Event-Space

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 theatre’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.

Dorita Hannah works across the spatial, visual and performing arts as a scholar
and design practitioner specializing in theatre architecture and performance
design. She is a Professor affiliated with the University of Auckland (New
Zealand), University of Tasmania (Australia) and Aalto University (Finland).
Event-Space
Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde

Dorita Hannah
with original photography by Marc Goodwin

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss
Publication Fund of the College Art Association.
First edition published 2019
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© 2019 Dorita Hannah

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hannah, Dorita, author.
Title: Event-Space : theatre architecture and the historical avant–garde / Dorita
Hannah.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047491 | ISBN 9780415832168 (hardback) | ISBN
9780415832175 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780203491553 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Experimental theater—History—20th century. | Theater
 architecture. | Experimental drama—20th century— History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN2193.E86 H36 2018 | DDC 792.02/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047491
ISBN: 9780415832168 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780415832175 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780203491553 (ebk)

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To my beloved parents, John (1934–2006) and Catherine Hannah.
Contents

List of figures
Preface: toward a theory of ‘spacing’ through avant-garde action
Acknowledgements

Introduction: event-space: a performance model for architecture

Architecture as event
Event-space: a useful paradigm in motion
Space (becoming-performance of architecture)
Event (becoming-architecture of performance)
(Re)Birth of the will-to-destruction
Avant-gardism and modernism

1 Disciplining the bourgeois glory machine

“Our provisional theatre at Bayreuth”
The baroque model and post-revolutionary performativity
Garnier’s architecture as mise-en-scène
The glory machine
The case of Bayreuth
A new public
The invisible theatre

2 Absolute space: universal landscapes

“The Beginning … The Birth …”
Absolute stage space
 Symbolist “Theatre of the Mind”
Dancing architectures
Duncan’s temple
Spatial rhythm and universal landscapes
Adolphe Appia
Architecture as temple-laboratory
Hellerau
Resisting the black void
The new monumentality of absolute space

3 Abstract space: toward an architecture of alienation

The “Troubled Art”: avant-gardism divided
City as a “Montage of Attractions”
Stage space – Space Stage
Bauhaus festivities
Total Theatre: the “Great Stage Machine”
Architectures of alienation
Ghost in the machine

4 Abject space: toward an architecture of cruelty

Violence takes centre stage
Spatial violence
Bravo! And Boom, Boom!
Abjection: eROTic object
Palace of Culture
Enter Artaud (Flinging Bombs)
An architecture against architecture
A site of recovery
Dis-eased body
Ex-ploding space
De-centring architecture
Cruel machine

Conclusion: making architecture tremble

Nietzsche’s architect(ure)
Building Babel

Bibliography
Index
Figures

0.1 Ancient Greek amphitheatre: diagrammatic plan showing component parts

referred to throughout this book
1.1 Margravial Opera House, Bayreuth (1748): engraving of the 1872
inauguration of Wagner’s Opera House in Bayreuth, with Richard Wagner
himself conducting
1.2 Charles Garnier’s Opera House, Paris (1861–1875): painting of L’escalier de
l’Opéra Garnier by Louis Béroud (1877)
1.3a Opéra Garnier, Paris: grand foyer (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
1.3b Opéra Garnier, Paris: grand staircase (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
1.4 First performance of Wagner’s opera, Rheingold, at Bayreuth Festspielhaus
(1876)
1.5a Wagner Festspielhaus, Bayreuth: orchestra pit (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
1.5b Wagner Festspielhaus, Bayreuth: auditorium (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
2.1 Isadora Duncan dancing in the Acropolis’s Theatre of Dionysus, Athens,
taken by Raymond Duncan (1903)
2.2 Diagram from Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura (1545), with annotation by
Edward Gordon Craig (1907)
2.3 Etching from Edward Gordon Craig’s Scene series (1908)
2.4 The unfinished walls of Kopanos, Athens (1903)
2.5a Edward Gordon Craig’s model for The St. Matthew Passion (1913–1914)
2.5b Section through 1913 model of Edward Gordon Craig’s proposed staging of
Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Drawing by Edward Carrick
2.6 Adolphe Appia’s Rhythmic Spaces (1909)
2.7 Edward Gordon Craig’s frontispiece for The Theatre Advancing (1921)
2.8 Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin (1919): designed by Hans Poelzig for Max
Reinhardt
2.9 Hellerau Festspielhaus, Dresden (1913): designed by Heinrich Tessenow
(architect) showing the interior shaped by Adolphe Appia (scenographer) in
association with Alexander von Salzman (lighting designer). Looking
towards stage (left) and seating bank (right)
2.10 Hellerau Festspielhaus with backlit textile walls and Adolphe Appia’s
design for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, directed by Jaques-Dalcroze
2.11 Hellerau Festspielhaus, Dresden (1913): hall (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
2.12 Performance APPI(A)PPIA (Hellerau 2017) during Reconstructing the
Future: choregraphed by Avatâra Ayuso and Ángel Martínez Roger. Dancer:
Avatâra Ayuso Photographer: Stephan Floss
2.13a Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (1913): axonometric of permanent stage
layout designed by Louis Jouvet for Jacques Copeau
2.13b Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (1913): photograph of stage landscape
designed by Louis Jouvet for Jacques Copeau
3.1a Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (1892): stage and auditorium (Photo:
Marc Goodwin)
3.1b Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (1892): diagonal red cross painted on
Kaiser’s box (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.2 Production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm
(1928): designed by Caspar Neher
3.3 El Lissitzky’s set model of Sergei Tretyakov’s I Want a Child (1928–1929), for
Meyerhold’s unrealized production
3.4 Proposal for Meyerhold Theatre by Barkhin and Vakhtangov (1932)
3.5 Frederick Kiesler’s Space Stage: International Exhibition of New Theatre
Techniques, Vienna (1924)
3.6 Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral of Socialism, Bauhaus Manifesto (April 1919)
3.7 Paul Klee’s sketch for the structure of the Weimar Bauhaus curricula (1922)
3.8 Johannes Itten’s diagram on the cover of the Bauhaus Statutes by Walter
Gropius (1923)
3.9a Bauhaus, Dessau: view from mensa (canteen) (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.9b Bauhaus, Dessau: view from stage (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.9c Bauhaus, Dessau: auditorium (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.10 Dessau Bauhaus auditorium (1927)
3.11 The Bauhaus Building as a stage
3.12 Walter Gropius’s unrealized Total Theater for Erwin Piscator (1927)
3.13a Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin: Hall A with raised floor (Photo:
Marc Goodwin)
3.13b Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin: wall detail (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.14 La Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris (1970): production of Théâtre du
Soleil’s 1793 (1972) before permanent seating was added
3.15a Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, plan diagrams by Nikolaus Hirsch and
Michel Müller for William Forsythe (2003)
3.15b Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, felt objects and drops designed by
Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller for William Forsythe (2003)
3.16a Tate Modern, London: Turbine Hall view to entry (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.16b Tate Modern, London: Turbine view beyond bridge (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.16c Tate Modern, London: Turbine Hall ramp (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.17a Radialsystem V, Berlin: hall with moveable seating bank (Photo: Marc
Goodwin)
3.17b Radialsystem V, Berlin: side view of hall (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.18a Manchester Royal Exchange: the Great Hall (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.18b Manchester Royal Exchange: theatre ceiling (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
3.18c Manchester Royal Exchange: theatre galleries (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.1 Post-siege media image of the Dubrovka Theatre, Moscow (2002)
4.2 Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary.
William Reveley (1791)
4.3 Bernard Tschumi: from Advertisements for Architecture (1975)
4.4a The Vesnin brothers’ Proletariat Palace of Culture (ZIL) in Moscow (1930–
1936): view from balcony
4.4b The Vesnin brothers’ Proletariat Palace of Culture (ZIL) in Moscow (1930–
1936): view from stage
4.5a Aleksandr Vesnin’s design for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was
Thursday (1922–1923), dir. Alexander Tairov: set model
4.5b Aleksandr Vesnin’s design for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was
Thursday (1922–1923), dir. Alexander Tairov: in performance
4.6 Kurt Schwitters’s Hanover Merzbau (1930)
4.7a Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater (1926): plan
4.7b Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater (1926): section
4.8a Bouffes du Nord, Paris: view to stage (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.8b Bouffes du Nord, Paris: upper gallery (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.8c Bouffes du Nord, Paris: inside proscenium (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.8d Bouffes du Nord, Paris: wall detail (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.8e Bouffes du Nord, Paris: wall detail (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.9a Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carcere oscura con antenna del suplizio de’
malfattori (1743)
4.9b Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘The Gothic Arch’ from Carceri d’invenzione (ca.
1749–1750)
4.10a National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Le Fresnoy: upper walkways
(Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.10b National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Le Fresnoy: upper stairs (Photo:
Marc Goodwin)
4.11 Tschumi’s Studio of Contemporary Arts (1992–1998) Le Fresnoy Conceptual
sketch
4.12 Section and plan of the Hannah Playhouse, designed by James Beard:
Wellington, New Zealand (1973)
4.13 Performance in Teatro Oficina, São Paulo, Brazil
4.14a Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: “Rua Lina Bo Bardi” theatre street (Photo: Marc
Goodwin)
4.14b Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: view to entry (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.14c Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: scaffolding galleries (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
4.14d Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: view to opened retractable ceiling (Photo: Marc
Goodwin)
4.14e Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: side wall (Photo: Marc Goodwin)
5.1a The Heart of PQ: A Performance Landscape for the Senses: installation in the
Central Hall of Výstavište Industrial Palace, Prague (June 2003). Design
Director Dorita Hannah with Sven Mehzoud and Lee Gibson
5.1b The Heart of PQ (2003): view of installation in the Central Hall of Výstavište
Industrial Palace
5.1c The Heart of PQ (2003): landscape performance (choreographer Carol
 Brown) 326

Note: All images by Marc Goodwin are subject to copyright by the photographer.
In addition, every endeavour has been made to identify and secure permission for
those figures for which it is required. Any parties wishing to discuss or query the
rights to unsourced figures should contact the publishers directly.
Preface
Toward a theory of ‘spacing’ through avant-
garde action

The tendency of twentieth century art is to revolve around the act rather
than the work, because the act, as the intense power of beginning, can only
be thought in the present.
Badiou: The Century, 136

Referring to its many avant-gardes, Alain Badiou suggests that the 20th century
“managed – through its artists, scientists, militants and lovers – to be Action
itself.”1 But amidst the commotion created by these riotous movements dedicated
to deploying various artistic genres for radical acts, political agitation and social
activism, resides a relative silence from architecture’s so-called vanguard,
especially in the first half of the century when the term avant-garde was most
resistant, adamant and potent. It would appear that, while artists were fixated on
the fleeting act, architecture maintained its focus on the enduring work through a
new classical modernism. Yet, even when the act and the object came together,
neither seemed to inform the other in any significant or enduring way in order to
break the mould of what theatre architecture could be.2 Perhaps the problem lies
in nomenclature, in which the word ‘architecture’ belongs to a discrete profession
protected by law whose principal focus is on the art and practice of designing and
constructing buildings and infrastructure rather than environments and
experiences, including a tendency to silo itself as an occupation detached from
the other arts? Rather than ‘theatre’ or ‘architecture’ we could focus on
‘performance’ and ‘space’ in order to consider spatial performativity, generally,
and performance space, specifically.
This book emerged from the desire to provide a much-needed text for those
contemplating the design of performing arts venues without immediately
deferring to typological preconceptions of ‘theatre architecture.’ Loosening the
term to come adrift in a more expanded notion of ‘performance space’ allows us
to consider the part such environments are capable of playing in shaping and
staging live events. This dynamic is aligned to the delineation established by
British philosopher J. L. Austin between the constative (descriptive) and the
performative (active) in language, whereby locations, like certain utterances
(referred to as speech acts), can take on effective and affective roles.3 Buildings
are no longer perceived as works of architecture but as spatial action itself … as
spacing!
Favouring an experiential rather than tectonic approach to performing arts
environments encourages interconnections between the discursive and spatial
practices of architects, performance-makers and the public.4 But, as we all know,
‘space,’ which floats around and through our tenuous connections to a rational
framework, is itself a nebulous word. Yet – whether a suspended pause, a blank
area, an empty room, a discursive realm or a limitless cosmos – space performs.
Pondered over centuries by philosophers, scientists, artists and dramatists, this
complex and elusive term denotes the fundamental immaterial-material that
designers utilize to create sites for theatrical performance. It is the stuff of
architects (who construct it) and scenographers (who abstract it); experienced by
inhabitants (immersed in it) and spectators (who tend to regard it). As much a
social construction as a physical one, space is a performative medium, and
therefore an inherently active entity, which acts on, and is activated by, its
occupants who need not be physically present within it.
Event-Space therefore aims to establish a general theory of spatial
performativity through the specificity of performance space: insisting that the
built environment housing the event is itself an event. In this case, theatre
architecture is the vehicle for such an exploration: theorized principally through
the concepts and practices of Europe’s historical avant-garde whose militant
reaction against theatrical realism and naturalism was also an attack on
architecture; resisting its undeniable monumentality, materiality and stability in
pursuit of alternative sites for performance. Out of this study spatiotemporal
models have emerged that not only illuminate avant-garde history but also,
hopefully, inspire new approaches to contemporary performance space.
Characterizing space by way of the transitory event – whether historic (epic
incidents), aesthetic (theatrical displays) or banal (daily occurrences) – realigns
the static object of built form with the dynamic flux of performance, thereby
exposing an intricate system of active forces that undermine architecture’s
traditional role as a fixed, durable object designed to order space and those who
inhabit it. As a multiplicitous event, space (both actual and virtual) is an intricate
and active player in our everyday lives. This notion of the ‘evental’ emerged from
spatiotemporal revolutions in 20th-century science, arts and communication,
whereby the static spatialization of time shifted to a more dynamic
temporalization of space that emphasized movement, relativity and duration.5
The shift was a product of modernity – defined as a network of socio- political,
philosophical and technological changes emerging from Europe’s Renaissance
and developed through the Age of Enlightenment into the Industrial Revolution –
which gave rise to modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a period
of dramatic innovation, delineated by a break with traditional modes of
representation, in which the avant-garde played an extremist and challenging
role.6
Radical shifts in European modernism ultimately disclosed space as a temporal
event, undermining the discrete object of architecture – traditionally defined as a
professionally sanctioned practice, process and product of planning, designing
and detailing buildings. Instead of the boutique image of a highly designed
artefact, let us consider architecture as an orchestrated set of systems, forces and
complex socio-political and embodied relationships and experiences, in order to
perceive the constructed environment more in a state of active becoming than
passive being. Yet, while the artistic avant-garde enacted destructive gestures to
reveal the inherent volatility of modernity, architectural modernism
enthusiastically integrated its network of social, economic and technological
changes by creating a new abiding classical form, designed to incorporate “the
experience of shock” so as to reduce its intensity and effect. As Manfredo Tafuri
points out, although the “law of assemblage” united both artistic and architectural
avant-garde movements, the artist utilized it to expose what the architect sought
to absorb.7 Whereas the artistic avant-garde resisted style and reason,
architecture’s counterpart tended to embrace instrumentality and rationality in
the service of a new style. Nowhere is this schism most apparent than between
architecture and theatre.
For well over 100 years the relationship between architecture and theatre has
been a troubled one, with the architectural rejected by theatre and the theatrical
negated by architecture. However, although revolutions of the historical avant-
garde did not always coincide with the architectural reforms of modernism, the
gaps and overlaps between these converging and diverging movements provide
new ways of perceiving and producing theatre architecture. My formulation of
‘event-space’ (a term attributed to Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi) is therefore
located at the generative convergence between architectural theory (as the
discourse of space) and performance theory (as the discourse of events) in order
to provide a contemporary lens for re-viewing the 20th-century theatrical crisis,
where the built form was repudiated in favour of more non-representational
spaces. By concentrating on ruptures within modernism’s philosophical, political
and perceptual revolutions, I will identify three distinctive attitudes to
performance space that emerged between 1872 and 1947. Termed ‘absolute,’
‘abject’ and ‘abstract,’ these revolutionary spatial models aligned to symbolism,
constructivism and surrealism, challenged the 19th-century auditorium that could
no longer house the theatrical and technological upheavals of modernity.
Reflecting the modernist ‘crisis’ of representation and the emergence of a spatial
dis-ease, such models also proffer alternative spatial strategies for facilitating
performance.
The dates defining Europe’s historical avant-garde, comprised of a series of
short-lived radical movements reacting to modernity, tend to move around
depending on those scholars theorizing its delineation and impact. Many cite the
turn of the 20th century as a founding moment or a decade earlier, which allows
the symbolists to play a part. I would concur with Matei Calinescu, who saw
avant-gardism as something emerging from the failure of the 1871 Commune in
France, and with Bert Cardullo, who includes symbolism in the historic mix.
Although the following introduction explicates that one cannot always fix a date
on history’s significant events, the 1870s align to a time in France when the
military term, avant-garde, came to include the voice of literary and visual artists
in its social critique. As early as 1825, socialist thinkers such as Henri de Saint-
Simon (followed by his pupil, Olinde Rodrigues and, later, Gabriel Laverdant)
were positing the avant-garde artist as a soldier-priest in service of progress,
liberating practice from tradition. Such a creative vanguard – named after the
‘advance party’ of elite shock troupes sent out in front of the army – were to
forge a purified future by utilizing art as a weapon. As is also essential to this
book’s thesis, they were charged with sacralizing an increasingly secular world.
Constituted by what Guillaume Apollinaire called “extreme schools”8 – and
more recently characterized by Renato Poggioli (1968) through activism,
antagonism, nihilism and agonism – the avant-garde was, paradoxically, both
modernism’s ‘cutting-edge’ and its opponent; engaging with, yet fiercely resistant
to, its adoption of modernity’s industrial and rational transformations. Although
destruction became a means of creation for the avant-garde over three-quarters
of a century, it was the brutal and unrepresentable obliteration of bodies and
geographies at the end of World War II that also signalled the termination of this
fractured and multiplicitous movement of movements. While many have written
about the ensuing vanguard as the neo or second-wave avant-garde, these artists
have also been dismissed for absorbing vanguardism into an institutionalized
bourgeois shock style.9 Nevertheless, this second-wave did coincide with a period
in theatre architecture where multiple relationships between actors and audience
were explored, largely within a featureless (and preferably black) ‘box,’ studio or
hall.
So, what or where was the architectural avant-garde during this extended
period? In Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde, Günter
Berghaus delineates avant-gardism from modernism because the latter more
encompassing phenomenon sought to capture a transforming contemporary
world by working with (rather than against) the mediating agencies of cultural
institutions – such as newspapers, galleries, museums and theatres – in order to
create a new audience.10 Such an institutional alliance applies to the so-called
architectural avant-garde who tended to be the heroes rather than critics of
modernist architecture. While seminal texts on the theatrical and historical
avant-garde include the literary and visual arts, none of them even mention
architecture. Those architects who are cited in the annals of avant-garde history
were also operating as artists and/or designers, closely aligned and collaborating
with theatre activities in expressionism (Peter Behrens), De Stijl (Theo Van
Doesberg) constructivism (El Lissitzky, Walter Gropius and the Vesnins) and
surrealism (Frederick John Kiesler). Although artist-producer Hans Richter briefly
gathered together the genres in G: An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture,
Design and Film (1923–1926, in which theatre was absent from the mix), the
architectural vanguard, personified in the figures of Le Corbusier and Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, chose architecture rather than revolution, focusing on the
“programming and planned reorganization of building production and of the city
as a productive organism.”11 While the artistic avant-garde resisted
institutionalization and style, architecture, more aligned with modernism
(serving rather than critiquing power), became part of the establishment and was
ultimately represented as “International Style,” established in the 1932 MoMA
exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock.
Tafuri, whose dialectic historiography focuses mainly on utopian modernism,
is perhaps the only author to consider architectural avant-gardism, particularly
through his reflections on 18th-century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
theorized as a disenchanted critic of Enlightenment and early avant-garde
architect. Aligning Piranesi’s techniques to those of Russian theatre and film
artist Sergei Eisenstein, Tafuri saw a transgression of architectural tradition via
montage as a means of fragmentation and reconstitution, as well as through the
artistic imagination that resists scientific rationale.12 Yet, as Hilde Heynen points
out, the avant-garde focus on transitory destabilizing events was at odds with
modernism’s principle of rationality, which architects found hard to renounce.13
The biggest challenge to architectural avant-gardism will emerge during the
course of this text through the conflicting urges of construction and destruction.
While Badiou defines 20th-century art and its avant-garde formalization as “the
radical attempt to practice a non-classical art,”14 modernist architects were
seeking a new classicism that constructed the very utopia the avant-garde
performed against. As Georges Perec observes, all utopian visions establish a
reign of order, leaving no room for chance or difference and generally concealing
“some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its
place.”15
In order to inform contemporary practice in theatre architecture I began this
book with a body of knowledge gained as a scenographer who also consults on
the planning of new and renovated performing arts venues, working closely with
project teams. Building on this tacit knowledge, the book’s argument has
emerged and developed from both theoretical and historical research as well as
analyses of specific buildings and scenographic practices from the past and
present. I have explored a range of bibliographic and archival materials and
visited all the existing buildings mentioned throughout the book, most of them
‘in action’ (i.e. experienced with live performances onstage). A broad overview of
an epoch in relation to current thought, my research has not only relied on
existing theoretical literature and theatrical/architectural manifestos associated
with the historical avant-garde, but also on ‘reading’ the buildings themselves as
performative spatial texts.
Performance studies, with its “broad spectrum approach”16 and
interdisciplinary focus – or even its claim to a “post-discipline of inclusions”17 –
provides the primary discursive field that expands the notion of performance
beyond theatrical practice and systems analysis to articulate how discourses from
outside architecture reconvene built space as both embodied experience and
evolving time-based event. Event-space is here constituted with a hyphen that
operates on the term through a dynamic spatiotemporal interval, outlined in the
following introduction as ‘spacing’: an operational act and its effect.18 Theorizing
architecture as ‘evental’ repositions it more centrally in performance theory – no
longer as an object on the periphery but as a volatile spatial subject that actively
unfolds materially and discursively within the field.
In concluding this preface, a word on the bespoke photographs taken by
architectural photographer Marc Goodwin. Many theatre architects tend to prefer
images of auditoria full of people. As 2014 Stirling Prize-winner Steve Tompkins
wrote to me, “populated photos are always preferable because the audience is (or
should be) such a huge component of the architectural surface of the room.”19
However, while many criticize architects for documenting empty spaces without
humans and signs of their occupation, this is perhaps because such inhabitation
forecloses on the multiple scenarios performed in the architects’ minds during the
design process, thereby fixing the space in a specific time and situation. Such
specificity denies an inherent spacing, which, as Andrew Benjamin and Mark
Wigley have discussed, evades containment and recognizes the complex time of
architecture, which is inherently irreducible and unmasterable.20 The venues are
therefore approached as sites-in-waiting: already enacting their own ‘slow
performance’ and echoing this book’s central premise that ‘space precedes action
– as action.’
Focusing on historic or more contemporary interiors mentioned in my text,
Goodwin’s photos capture how they anticipate imminent occupations, having
chronicled or eradicated previous residencies through traces or lack thereof. Like
Adolphe Appia’s Rhythmic Spaces (discussed in Chapter 2), they vibrate with
time and matter – while harbouring the atemporal and immaterial –
simultaneously predetermining typological inhabitation (critiqued in this book as
disciplinary) alongside possibilities for digression. Acknowledging the endless
parade of performances, past and future, these houses of returning actions,
audiences and seasons conceal the differentiated within the predictable:
constituting Henri Lefebvre’s ultimate rhythmic spatiotemporal site, designed for
“repetitions, ruptures and resumptions.”21

Notes
1 Badiou, The Century, 147.
2 This is evident in the unrealized schemes of those architects, such as Frederick J. Kiesler and Walter
Gropius, who collaborated with avant-garde artists and theatre-makers and whose work is discussed in
this book.
3 Austin’s ‘performative’ is discussed further in the Introduction.
4 ‘Spatial practice’ is here referred to as both a disciplinary undertaking (the practice of making
architecture or theatre) and a socialized behavioural convention within prescribed environments (see
Lefebvre’s The Production of Space).
5 This is discussed by Sanford Kwinter who describes “evental,” with its alliance to time, as “concrete,
plastic and active” (Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, 69n.29).
Peter Hallward’s translation of événementielle is something akin to “of the event,” or that which
constitutes the event as new and irruptive of the old, discussed in his introduction to Badiou, Ethics: An
Understanding of Evil, xxxvi–lii.
6 Bert Cardullo and Günter Berghaus provide the most pertinent definitions and foundations for this
study in their (co)edited and authored books on theatre, performance and theories of the historical
 avant-garde.
7 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 86.
8 Apollinaire and Eimert, Cubism, 12.
9 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 40 maintains that the ‘Neo Avant-Garde’ movements of the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s institutionalized and therefore negated true vanguardism in art.
10 Berghaus, Theatre, Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde, 40.
11 Tafuri, Architecture & Utopia, 100.
12 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s.
13 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, 29.
14 Badiou, The Century, 140.
15 Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Places, 185.
16 Schechner, “Performance Studies: The Broad Spectrum Approach,” 7–9.
17 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Performance Studies,” 43.
18 This is linked to Derrida’s notion of différance that – speaking to both the difference and deferral of
meaning – signifies both difference/alterity as espacement (spacing) and the deferral/delay as
temporization (temporalization), thereby emphasizing the spatiotemporal and the notion of the archi-
trace, which negates architecture as thing, emphasizing movement through an interweave between
temporalized space and spatialized time. See Of Grammatology.
19 Steve Tompkins, in an email to the author, 28 January 2015. Specializing in theatre architecture, his
firm, Haworth Tompkins Architects, gained the 2014 RIBA Stirling Prize for their design of the
Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, England.
20 Balkema and Slager, Territorial Investigations, Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory.
21 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 78.
Acknowledgements

This book – the product of ongoing thinking through theatre architecture as

practitioner and scholar – comprises the text I have wanted to offer a long line of
architecture, scenography and spatial design students, researchers and
practitioners who have consulted me regarding their studies and design projects
over the last twenty-five years. It was finally developed via my NYU doctoral
dissertation in performance studies (2008) and owes much to the guidance and
support of my supervisor, Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and advisors,
Allen S. Weiss and André Lepecki, whose teaching, scholarship and creative
practices continue to provide inspiration. Special thanks to Barbara who taught
me the value of excellent supervision alongside hospitality; something I could
never match but will always aspire to. I am also indebted to past work colleagues,
Duncan Joiner, Tony Parker, Amanda Yates, Sven Mehzoud and Sam Trubridge
whose support over the years allowed me to focus on the main body of research
within these pages.
The project has involved considerable travel in Europe, knocking on theatre
doors and asking to be shown the nooks and crannies of many working venues. I
am therefore grateful to the technicians and managers who gave their time and
expertise and am particularly indebted to Britta Kroker and Wolfgang Hanfstein
who provided a base in Germany and made the necessary contacts with many of
the venues, and to France Hervé who did the same for me in Paris. Also to
Brazilian colleagues, Lidia Kosovski and Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima, for
introducing me to Edson Elito, who worked with Lina Bo Bardi on São Paulo’s
Teatro Oficina, and helped organize access to the space. To conclude a book,
generally focused on dead white European men, by being able to reference more
recent designers such as Bo Bardi and Carla Juaçaba from Brazil speaks toward
an exciting future for performative architecture outside perceived Western
centres of culture and gendered authority.
My particular thanks go to Katerina Gaeva and Theatrical Russia for assistance
with information on the Dubrovka Theatre and to Maiya Pramatarova who
helped with Russian contacts. Katerina was in the production team for Nord-Ost,
which was playing when the theatre was taken over by the Chechen rebels, and
lost friends and colleagues in the 2002 siege. I am also grateful to Professors
Arnold Aronson and Christopher Baugh who, as leading figures in the field of
scenography scholarship, gave considered responses to my queries from both
sides of the Atlantic. Thanks also goes to the directors and choreographers who,
as creative collaborators, have allowed me to play out my research through
performance design, especially Colin McColl, Anna Marbrook and Carol Brown,
who embraced the processes and outputs of truly open, non-hierarchical
collaboration. The same could be said of my Prague Quadrennial colleagues –
past and present – at the Czech Theatre Institute, particularly Sodja Lotker and
Tomáš Žižka.
I will always be indebted to my dear departed friend, Tony Williams of Renton
Howard Wood Levine Architects in London, who shared his passion for theatre
architecture back in the late 1980s, mentoring me in the early stages of my career,
and to Josh Dachs of Fisher Dachs Associates in New York who, two decades
later, was hospitable with both knowledge and access to his substantial library.
Thanks particularly to photographic artist, Marc Goodwin, who enthusiastically
and generously accepted the challenge to create high-quality bespoke images for
this publication (aided by a grant from the Meiss Publication Fund and
Routledge’s commitment to colour images) and to those theatres that opened
their doors to his camera’s eye. Gratitude also to Charles Murdoch who tirelessly
worked to track down many of the other images, and Duncan Munro for
invaluable advice on the cover design. Also to colleagues and good friends
Mitchell Davis, Barbara Spandorf, Sharon Jansen, Olav Harsløf, Jane Rendell,
Rodrigo Tisi, Omar Khan, Rachel Hann, Kasia Pol, Kathleen Irwin, Joslin
McKinney, John Di Stefano and Reija Hirvikovski for continued support and
inspiration over the years.
 But most of all I am ever-grateful to my family who have taught me the value
of love in order to consider this in relation to the practice of performance design
through what Jon McKenzie calls ‘political love’; opening up and transcending
“private, familial and bourgeois notions of love,” with one “that is both intimate
and immense, both personal and public, both proximate and distant.”1 This
equates with Slavoj Žižek’s claim that love, with its ‘miraculous’ nature and
circular structure – linking effects to causes – is also evental.2

Notes
1 McKenzie, “Global Feeling,” 135.
2 Žižek, Event, 4.
Introduction
Event-space: a performance model for
architecture

We have no contemporary theatre. No agitators’ theatre, no tribunal, no

force which does not merely comment on life, but shapes it.
– Frederick Kiesler, Endless Theatre (Shelter Magazine, 1932)

In architectural discourse, the term “performance” has generally been associated

with building science. As a technical and diagnostic tool for investigating the
quantifiable workings of the constructed environment, building performance has
focused on improving the operations and efficiencies of buildings and their
physical impact on occupants who are rendered “users.” Implicated in
architectural modernism’s ongoing utopian project its concerns with optimization
have remained central in the engineering sciences, although recent architectural
publications have attempted to align the more pragmatic concerns with
architecture’s aesthetic considerations.1 However, as David Leatherbarrow
maintains in the opening chapter of Performative Architecture: Beyond
Instrumentality, “[t]he continued dedication to a technical interpretation of
performance will lead to nothing more than an uncritical affirmation of old-style
functionalist thinking – a kind of thinking that is both reductive and inadequate
because it recognizes only what it can predict.”2 It is perhaps more productive to
ask not what a building is, but what it does.3
This book, theorizing architecture as a complex and active player in our
everyday lives, establishes spatial performativity through the intricate and
varying forces of the event (historic, aesthetic and quotidian) in order to realign
the static object of architecture to the dynamic flux of performance. Event-space
– a term that emerged toward the end of the 20th century – is here developed as
a means of articulating how space performs through time and movement and
how performance is spatialized through the event, specifically in theatre
architecture.
“Theatre” refers to both dramatic practice (performance) and the building
(architecture) housing that practice. As an art form theatre incorporates the
theatrical artifice of fleeting events that utilize the ephemeral materials of
gesture, light and sound alongside the disposable elements of costume, prop and
setting; while, as a built form it provides a stable environment conceived to
persist beyond the transitory events it houses. The synthesis of both forms has
tended to define each theatrical epoch in Western history: the Greco-Roman
amphitheatre, Renaissance picture- frame stage, Elizabethan globe, Restoration
playhouse and the baroque horseshoe opera houses of the 18th and 19th
centuries. In the early 20th century the theatrical avant-garde aimed to eliminate
the bourgeois sociality and monumentality of the baroque auditorium in order to
produce a more intense and immediate experience, seeking alternative sites and
proposing their own scenographic performance machines that captured the spirit
and challenges of a new industrial age. This resulted in multiple experimental and
hybrid forms in new and adapted buildings, especially during the second half of
the century. However, a definitive 20th-century model for performance space is
not so clearly established, although the persistent form of a rationally planned
fan-shaped or shoe-box theatre – in which all seats face the proscenium stage in
an auditorium focusing on clear sightlines, comfort and acoustics – tends to
dominate, alongside the ubiquitous black box studio that replicates the stage itself
as a spatial void within which theatrical images are manufactured. This was a
direct legacy of Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre) at Bayreuth, a
coherent model that opened in 1876 and was embraced by architecture’s Modern
Movement. Yet as David Wiles suggests, “Theatre architecture turned out to be
one of modernism’s greatest failures, flexible, versatile theatres stripped of social
messages proving a conceptual impossibility. The machine á jouer proved as
chimeric as Le Corbusier’s machines á vivre.”4
 I would contend that many powerful aspects of avant-garde performance
practice failed to be spatially realized in built form during the first half of the
20th century due to a mutual gap that emerged between the ancient disciplinary
structures of theatre and architecture, which seem not only to have grown apart,
but also, through modernism, to have been cleaved in two; theatre negated the
role of architecture while architecture rejected the theatrical. Although avant-
garde revolutions did not always coincide with the architectural reforms of
modernism, an investigation of the relationship between event and space (and
what transpires as their inseparability) can offer inspiration for discussing this
schism and exposing unrealized forms of theatre architecture. Event-Space
provides a means of dealing with the theatre as an integration of art form and
built form, revealing how space performs as an event and in turn houses events.
This book establishes spatial performativity through the event as a distinctly
modernist phenomenon that brought the built environment more in line with the
dynamics of performance through the constitutive elements of time, movement
and action. Such a challenge to architecture’s status as fixed and enduring object
emerged from radical shifts in thought, perception and technology between 1872
and 1947, troubling a clear articulation of the 20th-century auditorium, especially
in relation to avant-garde practices.
Building commenced on Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth in 1872,
coinciding with Friedrich Nietzsche’s publication of The Birth of Tragedy, while
1947 marks Antonin Artaud’s un-broadcast performance of Pour en Finir avec le
Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God) and the publication
of Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command. Nietzsche’s and Artaud’s
two declamations of modernism’s loss of faith, which bookend this historic
trajectory, fundamentally undermine the role architecture traditionally played in
theatrical performance and define a period that moved from the technological
innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution to the technological slaughter
during World War II. The setting for this discussion is therefore characterized by
modernism’s preoccupation with the metropolis, new industrial technologies and
a rejection of tradition. “Shocks” elicited by the mechanization of transport,
communication and war led to the collapse of Cartesian perspectivalism, which
defined and stabilized the spatial image of stage and architecture and a tendency
toward fragmentation, ambiguity and irrationality. The revolutions of Vladimir
Lenin combined with the dreams of Sigmund Freud to create implosions and
explosions of sociopolitics and psychoanalysis that undermined both the
theatrical conventions and the material walls of the melodramatic realistic
theatre. The well-constructed playhouse seemed as meaningless as the well-made
bourgeois play. However, as Max Herrmann has discussed, the idea of theatre as a
‘festival’ and therefore ‘event’ had begun to take hold in the late 19th century,5
and was subsequently taken up by early 20th-century reformers: leading to the
emergence of alternative spatial models, principally through the writing and
unbuilt proposals of the avant-garde’s theatrical resistance.
This book takes the historical avant-garde as modernism’s volatile edges that
worked to destabilize the fixity of architecture and bring it more in line with the
flux of performance. It isolates and explores three distinctive spatial models that
developed in relation to the theatrical movements associated with symbolism,
constructivism and surrealism, which were seldom brought to fruition in built
form: Absolute Space, as exemplified by the atmospheric, universal landscapes of
Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia; Abstract Space, encapsulated in the
Total Theatre of architect Walter Gropius for Erwin Piscator that transforms the
theatre into an architectural machine; and Abject Space, called upon by Antonin
Artaud and Georges Bataille to enact a physical revolt against architecture’s
denial of the visceral and uncontainable body, signalling a failure in the early
20th-century utopian projects of both architecture and theatre. Each spatial
model constitutes an archetype that is haunted by an-other event-space, emerging
to develop over the century as the black box, industrial site and found space.
These three revolutionary models of absolute, abstract and abject space form
separate chapters in the book: each concentrating on significant architectural and
theatrical projects of the avant-garde and their influence on subsequent buildings
and environments.
They follow the first chapter, which demonstrates how the baroque theatre –
appropriated by the 19th-century bourgeoisie – reached its limit on both sides of
the proscenium’s frame. As a glory machine that negotiated between spectacle
and surveillance, its apotheosis occurred in Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House,
constructed at the same time as Wagner’s Festspielhaus. The two theatres opened
almost simultaneously; one representing the conclusion of an epoch; the other
providing a new model, which refuted the audience as spectacle by focusing on
the staged event and strengthening the disciplinary nature of the auditorium’s
architecture.6
Each chapter shuttles between the past and present, the historical and
theoretical, mobilizing history and theory in the service of contemporary
practice. As an exploration of the relation between architecture (built form),
scenography (fictive environment) and performance (embodied practice), this
study draws upon theatrical/architectural manifestos associated with the
historical avant-garde, existing buildings and archival documentation of stage
designs and theatre buildings.7 Close readings of texts, settings and buildings
reveal critical encodings as “spatial speech,” addressing the mutual lacunae that
exist in contemporary architectural and theatrical discourses between the
spatiality of performance and the performativity of space. In understanding the
dynamic possibilities of sites specific to theatrical events we can expand the
potential for conceiving and perceiving architecture itself as an intricate event.

Architecture as event
Put together two or three people and right away theatre exists, at least in
principle. Two of the people converse for a moment between themselves,
they become actors; the third watches and listens to them, he is the
spectator; that which is said is the poem; the place where the conversation is
held, that is the stage, and this dramatic rudiment comprehends from that
moment the entire primitive idea of the theatre.
– Charles Garnier, Le Théàtre

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this
empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is
needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.
– Peter Brook, The Empty Space

The idea of any given space as an essentially active site for theatrical encounter,
where action (of performer) is observed (by spectator), was articulated in 1871 by
Charles Garnier as a “primitive idea of a theatre” and almost a century later by
Peter Brook as the archetypal “empty space.”8 For the 19th-century architect, this
was the fundamental condition from which to construct a richly detailed
environment for social encounter, whereas the 20th-century director is concerned
with a specifically dramatic encounter. However, for both Garnier and Brook, the
empty space is replete with character and action. Every location contains its own
particularities that influence, shape and are in turn shaped by, multiple
performances harnessed through the spatial program and social codes of
architectural inhabitation. These are made more complex during the theatrical
performance by the production’s mise-en-scène, which, often acknowledging the
incorporeal, aspatial and atemporal, is designed to admit the virtual. This book
also posits an existential void at the heart of 20th-century modernity that haunts
its spatiality, which, as Chapter 2 will demonstrate, is simultaneously full and
empty.
In 1968 Brook establishes his “empty space” as a means of wiping away the
19th-century notions of a theatre that endured well into the 20th century and
continues to persevere in the early 21st century. He begins by eradicating the
trappings of stage and auditorium, including rows of seats, controlled exits, raised
podium, curtain and proscenium arch, all reinforcing the divide between real and
ideal. The result is no modernist tabula rasa but a claim that any space, with its
intrinsic character, not only becomes a site for performance, but also performs.9
Yet this notion of spatial performativity has been largely overlooked, especially in
relation to existing literature on theatre architecture.
Marvin Carlson’s Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture
(1989) integrates the theatrical, spatial and sociocultural aspects of Western
theatre architecture from ancient Greece to the late 20th century to discuss its
event dimension as a complex text. Although Carlson maintains that the theatre
is “one of the most persistent architectural objects in the history of western
culture,” he does not explicitly apply performative spatiality to performance
space.10 In a subsequent book, Performance: A Critical Introduction (1996), he
insists “human agency” is vital to performance’s ontology, parenthetically noting,
“(even in the theatre we do not speak of how well the scenery or costumes
performed).”11 Excluding designed elements from performance theory denies the
performativity of places and things, as well as their ability to augment the actor’s
body, performing without and in spite of human agency. Jiří Veltruský counters
this bias when he writes, “even a lifeless object may be perceived as the
performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element
completely without will.”12 What if we were to extend this argument to built
space itself, agreeing with architectural theorist Mark Wigley that “in an
important sense, space precedes action,”13 and adding “ – as action”?
This notion of the auditorium’s inherent spatial performativity is rarely
discussed but often inferred by those specializing in theatre architecture, such as
Iain Mackintosh in Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993). Mackintosh focuses
on the dynamic contribution architecture makes to the performance experience as
“a three-dimensional and three-way event” in order to recover the active role
played by the audience.14 In Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the
Theatre (1999), dramatic theorist Gay McAuley considers performance space as a
complex social mechanism rather than an aesthetic object: “not an empty
container but an active agent; it shapes what goes on within it, emits signals
about it to the community at large and is itself affected.”15 Citing Gertrude Stein
who said the theatre is “a space of time that is filled always filled with moving,”
McAuley suggests that movement rather than mimesis is theatre’s principle
characteristic.16 Focusing on text-based productions, she maintains that actors
give meaning, life and mobility to objects.17 I would argue that elements
reciprocally engage with actors and that such transference extends into the
auditorium as a mutual relationship between architecture and audience, as well
as architecture and performance.
Gaëlle Breton contradicts this notion of architecture’s active role during
performance in the introduction to Theatres (1989) when she remarks, “theatre
transcends architecture. The architectural framework may foster or frustrate
dramatic action but it is not the source of this emotion. Once the theatrical spell
has been cast, the limits of physical space become irrelevant.”18 Like many
scholars focusing on theatre architecture, Breton renders it a secondary scenic
device that disappears when the lights are lowered. However, the construction of
the live theatrical experience occurs through fluctuating modalities of attention
in an intertwining of architecture, audience, performance and its fictive
environment. It is more than, as McAuley contends, an “inversion of interior and
exterior” in which attention is shifted from auditorium to stage when the curtain
rises.19 An intricate spatiality is at work that was particularly evident in pre-20th-
century theatre, which, pre-cinema, involved a three-dimensionally distributed
audience engaged with itself as well as what was happening on the framed stage.
A pertinent exploration of this interconnection between space and
performance was undertaken in Arnold Aronson’s History and Theory of
Environmental Scenography (1977),20 which builds upon Richard Schechner’s ‘6
Axioms for Environmental Theatre’ where the pre-existing space itself is taken as
another production element in the performance field.21 Aronson looks to the
traditions of “non-frontal performance” to place the environmental theatre
movement of the 1960s and 1970s on an historical continuum, including the
experiments of Europe’s earlier avant-garde. For Aronson a unified space,
specifically prescribed for the theatrical event, becomes a “transformational
agent” through the built environment itself as an enveloping scenography.22
Looking to staging performances in scenographic environments beyond
theatre’s prescribed location (first theorized by Edward Gordon Craig, radically
experimented by the surrealists and Dadaists and publicly staged before and into
the 1920s by German avant-garde director Max Reinhardt)23 has gained traction
within contemporary theatre under the influence of scholar-practitioners such as
Mike Pearson, whose book Site-Specific Performance (2010) addresses the
inadequacies and unsuitability of the auditorium’s conventions and techniques.24
For Pearson the built environment beyond theatre’s prescriptive confines offers “a
scene of plenitude, its inherent characteristics, manifold effects and unruly
elements always liable to leak, spill and diffuse into performance.”25 Expounding
the readability of site as well as how it conditions performance, he acknowledges
that locations are saturated with social and political realities, which inform how
performances are created and received through an interpenetration of the found
and fabricated. Pearson refers to Miwon Kwon who points out that, while
performances are no longer all physically grounded, reflecting the contemporary
realities of societal deterritorialization, diasporic movement and digital interfaces,
“we maintain a secret adherence to the actuality of places.”26 Site-specific events
can neither fully engage with nor erase the multiple pasts and forces inherent to
‘found’ and ‘chosen’ locations but, during their brief residencies, are capable of
recontextualization: “it is the latest occupation at a location at which other
occupations – their architectures, material traces and histories – are still apparent
and cognitively active.”27 As a performance-maker who works in, around and
away from conventional venues, I’m interested in how theatre itself can be
approached site-specifically: with each unique venue continually
recontextualized from one production to another through ever-varying spatial
assemblages that integrate scenography, performance and audience.
Erika Fischer-Lichte discusses such shifting and unrepeatable constellations
created by people, places and things in The Transformative Power of Performance:
a new aesthetic (2008), in which she develops Max Herrmann’s notion of the
‘performative turn’ that defines theatre’s particular “aestheticity” through a
perceptual shift from singular artwork to participatory, embodied and spatial
event.28 Asserting the dynamics of interaction in theatre as an “autopoietic
feedback loop,” which emplaces the audience in “a radically liminal state of
betwixt and between,”29 Fischer- Lichte argues that the environment can no
longer be approached as a static “architectural-geometric” container, instead
asserting the unstable, fluctuating and atmospheric conditions of theatre’s
“performative space.”30
A recent proliferation of books on performance and place/space illustrate a
burgeoning interest in this confluence, though they seldom mention architecture
and are rarely authored by architects or architectural theorists. However, they all
tend to focus on what Fischer-Lichte and Benjamin Vihstutz refer to as the
“historically intertwined triad” of performance, politics and space,” applicable to
multiple fields of study and thereby forming a “transdisciplinary subject.”31 This
discursive opening out can then be applied to designing performance venues by
taking into account the geographical, cultural and socio-political factors that
inevitably form their complex, spatial dramaturgies.
David Wiles adopts a dramaturgical approach in A Short History of Western
Performance Space (2003), which draws on the history of Western thought in its
review of theatre architecture, including and outside its traditional sites. Wiles
offers a range of spatial models “to tell seven parallel stories about seven discrete
performance practices” on a historical spectrum.32 These “micro narratives”
include sacred, processional, public and sympotic spaces as well as the cosmic
circle, cave and empty space, developing the definition of “theatre” through a
broad-based view that extends beyond its proper sites into galleries, churches,
pubs and streets. Event-Space adopts a similar approach where spatial paradigms
that integrate thought and action are encouraged to emerge against a complex
background of historical, dramatic and quotidian events.
 However, in order to articulate these performative models in Chapters 2 to 4,
this introduction works to realign the conventionally static object of architecture
with the dynamic flux of performance through the intricate and varying forces of
the event (historic, aesthetic and quotidian) by developing event-space – a term
that appeared toward the end of the 20th century – as a means of articulating
how space performs through time and movement and how performance is
spatialized via the event, specifically in theatre architecture. This event-space
formulation emerges from an extended discussion on the affects and effects
modernity had on shaping modernism generally, which is followed by a
meditation on how modernism and the avant-garde are characterized in relation
to both architecture and theatre, highlighting where they aligned and diverged.
The introduction concludes by turning to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and
the philosopher’s return to the ancient site of Greek theatre as a means of
recuperating a more embodied, participatory and visceral space for performance.
Nietzsche’s Dionysian resistance to Apollonian architecture as a safe container is
aligned to Artaud’s philosophy. Both men contributed to a shift in how theatre
and architecture are conceived, presented and experienced.

