Event-Space

Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde

Dorita Hannah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135053772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and political 'event', the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself.

Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde's championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of 'performative architecture'.

'Event' was of immense significance to modernism's revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.

Chapter 1

Disciplining the bourgeois glory machine

“Our provisional theatre at Bayreuth”¹

As we were building a merely provisional theatre, and therefore had only to keep in view its inner fitness for its end, we might congratulate ourselves on being relieved, for the present, of the task of furnishing our edifice with a beautiful exterior in architectural harmony with the inner idea. Had we even been supplied with nobler material than our estimates allowed of, we should have shrunk in terror from the task of erecting a monumental pile, and been obliged to look around for assistance such as we could scarcely anywhere have found just now. For here presented itself the newest, the most individual problem, and, since it could never yet have been attempted, the most difficult for the architect of the present (or the future?) day.

– Richard Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse)”

For an event to possess greatness two things must come together: greatness of spirit in those who accomplish it and greatness of spirit in those who experience it. No event possesses greatness in itself, though it involves the disappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of entire peoples, the foundation of vast states or the prosecution of wars involving tremendous forces and tremendous losses: the breath of history has blown away many things of that kind as though they were flakes of snow.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth”

Six years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s mad prophet declared God’s death, the philosopher wrote of another prophet out of time in the last of his Untimely Meditations, which he dedicated to “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” (1876).² He begins this critical examination of Wagner’s Bayreuth project with a comment on the foundation-laying ceremony for the composer’s Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre), in which Nietzsche himself participated as guest, supporter and witness in 1872. Nietzsche was acutely aware of both the “resonance” and “effect” of this small inaugural event, not in relation to Wagner’s artwork – “everything that had gone before was a preparation for this moment” – but as a new mode of experiencing aesthetic events.³ He cited it as an historic event of major proportions, insinuating it contained the catastrophic within its apparent banality: awash with “tremendous forces and tremendous losses.” All who gathered at this event were aware that the groundbreaking was not only literal and metaphorical, but also performative.⁴ In marking the moment of this building’s construction, Wagner also laid the foundation for a new form of theatre architecture, which radically reworked the auditorium.

This chapter cites the 1872 incident as the overthrow of the baroque auditorium in order to establish a modernist paradigm of event-space: the now-familiar model of an austere fan-shaped auditorium. Wagner enacted the construction of this new model in his speech, presenting the future auditorium and his theories that supported its creation. He simultaneously dismantled the traditional multilevel horseshoe auditorium, which had transformed into the bourgeois glory machine, a legacy of the persistent baroque tradition. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, such notable events possess a complex temporality and require time to take effect. While Wagner built his theatre in the mind’s eye of the audience gathered for its inaugural ceremony, the ultimate bourgeois palace for entertainment was concomitantly under construction in Paris. Garnier’s Opera House is also investigated in this chapter as a monument to an architectural tradition that was being simultaneously toppled in Bayreuth. This fall undermined the central role played by the architect as well as long-established cultural and social performances enacted by the public.

Nietzsche and Wagner acknowledged that the new theatre, as both art form and built form, was dependent on a new audience, which the philosopher recognized as a “correspondence between deed and receptivity.”⁵ The final part of this chapter returns to Wagner’s Festival Theatre and his alternative ideas for a venue that stood in sharp contrast to the rigid and disciplinary form he established. Although “provisional” to the maestro, the Festspielhaus continues to endure, not only as a site for Wagnerian pilgrimage, but also as a legacy to the modern auditorium, which the second-wave and contemporary avant-garde continue to challenge as vociferously as their historical counterparts did its baroque predecessor.

The foundation-laying ceremony took place on 22 May 1872, in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth on Wagner’s fifty-ninth birthday. Standing before the gathered crowd in a “drenching storm” on the hilltop site overlooking the township, Wagner set the foundation stone, in which were embedded talismans such as coins and a telegram of congratulations from his patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for his new opera house.⁶ He tapped the block three times with a hammer, saying, “Be blessed my stone, endure for long and be steadfast.” By embedding a time capsule, Wagner saw ongoing value in this “provisional building,” which he originally intended to last a few nights for a single festival occasion – presenting Der Ring des Nibelunge as a consecutive cycle of four epic operas – and then to be destroyed together with the scenery and even the score of the music-drama it housed.⁷ He began the speech that accompanied this ceremony – addressed to “the friends of my particular art” – by stating his intention of “presenting this work in pure and undisfigured form to those who had demonstrated a serious interest in my art even though it had hitherto been presented to them only in impure and disfigured form.”⁸

