If you are in Madrid, this is the opportunity to be in this event, personally , is the type of venue you must see! La Casa Encendida hosts an exhibition on the stage designer and theatre director, Edward Gordon Craig. The exhibition "El espacio como espectáculo" ("Edward Gordon Craig. Space as Spectacle") offers an insight into the life and work of this actor, stage designer and theatre director from the early 20th century. Craig's conception of scenic space played a decisive influence on the modern vision of theatre and helped to shape the work of numerous contemporary directors and designers, such as Joseph Svoboda, Jannis Kokos and Gilles Aillaud.
Curated by Aurora Herrera Gómez, the exhibition takes a retrospective look at theatrical space based on Gordon Craig's work. As an actor and theatre director, he published several texts, including "The Art of the Theatre", a seminal text for the renewal of 20th-century theatre.He also created stage sets, designed costumes and invented the term "scenic space", diametrically opposed to the illusionist theatre of previous centuries in which the text was all important. Using cubes, stairs, segments and other staging devices, he developed new spatial solutions that enabled the stage to evolve towards a symbolist aesthetic.
The drawings, sketches and construction and chromatic designs on display in the exhibition all shed light on the scenographer's creative process."Edward Gordon Craig. El espacio como espectáculo" has been organised with the special collaboration of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and in association with other institutions such as the British Institute of Florence, the Gabinetto G. P. Vieusseux in Florence, the Österreichisches Theater Museum in Vienna, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and Paul Reeves and the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections in Los Angeles
The exhibition:
- explores "scenic space", a term coined by the author in direct contrast to traditional stage productions based first and foremost on the text.
Craig's proposal derives from the confluence of the two phenomena: text and space.
The exhibition has several goals:
* To provide spectators with an insight into the little-known actor, stage designer and theatre director, Edward Gordon Craig.
* To unravel the varied and abundant influences that both nourished and impacted on his thinking.
* To analyse the theatre from the spatial perspective. Gordon Craig conceived stage design as a laboratory of architectures, folding screens, prisms, stairs and segments, achieving maximum expression through minimal, extremely simplified architecture.
The comprise of 200 works are in summary the native and chosen universe of Edward Gordon Craig, stairs - states of mind I, II, III and IV: a spatial laboratory, the window and the reticle, space and light, movement and Hamlet.
Edward Gordon Craig believed that these elements should form a unified whole to formalise the art of theatre. His work is open to interpretation and brimming with suggestions. Only through the incorporation of visual and sound elements can a written work become theatre in its fullest sense.
Don´t Miss it.
Exhibition: "Edward Gordon Craig. El espacio como espectáculo"
Dates: November 20, 2009 - January 7, 2010
Place: Halls B, C, D and E
Open Monday to Sunday from 10 am to 21.45 pm
La Casa Encendida
Ronda de Valencia 2, Madrid
Free Admission