Event-space: a useful paradigm in motion

Architecture is as much about the events that take place in spaces as about
the spaces themselves […] the static notions of form and function long
favoured by architectural discourse need to be replaced by attention to the
actions that occur inside and around buildings – to the movement of bodies,
to activities, to aspirations; in short, to the properly social and political
dimension of architecture. Moreover, the cause-and-effect relationship
sanctified by modernism, by which form follows function (or vice versa),
needs to be abandoned in favour of promiscuous collisions of programs and
spaces, in which the terms intermingle, combine and implicate one other in
the production of a new architectural reality.
– Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities

Space, like time, is emergence and eruption, oriented not to the ordered, the
controlled, the static, but to the event, to movement or action.
 – Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture for the Outside

This introduction focuses primarily on establishing event-space as a useful

paradigm for analyzing and articulating both spatial performativity and
performance space, especially in relation to avant-garde revolutions that evaded
and resisted architectural expression. Time and action are employed to mobilize
the built environment as a producing-machine that reciprocally enacts its own
forces upon history and bodies.
A theory of the “event” (with its fleeting elusive qualities) effectively
undermines the proper place of architecture, opening up possibilities for a new
way of approaching its practice and production. However, as Peter Eisenman
notes, “traditional architectural theory largely ignores the idea of the event.”33
This may be because a performative focus on architecture contains an inherent
threat to its very foundations, confronting the unshakable modernist alliance
between space and use where the program is considered to be as fixed and secure
as the building. The event reveals inherent disjunctions that undermine
architecture’s stability as a material phenomenon and a discursive field. Yet
architecture, the “artful building of spaces” with their “frozen rituals of
occupation,” has long been considered an enduring art form, attempting to elude
the complexities of temporality and the unpredictabilities of the social and
individual bodies it seeks to contain.34
K. Michael Hays cites the term “event-space” as originating with contemporary
Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi,35 who, since exploring architecture through
performance and conceptual art at the London Architectural Association where
he taught in the 1970s, has associated architecture – “its social relevance and
formal invention” – directly with the event.36 Tschumi’s statement “there is no
space without event” has continued to provide the basis for the performance of
his praxis as “paper architecture” (highly discursive, and often unbuildable,
architectural propositions) and as built projects.37 He persists in questioning
architecture’s inveterate association with continuity, coherence and autonomy by
focusing on time, action and movement. Although his influences are found more
in literature, cinema and performance art than in theatre, Tschumi’s alliances
with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and his belief in the active nature of the
built environment have served to influence and shape recent architectural theory
as “the discourse of events as much as the discourse of spaces.”38 Tschumi, like the
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, lays down a challenge to architecture to be more
active.
In Architecture from the Outside, Grosz suggests that discourses “other” to
architecture can create a necessary disturbance “to force an encounter, to effect a
transformation or becoming, in which the series that is architecture can be
intercut with an element (or several) from its outside.”39 This encounter manifests
itself through operations that radically disturb the very body of the discipline and
its historic discourse. Grosz refers to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of difference
as a wager “in which thought (thought in concepts, thought in images, thought in
building materials) asserts its full force as event, as material modification, as
movement beyond.”40 Such a conceptual strategy accepts an inevitable mutilation
of both disciplines in order to submit to a “third term” outside the mainstream of
these discourses.41 This invocation of the limits beyond which architecture,
defying its own calculations, can neither function nor control, has the potential to
refresh the field in which buildings, environments and cities are created.
Event-space is here posited as a “third term” of Grosz’s formulation, by staging
an encounter between architecture (spatial discourse) and performance (event
discourse). While the former is associated with endurance, stability and fixity, the
latter embraces ephemerality, fictionality and flux. Both discursive fields can,
however, be mutually transformed through Grosz’s formulation (Ibid: 64) as the
becoming-performance of architecture and becoming-architecture of
performance.42 Such a convergence of two seemingly divergent disciplines
designates event-space as a “third space” for productive encounter – disrupting
binary oppositions and offering a fluctuating realm of movement, development
and contestation – both within the specific site of theatre architecture and the
general environments of everyday life.43

Space (becoming-performance of architecture)

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of taking place in space
… an event.
– Jacques Derrida, Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture
As a compound term, event-space combines the disciplines of performance and
architecture through the hyphen – a punctuation mark that simultaneously
separates and joins while enacting a break or interruption. In Of Grammatology
(1967), Jacques Derrida aligns this dynamic action in punctuation to “spacing”
that “speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and
the becoming-time of space.”44 For Derrida, punctuation enacts its own
performative utterances, designating not only the interval but “a ‘productive,’
‘genetic,’ ‘practical’ movement, an ‘operation,’ if you will.”45 The hyphen operates
like a necessary membrane holding the fluid from the solid, the dynamic from the
static – event from space. However, the pairing of these two terms must not be
understood as existing in opposition. As an expressive interval, the simple dash
adopts a performative gesture reflecting the creative and conflicting relationship
between the fields of performance and architecture, forming an-other space for
productive expression.
Almost two decades after establishing the spatiotemporal in language through
punctuation, Derrida went on to propose the notion of architectural
performativity, whereby architecture, by “taking place,” becomes “the event of
spacing.”46 This was through his critique of Bernard Tschumi’s, Parc de la Villette
(1982–1998) in Paris, in which the philosopher maintains that as an “acting out”
architecture puts something “into form.”47 In this particular case, the structure
and placement of the park’s architectural follies – associated with madness (la
folie), or more precisely madnesses (les folies) – are “acting out dissociation.”48
What began for Derrida as a critique of the “confinements within language” and
the “solid, real buildings of social constructs” led to an evaluation on how
discourse is structured by physical space; an active reading of architectural
potentiality, navigating between the space of architecture and architectural space
– between spatial language (utilizing architectural metaphors) and architectural
construction.49 Spacing becomes an architectural act for the designer formulating
architecture and for the inhabitant experiencing it. As “the provocation of an
event,” this spatial performativity specifically references J. L. Austin’s
“performative” in How to Do Things with Words (1975), wherein Austin
establishes how the dynamic nature of “speech acts” expands beyond language
into action itself.50 Separating the constative (descriptive) from the performative
(active), Austin articulated how in speaking we can also be doing: that phrases
such as ‘I do’ (marry) or ‘I bet’ or ‘I name’ (a ship) actually enact what they state.
Yet these speech acts require certain environments, actions, objects and witnesses
to accompany them: maybe no longer a white dress or even a wedding ring for
marriage, but some sort of ritualized place, communal gathering, celebrant and
contract. Even a bet has an accompanying gesture and naming a ship requires the
vessel itself. So these places and things, replete with cultural meaning, also
perform rather than describe. They are not mimetic (copies) but authentic
elements inherent to the event: suggesting How Spaces and Things Do.
If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done through the
saying, which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of
architectural construction something is being done through spacing as both the
act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation. Dramatic
theorist Elin Diamond describes performativity within performance as “that risky
and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done.”51 By both
enacting and describing, the performative provides us with “access to cultural
meaning and critique.”52 As an aesthetic invention ‘design’ is both a doing
(creative act) and a thing done (cultural artefact). The same could be said for
architecture as ‘spacing’ an act always in the making, whereby inhabitants are
constantly re-constructing their perception of, and engagement with, the built
environment through its occupation. This relates to the choreographic notion of
spacing as a means of registering and apprehending changing relationships
between dancers in motion and the place they occupy. Within the singular
performance event multiple events are enacted through spacing.
In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter takes up Austin’s performative,
insisting that architecture confront its character as “an illocutionary event, or at
the very least as an element inseparable from and in constant interface with the
world of force, will, action and history.”53 He notes that this idea of the evental –
as active and interruptive of the status quo – signalled a break with architectural
history in which past epochs expressed their “will to form.”54 Through last
century’s spatiotemporal revolutions in science, arts and communication,
architecture has become perceived as an intimate system of forces giving shape
and rhythm to everyday life via “micro-architectures” and “macro-architectures”
derived from a system of practices that are both private and political.55 Kwinter
outlines how these modernist revolutions shifted the static spatialization of time
to a more dynamic temporalization of space through an emphasis on movement,
relativity and duration. Architecture is rendered performative, realigning it as
active becoming rather than passive being.
Radical shifts in modernism revealed space as a temporal event, undermining
the discrete object of architecture. The multiple revolutions that occurred in the
disciplines of art, science and thought during the late 19th century and early 20th
century transformed space, form and matter into continuous and explosive
phenomena.56 Objects were isolated and perceived as events through observation
and experience – performing beyond their signification. As active agents in the
spatiotemporal field, such objects gained a performative quality that architectural
modernism tended to resist, preferring to focus on a timeless passivity of form.
Yet the built object, both temporal and qualitative, can also be figured as an
event. Deleuze has referred to this object-event as the objectile: “a very modern
concept of a technological object,”57 which has its origins in baroque complexities
of folds, pleats, undulations, vibrations, nooks and crannies that privilege a
material and time-based spatiality over structural elements and coherent form.
No longer essentializing but active, the object, through continual variation, is
rendered a “theatre of matter.”58 Unable to be apprehended as a framed and
structured singularity, it resists and overflows its boundaries so as to annihilate
the frame. The event actualized in architectural space transformed it through the
element of time from passive, homogeneous container/object into something
more uneven, contracting and expanding. This alternative mode for architectural
perception, as a sensorial and volatile experience in motion, is evental. Space,
saturated with spaces, becomes a continual unfolding defined by time and
multiplied by an “accelerated succession of actions.”59 Within the dilating layers
of the architectural objectile the built environment can be interpreted as space-in-
action.
In his article “Unfolding Events” (1992), Peter Eisenman refers to Deleuze’s
formulation when he claims that the new architectural object is an objectile
because it involves “a temporal modulation that implies a continual variation of
matter.”60 However, such a temporalization of space and form is not so new,
having been played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde, who
focused on the dynamic event rather than the autonomous object. Eisenman’s
architecture of unfolding events announces a tardy embrace of the evental by
architectural discourse, finally acknowledging the active force of built form and
the difficult, complex relations that take place in a constantly changing context.61
This displacement of the static conception of the built environment recognizes its
complex temporality where the past and future are brought into a fluctuating
present. Within the “play” of time, architecture is experienced through variable
intensities of movement that occur within matter and by the body on the move.
The Deleuzian ontology of becoming thereby challenges the invariable presence
of modern architecture that has continued to rely on an ontology of stasis.
Sanford Kwinter plots this transformation of 20th-century epistemology as an
interplay between science and the arts:

To approach the problem of “the new,” then, one must complete the
following four requirements: redefine the traditional concept of the object;
reintroduce and radicalize the theory of time; conceive of “movement” as a
first principle and not merely as a special, dismissible case; and embed these
later three within an all-encompassing theory and politics of the “event.”62

Reyner Banham’s Guide to Modern Architecture points out that the notion of
“architectural space” only emerged in the late 19th century and defined the
architecture of the next century’s Modern Movement: “experienced as a series of
partitions of infinite space by an observer moving through them on a prescribed
route.”63 The observer becomes the source of spatial experience, participating in
the “free crazy space” of spatial infinity, which is held in check by geometricized
forms interpenetrated by interior and exterior.64 Like Sigfried Giedion, who
defined modern architecture through the incursion of time, Banham refers to the
Eiffel Tower (1889) as the determining structure of this new spatiality. He also
echoes Giedion’s assertion in Space, Time and Architecture: the growth of a new
tradition, that cubism signalled a further shattering of architectural space and its
perspectival representation. Pablo Picasso’s painting, Demoiselles D’Avignon
(1907), marks this defining spatial event, which is both projective and
experiential: “in order to grasp the true nature of space the observer must project
himself into it.”65 This recognized that forms are no longer bound by their
physical limits but emanate and model space through motion interaction and
orchestration.66
 Modernism’s multiple spatiotemporal and perceptual revolutions radically and
irreparably challenged the continuous and uniform homogeneity of Euclidean
space, which was hitherto reinforced by the universality of Sir Isaac Newton’s
“absolute space” – at rest “always similar and immovable.”67 Friedrich Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, followed by Albert Einstein’s relativity theories, privileged an
interpretative approach to reality as constructed of multiple and shifting
perspectives. The avant-garde adopted the strategy of withholding temporal and
spatial coordinates, playing into what Vargish and Mook refer to as an “epistemic
trauma” in science, art and life, where “there no longer exists a consensus on the
way the world looks and on the ways in which it may be represented.”68 The
secure orientations that modernity had constructed since the Renaissance were
no longer upheld. Instead spatiotemporal disorientation became essential to the
conception, execution and reception of art, literature and performance. A
relativistic approach to reality acknowledged the simultaneous existence of
multiple and often contradictory meanings, where the observer’s unique system
of observation challenged long-established formal systems. Einstein’s Special
Theory of Relativity (1905) and General Theory of Relativity (1915) bookended
cubism, which obliterated the distinction between objects and space. By 1920
Einstein insisted that “space” had become a vague word because “there is an
infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other.”69
Space became arithmetically, perceptually and culturally multiplicitous,
bringing it in line with shifting sociological, philosophical and geometric
perceptions. Stephen Kern points out how this worked to undermine the
emerging utopian project of materialism and its revolution that insisted on “one
and only one real framework of time and space in which the events of all cultures
take place.”70 Implicated in architectural modernism the utopian revolution
encapsulated a desire to create a unified stability through spatial homogeneity
and scientific rationality, despite the evidence that the time of architecture was
no longer detained as a petrified and timeless present. Built form had accelerated
into a dynamic, perpetually activated flow over the 20th century alongside the
developments in arts, sciences and technologies.71
Henri Bergson’s formulation of durée proposed that reality itself was no longer
fixed and that all matter was in perpetual, vibratile motion.72 Temporality altered
the dynamics of body and space through an existence that is always in the
making and never made: calling the solidity and stability of the corporeal and
built world into doubt. In revealing the fluidity within the solid, summed up by
Brian Massumi as “Concrete is as concrete doesn’t,” bodies and buildings are
rendered indeterminate – always in passage or process.73
Although movement was critical to the apprehension of modern architecture,
architects clung to the persistence of the object, replacing traditional classic form
for a new one, resisting the transience and mobility inherent in the modern
artwork. Only the futurists desired to abandon the heavy, static and enduring for
the light, swift and temporary. In the final paragraph of his Manifesto of Futurist
Architecture (1914), Antonio Sant’Elia proposed, “the fundamental characteristic
of futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. THINGS WILL
ENDURE LESS THAN US. EVERY GENERATION MUST BUILD ITS OWN
CITY.”74 Although the movement’s founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, may
have insisted Sant’Elia include this claim to an ephemeral and evolving
environment, it nevertheless represents one of the few strategies of the
architectural avant-garde to specifically address and undermine the persistence of
architecture in the face of extreme and continual change. The radicality of
Sant’Elia’s proposal highlights architecture’s inherent conservatism in
maintaining itself as centred, atemporal and monumental, resisting the continual
and destabilizing fluctuations of modernization.
Modernism’s plural and provisional constructions of reality created a kind of
vertigo, where “there is no longer a privileged vantage point from which one can
observe culture and its practices.”75 In the theatre this posed a major threat to the
static fixity of the proscenium stage and its relationship to a seated public within
the auditorium. Montage in paintings and film acknowledged the heterogeneity
of visual space, calling into doubt the notion of a singular point of view. This was
easier to achieve in the abstract space of the canvas or movie screen than the
architecture of the stage and auditorium, which negotiated between the gravitas
of its own materiality and art’s abstract desires. Unlike painting and cinema,
theatre could not create the immaterial representations achievable through visual
editing and multiple perspectives. Sitting before the proscenium arch the
spectator maintained a single fixed position. As Kern writes, “Theatre viewers
saw action in the same frame, from a single angle, and from an unchanging
distance in a space that was stationary from beginning to end.”76 The incursion of
movement into art challenged the assumption of a static spectator in both theatre
and architecture, reinforcing a new apprehension of space by perceptual bodies in
motion. New spatial models were required to express the new physics of space-
time that, incorporating the event, had shifted architecture from monolithic being
into a constant state of active and “perpetual becoming.”77
Event-space as space-in-action emerges through the spatiotemporal effects that
terminated the concept of absolute time along with the classical notion of space
as a fixed background against which things take place. I now turn to action-in-
space through a theory of the event as a turning point, an invention and a shock,
operating in both the quotidian and the monumental. Event-space, as an
enfolding of the evental with the spatiotemporal, can be cited (as significant
historic moments that shift thought), sighted (as dramatic spectacles, shows and
displays) and sited (as embodied quotidian performances in time and space). This
multiplicity of the event establishes an intricate system of spatial forces at play in
the built environment that, operating in the realms of reality and possibility, are
both actual and virtual.78

Event (becoming-architecture of performance)

Being an event rather than an object, performance is radically unstable in
the meanings it generates and in the activities it engages.
– Gay McAuley, Space in Performance

Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning
hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek
God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around
just then, he provoked much laughter. […]
“Wither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I.
All of us are his murderers. […] Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the
entire horizon? […] Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying
through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? […]
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Although Nietzsche claimed not to believe in the resounding “great event” but in
shifts that created new values,79 the 19th century was brought to a close with the
echoes of his proclamation that “God is dead.”80 Deleuze acknowledges this
statement, first outlined by Nietzsche in Gay Science (1882), as “the dramatic
proposition par excellence” in its denial of an identifiable unity from which all
the differences of the world emanate and to which they return.81 Reflecting the
general intensification of doubt in the eternal, in order to place more faith in the
present, God’s death could also be considered the decisive modern event; “an
event with a multiple sense,” fracturing that entity which was previously
considered singular.82
As a seminal modernist event, the death of God called into doubt the physical
space of worship and therefore architectural typology – “What are these churches
now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”83 More radically, it
emphasized the disappearance of any absolute reference to a closed system of
spatiotemporal coordinates previously defined by Cartesian perspectivalism (also
referred to as the ancien scopic régime), whereby space, its subjects and objects,
are constructed and perceived through Euclidean geometry.84 This signalled the
end of mimetic representation that, since the 16th century, had bound art,
architecture and theatre through scenography (scenografia), defining our ways of
seeing and experiencing both architectural and theatrical space.85 The framed
perspectival construction within the 19th-century proscenium arch
simultaneously distances and centralizes the viewer in the event, integrating the
monumental architecture of the house with the pictorial architectonics of scenery.
The plane of the proscenium forms both window and mirror, beyond which a
perspectival world is artificially constructed through spatial collapse and
distortion. The spectator’s gaze apprehends a spatial continuum via geometric
projection that is dependent on a horizon line and vanishing point where
“infinity, aesthetics, mathematics and theology meet on a unified plane whose
grandeur and perfection symbolizes God himself.”86 However, as Nietzsche’s
madman claimed, the horizon had been wiped away and the vanishing point had
opened up to reveal a gaping void, undermining hitherto rational, stable and
homogenous space, which assumed the sovereignty of vision through a single
immobile eye and the mathematization of psychophysiological space.87
 Nietzsche’s pronouncement declared the end of the classic age as the end of
illusion. It coincided with a loss of desire to represent within the field of art,
discussed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970) as a mimetic crisis in
which the world had become unrepresentable.88 This in turn destabilized both
architecture and the stage, neither of which could now play a role in representing
a closed, complete universe as a finitely constructed totality. However, just as the
madman who frantically heralds God’s death in the marketplace maintains “this
tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering,” Nietzsche also recognized it
as one in motion:

the event itself is much too great, too distant, too far from the
comprehension of the many even for the tidings of it to be thought of as
having arrived yet, not to speak of the notion that many people might know
what has really happened here, and what must collapse now that this belief
has been undermined.89

The edifice of classic representation was therefore in a state of slow and

inexorable collapse, reconfiguring how space is constructed not only for events,
but also as events.
As historical Event (with uppercase “E”), Nietzsche’s proclamation also
declared an end to the grand narratives of Western civilization and their
essentialist foundations. The philosopher – for whom existence was constructed
of only wills and events – was aware of how such major occurrences, which shift
perceptions on an extensive scale, are in danger of foreclosing on the multiple
happenings in and around them.90 Kwinter clarifies the decisive historical Event
as “an objectively significant, historically measurable occurrence that extends its
effects simultaneously into a quasi-totality of phenomena, thereby gathering
reality around itself like a centre and commanding a certain measure of space.”91
Akin to Foucault’s “events in thought,”92 such incidents summon something ‘new’
through what Elizabeth Grosz calls ‘the unprepared for, unforeseeable, singular,
unique and transformative.”93 Of course we cannot consider the disruptive Event
as significant turning point without referencing Alain Badiou, who framed it as a
“possibility of possibilities” in which the irreducible spatiotemporal rupture
carries a sense of progress: a potential for futurity in its transformative logic.94
 While the singular event may have been removed from its privileged position
to reveal more enduring structures of history, Foucault suggests “squeezing” it in
order to attend to its specificity and “enable us to circumscribe the ‘locus’ of an
event, the limits to its fluidity and the conditions of its emergence.”95 He notes
that although events are not corporeal they always take effect on the level of
materiality. Appearing aleatory, they become effective as moments of disruption:
“those caesurae breaking the instant and dispersing the subject in a multiplicity
of possible positions and functions.”96 As moments of suspension, they are linked
to Derrida’s “spacing” that frames the outstanding event from a proliferation of
events.97
For Deleuze this materialization of the event as a specific and significant
singularity occurs through the intervention of a “screen,” which removes it from
the disjunctive diversity of “chaotic multiplicity.”98 Such a screen, which “makes
something issue from chaos,”99 is more than a framing device and could also be
likened to Plato’s maternal receptacle in Timaeus with its “formless elastic
membrane.”100 Referred to as chora this primordial site is the original placeless
place of performance within which events are reproduced. Daedelus – the mythic
first architect – is said to have grounded the elusive movement of chora as dance
in the choros (which means the dance, the dancers and the place of dancing),
designed to frame the eternally returning event of nature made art.101 Although
chora provides a malleable and amorphous screen (as vertical frame, horizontal
ground and three-dimensional field) to materialize the shifting event, the more
specific geometry and materiality of theatre architecture, as choros, isolates and
frames the event as a singularity through the complexities of a constructed
spatiality and the particularities of its stage (whether as a raised platform or a
space simply claimed by performers). Chora also provides a potentially abject
border condition – as expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror – the
spatiality of which is discussed in the final chapter on abject space.102
Transcending the Aristotelian notion of the event as a narrative sequence of
actions within a prescribed setting, John Rajchman proposes that the historical
Event (amid multiplicitous events) is isolated as

a moment of erosion, collapse, questioning, or problematization of the very

assumption of the setting within which a drama may take place, occasioning
 the chance or possibility of another, different setting […] it is like those
events in a drama which take the drama itself as an event.103

The psychic jolt it elicits is not only irrevocably bound to both space and thought,
but also to the event as dramatic phenomenon. In his essay on Tschumi’s folies of
Parc de la Villette, Derrida proposed an “architecture of the event” that would
“eventualize” by opening up that which is traditionally understood as fixed,
essential and monumental.104 For Tschumi this architectural mobilization is
triggered by “shock,” a device that resists permanence and authority through a
capacity to perpetually alter perceptions and challenge the eternal object of
architecture.105
As established in the previous section, the increasing temporalization of space
mobilized the inherent performativity within the architectural object as an event
in itself, referred to as the objectile. No matter how monolithic, objects are always
in flow. Deleuze aligns the monumental event to its architectural counterpart by
referring to Alfred North Whitehead’s example of an eternal object: “The Great
Pyramid signifies two things: a passage of Nature or a flux constantly gaining
and losing molecules, but also an eternal object that remains the same over the
succession of moments.”106 Modernity activated and varied the performative
speed of objects through the shifting temporalities of stream of consciousness,
bodies in motion and vibratile matter. The architectural object, no matter how
seemingly still, is itself a slow performance: a spatial thing in perpetual motion –
heating and cooling, contracting and expanding, eroding and accruing,
chemically altering and harbouring microbes __ what political theorist Jane
Bennett refers to as “vibrant matter.”107 Akin to Kwinter’s “flow phenomenon” of
the evental,108 such performativity accentuates both the liveliness and liveness of
the seemingly inert, riddled with microscopic bio-action of varying durations.
The complex temporality of vibrant and vibratile material space takes into the
future its accumulating histories. The past persists, not only in human
consciousness but also with materiality’s dynamic relation to the present. The
magnitude of the “shocks” that occur with singular historical Events such as the
death of God (1882),109 Titanic disaster (1912) or the attack on the World Trade
Centre (2001) are measured by the contrast between temporalities: when the slow
performance of a seemingly eternal architectural object (church, liner or
skyscraper) collides with the dynamic and destructive nature of the catastrophic
Event (metaphysical, technological or political).
Although ranging from banal to transformative, Slavoj Žižek points out that
every event carries the possibility for philosophical transformation in which
something may intervene to upset the established rhythm of daily life and even
question the eternal order of Ideas:110 describing this as the “the effect that seems
to exceed its causes,” inseparably bound to “the space of the event […] which
opens up the gap that separates an effect from its causes.”111 Discussing the
relation between art and event, Stephen C. Foster reminds us that, as temporal
phenomena, these “configurations [… are] at once the fruits of prerequisite
circumstances and the harbingers of something new.”112 They can be utilized to
invent historical realities, becoming the “means by which history may be made,
written, enacted or critiqued.”113 This occurs when the dramatic nature of the
historical Event is co-opted for political purposes, appropriating its dynamic force
for social change. The dramatic event, inherent in the historical moment, utilizes
both the multiplicity of constantly unfolding quotidian events and the grand
narratives of the epic historical Event by isolating and framing them in theatrical
performance, traditionally through the literal and fixed screen of the proscenium.
This is the “aesthetic event,”114 either sited in a theatre or in a found space with
specific characteristics. Tschumi points out that architects (from Gian Lorenzo
Bernini to Albert Speer) once orchestrated public and private spectacles as
“exquisite spatial delights, […] delirious landscapes, theatrical events where actor
complements decor […] sinister and beautiful rallies.”115 These mediated and
often highly political performances were carefully designed to integrate existing
sites with the festival’s scenography, working between the inherently
uncontrollable qualities of the given location and the performative interventions
of theatrical artifice. Whether housed within controlled interior environments or
un-housed into more complex unpredictable locations, the aesthetic event has
always negotiated the space of lived reality and the more inventive territories of
myth and the imagination.
Alain Badiou maintains the dramatic event is an assemblage of disparate
components gathered into a recurring yet singular phenomenon.116 As a
spatiotemporal performance it is also “an event of thought” that “arrives on
stage” for a brief time, requiring an unrepeatable chance encounter with the
audience “to complete the theatre-idea.”117 Its singularity is therefore as
dependent on reception as production. The dramatic event that takes place on a
“stage” (whether within a theatre building or found space) is, and always has
been, multidimensional. Although it has traditionally tended to lead the spectator
through a narrative sequence, the dramatic event has never been spatially or
temporally fixed. Co-opting the site of imagination it moves fluidly, spacing back
and forth between diverse locations and temporalities. Through gods and ghosts
it also collapses real and fictive worlds upon each other.118 As a specified zone, in
which simultaneous dramatic events and places can be played out with varying
and unique spatiotemporal forces, the stage presents “a world which is not
determined, but is rather in the process of becoming.”119 This gives it a powerful
and compelling charge, especially in relation to the dynamics of communal
encounter. The theatregoing public has always been conscious of itself, its
expectations and the power it holds over the staged event. This inherent and
essential awareness of its own performance within the meta-performance of the
event creates a necessary and creative tension between audience and performers
that can be manipulated by the production but never completely controlled. The
architecture, as a complex, enveloping spatial screen, is also a disciplinary
mechanism for shaping, managing and sustaining the relationships and reception
of the event that is under constant threat of collapse.
In his introduction to “Event” Arts and Art Events, Foster examines how the
artistic event was co-opted as a 20th-century medium of social activism to enact a
commentary on the social event for attending audiences in order to confront the
larger audience of society. The live structure of performance was utilized to
heighten the live nature of society itself through the utopian notion of “avant-
gardist, as event-maker.”120 This harnessed the immediacy of the presentational as
a means of reconstructing and reorganizing social experience by escaping the
conventional limitations of the representational in politics. Revolution, as event,
had provided the avant-garde with a major paradigm for sharpening the focus
and purpose of art, providing the means of transition between old and new
worlds through the innovative uses of “live” structures. The event of social crisis
was utilized as a turning point that opens up the possibilities for change because
it contained the preconditions for its happening (past events) and the potential for
future developments:
 An exploration of the variety of responses by early-twentieth- century arts
to the event, where the latter was perceived as an instrument, or live
framing device, for criticizing, altering, or projecting the unfolding of human
affairs, is essential to any understanding of the intentionality of the avant-
garde.121

Architecture, as a principal framing device for live performance, is irrevocably

associated with the traditions it houses. The theatrical avant-garde therefore
resisted the conventional spaces of performance by altering them, attacking them,
or abandoning them. In un-housing performance from its traditional confines, the
site of performance is extended, multiplied and complicated through the manifold
events that each specific “found” site harbours.
Making a connection between Tschumi’s term “program” and the theatrical
term “scenario,” Mike Pearson claims that “site-specific performance itself might
best manifest the multiple articulations of event and space which [Tschumi]
envisages.”122 Referred to by Nick Kaye as “placeevents,”123 such performances
acknowledge and utilize the complex coexistence “of two basic orders […] of that
which pre-exists the work and that which is of the work: of the past and of the
present.”124 Performance recontextualizes the site through the numerous
meanings and readings that “intermingle, amending and compromising one
another.”125 This notion of two orders corrupting and informing each other
addresses the binary oppositions that arise between disciplines, modalities and
temporalities, recalling the transformational strategy of event-space as a “third
term.” Considering the auditorium itself as a site-specific environment – bringing
its own pre-existing conditions to performance – allows its inherently evental
qualities to be incorporated with the specificities of each dramatic event.
The architectural discourse shaping event-space produces “a shift from object
to field” acknowledging the multiple forces at play in the built environment.126
Massumi discusses how the event dimension of “play” modifies this field,
working against the contained perspectival stage, which he refers to as “an anti-
event-space” that focuses on coded belonging rather than becoming.127 The
totalizing singularity of perspective and its literal frame of representation
foreclose on the staged event’s inherent multiplicity through the codified,
reproducible and invariable proscenium theatre.128 Theatre architecture as event-
space therefore tends to be both regularizing (self-referential and recognizable)
and regulating (codifying performance and reception). As a familiar spatial type,
it resists ways of freeing itself from its regularity, from its limited and limiting
containment. Even though perspectival space has been challenged in scenography
over the last century, the proscenium continues to stand in as a container for this
visual mode of presentation.
Massumi writes: “What is pertinent about an event-space is not its
boundedness, but what elements it lets pass, according to what criteria, at what
rate, and to what effect.”129 For Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió this is achieved by
“weak architecture”; a utilization of the fleeting, vestigial and ephemeral, to
construct a new type of monumentality “bound up with the lingering resonance
of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has
been seen.”130 Solà-Morales refers to the tendency for architectural modernism to
foreclose on chance by attempting to create itineraries of control. In order for
architecture to be transformed into an event, the aleatory and temporal, as found
in the aesthetic event, must be admitted: “This is the strength of weakness; that
strength which art and architecture are capable of producing precisely when they
adopt a posture that is not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and
weak.”131 Theatrical productions have the capacity to weaken theatre architecture,
opening it up to multiple interpretations as outlined in the second chapter on
absolute space.
While the theatrical event, as an attraction, negotiates between real time and
fictive time, existing site and scenography – as well as between actors and actors,
actors and audience, audience and audience – a formulation of the quotidian
event focuses on the “spectacle of everyday life,” which is neither singular nor
isolated, but fragmented, overlapping and shifting. Walter Benjamin recognized
that this flux of plural events is often experienced, like architecture itself, in a
“state of distraction” rather than the “attentive concentration” demanded by a
dramatic event.132 Through distraction the “real reality” of the quotidian event is
infiltrated by its dramatic other as expounded by Benjamin, who apprehended
the city as an intoxicating, phantasmagoric, kaleidoscopic and cacophonous
dream world. This ever-present virtuality is reflected in his statement: “Not what
the moving red neon says – but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt.”133 As a
performative phenomenon, event-space calls into question both the materiality of
the built world and the immateriality of the event, revealing the real world as a
space of virtuality: “saturated with spaces of projections, possibilities, and the
new,” allowing the unrealized and unthought to emerge.134 Kwinter reinforces this
in the conclusion of his Architectures of Time where he maintains that events
exist “in the same atemporal virtual space, already incorporated into phenomena,
already contracted in, and unfolding from, the real.”135 Just as the temporal event
is haunted by stasis, the vacuum troubles material space. This is death’s presence
– the void of inevitable and impending stillness that haunts us all.
Benjamin’s formulation combines the theatrical and the quotidian with the
epic Event, conflating “the moment of enchantment” with the “figure of shock”
and “catastrophe.”136 The quotidian event is therefore haunted by catastrophe as a
moment of absolute failure and disruption from an exterior unrealized force,
revealing civilization’s impossible interior, dislocating representation and
presenting a moment where what seemed solid disintegrates. For Eisenman, the
catastrophe contains the potential not only to destroy the city but to set things off
in a new direction, “unfolding new social organizations from existing urban
environments.”137
Within the seemingly banal unfolding of daily events – experienced by a body
on the move as multiple distracted performances – are embedded not only
dramatically isolated moments but the manifold calamities of history past and
future, eternally revisiting the site of (un)consciousness. Just as architecture
provides a spatial screen, the event itself can throw up an intervening psychic
screen that can be tainted, revealing an excess of reality disrupting the symbolic
order and creating a split between reality and the Real that is beyond the
imaginary dimension of theatrical representation. Slavoj Žižek identifies this as a
“ ‘stain of the Real’: a detail which ‘sticks out’ from the frame of symbolic reality
– in short, a traumatic surplus of the Real over the Symbolic.”138 Referring to
Jacques Lacan’s triad (Symbolic-Imaginary-Real), Žižek maintains that “the big
Other” is also called into question. This reified agent of symbolic space – “fragile,
insubstantial, properly virtual [… that] exists only in so far as subjects act as if it
exists” – can no longer be sustained, be it God (called into doubt by Nietzsche) or
great causes (progress called into doubt by the sinking of the Titanic, or freedom
called into doubt by 9/11).139
Catastrophic Events defy the calculation of both architecture and the
contemporary imaginary while disrupting a symbolic order. However, they open
up possibilities for new orders, attaining what Eugenio Barba calls “density”; a
disorienting force that compels spectators “to extract the difficult from the
difficult” in order to realign thinking.140 As spatial events they expose the
potentiality of architecture’s inherent fallibility, undermining the slow time of the
eternal object and resisting its modernist objectality in favour of it being an
objectile.141 This is where Solà-Morales’s notion of weak architecture can exert its
powers as both performative and resistant in defying attack through
ephemerality, permeability and anti-monumentality: an issue critical to my
discussion in the final chapter on abject space.
Assuming the role of architectural ringmaster of the Eternal Return, Tschumi
proclaims: “Events ‘take place.’ And again. And again.”142 In order to elucidate
the possibilities of event-space as a paradigm that can be applied to outlining
contingent architectural models, this section has explored the complexities of the
event as a turning point, a dramatic presentation and a singular moment capable
of being perceptually isolated amid the plurality and chaos of evental reality. As
historical “event-space” it occurs on the limits as a limit, through shock,
containing within it elements of the dramatic “event-space” that takes place
between the opposing terms of reality and illusion, presence and absence, here
and there, now and then, performer and spectator.143 This complex interplay is
further complicated when leaving the confines of buildings constructed to house
theatre, where the dramatic event intersects more overtly with the multiplicity of
the quotidian “event-space” that often lacks an explicit theatrical/architectural
frame, collapsing the dramatic into the everyday. However, as this book will
outline, the multiplicity of quotidian events has always existed in the auditorium,
through multiple actions and interactions (despite the best attempts to spatially
and socially deactivate occupants), threatening the stability of the staged event.
Human existence – where the real and virtual coexist – is experienced as an
integration of historic, dramatic and quotidian events.
Asserting event-space as a “third term,” negotiating the fields of both
architecture and performance, engages with the architectonics of performance
and the theatricalization of architecture in order to uncover new sites of inquiry.
McAuley suggests that such “thirdness” creates a space of possibility: functioning
to “throw into question our normal modes of apprehension of the real.”144 For
McAuley theatre partakes explicitly in this “thirdness,” which Henri Lefebvre
directly aligns with “classical theatrical space.”145 However, Lefebvre’s conception
extends into the arena of “perceived space […] which is no longer either scenic or
public,” but rather an oscillation between the scenic “representation of space” and
the lived experience of “representational space.”146 As a “taking place” between
two seemingly opposing conditions, event-space could also constitute what
Eisenman calls the “non-dialectical third condition” that reconstitutes the nature
of both as a reframing device.147 This also aligns it to Nietzsche’s creative and
forceful encounter between the Apollonian and Dionysian, discussed in the
following section as an influential return to the site of ancient architecture and
performance, which influenced Wagner and the early historical avant-garde.

(Re)Birth of the will-to-destruction

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian condition:
here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the
intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most
powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always
been influenced by power.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

[T]he very spirit of the avant-garde movements is that of the sacrifice and
the consecration of the self for those who come after …
– Massimo Bontempelli, L’Avventura Novecentista: Selva Polemica

Event-space as a paradigm emerged from traumatic events and perceptual shifts

that occurred early last century, which were eventually galvanized in critical
theory and articulated by Tschumi in his praxis.148 Even as the Modern
Movement sought to industrialize, control and harmonize space, the avant-garde
wished to radically undermine it, celebrating the sacrificial body dancing amid
the debris. This theatrical will-to-destruction – standing in opposition to an
architectural will-to-creation – was prefigured by Nietzsche, whose book, The
Birth of Tragedy, embodied the violent transition into a new century, calling for a
return to the intoxication and excesses of ancient Dionysian rites in Greek
performance in order to compensate an overemphasis on Apollonian form and
vision. Despite Mackintosh’s claim that “to start with ancient theatre may be
confusing for all but the specialist” because it “did not shape theatre directly,”149
the origins of Renaissance theatre architecture and modernity’s European stage
are sited in ancient Greece and the theatres that emerged from Dionysian
festivals. However, while the Renaissance academies utilized this antique form to
establish the Italianate theatre model, which has developed and persisted since
the mid-16th century, the early avant-garde paradoxically adopted the ancient
Greek theatre to undermine the Italianate model at the end of the 19th century.
What follows is a brief summation of its architectural elements as they are
generally thought to have developed over two centuries, emerging out of the
Athenian Festival of Dionysus and developing from the dancing ground of
communal ritual in to the machinic amphitheatre for public spectacle.
The form of the Greek amphitheatre began with the threshing floor that
became utilized for ritual worship. Situated in the landscape away from the more
urban place of the agora (marketplace and civic centre) where public
performances were first located, this circular ground transformed into the choros
(dancing-place), a word also referring to a group of dancers and the dance itself –
linking the work of architecture to “choreo-graphy” as an expressive weave of
body, language and space.150 The altar (thymele) for the blood sacrifice was
centralized in the choros (later referred to as orchestra) and the natural slope of
the land overlooking it eventually became tiered with stone terraces into the
amphitheatre of the theatron (seeing-place), also referred to as koilon. In 534 BCE
Thespis of Icaria, who competed in the first state-organized performances of
tragedy emerging from the Dionysian Festival, is reputed to have differentiated
himself from the chorus as a separate actor by using a mobile table, which
developed into a fixed platform that was architecturally articulated into a
multileveled playing area as the skene (scenic-place). It was eventually crowned
with the elaborate mechanism of the deus ex machina (god from the machine): a
device lowering performers from above or raising them from trapdoors in the
floor, allowing deities and heroes to intervene in the drama. As an extended
moment between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, the development from threshing
floor to amphitheatre – from sacrificial arena to one of machinic artifice –
transformed performance from a fully embodied participatory experience within
the choros to one also involving distanced contemplation from the theatron
(Figure 0.1).151 This has been often discussed as the coexistence of “architectural
event” and “theoretical event.”152
It was to this ancient site that Nietzsche turned, setting in motion a revolt
against the bourgeois theatre and its architecture. As modernism’s first dramatic
manifesto, The Birth of Tragedy called for a return to the feverish excesses of
Dionysian rites in ancient Greek performance enacted before a more refined
Apollonian approach was adopted distancing the spectator (no longer embodied
partaker) from the art form. The Dionysian performer, as “pure primordial pain
and its primordial re-echoing,” is absorbed in the image, returning the precedence
of the choros as a participatory space in which the image was unable to be
apprehended as a whole.153 This return to an emphasis on the choric realm was
intended to challenge the primacy of vision and efface the gap between the
distanced view from the theatron (auditorium) and the exclusive performance
realm of the skene (stage). Nietzsche desired to undermine the monumental form
of the multilevel bourgeois theatre with its framed proscenium stage by
introducing what Una Chaudhuri calls a “rule of disorder.”154 His treatise was
published the same year that Wagner laid the foundation stone for the Bayreuth
Festspielhaus, a project that was developed in parallel to the friendship between
philosopher and composer. The Festspielhaus was the first modernist theatre and
presented a definitive break from the baroque auditorium that had dominated
continental theatre architecture for three centuries.155 However, as will be
discussed in the following chapter, Wagner’s architectural conception did not
cohere with that of his erstwhile protégé, Nietzsche, who had dedicated The Birth
of Tragedy to the composer. Instead the Festspielhaus adopted a disciplinary
spatial model for experiencing performance, negating public participation and
reinforcing rather than effacing the framed distance.
Figure 0.1 Ancient Greek amphitheatre: diagrammatic plan showing component parts referred to
throughout this book

Source: Graphic by Jonathan Go

Nietzsche’s primary intention was to articulate and incorporate the opposing

forces of Apollo (god of healing and the arts) and Dionysus (god of fertility, ritual
madness and wine) – indicating representational form and nonrepresentational
excess – dynamically at play within the Attic tragedies of the Dionysian festivals,
as a model for generating art.156 The Apollonian principle of dreams, appearance
and representation (embodied in the distanced contemplation from the theatron)
collided with the Dionysian principles of experience, intoxication and the will,
found in the participatory ritual within the choros. As fundamentally conflicting
principles, their antecedents lay in Arthur Schopenhauer’s contrast between the
world as “Will” and the world as “Representation.” However, as Adrian Poole
notes, Nietzsche’s notion of the Will was no longer the root of all evil, pain and
suffering, but an inevitable consequence of the Life-Force: “for Schopenhauer
pain means death throes, for Nietzsche pain means birth-pangs.”157 This
complicated relationship between dying and birthing has spatial ramifications for
the stage, as will be discussed in the following chapters on absolute and abject
space.
Nietzsche wished creative and destructive forces to operate in dynamic
tension. Working with binary oppositions as essential to the tragic form, he
encourages us to accept and embrace contradictions rather than dialectically
subvert them: thereby revealing the essential nature of violence, pain and
conflict, and the need to acknowledge and incorporate them into the artwork.
Tragedy was an admonition and critique against the rigid Apollonian form,
which the Dionysian act comes to shatter, revealing the inherent fragility of
human structures, as individual identities, social institutions and constructed
assemblages. Dionysus, as creator and destroyer, is a force driving through all
forms, challenging their Apollonian individuation, differentiation and rigidity,
making and remaking them. This radical critique of the human products,
structures and artefacts in which we put so much faith, impacted as much on
architecture as the other art forms, particularly on the auditorium.
Nietzsche deliberately critiqued the Apollonian “architectonics” of Doric art
that denied the natural instincts and savage excesses of the Dionysian festival,
which he referred to as “that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty.”158
Through the performance of the Dionysian dithyramb, the visceral and ecstatic
dancing body undermined architectonic control, causing astonishment in the
Apollonian Greek “mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was not so
very alien to him after all, in fact, that it was only his Apollonian consciousness
which, like a veil, hid his Dionysian world from his vision.”159 The communal
shudder that trespasses on consciousness is a visceral experience, underscoring
how the Dionysian exceeds vision, just as the dance exceeds space. The ecstatic
sensorium of the performing body displaces the more static ocularcentricism of
architecture, undermining its stability with Zarathustra’s “dancing- mad feet.”160
As Mark Wigley contends of Nietzsche’s dance, “The dance disrupts the spatial
regime by locating something aspatial within it.”161 It contains a phantasmatic
promise of theatre’s virtuality that troubles architecture’s secure spatiality.
The inherent excesses of performance – exposed by Nietzsche in laughter and
play as well as in the dance – mobilized “things” as multiple and evental, and
weakened the basis upon which thought itself had previously been constructed.162
In The Architecture of Deconstruction, Wigley names this philosophical instability
the “edifice complex” where metaphysics, as a sound structure erected on secure
foundations and stable ground, is threatened because the ground is no longer
considered stable. Nietzsche created a new philosophical space seen by Heidegger
as ungrounding ground, opening up and revealing the metaphysical void.163 In
aligning philosophy with architecture we can see that Nietzsche’s thought
destabilized built form by weakening its structures and questioning its abiding
qualities of strength and durability. This undermining of architecture both
reinforces the theatrical experience and reiterates the strength of weak
architecture as advocated by Solà-Morales.
Nietzsche’s reconciliation of Dionysian and Apollonian forces therefore
constituted a revolutionary spatial event that was also aspatial. It required more
than tearing down the physical and metaphorical veil-as-curtain that separated
the distanced viewing place of the theatron from the participatory space of the
chorus. The Apollonian culture was an artistic structure that must be levelled
“stone by stone” to make visible the foundations upon which it rests.164
Dismantling this cultural edifice also reveals the ever-present pit beyond the
visible; “the terror and horror of existence” covered over by the Apollonian dream
structure, which, as a “mere appearance of mere appearance,” is a construction, a
“naive work of art.”165 Refuting the mimetic nature of the artwork, Nietzsche sees
this Apollonian illusion as a totalizing world-view, which he likens to a
“permanent military encampment.”166 He wished to undermine architecture’s
supposed rationality, stability and disciplinary imperative; revealing its cracks
and crevices and, eventually, that ever-present abyss, over and within which
theatre could constructively play.
For Nietzsche, the true tragedy of modernity was a refusal to communally
embrace a primordial unity in the face of the loss of God and Christianity’s
homogeneous unity, acknowledging “life-giving” chaos as the basis of the
universe. As an Apollonian force, the increasingly utopian project of modern
architecture denied this tragic Dionysian vision while it attempted to build a
rational, unified world over the void, rather than “looking boldly right into the
terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of
nature.”167 Antonin Artaud, who also railed against theatrical representations and
the buildings that housed them, echoed this sentiment half a century later in his
manifestos on a Theatre of Cruelty (1932–1936).168
Nietzsche and Artaud are here presented as two anarchic prophets of
modernism whose spatial speech continues to undermine the spatiality of
traditional theatre: they revealed the modernist tragedy as doubt in the divine,
loss of a centre, confrontation of the abyss and acknowledgement of the inherent
cruelty of human nature. Both were driven by (and in spite of) mental and
physical suffering, yet both affirmed life and demanded a creative engagement
with passions denied by Christianity. Susan Sontag writes, “Like Nietzsche,
Artaud conceived of himself as a physician to culture – as well as its most
painfully ill patient.”169 Art for both men was the “truly metaphysical activity of
man,” taking precedence over morality.170 They recognized in the agitation and
excess of madness a necessary symptom of “degeneration, decline and the last
stage of culture.”171 Their affirmation of life involved a celebration of cruelty and
a predilection for what Nietzsche called “the hard, gruesome, evil, problematic of
existence” that was both intellectual and intuitive.172 Refusing the scientific
rationale of modernity, which they saw as embodying fear and denial, Nietzsche
and Artaud embraced the cruel and tragic as the means for affirming life in spite
of suffering and cruelty. Both believed in a visceral engagement with space and
performance through “an inspired shudder,” the reverberations of which outlived
the performance.173 This involved a celebration of the frenzied rites of blood and
excess, encapsulated for Nietzsche in the Dionysian festival and for Artaud in the
peyote ceremonies of pre-Columbian Indians. In looking to other civilizations to
create their own formulation, they synthesized elements from past and
“primitive” societies alien to the bourgeois European culture. As Sontag points
out, such plundering, parodying and distorting of other cultures plays into the
colonialist outlook of their time, but is redeemed by the fact that they co-opt
other civilizations as “both models and mysteries.”174
The defining moment (albeit one in motion) of Nietzsche’s death of God forced
European culture to face the decline of Christian homogeneity and the rise of a
heterogeneous modernity. Nearly seven decades later, Artaud screams that he has
done with God’s judgement, acknowledging that Christianity had not exhausted
its authority and that European culture and its objects remained petrified. The
trajectory between these declamations is that of this book, traversing two
catastrophic World Wars to arrive at the site of the Modern Movement’s failed
utopia, where the dream of a progressive, unified, mechanized, healthy society
lay scattered in fragments.
God, for Nietzsche and Artaud, must be refuted because he represented the
fallacy of repetition rather than the creative force of return. This is encapsulated
by Derrida in his seminal text on Artaud’s theatre, “The Theatre of Cruelty and
the Closure of Representation”: “God is the eternity whose death goes on
indefinitely, whose death, as difference and repetition within life, has never
ceased to menace life.”175 Obliterating the control and totalizing presence of a
singular symbolic entity that is God eradicated the distance between performer
and role, actor and spectator, instinct and consciousness.
Nietzsche and Artaud also resisted the lure of mimesis, believing in the
theatrical power of a reality set apart rather than aesthetic imitation, and seeking
the character of an immersive rite rather than the distance of mimetic display.
Instead of the artifice of dissimulation they believed in an art that embraced
space, time and causality. As Jonas Barish indicates, both men shared “a vision of
theatre as a mass event in which impersonation disappears, fiction vanishes and
the spectator loses himself amid the swarm of sensory excitants that assail
him.”176 Theatre was to become a participatory secular rite arousing and
overwhelming the spectator with unmediated reality unrelated to mimesis. Their
proclamations against God’s existence signalled the end of representation and
impacted on how both theatre and architecture are conceived, presented and
experienced.
In threatening fundamental belief structures, Nietzsche and Artaud also
undermined the buildings that literally house such structures, thereby exposing
architecture’s constitutive instability: the church that housed a dead god became
a mausoleum, while the new theatre could resacralize performance space.
Upheavals and discoveries made between the two destabilizing events of their
refutations – God is dead and so is His judgement – introduced an intricate
conception of temporality to the built environment. This presented the possibility
for architecture to partake in the avant-garde project through active agencies of
performance – ephemerality, movement, theatricality, illocution and virtuality –
in order that theatre as built space align with the art form that resisted it and
become de-materialized, un-housed and de-constructed. However, as Denis
Hollier contends, this necessitated loosening “the structure that is hierarchical
and at the same time creates hierarchy”177: an action which architectural
modernism was resistant to undertake.
Avant-gardism and modernism
We the artists will serve as the avant-garde: for amongst all the arms at our
disposal, the power of the Arts is the swiftest and most expeditious […] we
must also make use of the stage, and it is there above all that our influence is
most electric and triumphant. We aim for the heart and the imagination, and
hence our effect is the most vivid and the most decisive.
– Henri de Saint-Simon, “The Artist, the Savant and the Industrialist”

[T]he avant-garde is not simply a historical event, but history as event, or an

event that happens to history as well as in it.
– Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism

Although modernity, modernization and modernism are aligned terms, modernity

is the broad collective response to the dynamic forces of modernization, which
was enacted by modernism through a series of self-conscious alliances that
replaced the static “schools” of former epochs with the active notion of
“movements.” As products of change, these many isms put space into motion as a
constantly regenerating and unstable force. They were also defined by the
“manifesto”: a declamatory form of public media, passionately and scornfully
announcing the new.178 Modernism in architecture became a retrospective
expression for a loose collection of ideas that covered a range of styles and
movements in Eastern and Western Europe as well as the United States,
especially in the major cities:

All of these sites were stages for an espousal of the new and, often, an
equally vociferous rejection of history and tradition; a utopian desire to
create a better world, to reinvent the world from scratch; an almost
messianic belief in the power and potential of the machine and industrial
technology; a rejection of applied ornament and decoration; an embrace of
abstraction; and a belief in the unity of all the arts – that is, an acceptance
that traditional hierarchies that separated the practices of art and design, as
well as those that detached the arts from life, were unsuitable for a new
era.179
Linked with urbanism, as well as social and political concerns, architectural
modernism consolidated into a specific style by the 1930s: abstract, geometrical,
industrial and international, it developed into the “Modern Movement” and was
disseminated between the World Wars by artists and architects, generally in
political exile.
Paul Greenhalgh describes The Modern Ideal as a freestanding project with
internal volition and structure, whose edges are delineated by the avant-garde.180
Although modernism rose in reaction to modernization’s mass culture and
consumption – insisting on the autonomy of the artwork – the hostility and
dynamism of its vanguard constantly undermined its independence as a
totalizing project, threatening to annihilate it from within. As modernism’s
volatile edges, the avant-garde worked to destabilize the singularity and stability
of its object.
The originally military term “avant-garde” appeared at the turn of 19th-
century in reference to a small troop of soldiers that explore the terrain ahead of
a large advancing army and help plot the course of action. Henri de Saint-Simon
(an early French socialist) appropriated the term after the terror of the French
Revolution to propose an ideal society led by artists aided by scientists and
industrialist-artisans. Prefiguring Nietzsche’s proclamation of Christianity’s
demise, Saint-Simon saw “the great work of Christianity drawing to a close” and
called on the artistic “force of the imagination” to recuperate it.181 Artists, rather
than the church, were to lead humanity forward: a type of secular priesthood,
they would counter the potential barbarization of “progress” in the processes of
industrialization and secularization. Because the stage was considered the
influential site for enacting this spiritualized socialism, the theatre took on a role
as secular temple for the 19th-century avant-garde.
Born out of revolution, the avant-garde sought to transform art and thereby
life. This was Nietzsche’s project in The Birth of Tragedy, where drama was no
longer considered a work of art as art, but something that “acts” on the spectator
“corporeally and empirically.”182 Storming boundaries of life and aesthetics, the
artistic vanguard aimed to fuse everyday reality with the heightened (as opposed
to imitative) reality of the artwork, adopting an adversarial relationship with
modern culture that associated itself with industry, urbanism and the socio-
political values and desires of the dominant middle class. However, as an
adversary it emerged from within, borrowing, exaggerating and distorting
elements of modernity to establish a world set apart – beside itself. Refusing to
participate in modernism’s unquestioning embrace of modernization and
progress, avant-garde artists explored an anti-aesthetic aesthetic that mercilessly
exposed the prevailing crisis of representation and institutional participation in
this predicament. Futurist and constructivist architects were exceptions to this
refusal – aligning themselves with the world of theatre and art as well as
architecture – as they undertook a hyperbolic celebration of progress and
modernity by sharing and utilizing avant-garde techniques. Through shocks,
interruptions, defamiliarization and estrangement, the theatrical and artistic
avant-garde creatively engage with this crisis, which the Modern Movement’s
architectural avant-garde tended to resist. Inherent to these conflicting positions
are the ontological differences between performance’s fleeting acts and
architecture’s enduring forms: each discipline posing a threat to the other. The
theatrical avant-garde, having no intention to either save or renew mimetic
representation, relied on a constant play of contradictory forces to destabilize any
sense of hierarchy, control, or consistent spatiality, denying the audience “a
convention- authorized centre around which to order its response.”183
The avant-garde therefore bears a relationship to modernism that is both
inclusive and oppositional, occupying and troubling its margins as a creative
threat. Matei Calinescu refers to the “two modernities” – bourgeois and cultural –
that emerged in the 19th century, where the latter, as a temporal phenomenon,
adopts Charles Baudelaire’s celebration of “the transitory, the fugitive, the
contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”184
This modernité, aligned to the avant-garde’s obsession with an ever-disappearing
present, stands against utopian modernism’s wish for a secure future, exposing
the tension between the theatrical will-to-disappear and the architectural will-to-
persist. The thread of my argument therefore follows the theatrical avant-garde;
from its late 19th-century beginnings, where symbolist manipulation of aesthetic
material was more aligned to the modernist project; to its utopian attempt in the
following century to cohere performance and architecture with constructivism; to
the aggressive conflict waged by Dadaism and surrealism that revealed the
catastrophic consequences of a failed utopia.185
The break with conventions enacted by the avant-garde forced a crisis by
privileging ephemeral action and a Nietzschean creation through destruction.
This threatens both the conceptual framework that isolates and distinguishes the
autonomous artwork and the literal frame that contains it. While Paul Mann
maintains that the problematic nature of the avant-garde lies in its “rhetorical
geography of centres, interiors, limits, margins, boundaries, exteriors,”186 in
theatre architecture these spatialities are as literal as they are rhetorical,
providing the means of exploring, undermining and destroying the boundary
conditions defined by its most overt frame, the proscenium arch. For Bertolt
Brecht this frame had to be radically emphasized and for Artaud it had to be
radically annihilated. These two avant-gardists employed the stage’s limits in
differing ways (Brecht emphasizing and Artaud dematerializing) to radically shift
theatrical conventions, reflecting Nietzsche’s belief in the ability of art to
radically transform rather than aesthetically affect. They were critiquing
naturalistic realism in drama by manipulating the architecture that defined and
housed it. Their radical performative moves are translated into what I have
named the architectures of alienation and cruelty.
The Dionysian element of the avant-garde sought to break conventions in
order to force a state of crisis and project a disturbing otherness. They
deliberately and self-consciously parodied modernism, turning artworks into
manifestos and performances of resistance that countered the modernist faith in
industry and progress. Adopting an adversarial relationship to modern bourgeois
culture the avant-garde took action: pushing the artwork to the edge of self-
destruction, deforming form and presenting a crisis in representation. This focus
on destructive action against the form aimed to undermine the autonomous
artwork. Utilizing spatiotemporal complexity they mobilized art as event,
effacing the framed distance of Apollonian appearance with Dionysian
intoxication.
Counter to this, architecture’s “avant-garde,” the Modern, Movement, was an
“ideological instrument” that emerged in reaction to the chaos and excesses of
late 19th-century bourgeoisification, urbanization and industrialization.187
Embracing the machine’s promise of liberation, desacralization and the new fluid
forces of production, the Modern Movement was defined by an interest in new
urban principles, a turn toward rationalism and distaste for ornamentation. It
grew out of the pre-World War I Deutscher Werkbund and expressionism and
was further refined during the Weimar Republic’s New Objectivity movement or
Neue Sachlichkeit (1919–1933). Influenced by the De Stijl and constructivist
avant-gardes, it became catalyzed as a more global movement through CIAM, the
International Congress of Modern Architecture (1928–1956), and, in 1932, was
officially recognized as the International Style.188
Hilde Heynen, in her book Architecture and Modernity, points out that “Unlike
visual artists or theatre directors, [the architectural avant-garde] had to deal with
a socio-political and physical context that limited their freedom of movement.”189
In recognizing the gap between the historical avant-garde and architecture’s
Modern Movement, she maintains, “modern architecture showed in most of its
manifestations a face which was clearly distinct from the radicality and
destructiveness of the artistic avant-garde.”190 While Heynen compares the early
20th-century architectural vanguard to its radical “counterparts in art and
literature,”191 she barely refers to the theatrical avant-garde. Such an absence of
engagement with theatre is endemic in 20th-century architectural theory,
constituting a blind spot in modernism’s discourse. This goes beyond
architecture’s socio-political and physical imperatives and owes much to theatre’s
complicated relationship with reality, materiality and mortality, which threaten
architecture’s persistent modernist agenda.
The destructive gestures of theatre’s historical avant-garde therefore stood in
opposition to the constructive agenda of architecture, revealing its resistance to
time and action as well as its collusion with politics, capital and maintaining the
status quo. Yet the question must be asked: How would an avant-garde
architecture perform? Tschumi posed this in “The Architecture of Dissidence,” his
1979 lecture at the Architectural Association in London, where he outlined “A
Hypothetical Book” that explored the architectures of the avant-garde and the
“new spatial sensibility” they created as spaces of destruction, sensation, limits,
notation, coercion, empathy, fiction, hypnosis and subjectivity.192 He proposed
investigating the staged events of the historical avant-garde “in terms of
architectural spaces” that were announced toward the end of the 20th century.
Although my book does not follow his structure – which breaks the entire 20th-
century avant-garde into their movements of futurism, Russian constructivism,
expressionism, Dada, surrealism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and on into the 1950s,
1960s and 1970s – it does look at how avant-garde actions and performances
enact an unrealized spatial performativity, confronting in part what Tschumi
refers to as one of the “notorious gaps in architectural history, those shadowy
areas where ideas have been eclipsed by built reality.”193
What follows is an application of the generalized theory of event-space to the
specific event spaces that house theatrical performance and – through material
and temporal forces – execute their own performances. It takes into account how
theatre architecture is shaped by history and social encounter, enacting multiple
aesthetic, communal and political performances that occur among and between
performers and spectators, reinforcing Michael Hays’s statement that “the theatre
event provides a culturally bound image of existence.”194 The focus is on the
interior space that houses this particular typology, gathering performers and
audience for the staged event, which is framed literally through the architecture
and culturally via social encodings. These two framing devices (architectural and
cultural) define the spatial relationships and behaviours between those who
perform and those who witness the performance.
The physical frame that defines the limit is seen in the figure of the
proscenium arch, which, in the second half of the 20th century, was completely
eradicated in favour of varying spatial configurations such as thrust, transverse,
arena and promenade. However, the first half of the century was spent exploring
it, reinforcing it, encompassing it, challenging it, and eventually annihilating it.
As a spatial and social limit the proscenium arch theatre became an object to be
performed against by the theatrical avant-garde. My project therefore attends to
Herbert Blau’s caution in his 1964 manifesto for The Impossible Theatre:

Yet before we hack at the proscenium […] we ought to have pounded it with
our fists, exhausting ourselves in the task of knowing its limits, so that when
it crumbles, we know what we’ve knocked down and whether we have
anything genuine to erect in its place.195

Having begun this book with the death of God as a defining event, the ensuing
chapters are constructed around four influential “events” that are “squeezed” in
order to provoke and mobilize the thematic ideas they contain. Each section also
recovers and reworks elements of the ancient Greek theatre – theatron, skene,
deus ex machina, choros and the sacrificial altar.
 The first chapter takes the 1872 inauguration of Richard Wagner’s
Festspielhaus in Bayreuth as a decisive moment in which a new architectural
form is established along with the public necessary for its success and endurance.
We begin with Nietzsche enthusiastically witnessing the composer laying the
foundation stone for his new Festival Theatre, initially conceived to last a single
season and house his epic Ring Cycle. Although Wagner wished to create a
provisional and “cloudy” structure, his Festspielhaus firmed up into a rigid
container that eradicated decoration and multi-layered spatiality in order to
discipline the audience and their view. Wagner’s new form is analyzed alongside
the concurrent spectacle of Garnier’s Paris Opéra, which represented both
apotheosis and denouement of the enduring baroque model’s highly decorated
Italianate auditorium: the very archetype against which the composer was
revolting. This 300-year-old form provided audiences with a performative interior
in which they themselves could perform, disparagingly referred to by playwright
Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam as ‘The Glory Machine.’ Yet, as the chapter
reveals, Wagner’s Bayreuth theatre itself constituted a modernist glory machine
to his own work, one replete with contradictions and the yearning for a more
fluid, immersive and “invisible theatre” aligned to that subsequently sought by
the European symbolists.
Focusing on symbolism, Chapter 2 utilizes Edward Gordon Craig’s 1908
annunciation scene, “Motion,” in which the scenographer claims to have given
birth to an innovative theatre, which is simultaneously replete and empty. Craig’s
new ‘scene’ announces an Absolute Space of theatrical reproduction, also inferred
in the writings and scenographies of Adolphe Appia. Both Craig and Appia
introduced architectonics and plasticity to the stage as well as a more abstracted
performing body. Emerging from mysticism, exile and an interest in rhythmic
movement, their integration of scenography and architecture establishes the
‘universal landscape,’ reflected in the Duncan family’s Kopanàs Temple (Athens),
Appia’s Festspielhaus Hellerau (Dresden) and Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-
Colombier (Paris). The absolute space of symbolism also anticipated Peter Brook’s
‘Empty Space’ as well as the creation of the black box: an architectureless
architecture of the void.
The third chapter formulates abstract space provoked by Bertolt Brecht’s
“Street Scene” and the incursion of the industrial metropolis into the theatre.
Through revolutionary movements in Russia and Germany, the theatrical
infiltrates the city, encouraging the utopian projects of theatre and architecture to
briefly cohere within the avant-garde. For constructivist theatre-makers of the
1920s and 1930s, architecture provided a fertile laboratory within which to test
their ideas, utilizing ‘construction’ as their “favourite theoretical instrument.”196
They were architects not only of the stage but also of new social relationships,
discovering a means of mastering the utopian ‘Machine Age’ in an attempt to
create harmony and unity within the industrial environment. Although only a
few of their projects were realized – such as the Bauhaus (Dresden) –
constructivist ideas resonate in subsequent spaces that employ an industrial
aesthetic such as the Shaubuhne (Berlin), the Bockenheimer Depot (Frankfurt), the
Tate Modern (London) and Radialsystem V (Berlin), as well as the reconditioned
spaces of the Ruhrtriennale; projects that not only retain the fascination of the
machine without the revolutionary zeal of their progenitors, but, as renovated
spaces, are haunted by the failure of the constructivists’ utopian project.
The fourth chapter on abject space is centred on a more recent historical event
of the 2002 Moscow Theatre Siege when, through the invasion of Chechen rebels
during a performance, terror literally took the stage, exposing the inherent
violence of the auditorium – a legacy of Wagner’s Festspielhaus. Here I maintain
that the modernist cookie-cutter auditorium became a carceral space, which held
the public, performers and rebels hostage. Such a disciplinary space is countered
by the feverish performing body of the post-World War I avant-garde whose
search for alternative spaces are investigated, focusing specifically on Artaud’s
Theatre of Cruelty and the writings of Georges Bataille. This gives rise to an ex-
plosive, dis-easy and de-centred spatiality – signified in the spectral image of the
Chechen ‘black widow’ suicide bombers – which enacts its own revolt against
architecture to propose alternative models that resist incursion and control:
bringing the space of the event in line with evental spatiality. This final chapter
considers architectural cruelty as it pertains to Artaud’s ‘spatial speech,’ which
was affected by two World Wars in which the European world had exploded and
a lucid space was no longer feasible for the avant-garde. The surrealists’
preoccupation with intoxication, the Sacred, the Plague and hallucinatory
performance conjured up an abject theatre that defies containment and propriety:
piecing together a fragmented vision that rejects any coherent representation.
This move ‘against architecture’ resonates in contemporary theatres such as the
Cartoucherie and Bouffes du Nord (Paris), the BAM Harvey (New York), Almeida
(London), Teatro Oficina (São Paulo) and the Hannah Playhouse (Wellington),
where the materiality of environs and body are integrated to shape new and
multi-layered spaces for performance.
The book concludes by recuperating the Nietzschean architect’s mighty act of
will to construction as one that submits to chance rather than power in order that
theatre architecture fulfils the goals of the historical avant-garde. Edward Albee’s
2002 play, The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, provides the final event in which the
monumental architect is deposed to reveal the void under which his edifices are
constructed. Resonating with Nietzsche’s call for a more labyrinthine
architecture, this brings the Nietzschean architect in line with the Nietzschean
artist. The incomplete and unstable Tower of Babel becomes the final spatial
paradigm discussed here, proposing the possibility for environments that,
through thirdness, embrace non-dialectic relationships between containment and
contamination, viscerality and virtuality, theatre and architecture. Such spatial
complexity is found in a small theatre in São Paulo, which defies monumentality,
centrality and a scopic overview: recognizing the vertigo of the void, the
impossibility of the machine and the fleshiness of the organism.

Notes
1 See Kolarevic and Malkawi, Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality; Hartoonian, The Crisis
of the Object and Architecture of Theatricality; Wigginton and Harris, Intelligent Skins; Bachman,
Integrated Building: The Systems Basis of Architecture; Ng and Patel, Performative Materials in
Architecture and Design; and Geiger, Entr’acte: Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture
2 Leatherbarrow, “Architecture’s Unscripted Performance,” 7.
3 Ibid.
4 Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 22.
5 Discussed at length by Erika Fischer-Lichte in Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political
Theatre and The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics
6 Iain Mackintosh notes, “But if Bayreuth of 1876 marked a beginning in modern theatre architecture, the
Paris Opera of 1875 certainly did not mark an end for the older traditions.” Architecture, Actor and
 Audience, 44.
7 I have visited, investigated and experienced all extant theatre venues mentioned in this book; generally
‘in performance.’
8 Garnier, Le Théàtre, 1–2, quoted and translated in Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra: Architectural
Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism, 294; Brook, The Empty Space, 9.
9 Brook’s adaptation of existing theatres and found spaces to suit his productions are discussed in The
Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments by Andrew Todd and Jen-Guy Lecat.
10 Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, 6.
11 Carlson, Performance: A Critical Introduction, 3.
12 Veltrusky, “Man and Object in the Theatre,” 84.
13 Wigley, “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to Discuss,” 23.
14 Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, 2.
15 Stein, Lectures in America, 160, quoted in McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the
Theatre, 41.
16 McAuley, Space in Performance, 92.
17 Ibid., 91.
18 Breton, Theatres, 4.
19 McAuley, Space in Performance, 76.
20 Aronson, History and Theory of Environmental Scenography.
21 Schechner, “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,” 41–64.
22 Aronson, Environmental Scenography, 27.
23 Ibid, chapter 3.
24 Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, 1.
25 Ibid., 4.
26 Kwon, One Place After Another, 165.
27 Pearson, Site-Specific Performance, 35.
28 Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic, 36. Because of the notion,
expounded by German theatre historian and theorist Max Herrmann (1865–1942), that the ‘event’
began to define theatre at the turn of the 20th century, I am utilizing the term avant la lettre, as also
translated from German and French in late 19th- and early 20th-century texts.
29 Ibid., 67.
30 Ibid., 115.
31 Fischer-Lichte and Vihstutz, Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology, 3.
32 Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 19.
33 Eisenman, “Unfolding Events,” 424.
34 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 19.
35 Although Bernard Tschumi’s specific mention of this term is not prevalent in his texts, K. Michael Hays
has cited him as its progenitor in Architecture Theory Since 1968, 216. In an interview with Manifold
Magazine, Hays states “the term ‘event-space’ belongs to Tschumi.” Hays, “Postcriticality.”
36 Tschumi, “Spaces and Events,” 88. On the mandate of his architectural circle in the 1970s, Tschmui
writes, “Our work argued that architecture – its social relevance and formal invention – could not be
dissociated from the events that ‘happened’ in it” (Ibid).
37 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 139.
38 Ibid., 149.
39 Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Spaces, 64.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., xiv.
42 Toward the end of the 20th century both architecture and philosophy sought to tackle new concepts of
space through issues of temporality, virtuality, transgression and embodiment. Elizabeth Grosz proposes
an encounter between these two fields in order to achieve a reciprocal transformation: “the becoming-
philosophy of architecture can only be effected through the becoming-architecture of philosophy”
(Ibid., 64).
43 For Grosz ‘third space’ operates ‘outside’ dual discourses “in which to interact without hierarchy, a
space or position outside both” (p. xvi), therefore constituting an ‘other’ space. Edward Soja has taken
up this idea of ‘an-Other’ in his notion of ‘third space,’ which draws on Lefebvre’s spatial trialectics
bringing together the perceived and conceived in lived space. For Homi Bhabha ‘third space’ is a hybrid
condition that avoids the politics of polarity. Event-space therefore not only falls between the space for
performance and the time of its event but also constitutes the space of experience between
representation and its reality.
44 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68. For Derrida, spacing as ‘espacement’ is also related to the
spatiotemporal notion of différance – as both deferral and difference – enacted by such punctuation.
45 Derrida, Positions, 76
46 Derrida. “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture,” reproduced in Leach (ed.), Rethinking
Architecture, 324–36, 320 and 335. Jacques Derrida, who was introduced “into” architectural discourse
by Tschumi, saw an application of his philosophy of deconstruction to architecture within the project of
the Parc de la Villette. As the philosopher noted, this invitation to participate in the project threw him
“into the space of architecture, rather than architectural space” exposing him to a new discipline.
 Wigley, “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to Discuss,” 10–11.
47 Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture,” 333–4.
48 Ibid.
49 Derrida in Wigley, “Jacques Derrida,” 12.
50 Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 8.
51 Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics, 5.
52 Ibid.
53 Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 14.
54 Ibid., 13.
55 Kwinter defines “micro-architectures” as the relations that saturate and compose the architectural
object, whereas in “macro-architectures” the relations envelop and exceed the object (ibid., 14).
56 See Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918; and Vargish and Mook, Inside Modernism:
Relativity Theory, Cubism and Narrative. Stephen Kern outlines this defining era of modernism
between 1880 and 1918, while Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook extend the period from the 1880s to
World War II.
57 Deleuze, The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, 88. Gilles Deleuze is also referring to Bernard Cache’s
notion of the objectile, which transforms the architectural subjectile, forming volume through surface,
to the objectile as a spatial variability within that volume. See Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of
Utopia. Eisenman refers to Deleuze’s objectile as “object/event,” again showing how performative
punctuation – as temporal spacing – sets each element in motion. See Eisenman, Written into the Void,
16.
58 Deleuze, The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, 37.
59 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 118.
60 Eisenman, “Unfolding Events,” 424. Eisenman articulates a paradigm shift from the “placebound”
architecture of the mechanical age to an “evental” architecture that takes account of the mediated
world; “a new type of environment, comprised of light, sound, movement, an event-structure in which
architecture does not simply stand against media, but is consumed by it” (ibid.). Although discourse
surrounding the objectile by Deleuze, Cache and Peter Eisenman refers to effects of the digital age –
and Marco de Carpo points out that digital thought preceded digital technology (Architecture in the
Age of Printing, 123) – this thesis maintains that the objectile, as active agent, is not dependent on
digital media. Focusing on a pre-digital consciousness, my concern lies more with virtuality, which has
been mediated in theatrical space since ancient Greece.
61 Williams, “Deleuze’s Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architecture,” 207.
62 Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 11.
63 Banham, Guide to Modern Architecture, 45.
64 Ibid., 52.
65 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 432.
66 Ibid., xlviii.
67 Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 77.
68 Vargish and Mook, Inside Modernism, 36.
69 Einstein, Relativity: The Special and General Theory, 142.
70 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, 135.
71 This notion of architecture as “petrified in a timeless present” continues to be utilized in architectural
discourse, reifying it as fixed and monumental. Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin: Architecture of the Senses,
37.
72 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 272.
73 Massumi is citing the lyrics from a Sheryl Crow song, “Solidify” (1993). Massumi, Parables for the
Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, 6.
74 Sant’Elia, “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914,” 172.
75 Vargish and Mook, Inside Modernism, 73.
76 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 142. However, it’s important to note that all viewers, disposed
throughout the auditorium, each have their distinct and varying perspectives: often filling in for the
ideal, singular privileged and centralized viewpoint.
77 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 272.
78 Grosz defines the “virtual” as resisting “an already preformed version of the real” in favour of that
which “promises something different to the actual that it produces.” Architecture from the Outside, 12.
79 Nietzsche, “On Great Events,” 131.
80 Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” 95. Nietzsche outlined the death of God in Gay Science (1882) and Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1892), 12.
81 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 152.
82 Ibid., 4.
83 Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” 95.
84 Martin Jay refers to “Cartesian perspectivalism” as the “dominant, even totally hegemonic, visual model
of the modern era.” “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 5. See also Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of
Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
85 Aristotle briefly refers to skenographia in Poetics (1449a: 18) as a ‘scenic writing’ linked to stage
 painting. In Book I.2 of De Architectura (1991: 24–5), Vitruvius described scaenographia as the
representational art of perspective. In 1545 the Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio utilized
scenografia in the second book of his Architettura (1611: 45) as a means of integrating the science and
craft of architecture, scenery and painting into a combined stage and auditorium, which in turn
influenced the planning of buildings, cities and landscapes. Scenography is now generally referred to as
the art of scenic design, including setting, costumes and lighting (Howard, What Is Scenography?, 125),
although the ‘scenographic turn’ – outlined in the first issue of the Theatre and Performance Design
Journal (2015) – established it more as an ‘expanded field’; seen in anthologies such as Thea Brejzek’s
Expanding Scenography (2011), Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer’s Scenography Expanded (2017) and
the Performance Research Journal’s themed issue ‘On Scenography’ (2013).
86 Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics, 59.
87 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 29–30. In his essay on Las Meninas, Michel Foucault refers to
the vanishing point as the “essential void,” 16.
88 Foucault, The Order of Things.
89 Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” 447.
90 Jean-François Lyotard critically refers to this totalizing incident as the “grand narrative,” a product of
modernity claiming an interconnection and inner connection between historic events in order to
present a gradual and stable historic development that gives order and meaning to Western thought.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiii.
91 Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 111.
92 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on Language, 142.
93 Grosz, Architecture From the Outside, 138. See Foucault, “Discourse on Language,” 201.
94 Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 243. While Badiou’s discussions around the event tend to focus on
mathematics and subset theory, what’s critical to his formulation is how, as an unpredictable
spatiotemporal disruption and historical turning point, the Event transforms the way bodies and
languages are prescribed in defined situations, thereby bringing something new into the world.
95 Foucault, Archaeology of Things, 230.
96 Ibid., 231.
97 For Derrida “spacing” is a temporal and interruptive operation that involves “the movement of setting
aside.” Positions, 86n.42.
98 Deleuze, The Fold, 76.
99 Ibid., 82.
100 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, 67.
101 McEwan, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings, 57–8.
102 Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, 3.
103 Rajchman, Philosophical Events: Essays of the ’80s, vii.
104 Derrida, Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture, 325.
105 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 247–8.
106 Deleuze, The Fold, 79.
107 Bennett, Vibrant Matter. The time of the thing and its material agency has eventually led to Jane
Bennett’s theorization of “vibrant matter,” in which she encourages us to rethink our “habit of parsing
the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings),” focusing instead on the “vitality of
matter” (pvii). Maintaining that our “analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of
things more due” (pviii), Bennett further disperses Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ by giving
agency to materials and objects that produce effects and make a difference. Her theory of thing-power
is modelled around Bruno Latour’s ‘actant’: a participatory source of action that can be either human or
inhuman: responding and requiring response.
108 Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 48.
109 Friedrich Nietzsche was aware that his proclamation of God’s death was not a punctual event but
rather one that was still on its way while also reverberating into the future. However it is included here
with the date of its first publication as a catastrophic historic Event that had similar effects to more
readily dateable moments such as the sinking of the Titanic and the attack on the World Trade Centre,
the effects of which also expanded back and forward in time.
110 Žižek, “The Three Events of Philosophy,” 1–25.
111 Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept, 5.
112 Foster, “Event” Art and Art Events, 7.
113 Ibid., 8.
114 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, xiii.
115 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 125. Tschumi himself designed the fireworks display for the
opening of Parc de Villette in 1998.
116 Badiou, Handbook of Anesthetics, 72.
117 Ibid., 74.
118 For detailed analyses of this spatial complexity on stage, refer to McAuley, Space in Performance:
Making Meaning in the Theatre.
119 Hays, The Public and Performance: Essays in the History of French and German Theatre, 1871–1900, 6.
120 Foster, “Event” Art and Art Events, 4.
121 Ibid., 9.
122 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, 24.
123 Nick Kaye took this term, “placceevent” from correspondence between him and the Welsh performance
company Brith Gof (of which Mike Pearson was co-director: 1981–1997). Site-specific Art: Performance,
Place and Documentation, 52.
124 Pearson and Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology, 23.
125 Ibid.
126 Allen, “Dazed and Confused,” 48.
127 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 79.
128 Ibid., 83.
129 Ibid., 85.
130 Solà-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, 71.
131 Ibid.
132 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 238.
133 Benjamin, “This Space for Rent,” 45.
134 Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 78.
135 Kwinter, Architectures of Time, 112.
136 Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 27.
137 Here Eisenman is referring to what he calls the “catastrophic fold” as a “non-dialectic third condition,”
an architectural strategy for reframing and transforming sites and organizations. “Unfolding Events,”
426.
138 Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” 236.
139 Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 10.
140 Barba, “The Deep Order Called Turbulence,” 255.
141 Henri Lefebvre’s notion of objectality as concrete resistance contrasts to Deleuze’s more mobile and
fluid objectile. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57; Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 19.
[discussed further in Chapter 4]
142 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 160.
143 McAuley, Space in Performance, 255.
144 Ibid.
145 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 118.
146 Ibid.
147 Eisenman, “Unfolding Events,” 426.
148 Khan and Hannah, “Performance/Architecture: An Interview with Bernard Tschumi,” 52–8.
149 Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, 7. A British theatre planner, MacKintosh focuses on the
Elizabethan model, which could be understood as an indigenous form of English theatre architecture.
150 Péréz-Gomez, “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation,” 16.
151 McEwan, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings, 4. See also Péréz-Gomez, “Chora:
The Space of Architectural Representation,” 13.
152 Theatre and theory cohere etymologically with theõrein as both a distanced look and close viewing,
defined by Martin Heidegger as “to look at attentively on the outward appearance wherein what
presences becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing – to linger with it.” The Question Concerning
Technology, 163. Indra Kagis McEwan also discusses this in Socrates’ Ancestor, 20–1.
153 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music,” 50.
154 Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, 21.
155 British theatre architecture tends to stand outside this discourse separated by the specificities of the
Shakespearean stage and other ensuing performance traditions, which impacted the shaping of the
playhouse.
156 For detailed analyses on the aesthetic implications and complex relationship between Apollonian and
Dionysian elements, see Weiss, “Drunken Space,” 17–37; and “Possession Trance and Dramatic
Perversity,” 3–11.
157 Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, 63.
158 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 39.
159 Ibid., 41.
160 In his essay, ”Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,” Badiou takes Zarathustra’s dance as a form of
resistance, citing R. J. Hollingdale’s translation. Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 58. In Walter
Kaufmann’s translation it is “my foot, frantic to dance.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 224.
161 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, 159.
162 Deleuze regards Nietzsche’s focus on dance, laughter and play as “affirmative powers of transmutation:
dance transmutes heavy into light, laughter transmutes suffering into joy and the play of the throwing
(the dice) transmutes low into high. But in relation to Dionysus dance, laughter and play are
affirmative powers of reflection and development. Dance affirms becoming and the being of becoming;
laughter, roars of laughter, affirm multiplicity and the unity of multiplicity; play affirms chance and the
necessity of chance.” Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 193–94.
163 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, 6–13, 62.
164 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 41. This was a gesture designed to fundamentally weaken, rather
than annihilate, architecture.
165 Ibid., 42, 45.
166 Ibid., 47.
167 Ibid., 59.
168 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double.
169 Sontag, “Artaud,” xxxviii.
170 Nietzsche, “Attempt at Self-Criticism,” 22.
171 Ibid., 21.
172 Ibid., 17.
173 Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God,” 569.
174 Sontag, “Artaud,” xl.
175 Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” 42.
176 Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, 455.
177 Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, 23.
178 Williams, The Politics of Modernism Against the New Conformist, 33.
179 Wilk, “What Is Modernism?” 14.
180 Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts, 23.
181 De Rouvroy (Comte de Saint-Simon), “The Artist, the Savant and the Industrialist (1825),” 41.
182 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 57.
183 Graver, The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama, 57–8.
184 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life (1863),” 497.
185 Futurism, which created its own avant-garde formulation of radical utopian resistance, is not so closely
scrutinized here because of its complicated relationship to fascism. Nevertheless it cannot be ignored in
the overall dialogue.
186 Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde, 13.
187 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 48.
188 While the artistic avant-garde resisted institutionalization and style, architecture, more aligned with
modernism, became part of the establishment, cohering itself as The International Style in the seminal
exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchock at MoMA, NY, in 1932.
189 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 678.
190 Ibid., 2.
191 Ibid., 1.
192 Tschumi, Questions of Space, 81.
193 Ibid., 62.
194 Hays, The Public and Performance, xvii.
195 Blau, The Impossible Theatre: A Manifesto, 13.
196 Michaud, Eric. “Social Criticism and Utopian Experiments,” 310–11.
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 (designed in 1865).19 It was in
these unrealized projects that composer and architect developed the amphitheatre
format and sunken orchestra. However, Wagner, who did not utilize Semper for
Bayreuth, instead commissioning Otto Brückwald, also renounces the “noblest
renaissance ornament” of his erstwhile friend’s architecture, which he
maintained transforms every surface “into a perpetual feast for the eye.”20 Rather,
all eyes would focus on the stage through the innovations of technical consultant,
Karl Brandt, whose idea it was to extend and repeat the ever-widening
proscenium uprights into the audience realm, focusing the perspectival scene and
masking the doors and steps into the auditorium. American theatre consultant
George C. Izenour marks this as a significant shift in the status of the architect,
who is usurped by the technical expert.21
The “tangible diagram” of Wagner’s “infinitely complex apparatus” offered
limited scope for his supporters and followers to perform as an audience and
nowhere for them to gather and shelter outside of the auditorium.22 His
“theatron” was a room whose sole purpose was to encourage each spectator to
look “straight in front of him.”23 In concluding, “[t]here may it stand, on the fair
hill by Bayreuth,” Wagner paradoxically asserted that his provisional theatre
would be a lasting legacy, and it remains to this day an active festival theatre for
the production of his work.24 No longer provisional, this late 19th-century pop-up
venue has become the concrete legacy of the Wagnerian project and a site of
pilgrimage for all Wagnerian devotees.
For the composer, a “pure and undisfigured form” lay in the artwork rather
than in the architecture, which he considered stylistically irrelevant. Wagner’s
simple scaffolding and austere interior resisted the theatrical art of monumental
architecture and its decorative ‘masking’ expounded by Semper as a celebration
of the social, in favour of a workable apparatus that focused on the creation and
maintenance of the staged illusion.
Due to the inclement weather, the ceremony withdrew to the township and the
Margravial Opera House, where Wagner completed the event by conducting
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This elaborate 18th-century baroque theatre (built
1744–1748), designed by the Italian scenographer/architect Giuseppe Galli
Bibiena (Figure 1.1), had initially drawn Wagner to Bayreuth in 1870, when he
was searching for an appropriate venue under the patronage of the Bavarian
King. Although it possessed the largest stage in Germany, he rejected it as
inappropriate for his developing vision and was in turn offered the hilltop site by
the town’s Burgermeisters. By concluding the ceremony in a space that was so
antithetical to the vision, which he had only just finished outlining – the
audience distributed in a vertical layering of ornate gilded boxes wrapping a flat
parterre – Wagner would have effectively reinforced the uniqueness and
radicality of his proposed venue.
Nietzsche elatedly regarded this staged event in Bayreuth as a decisive turning
point where “men compress together all they have shared in an infinitely
accelerated inner panorama, and behold distant events as sharply as they do the
most recent ones.”25 As Wagner constructed his new festival theatre in the minds
of those who represented its future audience, he simultaneously deconstructed
the commonly accepted model of the multilevel U-shaped auditorium and the
active role it played in both the theatrical and social event.26 The composer’s anti-
architectural architecture was a revolt against “that Franco-Italian opera-house,”
the particular dynamics of the middle-class audience it housed and the architects
it glorified.27 It was also initially intended as a rebellion against the
ocularcentrism of monumental architecture. However, as Wagner’s plans for
Bayreuth developed and solidified, so did the built form designed to house it. The
cloud that firmed into a building lost the complex ephemerality and temporality
that was embodied in his concept of a truly provisional theatre that would gather
people to celebrate within the supreme communal artwork.

Figure 1.1 Margravial Opera House, Bayreuth (1748): engraving of the 1872 inauguration of Wagner’s
Opera House in Bayreuth, with Richard Wagner himself conducting

Source: Photo Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images

The baroque model and post-revolutionary
performativity
Architecture can set before herself no higher task than to frame for a
fellowship of artists, who in their own persons portray the life of Man, the
special surroundings necessary for the display of Human Artwork.
– Richard Wagner, “Art-Work of the Future”

[A]ll will have an air of festivity and pleasure, and without realizing what is
owed to architecture for this magical effect, everyone will participate in it
and everyone will thus render […] homage to this great art, so powerful in
its manifestations, so elevated in its results.
– Charles Garnier, Le Théâtre

Richard Wagner and Charles Garnier – progenitors of the two most significant
European theatre buildings at the end of the 19th century – concurrently created
two different kinds of event-spaces in Bayreuth (1872–1876) and Paris (1861–
1875). As these epigraphs make evident, Wagner utilized architecture to focus the
performance as a singular framed artwork that privileges the artists, while
Garnier employed it to emphasize the multiplicity of participatory performances
enacted by the public. The mutual resistance between spectacles on stage and in
the auditorium, mediated by the proscenium arch, had reached a limit: the former
as a scenic construction and the latter as a social construction. The scenic stage of
Wagner’s Festspielhaus had to destroy the auditorium’s bourgeois sociality, most
conspicuously celebrated in the architecture of Garnier’s Paris Opera House, the
foundation stone for which was laid ten years prior to Bayreuth. This second
theatre was the apotheosis of the 19th-century baroque model, bridging between
the aristocratic and bourgeois regimes, discussed here as a post-revolutionary
event-space.
The baroque auditorium originated in the academies and palaces of Italy
toward the end of the 16th century, developing over 300 years into a pan-
European model, which formed a reasonably coherent spatial paradigm that
integrated the multi-layered horseshoe auditorium with framed perspectival stage
house.28 Although diverse in its geometric articulation and details – varying from
place to place and from theatrical genre to theatrical genre – the late 19th-century
European theatre presented a distinct archetype that formed the basis for social
participation and cultural resistance: a model with which the bourgeois
community identified and against which the avant-garde eventually railed.
Whether we refer to it as “baroque,” or “neoclassical,” the continental auditorium
tended to be a U-shaped configuration of shallow tiered balconies and boxes that
encircled a flat central area originally deemed the pit or parterre and later, the
orchestra or stalls.29 In the municipal theatres the royal box remained as the
psychological, social and pivotal centre of the auditorium: a miniature stage that
faced the stage proper, often rivalling it in its decor.30 Carlson notes that,
although no longer the exclusive realm of the aristocracy, “[t]he decorative
vocabulary of the princely theatres of the baroque era was frequently copied in
public theatres, where it was aimed to suggest aristocratic elegance without the
patronage of the prince.”31
Historic, symbolic and mythical elements were incorporated into the richly
gilded, polychromatic decor throughout the auditorium. This was further
augmented by the elaborate gowns, jewellery and exposed flesh of the watching
(female) public who gazed across and down (and were gazed at) from a vertical
gradation of balconies and boxes that encircled the audience in the parterre. The
balconies were integrated into an equally ornamental proscenium arch that often
contained boxes of spectators who were more focused on the auditorium than the
stage. Light from sconces on the balcony fronts and a shimmering chandelier,
invariably hanging from a centralized dome, accentuated the vertiginous and
multi-layered integration of humanity and décor: where social participants
formed a supplemental décor. Wolfgang Schivelbusch maintains that, although
the installation of gas lighting in the early 19th century facilitated more dramatic
control and contrast between brightly lit stage and dimmed auditorium, the
audience was never plunged into darkness because a certain amount of light was
necessary for the social effect of spectatorship. This “social desire to see and be
seen” was most conspicuous in the opera box as a repeated yet discrete space
within a distracted world of spectatorship.32 As a secondary stage, it provided a
point of surveillance that allowed the spectator, simultaneously the object of the
gaze, to retreat into the shadows or behind the drapes. The muted lighting that
played on the ornate surface of bodies and decor also made apparent the
shadowy recesses in the zone between the balcony fronts and the walls that
enclosed the auditorium.
While the development of the 19th-century auditorium tended to retain the
baroque splendour and spatial stratification from the previous two centuries –
appropriating aristocratic space for the self-regard of a bourgeois public – the
forestage (once principal acting zone) retreated from the audience domain of the
auditorium to become completely encapsulated within the thick frame of the
proscenium arch. The performing bodies of singers/dancers/actors no longer
shared this lively realm – where all spectators could once view them, including
those seated in balconies and side boxes – but became incorporated into the
scenic constructions of the stage house behind the proscenium, which also
compromised sightlines from the sides.33 Such a spatial rift eradicated the vestiges
of the ancient theatre’s choric space of action as an interlocking sensorial zone
between the fictive world of the stage and the architectural reality of the
playhouse. The orchestra pit, which increased in size, reinforced this spatial
divide between the world of performers and the world of spectators.
The proscenium frame provided an architectonic oculus that “figures the
merging of singular vision into a collectivity: all eyes are directed toward one
aperture.”34 As both representational window and mirror it formed a plane
beyond which a perspectival world was artificially created through spatial
collapse and distortion. The cohesive stage image, constructed from disparate and
counterfeit parts, unified the audience within the auditorium, which was aware
of its scenic ruse. However, the multiplicity of dispersed gazes in the spatially
partitioned and distracted auditorium troubled the role of proscenium as mirror,
which could no longer sustain a unified world either side of its divide. As Daniel
Rabreau writes on the ‘Theatre-Monument’: “[i]nterflow inside the theatre
between stage and auditorium led to frenzy that soon surpassed the latter’s
limits.”35 This chaotic state was complicated and influenced by dramatic events
outside the rarefied confines of the environment housing public and theatrical
artifice. A perceptual threshold was reached at the auditorium’s literal threshold
that required a spatial realignment.
The modern theatre emerged as much out of social, political and economic
revolutions as a return to the ancient amphitheatre of Attic tragedy. The
publication of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and the commencement of
construction on Wagner’s Festspielhaus were linked to a post- revolutionary age.
Although revolutions against the aristocracy resulted in the destruction and
reconstruction of identities, creating what Kristen Ross names “the delirious
subject-in-process,” post-revolutionary society also established a new stable
bourgeois order within the industrialization, secularization and formation of
Europe’s mercantile nation-states.36 Within this new order the avant-garde artist
was evolving as a politically motivated individual who was profoundly aware of
the impact “progress” was making on spectacles, commodities and the masses.
Submitting to the flux of the urban crowds, the thrill and danger of revolt, the
alienation of industrialization and the inherent madness of modernity, mid- 19th-
century avant-garde artists began a gradual undermining of any cohesion,
stability and fixity of art and its structures.
Charles Baudelaire, who greatly admired Wagner, saw modernity as a
doubling of this avant-garde frenzy with the more monolithic tendencies of the
bourgeoisie, defining it as the ephemeral counteracting the immutable. In
resisting history’s monumentality to embrace the present flux, the emerging
avant-garde artists were aware of the performative forces that surrounded them
in daily encounters and built environments shaped by new orders. Nevertheless,
with the official sites for dramatic production, every effort was made to assert
theatres as stable, conservative and monumental spaces for public gathering and
encounter. This was achieved through an architecture that resisted radical reform,
embracing and appropriating the baroque auditorium as a form capable of being
co-opted and marginally altered by the changing political and social regimes.
In her investigation on the emergence of post-revolutionary social space, Ross
suggests that events such as the destruction of the Vendôme Column during the
Paris Commune in 1871, along with the bricolage of the barricades, evoked a
radical new form of architecture continually fashioned from the debris of
assault.37 Such events signalled a shift in attitude against monumental
architecture, as evidenced by Wagner’s preference for provisional theatres in
Munich and Bayreuth. This can also be linked to the composer’s architectural
collaborator, Semper, who designed and supervised the construction of a
makeshift wall of carts and domestic items outside his house during Dresden’s
1848 revolution – referred to by Wagner in his memoirs as the “famous ‘Semper’
barricade.”38 Although the composer resisted Semper’s monumental architecture,
the architect had proposed two designs for Wagner’s initial provisional theatre in
Munich and embraced the symbolic impermanence of theatrical masking,
improvised festival structures and carnivalesque atmospheres.39 However, in post-
revolutionary European centres the rising merchant classes wished to replace the
palaces of the aristocracy with those for a bourgeois public. The adoption of
ephemeral constructions over the monumental architecture tended to remain an
untimely event: in Nietzsche’s words, “still wandering.”40
In the year of the Paris Commune and Franco-Prussian War, while Wagner
was finalizing his plans for Bayreuth, Nietzsche was fashioning his own assault
on European culture. The Birth of Tragedy proposed a radically revisionist form
of architecture that challenged established models, especially in European
Romantic theatre, which had become an “all-illuminated total visibility” of
Apollonian illusion, privileging the eye above all other receptive senses.41 This
scopic domination was not limited to the stage but included the entire
auditorium, where the world of mere appearance applied to the articulation of its
form, decor and inhabitants. The late 19th-century theatre, as an adaptation of
the baroque model, had undermined the participatory space of the choros,
considered by Nietzsche to be critical to the Dionysian force in performance,
which once bridged between those watching in the theatron and those being
watched on the skene. What remained of the choral space in baroque form was
divided into an orchestra for musicians and principally filled with audience,
forming a distracted meeting ground overlooked on three sides by surrounding
balconies.
The dynamic multiplicity in the auditorium challenged the focus and cohesion
of the staged performance, which pandered more and more to a multilevel
distracted audience, architecturally held within its own spatial embrace. The
auditorium deferred to the mutual power of the theatron and skene as spaces of
spectacle, which the frame of the proscenium arch both connected and separated.
While for Wagner, the baroque theatron reinforced the distracting spectacle of
the audience and its architecture, Nietzsche objected to the mechanized staged
spectacle, which returned the Euripidean deus ex machina that once “took the
place of metaphysical comfort,” providing affect through effect.42
The idea of the modern theatre as a machine for spectacular effects began in
the Renaissance where architects, as scenographers, combined the artifice of
painting with that of the stage to synthesize both fields within built form. This
was achieved through perspectiva, which was not only a representational form,
but also a way of integrating the spectacles of art, architecture and performance,
both inside and outside the theatre (previously mentioned in the introduction as
scenografia). Discussing the influence of scenography on constructions of public
space, Hénaff and Strong refer to this “Machiavellian moment” as a strategic
manipulation and management of appearance in order to master reality, whereby
the “scenery of the political […] conformed to the new order of reason.”43 The
place of power, where all the forces met, was therefore marked and read through
a technology of spatial organization dependant on a distorted, projective
geometry. He, who faced the point of origin and sat online with its horizon, was
master of the illusion as reality, representing all who were not at that privileged
position, but around which they were able to construct the ideal view in their
mind’s eye.
As a theatrical apparatus, the baroque model developed over 300 years by
combining the art of perspective and the science of machinery to produce
dazzling events that delighted audiences who increasingly craved melodramatic
scenarios, manufactured worlds and scenic transformations presented to them
from the increasingly isolated realm of the picture-box stage, defined by the
proscenium arch and revealed by the shifting veil of a curtain.
However, the stage spectacle was matched more and more by that of the
audience, no longer dominated by the commanding eye in the centralized royal
box. This aristocratic gaze was first undermined in the 18th century with the
introduction of two-point perspective (also referred to as scene ad angolo or
vedute per angolo), which was no longer predicated on the sovereign view of an
ideal single-point perspective. Although still constructed around a centralized
viewer, the new location of vanishing points in the wings outside the stage
picture withheld the power and scrutiny of a monocular view, weakening the
central position of the royal box and the all-seeing I of the Monarch that had
replaced the all-seeing eye of a medieval God. Writing on this phenomenon,
Bruno Forment cites Esteban de Arteaga who, in 1783, wrote, “the departure from
perspectives running to a central vanishing point and thus constituting, so to
speak, the limit of visual and imaginative power, was like opening up an immense
path to the busy, restless imagination of those beholding the scenes from a
greater distance.”44 Through subsequent revolution and the rise of the middle
classes, the singular focused gaze in the auditorium was fractured into the many
eyes of the bourgeois public; their multiple gazes wandering from the stage
picture and self-regulating each other’s behaviour as public performance. The
theatre as “one of the main attractions” in the industrializing metropolis became a
machine for producing and managing the “citoyen (member of a state) and
citadin (inhabitant of a city).”45
Michel Foucault exposed architecture’s complicit role since the 18th century in
disciplining spatial practices through “the meticulous, concrete training of useful
forces.”46 This is outlined most acutely in his essay on the “Panopticon,” as the
Enlightenment’s disciplinary model par excellence, where he evokes the theatrical
machinations of spatial authority. Although he asserts that our society is one of
surveillance rather than spectacle, he refers to both the amphitheatre (the place of
surveillance) and the stage (the space of spectacle) as constituent of the panoptic
machine manufacturing social control.
Jonathan Crary utilizes this “overlap between models of a society of discipline
and of spectacle” to assert that, in the 19th century, “[s]pectacle is not an optics of
power but an architecture,” co-opted by modernity to produce separate, isolated
individuals.47 This reinforces Foucault’s contention that in combining the
spectacle of the “festival” with the “school” of surveillance, the multiplicitous
nature of the crowd is disciplined into “a collection of separated individuals.”48
However, surveillance in the theatre is no more limited to the auditorium than
spectacle is limited to the stage. The orchestrated public event that gathers large
amounts of people together in a shared space is highly performative
(aesthetically, operationally and technologically) and under continual threat of
chaos and collapse. The task has always been to harness the collectivity’s energy,
made up of active individuals, and focus it on the stage; a particular challenge for
the 19th-century bourgeois theatre, which had to isolate and fix the newly
formed individual who moves through industrialized urban space experiencing
new temporalities and exercising vision as a multiple and fragmented experience.
If attention is, as Crary contends, “a disciplinary immobilization as well as an
accommodation of the subject to [repetitive forms of] change and novelty,”49 then
nowhere is it more obligatory and overt than in the late 19th-century bourgeois
theatre, which demanded attention through both attraction (focus) and
distraction (absorption).
The post-revolutionary 19th-century auditorium could therefore be seen as a
new civic space, utilizing the old baroque model to regulate cultural conduct
through what Tony Bennett designates the “exhibitionary complex”: a mode of
institutional embourgeoisement that is simultaneously a means of social
behaviour and an architectural object. Through the macro-site of the auditorium
and its multiple micro-sites, the space combines desire with discipline to create
an atmosphere of both festivity and schooling. As Michael Hays points out, this
forms a detailed mechanism “where the group could observe itself in the process
of proclaiming its social and aesthetic perspective for itself and others,” achieved
by combining the boisterous spectacle of popular entertainment with the
aristocratic control of the court.50 The embourgeoised theatre instructs and
celebrates its inhabitants, folding the external world into its interior. The
spectacle of and within the theatre is supported by the emerging fascination with
the spectacle of everyday life in the urban environment, housed in what Walter
Benjamin referred to as “[d]ream houses of the collective: arcades, winter
gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations.”51
Although urban performativity is transposed back into the theatre interior,
shifting its dynamic to suit a new public, the auditorium also remained a
concentrated space of social control, holding at bay the excesses and disorders of
the metropolis. The bourgeois may have emerged to claim the theatre for itself,
but the post-revolutionary courts and new order of merchant princes upheld
auditoria as opulent and palatial settings, constructing highly codified social
gestures. The transition from aristocratic rule to bourgeois power was not
reflected in the architecture as radical change but as a gradual and inevitable
appropriation by the middle classes away from the aristocracy. The theatre, with
its regulated spatiality and customized performances, became an institution to
which the bourgeois clung, resulting in what Hays sees as stagnation, solidified in
its very architecture.
Europe’s political and social revolutions did not radically alter theatre
architecture but shaped the existing forms for a new status quo. Over three
centuries the baroque auditorium utilized new systems in heating, lighting and
ventilation, industrializing the stage with complex machinery and special effects
required by Romantic drama, supporting a demand for larger and larger settings
and more elaborate technical effects. This reached its acme in Paris where the
social, political and urban dramas matched the melodramas enacted on stage and
in the auditorium.