Wagner acknowledged that the successful presentation of his artwork was dependent on the building housing it, acutely aware that he was laying an enduring foundation for a new ideal form, whose original structure was, paradoxically, intended to be temporary – a rehearsal for future structures.⁹ This provisional nature is aesthetically expressed in its timber construction and use of simple materials, which deliberately reference temporary makeshift wooden structures for festive gatherings in small German towns. However it was to be even simpler than these festival halls by virtue of “a total absence of embellishment,” presenting neither “solid lastingness” nor “monumental shrine.”¹⁰ As an interim “temple,” the building provided a “scaffolding” for the interior, which would be the more “enduring portion of our edifice,” designed to portray “scenic pictures that seem to rise from an ideal world of dreams.”¹¹ Wagner envisaged that the material form of his vision, which had finally found a site on the outskirts of an “out-of-the-way forgotten town” far from the “glitter of a crowded capital,” would manifest the “cloudy shape” of his “music of the future.”¹²

Through this foundational speech Wagner was resisting the well-established typology of the theatre as a palatial urban monument which King Ludwig II had previously commissioned the celebrated contemporary architect Gottfried Semper to create for the composer’s work in Munich. Wagner was deliberately establishing a model outside the conventional scope of architectural thinking whereby such venues, sited centrally in town and city, were traditionally conceived as monumentally imposing, highly ornate and emphatically social. Like Henri de Saint-Simon and subsequent avant-gardists, Wagner regarded his new theatre as a temple devoted to the exercise of art as the new religion, which was also to play an instructional role.¹³

The maestro’s speech and his subsequent report on the event summarize over two decades of exploration in which he had built a vision, now finally under construction. It was the outcome of considerable thinking and writing since he was first forced into exile in 1849 after his involvement in the Dresden revolution. Through his exile, and many subsequent failed attempts to mount his work, Wagner realized how important it was to have a physical home for its realization: one that required a certain amount of isolation and artistic control away from the demands of the aristocracy and regulatory authorities. After years of contemplating and formulating a series of schemes, being banished from and returning to Germany, seeking and finding a patron, searching for an appropriate site and working with a number of architects including Semper, the composer finally saw his dream becoming concretized. He hailed it as “a total transformation of our neo-European theatre” through a concentration of the audience’s attention assisted by the architecture.¹⁴

In the auditorium the eye was to be directed away from the surrounding bodies and focused on the stage picture through a perceptual projection “such as the technical apparatus for projecting the picture.”¹⁵ This throwing forward of the gaze would be achieved through a steeply raked amphitheatre format that inclines the audience toward the stage and does away with side boxes, which typically afforded views of the musicians and other spectators in the house.

[F]or the object to be plainly set in sight was no longer the chorus in the Orchestra, surrounded for the greater part by that ellipse, but the “scene” itself; and that “scene,” displayed to the Greek spectator in the merest low relief, was to be used by us in all its depth.¹⁶

Wagner outlined how a double proscenium arch would reinforce the “scenic picture” through a large secondary arch that nestles the primary stage frame and binds the architecture to the laws of perspective through diminishing size. A multiplication of the frame out into the auditorium, following its fanning form, would emphasize this further. The rhythm and placement of these side elements – “narrowing in true perspective toward the stage”¹⁷ – would echo the receding borders of a stage construction, enfolding the audience and leading its gaze to the centre of the stage where the lines of scenography and architecture would converge.

The thrown gaze is simultaneously held back by a deliberately established distance between spectator and the ephemeral stage image, effected by the double proscenium and the “mystic abyss” of the buried orchestra; designed to separate “ideality from reality.”¹⁸ In describing this hidden pit, Wagner recognizes the contribution made by Semper, who worked with him on developing three earlier proposals for the Munich theatre; the first two, temporary insertions into the Glaspalast (designed in 1856) and the third a grand edifice to be approached on a ceremonial axis by a bridge over the River Isar (design...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface: toward a theory of ‘spacing’ through avant-garde action
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: event-space: a performance model for architecture
• 1 Disciplining the bourgeois glory machine
• 2 Absolute space: universal landscapes
• 3 Abstract space: toward an architecture of alienation
• 4 Abject space: toward an architecture of cruelty
• Conclusion: making architecture tremble
• Bibliography
• Index