching actors. I find such a deep commonality between the realistic and the abstract, the conventional and experimental, the dramatic and the poetic, the classical and the avant-garde. Just for starters, they all contain the same basic elements, or foundations: differing degrees of balance, contrast, texture, duration, and so on and on. We can add: connection or relatedness, and form… the list is a long one. Think of Kandinsky's book, Point and Line to Plane.
Even by itself the
title says so much that
any work of art
is—whether
it's a book or a
play, poem, piece of
music, painting, dance,
sculpture,
building—it
starts somewhere
(point); it goes
somewhere else, takes a
path, takes on
intention (line); it
proceeds, develops a
dimension (plane). Or
you can think about all
this any way that
excites you—that
gets you started,
moving, doing!
To be continued…
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