Garnier’s architecture as mise-en-scène

People of Paris
open the path to the triumphant Fattened Ox.
Neither Asia nor Africa
Has ever seen better,
This pride and joy of the butcher’s trade.
– Francesco Maria Piave and Giuseppe Verdi, La Traviata

In the final act of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata (1853), the curtain rises to
reveal the consumptive demimondaine, Violetta Valéry, in her boudoir. As she lies
dying, masqueraders are heard outside singing to the carnival king and the
fattened ox of Paris, a city on the verge of radical change where old worlds are
giving way to new ones. The riotous streets of Paris invade the domestic space,
conflating the crowds outside with the intimacy of an interior. Characters enter
this final scene to create a series of tableaux vivants around the bed of the dying
woman, who was caught in the web of the modern city that has created her
undoing. The characters onstage also reflected many of those gathered in the
auditorium: the women who were enjoying a new but dubious public status
through the artists and entrepreneurs with whom they fraternized.
Verdi’s opera was an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s novel, La Dame aux
Camélias (1848), itself adapted into a play that was staged in Paris at the time of
the composer’s visit to the French Capital early in 1852. Based on the French
author’s relationship with the celebrated Parisian courtesan, Marie Duplessis,
who died at twenty-three of tuberculosis, La Traviata was the first opera to take
the contemporary reality of urban society as the setting for a tragedy, presenting
the stress and confusion of a large city invaded by the sensual experience of the
demimonde, who mixed with the emerging avant-garde poets and artists,
mobilizing modernity.
Violetta is one of Catherine Clement’s “favourite ghosts” haunting the Opera
House, a building she eloquently evokes in the prelude to her lament on Opera,
or, the Undoing of Women:

A great house, a strange one, in the heart of the city. Nightfall, going to the
opera. Changing worlds. Trading the working world for one of fantastic,
fleeting leisure. Climbing giant staircases. Bronze women proffer fake
torches, ceilings full of goddesses and gods watch with indifference; evening
cloaks trail their velvet hems with old-fashioned grace on the marble floor;
bit by bit a dull roar swells the festival house. [… I]n this architecture can be
read a whole, no longer existent world. […] Theatre house and stage are a
match for each other, reflecting the same golden image: the long gowns, the
pomp of festive bourgeois in search of a forgotten nobility, correspond to the
brilliant spectacle and the stage costumes.52

This is undoubtedly Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House (Figures 1.2, 1.3a and
1.3b), where, since opening in 1875, the bourgeoisie have continued to display
their affluence, and woman is endlessly reproduced in the mirrors, paintings,
gilded figures, bronze statues, as well as the resplendent bodies of society ladies,
all of which merge into the architecture, its social ritual and the roar of the
crowd.
Figure 1.2 Charles Garnier’s Opera House, Paris (1861–1875): painting of L’escalier de l’Opéra Garnier by
Louis Béroud (1877)

At the time La Traviata was completed in 1853, Paris, “capital of the

nineteenth century” and “capital of modernity,” was undergoing momentous
social, political and physical changes.53 Napoleon III was ruling the Second
Empire and had appointed the civic planner Baron Haussmann, who was
preparing to demolish and rebuild the city centre, in an ambitious scheme that
included plans to construct a new opera house. In 1861 the King commissioned
the building through a competition won by Garnier. As Benjamin notes,
“conceived of as a place of pageantry […] it was the stage upon which Imperial
Paris could gaze at itself with satisfaction […] A theatre conceived of as an urban
centre, a centre of social life – this was a new idea, and a sign of the times.”54
By the time of its lavish gala inauguration in 1875, the Opera House was the
jewel in the crown of Haussmann’s radically reconstructed Paris. But the Crown
itself had once more been overthrown in 1870 and the Third Republic was in
power, completing the transition from ancien régime to modern industrialized
world. Designed for an aristocratic patron, the building was opened for a
bourgeois public. This process of change was also reflected in the designer: born
and raised in the Paris slums cleared by Haussmann, Charles Garnier was the
archetypical new bourgeois architect.
Garnier linked theatre to the general “human spectacle,” whereby “to be an
actor or spectator […] is the vital condition of life.”55 He was conscious of the
civic role the building played as “a chair of instruction,” bringing the masses into
“more intimate contact with the idea of those privileged by fortune.”56 His
architecture recognized and encouraged spectatorial surveillance throughout the
building – “one observes and senses oneself observed” – particularly in the
auditorium, where “spectators, whilst able to see the stage, see the house as
well.”57 However, as Hays points out, although Garnier sought to democratize
space by allowing all to enjoy its palatial splendour, his architecture recognized
social hierarchy through the decoration, the detail of which increased with status:
“Thus the scenography of the event extended to all the architectural elements of
the theatre and a drama of politics, intrigue, business and marriage was played
out by the audience as well as by the actors on stage.”58
Garnier’s architecture facilitated a range of public and private performances
and encounters. Like the staged mise-en-scène, his design was predicated on a
sequence of picturesque tableaux created between bodies and the architectural
scene in relation to a spectator’s passage through the building. This is in keeping
with Tschumi’s formulation of Space/Event/Movement in which architecture is
apprehended through mobility as a series of unfolding encounters.59 Garnier was
interested in the animation of architecture by human bodies in social interaction,
as well as by the light, colour and texture of its details. His deliberately
scenographic approach was not one of creating backdrops for action but rather of
immersion within a continually shifting scene that depended on reciprocity
between the building and its public. As contemporaneous French critic Théophile
Gautier noted in May 1863, the Opéra’s new interior would contain the public as
“spectator and spectacle at the same time” within its “enchanting architecture.”60
In Le Théâtre Garnier describes the “theatrical art” of his architectural mise-en-
scène as a combination of static scenery and dynamic public performance: the
building is “adorned,” “animated” and “enlivened” by the varying temporalities
and modalities of occupation, as a result of which “all will have an air of festivity
and pleasure, and without realizing what is owed to architecture for this magical
effect.”61
As the riotous exterior folded into the more controlled interior, so did the
domestic realm fold into the civic realm. The opera house as housewas linked to
domesticity not only through its overt references to the decor of palatial homes
but also through the emerging philosophy that a French theatre should be truly
democratic. Marvin Carlson cites the architect Gabriel Davioud who, in 1865,
wrote, “A theatre belongs to everyone, and every spectator must be able to move
about as he would in his own home.”62 In the opera house the wealthy
bourgeoisie chose to create a home away from home in the opera box:
Figure 1.3a Opéra Garnier, Paris: grand foyer

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 1.3b Opéra Garnier, Paris: grand staircase

Photo: Marc Goodwin

[T]he typical subscriber had his own personal box, which gave him the rare
opportunity to indulge in other forms of ostentation. He had to take the
whole box, but then he could have it fitted out to suit his own taste, invite
friends and acquaintances to share it or receive visits from other opera goers
during the course of the performance.”63

Boxes in the Paris Opera House were apparently bought and sold on the black
market, changing hands several times in the process.64 The private opera box
within the public auditorium was also a commoditized item.
The spectacle of the opera box provides the miniaturized stage within the
larger hierarchized mise-en-scène of the architecture. Garnier himself became
victim to its power on the opening night of the building when, amid the pomp
and circumstance, the authorities offered him a box on the second loge and
requested payment for the pleasure. Relegation to a literal second tier in the
proceedings greatly offended Garnier, who considered it both an insult and a
political act.65 This incident serves to illustrate the potent socio-political position
that the box continued to hold as a space of privilege and value within the
hierarchy of the auditorium, despite its new democratic agenda.
The architectural performativity of Garnier’s building was most pronounced,
radical and democratic in the foyer, where the cage of the Grand Escalier
fragmented, redistributed and merged the singularities of the stage and
auditorium throughout the space – on the ramps of its sweeping staircase, the
central landing and the loge balconies that wrapped the space on varying levels.
As Garnier acknowledged, “In the foyers all the seats are confused, only in the
auditorium are they distinct.”66 He intended to create a democratic mise-en-scène
that celebrated the public spectacle rather than the nobility or upper classes.
However, although he united the audience vertically in the much-celebrated
central foyer space, social stratification was upheld because not all the paying
public could access the escalier d’honneur (stairway of honour) in order to
proceed to their seats within the auditorium: “Here, before entering the theatre
proper, the bourgeoisie staged a model performance for itself and for the wonder
of the lower classes – those members of the public not ‘privileged’ by fortune.”67
The foyers gave Garnier more opportunity to present his architecture as an
event-space for multiple scenarios, which he speculatively played out during the
design process in order to establish a variety of spatial conditions that encouraged
an active engagement between bodies and building.68 While designing he isolates
a range of theatregoers – from the sedentary to the active – and their varying
modes of spatial engagement, utilizing these “types” to shape the public zones.69
Garnier’s understanding of characters, situation and movement enacted a spatial
dramaturgy throughout the design process, involving an understanding of
personal and communal expression, as well as an attention to multiple scenarios
for social interaction. According to Christopher Mead, in Charles Garnier’s Opera
House, the building’s “empathetic architecture” addressed synesthetic perceptions
and their effect on human imagination through correspondences between
auditory, tactile and visual harmonies. This approach linked Garnier to Charles
Baudelaire, whose celebrated poem “Correspondences” (1846–1847) explored the
interrelationships between extensive orders of sensations.70 By manipulating
architectural elements in relation to embodied experience Garnier played with
the reciprocal relationship between human performance and architectural
performativity. About his Nouvel Opéra de Paris, he wrote that the building is
more than a “Temple of Pleasure”:

[I]t is also and above all a Temple of Art, an exceptional art that speaks to
the eyes, ears, heart and passions: in other words involves all resources of
human organization. It is vital that such exuberance be performed in a
favourable setting, and that such profusion of impressions springing forth
from lyric drama be further complemented by an impression of profusion
that springs forth from architecture.71

Opera, as a rich synthesis of the arts, was to be housed in a building where the
dreamlike universe on the stage is matched by the architecture. It responds to the
age-old challenge posited by Gérard Fontaine: “how to give the temporary
illusion that one’s dreams have come true, so that one might better tolerate the
remainder of time when they have not been fulfilled.”72
The Paris Opera House therefore claimed star billing alongside its creator-
architect. Contemporary press coverage noted that performances were not
restricted to the stage or even the auditorium but took place in the palatial,
reflective and layered foyers. In January 1875, Garnier’s Opera House was hailed
in Le Monde Illustré by Albert de Lasalle as “an architectural event” where the
“frame has effaced the painting […] since it is the Opéra itself the people go to
see.”73 The building was such a compelling event that the public bought tickets
without even knowing what was being performed on its stage proper.
Architecture itself was the performance and came to be regarded as an excessive
force that threatened the art form it housed.74 Of course this is played out today
on a global level with recently opened theatres, opera houses and concert halls
designed by ‘starchitects’ being initially booked out by those who have more
interest in seeing the buildings than the events they stage. Some, such as Jean
Nouvel’s Danish Radio Concert Hall (in which the architect took a bow at the
opening gala) have had to readjust their program once the ‘architectural tourism’
has abated in order to maintain better ‘houses.’
Combining baroque sensuality and neo-classical rationality, Garnier’s opulent
decor deliberately masked a remarkably functional plan and structure; in his
words, “as one would hang large, rich draperies in the immense bays of a festival
hall.”75 He layered the cast iron structure of the auditorium with ornamental
detail, gold and velvet, creating an architectural scenography that endowed the
space with a virtual quality: “not the world as it is […] but the world as it should
be.”76 This strategy of theatrically masking a structural framework is in line with
that of the French architect’s German counterpart, Semper, whose concept of an
architectural “theatricality” was influenced by his understanding of the ancient
Greek stage for high sacred drama: “the battened-down ‘improvised scaffolding’
complete with scenic props, choral processions and leading performers,” in which
the architect played the role of “choragus” or choral master of artistic effects.77
Garnier and Semper saw the walls providing a supporting framework for
elaborate spatial masking and dressing that gave character to their architecture,
which was both effective and affective.
Semper, who worked with Wagner on the early proposals for both provisional
and monumental theatres in Munich, also drew on the mise-en- scène as a
method of framing and heightening human experience, rendering the
architectural object an experiential rather than pictorial entity. Like Garnier he
aimed for an immersive and expressive force, utilizing “play” as an aesthetic
strategy and decor as a fleshy spatial “dressing.” Semper’s theatrical architecture
harnessed the “tiny world” of play as a means for the individual to mediate the
larger world.78 Although the projects he designed for Wagner were never built,
Semper had established his reputation as a theatre architect with the Dresden
Hoftheatre, which he first designed in 1843, and, due to its subsequent destruction
in a fire, redesigned for its reopening in 1878.79 Despite having formulated a
radical plan with Wagner for the Munich auditorium in the intervening years, the
architect deferred to the horseshoe format in the design of his second Hoftheatre,
now referred to as the Semper oper.
 Like Garnier’s Paris Opera House, Semper’s second Dresden Hoftheatre was a
spectacular example of late 19th-century neo-baroque architecture. Gevork
Hartoonian writes of Semper’s “aesthetics of theatricality” where “architecture is
the crust of the life-world, framing, almost like the horseshoe shape of the stage,
the totality of the everyday life experience; even those most remote archaic ones
washed out from the present objective world.”80 Hartoonian’s curious inversion of
the baroque stage for its U-shaped auditorium, illustrates how the architectural
and public theatricality within the late 19th-century auditorium threatened the
proper site of the stage on the other side of the proscenium arch. It was these
theatrical excesses of the baroque horseshoe theatre that the playwright Villiers
de L’Isle-Adam highlighted and rebelled against in 1874 with his proposal for
“The Glory Machine.”

The glory machine

[T]he whole theatre will shake with applause. And the Machine is so
powerful that if necessary it could literally bring the house down.
– Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, “The Glory Machine”

Imagine a theatre that, in applauding its own splendour, assaults the audience
with discordant sound, unpleasant smells, physical blows, nerve gas and electric
shocks. Villiers’s “The Glory Machine” was conceived as an auditorium that
mechanically enacted a brutal rebellion against the bodies and art form it housed.
Represented in text, rather than architectural drawings, this fictional auditorium
was engineered by an equally fictional Baron Bathyius Bottom to avenge the
author whose play La Révolte played only five times at the Théâtre du Vaudeville
in 1870. Sited on the Boulevard des Capucines, the Vaudeville was part of Baron
Haussmann’s Second Empire city and was designed by M. Magne to vie with
Garnier’s Opera House.81 Through the Second Empire project, the vaudeville
theatre had evolved into a more refined boulevard venue that included
melodrama in its program. As one his Cruel Tales, Villiers creates an archi-
textual event that exposes such late 19th-century theatres as bourgeois glory
machines against which the theatrical avant-garde was on the verge of rebelling.
Villiers’s hilarious and hazardous industrialized theatre was conceived out of
revolt: revolt against the professional “clappers,” whose manufactured applause
influenced the success of plays; revolt against the audience whose lack of
enthusiastic response declared his own play a failure; revolt against the critics
who were generally hostile toward his work; and revolt against the building that
transformed all those inhabitants into a treacherous force. Although the play in
question was a typical bourgeois domestic drama without the stylistic signatures
of future naturalist or symbolist performances, Frantisek Deak considers it a
formative piece of early avant-garde performance because of its subversive
content. Fittingly titled La Révolte, it presented the failed rebellion of a woman
against her comfortable bourgeois marriage and position. As a domestic tragedy,
it turned a theatrical mirror on the audience, who refused to recognize itself by
identifying with the heroine and her predicament. Aligning themselves instead
with the husband, their response was either hissing or booing or complete silence.
While the production gave an “aesthetic thrill” to a few of the young attending
poets, it shocked and confused the majority of the audience it was censuring.82
Whether disruptive or silent, the audience was not the enthusiastic applauding
crowd. Thanks to the lack of empathy for Villiers’s contemporary tragic heroine
rebelling against her own class, and the subversive nature of such a rebellion, the
authorities closed down the play after its fifth performance.83
The writer’s retribution for the tyranny of the audience, who applaud either
indiscriminately or strategically, is the transformation of the auditorium into an
avenging machine. The main object of his derision was the claque, a body of
people hired to clap and cheer in the theatre. As a professionally managed
theatrical institution of paid spectators, the claquers manipulated the audience
within the auditorium by applauding, laughing, crying, or calling for encores.
Aligning these hired clappers to professional mourners, the playwright was
aware of how they manufactured dramatic glory as a “machine made of
humanity.”84 In his proposal for the glory machine, Villiers asks: “Between a
machine (the physical means) and glory (the intellectual end) is it possible to
establish a unifying common factor?” For him this coalescing element was the
space, which literally incorporated the audience, fusing bodies and building into a
dynamic and formidable apparatus. The “Bottom Machine,” as a mechanized
claque, is therefore “the auditorium itself. It is adapted to the auditorium, forms a
constituent part of it, and spreads all over, so that any work, dramatic or not,
becomes a masterpiece as soon as it enters it.”85
The architectural decor of Villiers’s mechanical theatre is embedded with
technical devices. Loudspeakers are inserted in the mouths of gilded cupids and
caryatids, tubes of laughing gas and tear-gas are interspersed with the gas
lighting system, and balconies conceal metal fists that pummel dozing audience
members. Contraptions also fling bouquets and laurels from the balconies, and
under every seat in the circle and stalls are applauding mechanical hands, finely
gloved and modelled on illustrious patrons. The feet of the chairs double as
mechanized walking sticks and boot heels, studded with nails, which utilize
springs to strike the floor with thunderous ovations. The resulting dissonance is
as loud and indiscriminate as “that human machine” against which Villiers rails.
It encourages the passive patrons to applaud, forcing the more resistant ones with
electric shocks, thereby ensuring the play’s success. The machine becomes a
manufacturer of glory that “passes really and truly into the auditorium.”86
Allen S. Weiss has cited “The Glory Machine” as a diatribe against the
technological progress of modernity, proffering “what may be deemed a
prototypical manifestation of the theatre of cruelty,” which exposes seemingly
arbitrary audience reactions – bravos, cheers, catcalls, laughter, tears and
pounding the floor in approbation – as orchestrated special effects of spectatorial
art capable of being replaced with a mechanized process.87 This socially agreed
and tolerated behaviour adheres to Jon McKenzie’s theory that generally we
“perform … or else.”
Villiers turns the power of the theatre patrons against themselves by regulating
and focusing their multiple and fragmented performances within the various
zones of the auditorium, which constantly threaten the unity of the onstage
performance. His cruel mechanical interventions foreground and critique the
inherent spectacle of the auditorium, fusing bodies with architectural detail into a
cacophony of sound designed to overwhelm the onstage performance. The
machine highlights and adapts the complicity of the auditorium architecture
within the spectatorial event, utilizing its fantastical humanity of gilded figures
that supplement the living patrons, the shelves of balconies that wrap around and
energize the central body of audience and the reverberant wooden floors upon
which the walking sticks and heels drum and multiply the spectators.
Architecture is mobilized to perform against itself and its occupants in order to
transform these threatening elements of distraction and multiplication into a
theatrical arsenal that obliterates stage action.
The intensifying mayhem is no longer a capricious, aleatory event inflicted by
the professional claquers or restless patrons. Instead it is controlled from the
central position of the prompter’s box below the forestage, which conceals a
control room, and the Operator who works the pulleys, circuits and levers that
release the currents, gases and devices. Vengeance upon the auditorium and its
occupants is a highly technical, stage-managed performance of disciplinary
action.
Villiers’s Operator, who manipulates the auditorium from his concealed view
under the stage, can be likened to Richard Wagner conducting The Ring from the
“mystic abyss” of his buried orchestra. Like the playwright, the composer also
rebelled against the theatre’s glorification of audience and architecture by
creating his own apparatus that restrained and managed the offending elements.
However, while Villiers transformed the auditorium into an orchestrated and
mechanized spectacle that overcame the staged performance, Wagner overcame
the unruly auditorium and its occupants through a severe spatiality that
refocused all gathered on his staged spectacle. His machine was to the glory of
the total work of art over which he exercised complete control. Wagner was
combating the bourgeois glory machine with one of his own.

The case of Bayreuth

Ah, this old magician, how much he imposed upon us! The first thing his art
offers us is a magnifying glass: one looks through it, one does not trust one’s
own eyes – everything looks big, even Wagner – What a Clever rattlesnake!

Wagner is the modern artist par excellence. […]

In his art all that the modern world requires most urgently is mixed in the
most seductive manner: the three great stimulants of the exhausted – the
brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).
– Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner”
It was to Richard Wagner that Nietzsche dedicated The Birth of Tragedy: Out of
the Spirit of Music, believing the composer’s music-drama could revive tragedy in
the theatre. Since first meeting in 1868, Nietzsche and Wagner influenced each
other as they developed their separate visions for the future artwork, both
inspired by the ancient amphitheatre as a generative site. The philosopher
consistently gave public support to the composer’s battle to realize his theatre.
However, by the time the Festspielhaus opened in 1876, Wagner’s utopian and
revolutionary theatre had been transformed into a brutal and disciplinary space
that bitterly disappointed Nietzsche (Figures 1.4, 1.5a and 1.5b). Standing on the
rain-swept hill in 1872, among the “disciples of an art resurrected,” the
philosopher had hoped this project would transcend the “uncertain, ill-
coordinated recollections of a true art which we moderns have derived from the
Greeks.”88 But the actual experience of attending the first festival at Bayreuth
four years later marked the definitive break between the philosopher and the
composer, resulting in Nietzsche’s eventual dissociation from Wagner.
The theatre that opened in 1876, specifically for the performances of Wagner’s
Ring Cycle, lacked any spaces for the embodied expression of a mobile
presentational public. Having climbed the hill from the township, the pilgrim-
spectator entered an austere building with restricted social space and a minimal
circulation zone that allowed only for efficient movement in and out of the
auditorium. All side balconies were eradicated with a limited number of boxes
embedded in the rear wall’s shallow curve. These were built primarily to house
Wagner’s shy royal patron, Ludwig II, who never attended a full production and
were quickly utilized to accommodate Wagner’s family. The main body of
spectators that occupied the single steeply raking plane of the fan-shaped seating
block was required to sit in darkness and in awed silence for hours at a time,
although it’s worth noting that Wagner did not originally intend to plunge the
audience into complete darkness, claiming he was thwarted by problems with gas
lighting at the opening.89 The repeated uprights of the proscenium frame in the
auditorium enclosed the audience within the perspectival scene of both
architecture and scenery that converged on a mutually sited vanishing point
toward the back of the stage. The buried orchestra pit reinforced this spatial
unification of the real with the ideal by eliminating the usual visual and spatial
interruption of musicians and conductor. Yet, while the devices of double
proscenium, invisible orchestra and darkness worked to immerse the audience in
the fictional world presented on the stage, they simultaneously formed distancing
devices that withheld any active participatory engagement with and between the
audience, which Nietzsche advocated.90

Figure 1.4 First performance of Wagner’s opera, Rheingold, at Bayreuth Festspielhaus (1876)
Figure 1.5a Wagner Festspielhaus, Bayreuth: orchestra pit

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 1.5b Wagner Festspielhaus, Bayreuth: auditorium

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Nietzsche’s meditation on “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” recognized the

building as the encapsulation of the composer’s artwork where place and
performance came together in a new form with a new audience. Walter
Kaufmann maintains that the break between the two men was precipitated “not
by Wagner’s art but by Bayreuth.”91 Nietzsche wrote later, “My mistake was to
come to Bayreuth with an ideal. I was forced to experience the bitterest
disappointment. The excess of ugliness, distortion and overexcitement repulsed
me vehemently.”92 In his letter outlining the “Case of Wagner” (1888), Nietzsche
contends that the composer had created an art that “offers us a magnifying glass”
where “everything looks big, even Wagner.”93 This magnification effect equates
with Wagner’s double proscenium, which played with scale to make the
performers on the forestage appear as Gods. The visionary apparatus of his
festival and its venue focused and concentrated effects with what Nietzsche
called “the pressure of a hundred atmospheres.”94 In removing the surrounding
balconies and multiple viewpoints, and by tilting all audience members directly
toward the stage – doubly framed by proscenium and doubly distanced by pit –
Wagner had eradicated the last vestiges of the choros occupying the auditorium
as social performers. Suturing theatron to skene, his emphasis on the illusory
distance of the constructed scene and the immobility of the audience exemplified
the pure Apollonian vision that Nietzsche had spurned in The Birth of Tragedy.
Wagner had created a theatre dedicated to a synthesis of the creative arts,
which he had discussed in “Art-Work of the Future” as Gesamtkunstwerk (total
work of art). Recalling “the great unitarian artwork” of Greek tragedy where all
artistic forms within the theatrical event were once integrated, he attempted to
reunite what had long since been separated.95 However, Nietzsche associated
Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk to the totalizing “master morality” of Christianity in
its annihilation of difference and multiplicity.96 According to Theodor W. Adorno,
the unified force of Gesamtkunstwerk – “that suspicious synthesis” – is
“essentially immutable and atemporal.”97 For Adorno, Wagner’s artwork,
matching Nietzsche’s description of Apollonian representation, is “pure
appearance – an absolutely immediate, as it were, spatial phenomenon.”98 It is
therefore no wonder that architectural modernism, aiming to stem the
proliferating flux of modernity with the eternal stasis of built form, quickly
adopted Wagner’s concept within its utopian program. Holding the viewer in an
immersive immobility as passive observer emphasizes the static and monumental
quality of the synthesized artwork. And yet paradoxically, as will unfold, Wagner
was opposed to stasis and monumentality in architecture.

A new public
 In the proportions and arrangement of the room and its seats, however, you
will find expressed a thought which, once you have grasped it, will place
you in a new relation to the play you are about to witness, a relation quite
distinct from that in which you had always been involved when visiting our
theatres.
– Richard Wagner, “Bayreuth”

Perhaps the most significant cultural phenomenon in the second half of the
nineteenth century where problems of theatre, spectacle, and the techniques
of psychological control come together is in the operatic work of Richard
Wagner.
– Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception

Returning to the inaugural event that opened this chapter and defined a new
period in theatre architecture, Wagner asks rhetorically of those gathered before
him: “But to whom shall I turn, to ensure the ideal work its solid lastingness, the
stage its monumental shrine?”99 As Nietzsche noted, the maestro understood that
in order for this moment to be significant and for his work to endure, it required
willing reception. He demanded a new audience and a new form of receptivity,
characterized by Mark Twain, who attended the Bayreuth festival in 1891, as
“fixed and reverential attention” throughout the performance.100 George Bernard
Shaw, who also attended the festival in 1889 and 1891, described the “Wagner
audience,” as those who “sit in the dark and worship in silence,” noting that “the
strain on the attention, concentrated as it is by the peculiarities of the theatre, is
enormous.”101 We need to remind ourselves just how unique the features were of
the dark auditorium, hidden orchestra, prominent and brilliantly lit stage and
extraordinary stage effects and machinery. The audience not only had to adapt to
a new form of musical performance, but also to a novel space that required new
modes of spatial and spectatorial practice.
Wagner had sacralized his theatre, in what Nietzsche designates “a form of
demolatory.”102 He required pilgrims prepared to worship his art in an
atmosphere of devotion, described by Mark Twain as

persons in whom music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its
creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands
 consecrated things, and the partaking of them with eye and ear a sacred
solemnity.103

The usually distracted spectators of the late 19th century were transformed into
hushed listeners in the “temple” to Wagner’s art. The conspicuous “neighbour”
who reigned in the bourgeois theatre became an isolated “devotee” within a
faithful collective.104 Paying tribute to Bayreuth as a “triumph of rational
auditorium design over the Italian baroque tradition,” Izenour praises its
architecture for setting up a direct relationship between performance and
individual spectator isolated in comfort and ease with an unobstructed view of
the stage.105
The new spectators, as intellectual devotees who made the pilgrimage to this
remote and unpolluted site set apart from the urban chaos, also had to adapt to
the experience of “fatigue” resulting from the demand for their rapt attention.106
The crowd that gathered for the foundation-laying ceremony represented not
only future Festspielhaus audiences, prepared to make the annual journey to the
Wagnerian festival, but today’s audiences in general who are willingly isolated in
the dark and arranged in numbered seats, their eyes trained on the stage viewed
beyond the backs of rows of heads. As Luce Irigaray wrote of the captives in
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: “Heads forward, eyes forward, genitals aligned, fixed
in a straight direction and always straining forward, in a straight line.”107 Radical
and demanding in the 1870s, this way of attending a performance differed greatly
from the more mobile body and distracted gaze inhabiting the baroque
auditorium. Like Plato’s prisoners, we are now willingly enchained to darkness,
silence and each other, entranced by projected images on the wall and too often
oblivious to alternative ways of participating in the event.108 Despite numerous
experimentations with spatial configurations in auditorium architecture over the
following century, Wagner’s disciplinary structure successfully re-educated
distracted audiences through an architecture of concentration we now take for
granted as the standard way of viewing opera, dance, drama and cinema. Yet the
composer’s desire for architecture “to become a concrete plastic deed,” and
therefore an active entity, did not always lie in the final form that was built in
Bayreuth.109
Although he was well aware of the theatrical theories of Nietzsche and
Semper, Wagner resisted the participatory excesses of the philosopher (that
focused on the Dionysian chorus) and the decorative excesses of the architect
(that concentrated on spatial masking) in the design of his Festspielhaus. As he
battled to achieve an artistic space and his own place in history, the architecture
solidified, representing the authoritarianism of its originator. Shaw observed of
Wagner, “All authority was opposed to him until he made his own paramount.”110
Yet even while his theatre on the hill was under construction, Wagner was
contemplating forms of presentation that were more true to the “naive simplicity
of a makeshift structure,” which he had advocated in his groundbreaking
speech.111 He was caught between two conflicting architectural models: the
deeply interior and strictly separated stage-auditorium of the Festspielhaus,
versus the more open performance platforms of the Dionysian and Elizabethan
stage and the kasperltheatre (popular puppet theatre), which was spontaneously
erected in fields and open public spaces.112
The same year he laid the foundation stone for the Festspielhaus Wagner wrote
“On Actors and Singers” (1872), in which he moved away from the absolutist
claims of his illusionistic theatre to contemplate the ideal principle of an open,
embraced stage and the shared ground of the chorus in which the audience
performed a “rapturous entertainment of itself.”113 Also that same year Wagner’s
wife, Cosima, notes in her diary that her husband was considering how the
Elizabethan stage model could be utilized for the staging of Faust to establish an
active, improvised role for the spectators in which settings were indicated rather
than replicated and action took place behind as well as in front of the audience.114
Dieter Borchmeyer suggests that Wagner’s alternative visions were influenced by
Nietzsche’s call for a merging of action and audience in The Birth of Tragedy
(with which the composer was familiar while the young philosopher was writing
it). But, prior to meeting Nietzsche, Wagner had written “Art and Revolution”
(1849), which favoured the Greek stage where the chorus stood “at the very heart
of the audience” surrounded on three sides “merging in intimate oneness” with
the community and Dionysus.115 Influenced by Friedrich Schiller, Wagner saw
this communal rite expressing the oneness of public life. Yet, in 1873 he wrote “A
Glance at the German Operatic Stage of Today,” reinforcing his distaste for the
baroque theatre in which the spectator’s glance is always sullied by the presence
of other spectators:
 From nowhere can one get a view of the stage that does not include a large
slice of the audience: the flaming row of footlights abuts on the middle of
the proscenium-boxes; it is impossible to watch the prima donna, there in
front, without taking in the glasses of the “opera-friend” who ogles her. One
thus can find no line to part the putative artistic action from those before
whom it is set. The two dissolve into one brew of most repulsive mixture, in
which the Kapellmeister twirls his staff as magic-ladle of the modern witch’s
caldron.116

That free community of the Volk gathered on the hillside amphitheatre or in the
festive field, which united to create an instinctive force that conditioned the
artwork, becomes a distracting and distracted entity to be conditioned within and
by the public auditorium.117 Wagner opted for a clear dividing line between stage
and audience with the conductor no longer caught between but hidden below.
This gave credence to his emphatic proscenium with the “invisible orchestra”
buried in that infamous “mystic abyss” likened to the “primeval womb of
Gaia.”118 The open space of the ancient orchestra that he simultaneously espoused
as a “fruitful mother-womb of the Ideal Drama” was submerged, rendered
inaccessible and out of site.119
Wagner’s ongoing predicament between controlling both audience’s
concentration and stage image while creating an open, responsive and inclusive
community represents a quandary that theatre-makers continue to struggle with.
In The Development of the Playhouse, Donald C. Mullin maintains it is impossible
to amalgamate the open stage platform with the picture-frame playhouse: “one
may have either the Italian scenic stage or the bare Elizabethan platform, but
there is no satisfactory way in which they can be combined.”120 However, since
Mullin made his claim in 1970, this issue has been most profoundly and
successfully addressed by Peter Brook in the second half of the 20th century as he
and his architectural collaborator, Jean-Guy Lecat, explored found sites and
adapted existing buildings into theatres to accommodate specific productions for
the Paris- based CICT company (International Centre for Theatre Creation).
Brook’s 1974 and 1988 renovations of the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord (1876) in
Paris and the Majestic Theatre (1904) in New York, respectively, successfully
transformed baroque U-shaped auditoria into dynamic venues by eradicating the
raised stage in order to extend the acting area in front of the proscenium arch at
the same level as the front rows of the audience. In New York this involved
building over the existing stage and altering the seating rake to connect a new
extended platform with the front of the circle. In both venues the proscenium
arch maintains its role as delineating structure, framing a scenic stage behind it
while emphasizing the more inclusive performance space in front located within
the audience realm. The new format recalls not only the Elizabethan thrust stage
but also conjoined choros and skene of the ancient Greek theatres.
As Wagner sought a resolution between the Attic amphitheatre and
Elizabethan stage, his own theatre developed into neither. Its forceful proscenium
came to dominate and subvert any spatial unification of scene and audience. As
Borchmeyer contends, the composer’s alternative models “form the greatest
possible contrast with the modern proscenium stage from which Wagner was
unable to break free in Bayreuth, in spite of his bold and far-reaching plans to
redesign the (spoken) theatre.”121 The emphasis by Wagner and subsequent
theatre historians on a return to the fan-shaped amphitheatre of ancient Greece
as a ‘democratic’ form is problematic. Any resemblance to this format is in the
singular inclined plane of viewers that was narrowed to 30 degrees in order to
submit to the demands of the perspectival stage. Otherwise it bears little
resemblance to the semi-circular amphitheatre of the antique stage, which
wrapped the participatory space of the orchestra. Wagner’s more constricted
wedge format allowed no such inclusion. Shaw was quick to point out that,
although constructed in the name of democracy, all seats may have had “equally
good” views, but the wedge format positioned a larger number of people further
from the action as seating spread away from the stage.122 Mikael Askergren
critiques the fan-shaped wedge form established by Wagner as ideal for
“lecturing, preaching, and other forms of didactic, one-way communication.”123
Masquerading as democratic, Wagner’s architecture demands “submissiveness”:

In actual fact, though, the “altruism” of Wagner’s “democratic,” darkened

auditorium is a disguise. There is nothing humble about Wagner’s demand
for the audience to submissively give its undivided attention to his art, and
nothing else – just like the pupils in a classroom or lecture hall they are
expected to submissively devote their full attention to the teacher or lecturer,
 without causing any disturbance.124

What emerges from the anti-architectural architecture of the Festspielhaus are a

series of contradictions that make it and its creator a fascinating model.
Romanticism merges with modernity, the provisional with the monumental, the
revolutionary with the reactionary, and the energetic with the controlled. Issues
of democracy collapse onto those of discipline and the scenographic interior,
which is influenced by architecture, replaces the architectural interior, which was
influenced by scenography. Only in an isolated location – set apart from the
dynamics of the city, the authorities and even his patron – could Wagner
construct a revolutionary space in which to isolate and immobilize the spectator
within a community of watchers. True to his idea of a provisional space, the
auditorium had no pretence to monumental architecture, but rather only the
effect of it. This was in keeping with earlier Italian Renaissance theatres, which
were built as temporary insertions in courts, academies and palaces.125 Like
Wagner’s theatre they utilized an architectural scenography to adapt the model of
the classical outdoor stage for the cognoscenti, the origins of which lay in the
shared communal space of threshing floor or agora in the marketplace.
In the “Art-Work of the Future,” Wagner claims the machine was “the cold
heartless ally of luxury-craving men” who are absorbed by it rather than
encouraging nature to be absorbed by the artwork.126 Yet his theatre, which
refuses to trust the fragmented force of the audience, becomes an absorptive
apparatus. Wagner enacted theatrical modernism’s first condemnation of
architecture, maintaining that the “theatrical edifice of the future” could not be
solved by architects who join “speculation for gain” with “luxurious ostentation
[…] and thus no architect in the world will be able to raise our stratified and
fenced-off auditoria – dictated by our parcelling of our public into the most
diverse categories of class and civil station – to conformity with any law of
beauty.”127 For Wagner, the theatre architecture of the future promised “an
undreamt width of field […] open for invention.”128 Ultimately, although he saw
potential in the communal gathering and the architectural profession, he refused
to trust either within the bounds of his own creative work. Yet he also insisted he
was offering a building “in all the naive simpleness of its emergency,”129 which
was provisional not only in its material being but in its becoming as a national
theatre, which, with its architecture, would emerge and develop slowly over time.
Wagner replaced Semper with Otto Brückwald and Karl Brandt, an architect
and technician who were willing to forgo architectural detail and monumentality
in order to fulfil the impresario’s desire to subdue spatial and public expression.
The Semperian idea of the architect as a choral master orchestrating artistic
effects was at odds with Wagner’s indomitable will to compose more than just
the music. While both men believed in a grand unity of effects, Wagner feared
that monumental public spaces (in auditorium and foyers) would overwhelm and
compete with his own work on stage and maintained that architecture was not
yet in step with the new artwork he had devised. This contradicted his earlier
claim in 1849 that “marvels blossom from the fabric of the Architect” who
“summons forth the terms of its enlivening from the individual resources of his
art.”130
Izenour insists that Wagner’s Festspielhaus finally broke the “tyranny of the
baroque” by moving the initiative for theatre design innovation from architect to
“the theatrically and technically oriented man of the theatre.”131 With this
statement, Izenour, who was a theatre consultant and stage engineer rather than
an architect, fortifies his position as a technical expert and displays his own
prejudices as a rationalist modernist. However his statement also highlights the
theatre profession’s loss of confidence in architects that was first signalled by
Wagner’s disregard of Semper, his marginalization of Brückwald and approbation
of Brandt.
In 1876 the Paris Opera House and Bayreuth Festspielhaus presented two
antithetical theatres – one dazzling, lavish and ostentatious; the other frugal,
spare and utilitarian: “Garnier’s stood as a symbol of the old order, socially and
architecturally; Wagner’s as a forerunner of the future.”132 The composer’s “old
barn” built of timber was never the “large theatre of stone” that Ludwig had
commissioned Semper to build for him in Munich.133 The stillness, fixity and
isolation of Wagner’s auditorium stands in contrast to Garnier’s requirement for
a body on the move in the communality of his foyers, defined by social action.134
In the Paris Opera House, the event-space centred on the social event, while in
the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, the event-space privileged the staged event. In his
obituary for Charles Garnier, Edouard Canté described his architecture as “flesh
announced through the monument.”135 This quivering viscerality in the
architectural monument stands in dramatic contrast to the resistant objectality of
Wagner’s anti-monumental monument. While the Paris Opera House was an
architecture set in stone for a multiplicity of fleeting events, especially within its
foyers, the foyerless Festspielhaus established a more insubstantial architecture
for petrified social action.
The contrasting event-spaces also reflect cultural difference in late 19th-
century Europe, where the French practiced an outward urbane sociality in
comparison to the more inward private poetics of the German character. That
France, as a more publicly oriented society, was better suited to lavish visual
theatre, is posited by Simon Williams, citing Romantic poet Heinrich Heine who
maintains, “[I]n Germany the heart of tragedy lay in its poetry rather than its
action,” working “more effectively on the lonely reader than on a great
gathering.”136 Wagner aimed for a clear distinction between the “real” world of
the spectator in the auditorium and the “unreal” world on the stage, while
Garnier blurred those distinctions.
The Festspielhaus achieves Wagner’s celebrated notion of the
Gesamtkunstwerk by incorporating architecture in the total work of art and
recognizing its indivisibility from the performed event. However, architecture is
appropriated to serve the music-drama of the stage picture, whereas Garnier
utilizes the dramatic stage picture to serve architecture. Both men show different
ideas of democratic space; for Wagner it is in the auditorium, whereas for Garnier
it was in the foyers. While Wagner was interested in isolating and focusing the
individual, Garnier concentrated more on “la liberté collective” than “la liberté
individuelle.”137 Fontaine points out that in many ways Garnier’s architecture
realized Wagner’s vision outlined in his “Theatre of the Future” by creating a
“total work of art” that abolished the differences between auditorium and stage,
life and drama, synthesizing all the arts not only on stage but within the
auditorium.138

The invisible theatre

Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible
theatre.
 – Richard Wagner, in Cosima Wagner’s Diaries

Wagner, who created the “invisible orchestra” by burying it out of sight,

lamented that he had not created the “invisible theatre.”139 This was due in large
part to scenic failings in his initial festivals of 1876 and 1878. Yet, in plunging the
audience into darkness and minimizing the auditorium decor, he had significantly
diminished the visual impact of architecture and audience, concomitantly
strengthening the visual impact of the stage world. While the disciplinary effects
of an obscured architecture focused the spectator’s gaze on the stage, the scenic
picture did not match the radical developments of his musical drama. Although
there were advances in stage machinery and lighting, including elaborate
contraptions for floating Rhine maidens, transformations of form, magic fires and
fierce dragons, these spectacular effects fell dismally short due to Wagner’s
failure to match his hallucinatory music and fantastical dramaturgy with the
visual picture. It wasn’t until the advent of the “New Bayreuth” (1951–1966),
under the design direction of his grandsons, Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, that
a powerful and effective scenic world was achieved in the Festspielhaus, strongly
influenced by symbolist artists, themselves inspired by Richard Wagner’s
theatrical reforms. It took over three-quarters of a century for the “invisible
stage” of Wieland Wagner to complement the hidden orchestra and darkened
auditorium of his grandfather, thereby achieving the composer’s “invisible
theatre.”140 The Wagners’ invisible theatre achieves Rancière’s idea of a fixed yet
“emancipated spectator” – both active agent and communal performer, despite an
embodied passivity141 – suspended in an immersive darkness where the
dominance of the contained image is troubled and released through the
uncontainable element of sound.
Wagner became a powerful force for the theatrical avant-garde in the latter
half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century through his emphasis on
archetype, dream, myth and dramatic unity, as well as his focus on musicality,
which challenged the primacy of the written word and revolutionized drama.142
The spatial divide he established between stage and auditorium was emphasized
by means of a monumental frame, veiling curtain, and performance platform
rising from the concealed depths of the orchestra: encapsulating a figurative gulf
between theatrical naturalism and symbolism that followed in his wake. While
naturalist drama contained the pictorial scene via the fourth wall (transparent to
audience and opaque to performer), the symbolists acknowledged the
impossibility of sealing off the flowing and fluctuating forces emanating from the
abyssal space of the stage. By destabilizing the perspectival regime, the black hole
of representation, previously signified through the vanishing point’s miniscule
pinpoint, opened up to become a void on the eradicated horizon, flooding the
theatre with the primal spatiality of Wagner’s “ur maternal sea.”143 This
immersive and mobile spatiality, which resisted containment and countered an
ocularcentric focus, was taken up by the European symbolists based in Paris
during the 1890s and reinforced further by the scenographic visions of Edward
Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, who were influenced by the rhythmic
movement explorations of Isadora Duncan and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze.

Notes
1 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 336.
2 Nietzsche wrote of “untimely men: their home is not in this age but elsewhere, and it is elsewhere too
that their justification is to be found.” “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” 198.
3 Ibid., 199.
4 Wagner’s ceremony could be aligned to J. L. Austin’s illocutionary utterance of naming a ship, in this
case enacting the laying of a foundation for a new form of theatre architecture. See Austin, How to Do
Things with Words, 5. In “A Retrospect of the Stage-Festivals of 1876,” Wagner recognized the event as
laying “the foundation stone of my own artistic structure.” 98.
5 Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” 197.
6 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 323.
7 On 30 September 1850, from exile in Zurich, Richard Wagner wrote to his friend Theodor Uhlig of his
desire for a “rough theatre of planks and beams” in a pastoral setting adjacent to a city, furnished with
theatrical machinery in which an event could be created to which a select audience of musicians,
scholars and sympathetic lovers of musical drama would be invited. “When everything was in order, I
should give three performances […] in the course of a week; after the third, the theatre would be pulled
down and the score burned.” Quoted in Hartford (ed.), Bayreuth: The Early Years: An Account of the
Early Decades of the Wagner Festival as Seen by the Celebrated Visitors & Participants, 19. Through this
conceptually complex and radical idea, Wagner was aiming to emphasize performance’s inherent
 ephemerality, while also utilizing the event as a money-raising strategy for his longer-term project.
8 Wagner in Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” 198.
9 The provisional nature of Wagner’s Festspielhaus was both architectural (as temporary building) and
conceptual (as a preliminary model for a German National Theatre).
10 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 324.
11 Ibid., 325.
12 Ibid., 328.
13 As early as the 1840s, Wagner began developing his vision of the theatre as “a temple in which all that
was best in humanity was […] put to uses as noble, as uplifting, as those of any temple devoted to the
exercise of religion.” Wagner in Williams, Richard Wagner and the Festival Theatre, 36. Mark Twain,
who visited the Festspielhaus in 1891 referred to the building (from the point of view of a “heretic in
heaven”) as “the Wagner Temple” in his essay “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” 226–7.
14 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 333.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 334.
17 Ibid., 336.
18 Ibid., 335.
19 Gottfried Semper worked on three proposals for a theatre in Munich dedicated to Wagner’s work under
the patronage of Ludwig II. However, tensions arose where architect and architecture were caught
between the patron’s desire for a public court theatre and the composer’s need for his own idiosyncratic
building. Wagner’s excesses and intrigues led to him being banished from Germany in 1865 for the
second time (the first time being when he and Semper were exiled for their support of the 1849
Revolution) and the project lost momentum and funding, convincing Wagner he could only rely on a
venue over which he exercised complete authority.
20 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 335–6.
21 Izenour, Theatre Design, 80. George C. Izenour exhibits a modernist prejudice in his predilection for a
rational scientific approach, suggesting “a theatre-trained mind, Karl Brandt’s, was at work here instead
of one devoted to the usual 19th-century studied monumental architectural nonsense with its confusion
of detailed pediments and cartouches that instead of solving the problem covers it up with an overdone
interior, stylistic cliché” (Ibid., 79). However, as an acoustician and engineer, Izenour also challenged the
architectural preference for the visual above the sonic as a receptive means of experiencing
performance.
22 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 338.
23 Ibid., 335.
24 Ibid., 340. The Festspielhaus, which still stands on the hill at Bayreuth accommodating the yearly
Wagner Bayreuth Festival, has had its structure reinforced and renovated over the years, and its stage
house extended to accommodate new technologies. The auditorium has been marginally refurbished,
retaining its decor and layout.
25 Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner and Bayreuth,” 199.
26 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 327.
27 Ibid., 333.
28 Andrea Palladio designed Vicenza’s Teatro Olimpico, considered the first Italian Renaissance theatre. It
was completed in 1585, for the Accademia Olimpico of which the architect was a member. The venue,
based on a range of antique theatres studied by Palladio, was built to stage classical plays. It resembled
an indoor version of the Roman theatre with a semi-circular amphitheatre wrapping a sunken orchestra
that faced a stage backed by the frons scenae, a permanent perspectival architecture designed by
Vincenzo Scamozzi.
29 It is worth noting that, in Great Britain, theatre architecture of the late 19th century varied from that of
the continent with the development of deeper raked galleries at the rear of the auditorium, rather than
shallow boxes. The US counterparts tended toward the UK model but with wider prosceniums and
upper circles with shallower curves that were situated in closer proximity to the stage, affording little
visual connection to audience on the lower levels.
30 Although by the 19th century the royal box could also be found on the side, immediately adjacent to
the stage, and even imbedded into the proscenium itself, the assertively located and often separated
booth became an architectural archetype for the privileged perspectival gaze: an ideal viewpoint around
which all views were arranged.
31 Carlson, Places of Performance, 172.
32 Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, 209.
33 The proscenium zone – deriving from the Greek proskenion meaning “in front of the scene” – was
originally the acting platform behind which the proscenium arch framed permanent scenery.
Mackintosh identifies this feature as the critical difference between 18th- and 19th-century models.
Drawing on ad quadratum geometry, he points out how the intersecting zones of stage and auditorium
form a “vesica piscis […] where the worlds of audience and actor interconnect” a space lost in the first
half of the 19th century, 144.
34 Downing, “Architectural Visions of Lyric Theatre and Spectatorship in Late-Eighteenth-Century
France,” 60.
35 Rabreau, “The Theatre-Monument: A Century of ‘French’ Typology, 1750–1850,” 48.
36 Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, vi.
37 Ibid., x–xi.
38 Wagner, My Life, Vol. 1, 515.
39 Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, 249–50.
40 Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” 96.
41 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 140.
42 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 109. Deus ex machina is a Latin term for “the god from the machine”
in classical drama where a deity enters at the end of the play, to resolve the otherwise irresolvable
complexities of the plot. In Greek tragedy this involved lowering the gods from above by a crane
(mechane). The term was later adopted to describe the use of an unexpected or improbable device,
element or event to disentangle otherwise insoluble situations.
43 Hénaff and Strong, Public Space and Democracy, 22.
44 Forment, “Trimming Scenic Invention: Oblique Perspective as Poetics of Discipline,” 31.
45 Rabreau, “The Theatre-Monument,” 48.
46 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 217.
47 Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, 74–5.
48 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201.
49 Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, 33.
50 Hays, The Public and Performance, 5.
51 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 405. Benjamin, who maintains consumers begin to consider themselves
as a spectatorial mass, outlines this extension of the theatrical realm into the metropolis: “Hence, the
circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened” (Ibid., 43). As
Wolfgang Schivelbusch remarks, “The illuminated window as stage, the street as theatre and the
passersby as audience – this is the scene of big-city night life.” Disenchanted Night, 148.
52 Clement, Opera, or, the Undoing of Women, 3–5.
53 The former term was established and expounded by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, which was a
prelude to his Arcades Project: “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century”; David Harvey expanded on
the latter term in Paris Capital of Modernity.
54 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 410.
55 Garnier, Le Théâtre, 2.
56 Ibid., 14–15.
57 Ibid., 147.
58 Hays, The Public and Performance, 6.
59 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 162.
60 Gautier, “Le Nouvelle Opéra. Intérieur,” quoted and translated in Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra,
127.
61 Garnier, Le Théâtre, 4–6.
62 Davioud, Revue générale de l’architecture, 123, quoted in Carlson, Places of Performance, 156.
63 Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theatre in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, 32.
64 Gishford, Grand Opera, 54.
65 Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra, 194.
66 Garnier, Le Théâtre, 112, quoted and translated in Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra, 298.
67 Hays, Public and Performance, 5.
68 Charles Garnier’s notion of spatial scenario is in line with Tschumi’s performative architectural play in
the spaces peripheral to the auditoria he designs. Garnier’s scenarios also correspond to Tschumi’s
scripting as seen most acutely in his Manhattan Manuscripts but also in performance venues such as Le
Fresnoy.
69 These ‘types’ include those who move distractedly through space, those seeking active encounters,
those who withdraw to quieter spaces, those who leave the building for fresh air, and those smoking or
partaking in refreshments. See Garnier, Le Théâtre, 97–9.
70 Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra, 257–8.
71 Garnier in Fontaine, L’Opéra de Charles Garnier: Architecture et Décor Exterieur, 13.
72 Fontaine, L’Opéra de Charles Garnier, 13.
73 Lasalle, “Chronique Musicale: Le Nouvel Opéra.”
74 This experience of architecture as event occurred in the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by architect
Daniel Libeskind, where, between 1999 and 2001, it operated solely as a venue for architectural tours.
As an empty building, prior to the installation of its exhibits, it became the main spectacle apprehended
by the experiential body on the move. For a reading of its spatial performativity see Hannah, “Jewish
Museum of Berlin: Dancing Between the Lines,” 26–41; and “Body Space: Mining the Limits Between
Architecture and Dance,” 74–7.
75 Garnier in Fontaine, L’Opéra de Charles Garnier, 35.
76 Ibid.
77 Semper, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity,” 52.
78 Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writing, 35.
79 The Opera House was decimated during the allied firebombing of Dresden in 1945.
80 Hartoonian, Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, 39–40. Gevork Hartoonian presents a
detailed discussion on Semper’s architectural “theatricality” as a structural-symbolic expression of
tectonics that exceeded the technical exigencies of construction, which he applies to the work of
 Tschumi as a tectonic dressing.
81 Hitchcock, Architecture: 19th and 20th Centuries, 206.
82 The first production of La Révolte is discussed at length by Frantisek Deak in Symbolist Theatre: The
Formation of the Avant-Garde, 33–9.
83 La Révolte was restaged in Paris twenty-six years later at the Odeon (1896) and then in the Théâtre
Antoine (1899). Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, who had passed away by this second restaging, was
now recognized as a cult figure for the symbolist generation. Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 31.
84 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “The Glory Machine,” 52.
85 Ibid., 7.
86 Ibid., 59.
87 Weiss, “Erotic Nostalgia and the Inscription of Desire,” 68.
88 Nietzsche, “Richard Wagner at Bayreuth,” 199.
89 Wagner wrote: “[A]gainst our will the auditorium became completely dark when we merely wanted to
shade it strongly.” Wagner, “A Retrospect of the Stage Festivals of 1876,” 104.
90 While Jacques Rancière has argued that a distanced spectator can be actively engaged without
embodied participation, Nietzsche was more interested in visceral and spatial engagement.
91 Walter Kaufmann is citing Ernest Newman’s statement in the introduction to Nietzsche’s “The Case of
Wagner.” Quoted in Nietzsche, The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 605.
92 Nietzsche in Fischer-Dieskau, Wagner and Nietzsche, 139.
93 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” 616.
94 Ibid., 628.
95 Gesamtkunstwerk, translated as “total work of art,” depends on an effective interplay of elements
(music, orchestration, singing, acting, scenery, costumes, lighting and architecture) synthesized into a
totality to realize the artist’s vision. Wagner first outlined this in his 1849 essay “Art-Work of the
Future,” 182–91. For a discussion of this concept’s effect on theatre theory and practice see Kirby, Total
Theatre: A Critical Anthology.
96 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” 646.
97 Adorno, In Search of Wagner, 26.
98 Ibid., 22.
99 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 326.
100 Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, 154.
101 Ibid., 142, 145.
102 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” 639.
103 Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, 154.
104 Nietzsche wrote of the modern audience in the theatre: “There the most personal conscience is
vanquished by the leveling number of the great number […] the neighbor reigns, one becomes a mere
neighbor.” The Gay Science, 33.
105 Izenour, Theatre Design, 75.
106 It is no surprise that Wagner acknowledged the local garrison, brought in to test the reverberation time
of the unfinished theatre, as an ideal audience because they took their seats promptly, didn’t talk or
fidget during the performance, and refrained from airing their opinions after the piece. See Hartford,
Bayreuth: The Early Years, 34.
107 Irigaray, “The Stage Setup,” 64–5.
108 For detailed discussions on the link between Plato’s Cave and the theatre, see David Wiles’s chapter on
“The Cave” in A Short History of Western Performance Space and Luce Irigaray’s essay “The Stage
Setup” in Mimesis, Masochism and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French
Thought.
109 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 333.
110 Shaw, “Bayreuth (1889 and 1891),” 143.
111 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 339.
112 Borchmeyer, Wagner, Theatre and Theory, 29.
113 Wagner, “On Actors and Singers,” 195.
114 Cosima referred to this as “Wagner’s laboratory” that would be sited in “a sort of stable with a pointed
roof.” Wagner, Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 552–3.
115 Wagner, “Art and Revolution.”
116 Wagner, “A Glance at the German Operatic Stage of Today,” 277.
117 For Wagner’s elucidation of the concept of “Volk” (Folk) as a common and collective force see his 1849
essay “Art-Work of the Future.”
118 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 335.
119 Wagner, “On Actors and Singers,” 195.
120 Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse: A Survey of Theatre Architecture from the Renaissance to
the Present, 151.
121 Borchmeyer, Wagner, Theatre and Theory, 46.
122 Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, 155.
123 Askergren, “Submissiveness of Architecture – Submissiveness to Architecture.”
124 Ibid.
125 Leacroft and Leacroft, Theatre and Playhouse: An Illustrated Survey of Theatre Building from Ancient
Greece to Present Day, 44.
126 Wagner, “Art-Work of the Future,” 85.
127 Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 185n.
128 Wagner, “Art Work of the Future,” 185n.
129 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 340.
130 Ibid., 186.
131 Izenour, Theatre Design, 80, 82.
132 Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 51.
133 Ibid., 8, 35.
134 Garnier’s architecture “gains meaning only when viewed by a spectator moving through a building […]
what is shaped by human action must be comprehended by human action.” Mead, Charles Garnier’s
Paris Opéra, 114.
135 Canté in Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra, 288.
136 Williams, Richard Wagner and the Festival Theatre, 24.
137 Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opéra, 133.
138 Fontaine, L’Opéra de Charles Garnier, 21.
139 This is noted by Cosima Wagner in her diary on 23 September 1878, when Wagner confided, “Having
created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theatre.” Wagner in C. Wagner,
Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, 154.
140 As directors and scenographers, Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner produced Richard Wagner’s operas
utilizing highly abstracted minimalist environments where stylized bodies, symbolic objects and
hieratic forms were isolated against dark, sculptural and often undefined backgrounds.
141 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator.
142 Wagner’s work reinforced Walter Pater’s mid-19th-century formulation that “all arts constantly aspire
to the condition of music.” Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” 35.
143 John Cody explores Wagner’s reference to music as a maternal sea and music as essentially feminine in
“Richard Wagner and the Ur Maternal Sea,” 556–77.
Chapter 2

Absolute space
Universal landscapes

As I write, it is not easy to refrain from singing – the moment is the most
lively, the most hallowed in all my life – for in a few minutes I shall have
given birth to that which has for a long while been preparing far back before
I was born, and all during my life, and now I am the one selected to this
honour and am amongst the creators.
– Edward Gordon Craig, notes to Scene

“The Beginning … The Birth …”1

This excerpt from notes written on 9 February 1907, by the designer Edward
Gordon Craig and placed in the back of his copy of Sebastiano Serlio’s
Architettura (1545),2 reads like the Virgin Mary’s post-annunciation song of
praise, heralding the arrival of a messiah created through immaculate conception.
However, in this case the writer nominating himself as simultaneously mother,
father and divine messenger, was announcing a progeny that was strange fruit
indeed. Craig’s “moment” could, in fact, be marked as the arrival of a new
performance space, further outlined by him as follows:

The place is without form – One vast square of empty space is before us – all
is still – no sound is heard – no movement is seen […] at the back […] there
seems to be no back – the floor seems to be an absence – the roof a void.
 Nothing is before us –
And from that nothing shall come life – Even as we watch, in the very
centre of that void a single atom seems to stir – to rise – it ascends like the
awakening of a dream – no light plays around it, no angles are to be seen, no
shadows are visible – only the inexorable ascension of a single form – near
it, yet further back, a second and third atom seems to have come into a half
existence […]
[…] and while they grow the first atom seems to be disappearing – a
fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh, and yet, as we look, we are only conscious of
four – Ah, birth of my love already you have multiplied four fold.

cease not until you will –

continue to increase.3

Within Craig’s notationally portentous text can be found the essential qualities of
an evental space, which the designer articulated as Scene: a spatial dramaturgy
based on the “art of movement” and presented in a series of etchings titled
“Motion.” As a preface to their publication the following year, he reworked these
notes into blank verse and published the text in the first volume of The Mask: A
Monthly Journal of the Art of the Theatre. Opening with “The Beginning … the
Birth,” he invokes a dark, silent and motionless ether out of which objects, bodies
and architectonic forms are materialized and suspended. And yet this compelling
and mystical space is also terrifying as it summons the void that had opened up
in fin de siècle Europe – referred to by Poggioli as “that difficult and unknown
territory called no-man’s land” – which avant-garde artists were attempting to
confront in poetry, painting and on the stage.4 Emerging from the late 19th-
century symbolist movement, Craig’s rhythmic and abstract scene developed into
a dynamic and tectonic no-man’s land, which found expression in the
scenographic landscapes proposed by him and Adolphe Appia, and was later
realized in Robert Wilson’s Theatre of Images and Peter Brook’s Empty Space
during the last quarter of the 20th century.
This chapter, taking Craig’s natal scene and its theatricalization of the Genesis
myth, returns to an originary space opened up by modernist doubt. Referred to as
absolute space, it continues Nietzsche’s themes of the birth of tragedy and the
death of God by establishing the stage as a space of possibility that negotiates
between the materiality of the choric zone and the immateriality of the void.
Absolute space exemplifies the symbolist desire for an “etherealization of the
theatre” through a secular temple set apart from daily life, which was prefigured
by Wagner and his desire for an “invisible theatre.”5 This was realized in part by
scenographies and architectures created by Isadora Duncan, Craig and Adolphe
Appia, which are discussed in the following sections. Before outlining this work,
the notion of absolute space is developed in relation to the French symbolists who
revealed (and revelled in) the theatrical void, previously marked by the
infinitesimal signification of perspective’s vanishing point, which was no longer
centred on a contained horizon within the unified spatiality of a proscenium
stage.6
Posited as a spatial paradigm that emerged from symbolist theatre, absolute
space is much more than a radically simplified stage. The term is taken from
Henri Lefebvre’s influential treatise The Production of Space, in which he defines
absolute space as embodying “an antagonism between full and empty.”7
Associated with the natural world and the ancient sanctuary, this archaic space is
not an object to be visually apprehended and can only be grasped “by means of a
thought process, capable of perceiving it as a totality.”8 As a realm that
“consecrates” and “concentrates,” it establishes an empty space to be filled up and
activated: “At once mythical and proxemic, it generates times, cycles. Considered
in itself – ‘absolutely’ – absolute space is located nowhere. It has no place
because it embodies all places and has a strictly symbolic existence.”9 Its
alignment with both the “temple” and “nature” encapsulated the symbolist desire
to sacralize the site of performance and the fascination with the ancient Greek
theatre, which Nietzsche and Richard Wagner expounded.
Considering absolute space as a highly activated “receptacle for, and stimulant
to, both social energies and natural forces,” Lefebvre also linked it to both the
womb and tomb.10 In the material world of the body, absolute space is the space
of the womb, that fleshy reproductive interior also associated with nothingness
that lies “between maids’ legs.”11 In the material world of architecture, absolute
space is the space of the tomb: “Absolute space is thus also and above all the
space of death, the space of death’s absolute power over the living.”12 This spatial
model therefore negotiates between the material site of embodied architecture as
sanctuary, mausoleum and reproductive receptacle and the immaterial site of
void out of which virtual worlds are conjured.
The void is no longer equated solely with God and transcendent being but also
with absence, castration and lack; with a density below ground as well as the
ether above, with the sacred and accursed place of subterranean mundus: “As the
locus of time, of births and tombs, vagina of the nurturing earth-as-mother, dark
corridor emerging from the depths, cavern opening to the light, estuary of hidden
forces and mouth of the realm of shadows, the mundus terrified as it glorified.”13
Here, in the maternal body, lies the monstrous in the abyss. Its distinct gravitas
and materiality stand in contrast to the immaterial spacelessness of the
symbolist’s floating world, haunting the cosmic void with the spectre of
mortality. The substantive fall into existence enacted by birth is critical to
Nietzsche and Craig, for whom the rhythmic body, both suspended and
grounded, was as essential as the void, both ethereal and abyssal.14 Light-footed
movement became the means of defying profound depths.
Through Craig’s metaphor of birthing, an abject space haunts absolute space as
its disturbing other, both enlivening and threatening the ephemerality of
theatrical space and the intelligibility of architectural space. It provides a
grounding element that reemphasizes the choric space between the stage and the
auditorium, where Nietzsche’s “ideal spectator” is located and immersed: “the
only beholder, the beholder of the visionary world of the scene.”15 Linked to
Plato’s chora, this interstitial zone also evokes the originary space where things
are born: a maternal space and a space of matter, which stands in opposition to
the technical black box theatre.
It would be easy to defer to the archetype of the black box theatre as the
definitive empty space of theatrical reproduction that Craig’s natal scene
describes. Like Wagner’s fan-shaped auditorium, which formed the archetypal
model for the 20th-century proscenium theatre, the black box came to represent
experimental theatre space in the second half of the 20th century. Described by
Marvin Carlson as “a featureless box filled with light and abstract figures,”16 the
definitive form of the black box theatre developed into a simple rectangular
volume, its walls and technology darkened but often still in view. It was easily
reproducible by virtue of black walls or drapes, rendering any space with suitable
dimensions a “black box.” George C. Izenour defines the form as an
“uncommitted space” that rejects architecture entirely in favour of an
experimental “of-the-moment” approach to space by the artist which could be
“variously circumscribed by a combination of kinetic systems including seating,
walls, lifts and lighting.”17 Built as an instrumentalized theatrical void that
suspends notions of time and place, the black box negates the object of
architecture itself; associated with the second-wave theatrical avant-garde, it
presents a symbolic location cut off from the concrete world. Complemented by
its visual arts counterpart – the white cube gallery – it has sought to construct
emptiness, silence and lack through an apparent dematerialization of form
facilitated by the simple absence of colour.
A close look at the work of Craig, his predecessors and his contemporaries
reveals how the theatrical void is tempered and informed not only by the virtual
entities it invokes, but also by the cohabitation of material bodies, objects and
physical environment. The empty space is not simply a stripping bare to make
way for innumerable fabricated worlds, but a means of both expressing and
facing the breach that had opened up toward the end of the 19th century. By
investigating how the European symbolists produced this on stage, informing the
Architectonic Scene and Rhythmic Spaces of Craig and Appia (established through
collaboration with Duncan and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze), a new architectural
monumentality is proposed which is far from the hermetically sealed black box.
Predicated on movement, openness and flexibility, architecture and scenography
are folded into universal landscapes, which presage the abstract spaces of
architecture’s Modern Movement and infuse them with performative qualities
that challenge their static rationality.

Absolute stage space

We are in Darkness… … . . all is still.
We hear no sound… … we feel no movement… … we see nothing.
– Edward Gordon Craig, “Motion”

With the ellipses, spaces and dashes of his blank verse Craig is as much aware of
the appearance of words as he is their disappearance. Like the originary scenic
space he is bringing into play, the text itself is charged with presences and
absences. In the Mask’s 1908 publication of “Motion,” the visual construction of
his typography plays against the whiteness of the page, reminiscent of the
technique developed by the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé who
consciously worked with a poetic spatiality that emerges from a blank page as
performative spacing.18 The rhythm and musicality of the writing sets both the
space of the page and the imagination in motion, evoking an inherent movement
in the text. Using evocation, allusion and suggestion, Craig’s writing aspires to
the ideal symbolist mise-en-scène advocated by Mallarmé: the depiction not of
the thing but its effect.19 The dialectic of absence/presence is a Mallarméan mode
of overcoming the materiality and deception of realistic drama through a more
abstract scene.
Like Mallarmé’s white page, the scenographer’s dark space is a physical place
of Nothingness and possibility, an empty stage filled with darkness rather than
light. Craig’s mystic realm appears to exceed the physical limitations of its
containing frame; in the darkness and stillness of the stage, a “mist, motionless
and colourless” envelops the viewer.20 This ether recalls the absolute space that
Isaac Newton outlined in his Principia (1687): an infinite and eternal volume of
universally immutable space that acts but cannot be acted upon.21 John Barrow,
in The Book of Nothing, characterizes this space as “an ocean of ethereal material
through which we moved but upon which we exert no discernable effect.”22
Craig’s cosmic maternal void negotiates between the theological tradition of
Judeo-Christianity’s creatio ex nihilo and the ontological nature of Aristotelian
materia prima to posit a space for theatrical birth. In the spirit of creatio ex
nihilo, it is a vast Nothingness out of which the world is created and, as materia
prima, it forms a pre-existing material in motion, characterized by Werner
Heisenberg as “an indeterminate substrate which contains the faculty to assume
some given form, and thus to enter into physical reality.”23 Embodying the
tension between the infinite space of the cosmic void and the finite reality of the
mutable stage, Craig’s scene is simultaneously empty and full. The life unfolding
from its conceptual void stirs the veiled spaces into being through mobile forms,
living gesture, fluctuating sounds and shifting light.
Craig’s thinking was rooted in theatrical symbolism that emerged principally
in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s, rejecting a naturalistic configuration of the
world in favour of creating more abstract environments out of darkness and
shadow.24 The pictorial stage gave way to an aesthetic of “atmospherics,” aided by
the invention of modern electric lighting, which exposed the trompe-l’oeil
backdrops as painted surfaces, undermining the illusion of perspectival
scenography. However, as Christopher Baugh points out, “the architecture of the
theatre and the stage house was planned and constructed for the management of
two-dimensional scenery.”25 While experimental and independent artists in
Europe formed avant-garde theatre companies, the theatre buildings themselves
proved inappropriate and resistant to the ambitions of the new artistic practices.
For the naturalists, this presented a technical issue as to how to create a unified
representational reality on stage. For the symbolists, it was a challenge to render
the stage itself a suspended site out of which symbolic worlds emerge. At first
this required a different approach to scenography. Eventually, through the
scenographic landscapes of Craig and Appia, it led to a rethinking of the
relationship between stage and auditorium as conjoined site of the secular-sacred
whereby the theatre becomes a more participatory space oscillating between
material container and immaterial force. This was most profoundly expressed in
Appia’s contribution to the community hall at Hellerau, which is discussed later
in the chapter.
The late 19th-century symbolists transformed the stage into a
nonrepresentational psychic landscape: the drama of the abyss that opens out to
infinity. As Daniel Gerould points out, they seemed intent on retelling and
revising the parable of Plato’s Cave, one of the earliest “landscapes of the mind,”26
where the internal darkness resonates with and is dependent on its counterpart,
the external expanse of light.

Symbolist “Theatre of the Mind”

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the
twentieth, the affirmation of the conventional worth of spectacle, the
problem of reunification of the spectacle and the audience, as well as that of
the overturning of artifice into real life became part of an already well-
established thematic, concerned with a profound reflection on the
Wagnerian tradition and on Nietzschean thought. The theatre became the
 means for the recovery of a collective catharsis – for the recovery of a
portion of unalienated space.
– Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth

[O]bjective reality is but pure semblance, a vain appearance which I am free

to vary, transform or annihilate as I wish.
– Jean Moreas, “Chronicle”

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy sought a rebirth of the arts and theatre by
returning to the origins of ancient tragedy, and it was in Wagner that he initially
placed his hopes for a new modern theatrical form. However, as previously
discussed, the reality of Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival, the building for which it was
built and the scenic images forced on its spectators, left Nietzsche disappointed
with the maestro’s magic tricks and histrionics. The totalizing effect of Wagner’s
“total work of art” did not create the participatory realm that Nietzsche hoped
for.27 Missing was “la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grace, the great logic; the
dance of the stars; the exuberant spirituality; the southern shivers of light; the
smooth sea – perfection.”28 The symbolists also embraced such qualities in their
rejection of the gravity of the stage in their efforts to create less literal poetic
dramas. Their legacy as the early theatrical avant-garde not only influenced
Craig and Appia, but also Max Reinhardt, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander
Tairov, Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti, André Breton and Antonin Artaud; all who
shared an interest in evoking hidden realities in metaphysics and mysticism.29
Initially inspired by Baudelaire, who celebrated the complexities of
metropolitan life, the symbolists ultimately rejected the modern city,
industrialization and the bourgeois lifestyle; they took refuge in idealized
landscapes and dreamscapes, reverie and drug-induced hallucinations.30 Whereas
the urban “dreamworlds” of 19th-century modernity re- enchanted the city with
new theatrical scenes for bodies on the move, the death of art’s aura and “the
absolute vacuity at the heart of everyday life” prompted the symbolists to look
for a new theatricality away from the metropolitan frenzy.31 This involved
darkening the stage and plunging the visible into an obscurity out of which
dreamscapes could emerge: “blindness becomes a badge of insight.”32 It created a
rarefied quasi-religious atmosphere that required an informed spectator willing
to enter a deep contemplative state and give up visual spectacle.33 French
audiences attending symbolist performances in the 1890s began to focus more on
the stage than each other, although they were aware of the role they played in the
event. Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859) had
provided artists and intellectuals with a manual for self-transformation into a
work of art, raising awareness of themselves as a theatrical public.34 Whether
dandy or literary bohemian, spectators were no longer just spectators: poets and
artists now occupied both sides of the proscenium. As Frantisek Deak maintains:
“The theatricalization of literary discourse which took place in the symbolist
theatre is enacted in the space between the stage and the auditorium, between
two groups of players.”35 This often led to skirmishes between devotees and those
uninitiated in symbolist drama. Unlike the passive pilgrims in Wagner’s
Festspielhaus, the symbolists returned the choric role to the audience as secular
congregation. Stage and audience were united within a theatrical gloom laden
with visions. The no-place of the void became a cosmic space of possibilities
where mental states were projected through synthetic decor, hieratic gestures and
an emphasis on sonority.
Spearheaded by poets and painters, symbolist theatre challenged the
constructed perspective of the theatre’s master painters and Renaissance tradition
of trompe l’oeil. In contrast with the spaces of naturalist theatre, which
emphasized the three-dimensional materiality of the actor, the symbolists
abstracted both environment and human form through marionette-like
movements and gestures in symbolic settings that were created by artists from
outside the theatre. Painters from the post-impressionist Nabis movement
participated in productions mounted by the two principal symbolist companies,
Théâtre de l’Art and Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. Working in the standardized Italianate
theatres, their settings focused on a bare stage with limited objects and a
monochromatic painted backdrop in front of which performers were reduced to
moving, hieroglyphic elements. This was first seen in Paul Fort’s Girl with the
Cut-Off Hands (1891), where Paul Sérusier provided a single gold-painted
backcloth decorated with abstracted figures, and in the defining avant-garde
theatrical event of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1896), where Jarry collaborated with
Edouard Vuillard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Sérusier to collectively paint a
backdrop of iconic images that simultaneously depicted all scenes in a play
fundamentally set in “Nowhere.” With such settings, perspectival depth was
radically eliminated and bodies abstracted in order to focus on
nonrepresentational dreamscapes of light and shadow. A “universal” type of place
and persona was introduced rather than specific location and character.
The symbolists preferred to work with impressions and atmosphere rather than
with mimetic representations, evoking limitless landscapes through the recitation
of rhythmic poetry in lieu of pictorial scenic depictions. Words conjured up
locations in the imagination of the spectator, supplanting realistic scenery with
Mallarmé’s “theatre of the mind.”36 Instead of specifying time and place, the
symbolists created an eternal fixed space by means of “a highly abstract,
trancelike theatre” on relatively unadorned stages.37 Abstracted light and
movement deemphasized literal representation in favour of a universality of
gesture and form to create an “impression of the infinite multiplicity of time and
place.”38 By 1900 Henri Bergson saw the symbolist’s external figuration of
internal life on stage as an expression of élan vital where art and drama could
contact that “vital impulse” by offering glimpses into the hidden part of man and
nature’s dark and turbulent passions.39
The darkness on the symbolist stage was not yet the saturated black with
which we are now familiar, but rather a resonant gloom afforded by a greater
technical control of lighting. As Nietzsche writes in Gay Science: Book V (1887),
all is not darkness “but rather like a new, scarcely describable kind of light” akin
to that of dawn, revealing a new space to be navigated: “an open sea.”40 Alain
Badiou refers to this as “the dim that can never be total darkness” where thought
still has access and can move.41 Cast adrift from Euclidean space and
chronological time, as well as the framed and grounded stage of the theatre, such
a dark and liquid state collaborates with the imagination of the individual
spectator. Alfred Jarry referred to this as a theatrical “exosmosis,” where the
multiplicity of scenic requirements is concentrated into a fluidity, which passes
through the setting that acts like a membrane.42 As a spatial liquescence it comes
to inform Craig’s space of “Motion,” in which “life moves like a sea” and the
mobility of “tender light” constructs form.43
For the symbolists following Mallarmé, the ideal theatre arises from a
reciprocal projection between the action on stage and its effect on the mind’s eye.
This was reinforced by Aurélien Lugné-Poe’s motto that “the word creates the
décor.” The stage provided an empty space to be filled and emptied, akin to the
space of the imagination. As an abyssal realm, the stage is a place for imaginary
voyages between the horror vacui of the void’s emptiness and the pleasure of
submitting to a space without coordinates or gravity. In confronting Nothingness,
one’s death is also confronted, but as Mallarmé contends, this confrontation of
the death of the self leads to the discovery of a profound beauty.44 The symbolist
playwright Maeterlinck reinforced this belief that the theatre provided the locus
to confront the spectator with the sublime terror of death through the void of the
unknown.
In the early 1890s, terror was being played out on the streets of Paris, through
sporadic anarchist bombings, as the symbolists developed their productions on
stage, which were concurrently referred to by the press as attentats ([bomb]
attacks). Erin Williams Hyman discusses this link between urban and theatrical
terrorism in her essay on this period: “Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist
Spectacle.”45 The new avant-garde had withdrawn from the public realm,
utilizing the theatre to enact its own anarchic attacks on the status quo. Hyman
connects the provocative performances of Maeterlinck and Jarry who employed
“terror” as dramatic effect to Antonin Artaud’s destructive and purifying theatre
of cruelty.46 The proscenium arch was no longer a plane reflecting social values,
but a frame opening into an abyss, which returned the gaze.
Wagner had already established the potent abyssal quality of the orchestra pit
as a spatial device that placed a radical distance between the material reality of
the auditorium and the immaterial ideality of the stage. The European symbolists,
riding in his slipstream as the 19th century moved to a close, took up the mystical
spatiality of Wagner’s “invisible orchestra.”47 As “an empty space,” the Wagnerian
pit was intended to create a “floating atmosphere of distance,” removing the scene
to “the unapproachable world of dreams.”48 The ground of the staged world rose
from this “mystic abyss” that also refers to an underworld, theatrically of
mythical characters and mechanically of musicians and technicians. It is the
underworld cave of the Nibelung and the engine room for machinery of effect
from which sound emanated, deemphasizing the individual musicians and
melding them into a single fluid musical entity: “spectral music sounding […] like
vapours rising from the primeval womb of Gaia.”49
The notion of a theatrical void and its identification with birth, uterus and
death was initiated by Wagner, reinforced by Craig and inspired by Nietzsche
who wrote: “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”50
In Looking into the Abyss, Arnold Aronson cites the returning gaze of Nietzsche’s
void, maintaining that in facing the stage we confront a great space and the
possibility of limitless worlds of mystery and terror. Aronson associates this with
the actual process of birth, when we emerge from the safety of uterine enclosure
out into an unknown expanse.51 Here, as in Craig’s vision, Aronson posits the
process of birth as a dynamic movement from one state to another, a terror-filled
becoming. This passage is akin to Julia Kristeva’s description of birth as a deathly
“fall” into life, which she aligns to “true theatre.”52 The absolute cannot escape the
abject, where the immaterial sublimity of the void is connected to the materiality
of the womb.
Writing between two brutal World Wars, Walter Benjamin, in his exposition
on Brecht’s Epic Theatre, referred to Wagner’s pit, claiming that the stage “no
longer rises from an immeasurable depth; it has become a public platform.”53

The abyss that separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the
living, the abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama, whose
resonance heightens the intoxication of opera, this abyss which, of all the
elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces of its sacral origins, has
lost its function.54

The abyssal, as Benjamin explained, is that space associated with God and death,
an interstitiality of the sacral sublime, which literally and metaphorically falls
between. It elicits vertigo and fear of disappearance. In transferring this mystic
abyss from orchestra pit to stage, the symbolists aimed more directly to confront
the void created by a loss of faith in Christianity voiced by Nietzsche and his
messianic figure of Zarathustra. Closing the gulf between ideality and reality,
they sought to bridge performers and audience. Whereas Brecht wished to
replace ideality with reality, the symbolists moved to immerse the real in the
ideal.
The sacralized stages of the 19th-century symbolists attempted to recuperate
the unrepresentable absolute through a negation of traditional theatrical
representation. Resisting realism and naturalism, they tended to suspend
themselves in a vertiginous no-man’s land, where the senses were deliberately
enveloped and disordered within the psychic landscape that evoked a dramatic
abyss. Yet the void that threatened to swallow and annihilate the audience was
held in check by the monumentality of the proscenium arch, which remained a
defining frame for action to the end of the 19th century and was only questioned
in the 20th century by those, such as Craig and Appia, following in the
symbolists’ footsteps. This picture frame, which continued to evoke its virtual
counterpart, the framed mirror pointed to “the instability of the scenographic
object” and enacted reciprocity between ideality and reality.55 Yet, as Jarry –
whose production of Ubu Roi catapulted 19th-century symbolism into 20th-
century avant-gardism – claims, this mirror was necessarily an “exaggerating”
one.56 Through abstraction of body, movement and space, the audience could
meditate upon performance and therefore change. This gestural force was
realized in the following decade through the rhythmic body, both grounded and
transcendent.

Dancing architectures
I would believe only in a God who could Dance.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

How is it that we know she is speaking her own language? We know it, for
we see her head, her hands, gently active, as are her feet, her whole person.
And if she is speaking, what is it she is saying? No one would ever be able to
report truly, yet no one present had a moment’s doubt. Only this can we say
– that she was telling to the air the very things we long to hear; and now we
heard them, and this sent us all into an unusual state of joy, and I sat still
and speechless.
– Edward Gordon Craig, “Memories of Isadora Duncan”

Nietzsche pitted the levity and joy of dance against the unfathomable depths of
life’s ever-present abyss.57 He associated dance with Dionysus: its defiance of
gravity through which “all things fall” constituted an overcoming.58 Writing on
Nietzsche’s “dancing-mad feet,” Badiou sees dance as an antidote to the heaviness
and “histrionics” of theatre, creating an atemporal space of suspension out of
which time emerges in the rhythmic appearances and movements of forms.59 The
“lightfooted” dancing body, freed from the burden of character, challenges the
banality of mimetic representation by transforming the performer into an
expressive hieroglyphic form. Such an abstracted body, capable of “symbolic
gesture” sought by the symbolists, was fashioned by Craig into the Über-
marionette: an artificial performer designed to negate the material and imitative
nature of the actor.60 This Über-marionette is akin to the mechanical creatures
fashioned by Daedelus, the original, mythical architect of ancient Greece.61
For Craig, who declared, “Art arrives only by design,” live performers could
never match the artificiality of marionettes.62 Artificiality was a virtue: not only
could the artist control the “faithful medium of the puppet” with exacting
precision, but could also make it “speak” a universal “language” of gestures and
movements and allow the audience’s imagination to complete the abstract images
presented on stage.63 Craig, who was influenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s theories
on the marionette as a figure more godlike than the human performer, proposed a
god-doll that “will not compete with life – rather will it go beyond it. Its ideal
will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in trance – it will aim to
clothe itself with a deathlike beauty while exhaling a living spirit.”64 This
performer, overcoming the base and emoting human actor, could take on the
grace afforded through a defiance of gravity.65
That said, Craig found his inspiration in a live performer: the revolutionary
American dancer, Isadora Duncan, whom he met in 1905, and with whom he was
romantically and creatively involved for many years. In contrast with the
marionette, whose freedom from the burden of gravity was so highly valued,
Duncan’s body was grounded: her movements were fluid, natural and rhythmic,
while also light and flexible (Figure 2.1). Exemplary of what Hillel Schwartz calls
“the new kinaesthetic,” Duncan “demanded sincerity, the loving accommodation
of the force of gravity, fluid movement flowing out of the body centre, freedom
of invention and natural transitions through many fully expressive positions.”66
Duncan, an avid reader of Nietzsche, insisted that “dancing is the Dionysian
ecstasy which carries away all,” and often hosted bacchanals and soirées that
combined food, drink and spontaneous performances.67 She established a
universal landscape for her stage performances that became a signature
environment for her studio, stage and touring performances.
With the help of Craig, Duncan created an austere and rarefied space by
surrounding herself in tall blue drapes that hung the full height of the stage. This
was an adaptation of her smaller blue-grey curtains that were previously strung
between wooden Greek columns, which her brother Raymond had designed for
her and which the dancer maintained she had invented at the age of 5 years. In
her memoirs Duncan writes of her first meeting with Craig where he rhetorically
claimed she had stolen his ideas stating: “They are my décors and my ideas! But
you are the being I imagined them in. You are the living realization of all my
dreams.”68 Isadora’s curtains created a signature environment that deliberately
eluded the familiarity of stage scenery and, when lit, evoked a limitless spatiality
likened to atmospheric skies and seas.69 They were not only utilized on stage but
in her various studios to create an oceanic space that could be cited as symbolist
in its link to death and drowning. The dancer, who attempted to drown herself
before the birth of her first child, lost both her children to drowning in 1913.
Mourning them, and often veiling her own body after the tragedy, Isadora
swathed the windows in the salon bleu of her 18th-century Paris mansion,
Bellevue (that she renamed The Dionysian), which Paris Singer had purchased to
help her get over her grief. As a temple of dance dedicated to the rebirth of art,
Duncan’s studio became a world adrift. She wrote to Craig, the father of one of
her children, that they were “freed from this abominable bad dream of matter.”70
Duncan’s curtains created a distinct transportable space that shut out the
particularities of the places she occupied in her travels. She referred to this mobile
textile space as her “Ark”: “a great space silent and high, separated from the
world.”71 As an atmospheric realm of suspension, it countered the dancer’s
grounded body, while complementing her abstract movements, inspired by the
natural rhythm of waves and wind.72
Figure 2.1 Isadora Duncan dancing in the Acropolis’s Theatre of Dionysus, Athens, taken by Raymond
Duncan (1903)

Source: Photo courtesy of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation Archive, New York, NY

Duncan’s movement – rhythmic, symbolic and fluid – offered Craig a living

alternative to his Über-marionette, which has been linked to Nietzsche’s
Übermensch or “superman,” the figure of overcoming who succumbs to nihilism
in order to transcend it. Ann Daly maintains that Duncan was aware of
Zarathustra and sought to embody the corporeal wisdom and will demanded by
the philosopher-dancer, claiming that dance constructs “[t]he highest intelligence
in the freest body,” thereby resisting death and affirming life.73 Duncan’s “telling
to the air” offered the avant-garde a new language and alternative to the word.74
 Like his contemporary Appia, who worked with Dalcroze, the inventor of a
system of expressive gymnastics, Craig turned to new improvisational methods
for movement and tried to expand them into architectonic form. He was inspired
by two diagrams in Serlio’s Architettura that extruded orthogonal forms from a
grid in two-point perspective (Figure 2.2). The three-dimensional spatial grid
could provide a matrix for the appearance and disappearance of endless
permutations of monochromatic forms. However it was the dancer’s rhythmic
movements that would enliven the otherwise mechanical and static forms of a
regimented architecture to create a space that negotiated between gravity and
flight, architecture and flesh, the grid and fluctuating form. The grid of Serlio’s
perspectival scene formed the rational basis for Craig’s Scene created from
tectonic shapes that could be lowered and raised to varying levels. As a flexible
system that was able to be installed and reproduced on any stage, its moving
forms, bodies and light depended on the conductor, whose manipulation of the
technology from a point of control within the auditorium was a mode of
choreography: in Craig’s words, “movement of the entire stage can be so
governed by time as to produce rhythm.”75

Figure 2.2 Diagram from Sebastiano Serlio’s Architettura (1545), with annotation by Edward Gordon Craig
(1907). Courtesy of the Edward Gordon Craig estate

As metteur-en-scène, Craig wished to orchestrate architecture, scenery, body

and light within an expressive and mobile system. The stage itself would act as
Über-marionette translating “volcanic improvisation” directly into stage action,
aided by the Asphaleia System, a mechanized set of stage platforms adapted for
his “Art of Revelation.”76 From this combination of technology, architecture and
movement, Craig developed Screens, a patented system of mobile surfaces that
was capable of creating a Thousand Scenes in One Scene through “the art of
movement.” His scenic choreography set space in constant motion, challenging
the authority of static perspectival scenery. However, the movement should be
extremely subtle. Inspired by Duncan, who was capable of creating vibratile
stillness, scenographic form and atmosphere could be imperceptibly manipulated
via such scenic orchestration.77 The scenographic performativity of Craig’s Scene
(Figure 2.3), which contributes to the dramatic action through its shifting
architectonics, constructs and deconstructs an “other” world on stage. Elements
“fold” and “unfold” from the darkness at varying rates, playing out what Badiou
calls immanence: “the time before the time that will come to be.”78

Duncan’s temple
Craig had a chance to formulate his ideal theatre in 1912, when Singer invited
him to be the design consultant on Duncan’s Théâtre du Beau in Paris, which was
to open in 1914. According to the Daily Mail, the structure, to “be modelled on
the lines of ancient playhouses will be ideal from the point of view of seating
accommodation, and good seats at popular prices will feature.”79 This was
followed two weeks later with the statement that “no effort will be spared to
make the theatre a real temple of art.”80 Singer and Duncan included two cursory
sketches in notes to Craig (who eventually turned down the project), which
outline a fan-shaped auditorium and stage that resembled Wagner’s
Festspielhaus;81 Duncan, who had performed there in 1904 at the invitation of
Wagner’s widow Cosima, referred to it as “the temple on the hill […] with its
waves and reverberations of magic.”82 Upon leaving Bayreuth and its staged
legends, she wrote, “all were hereafter to obliterate forever the clear vision of
Doric columns and the reasoning wisdom of Socrates;” echoing Nietzsche’s
resistance to the Apollonian aesthetic in The Birth of Tragedy.83 Despite her view
of dance as a form of “Dionysian ecstasy,” Duncan saw only the radical
modernity of Wagner’s theatre, which was inspired by the ancient amphitheatre,
overlooking its Apollonian formality or absence of audience participation.84

Figure 2.3 Etching from Edward Gordon Craig’s Scene series (1908)

Source: Courtesy of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate

Wagner, through his Festspielhaus, had raised the theatre to the status of
temple for the practice of an aesthetic religion. In removing the venue from the
politics and pressure of the city, he had made it a site of pilgrimage. This notion
of theatre as a place of worship is in keeping with the original avant-garde idea
that the theatre should replace the failing church as the space of transcendental
communal experience (just as Saint-Simon had envisaged half a century earlier,
but without the French Socialist’s political agenda). By the final decades of the
19th century, God himself had been ousted from the church, and these buildings
became, in Nietzsche’s words, his “tombs and sepulchres.”85 In search of a
desacralized (neo)monumental space of public commune, the symbolists and
those who followed them turned to the theatre as a site of aesthetic worship, as
can be seen in Craig’s Basilica, Appia’s and Gropius’s Cathedrals, Artaud’s
Temple-Barn and Brook’s much later Holy Theatre. As Deak points out, “Seeing
contemporary alienation, revolt and nihilism in Gnostic, cosmic terms,”86 many
symbolists explored cults and sects and adopted rituals and initiation rites as a
way to “transform their negative social situation into a metaphysical position”
and satisfy the spiritual needs of the community.87
In 1903, two years before she met Craig, Duncan had the opportunity to build
her own hilltop sanctuary when her family made a pilgrimage to Greece, a
country whose ancient arts held symbolic value for their emerging dance
ideology. Dancing ecstatically in the Parthenon’s Temple of Dionysus they
resolved to “remain in Athens eternally and there build a temple that should be
characteristic of us.”88 Agreeing to wear only the tunics and sandals of the
ancient Greeks, the “Clan Duncan” was determined to stay in Athens singing,
dancing and teaching the locals their lost ancient arts. As Americans in self-
imposed exile, oblivious to their naive cultural appropriation, they wished to
create a utopic elsewhere, drawing on mythology and history, without
recognising the political, social and economic realities of the place it occupied.
They found a site in the countryside outside the city, on the hill of ‘Kopanos’ at
the same level as the Parthenon and proceeded to design and construct their
building without the help of architects or builders.89 Raymond Duncan led the
project, modelling the plan on the Palace of Agamemnon at Mycenae, albeit
radically scaled-down and distinctly rustic in character. Modest in scale and
described by Isadora as a simple square space with thick walls constructed from
red stones,90 it held no amphitheatre, choros or skene but referred more to a
temple sanctuary.
As with Wagner’s building, the laying of the foundation stone was celebrated
with a ceremony, in which the Duncans danced the outline of its borders, calling
on a priest to perform a ritual and sacrifice a fowl. While waiting for the building
to be completed, the family, deliberately keeping themselves apart from the
locals, secured a permit to dance in the Acropolis’s Theatre of Dionysus on
moonlit evenings. However after a year of attempting to live in their suspended
ancient time, the family found themselves broke and struggling with a painfully
slow building process and a site that had no access to water. Duncan
acknowledged the end of her “beautiful illusion,” admitting “we were not nor ever
could be anything other than moderns.”91 She left Greece to resume her
peripatetic career, sending money to Raymond who continued slowly to build his
clumsy stone structure, living in the one enclosed room with his wife and child
(Figure 2.4).
Duncan returned to Athens in 1920 in an effort to transform the unfinished
structure back into a temple to her art. However, a regime change in Greece and
loss of government patronage thwarted her plan; she left the crude edifice, which
remained a ruin until 1980, when, having been occupied as a bar and makeshift
theatre, the local municipality renovated it into the Isadora and Raymond
Duncan Dance Research Centre. Now surrounded by apartment buildings in the
suburb of Byron, the building no longer affords a view of the Parthenon.
Although by no means an architectural masterpiece, this building represents an
early attempt to build a space for modern dance specific to its ancient origins and
is today a working centre for contemporary dance in the Duncans’ name.

Figure 2.4 The unfinished ‘temple’ of Kopanos, Athens, 1903. Duncan Collection.
 Perpetually in transit across Europe and the Atlantic, Duncan was in a
continuous state of motion. Like Craig and Appia, she collaborated across
languages and cultures in a state of voluntary exile. The nature of Duncan’s and
Craig’s touring projects and commissioned works demanded that they move
fluidly from country to country. Each a “transnational dominant,”92 they worked
across national borders; no longer belonging to the country of their origin, in
search of more original origins through movement. At odds with society, they
were like Mallarmé’s solitary artist “who isolates himself to create his own
tomb.”93 Appia, who was extremely shy and hermetic, moved into a self-imposed
exile, eventually cloistering himself away to conduct his work in other countries
by written correspondence from Switzerland. Self-displaced, these artists of the
theatre inhabited a shifting stage of uneven visibility. As Peggy Phelan writes,
moving from one terrain to another creates a deferred moment where “neither
here nor there. […] it is hard to see, and harder still to be seen.”94 In the fold of
this nomadic movement from place to place, the artist becomes a “kind of blur, a
figure suspended in the drama of non-arrival.”95 This universality of existence
and resistance to a prescribed location is reflected in the dramatic environments
sought by these artists: spaces where they are temporarily held in a state of
suspension. Recalling Craig’s production of Dido and Aeneas, at the turn of the
new century, W. B. Yeats remarked that the designer had “created an ideal
country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse or in music, or the
expression of the whole of life in a dance.”96
Such a notion of a placeless, timeless site, which evades location and exceeds
borders, resists the fixity and site-specific nature of architecture itself. Like
Daedalus, the original mythic architect, these protagonists of a new space were
rootless wanderers building in exile, proposing an architecture as fugitive as their
own existence. The performance landscapes built on stage by Appia and Craig
were ideal states – universal to place and time and presaging the utopias of
architecture’s modernist movement – yet as sacred-secular spaces, they were also
cast adrift within the imagination of those occupying the performances for a
limited time. Like Sir Thomas More’s original utopia, these non-existent island
spaces re-presented an ideal: “Considered in itself – absolutely – absolute space is
located nowhere. It has no place because it embodies all places, and has a strictly
symbolic existence.”97
Spatial rhythm and universal landscapes
[W]e must recall the principles of a new art: that it was to be a single
assembly of mobile forms and volumes; not one or more stage settings but a
single scene, a place, capable of infinite variation; not a succession of stage
pictures, but the “movement of things” in the abstract.
– Denis Bablet, Edward Gordon Craig

Rhythms in all their multiplicity interpenetrate one another. In the body and
around it, as on the surface of a body of water, or within the mass of a
liquid, rhythms are forever crossing and recrossing, superimposing
themselves upon each other, always bound to space.
– Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Rhythm was central to the early European symbolist movement. For Duncan,
rhythm provided a controlling matrix of time, space, dynamics and gesture.98 For
Craig, its “supreme force” gave life to inanimate forms.99 For Appia, influenced
by the eurhythmic gymnastics of Dalcroze, it transformed space into a living
entity. In “Symbolism – a Manifesto” (1886), Jean Moréas defines rhythm as an
enlivening force capable of ordering and disordering.100 Responding to the
conservative backlash against this manifesto, Gustave Kahn reiterated the power
of rhythm to mobilize language, allowing “the multiplicity of intertwining
rhythms [to] harmonize with the measure of the Idea,” thereby escaping “the
banality of transmitted moulds.”101 If we translate this into spatial, rather than
literary terms, how can rhythm enact a force on architecture? How can it breach
not only the transmitted cast of the stage but also of the auditorium? How can it
rupture the building’s form through a relentless and shifting tempo?
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre proposes “rhythm analysis” as a
means of addressing the “concrete reality of rhythms” found in the continual life-
force of pulsing bodies: “Such a discipline’s field of application par excellence, its
preferred sphere of experiment, would be the sphere of music and dance, the
sphere of ‘rhythmic cells’ and their effects.”102 While resisting analytic thought,
these rhythmic repetitions and redundancies translate into intensity, tension and
action: they form an interactive relationship between performer and spectator,
integrating them into “a ritually linked gestural chain.”103 For Lefebvre this
“lived” spatiotemporal experience brings an animated space into being that
extends the realm of embodied occupation and can even become invested in built
environments: “Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms
that they entertain (gaits, ritual gestures, processions, parades etc.) and their
musical resonance.”104 However this reciprocity with the non-visible extends
beyond acoustic rhythms into visual and haptic tempos of the barometric or
calendrical – alterations in temperature, light, humidity, density, season, etc. –
that contribute to a shifting spatiality even if the built form itself does not move
significantly. Light moving across a form changes its colour and density, heating
and cooling it literally and visually. The slow performance of the built
environment itself encapsulates Craig’s demand for action to “move hugely,
slowly and grandly.”105
Craig used various techniques to express the inherent rhythms and musicality
of performance as an uninterrupted flow. The seemingly infinite permutations of
his mobile Screens gave way to the Architectonic Scene, which was more fixed in
form with shifts of location and atmosphere defined by discretely moving
constructed elements, large iconic props, grouping of performers and coloured
lighting. His presentational Architectonic Scene, which was to replace the
representational Pictorial Scene, rendered scenography a “genuine thing. A work
of architecture. Unalterable except for trifling pieces here and there – except for
the everlasting change that passed from morn till morn across its face as sun and
moon passed.”106
In the 1923 publication of his early drawings for Scene, Craig described how he
developed his theatrical environments, emphasizing “place” rather than “scene”
through the “simplified stage.”107 This allowed him to establish a single
performance environment that evokes a multiplicity of places from slum to
palace, from heaven to hell, through the careful orchestration of well-chosen
objects, lighting and the movement of performers. Craig searched for essential
form by identifying common and persisting features in 250 models of historic and
international architecture: “I found that the only things in every inhabitation of
man were the flat floor – flat walls – flat roof […] I wished to reduce scene to its
essentials and I found it reduced itself […] I then added mobility to it.”108 He also
distilled his elemental “scenes” from four theatrical archetypes: “first scene,” the
originary scene of the architectural skene in ancient theatre; “second scene,” the
European church, which unites all worshippers as participants; “third scene,” the
ubiquitous wall found in street, cellar, civic or aristocratic building; and “fourth
scene,” the simple improvised shelter for public performance, which leads to the
early Renaissance theatres patronized by academies and aristocracy. These four
architectural scenes coalesce in the “fifth scene” of his scenography as mobile
three-dimensional units, each “an architectonic construction with a life of its
own” and adapted to the movement of performer and drama.109 Conforming to
“the spirit of incessant change,” Craig’s Scene combines the apparently timeless
and stable elements of architecture with the flux of modernity and the
requirements of theatrical production.110 An explication of his “simplified stage”
reveals that neither the process, nor the product, is simple.
Craig’s rigorous process of analysis and rejection eventually leads beyond the
mutable architectonics of his scenographic Screens (patented in 1910) to the more
architectural fixity of his Architectonic Scene in design proposals for The St.
Matthew Passion, which occupied him for many years and was never realized in
built form. He originally intended his Screens to be inserted into a church as a
permanent scenic system but soon realized that this design could be transformed
into the permanent architecture of an epic theatre especially erected for annual
festival performances of the oratorio, which he would personally orchestrate.
Moving from infinite permutations of simplified forms, Craig advocated a single
structural setting capable of presenting many places, just as the classical skene
provided a universal setting in ancient Greek theatre.
Based on the small Italian Romanesque church in Giornico, which Craig
sketched in 1910, the design for The St. Matthew Passion developed into a
complex multilevel structure of stairways, bridges, platforms and receding arches,
beyond which lay a limitless field of light. His design for the Passion had moved
from the horizontal field of pictorial representation in an early 1901 proposal to
the 1914 scheme for a permanent purpose-built setting with over six acting levels
presented in a large wooden scale model (Figures 2.5a and 2.5b). Here, as Craig’s
festival site, was the equivalent of Wagner’s Festspielhaus, except the designer
had integrated stage and auditorium into a unified architectural setting. While
there is little evidence of what Craig may have proposed for the audience zone, a
sectional image shows a dark cavernous space within which spectators, as the
“faithful,” stand on a raked floor presided over by Craig — as auteur, impresario
and director — conducting from a pivotal platform.111
The permanent setting strengthened Craig’s fundamental rejection of the
pictorial scene and development of the architectonic scene into what became the
architectural scene; an enduring fixed structural edifice upon which performers,
light and objects moved to signal shifts in dramatic location. This was consistent
with Craig’s desire to recover architecture as the primary source of the theatrical
setting. In the second preface of Towards a New Theatre, he wrote: “Once upon a
time, stage scenery was architecture. A little later it became imitation
architecture; still later it became imitation artificial architecture.”112 For Craig,
such etiolations from the material reality of a sacralized architecture (seen
primarily in church or ancient amphitheatre) to the fakeries of painted
perspectival scenery represent a spatial and performative weakening of theatre
space from “architectural” to “pictorial.”113 His St. Matthew Passion established a
universal landscape for the oratorio in which the designer had distilled the
multiple spatialities of the work into a complex performative environment that
worked with an audience’s imagination to complete the places it evoked.

Figure 2.5a Edward Gordon Craig’s model for The St. Matthew Passion (1913–1914)

Source: Courtesy of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate

Figure 2.5b Section through 1913 model of Edward Gordon Craig’s proposed staging of Bach’s St Matthew
Passion. Drawing by Edward Carrick

Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Adolphe Appia
The year Craig constructed the scale model for the Passion was the year he first
met Appia, his Swiss counterpart, whose ideas were developing independently
yet in parallel. Both designers – acknowledged cofounders of scenographic
modernism – were influential in the dramatic and architectural development of
20th-century theatre, although the impact of their radical thinking took time to
take effect. They both maintained that the theatrical environment was a “living
thing” and therefore a dynamic and performative entity that had to be treated
with finesse, carefully coaxing it into action as one would a performer. Both saw
the theatre as an animated laboratory for the embodied expression of their ideas,
researched in real space and real time in order to transcend spatiotemporal
reality. For Appia and Craig, objects, light and scenic form work actively in
conjunction with the live actors.114 The dynamic quality of their monochromatic
architectural environments could only be coloured and brought into life through
an interaction of elements, enlivened by the mobile performer and light. While
Appia tended to emphasize a horizontal layering of space, Craig bestowed a more
vertical force on his scenes. Craig integrated figures of performers into his
drawings and models as elements of equal value to form, object and light,
whereas Appia’s images presented empty spaces that seemed to lie in wait, “in
anticipation,” of performers and light. Their fundamental difference was that
Craig saw the performer as one element among many, to be made artificial
through the production, while Appia saw the live performer, “the measure of all
things,” as the vital intermediary between music and setting through which both
come alive.115
Long before he met Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Appia considered “musical
gymnastics” as a force defining the mise-en-scène: an admirer of Wagner’s
atmospheric works, Appia tried to replace the Romantic decoration of Bayreuth
with a more musically performative setting.116 He was motivated by Wagner’s
integration of music with gesture, which echoed Arthur Schopenhauer’s belief
that music expresses “the inner essence of the phenomenon” and Friedrich
Schiller’s idea that music is capable of becoming form.117 On seeing Dalcroze’s
lecture-demonstration of Rhythmic Gymnastics in 1906, Appia was moved by the
powerful effect of an embodied reciprocity: “I was aware of a new force entirely
unknown to me! I was no longer in the audience; I was on the stage with the
performers.”118 This experience informed Appia’s faith in the spatial extension of
performance and its potential to activate a seemingly passive public. Focusing on
the communal experience of performance as a “living art,” he emphasized the
presentational nature of stage action (here and now in a shared space) as opposed
to its representational focus (there and then in a discrete setting). The audience in
taking place is also taking part.
Craig and Appia met their movement muses around the same time (1905 and
1906, respectively), developing their abstract universal landscapes in tandem.
Dalcroze’s movement system,119 which translated musical composition into
spatial expression, answered Appia’s need to reconcile musical time, bodily
movement and three-dimensional space, leading to his Rhythmic Spaces: the
twenty design proposals he sent to Dalcroze in 1909 (Figures 2.6a and 2.6b). Like
Craig’s Architectonic Scene these “practical settings” were formed from simplified
three-dimensional elements such as walls, stairs and plateaus, which Appia called
“practicables.” As a kit of parts, the objects could be moved around to create
iconic spaces or “terrains”: not “merely the part of the stage walked upon by the
actor but rather everything composing the setting that relates to the physical
form of the performer and his actions.”120 Although practical, Appia’s Rhythmic
Spaces were identified by poetic names such as “Morning Light,” “The Cataracts
of Dawn,” and “Evening Round” because he envisaged a fusion of built setting
and atmospheric light. Appia had abstracted natural landscapes into architectonic
forms and softened them by diffuse, projected and moving light: “We should no
longer try to give the illusion of a forest, but instead the illusion of a man in the
atmosphere of a forest.”121

Figure 2.6 Adolphe Appia’s Rhythmic Spaces (1909). Courtesy of Richard C. Beacham

In order for the scene to “create a living atmosphere on stage,” Appia, like
Craig, distilled his environments to a “mere indication” by coaxing an archetypal
exterior form from the drama’s inner worlds and mediating it with the material
reality of the performer and the immaterial play of light.122 Utilizing the floor as
the most real thing on the stage other than the performer, he layered it into
multiple levels and undulations that could represent a range of varying locales
evoked through light and action. These architectonic sites were to engage with,
challenge and resist the soft fleshy forms of moving bodies, and “by opposition,
take on a kind of borrowed life.”123 “Diffused” and “formative” light provided
general atmospheres and sculpted forms, moving with the rhythms of the
performance, creating emphasis and counterpoint, and bestowing on space a
liquid action. Such rhythmic atmospherics suggests a three-dimensional spatial
density that, no longer containable by the frame, exceeds the frame.
Combining setting and choreography, Appia and Dalcroze utilized bodily
movement as a mobile spatial scenography. Their distillation of the scene to its
essential architectonic forms created a universal performance landscape. Rather
than scenery, which had hitherto been defined by the frame (be it a picture frame
or the proscenium arch), the performance landscape is like Jarry’s “Nowhere,”
combining a range of spaces into one ambiguous realm. However, whereas Jarry
established the universality of place specific to the varying locales of Ubu
through symbols on a painted backdrop, Craig and Appia refine and combine
them into an austere environment that resists clear identification with any one
site. This allows the location to shift from interior to exterior, from nature to built
form, from concrete to imaginary. Refusing containment by the frame, their
rhythmic scenes extend spatially, in keeping with Gertrude Stein’s 1935 allusion
to a play as a landscape: simultaneously in movement and stasis, a relationship
among things where no one element is the central focus.124 Craig and Appia
sought a symbiosis between performance elements (light, sound, set, body, object)
in which they fluctuate in their powers but unite in their effect. Their
performance landscapes, which refuted the scenic background in favour of a set
of environmental conditions, became dynamic players that supported, provoked
and, at times, resisted the performer. Abstract, architectural, elemental and
atmospheric, these architectonic fields evoked a multitude of places with an
active force that challenged the absolute centrality of the live performer.
Appia, who was impressed by Wagner’s ability to build a theatre and create a
festival for the production of his oeuvre, eventually built a space for his own
theoretical practice. However, for Appia, the radicality of Wagner’s viewing
machine did not match what it was built to view, an opinion shared by George
Bernard Shaw, who attended the first Bayreuth festival in 1886, maintaining: “the
utmost perfection of the pictorial stage” lacked “action, motion and life.”125
Although Wagner had seen the capabilities of landscape painting to “become the
very soul of Architecture,” providing a warm, living and authentic setting in the
dramatic “art work of the future,”126 he deferred to pictorial representations for
his own productions. It was Appia who abstracted the landscape to distil its
essential forms into a spatiovisual realm, which could alter compositionally with
the music. The atmospheric structure of Wagner’s music suggested a rhythmic
and undefined spatiality in motion like weather, waves and mystic mists. Appia’s
universal landscapes evoke rather than imitate: as spaces adrift, they belong to no
particular time or place.
The performance landscape is simultaneously fixed and mutable, capable of a
range of uses and adaptations. Its universal quality is the result of a reductive
process that involves, for Appia, a “renunciation” and “sacrifice” in order to evoke
“the inner essence of the phenomenon” through a “simplification of nature, in
favour of the intensification of expression.”127 Like Craig, Appia went through a
process of reduction and concentration: “simplification” through abstraction
intensified empty space, which was at one and the same time replete. In his essay
“What is Abstract?” John Rajchman considers abstraction as anything but a
stripping away; questioning the artist’s melancholic view of the blank canvas,
empty page, or bare stage as a process of negation. For Rajchman, abstraction is
an intensification that utilizes the state of things prior to forms (blank, empty,
bare) in order to open the medium out from itself, so it becomes “beside itself,”
entailing “a certain blindness that enables a whole art of seeing.”128 Integrating
the fullness of materia prima and the emptiness of ex nihilo reveals a potentiality
instead of a lack. This Deleuzian formulation of abstraction constitutes a filling
up rather than an emptying out: the artist sees not a blank canvas, empty page, or
bare stage but unlimited and ceaseless intensities; an incongruous world opening
up to actualized virtualities.
Appia’s and Craig’s universal landscapes negotiate between the two Deleuzian
abstractions cited by Rajchman: “immanent condition” (possible worlds in our
world) and “transcendental form” (potential worlds beyond our world).129 Their
simultaneous familiarity and estrangement from reality allow an interconnection
of meanings for a singular yet non-totalized environment, establishing what
Rajchman calls “lighter Nietzschean pathways out of Wagnerian totality.”130
Abstraction is consequently not a simplification but a condensation, at the core of
which resides an excess of meaning and therefore a spatial multiplicity: “the
attempt to show – in thought as in art, in sensation as in concept – the odd,
multiple, unpredictable potential in the midst of things, of other new things, other
new mixtures.”131
Unlike Lefebvre’s formulation of abstract space, discussed in the following
chapter as an instrumental tool that privileges the visual and the geometric, the
spatial abstraction of absolute space eludes the spectacle’s visual charge and
looks back as it looks forward. With its emphasis on inner and transcendent
worlds, absolute space also looks beyond. The atmospheric universal landscapes
of Appia and Craig combined simplified abstracted forms of a modernist visual
aesthetic with the sublime atmosphere of 18th- and 19th-century Romanticism, as
seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner.132 Marie-
Louise Bablet refers to this emphasis on atmospherics as creating the “dimension
of the inexpressible.”133 Indistinctness on stage, produced through light, shadows,
vapour and gauzes, softened the severity of line, plane and form in the built
environment. This mysterious veiling of the scene “permits the expression of the
innermost feelings and thoughts, letting us experience sentiment and emotion,
the uncertain, endless and infinite, the dream and the ideal.”134 The pervasive
atmosphere dematerializes the rigid architectonics that ground the scene and
evokes the ever-present abyss. Romanticism persists through the symbolist
reworking of a Wagnerian Romantic aesthetic. Like Tristan’s “vast realm of
Universal Night,” described by Simon Williams as “a timeless expanse before
birth and beyond death, void of human feature,”135 the absolute space of the
modern stage clings to a pretemporal zone. This also induces a metaphysical
vertigo, described by Allen S. Weiss as a Burkean terror of the sublime, which
incorporates “the hyperbolic (obscurity, power, vastness, infinity, magnificence)
and the privative (vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence).”136 Combining nature,
where the physical abyss lies, with dreams, where the metaphysical abyss lies,
can produce a boundless exterior within an interior space. It seems that a move
from the perspectival scene to the architectonic landscape required atmospherics
to maintain an aesthetic charge that renders the natural supernatural.
Atmospheric settings defy containment, especially on the stage where they
leak, drift and hover, resisting the frame that binds the image. Like the vibratory
ether that spreads around us so do these environments, which suggest an
unlimited spatiality as they meld and dissolve into an infinity of blinding light,
confounding mist or deep shadows. This is reinforced by the visual
representations of Appia’s and Craig’s settings that tend to ignore, and therefore
deemphasize, the proscenium arch. Their drawings imply the frame of the image
was only established to hold in the scene on the page, the ambience of which is
designed to envelop spectators and performers alike. Such theatrical atmospherics
also trouble the theatre’s architecture by surrounding, clinging and seeming to
emanate from its physical form, extending the dramatic setting and binding the
stage with the auditorium, which itself becomes indistinct as a material container.
No longer scenery or setting these evocative environments become an
indeterminate architecture, eradicating the proscenium boundary and including
all in a unified theatrical ambit.
Gottfried Semper had previously promoted theatrical atmospheres in his
advocacy for the “haze of carnival candles” as a “dressing” that alters a given
site’s material reality.137 While Appia and Craig sought to strip away any
superfluous details, their more streamlined decor is predicated on an essential
atmospheric mask that hovers between stage artifice and built form as an evasive
and unsettling force. This is in keeping with Mark Wigley’s notion that “the
concept of atmosphere troubles architectural discourse – haunting those that try
to escape it and eluding those that chase it.”138 Appia’s and Craig’s performance
landscapes expose the troubling reality that “seemingly ephemeral atmospheres
can be as solid as any building.”139 However these designers moved further and
further away from collaborative production, utilizing their work as either
embodied research (through speculative design) or theoretical enunciations
(through writing) to rehearse event-spaces, which remained unrealized in the
commercial theatre.140

Architecture as temple-laboratory
 Theatre is another sort of world to architecture.
– Edward Gordon Craig, Scene

It seems that architectural practitioners played little part in this theatrical spatial
revolution that rejected painting and embraced architecture. In the previous
chapter, I discussed how Wagner undermined the role played by architects in
shaping his auditorium. In the following chapter, I consider how architects
collaborated with theatre-makers to formulate machines for action. This chapter
reveals a gap between the two disciplines. Craig’s architectural sensibility opens
this gap in his refusal to collaborate, and Appia closes it in his subsequent
collaboration on the Hellerau Festspielhaus.
Architecture, for Craig, was a powerful example of what he called the “drama
of silence,” when speech fails in the face of something greater.141 He wished to
give life rather than voice to architectural spaces, “using them to a dramatic
end.”142 Although he claimed that a new architecture had to be found to house
the new drama, Craig never managed to collaborate on the design of such a
theatre: he rejected Singer’s offer to develop Théâtre du Beau in 1912 by refusing
to work with any artists on such projects – not even Duncan, for whom Théâtre
du Beau was to be built.143 Nevertheless his adaptations of the London Concert
Hall for the Purcell Society in 1900 show significant innovations in expanding the
scenic field into the auditorium: he linked stage and auditorium with steps;
continued the scenic wall into that of the theatre; and suggested that the audience
nearest the stage lie on sacks, anticipating future environmental theatre settings.
Craig sought a contiguous relationship between the auditorium architecture
and the architectonic scene through the monochromatic three-dimensionality of
his screens. Konstantin Stanislavski praised the screens, which he commissioned
for his 1912 Moscow production of Hamlet: “The public was to come to the
theatre and see no stage whatsoever. The screens were to serve as the
architectural continuation of the auditorium and were to harmonize with it.”144
Such continuity presupposes monochromatic auditorium architecture, free of
decoration and, like the stage settings, refined to its essential elements,
encapsulated in the modernist ‘Art Theatres’ emerging around the time.145 The
reduction of architectural archetypes to the fundamental dramatic setting
therefore also applied to the theatre architecture itself as the shared space of
performers and audience. In 1961, Denis Bablet, citing Craig, proclaimed the end
of the Italianate model and demanded a new unified theatre interior: “Theatre
must be an empty space with only a roof, a floor and a wall.”146 Unfortunately,
this call that ushered in the neo-avant-garde ended up advancing the black box
stage house and studio, rather than the essential materiality and monumentality
of architecture expounded by Craig in Scene.
Working from Craig’s extensive writings and drawings, we can deduce only a
vague outline of the theatre architecture he advocated. In 1908, he leased the
Arena Goldoni in Florence, where he established his studio, workshop, publishing
office and eventually his school. In 1910, he published an article on this venue in
Mask praising the 1,300-seat, 19th-century urban theatre as an “ideal” space.147
Built on the site of an old convent it had adapted the form of the ancient outdoor
amphitheatre with an enclosed proscenium stage. The article concludes much as
Wagner’s preface to the Ring finished in 1863: where the auteur calls for a patron
to help achieve his vision, in this case a new school of the Art of the Theatre.
However, seeking a “courageous capitalist” rather than the “prince” sought by
Wagner,148 Craig’s patron did not materialize: in 1914 he was forced to abandon
his Florence base. However, it did influence his proposed “Design for a Theatre
open to the air, the sun, the moon” presented on the frontispiece of The Theatre
Advancing (1921). In this sketch Craig adapts the ancient Greek and Roman
amphitheatres he so greatly admired – references to skene, chorus and theatron
are unmistakable – in combination with the Modern Movement’s architectural
style for the stage and auditorium (Figure 2.7).
Craig was seeking an Über-architecture, which, like his Über-marionette,
would transcend the quotidian world and achieve the “ease, lightness and grace”
called for by von Kleist.149 However, while the antigravitational space held as
much appeal as the antigravitational body, materiality proved as important as it
did in the dancing body of Duncan. By 1911 Craig’s vision of an ideal space was
no longer a theatre for the paying public but a school for acolytes, which he
described as a lofty light-filled laboratory, painted white with clerestory
windows: a contemporary adaptation of a Romanesque basilica.150 The new
theatre was to be not only a modern temple for the initiated but also a laboratory
for practitioners and visitors; a concept shared and independently developed by
Appia, who articulated his ideal space some years later in his essay
“Monumentality” (1922).

Figure 2.7 Edward Gordon Craig’s frontispiece for The Theatre Advancing (1921)

Source: Courtesy of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate. Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Appia’s first allusion to the new theatre as “the cathedral of the future” was
made in a letter to Craig (30 November 1918), which he developed in “Actor,
Space, Light, Painting,” a conference paper delivered the following year: “We shall
arrive eventually at what will simply be called the House: a sort of cathedral of
the future, which in a vast, open and changeable space will welcome the most
varied expressions of our social and artistic life, and will be the ideal place for
dramatic art to flourish, with or without spectators.”151 Yet Appia had, in part,
concretely realized this vision some years earlier when he collaborated with
Dalcroze to establish a School for Rhythmical Gymnastics (1911–1914) in the
garden city of Hellerau on the outskirts of Dresden.

Hellerau
 My task as architect must then start with an attempt to discover the type of
theatrical space needed by a modern community, and, at the same time,
what mission this space should suggest to the community.
– Appia, ‘Monumentality’ in Texts (138)

The move to explore a transcendent spatiality in built form was curtailed by a

rising pragmatism in architectural thought. Wagner’s eradication of the
horseshoe-shaped baroque theatre and utilization of a fan-shaped auditorium
resonated with the increasing rationalization of architecture and move against
ornamentation, and was soon adopted as a standardized modern form. However,
architects based in Germany who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, such as
Max Littman, Henry Van de Velde, Hans Poelzig, Peter Behrens and Bruno Taut,
were interested in a more in-depth exploration of theatre architecture and
collaborated with communities and artists to establish new forms. As conduits
“between the romantic-idealist and radical-objective tendencies in the new
architecture,”152 they set out to challenge the empty content and petrifaction of
traditional architecture; their manifestos took on a strident quality with
proclamations to retain the essential qualities of materials and appearance
through a rational approach to form and construction. Littman worked with
Fuchs to establish the “relief stage,” minimizing stage depth in order to bring
performers into a closer relationship with the audience; the Munich Kunstler
Theatre (1908), with its sunken stage, which could be covered over to form an
acting forestage, embodied this principle.153 Van de Velde advocated a more
panoramic approach through the “tripartite stage”: his Werkbund Theatre in
Cologne (1914) provided three acting areas across the field of vision that could be
opened into one sweeping view.154 Poelzig collaborated with Max Reinhardt to
create one of the most important and problematic expressionist theatres, the
Großes Schauspielhaus (1919), an adaptation of Berlin’s Circus Schumann,
formerly a market, in order to accommodate 3,500 people within a red cavernous
space below a central dome encrusted in honeycombed pendants that resembled
stalactites (Figure 2.8). Designed to “comprise the masses who, up to now, have
been strangers to theatre,”155 it presaged Brook’s model (mentioned in the
previous chapter) of the ‘open circle’: a proscenium stage behind a curving thrust
floor around which the audience wrapped as a community sharing the
performance space. This same model, which negotiated between the exclusive
framed image and inclusive open space, was soon to be explored by Erwin
Piscator and Walter Gropius, as well as Meyerhold with Mikhail Barkhin and
Sergei Vakhtangov, as discussed in the following section. Such director-architect
duos (and trios) of the avant-garde were concerned with a new form of political
theatre that created an active community of watchers who experienced a more
direct relationship with the stage action.

Figure 2.8 Großes Schauspielhaus, Berlin (1919): designed by Hans Poelzig for Max Reinhardt

Source: Ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Performance spaces became central motifs in the pre-World War I Deutscher

Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen composed of artists, architects,
designers and industrialists), especially in relation to the garden city movement
that championed social reform and a return to the original purity of elementary
forms through an integration of art, craft, nature and industry. The garden cities
offered potential sites for the utopian ideal of absolute space to be played out,
combining an abstraction of nature with spiritual ideals to combat the
materialism of the modern world. While placing its faith in modern technology
as a redeeming instrument, the Werkbund also returned to the 18th-century’s
pursuit of the sublime.
In 1909 Wolf Dorn, an education reformer, approached Dalcroze to form an
institute at Hellerau, a small Werkbund community and Germany’s flagship
garden city, which had been established two years earlier by Karl Schmitt.
Dalcroze was invited to utilize his method as an educational system for the
community and to establish classrooms, workshops, gardens and a theatre to
“replace the missing church.”156 Although Heinrich Tessenow was commissioned
as architect for the project, Dalcroze called upon Appia to help formulate a
rhythmic architecture, especially for the interior of the central hall, which, as a
Gesellschaftshau (community building), was to be theatre, stadium and
gymnasium for the “restoration of sprit and art.” This was the ideal “house”
envisaged in 1906 by architect Theodor Fischer (also cofounder of the Werkbund):

[…] a house not to be inhabited by an individual or a family, but by all: not

to study and become wise, but rather simply happy; not to pray according to
this or that belief, but rather to mediate and to live intimately. Therefore not
a school, nor a museum, nor a church, nor a concert hall, nor an auditorium!
[…] something of all of these and also something more.157

Appia seized the chance to make concrete the revolutionary theories of spatial
performativity he had been developing through drawings and writing: generating
a space that radically broke down the barrier between audience and spectator;
eradicating the problematic proscenium opening that binds in the scenic world
(seen by him as a rigid force in Bayreuth); dropping the stage to ground level
from which rose a temporary bank of seating for 560 spectators; sinking an
orchestra pit into the ground between performers and audience that could be
covered over when not used; and wrapping the walls and ceiling with a cream
linen behind which lighting and windows were concealed.158
In order to express the dynamic beauty of the moving body, Appia created a
luminescent space, apparently stripped of all detail, with the tiered-audience
seating reflected on stage by a stepped landscape of practicables (Figures 2.9a and
2.9b). His Rhythmic Spaces were extended into the entire space, its austerity
offsetting the bodies of performers and spectators, who for Appia were
themselves creating and defining the space.159 The living quality of the
architecture came from its material relationship to the human body and
contiguity with the audience, manifested as a discrete but powerful performative
force enfolding stage and auditorium. In contrast with other theatre auditoria, the
entire interior was unified and made ‘practicable’ by being lined in linen just as
the set forms and audience seating were covered in muslin. Such stark simplicity
masked the technical complexity of concealed technology, including thousands of
luminaires controlled from a newly devised “light organ,” designed by Georgian
artist, Alexander von Salzmann. Following Appia’s call for diffuse and formative
light, von Salzmann created a luminescent architecture through “light-producing
space.”160 Radiant light dematerialized the architectural enclosure, bestowing an
internal force on the building. What made the effect even more dramatic was the
careful calibration of light to music during the performance, which gave a
rhythmic pulsation to the building; the architecture itself was implicated in the
musical orchestration.

Figure 2.9 Hellerau Festspielhaus (1913) with the interior shaped by Adolphe Appia (scenographer) in
association with Alexander von Salzman (lighting designer). Looking towards stage (left) and seating bank
(right). Courtesy of Richard C. Beacham
Figure 2.10 Hellerau Festspielhaus (1913) with backlit textile walls and Appia’s design for Gluck’s Orpheus
and Eurydice, directed by Jaques-Dalcroze. Courtesy of Richard C. Beacham

Appia felt an obligation to “diminish progressively the abyss which separates

the spectator from the actor.”161 Instead of Wagner’s dark mysterious gulf,
Hellerau’s entire space was transformed into a pale floating void.162 Here the tall
drapes that wrapped Duncan’s studio to let in a watery light were given
architectural form, while remaining in the world of scenic effect. The diffuse
glow of the walls and the seamless link between the abstract landscapes of stage
and seating suggested boundlessness. The audience was no longer an anonymous
collective of distanced passive viewers – “eternal spectators” – but was included
in the rhythmic environment that encouraged a self-sensing: a corporeal and
communal “awakening.”163 Appia’s original intention was for the seating itself to
be reconfigured in a range of changing formats, which included spectators in the
shifting theatrical landscape of his practicables (movable rostra). He did not wish
to make the audience completely at ease in this new utopian space of social
encounter. Discomfort was an invitation to be active and participatory: “to
conquer the public within ourselves.”164 However, Dalcroze deferred to the end-
stage format in his two festival presentations of exercises, movement pieces and
works-in-progress (1912), and in Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice (1913): it
was radical enough to eradicate curtain, proscenium, raised platform and stage
house (Figure 2.10). In between the mutually reflected stepped landscapes of
spectators and performers lay the “open space of shining floor”;165 a choric
ground, joining the real world with the evoked worlds. Here a new and
integrated architecture formed the “splendid frame” of Nietzsche’s “luminous
cloud formation,” called for in The Birth of Tragedy – that indistinct zone
blurring corporeal and spatial boundaries.166

Figure 2.11 Hellerau Festspielhaus, Dresden (1913): hall

Photo: Marc Goodwin

The architectural dreamscape of Hellerau (itself meaning “shining meadow”)

was a short-lived dream for Appia and Dalcroze; after less than three years the
Institute closed with the commencement of World War I. The fabric walls were
torn down during World War II and, in the Soviet era, the place became a Russian
military barracks and recreation hall. However, it was fully renovated in 2006 and
is now a working venue, in which the dance company of leading choreographic
artist, William Forsythe, took up residency until 2015. Although the luminescent
apparatus of its translucent walls and ceiling were not replaced, the bare white
architecture and high windows remain visible; its flat-floor format can still
accommodate a range of arrangements as originally envisaged by Appia (Figure
2.11).

Figure 2.12 Performance APPI(A)PPIA ((Hellerau 2017) during Reconstructing the Future: choregraphed by
Avatâra Ayuso and Ángel Martínez Roger. Dancer: Avatâra Ayuso
Photographer: Stephan Floss

Forsythe, who has a keen interest in architecture and multimedia, is celebrated

for his contemporary practice that grew out of two decades directing the
Frankfurt Ballet Company. Aiming to “bring the audience to a state where they
are more conscious of their breathing,” he sees the stage as a sensuous machine
acting on and dismantling familiar perceptual structures.167 Challenging notions
of the ideal body by constantly disclosing an otherness to the audience through
the precise orchestrations of imperfect movements, Forsythe’s work also tends to
avoid masking the stage houses in which his company performs. The pale
architectonic austerity of the Hellerau Festspielhaus, now lacking its misty
atmospherics, has matched the stark simplicity of the choreographer’s dance
installations and severe exposure of the performing body. However, Appia’s
incorporated scenery and shadowless atmospherics were briefly returned to
Hellerau during Reconstructing the Future in 2017: a month-long installation (17
October–11 November) in which architecture, scenography and lighting were
once again integrated by adding the backlit textile skin to walls and ceiling, as
well as the adaptable landscape of rostra arranged as per the Orpheus and
Eurydice setting (Figure 2.12). Dedicated to the themes of “space, light, movement
and utopia,” this reconstruction (albeit confined to the stage end) was
accompanied by a program of performances and lectures by renowned
contemporary choreographers, artists and architects who reinterpreted the
environment to demonstrate its enduring influence.
Although Wiles maintains that “the possibilities of Hellerau were limited” in
relation to Appia’s goal of shaking actors and spectators out of their prescribed
performances,168 it was one of the first theatres to eradicate elements defining a
barrier between stage and auditorium, presaging flexible black box auditoria of
the latter half of the 20th century that utilized concealed pits and mobile rostra
units to create a range of actor-audience formats. Hellerau’s inclusion in the
utopian garden-city project and its associations with the Reform of Life
movement illustrate how the reform of theatre space was aligned not only to
reforming movement but also to radical social reform. Through performance,
Hellerau’s Festival Hall challenged pre-established corporeal boundaries, which
were further dissolved in an atmosphere that enshrouded and permeated body
and architecture.
Director Jacques Copeau and designer Louis Jouvet soon took up the idea of a
universal architectonic landscape playing an active and visible role in theatrical
performance. The permanent stage setting (dispositif fixé) for their 1920
renovation of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris bears similarities to
Craig’s Passion model and Appia’s proposed setting for L’Annonce faite à Marie
at Hellerau (1913). Copeau and Jouvet built the stage setting primarily of concrete
with a series of levels and stairs that connected an upstage gallery to the open
platform, which in turn stepped down to the auditorium (Figures 2.13a and
2.13b). Answering Copeau’s demand for a “bare stage,” its monochromatic
architectural setting was deliberately visible and emphatically material, playing
an active and fluctuating role in all the productions. As with Craig’s
Architectonic Scene and Appia’s Rhythmic Spaces, this stage setting could shift
locale and character through additional units of platforms, steps and panels.
Figure 2.13a Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (1913): axonometric of permanent stage layout designed by Louis
Jouvet for Jacques Copeau

Although Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier remains a working theatre in Paris, the

fixed stage architecture has long gone, with a highly mechanized stage house in
its place. Existing venues that have also incorporated a forceful architectural
presence into the stage scenography and action include Théâtre du Soleil’s
Cartoucherie (1970) in Paris, Teatro Oficina in São Paulo (1984), the Hannah
Playhouse in Wellington (1973) and Moscow’s School of Dramatic Arts (2001): all
of which will be discussed further in this book; and all that resist the blackened
void of stage house and studio.
Figure 2.13b Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (1913): photograph of stage landscape designed by Louis Jouvet
for Jacques Copeau

Resisting the black void

Our petrified idea of the theatre is connected with our petrified idea of a
culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our mind
(esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space is full.
– Antonin Artaud: Theatre and its Double169

US theatre artist Robert Wilson has been identified as a contemporary successor

to Craig’s vision of performance through the hieratic gestures of his performers
who move at varying speeds in an abstracted scenography with costumes that
distil their characters and silhouette their bodies. Although Wilson’s performers
recall Craig’s Über-marionette, and his minimalist stage architectonics and
precise lighting evoke Craig’s performance landscapes, he continues to rely on
the black stage house of the proscenium theatre, never radically questioning its
rigid frame. His style is thus a late 20th-century realization of the late 19th-
century symbolist stage; it thrives within the dark confines of the proscenium
stage with its concealed, though more advanced, technology.
Czech theatre artist (architect and scenographer) Josef Svoboda is also credited
as inheriting legacies of Appia and Craig through his austere and flexible stage-
scapes. A major force in theatre architecture and scenography during the second
half of last century, Svoboda explored and developed nonverbal multimedia
performance in Prague’s Laterna Magika (1959), a venue he established with
director Alfred Radok after their success at the Belgian EXPO in 1958. The
current 400-seat theatre constructed as part of the National theatre in 1985, was
created specifically for their collaged performances that integrated live actors
with new “hi-tech” systems, including scenic wagons, mobile screens, moving
belts and projectors. However, the auditorium is a featureless dark, fan-shaped
amphitheatrical format of inclined seating with a raised forestage between
audience and proscenium frame, concealing the technological box of tricks.
Perhaps Svoboda’s more radical contribution to theatre architecture is Spirála,
Prague’s currently abandoned Spiral Theatre (1992): a cylindrical edifice in the
Výstavište exhibition grounds, which winds the audience on circular ramps
around a central playing space, with opportunities for multiple uses both
horizontally and vertically.170 Also painted black, this challenging dark vortex,
constructed from steel beams, grids and mesh, structurally articulates the
structureless void-like space that Svoboda claimed to face as a scenographer at
the beginning of every new project:

When I sit alone in a theatre and gaze into the dark space of its empty stage,
I’m frequently seized by fear that this time I won’t manage to penetrate it,
and I always hope that this fear will never desert me.171

Contrary to the featureless cyborgian wombspace, where technology is sutured

into the constructed void, which black box stage houses and studios have tended
to become, a theatre in Moscow presents perhaps one of the few, and most recent,
articulations of the symbolist absolute model, in keeping with the spatial speech
of Appia and Craig. The School of Dramatic Art, founded in 1987 by director
Anatoly Vasiliev, occupied a range of makeshift spaces modified by his long-term
set designer Igor Popov until it opened its doors to a new venue in 2001. Designed
by the director and designer with architects Boris Tkhor and Sergei Gusarev this
contemporary assemblage of eclectic architecture – referencing Feudal, Italianate,
Constructivist and Orthodox styles – is crowned with a glass roof beneath which
are housed a series of bright white, naturally lit spaces, including street-like
foyers, rehearsal studios and the small Shakespearean Globus (seating 100
people). The larger Manezh/Manege theatre (300–400 seat capacity) – resembling
a Romanesque basilica, medieval banqueting hall and Mediterranean piazza –
captures the monumentality Appia wrote of and the basilica-like laboratory to
which Craig referred, albeit in a more pastiche-style than the minimalist
modernism of the two earlier designers. Emphatically architectural, the blanched
walls, columns and galleries, with timber balcony fronts, floor and ceiling,
strongly articulate a flexible space where audience and performance spaces can
mingle or separate.
Conceived of as a “theatre city,” the building reflects the company’s ideology of
theatre as “a kind of cosmos, as an orderly whole, as a diligently constructed
unity that withstands and opposes chaos, or the gaping void of modern (civilized)
theatre.” Combining many of the spatial typologies discussed in this chapter,
Vasiliev’s theatre is sanctuary, cosmos, church, monument and “a theatre
laboratory, where performance is not a final goal. The experiment itself is the
goal.”
Perhaps the closest parallel to Appia’s and Craig’s metaphysical landscapes
within the architectural canon can be found in the work of Louis Kahn (1901–
1974), whose language took on a symbolist characteristic with its deliberately
mystical qualities. In Fort Wayne’s 669-seat Theatre of Dramatic Art (1973),
pleated concrete walls conceal multiple entry points and enfold the audience in a
forceful rhythm. In the central plaza of the Salk Institute of Biological Studies
(1965) at La Jolla, monolithic forms facing each other across the expansive
courtyard establish a monumental and iconic space. Of the Salk Institute and his
first meeting with the client, Kahn wrote: “the scientist needed the presence of
the immeasurable, which is the realm of the artist.” Like Appia and Craig, Kahn
was interested in the architectural drama of “silence and light.” However, Kahn’s
work is more akin to Wagnerian settings: the Fort Wayne theatre strongly
resembles the Bayreuth Festspielhaus with the repetition of its emphatic stage
frame into the auditorium, while Salk’s celebrated image of the central incision of
a water channel running axially toward the horizon is deliberately perspectival in
effect. Both stage and courtyard require viewers to project their presence from
one space into another, rather than more directly inhabit an atmospheric
enfolding of the real and ideal.
For David Wiles, the Empty Space was an attempt by the second-wave
theatrical avant-garde, spearheaded by Brook, “to start afresh, finding no roots in
the historical past.”172 He considers it a “philosophically untenable” ideal because
it calls for an affirmation of what the space should be rather than a “sense of
how” it could be achieved.173 This may be why the black box studio and darkened
stage house were reinforced in the latter half of the 20th century, but, in my
opinion, Wiles’s reading of the Empty Space as “an ideal locus for performance, a
space emptied of any attributes that associate it with a particular space and time”
aligns it more with the absolute space of early symbolism, or even the
endeavours of Appia and Craig, rather than that espoused in Peter Brook’s 1968
treatise, The Empty Space.174 Since its publication, much of Brook’s performance
work has been based on research dedicated to adapting and establishing venues
that work with the inherent qualities of existing architecture; folding the built
real with the performed ideal; most concretely realized in the renovation of
Théàtre des Bouffes du Nord, to which I have already referred. An innovative
venue and the work of Brook’s company CICT have together proved that the
physical attributes of a space influence the performance, although Wiles argues
“the clutter round about” should be eradicated in order to provide a strong
frame.175 However, it seems that weakening the frame is a critical aspect of this
venue. The careful orchestration of the attendant clutter becomes part of the
Empty Space’s ineradicable and accruing past, which like Tadeusz Kantor’s
embellage spaces – metaphysical and functional, balancing at the threshold
“between eternity and garbage”176 – is transformed into an absolute space in
which its history is generalized as timeless yet full of time: immutable yet
charged with movement. This introduces a new type of monumentality discussed
in the chapter’s final section. However, the “clutter” also refers to the abject,
which can never be eradicated and therefore taints the absolute and abstract
spaces outlined in this book.
Brook, together with his collaborators Jean-Guy Lecat and Chloe Oblensky, has
attempted to articulate spatial possibilities between performance and participants
– oscillating between distanced ideal and ever-present real – which the late-19th-
century symbolists never managed to achieve as long as they adhered to the
baroque form of the proscenium playhouse. He took a classic late 19th-century
Italian-style horseshoe theatre, built in 1876 (the same year Wagner’s
Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth), and transformed it into a space for the holy,
rough and immediate attributes he believed were critical to a successful theatrical
experience.

The new monumentality of absolute space

Monumental space permits a continual back-and-forth between private
speech of ordinary conversations and the public speech of discourses,
lectures, sermons, rallying cries and all theatrical forms of utterance.
– Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

The people must receive the strong, unforgettable impression that they, their
living bodies, are creating and defining the space. The living body must feel
able freely to modify at will the actual space and its limits.
– Adolphe Appia, “Monumentality”

Why do contemporary architects who contemplate a more performative approach

to architecture, such as Bernard Tschumi, aim to establish an evental spatiality in
all zones except the space specific to the theatrical event? Deferring to the
traditional demands of stage and auditorium, their innovations concentrate on
the embodied potential of theatrical space in areas peripheral to the proper
performance space. This was broached in an interview I conducted with Tschumi,
who tends to focus on the in-between spaces in his architecture for the
performing arts rather than the auditoria themselves. It seems that
experimentation is possible in the peripheral zones, whereas the auditoria proper
are burdened by regulations, preconceptions and a proprietorial hold by the
theatrical status quo.177 The familiar monumental form of theatre architecture
requires rethinking in order to challenge its relation to authority and its will to
endure as a fixed monument to a fleeting art form.
An exploration of absolute space in relation to the scenographic performance
landscapes of Appia and Craig exposes two types of architectural monumentality:
the classical monumental form of the past, which Wagner was both resisting and
creating, and a new monumentality that is open and flexible. This new
monumentality, which allows for momentality, was something Appia was
seeking throughout his career and eventually articulated in his 1922 essay
“Monumentality,” in which he broadened his theatrical ideas to encompass
architecture generally as a translation of his scenographic concepts into built
form. Opposing the fixed form of the traditional monument as having long
outlived its usefulness, Appia advocated a new architectural monumentality that
would be adaptable without sacrificing strength, stability and permanence. He
was interested in keeping space alive as a continually contemporaneous
experience, enacting a reciprocity between art and life, between architecture and
creative expression. This spatial enlivening was not only predicated on bestowing
built form with a temporality through structural movement and shifts in light but
also sound, thereby facilitating a range of sonic experiences. Performance space
was no longer apprehended through the distanced gaze but active communal
participation.
Like Appia, Lefebvre distinguishes between the old monument and a new
monumentality, maintaining that the former represents “frontal (and hence
brutal) expressions of power relations,”178 whereas the latter is linked to the
community “as ‘agent’ (i.e. ‘one who acts’)” and therefore can be aligned to
spatiotemporal rhythms that are transformed by social practice.179 For Lefebvre,
monumental architecture is necessarily a transcendent phenomenon that escapes
time and exceeds death, which it tends to simultaneously represent and reject.180
However, in wishing to survive time and place, the monument submits to the
myth of its own imperishability through a will to power that implicates the
architect. In contrast, theatre is a transitory art form that by its very nature lives
on only in the minds of those who experience it. The role of the scenographer,
whose works are never intended to last, is to counter or complement the
architectural monument with a fleeting mo(nu)mentality.
It is therefore apposite that a scenographer should challenge the theatre
monument and proffer a new monumentality. Appia’s “cathedral of the future,”
an open forum for experimentation and sharing of ideas, was a building
constantly being renewed.181 Submitting to “its duration rather than its
immediate usefulness,” he proposed an architecture well suited to the evolution of
an art form that must remain both “resilient and transient.”182 In his essay, Appia
did more than theorize this new spatiality; he described his temple-laboratory in
detail and, as Mallarmé advocated, constructed it in the mind’s eye of the reader.
Because the passivity of spectatorship is inscribed into social practices, Appia
proposed bridging the gap between spectator and performer through a close
collaboration between architect, designer, actor, author and director. Rather than
confront the public with a new form, he promoted a flexible environment capable
of anticipating changes: the walls would open out onto the lobbies or adjacent
gardens; the proscenium could change its width and discretely disappear; the
orchestra pit could be covered over; and the floor would be systematized into
hydraulic units for staging and seating. As an adaptable building it could open to
the sunlight during the day and at night concealed lighting would create the
ambience. The interior decor would minimize detail but, “beautiful in design and
colour,” would have a presence that played a role in the events it houses.183 “The
materials used for construction should be fully evident in the building. […] my
structure will be architectural only in its function; its monumentality will thus
remain minimal both now and in the future.”184
This adaptability has been rarely achieved with the finesse described by Appia,
although examples can be found in the architecture of Steven Holl, whose
phenomenological approach parallels Appia’s advocacy for a building
apprehended through embodied movement and spatial rhythms. This is yet to be
transcribed by Holl into a specific theatre building, even though his collaboration
with Vito Acconci on New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture (1993)
created a flexible site as event-space that opens and closes through multiple
apertures on its busy corner site. The tiny building embodies a theatrical
performativity as a “dynamic combinative space” in which the “three
dimensional volume can be disposed towards the four dimensional with changes
in time.”185 Although high profile architectural practices such as OMA, Jean
Nouvel and Herzog and de Meuron have missed opportunities to create adaptable
and transcendent spaces in their auditoria design, such as the Netherlands Dance
Company (Hague, 1987), Guthrie Theatre (Minneapolis, 2007)186 and Laban
Dance Centre (London, 2003) respectively – where they tend to defer to
established and/or conservative forms – elements of spatial flexibility can be
found in some of their more peripheral performance spaces. Rem Koolhaas of
OMA incorporates a large industrial curtain in New York’s Second Stage Theatre
(1999) to cover a glazed wall and signal the shift of emphasis from audience to
stage, an idea he translated fifteen years later into Porto’s Casa di Musica (2005)
where corrugated glazing at either end of the concert hall allows light and views
in when required; Nouvel utilizes manipulable walls to open auditoria into
lobbies, as seen in the studio theatres of Lucerne’s Congress Hall (2000) and
Minnesota’s Guthrie Theatre (2006) with its ‘endless bridge’; a cantilevered
stageless auditorium overlooking the river. As these architects demonstrate,
scenography’s transformative techniques for creating mutable, fictive space has
much to inform the built environment.
The absolute space of symbolist architectonics as seemingly empty or blank
encapsulates the “spacing” Jacques Derrida saw in Mallarmé’s work. As a
“becoming space,” Wigley translates this into “the opening up of spatial distances,
the opening of another kind of distance between the world of those distances and
that of pre-spatial presence, and the internal division of that world, its primordial
opening to its other,” which is revealed by the architectonics hidden within the
dramatic text.187 As the interval, absolute space constitutes a generative force,
suspended between the scenic landscape and the imagination, between action and
perception, between the stage and the auditorium, between architecture and its
scenographic counterpart. As nothing and no-real-thing, its absolute
irreducibility continues to hold dramatic action at a distance while immersing the
viewer in an ethereal expansion. Predicated on movement, absolute space is
neither fixed nor singular, mobilizing not only the imagination – through a
constant marking and re-marking of dramatic space – but also the built
environment, revealing its inherent rhythms and therefore the performativity of
its temporal action: heating, cooling, illuminating, darkening, advancing,
retreating, lifting, lowering, compressing, expanding, sounding, opening and
closing. Through a coexistence of the material construction of architecture and
the architectonic scene as a fictive world, the boundaries of built form are
weakened, allowing entry to a shifting “presencing” of the virtual.
The absolute space of late Romanticism was an attempt to stay the accelerating
interruptions of modernity by seeking a space from which to escape its
continuing alienation. This came together most profoundly with the architecture
of the Deutscher Werkbund in Hellerau, a briefly lived attempt to resist
industrialization’s totalizing force through an emphasis on the intersection of arts
and crafts, at the centre of which was staged the joyous rhythmic body. As Tafuri
writes of this Utopian aspiration:

The city and the industrial universe were not considered as effects or causes
of the destruction of values or of the advent of an anguished chaos but as
premises for a new totality, for the conservation of culture brought about by
absorbing its antithesis, civilization.188

However, by the time Hellerau’s Festspielhaus had been built, this notion of an
integrated industrialized metropolis with self-contained forms had been
fragmented, and the cubist movement exploded the European art world
profoundly affecting architecture and its will to a synthesized spatial object. The
new type of spacing that emerged to shatter and desacralize the absolute space of
artistic unity was that of interruption rather than suspension, with its attendant
move from poesis to techne, as both architecture and theatre took on the scientific
age.

Notes
1 Craig, “Motion,” 185.
2 Craig’s extensive archive, now divided into collections around America and Europe, contains
comprehensive research and readings into the history of architecture. His annotated copy of Serlio’s
Architettura is part of the Rondell Collection housed in the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal in Paris.
3 Notes transcribed by Craig’s son Edward Craig, Gordon Craig: The Story of His Life, 237. Edward
Gordon Craig adapted and repeated this text in various publications, including “Motion,” as a preface to
A Portfolio of Etchings, Florence 1908, reproduced in The Mask: A Quarterly Illustrated Journal of the
Art of the Theatre, 185–6.
4 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 28.
5 Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, 289.
6 As discussed in the previous chapter, God and his omnipotent representative, the monarch, had both
been displaced from their central position in society and the theatre. The centre no longer held sway.
7 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 49.
8 Ibid., 237.
9 Ibid., 236.
10 Ibid.
11 Shakespeare, Hamlet (act III, sc. 2, ln.113), 78.
12 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 235.
13 Ibid., 242.
14 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
15 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 62.
16 Carlson, Places of Performance, 196–7.
17 Izenour, Theatre Design, 103.
18 Derrida discusses Stéphane Mallarmé’s blank page as spacing in Positions, 3–14, and in his essay
“Mallarmé,” 110–26.
19 Mallarmé instructed, “Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces,” in a letter to Henri Cazalis,
October 1864, in Mallarmé: Oeuvres Complets, 1440.
20 Craig, “Motion,” 185.
21 Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his System of the World.
22 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 10.
23 Heisenberg in Genz, Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space, 27.
24 Deak maintains that although the actual French symbolist movement can be officially dated from 1885
to 1995, it originated in the 1880s, reached its highpoint in the 1890s, and declined in the first years of
the 20th century. See Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 3.
25 Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Scenography in the Twentieth
Century, 25.
26 Ibid., 318.
27 Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” 631.
28 Ibid., 634.
29 Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 3.
30 Implicated in late Romanticism, the symbolists differed from their counterparts by acknowledging the
impossibility of imitating nature. Michelle Facos points out that this subversive distaste for mimesis
was founded in a desire to represent ideas rather than worldly appearances and emerged from “a
complex social context defined by the growth of cities and free-market capitalism, medical and
technological advances, class conflict, gender relations, demographic shifts, religious debates and
colonialism,” Facos, Symbolist Art in Context, 6.
31 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 122. “Dreamworlds” and “reenchantment” refer to Walter Benjamin’s
reading of 19th-century Paris as expounded in “Dream City, and Dream House, Dreams of the Future,
 Anthropological Nihilism, Jung,” in The Arcades Project, 388–404.
32 Gerould, “Landscapes of the Unseen: Turn-of-the-Century Symbolism from Paris to Petersburg,” 304.
33 Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 180.
34 Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 493–506.
35 Ibid., 251.
36 Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, 27. Term coined by Mallarmé to describe the ideal
theatre as “completely etherealized and uncontaminated by physical presentation.” Carlson, Theories of
the Theatre, 289.
37 Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 291.
38 Bablet, Revolutions of Stage Design in the 20th Century, 24.
39 Bergson in Carslon, Theories of the Theatre, 300. Carlson is referring to Henri Bergson’s essay, “Le Rire”
that appeared in two articles in the Revue de Paris in 1900.
40 Nietzsche, “Gay Science: Book V,” 448.
41 Badiou, Handbook of Anesthetics, 108.
42 Jarry, “Of the Uselessness to Theatre of the Theatre,” 11.
43 Craig, “Motion,” 185.
44 Mallarmé outlines this in a letter to Cazales, July 1866, where the poet makes a connection between
spiritual death and rebirth. Quoted in Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 81.
45 Hyman, “Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist Spectacle,” 101–22.
46 Ibid., 114.
47 Wagner’s writing and artworks had a strong influence on the symbolists. The monthly journal La
Revue Wagnerienne (1885–1888) was founded by Edouard Dujardin and provided a forum for a
symbolist interpretation of Wagner’s theories.
48 Wagner, “Bayreuth (The Playhouse),” 335.
49 Times critic J. W. Davison, who attended an early festival, wrote how Wagner’s vapours were
unfortunately realized when the steam apparatus in the basement, designed to enwrap stage scenes in a
veil-like mist, became excessive for “those unhappy dwellers in the orchestra who had to play like
demons in a cavern choked with vaporous exhalations.” Davison, “The Wagner Festival at Bayreuth,”
reproduced in Hartford, Bayreuth: The Early Years, 103.
50 Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil,” 279.
51 Aronson, Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, 101.
52 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3–4.
53 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 1.
54 Ibid.
55 Aronson, Looking into the Abyss, 97.
56 Jarry, Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, 72–3.
57 Nietzsche, “On Great Events,” 108.
58 Ibid., 41.
59 Badiou, Handbook of Anaesthetics, 69.
60 Craig, Craig on Theatre, 84.
61 The early creation of animated mechanical figures or automata (from the Greek automatos, acting of
itself) is attributed to Daedelus, the mythical architect and inventor.
62 Craig, Craig on Theatre, 82.
63 Ibid., 84.
64 Ibid., 86.
65 Von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre.”
66 Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the 20th Century,” 73.
67 Duncan, My Life, 111.
68 Ibid., 180. Craig had already utilized blue drapes in Venice Preserved (1904) and Electra (1905).
69 Peter Kurth quotes a description of the curtains’ effects by one of Isadora’s students: “Horizon blue –
the sky at dusk – the blue of the sea – the blue vert of the forest and mountains from afar – the blue of
night – endless space – infinity.” Isadora: A Sensational Life, 120.
70 Isadora Duncan in a letter to Edward Gordon Craig, June 1913, Museum of Performing Arts, Lincoln
Centre, New York, CD no 231.
71 Roberts, “Isadora Duncan’s School,” typewritten script in Mary Fanton Roberts Collection, City
Museum. Quoted in Kurth, Isadora: A Sensational Life, 365.
72 In her autobiography, Duncan wrote that natural rhythms were her “great and only principle. […] The
waters, the winds, the plants, living creatures, the particles of matter itself obey this controlling rhythm
of which the characteristic line is the wave.” Duncan, My Life, 165.
73 Duncan in Daly, Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, 30.
74 This refers to the epigraph that opens this section, in which Craig describes his first experience of
watching Duncan perform in 1904, which he recalled in a BBC radio interview on 31 May 1952, and
was transcribed and published in The Listener, 5 June 1952. Quoted in Craig, Gordon Craig, 191.
75 Craig, letter to The Times (London), 7 October 1907.
76 Craig, “Catalogue of Etchings being Designs for Motions by Gordon Craig, Florence 1908,” 1, 6.
77 Clearly this system had its problems, due to limitations in construction and technology early last
century, which resulted in the apocryphal story of collapsing screens in the Moscow Hamlet that in fact
 fell during a rehearsal due to technicians’ error rather than during a performance as commonly
believed. With current technical advancements in lightweight construction and remote-controlled
movement of scenery, Craig’s technique has become de rigueur in the theatre.
78 Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, 62.
79 “The Theatre of Isadora Duncan,” Daily Mail, 12 October 1912, Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward
Gordon Craig, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
80 “Miss I. Duncan’s Theatre,” in the Daily Mail, 29 October 1912, Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward
Gordon Craig, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
81 Correspondence between Paris Singer and Duncan, Donald Oenslager Collection of Edward Gordon
Craig. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 1, Folder 33.
82 Duncan, My Life, 146. In a letter to Duncan (31 July 1912), Singer writes, “I was building the theatre to
give you the possibility to show your work in its complete form.” In this same letter he sketches a fan-
shaped auditorium, which should have “comfortable seats” and “no boxes.” In a following letter (1
August 1912) Singer proposes the architect, Louis Sue, visit Bayreuth, saying he didn’t want boxes at
the rear like Bayreuth, which, in France, would be occupied by a distracted audience. Instead he
proposed cheap standing room at the back for artists and students. (Donald Oenslager Collection: Box
1, Folder 33.)
83 Duncan, My Life, 158.
84 Ibid., 152.
85 Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” 96.
86 Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 57.
87 Ibid., 131.
88 Duncan, My Life, 123.
89 The Duncan estate, which Isadora referred to as “Kopanos,” was sited on Kopanàs Hill, Athens, which
Isadora misspelled as Kopanos in her autobiography. The name Kopanàs has been forgotten, while the
hill is part of the Vyronas Municipality.
90 Duncan, My Life, 94.
91 Ibid., 134.
92 Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, 314.
93 Mallarmé in an interview with Jules Huret (1891), quoted in Deak, Symbolist Theatre, 59.
94 Phelan, “Moving to the Hill,” 16.
95 Ibid.
96 Yeats, Saturday Review, 8 March 1902.
97 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 236.
 98 Daly, Done into Dance, 65.
99 Craig, “From Representation to Revelation,” PAGE, reproduced in Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, 270.
100 Moréas, “Symbolism – a Manifesto,” 1015.
101 Kahn, “Response of the Symbolists,” 1017.
102 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 205. Lefevre achieved this study in his final work, Rhythmanalysis:
Space, Time and Everyday Life, helping us rethink space and time differently via the multiple measures
specific to place. Through “a general theory of rhythms” he highlighted how society was predicated on
the competing and cohering rhythms of the natural, psychological and social – their difference and
repetition – without which space could not be produced.
103 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 206.
104 Ibid., 225.
105 Craig, The Theatre Advancing, ixxix.
106 Craig, Scene, 5.
107 Ibid., 15. Craig wrote of “place” and “scene”: “it is a place if it seem real – it is a scene if it seem false.”
Ibid., 1n.1.
108 Ibid., 22.
109 Ibid., 1.
110 Ibid., 22.
111 In his “Foreword II” (1919), from Towards a New Theatre, Craig wished theatre to return to its early
Greek and Christian staging as “a rare festival.” Reproduced in Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, 228. Innes
points out that although Craig rejected Christianity and conventional notions of spirituality, claiming
to be a “pagan” in search of a “sacred theatre,” church architecture provided the basis for much of his
conceptual work (Ibid., 126). Craig’s design for The St. Matthew Passion drew upon the festival dramas
of ancient Greece and Medieval passion plays as well as the contemporary passion plays of
Oberammergau.
112 Craig, “Foreword II,” reproduced in Innes, Edward Gordon Craig, 227. Craig tends to personify stage
scenery as a living thing claiming it “went quite mad” over time. He also writes, “When Drama went
indoors, it died, and when Drama went indoors, its scenery went indoors too. You must have the sun on
you to live and Drama and Architecture must have the sun on them to live” (Ibid., 228).
113 Ibid., 230.
114 In Scene Craig writes of how Molière “made chairs act” and how a “real” room presented on stage is
“real yet quite dead – expressionless – unable to act.” Craig, Scene, 15. In “Stage Visions” Craig
compared his screens to the human face as elements capable of subtly shifting expressions. Craig, Craig
on Theatre, 129–30.
115 Appia, “Man Is the Measure of All Things.”
116 Appia, “Music and the Art of Theatre,” 1899, reproduced in Appia and Beacham, Adolphe Appia: Texts
on Theatre, 37 (henceforth, Texts on Theatre), 29–58.
117 Appia, Volbach and Beacham, Adolphe Appia: Essays, Scenarios and Designs, 179.
118 Appia, “Theatrical Experiences and Personal Investigations” 1921, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on
Theatre, 76.
119 Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who was principally a musician, developed a gymnastic movement system
designed to harmonize body and spirit, healing the alienated modern condition of “general arrhythmia”
through “musical eurthymia,” seen in continuous harmonized gestures that harness the inherent
rhythms of the body and translating them into a spatial expression. Eurhythmics, Art and Education.
120 Appia, “Music and the Art of Theatre,” 29–58, Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 49.
121 Appia, “Ideas on Reform of Our Mise en Scène,” 1902, 115–19, in Beacham, Adolphe Appia, 118.
122 Appia, “Music and the Art of Theatre,” quoted by Beacham in, Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of
the Modern Theatre, 23.
123 Beacham, Adolphe Appia, 79.
124 Stein, “Plays,” 129–30.
125 Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Nibelung’s Ring, ix.
126 Wagner, “Art-Work of the Future,” 181.
127 Appia, “The Work of Living Art,” 1919, 167–78, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 177. This
notion of “sacrifice” as a means of distilling elements to their vital forms was for Appia “the essential
principle of the work of art.” See Appia, “Music and the Art of Theatre,” 44–67, in Beacham, Adolphe
Appia, 47.
128 Rajchman, Constructions, 60.
129 Ibid., 66.
130 Ibid., 68.
131 Ibid., 76.
132 Jonathan Crary writes that this experience of beholding an indistinct image/object is imbued with an
“inescapable temporality,” deterritorializing vision and opening reception to multiple and delirious
sensations. Such experience reinforces that “the eye is no longer what predicates a ‘real world,’ ” which,
as Nietzsche asserted, was no longer “the most useful or valuable world.” Crary, Techniques of the
Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, 138, 149.
133 Bablet, “Adolphe Appia – ‘Inventor of Modern Theatre or: Space-Creating Light,’ ” 46.
134 Ibid., 60.
135 Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero, 112. Simon Williams is referring to Wagner’s opera, Tristan
and Isolde (act III, sc. 1).
136 Weiss, The Wind and the Source, 33.
137 Semper, Style, 250.
138 Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmospherics,” 18.
139 Ibid., 24.
140 As ‘untimely men,’ Craig’s and Appia’s innovations were eventually realized decades later when
lightweight construction and digital stage technology could facilitate remotely controlled mobile scenic
units as well as theatrical smoke, fog and haze.
141 Craig, “The Steps 1,” 108. Craig, whose father was the architect, producer and scenographer E. W.
Godwin (1833–1886) – a celebrated member of the British Aesthetic Movement – was versed in
architectural massing, composition and proportions. In 1904, Craig met Henry van de Velde and Joseph
Hoffman in Weimar; European architects straddling between art nouveau and 20th-century modernism,
with whom he shared “a number of guiding principles,” including freeing stage and architecture of their
19th-century clutter. Bablet, The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, 70.
142 Craig, “The Steps 1,” 108.
143 Craig turned down the project, writing in a letter to Singer, “I have made it one of my rules lately to
work for no performer however highly gifted or eminent.” Craig, letter to Paris Singer, 30 July 1912,
Donald Oenslager Collection, General Collection, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, Box 1, Folder 39.
144 Stanilavski in Baugh, Theatre, Performance and Technology, 52.
145 Cheney, The Art Theatre.
146 Craig quoted in Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 246.
147 Lees, “The Arena Goldoni, Its Past, Its Present and Its Future,” 38.
148 Ibid., 28.
149 Von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 417.
150 Craig, Craig on Theatre, 95.
151 Appia, “Actor, Space, Light, Painting,” 1919, 114–15, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 115.
152 Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 14.
153 Fuchs, Revolutions in the Theatre: Conclusions Concerning the Munich Artist’s Theatre.
154 For discussions on Van de Velde’s tripartite stage see Van de Velde, Theatre Designs 1904–1914; and
Wendell Cole, “The Triple Stage.”
155 Erika Fischer-Lichte citing Reinhardt’s dramaturge, Herald, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms
of Political Theatre, 67.
156 Tallon, “Appia’s Theatre at Hellerau,” 496.
157 Theodor Fischer’s statement is taken from a 1906 article, which was reprinted in the issue of Hohe
Warte, dedicated to Hellerau. Quoted in de Michelis and Bilenker, “Modernity and Reform, Heinrich
Tessenow and the Institut Dalcroze at Hellerau,” 150. This paper presents a succinct summation of
Hellerau and the process toward its establishment.
158 The textile walls were described as resembling balloon silk soaked in cedar oil (Tallon, “Appia’s Theatre
at Hellerau,” 501–2), and as two layers of white canvas impregnated with wax (De Michelis and
Bilenker, 161).
159 Appia, “Monumentality,” 1922, 135–43, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 112.
160 Salzman, “Licht, Belichtung und Beleuchtung,” 70. Quoted in Beacham, Adolphe Appia, 94.
161 Appia in Tallon, “Appia’s Theatre at Hellerau,” 500.
162 “It was a dynamic void which attracted the presence of actor and spectator alike.” Tallon, “Appia’s
Theatre at Hellerau,” 488–9.
163 Appia, “Eurhythmics and the Theatre,” 1911, 90–4, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 92.
164 Appia, “Style and Solidarity,” 1909, 80–2, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 82.
165 Described by MacGowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow, 189.
166 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 63.
167 Odenthal, “Danced Space: Conflicts of Modern Dance Theatre,” 44.
168 Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 236.
169 Antonin, The Theatre and its Double, 12.
170 Architects credited with the Spirála Theatre are Zbyšek Stýblo, Jindřich Smetana, Jan Louda and Tomáš
Kulík, www.theatre-architecture.eu/it/db/?personId=1183&theatreId=152
171 Sceno-graphy, “Josef Svoboda – the Scenographer.”
172 Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space, 241.
173 Ibid., 243.
174 Ibid., 241.
175 Ibid., 243.
176 Kantor, A Journey Through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944–1990, 79.
177 Tschumi in Khan and Hannah, “Performance/Architecture,” 56.
178 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33.
179 Ibid., 117.
180 Ibid., 35.
181 Appia, “Monumentality,” 135–43, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 136.
182 Ibid.
183 Ibid., 140.
184 Ibid., 140–2.
185 Holl, “Storefront for Art and Architecture.”
186 It is worth noting that Nouvel transposed the Guthrie’s original asymmetric auditorium (designed in
1963 by Ralph Rapson with scenographer, Tanya Moiseiwitsch, and demolished to make way for the
Walker Art Centre expansion by Herzog and de Meuron in 2006), to the new riverside venue. Its thrust
format with irregular shaped stage and fragmented seating blocks formed an extremely radical and
unique theatre in its time; challenging directors, designers, technicians, performers and spectators, even
today.
187 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, 74.
188 Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 84.
Chapter 3

Abstract space
Toward an architecture of alienation

It is comparatively easy to set up a basic model for epic theatre. For practical
experiments I usually picked as my example of completely simple, “natural”
epic theatre an incident such as can be seen at any street corner: an
eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident
took place. […] Yet experience has shown that it presents astounding
difficulties to the reader or listener as soon as he is asked to see the
implications of treating this kind of street corner demonstration as a basic
form of major theatre, theatre for a scientific age. […] If the scene in the
theatre follows the street scene in this respect then the theatre will stop
pretending not to be theatre, just as the street-corner demonstration admits
it is a demonstration (and does not pretend to be the actual event).
– Bertolt Brecht, “Street Scene”

[T]heatrical constructivism can only celebrate its own separateness from the
real: by definition, its pivotal point is the technique of estrangement.
– Manfredo Tafuri, “The Stage as ‘Virtual City’ ”

The avant-garde that emerged after World War I replaced the earlier quest for an
immersive and mythic space with a desire to harness the chaotic nature of an
increasingly alienating world and its inherent qualities of defamiliarization and
interruption. The symbolist stage, as a rhythmic landscape out-of-time, was too
internal and ethereal for a more politically motivated avant-garde, which
demanded an activist stage to operate as a mobile and open network. The shift
was therefore from a focus on absolute space to that of abstract space, posited by
Henri Lefebvre as the “space of modernity” – “at once homogeneous and divided,
at once unified and fragmented” – which provokes a dialectic spacing to be
played out.1 This was evidenced in the utopian move toward constructivism,
celebrating art, life and history itself as a construction, where the city was
acknowledged as a “montage of attractions” in which incidents can be isolated
amid its distracted complexity.
Bertolt Brecht isolates a street-corner demonstration of a traffic accident as the
“basic model” for his “epic theatre” of the new scientific age. His “Street Scene,”
outlined in this chapter’s opening epigraph, isolates the telling of a significant
and interruptive event, urgently re-enacted by a witness to fellow onlookers,
investigators and passers-by. Because there is much at stake in this
demonstration, the storytelling requires critical descriptions and gestures as well
as adopting multiple roles, all devised on the spot. This spontaneous presentation
represented a new theatricality of everyday life as much as a deliberately anti-
theatrical theatre. In framing an urban incident, Brecht illustrates the
requirement for theatre events to reflect a lived rather than staged reality and
indicates that the “natural” is always inflected with the “artificial.”2 This involves
a “de-heroization” of the old theatrical model and the presentation of a new
monumentality through its socio-political context, where there is more at stake
than the accident and its protagonists: “The subject matter is immense,” and
therefore “epic.”3 Richard Drain points out that although the term “epic theatre” is
inseparably associated with Brecht, it was first pioneered by Erwin Piscator who
maintained the new “hero” was no longer the individual “but the epoch itself”
with its epic sweep, brought to dramatic life on stage, presenting events with a
wider focus and reaching a wider audience by utilizing all the new technical
means available.4 This was taken up in the Weimar Republic that emerged after
Germany’s defeat in World War I, and in Russia following the 1918 revolution
where, out of social, political and economic turmoil, innovations developed in art,
design, architecture, theatre, literature and film.
The utopian avant-garde in Germany and Russia were acknowledging a new
alienating spatiality that emerged from quotidian experience. Ostensibly
instrumental, global and totalizing it masked a more fragmented and divided
condition. Created and reinforced by bourgeois capitalism, Lefebvre named this
abstract space, which he characterizes as geometric, spectacular and phallic:
masquerading as transparent and neutral, it erases distinctions, renders the
spatial object a passive entity and contains an inherent violence in its furtive
control.5 However, while architecture’s Modern Movement reinforced abstract
space as a tabula rasa from which to build a brave new world, the constructivists
played with its contradictions and divisions, exposing an inherent theatricality.
The theatre entered the street scene and the street scene entered the theatre,
allowing aesthetic and quotidian events to play off each other.
Brecht bemoaned the fact that audience members handed in their everyday life
in the lobby along with their hat and coat to become immersed in the
intoxication of illusory magic staged within.6 The spectators in his “Street Scene,”
rather than concealed in the dark behind a fourth wall, are engaged in the action
and aware of their complicit role in public events: “Let them dream in blazing
clarity!”7 As a commonplace urban site made extraordinary, this scene
exemplifies Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), which he defined as
“turning the object of which one is made to be aware, to which one’s attention is
to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into
something peculiar, striking and unexpected.”8 Through the street-corner
“demonstration,” characterized by Brecht as the “repetition” of a prior event, the
familiarity of the street is made unfamiliar, and therefore theatrical – revealing
the loose boundary separating a dramatic event from the quotidian one. It is
alienation that renders the ordinary theatrical.
Ironically, although Brecht considered conventional theatre architecture
outmoded, he continued to produce work in traditional venues. Upon returning
to East Germany after World War II, he moved his Berliner Ensemble into the
Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, built in neo-baroque style in 1892 (Figures 3.1a
and 3.1b).9 A classic bourgeois concoction, its opulent multilevel horseshoe
auditorium, painted red and gold, faces a proscenium stage flanked with
caryatids. The only spatial gesture to a Brechtian “theatre of alienation” is the
slash of a defiantly painted red cross on the royal box’s coat of arms: a
performative statement within a sea of plush velvet and gilded figures. Referring
to this theatre as “a hideous rococo affair,” Herbert Blau argues that Brecht
refused to modernize the space because “he felt the anachronism of the
auditorium gave another perspective, even horizontal depth, to the austere ironies
on stage.”10 Brecht’s staging was predicated on effectively alienating the
conventional auditorium, exemplified in the 1928 production of his Die
Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) presented in the Theatre am
Schiffbauerdamm long before his company took up permanent residency there
(Figure 3.2). His collaborator, designer Caspar Neher, created a jarring contrast
between the traditional auditorium and the production’s modernity through the
elements of a short curtain strung across the proscenium, screens displaying
handwritten titles, lowered battens with visible lighting, and a montage of found
objects. This spatial assemblage repudiated the perspectival image set up by the
auditorium architecture and, in denying an integrated stage picture, heightened
the verfremdungseffekt. A mutual resistance between architecture and
scenography created the desired effect and excluded affect.
Figure 3.1a Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (1892): stage and auditorium
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.1b Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Berlin (1892): diagonal red cross painted on Kaiser’s box
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.2 Production of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera at Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm (1928): designed by
Caspar Neher

Source: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv Theaterdokumentation 985/011. Photo: Zander
& Labisch

Although Brecht himself did not create alternative venues for performance, his
“Street Scene” reworked the role of the spectator into an active rather than
passive recipient: one able to receive information and make judgement calls.
Exposing spatial alienation as a performative force, it emphasized the constructed
nature of reality through montage techniques, and gave performance a political
agenda in everyday life.11 However the theatrical, artistic and architectural avant-
garde operating between last century’s two World Wars productively utilized the
disruptive techniques of modernity’s estrangement to explore alternative event-
spaces that begin to articulate an architecture of alienation. This was particularly
played out by the Russian constructivists and within the Bauhaus of the Weimar
Republic.
In order to ascertain what the epic architectures of an abstracted and alienated
spatiality were and could be, this chapter considers some of the developments
across these two decades (focusing particularly on the 1920s) as an extended
moment where attempts were made to transform the auditorium into a machine-
for-action. The chapter is structured around the Russian constructivists, the
Bauhaus and Brecht; united under the rubric of Marxist constructivism, described
by Fredric Jameson as “an attempt to overcome both paralysis and impotence, the
failure of individual action and the sense of a global situation that cannot be
changed.”12 Drawing on the myriad street scenes of the metropolis, the theatre
becomes a site for staging the virtual city and the city is rendered a stage for
theatrical construction. This momentary alignment between the revolutionary
projects of both theatre and architecture shaped some interesting spatial ideas,
which neither field produced independently. It also exposed the anti-theatrical
character of architecture’s Modern Movement and its complicity in reinforcing
the abstract nature of the architectural object. The chapter concludes by
discussing adaptations of early 20th-century industrial spaces toward the end of
the century, which achieved an architecture of alienation by staging the failure of
utopian modernism and revealing the paradoxes and duplicity of abstract space.

The “Troubled Art”: avant-gardism divided

The War over, everything organizes, everything is clarified and purified;
factories rise already, nothing remains as it was before the War: the great
Competition has tested everything and everyone, it has gotten rid of aging
methods and imposed in their place others that the struggle has proven their
betters.
– Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, “After Cubism”

Two seminal 20th-century texts on architecture and space claim cubism as the
defining “event” that dramatically altered how space was conceived, created and
experienced early last century. This decisive moment, cited as 1910 by both
Sigfried Giedion, in Space, Time, Architecture, and Lefebvre, in The Production of
Space, also exposed modernism’s epistemic trauma. The cubist shattering of
spatial representation into a series of planes that advanced, retreated and
overlapped was a spectacular annihilation of the containing force of perspectival
construction, which historically controlled theatrical and architectural
representations. The image of a stable world was breaking apart and threatened
the law of the symbolic. Cubism also pre-empted the devastation of World War I
out of which the definitive historical avant-garde emerged as the futurists,
Dadaists, surrealists and constructivists.13
 Architecture’s instinctive reaction to “the troubled art of a troubled era” was to
reorient space through a new order and purity, most profoundly articulated by
Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in their 1918 manifesto “After
Cubism.”14 As the founding document of the purist movement Ozenfant and
Jeanneret outlined “The Laws” for a new purified aesthetic. They criticized
Parade, an important cubist performance first staged in 1917 by the Ballet Russes
as a much-celebrated artistic collaboration between Serge Diaghilev, Jean
Cocteau, Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso.15 In the purist view Parade – a living,
exploded collage of animated bodies and scenic elements within the proscenium
frame – was “facile entertainment, facile decor, the facile arabesque, everything
that nullifies beauty.” With no relevance to the serious purpose of architecture, it
represented a discordant negation of the “new atmosphere of science and
industry” in which there was no place for the theatrical.16 Instead, Ozenfant and
Jeanneret wished to harness the destruction of World War I as a purifying force
that enabled a visual clarification of post-cubist rationalism, which incorporated
a machine aesthetic, new technologies and materials, and formal, clean
geometries. This new aesthetic could not be sullied by the theatre, which, in their
later essay “The Modern Painter” (1925), they equate with decoration as deviant
and decadent.17
In the aftermath of the catastrophic “war to end all wars,” the aim of
architecture as “ideological instrument” was to reconstruct a whole world.
Whether in the hands of the French purists or as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New
Objectivity) movement, architecture’s Modern Movement turned away from
decoration and toward rationalism, focusing on a new utopian ideology. By 1932,
the Modern Movement was officially declared “International Style” in the United
States, securing its status as a global phenomenon:18 the tabula rasa created by
technological warfare became the signature gesture of a clean, white, open-ended
architecture; abstract space par excellence. Yet, as Tafuri, contends, “the
dissolution of the architectural object in the overall process only emphasized the
internal contradictions in the Modern Movement.”19
During the 1920s, the architectural avant-garde was divided between those
committed to theatrical social laboratories in the public sphere and the emerging
masters of the Modern Movement who wanted to keep theatre behind the
proscenium arch. The Modern Movement’s “avant-garde” resisted other avant-
gardes, especially those associated with stage theatrics. Aiming to reconfigure the
traditional conception of architecture as “a stable structure, which gives form to
permanent values and consolidates urban morphology,” the Modern Movement
favoured “architecture […] rather than revolution” to play a political role through
its technically defined ideology.20 Convinced that the tools of estrangement could
combat modern alienation and concretize the dream of a better future, the
architectural vanguard replaced a spiritual utopia of absolute space led by artists
with a rational utopia led by scientists. Their L’Esprit Nouveau (new spirit) aimed
to sweep away both the mystical and the unclean and replace unhealthy interiors
and urban blight with clean light-filled airy spaces. Healthy bodies and efficient
machinery would prevail in their rational utopia.
According to Allen S. Weiss, a totalizing, if not totalitarian, impulse has always
informed such utopian dreams, which insist on a coherent law and a stable
symbolic, shun the aleatory and the deviant, and eliminate accident and
disorder.21 Architectural modernism is no exception. In its will to create secure,
enduring and lucid architecture, the Modern Movement embraced utopian
socialism. This architectural avant-garde was split between what Hilde Heynen
calls the “pastoral view” and the “counterpastoral view” of utopia. Consistent
with the pastoral view, the Modern Movement denied modernity’s inherent
tensions, contradictions and dissonances, believing that a harmonious,
continuous and creative force could unify economics and culture. In contrast, the
Russian constructivists, consistent with the antipastoralist view, tested the
dystopian idea that modernity was characterized by “irreconcilable fissures and
insoluble contradictions, by divisions and fragmentation, by the collapse of an
integrated experience of life, and the irreversible emergence of autonomy in
various domains that are incapable of regaining their common foundation.”22
Public participation, in which the user became a central element, was more
important than the unity of the object. While there was no place for the theatre in
the pastoral view of the Modern Movement, the counterpastoralists embraced
theatre as a fertile laboratory for the new order and exposed the impossible
possibility of any revolutionary utopia and the flaws in its idealistic technological
universe.
Beatriz Colomina has indicated that although the Modern Movement shunned
theatre, it was “inherently theatrical.”23 Its deferral to the precedence of the media
image became a means of presenting the faux reality of architecture’s abstract
rationalism as fixed, enduring and hygienic. Citing Peter Smithson’s critique that
“modern architecture was a staged architecture, a masque,” Colomina illustrates
how the smooth white walls of modernism masked its less ethereal constructions
and proclivity to eventual contamination and decay.24 Led by Le Corbusier (the
architect formally known as Jeanneret), the Modern Movement staged its
particular style, performing the heroic male figure of modernity as “energetic,
cool and detached” and choreographing spectacles as a form of architectural
entertainment.25 However a renunciation of architecture as either masque or
mask, foreclosed on testing the dynamics and rigor of the new style it was
advocating, keeping it hermetically sealed from the other arts. It was in the
Bauhaus, before architecture officially dominated the program, where
collaborations between differing artistic fields took place to test modern
architecture as a more embodied and evental phenomenon. This was even more
pronounced and radical in Russia where avant-garde artists, architects and
theatre-makers collaborated on provocative urban proposals.
An urban approach to performance, matched by a performative urbanity, grew
out of Russia’s post-revolutionary agit-prop (agitational propaganda). Aligned
with the Proletkult worker’s theatre movement,26 agit-prop engaged with the city
through exhibitions, pavilions, sculptures, re-enactments, marches, carnivals,
speakers’ tribunes and kiosks. Utilizing the urban elements of lighting, fountains
and fireworks, as well as “music-massed industrial sounds – blasts of factory
sirens, rhythmic machine noises,” it employed tram stops, streetcars, steamers,
trains and planes as public stages. The city became a complex montage
advertising the new regime with slogans, murals, decor and signage: “Art went
truly ‘into the streets’ and made people no longer simply observe, but also
participate.”27

City as a “Montage of Attractions”

Nobody pays any attention to the magnificent spectacle in our streets, for
every “somebody” is in the play himself. Every energy is employed for a
specific purpose. The whole is amorphous. All energies must be organized
 into a unity, crystallised, and put on show. In this way a work is produced –
it may be called a work of art.
– El Lissitzky, Victory Over the Sun

The newly formed Soviet Union transformed the theatre of revolution into
revolutionary theatre through the staging of mass festivals and urban agit-prop
events. Theatre, itself in the throes of revolt and adopted as a politicized tool,
became a thing in motion; it could no longer be physically contained. The
instability of the urban environment entered the theatres, which, in turn, took to
the streets where art, history and politics combined to raise the prestige of the
revolution: plebeian, conservative, innovative and moderate tendencies interacted
in agit-prop art, to form what Szymon Bojko calls “a base for joint action.”28
Luminaries of the new Soviet theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Vladimir
Mayakovsky – previously symbolists who were aware of Edward Gordon Craig
and Adolphe Appia’s work – had already aligned themselves with the cubo-
futurists. They were familiar with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s provocative
manifesto on “The Variety Theatre” (1913) that called for a disruptive auditorium
where “the action develops simultaneously on the stage, in the boxes, and in the
orchestra.”29 Marinetti’s polemic, like Villier’s Cruel Tale,30 enacted a revolt
against the theatre building and its occupants, calling them to action and
releasing their “body-madness.”31 Mindful that their new public was made up of
those who had stormed the Winter Palace, post-revolutionary theatre-makers
understood that a new theatre would be needed for the newly theatricalized
body, described by Tafuri as the “man-thing, a player on that dangerous stage
that is the city.”32
Brecht’s “Street Scene,” which found the theatrical in the ordinary, reflected
avant-garde concern with the city as an inherently theatrical phenomenon and
put the interiorized space of the theatre itself in question. In Tafuri’s words, “The
theatrical place itself must dissolve into the city. In such a place, one can only
celebrate the grotesque annihilation of the soul, or the equally grotesque attempt
of the soul to reappropriate the objects in revolt.”33 Whereas Brecht saw the city
as a viable stage, Tafuri maintains that the historical avant-garde also regarded
the stage as a “virtual city.”34 His idea that the stage presented “the spectator with
the bare skeleton of a total world,” in which the actor “is invited to compete with
the peripeteia offered him by the scenic mechanism,”35 informed the work of
1920s Russian constructivist scenographers such as Vladimir Tatlin, Liubov
Popova, Aleksandr Vesnin, Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodchenko, and El
Lissitzky, who traversed the disciplines of art, architecture, fashion and theatre.
Many, operating simultaneously as artists, architects and scenographers, also
collaborated on proposals for buildings, installations, uniforms and monuments
in the city.
The constructivists’ newly theatricalized city was presented on stage as a total
world of abstracted urban structures around, within and upon which abruptly
shifting events misfire. Sergei Eisenstein’s “Montage of Attractions” (1923)
advocated a theatrical experience “aimed solely at the nerves of the audience.”36
Entering the Proletkult as a designer in 1922, Eisenstein utilized theatre as an
“apparatus” for creating “attractions”; aggressive moments designed to shock,
amuse, provoke and stimulate the audience out of their preconceptions through
“a mathematical calculation of the elements of affect.”37 He gathers the audience
in the theatre, only to have their focus simultaneously enhanced and disrupted by
unexpected eruptions of sound and action. Inspired by cinema, music hall and
circus, his choreographed shock effects included high-wire acts directly above the
heads of the audience and fireworks beneath their seats.38 Lissitzky’s
“electromechanical peepshow” for the futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1923)
also incorporated such alienating effects as the deafening hammering of stage
machinery that put in motion the “bodies in play,”39 as did the stage constructions
of Russian scenographers, Stepanova and Popova, which they referred to as
“surprise machines” and “spatial-force constructions,” respectively.
Meyerhold’s “octobrist” proclamation (1920), which inspired Eisenstein,
rejected symbolist mysticism and upheld an ideal of the actor-acrobat performing
upon the biomechanical stage – an arena blending circus with congress and
theatre, which broke down boundaries between performers and spectators.40
Working closely with designers, Meyerhold subjected the 19th-century playhouse
to the socio-political revolution by disturbing the relationships within it. He
fragmented and geometricized building and bodies through abstract costumes,
biomechanic movements and mechanized sets; disturbing established boundaries
by exceeding the prescribed space of the stage. In The Dawn (1920), a
collaboration with artist Vladimir Dmitriev, Meyerhold utilized the orchestra pit
for a political chorus, placed performers in the auditorium, and dropped leaflets
from the balconies. The following year, in Mystery-Bouffe (1921), his designers
Vladimir Kharkovsky and Anton Lavinsky undermined the proscenium frame
with a collection of structured forms that step down from the stage into the
audience.
Meyerhold’s collaborations with Popova and Stepanova, in The Magnanimous
Cuckold (1922) and Tarelkin’s Death (1922), respectively, were characterized by
elaborate sets of moving parts; underscoring the action, these sets established his
principle of “objects at play” to be employed by performers.41 This architectural
“stage furniture” was utilized further as portable constructions designed to move
out of the bounds of the theatre: Popova’s design for Earth Rampant (1923)
incorporated a mobile freestanding structure with projection screen.
The restless constructivist theatre of the 1920s shuttles between theatre
interiors and found urban spaces. Perhaps the most radical meeting of both is in
Eisenstein’s Gas Masks (1924), staged in a real gasworks amid working machines
and working actors, in which the show ended as the actual night-shift personnel
came on duty. Although Eisenstein claims this production “represented the
success of an absolutely real, highly objective art,” he also acknowledges that
“[t]heater accessories in the midst of real factory plastics appeared ridiculous.
The element of ‘play’ was incompatible with the acrid smell of gas. The pitiful
platform kept getting lost among the real platforms of labour activity.”42 This
incompatibility between fictive and lived reality – a disjunction embraced by
postdramatic theatre – turned Eisenstein away from theatre’s limitations toward
cinema, where his montage effects could be more effectively manipulated: “The
horse bolted and the cart fell into cinema.”43
In their efforts to build a new world from the ruins of the old, artist-architects
such as Tatlin, Vesnin, Lissitzky and Konstantin Melnikov brought together the
materiality of the built environment and the immateriality of cinema. For
example, Tatlin’s unbuilt proposal for a Tower to the Third International of 1920,
which was designed to house the Comintern,44 used a steelwork structure of
interlacing spiral forms and projections. This structure, now known as Tatlin’s
Tower, contained three enormous suspended geometric volumes rotating at
varying speeds on a dynamic asymmetrical axis: the lower cube, which
accommodated lectures, conferences and meetings, revolved at one revolution per
year; the middle pyramid, designed for executive activities, revolved at one
revolution per month; and the topmost cylinder, conceived for receiving and
broadcasting information, revolved at one revolution per day. Featuring an open-
air screen that would light up at night to relay news, the structure, which was to
be twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, would also take advantage of cloudy
weather by projecting manifestos onto the sky. Here, Tatlin harnessed the
theatrical qualities of atmosphere and movement to produce and promote
political revolution using the dynamics of time.
Melnikov incorporated projection and movement systems into his competition
design for the Leningrad Pravda (1924). He proposed a building constructed of six
lozenge-shaped volumes, independently rotating around a central circulation
core, which would present a constantly changing silhouette. Viktor and
Aleksandr Vesnin’s winning scheme for this competition, with moving forms of
exterior elevators, signage and communication systems, recalled the dynamic
structures of Aleksandr’s set design for Tairov’s production of The Man Who Was
Thursday (1922) at the Kamerney Theatre (Figures 4.5a and 4.5b), which was
clearly influenced by the work of his friends, Popova and Stepanova.
Constructivist architecture in the early 1920s utilized the theatre as a
laboratory for rehearsing full-scale buildings, inspired by the Proletkult’s
“theatricalization of everyday life”45 and Meyerhold’s biomechanical stage as a
political platform. This interdisciplinary integration of art, architecture and
performance led to the creation of the hybrid object, which Lissitzky called a
Proun or “interchange station.” His Prounen (Projections for the Affirmation of
the New) focused on the dynamic form of the object, which, negotiating between
art forms and realities, is able to be apprehended from a range of vantage points.
One such interchange station was represented in Lissitzky’s photomontage of the
Lenin Tribune (1920); a tilting elevator structure with moveable telescopic
balconies and a sign that doubles as a projection screen so as to both reflect and
enhance the gesture of the speaker.46 This tribune, like Lissitzky’s Prounenraum
(Proun space) projects, was designed to utilize the movement of an urban public
in conjunction with that of its own elements: “As a process and ongoing event
rather than a static, self-contained thing, the work of art becomes increasingly
interesting, dynamic, open-ended. It becomes in a word, modern.”47 As a dynamic
urban intervention, the mobile and performative object establishes a performance
space by harnessing the energy and focus of spontaneous publics.
Lissitzky’s Prounen are linked to Eisenstein’s concept of Montage through an
emphasis on process as much as production: “The spectator not only sees the
represented elements of the finished work, but also experiences the dynamic
process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by
the author.”48 This applies to the theatrical and cinematic event as well as to the
architectural event, and is in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the
“Author as Producer,” where he advocates an equivalent concern for product and
its means of production in order to create an instructive model.49 Benjamin notes
that Brecht’s epic model utilized the technique of montage to expose the
established “theatre of complex machineries” as an inherently redundant
apparatus, through an interrupting action that discloses existing conditions as
much as it produces new ones.50
The same can be said of the urban interventions and proposed architectures of
the constructivists, for whom the city was an interruptive force. Applying this
technique of interruption to the specific space of the event allows all aspects of its
construction and production to be made not only visibly apparent, but for it to be
recognized as an active contributor beyond the role of passive container or
mechanical apparatus. The architectural montage of attractions, performing its
own shock effects, is deliberately created from a contrapuntal juxtaposition of
autonomous parts. Bernard Tschumi, referring to Eisenstein’s formulation, takes
up this performative disjunction, whereby a “programmatic collision” provides
the conditions for new architectural acts.51 As a machine-for-action the theatre
draws on the inherently resistant force of its built environment to reveal discrete
working parts as multiple events within the singular event.

Stage space – Space Stage

Audience involvement, the spatial realization of the futurist desire to lead
the eye of the spectator to the centre of the stage, is now entrusted to a
theatre-machine, a new institutional place.
– Manfredo Tafuri, “The Stage as ‘Virtual City’ ”
 The Space Stage of the Railway-Theatre, the contemporary form of theatre,
is floating in space. The ground floor is only the support for the open
construction. The audience is circulating in electro-magnetic movements
around the core of the stage.
– Frederick Kiesler, Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatretechnik

Meyerhold constantly explored the dynamic relationships between scenography,

performers, viewers and the existing architecture. He stripped his theatre to
expose its brick walls and bare stage, reveal an “alternative space” as architectural
machine and incorporate real machinery with stage machinery. Working with
Lissitzky, he established a powerful integration of space and action in the
proposed (and unrealized) set for I Want a Child (1928–1929): together, director
and designer displaced and rearranged conventional relationships within the
traditional picture-frame auditorium. Using an elaborate architectural
intervention, they seamlessly integrated both building and setting in order to
encourage active participation from the audience (Figure 3.3). This involved the
placement of extra seating on the existing stage that faced the auditorium across
a multilevel acting area in the form of a spiral ramp sited in the orchestra area.
Unfortunately, as a one-off conversion of an extant theatre, the project was too
complex to be realized. Such scenographic interventions were not enough for
Meyerhold, who demanded nothing short of a new form of architecture in which
to gather and perform: “I cannot represent the great advances of socialist
reconstruction with plywood scenery. I need new technical resources in a new
building. The problems facing the theatre are problems of technology.”52
Figure 3.3 El Lissitzky’s set model of Sergei Tretyakov’s I Want a Child (1928–1929), for Meyerhold’s
unrealized production

Source: The A. A. Bahkrushin State Central Theatre Museum

Meyerhold eventually commissioned architects Barkhin and Vakhtangov to

design a 1,600-seat venue in 1932. Working with the director, they proposed a
steeply raked amphitheatre. By affording axonometric views of the performance
area, this arrangement that wrapped a highly mechanized stage of two revolves,
clearly displayed the actors’ movement patterns (Figure 3.4). They completely
eliminated the proscenium and exposed the back of the stage, which included a
balcony that displayed the doors to the dressing rooms.
Figure 3.4 Proposal for Meyerhold Theatre by Barkhin and Vakhtangov (1932)

Source: The A. A. Bahkrushin State Central Theatre Museum

Although governmental interference and a move toward social realism stymied

the completion of the Meyerhold Theatre as originally envisaged, the proposal
shows how a space defined by light, stage machinery, projections and
architectonic bodies could be integrated into what the director called an
“industrialization” and “cinefication” of the theatre.53 However radical this
design, it left the long-established interiority of the theatre intact with its defined
areas for performance and spectatorship, in contrast with Lissitzky’s design for I
Want a Child, which utilized urban elements to integrate architecture,
scenography and bodies within an open and mutually theatrical site. By the end
of the 1920s, as the constructivists abandoned the dynamic and agitational
reciprocity between city and stage, the most convincing realized scheme for
biomechanical stage architecture had come not from Russia or Germany but from
Austria.
In 1924, Frederick Kiesler, a scenographer, artist and architect who was born in
Romania and worked in Vienna, organized the “International Exhibition of New
Theatre Techniques” as part of Vienna’s Music and Theatre Festival. Collecting
hundreds of concepts for theatre architecture, set design and costume design,
including posters and models, by Western and Eastern Europe’s avant-garde, he
not only designed the exhibition but also the flexible L+T System for displaying
objects and paintings, as well as the poster, catalogue, admission ticket and
stationery. Kiesler also created his Space Stage (Raumbühne), a full-size structure
installed in the central hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus for a program of lectures,
music, dance and theatre (Figure 3.5). Highlighting the need for a new type of
performance space to match the new theatrical movement, his provisional
structure was an ellipsoid multilevel construction of curving ramps, stairs,
ladders and elevator that wrapped a spiral tower; the actors had to perform to an
audience that totally surrounded them.54 He had drawn inspiration for his
“railway stage” from industrial systems, sports stadia and funfair rides, as well as
from Tatlin’s proposed Tower to the Third International, which he admired. The
previous year Lissitzky, declaring that he wanted “not to reform something which
already exists, but to bring something else into existence,” had already enacted a
break from the frontal approach to stage performance in his proposal for Victory
over the Sun; to be performed on a square accessible from all sides with puppets
whose range of movements would be stimulated by “electromagnetic forces and
devices” and controlled by a centralized operator directing action, sound and
light as a multimedia installation.55
Figure 3.5 Frederick Kiesler’s Space Stage: Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatretechnik, Vienna (1924)

Source: Photographer unknown. Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

Frederick Kiesler’s Space Stage also explored the idea of a fully surrounded
stage, but on a larger scale and using human performers rather than puppets.
Adapting the baroque proscenium form of the Konzerthaus into an arena for
action, the architect claimed that his was “the first theatre- in-the-round to be
built and acted upon.”56 However, the project’s true radicality lay in its capacity,
as a freestanding mobile object, to be inserted into any number of environments,
converting them into theatrical sites. By integrating his dynamic catalyst for
action into city spaces for 24/7 events, Kiesler hoped to transform everyday life
through theatre and spectacle.57 The following year, he developed these ideas into
the City in Space at the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et
Industriels Modernes” in Paris. His monumental free-floating megacity was a
physical manifestation of “correalism,” a developing theory of the limitless and
multidimensional correlation between the body, the object and space.58
Kiesler’s Space Stage – the first of his many explorations into stage space – and
the theatrical interventions of the Russian constructivists were indebted to the
Italian futurists who glorified movement and the machine to harness scenic
dynamism in the service of a highly mechanized age.59 Futurist designers, such as
Enrico Prampolini, saw the potential of the scenographer to spatially “renovate
the stage” with an abstracted reality, no longer “prowl[ing] around the dusty and
stinking corners of classical architecture.”60 In 1914 architect Antonio Sant’Elia
had called for architecture’s heavy, static monumentality to be replaced by a
“taste for the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift.”61 Prampolini
echoed this call in his demand for a “colourless electromechanical architecture,”
capable of forming a “polyexpressive and magnetic theatre” constructed of
powerfully illuminated reflectors designed to create intersecting light and
shadows and requiring neither actors nor stage.62 However, while Kiesler’s Space
Stage and City in Space were untethered sites of open networks, they were still
grounded in political reality and depended on the physical engagement of fully
empowered and expressive bodies. Wagner had seated spectators in the dark,
throwing their view forward into the scenic picture. Appia had enfolded the
choric onlookers in the rhythmic ambience of the scene. Kiesler’s urban citizens
now inhabited a delirious machine-in-action.
Following hard on the heels of the post-World War I avant-garde (futurists,
Dadaists, surrealists), the constructivists exploited an industrialized metropolis to
incorporate the anti-mechanical, the revolt of the object, spatial fragmentation,
disruptive techniques and a disordering of the senses – all incompatible with
architecture’s inherent objective to build a safe, new world. However, as Tschumi
points out, these activist gestures deliberately played out an opposition to
classical form, resulting in spaces “enhanced by all kinds of dynamic obstacles.”63
A productive alliance between architecture and this new activism was created in
the Weimar Republic through the Bauhaus that, as “the acceptable face” of
architecture’s avant-garde, explored an architecture mediating realism and
utopia.64 Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co identify the Bauhaus as a “decantation
chamber” refining and synthesizing the post-cubist radical movements into “the
ideological symbol of the unity of the Modern Movement as a whole.”65 However,
by the time this was achieved in Dessau, where architecture claimed ascendancy
in the institution, the pivotal role played by the Bauhaus’s performances, theatre
workshop and festive celebrations was diminished.
Bauhaus festivities
The Bauhaus looked lovely from the outside, radiating into the winter night.
The windows were pasted on the inside with metallic paper; the white and
coloured light bulbs were concentrated according to the room. The great
block of glass permitted long vistas; and thus for one night this house of
work was transformed into the “high academy for creative form.”
– Oskar Schlemmer: The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer

“At long last another party at this troubled Bauhaus,” noted Oskar Schlemmer in
February 1929, reminiscing on the festivities held in its previous location in
Weimar “at which Expressionism produced its wildest, most fantastic effects,
mark[ing] the happy festive stations along the otherwise thorny path of this
institution.”66 This diary entry was made during the last year he worked with the
Bauhaus, where he had led the theatre workshop since 1923. As with his Russian
counterparts, Popova and Stepanova, who produced objects as actors and actors
as objects, Schlemmer abstracted space and the performing body. His signature
performance of the Triadic Ballet (1922), which premiered in Stuttgart just prior
to his joining the Bauhaus, transformed bodies into elemental architectonic forms
that moved in choreographed geometries. Like Craig, with his Über-marionette,
Schlemmer’s focus was a metaphysical one, attempting to capture the grace and
precision of “man in space” by synthesizing “primordial impulses” with a new
mathematics of relativity. His transfiguration of the human form into an essential
hieroglyph distilled communication to elemental gesture.
A school of crafts and fine arts, the Bauhaus was part of the cultural
renaissance of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) after Germany’s defeat in World
War I. It had inherited the utopian legacy of the Deutscher Werkbund and sought
to insulate itself from city and technology through “the mystic communion of the
artist-artisan” so as to return to pre-bourgeois values.67 Taking part in the
transition from expressionism to New Objectivity, the Bauhaus cloistered
students and masters in Weimar (1919–1925), Dessau (1925–1932) and Berlin
(1932–1933), in contrast with the Russian constructivists who actively took to the
streets to create work.68
Walter Gropius, who established the Bauhaus and led it until 1927, wished to
recover the “architectonic spirit” that had been lost in the “salon arts.” He
proposed an interdisciplinary approach that assimilated body, craft and machine
in education, research and practice. The very etymology of Bauhaus – bau
(building) and haus (house) – signalled the importance of architecture to
Gropius’s doctrine. Although not offered as a specific discipline until his final
year in Dessau, architecture was always at the heart of this new “cathedral to the
future,” which, as outlined in the Bauhaus Manifesto (1919), “will embrace
architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise
toward heaven.”69 Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut image of a crystalline and
refractive Cathedral of Socialism (1919) graced the Manifesto’s cover (Figure 3.6).
This socialist edifice, constructed of fragmenting and intersecting planes, captures
Gropius’s insistence on “the multi-form shape […] of the building in its totality
and in its parts,” where architecture is constructed around the varying arts and
crafts offered by the material workshops of metal, textiles, ceramics, wood and
stone, as well as disciplinary workshops of joinery, furniture, printing,
advertising, weaving and theatre.70
Figure 3.6 Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral of Socialism, Bauhaus Manifesto (April 1919)

Source: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Atelier Schneider.

Like architecture, theatre was also not included in the original Bauhaus
curriculum – it was introduced in 1921 under the direction of Lothar Schreyer –
but, as Magdalena Droste points out, it became “a conceptual counterpart to
‘building’ [… where] ‘Building and theatre,’ ‘work and play’ were mutually to
enrich each other.”71 This relationship is clearly illustrated in Paul Klee’s sketch
for the 1922 curriculum (Figure 3.7), which shows the circular centre of a seven-
point star inscribed with the words Bau und Bühne (building and stage). Each
point of the star corresponded to a design workshop circumnavigating the central
hub. However, Johannes Itten’s more formal graphic adaptation of Klee’s sketch
in the 1922 statutes focused solely on Bau, more accurately reflected the way the
curriculum was structured at the time (Figure 3.8). Although architecture was not
yet taught as a distinct discipline, it was the locus for all practices of art and
design: its crucial role expressed by a circular form resembling both choral space
and a theatrical tribune. Bau as Bühne staged the implicit centrality of
architecture in the Bauhaus. Five years later in a lecture-demonstration at the
Dessau Theatre, Schlemmer reinforced the link between building and stage,
claiming that “like the concept of Bau itself, the stage is an orchestral complex.”72
Elsewhere in the Weimar Republic, Brecht’s design collaborator Caspar Neher
wanted to replace the traditional term Bühnenbilder (stage picturemaker) with
Bühnenbauer (stage builder) in order to highlight the constructive nature of
performance production.

Figure 3.7 Paul Klee’s sketch for the structure of the Weimar Bauhaus curricula (1922)

Source: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Markus Hawlik

Figure 3.8 Johannes Itten’s diagram on the cover of the Bauhaus Statutes by Walter Gropius (1923)

Source: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Performance became a central motif for the Bauhaus school, pervading its
other art forms, with the original Bauhaus manifesto encouraging “plays,
lectures, poetry, music, fancy-dress parties” not only in the project work of
faculty and students but also in their notorious and highly produced celebrations
(Feste).73 Many photographs from the period show an integration of object, body,
performance and building. Schlemmer saw performance as a counterbalance to
architecture; a “trial balloon” whose “diameter when fully inflated would equal
the building department.”74 For him the Dessau Bauhaus was at its most
promising when festive parties transformed it into what it proclaimed to be: the
“high academy for creative form.”75 This rationale for festivity is captured in
Johannes Itten’s motto “play becomes party – party becomes work – work
becomes play,” reinforced by Schlemmer (after Friedrich Schiller) as “the play
instinct (der Spieltrieb)”: a means of finding pleasure in production.76 By 1929, as
Schlemmer noted, there were fewer Bauhaus parties; the increasing precision and
rationalism of New Objectivity had deflated the performance balloon and
undermined the dynamics of art, as shouted “from the rooftops of modern
architecture.”77
The definitively modern work of architecture that housed the Bauhaus in
Dessau was designed by Walter Gropius and opened in 1925 (Figures 3.9a, 3.9b
and 3.9c). The building contained a Festebene (festive area) that was dedicated to
performance as a regular creative expression in relation to a range of events,
which included food, theatre, lectures and parties.78 Sited centrally on the ground
floor of the complex and thereby reinforcing theatre’s pivotal position within the
social and professional life of the school,79 the Festebene was formed out of the
interlocking zones of entrance, auditorium and canteen, all of which open into a
united common area. Gropius described this festive realm as a “miniature world”
that combined activities of working, eating, partying and performing.80 It formed
the focal point in a building that lit up at night as a floating dazzling form. A
program of public exhibitions, parties and performances accompanied the official
opening in December 1926, highlighting and mobilizing its performative nature
as a new architectural machine. By this time theatre was one of five workshops,
which also included architecture as its latest and premier discipline.
The new 164-seat Dessau auditorium (Figure 3.10) stood in stark contrast to the
previous makeshift theatre at Weimar – painted pink, grey and blue with murals
and fittings created by the various Bauhaus workshops – which Schlemmer
described as “a dubious suburban podium.”81 The austere white room of the
Dessau auditorium expressed the functionalist sachlich aesthetic of rationalized
pure form: nine rows of folding tubular steel and canvas chairs designed by
Marcel Breuer formed a united block of spectators facing the stage, which was
divided into three sections by two columns (Figures 9a-c). Kirsten Baumann, in
her visual documentation of the renovated building, refers to the space as
“provocative”: “at first glance [it] lacked any similarity to the traditional
representational theatre architecture.”82 This is reinforced by my own first glance:
the light-filled room, with its flanking windows, flat-floor auditorium, raised-
platform stage and limited ceiling height, exhibits few concessions to the
exigencies of sightlines, theatrical lighting requirements, technical control and
methods of stage production required of a working theatre venue. However, a
second, closer glance reveals that the seating area is very gently raked (only
partially attending to sightlines) and that the divided stage forms a weakened
proscenium with wings that can open out in the spirit of Van de Velde’s tripartite
stage (mentioned in the previous chapter). However, as a purpose-built “house
stage,” its limitations are present in the original intention to platform lectures and
staged performances.83 This programmatic compromise, accommodating more
than one function, renders the space more lecture hall than theatre. As
Schlemmer explained in his 1927 lecture-demonstration to the public, it offers “a
stage for performances on a limited scale.”84
The high modernism and limited theatricality of the Dessau Bauhaus
auditorium contrasts with the mechanization, aesthetics and abstraction of its
stage program. However, as an accessible, bare and open room, it facilitates the
direct un-theatrical relationship demanded by Brecht, Meyerhold and Piscator in
their quest for an anti-representational theatre. Nevertheless, the space is at its
optimum performance when the chairs are folded away, the concertina walls slid
apart between stage and canteen, and the doors to the auditorium opened to
connect with the entry vestibule. This discloses an enfilade of spaces for those
moving between spaces in party mode, confirming Schlemmer’s delight in the
building – as event – during the event.

Figure 3.9a Bauhaus, Dessau: view from mensa (canteen)

Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.9b Bauhaus, Dessau: view from stage
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 3.9c Bauhaus, Dessau: auditorium

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 3.10 Dessau Bauhaus auditorium (1927)

Source: Photograph by Erich Consemüller. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Gropius understood the Dessau complex as an architectural event apprehended

through movement by stating “you have to walk right round the whole building
in order to appreciate its corporeality and the function of its members.”85 In
Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion reinforces this notion of a new
temporal spatiality in which modern architecture is constructed from a series of
fragments through the mobile eye and circulating body of the occupant. Relating
modern architecture to cubism through movement, Giedion places an image of
the Dessau building next to Picasso’s 1912 painting L’Arlésienne.86
Gropius himself became more explicit about the Dessau edifice as a
performance site when he included its auditorium and a photograph of The
Building as Stage by Lux Feininger in a later edition of The Theatre of the
Bauhaus (1961, first published in 1925 prior to construction of the Dessau
building). Performers wearing Schlemmer costumes and adopting equally
abstracted gestures with iconic props are positioned on varying levels of the
student-housing block. The caption reads: “The modern building with a series of
transversable roof areas, terraces, and verandas will make the ideal outdoor stage
of the future” (Figure 3.11).87
In Schlemmer’s account of the Metal Party in February 1929, the building was
at its most performative through the deliberately orchestrated co-presence of
building, light, décor and music, as well as adorned and dancing bodies, realizing
the institution’s claim to creative form and expression. For Schlemmer, utopia
was to be found here in “the genuine feeling for play and the miraculous” as well
as “intellectual and spiritual receptivity and response.”88 Reformulating Friedrich
Nietzsche’s disputation of Apollonian architectonics, he saw the choreographed
geometry of bodies and buildings as a means of recovery through the expressivity
of performance, which, “Dionysian and wholly emotional in origin, becomes
strict and Apollonian in its final form, a symbol of balancing opposites.”89
Figure 3.11 The Bauhaus Building as a stage

Source: Photo: T. Lux Feininger. Choreography: Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Estate of T. Lux
Feininger

While the modernity of the Dessau building, described by Gropius as a

materialized “manifesto of Bauhaus ideas,”90 is a far cry from the expressionism
of the fracturing, crystalline tower that graced the cover of his original 1919
manifesto, its apprehension as an abstract space, expressing a fragmentation held
in check by a unified form, is in keeping with the desire to make whole and well
a damaged world through the “social art” of a “total architecture.”91 Gropius’s
vision for the “Building of the Future” (1919) furthers the tradition of synthesis
called for by Richard Wagner in his “Art-Work of the Future” (1849), followed by
Craig’s “Theatre of the Future” (1908). Gropius is also aligned to Wagner and
Craig through an adherence to the idea of a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk),
expressed in his proposal for a Total Theatre of 1927, which seems more
representative of a theatrical Bauhaus venue than the austere and limited Dessau
auditorium.
Total Theatre: the “Great Stage Machine”
The contemporary theatre architect should set himself the aim to create a
great keyboard for light and space, so objective and adaptable in character
that it would respond to any imaginable vision of a stage director; a flexible
building, capable of transforming and refreshing the mind by its spatial
impact alone.
– Walter Gropius, Theatre of the Bauhaus

Meyerhold’s exploration of changing relationships in existing auditoria broke the

traditional boundaries between performers and audience, which Appia had
previously considered for the Hellerau Festspielhaus with his unrealized vision of
shifting stage formats. Between 1919 and 1921, Austrian director Max Reinhardt,
who radically experimented with spatial relationships particularly in his large-
scale performances in urban spaces, briefly established a home in Poelzig’s
conversion of a circus arena into the Großes Schauspielhaus (Figure 2.8), already
outlined in Chapter 1. This cavernous space, literally hung with abstract
stalactites, returned the spatiality of the ancient Greek stage by means of its
amphitheatrical seating around a U-shaped choral space, which formed a bridge
between 3,500 spectators and a large scenic stage. Although the sheer scale,
problematic acoustics and difficult sightlines of this celebrated building worked
against its mandate as an open, accessible and democratic theatre, the Großes
Schauspielhaus clearly influenced Gropius’s Total Theatre of 1927, which in turn
inspired Meyerhold’s 1932 proposal for a flexible industrialized stage with two
revolves, the smaller of which could be filled in with spectators. These theatres,
acknowledging a socialist value in the return to choric space, were also designed
to operate as laboratories for creating spatial relationships and structural settings
in situ during rehearsal periods.
The Bauhaus, like the Russian constructivists, experimented with the
mechanized experimental stage by incorporating new industrial and cinematic
technologies, particularly evidenced in the design work of László Moholy-Nagy
and reaching full architectural integration in Gropius’s proposed Total Theatre
for Piscator, which this section focuses on. In 1924, Moholy-Nagy – building upon
the work of the futurists, Dadaists, expressionists and constructivists – called for
a Theatre of Totality that would integrate high and low theatrical forms into a
mechanized and mediatized “organism of perfect equilibrium” and challenge the
“peepshow” proscenium stage through its openness and three-dimensionality. He
fragmented the stage into “moveable space constructions” that floated, rotated
and moved out into the auditorium, drawing on cinematic effects such as close-
ups in order to connect audiences with the performance.92 He maintained that
“[a]s soon as an intense and penetrating concentration of action can be
functionally realized, there will develop simultaneously the corresponding
auditorium ARCHITECTURE.”93
Moholy-Nagy was aware of the contemporary spectator’s mobile kino-eye,
conditioned by watching film as a montage of quickly changing edited shots. As
a kinaesthetic experience, the more cinematic approach renders the stage a “field”
rather than a “picture”: “a mobile constellation of angles and planes running
together in time, where touch and three-dimensioned space make the eyeball an
extension of the moving sensate body.”94 Eisenstein articulated this notion of an
embodied eye in “Montage and Architecture” in the late 1930s: outlining how the
processing observer composes and edits a range of visual shots through
movement.95 As film displaced theatre as a popular art form, theatrical space of
the avant-garde sought to align itself with cinematic space. Wagner, who utilized
lantern projection for theatrical effect, had already radically altered optics in the
theatre by isolating a bright stage in front of a darkened auditorium so that the
proscenium operated more like a screen than a spatial frame. Jonathan Crary
identifies this “Bayreuth effect” with “precinematic forms of moving images,
projection and animation.”96 However, while Brecht, Meyerhold and Piscator
incorporated projection screens as scenographic elements for still and moving
images, the cinematic conceptions of Moholy-Nagy and Gropius called for a more
three-dimensional spatiality in contrast with the ubiquitous flat surface of
representation.
The Political Theatre of Berlin-based director Erwin Piscator addressed the
need for an alternative architecture to accommodate the new politically
empowered, kinaesthetically embodied spectator: “The flimsiest film reflected
more actuality, more of the real excitement of the times than the stage with its
ponderous dramatic and technical machinery.”97 Wishing to form a new company
that would “harness all the intellectual strength of the Left,” Piscator approached
Gropius to design a “theatre machine” enabling architecture and drama to
productively “interact one upon another” and create a symbiotic relationship
between space and action as a social force.98 The aim was to transform the new
scenographic concept of stage architecture, where “everything on the stage is
calculable, everything fits together organically,” into the building itself.99 This
resulted in the Total Theatre, a proposed 2000-seat auditorium for the Berlin
proletariat, which eliminated the proscenium and embraced the principle of
flexibility through convertibility. The space allowed the audience to directly face,
partially embrace or fully surround an acting zone: defined by a fixed end-stage
and a double-revolve comprised of a small turntable offset within a larger one,
which, in turning, would create multiple stages and flexible formats (Figure 3.12).
The fixed part of Gropius’s stage was a development of the simple tripartite
stage, which he had established in the Bauhaus auditorium, except that it was
now connected to side ambulatories and held the audience in its grasp “like a
forceps.”100 This pincer action is expressed in the bank of seating on the larger
revolve wrapping the smaller circular platform within it. The ambulatory wings
extend into an encircling passageway that slopes with the auditorium floor on
which wagons can be moved to play scenes around the audience, thereby
extending the scenic environment beyond the stage. Columns, defining this
encircling aisle, also serve as a structure between which to stretch projection
screens. Gropius also envisaged projections on the domed ceiling, expanding the
stage cyclorama into the entire auditorium as an enveloping surface for moving
images. This three-dimensionality would be reinforced by vertical stages at
variable heights, created by lowering scaffolding structures from above and
transforming the theatre into a space in which performance is totally enfolding:
“the projection surface (cinema) is superseded by the projection space […] and
this space, filled with illusions created by the projectors, itself becomes the scene
of events.”101
Figure 3.12 Walter Gropius’s unrealized Total Theater for Erwin Piscator (1927)

Source: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin and Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Ise Gropius,
BRGA.24.145; photo: Imaging Department, President and Fellows of Harvard College.

The theatre’s internal skin, as a dematerialized active surface, immerses the

audience in a mediatized space where the cinematic becomes a three-dimensional
force. However, the ancient theatre persists in this extremely modern proposition:
the classical format of audience surrounds a choric platform before a scenic stage,
and the theatre’s elliptical perimeter in twelve equal parts echoes the
cosmological order outlined by Vitruvius in geometric diagrams of the classical
theatre. Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga, in his critical reading of the Total Theatre,
relates the cupola of Gropius’s auditorium with its projections of clouds and stars
to the valerium (awnings) of Roman theatres,102 which Renaissance architects
Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi, as well as Wagner, reproduced in their
theatres.
Piscator desired his Total Theatre to be a politicized media machine,
disseminating information to an engaged public. Tafuri links this idea of a
didactic apparatus with the baroque théâtres des machines that employed
“ingenious machines” to socialize the public to a new productive universe.103
Gropius took Appia’s aspiration for active public participation into a political
realm with his “technically refined, versatile theatrical instrument.”104 It was
designed to convert the passivity of the audience through more aggressive spatial
gestures, “shaking the spectator out of his lethargy, of surprising and assaulting
him and obliging him to take a real interest in the play.”105 This spectacular and
aggressive immersion within the apparatus enacted a dramatic spatialization of
Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions.” However, as Tafuri points out, the chaotic
and unpredictable montage works against the smooth running of architectonic
machines. In harnessing the disruptive flow of metropolitan shock within the
sphere of theatrical technique, architectural space is made to “act” in order to be
productive, “exposing the fragments of an ‘order’ now lying in pieces.”106 This
also exposes the impossibility of any industrial utopia and the inherent failure of
abstract space to maintain neutrality and transparency. Schlemmer recognized
that an extensive exercise in mechanization inevitably reveals what cannot be
mechanized and the theatre provides a laboratory for exploring such organic
interruptions in the fabric of a technological universe, “marking precisely the
borders of legitimate meanings.”107 The mutual desire of Piscator and Gropius to
dematerialize the stage into a flexible, manageable instrument did not take into
account the inherent resistant agency not only in machinery but also in
industrialized bodies and buildings. However, like the proposed theatres of
Meyerhold and Kiesler, the Total Theatre – a constructivist ‘Glory Machine’ –
was never realized in permanent built form, remaining a significant work of
“paper architecture” in 20th-century theatre history.
The legacy of Europe’s constructivist architects was not new theatrical
machines but the eventual adaptation of historic industrial sites by grafting new
technology into an existing fabric. These conversions proliferated in the latter
half of the 20th century. Those who adapted such buildings – invariably
warehouses, power stations, army sheds and factories – were not only fascinated
with industrial architecture as a space of performance or exhibition, but also saw
them as technological icons. This equated the machines of the Victorian
Industrial Age with those that followed them, referred to by Reyner Banham as
“machines of the First Machine Age.”108 However, no longer “light, subtle,
clean,”109 these redundant buildings figure in the collective awareness of a
mechanized past and a failed utopian dream, constituting a threat of
estrangement that both haunts and delights the exiled postmodern subject,
bringing them home through the unhomely. The following section develops
Tafuri’s notion of the impossible machine of a failed utopia and how this has
been utilized in the creation of contemporary cultural sites.

Architectures of alienation
Half ruined buildings once again take on
The look of buildings waiting to be finished
Generously planned: their fine proportions
Can already be guessed at, but they still
Need our understanding. At the same time
They have already served, already been overcome.
All this
Delights me
– Bertolt Brecht, “Of all the Works of Man”

Brecht perceived the epic content of everyday life superbly: the hardness of
actions and events, the necessity of judging. To this he added an astute
awareness of the alienation to be found in everyday life. To see people
properly we need to place them at a reasonable distance, like the objects we
see before us. Then their many-sided strangeness becomes apparent: in
relation to ourselves, but also within themselves and in relation to
themselves. In this strangeness lies their truth, the truth of their alienation.
– Henri Lefebvre: Critique of Everyday Life: Volume I
In his discussion on the Total Theatre, Maurice Culot identifies a gap between
architectural conceptions and the political changes necessary to achieve them,
suggesting the concrete realization of Gropius’s building, predicated “more on
technique than imagination,” would have created a venue “burdened with a
technicality which is more constraining than if it did not exist at all.”110 For Culot
such “scenic monstrosities” rely on the smooth workings of stage machinery and
stage as machinery, denying Total Imagination in favour of Total Art.111 Culot
was formulating this critique in the 1970s, while radical left-wing director Peter
Stein sought a site for his company in the very city where Gropius had hoped to
build his theatre five decades previously. This search resulted in one of the most
dynamic and successful flexible theatres built last century: the Shaubühne am
Lehniner Platz (1981) within the converted Universum cinema, originally
designed by Erich Mendelsohn in 1927. Architect Jürgen Sawade conceived of the
Shaubühne as a giant convertible performance machine. With its modular
hydraulic platforms and moveable partitions, the space is well suited to cutting-
edge theatre and dance projects that, decades after it was built, continue to
explore a wide range of spatial configurations (Figures 3.13a and 3.13b). An
emphatically architectural space, composed of monumental concrete walls,
technical catwalks and platforms, the entire volume can accommodate up to 2,000
people or is able be divided into three auditoria of 700, 500, and 300 seats. As a
machine-for-action it articulates these spaces from the “rough typography” of
seventy-eight hydraulic platforms supported by a more “detailed typography” of
smaller lightweight platforms.112
Formed in 1962, the neo-avant-garde Schaubühne Company had, like their
constructivist predecessors, rejected the standard Italian model as too inflexible
and sought other sites such as film studios and exhibition halls for its
performances. However, the costs of spatially and technically adapting venues for
every production became prohibitive. The company fixed upon the old cinema as
a site in which other sites can be evoked and created, establishing a home that
still works with the inherent nature of homelessness, critical to the relationships
and quality of each new production configured as a “found-space.” Within their
own purpose-built playhouse, the company, changing under the artistic
leadership of its varying directors, has continued its nomadic identity.
Andrew Benjamin maintains that “homelessness,” which is “at home with
modernity,” involves “a different set of practices […] another politics of time” and
is always accompanied by the need to efface dislocation through the
countermoves of myth, historicism, unity and singularity.113 This location
through dislocation is inherent to the theatrical experience, in which the audience
is placed in order to be displaced. But, as a condition of modernism, homelessness
was also an alienating element pivotal to avant-garde theatre, which could no
longer be contained by the built form and instead took to the streets seeking
other sites and dynamic relationships. If, as Peter Eisenman contends, the difficult
task of architecture is “to dislocate that which it locates,” then this difficulty
doubles within the space of the event that aims to deny the presence of the
architectural object, while locating those it dislocates.114
Un-housing tradition, which is literally housed by architecture, leads to a
productive “homelessness” expounded by Nietzsche as a condition of
modernity.115 The exilic and ungrounded qualities of Western culture’s increasing
globalization and the consequences of colonization gave rise to modernity’s
homeless condition whereby the state of being in dwelling was threatened by the
constant becoming of transitory states. As Andrew Benjamin suggests, in
Nietzsche’s affirmation of “homelessness” there is “no sense of loss, but of an
overcoming: nostalgia would cede its place to joy,” facilitating a “productive sense
of homelessness.”116
A proliferation of event-spaces in redundant industrial sites during the latter
half of the 20th century utilizes an alienating architecture that presents the failed
utopia of modernism and its misplaced faith in machinic redemption. Theatre is
re-housed in the un-homely, retaining the sense of dislocation critical to a
theatricalization of abstract space as simultaneously united and divided;
harnessing the phantasmatic spectacle of industrial violence. Although Tafuri
argues that Eisenstein’s production of the Gas Masks failed because “the real
factory nullifies the very technique of scenic estrangement,”117 half a century
later such buildings were selected for their inherent alienating qualities as
locations for site-specific performances.118 Reyner Banham maintains that the
historical avant-gardists were interested in Machine-Age industrial architecture,
which, a “doomed building type,” they romanticized as already existing in the
past.119 Industrial buildings were likened to ancient monuments and classical
temples, embodying “some kind of technological utopia.”120
 It was this rational and technological utopia that Brecht took up in his project
of epic theatre. Hoping that modern technologies would contribute to building a
socialist mass culture, he embraced socialism’s construction as a “concrete
utopian process,” providing a means of warding off antiquarianism in cultural
production.121 Industrial buildings were more akin to the urban every day,
valorized by Brecht, than the established palaces of culture such as purpose-built
theatres and museums. However, as palaces and temples of industry, these
industrial sites were bestowed with their own epic qualities (i.e. grand,
monumental and heroic). In their current reuse as cultural institutions they have
come to replace one ‘epic’ architecture for another.
Figure 3.13a Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin: Hall A with raised floor
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 3.13b Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin: wall detail

Photo: Marc Goodwin

This paradox endures today in the proliferation of industrial sites that appear
to have lost their use-value, which are refurbished as museums, galleries, theatres
and cultural institutions, thereby taking on a new use-value through their very
sense of loss. The Factories: Conversions for Modern Culture, published by Trans
Europe Halles (a network of independent culture centres founded in 1983),
documents the late 20th-century conversions of industrial, merchant and military
sites that, having lost their raison d’être, were resurrected as places for cultural
production.122 Those in the visual and performing arts are drawn to “these places,
strongly charged with the history of a changing world, [which] naturally become
favoured territories for renewed links with contemporary society.”123 However, as
sites that “designate the brutal passage from one epoch to another,”124 they are
not, as the editors suggest, completely freed of their specific use and content in
order to be made freely available for sites of cultural activity.125 Instead they are
sought for the aesthetic charge elicited by the fact that “the brutal passage” is still
in motion, rendering them sites of estrangement. Their conversions harness this
coexistence of epochs through a process described by Susan Buck-Morss as
“mobilizing historical objects by connecting the shock of awakening with the
discipline of remembering.”126 As an outmoded machine the industrial building
reawakens us to the failed dream of the apparatus and a lost time when artists
and engineers sang the praises of an industrialized utopia.
The French director Ariane Mnouchkine has utilized the aesthetic charge of an
abandoned industrial landscape since 1970 when her company Théâtre du Soleil
moved into the Cartoucherie de Vincennes, a former arms factory on the
outskirts of Paris (Figure 3.14). She claims that its conversion into a theatre
succeeded because the factory had “been built to house creations, productions,
works, inventions and explosions!”127
Figure 3.14 La Cartoucherie de Vincennes, Paris (1970): production of Théâtre du Soleil’s 1793 (1972) before
permanent seating was added

Source: Martine Franck/Magnum Photos

In 1999 choreographer William Forsythe worked with architects Nikolaus

Hirsch and Michel Müller to convert the cavernous space of Frankfurt’s
Bockenheimer tramway depot into a performance venue by utilizing only heavy
felted wool drops, coverings and modular units to articulate the spaces and
modulate between the sounds, lights and rhythms of a busy city centre and a
more controlled environment (Figures 3.15a and 3.15b). By moving the thick felt
sheets on high sliding tracks, the dance company was able to achieve a range of
formal and informal formats, based on “regulated” and “unregulated”
temporalities, allowing the city to encroach or holding it at bay.128 What became
critical for choreographer and architects was to welcome the public, challenging
preconceived assumptions through porosity and accessibility, and encouraging
physical behaviour not normally associated with inhabiting cultural venues:
articulated in the felt-covered units, which weren’t designed for a specific age,
weight or body type, alllowing for, rather than determining action.129 Decades
after the historical avant-garde, Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and
Frankfurt’s Bockenheimer Depot carried on their precursors’ tradition of
establishing spatial laboratories for constructing new performance practices.

Figure 3.15a Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, plan diagrams by Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller for
William Forsythe (2003)
Source: Nikolaus Hirsch/Michel Müller Architects

Figure 3.15b Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, felt objects and drops designed by Nikolaus Hirsch and
Michel Müller for William Forsythe (2003)

Source: Nikolaus Hirsch/Michel Müller Architects

On a larger scale, the Ruhr region in Germany has renovated a number of

early 20th-century halls of industry – the central power plant, blasting hall,
gasometer and foundry etc. – into performance spaces for its Triennial, which
began in 2002. The conversion of this abandoned industrial landscape is reviving
an economically depressed area by creating an “imaginative landscape out of
industrial dereliction.”130 This long-overlooked territory is haunted by what it
once was and a prolonged stasis during its abandonment. However, throughout
this suspended time it has remained in motion, accumulating histories and
ecologies while collapsing into a state of deterioration. Melancholic in character,
the abandoned industrial building “borrows some of its features of mourning […
as] a reaction to the real loss of the love object”131: the idealized mechanized
utopia. It offers the ideal setting for a theatre, described by Phelan as “a kind of
mausoleum, a space designed to summon the phantasmatic charge of the
immaterial.”132 Yet, through this melancholic attribute, such conversions have
helped construct and uphold the “experience economy.”
Architects Herzog and de Meuron transformed London’s Tate Modern (2000)
from an industrial relic into cultural capital as a British millennium project
(Figures 3.16a, 3.16b and 3.16c). Bankside Power Station, designed by Giles
Gilbert Scott in 1950, lay dormant for twenty years in the once industrial
wasteland of Southwark. Until revived for the purposes of the Tate Museum, it
was a remnant in the act of disappearing – what Michel de Certeau and Luce
Giard would call a “legendary object,” a resistant fragment from a persistent
past.133 Sited on axis with St Paul’s Cathedral, the building’s industrial chimney
confronts the ecclesiastical dome across the Thames, forming an uncanny
dialogue between monuments to industry and God, both now cathedrals to the
cultural life of London.134 Refurbishing the building may have transformed it into
a contemporary institution, but its history and typology endure in the enormous
bulk of its brickwork, the assertion of its smokestack and the hyperbolic space of
its Turbine Hall, which is increasingly used for installations and performances.
Another legendary object has been recuperated in New York’s High Line park:
the once-abandoned stretch of elevated railway remaining in Chelsea with its
ruined wilderness, which was transformed into a public event-space where locals
and tourists self-consciously “walk the line.”135 Architects, Diller, Scofidio +
Renfro, whose work re-forms the late 19th-century’s “exhibitionary complex” –
discussed by Tony Bennett as a civilizing strategy through self-regulation – in the
early 21st century, have created interventions that play between the viewer and
the viewed, even framing 10th Avenue as a stage observed from a tiered
auditorium, which is seen by the cars passing below as a billboard of watchers.
Returning the historical flow of time negated by abstract space is as much a
temporal phenomenon as a spatial reality.
Figure 3.16a Tate Modern, London: Turbine Hall view to entry
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.16b Tate Modern, London: Turbine Hall view beyond bridge
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.16c Tate Modern, London: Turbine Hall ramp
Photo: Marc Goodwin

In 2006 Berlin’s Radialsystem V, sited between the River Spree and the new
Central Railway Station, reopened to accommodate the Sasha Waltz Company,
Berlin Academy for Ancient Music and Ensemble Musikfabrik (Figures 3.17a and
3.17b). This former sewage pumping station, built in 1904 and damaged during
World War II, has been stripped of its machinery and transformed into an
instrument for artistic and cultural expression, which negotiates between the
archaic and the contemporary. Two performance spaces and a large public loggia
are housed in the old brick edifice, and a new addition of steel and glass, designed
by Gerhard Spangenberg, contains rehearsal studios, seminar spaces, dressing
rooms and offices, with a café opening onto a riverside plaza. The central hall is
most impressive with its extraordinary height, glazed brick walls, arched
windows, steel gantry, and huge sunken pit. While signalling a flexibility of
formats, it remains defiantly architectural with conspicuous colours, textures,
materiality and detail. The complex opened with one of Sasha Waltz’s signature
Dialogues between performers and buildings, in which the public wandered
freely through its many spaces encountering moments of dance, music and
song.136 In this event of fragmented and overlapping performances, sited in a
collage of old and new spaces, Waltz cast the building as central character.
Perhaps the most interesting and enduring example of abstract performance
space, in relation to mechanistic space and reinhabiting industrial architecture,
can be found in the UK’s Manchester Royal Exchange (1976) designed by Levitt
Bernstein Associates in close consultation with director-designer Richard Negri
(Figures 3.18a, 3.18b and 3.18c). A galleried theatre-in-the-round configured
within a tubular steel structure, the auditorium is centrally sited in the
monumental interior of a Victorian cotton exchange, once the largest commercial
space in the world. Resembling a spaceship that has landed from the future, this
permeable performance space is constructed of monumental trusses spanning
between four massive brick piers, which support radial trusses forming the
theatre’s roof thereby enabling the suspension of an auditorium that seats 700
spectators. As a “building within a building” this curious intervention, radically
differing in architectural syntax to the pre-existing building it inhabits,
successfully and economically organizes the front-of-house and back-of-house
spaces around it.137 Unlike Gropius’s Total Theatre, which the Royal Exchange
resembles in its mechanistic aesthetic, the latter’s persistence and success are
probably due to the intimacy of its single format and an absence of complex
moveable systems. Through its surrounded arena format, Manchester’s Royal
Exchange Theatre is a purely choric space: absent any distancing of a framed
stage.
Refurbished industrial buildings continue to play into what de Certeau and
Giard refer to as a “haunted narrativity” in everyday life through “An
Uncanniness of the ‘Already There,’ ” where the city reveals itself as “a
fascinating theatre” transformed by “strange and fragmentary pasts” into “an
immense memory machine where many poetics proliferate.”138 The outmoded
architectural apparatus is rendered a mythic element that presences the ultimate
failure of the body-machine – death. This is the ghost that haunts the machinery
of theatre architecture. Andrew Benjamin points out that the Burkean sublime
still clings to modernity through the avant-garde experience in “the moment of
silence, the shock, the ‘as yet’ ” necessitating a certain distance that is both spatial
and temporal.139 While the Romantic-idealist conceptions of absolute space
utilized abstraction, the abstract space of the Modern Movement’s avant-garde
pursued the absolute – found in the Bauhaus cathedral, the basilica-like
Schaubühne and the temple-like Royal Exchange as well as the awe-inspiring
Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern – despite its mission of desacralization. This
persistent role of the absolute in modernity’s abstract space presents spatial
abstraction as a series of paradoxes in which the machine is an impossible ideal,
the sacred still clings to the rational, and the sole operator is required to hold
together a fragmenting universe.

Ghost in the machine

Viewed as an instrument – and not merely as social appearance – abstract
space is first of all the locus of nature, the tool that would dominate it and
that therefore envisages its own (ultimate) destruction.
– Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Figure 3.17a Radialsystem V, Berlin: hall with moveable seating bank

Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.17b Radialsystem V, Berlin: side view of hall
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 3.18a Manchester Royal Exchange: the Great Hall

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 3.18b Manchester Royal Exchange: theatre ceiling

Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 3.18c Manchester Royal Exchange: theatre galleries
Photo: Marc Goodwin

The glory machine of Wagner’s Festspielhaus rationalized theatre architecture as

an instrumental model that altered and focused the scopic drive within the
auditorium while maintaining and updating the baroque scenic machine that
performed the impossible and the marvellous behind its proscenium arch.
However, Bayreuth’s reinforcement of the proscenium stage at the expense of
public participation could not be tolerated by the 1920s avant-garde, which
aspired to include the audience as active participants in the politics of their
theatrical demonstrations. While Appia and Craig embraced and integrated
technology as a means of manifesting stage visions no longer bound by a
totalizing frame, their visions tended to be unrealized or fleetingly attained, with
many symbolists obliged to continue concealing mechanics behind walls and in
the wings, despite their compulsions to break free. By taking to the streets, the
constructivists brought technology into the open, utilizing its performative
qualities within their utopian theatre designed to build new social, political and
cultural regimes. However, the modernist theatre machine was haunted by what
Weiss refers to as its ancient metaphysical role: “In Western Culture, God is the
classical influencing machine in His role as guarantor of cosmic conjunction and
personal identity.”140 The Judeo-Christian belief in a manifestation of the divine
through ritualized social events, which had emerged from ancient pagan rites,
continued to adhere, especially within the avant-garde theatre that had aimed to
replace the church.
In Matei Calinescu’s discourse on modernism and the avant-garde he discusses
Ernst Bloch’s notion of a Spirit of Utopia (1918) as an authentically religious
phenomenon: “the sole legitimate heir of religion after the death of God” where
modernism’s abstract space creates a “hollow space” vacated by God in which
gods continue to be imagined in its waiting to be filled.141 In his 1959 essay
“Building in Empty Spaces,” Bloch maintains that the open-ended architecture of
modernism combines “the old utopia of crystallization with the desire to
disorganize”: a reconfiguration of the expressionist crystal cathedral with the
glass tower.142 Functional architecture, reflecting an alienating automated world
of the commodity as “abstract” composition, also contains “the unmistakable
ambition to depict empirically an imaginary space.”143
A coexistence of the real and imagined was critical to the German and Russian
theatre-makers of the 1920s, for whom theatre provided a fertile laboratory
within which to test their ideas, utilizing ‘construction’ as their “favourite
theoretical instrument.”144 They were architects not only of the stage but also of
new social relationships, discovering a means of mastering the new Machine Age
in an attempt to create harmony and unity within the industrial environment.
The metaphysical still clung to the emerging abstract space of global capitalism,
seen in the figure of the tower as temple-cathedral; a utopian edifice first realized
in the Eiffel Tower (1889),145 then championed in 1919 by both Appia and Gropius
as the “Cathedral of the Future,”146 and transformed into heroic propositions of
Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920) as well as Le Corbusier’s
plans for Voisin (1925) and Ville Radieuse (1935). Yet the tensions that reside in
abstract space reveal the weaknesses in the utopian dream of a towering machine,
which is under constant threat of collapse.147
The dynamic space of the Modern Movement, with its emphasis on the
working machine, is also haunted by the machine’s other: stasis, the failure or
complete breakdown of the apparatus, which in man-as-machine is the body’s
demise. This also applies to the human subject as healthy productive worker,
reflected in the performer and actively engaged audience member. Utopian
modernism, which focused on the health, vigour and innovation of its youth, is
therefore troubled by the spectre of death that threatens its sense of immortality.
Interruption, as a spatial caesura, stages absence’s presence, threatening a
permanent silence. And yet, performance operates within an economy of
disappearance undermining architecture’s promise of endurance, particularly in
those rehabilitated industrial sites that confront us with the failed promise of past
epochs.
Like the mythical architect Daedalus, with his performative machines, the new
architects of the Modern Movement were pitting their creativity against fate,
attempting to stay the inevitable destruction that lies within the spatial object.
Although they believed that industrial standardization would allow a more
metaphysical existence through the well-oiled architectural machine, which
would free the imagination to dwell on a higher plane, both machine and
building were quickly revealed as inherently flawed and inevitably redundant.
Unlike Nietzsche’s “joyful science” that acknowledged its own subjective bias and
limitations, the new scientific rationalization of tectonic space pursued an
unrelenting objectivity reflected in the concrete objectality of its architecture.
Abstract space is always under the threat of collapse and an ensuing revelation of
the false illusion of unity, stability and fixity. As Lefebvre stated, “Only an act can
hold – and hold together – such fragments in a homogeneous totality. Only
action can prevent dispersion, like a fist clenched around sand.”148Architecture of
the Modern Movement’s “heroic age” (cited by Banham as ‘The First Machine
Age,’ spanning between 1910 and 1930) becomes “a conformist and reformist
force on a world scale.”149 Taking over from the “neurotically overworked”
excesses of their “apostolic” progenitors, the modern masters assert “essential
virtue,” “moral authority” and “platonic purity.”150 As modernity’s conquering
crusaders they are unable to shake off a sacred connection. Out of their notions of
mechanical prophesy and mysticism emerged a neo-Puritanism, in which open
forms could generate an extensive spatiality: “Infinity had begun to enter the
consciousness of the plastic arts.”151
However the architectural machine, like the theatrical one, was an improbable
device; troubled by the multiple spectres of god, mortality, violence and the split
modern subject. Like the deus ex machina in the ancient theatre it had a two-fold
role: to solve and redirect the event in a new direction and to connect with the
divine. The rationalist architecture of the Modern Movement had attempted to
manufacture utopic mechanisms for dealing with a fractured world after the
catastrophe of World War I, in which Nietzsche’s destruction of the master point
of view was complete: “Immaculate Perception” had been eradicated once and for
all.152 Shattered by the industrialized conflict of what Gertrude Stein calls the
“cubist war,” Europe had to deal with a legacy of loss, mutilation and trauma
evident in the absent and damaged bodies, buildings and landscapes.153 This led
to a collapse in the rhetoric of rationality, which the Modern Movement
resolutely attempted to rebuild and reinforce, while its avant-garde theatricalized
this destruction as a constructive means of recovery.
Construction became a literal and figurative technique of creating a new order,
architecturally (building environments), politically (forming regimes) and
performatively (creating identities). However, the avant-garde theatre,
acknowledging the shattered mirror, could no longer contain a passive unified
audience which was increasingly drawn towards the more chaotic drama of the
city.” Like the marketplace in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the carnivalesque “Street
Scene” becomes a dizzying and dangerous space, calling into play the fragility of
the body that walks a precipitous line. However, while functionalism, globalism
and standardization developed in architecture – seeking clean and airy sites for
cultural expression – the antagonistic avant-garde, especially the Dadaists and
surrealists, refused the Brechtian imperative to “dream in blazing clarity.”154
Abandoning rationalist lucidity, these artists replaced the all-seeing gaze atop the
pyramid of enlightenment, with the blinded eye within the labyrinth where a
more deranged and sensory body had to feel its way through space.
Another ghost in the machine that also haunted theatre architecture was seen
in reproductive technologies, which, resisting architectural containment, sought
wider audiences across the light waves and airwaves, theorized by Weiss as
follows:

Here, reproductive technologies create the paradoxical ontological

conditions of simultaneously producing a duplication of and a gap within
the real; a perpetuation and transformation of the past; a simulacrum of a
prosthesis for the body. Henceforth, reproduction and creativity are no
longer distinguishable; temporality can no longer be conceived of as linear
and univocal; and human perception is inextricably intertwined with
artificial prosthetics.155

The cinematic and radiophonic further emphasized the demise of Euclidean space
and it was to the radio that our next protagonist, Antonin Artaud, turned for his
ultimate assault on the body, theatre and God. His last performance Pour en Finir
avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God; 1947)
followed hard on World War II where industrialized killing had been perfected on
an extensive and catastrophic global scale: “The mystical silence before God –
answered by the very silence of God – is now replaced by the desire to silence
God once and for all.”156
Returning to the originary site of Western theatre, the European modernists
had reconstructed elements of it for their own time. Wagner had strengthened the
theatron to house his new audience, Craig the skene to emphasize a universal
landscape, and Appia the choros to reassert theatre’s participatory rite; while the
theatrical constructivists focused on the deus ex machina, aiming to replace the
god in the machine with the idea of machinery itself as a liberating and
productive force. In attempting to harness industrialization’s promise the
constructivists also acknowledged the active potential of its attendant qualities of
alienation, defamiliarization and agitation. However what was missing was the
sacrifice, which was enacted by the avant-garde adopting the role of tragic
victim-hero, who immolated herself/himself to an art of the future.157
The next chapter looks at an architecture of cruelty through the notion of
Abject Space, activated by the Moscow Theatre Siege event (2002) and the spectre
of the Chechen Black Widows (female suicide bombers) who represent
explosivity, materiality and the maternal figure. Exploring spatial violence and
abjection emerging from the catastrophe and trauma of two World Wars, it
returns to Nietzsche’s trope of theatre’s rebirth and Craig’s own originary space,
which he claimed to have birthed. This allows the discourse of the European
avant-garde’s dead white men and the history of modern architecture to be
inflected with an-other spatiality, evident in the resistant notions of the
surrealists Georges Bataille, Artaud and Frederick Kiesler. It thereby returns
theatre to its originary site, which is chora within which the altar for the sacrifice
is located.

Notes
1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 306–8.
2 Brecht, “Street Scene,” 121–9. This was written in 1938 as an elaboration of a poem from 1930.
3 Ibid., 25.
4 Drain (ed.), Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook, 77.
5 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 377.
6 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 39.
7 Brecht, “Die Beleuchtung,” poem quoted and translated in Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils: A Critical
Study of the Man, His Work and His Opinions, 125.
8 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 143.
9 The Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm was also where Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper
(Threepenny Opera) was first staged in 1928.
10 Blau, The Impossible Theatre, 12.
11 Whybrow, Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin, 12.
12 Jameson, Brecht and Method, 47.
13 Although it was widely accepted in the second half of last century that pre-World War I cubism forged
a link between modernism’s artistic and architectural avant-garde, this notion has more recently been
queried and critiqued, most noticeably in Blau and Troy (eds.), Architecture and Cubism.
14 An English translation of “After Cubism” is reproduced in Eliel, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris
1918–1925.
15 Parade was first performed in Paris, May 1917, at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Cocteau hailed it as
groundbreaking because the decor enacted the ballet as an integrated expression within the
 performance. Although body and scenography were abstracted and combined, it remained firmly
contained within the frame of the proscenium, just as cubist painting tended to remain within the
framed canvas.
16 Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 144–5.
17 Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “La Peinture Moderne,” 168.
18 International Style was coined for the 1932 MoMA exhibition, “Modern Architecture: International
Exhibition,” cocurated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr. and Philip Johnson, who also authored the book
The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.
19 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 117.
20 Ibid., 42.
21 Weiss, “Without Shadows: Histories of Utopia,” 61.
22 Heynen, Architecture and Modernity, 13.
23 Colomina, “Art, Architecture, Advertising, and the Media.” As part of the “Conversations in Practice”
series, this public event brought theorist Beatriz Colomina and architect Bernard Tschumi together to
discuss the relationship between architectural forms, the events that take place within them and
modern institutions of representation. The webcast event can be found online:
www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/contested_territories/bernard_tschumi_beatriz_colomina/default.jsp
24 Ibid.
25 Colomina, “Where Are We?” 142.
26 An experimental federation of local cultural societies and avant-garde artists, which emerged in tandem
with the Russian Revolution and was most prominent in the visual, literary and dramatic arts.
27 Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Spectator: From Passivity to Participation,” 98.
28 Bojko, “Agit-Prop Art: The Streets Were Their Theatre,” 75, 72.
29 Marinetti, “The Variety Theatre,” 126–31, reproduced in Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, 27.
30 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, “The Glory Machine,” in Cruel Tales, 48–63.
31 Marinetti called for the introduction of surprise in the realm of the auditorium, inciting the audience to
action by placing glue or itching powder on their seats, selling too many tickets to provoke physical
fights and encouraging unstable individuals to attend and inflame the public. Marinetti, “The Variety
Theatre,” 126–31, reproduced in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 130.
32 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, 100.
33 Ibid., 98.
34 One of the most compelling texts on the relationship between the historical avant-garde and
architecture is Manfredo Tafuri’s essay “The Stage as ‘Virtual City’: From Fuchs to Totaltheatre” in the
Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s.
35 Ibid., 102.
36 Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions,” 87.
37 Ibid. It is interesting to note that, like Craig, whose father, E. W. Godwin, was a celebrated British
architect, Eisenstein’s father, Mikhail Eisenstein, was a well-recognized Russian architect.
38 Ibid.
39 Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art Other than Works by British Artists,
452–5. Catalogue reproduced online in Tate Museum P07137-47 Victory over the Sun 1923:
www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=8950&searchid=10772&tabview=text.
40 Meyerhold’s proclamation on “The October Theatre” translated agit-prop performances into principles
for the agitational stage. See Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 170.
41 Law, “The Revolution in the Russian Theatre,” 67.
42 Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions,” 87; Eisenstein, Film Form – Essays in Film Theory, 16.
43 Ibid.
44 Communist International, also known as the Third International, was an international Communist
organization founded in Moscow in 1919 to replace the 1916 dissolution of the Second International.
45 Frampton, “Industrialization and the Crises in Architecture,” 58.
46 Originally designed by Ilya Chashnik, Lissitzky reworked the Lenin Tribune into this celebrated
photomontage, including it in a spread on “Proun” within the publication Isms of Art, which he
published with Hans Arp in 1924. See Lissitzky and Arp, The Isms of Art.
47 Birnholz, “El Lissitzky and the Spectator: from Passivity to Participation,” 100.
48 Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 34.
49 Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 36.
50 Ibid., 99–101.
51 Tschumi, Event-Cities: Praxis, 13.
52 Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, 243.
53 Ibid., 257.
54 For a detailed description and analysis of the Space Stage see Held, Endless Innovations: Frederick
Kiesler’s Theory and Scenic Design.
55 Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, 452.
56 Held, Endless Innovations, 37.
57 Gronberg, “Performing Modernism,” 115.
58 Kiesler, “On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition and the New Approach to Building Design,” 61.
59 Sharp, “Theatre Spaces and Performance,” 29.
60 Prampolini, “Futurist Scenography,” 23.
61 Sant’Elia, “Manifesto for Futurist Architecture,” 170.
62 Prampolini, “Futurist Scenography,” 23.
63 Tschumi, Questions of Space, 80.
64 Ibid., 84.
65 Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 116.
66 Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 238.
67 Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 113.
68 That is not to say that the Bauhaus masters and students didn’t show work outside the institution,
especially in performances and exhibitions that were presented in other venues.
69 Gropius, “Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar,” in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on
20th-Century Architecture, 19.
70 Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto,” quoted and translated in Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider,
98. Reproduced in Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 49.
71 Droste, Bauhaus: 1913–1933, 135.
72 Gropius (ed.), Theatre of the Bauhaus, 81.
73 Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 52.
74 Schlemmer in Droste, Bauhaus, 114.
75 Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 239.
76 Gropius, Theatre of the Bauhaus, 82.
77 Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 233. Oskar Schlemmer left the Bauhaus that
year with the students throwing him a party in “The Grand Bauhaus Style,” the invitation promising
him a “grand finale” with jazz band, dancing, skits, parody, costume, masks and props. See Fiedler and
Feierabend, Bauhaus, 280.
78 For detailed discussion on Bauhaus performances and parties, see Koss, “Bauhaus Theatre of Human
Dolls,” 724–45.
79 Koss, “Bauhaus Theatre of Human Dolls,” 724.
80 Gropius in Droste, Bauhaus, 121.
81 Gropius, Theatre of the Bauhaus, 83.
82 Baumann, Bauhaus Dessau: Architecture Design Concept, 34.
83 Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 85.
84 Schlemmer, “Theatre (Bühne),” 79–101, in Walter Gropius (ed.), Arthur Wensinger (trans.), The Theatre
of the Bauhaus.
85 Gropius in Droste, Bauhaus, 121.
 86 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 490–1.
87 Gropius, Theatre of the Bauhaus, 78. Gropius described modern architecture as “uniformity of type in
modern attire,” which, lightly poised rather than grounded, “bodies itself forth.” The New Architecture
of the Bauhaus, 30.
88 Gropius, Theatre of the Bauhaus, 31–2.
89 Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 128.
90 Bauhaus historian Monika Markgraf outlines this in the “History” section of the Bauhaus Dessau
website: www.bauhaus-dessau.de/en/projects.asp?p=research. Also referred to in Markgraf,
Archaeology of Modernism: Bauhaus Dessau Restoration.
91 Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, 101.
92 Moholy-Nagy, “Theatre, Circus, Variety,” 68.
93 Ibid., 70.
94 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, 26.
95 Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” 59–60.
96 Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 259.
97 Piscator, The Political Theatre: A History, 1914–1929, 179.
98 Ibid., 180.
99 Ibid., 121.
100 Gropius, “Modern Theatre Construction,” 136. Quoted in Cole, “The Theatre Projects of Walter
Gropius,” 313.
101 Gropius, “On the Construction of the Modern Theatre, with Particular Reference to the Building of the
New Piscator Theatre in Berlin,” 180–5, reproduced in Piscator, The Political Theatre, 183.
102 de Zuvillaga, Gropius: Teatro Total; Total theatre: 1927, 47.
103 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 105.
104 Gropius in Piscator, The Political Theatre, 182.
105 Gropius in Giedion, Walter Gropius: Work and Team Work, 61.
106 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 105.
107 Ibid.
108 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 11.
109 Ibid.
110 Culoy, “From the Tripartite Stage to the Total Theatre,” 15.
111 Ibid.
112 Gaëlle Breton discusses this venue in Theatres, 64–9; as does Michael Forsyth in Auditoria: Designing
 for the Performing Arts, 179–84.
113 Benjamin, Style and Time: Essays on the Politics of Appearance, 73. Andrew Benjamin writes, “What
have to be thought through are the architectural and urbanistic correlates of an experience that
dislocates. The virtue of the term ‘dislocation’ is that it brings place – location – into a productive
conjunction with a thinking of interruption: in other words, it stages the productive nature of the
caesura as a strategic move” (Ibid., 70).
114 Eisenman, “The Blue Line Text,” 172.
115 “We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially in our descent, being ‘modern man,’ and
consequently can no longer participate in Nationalism.” Nietzsche, Gay Science, 378.
116 Benjamin, Style and Time, 79.
117 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 108.
118 Gas Masks, set during working hours in a gas factory, began with a character “purifying” the air with a
spray and included performers vaulting over workbenches, highlighting the inherent contamination
and danger of the site. Christie and Taylor, Eisenstein Rediscovered, 115.
119 Banham, Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925, 19.
120 Ibid., 7. This is clearly illustrated by Le Corbusier who celebrates American grain elevators and
factories – “the magnificent FRESH-FRUITS of the new age” – as modern counterparts to historical
masterpieces of monumental architecture. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 31.
121 Jameson, Brecht and Method, 4.
122 Trans Europe Halles, The Factories: Conversions for Urban Culture, 5.
123 Ibid., 5.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid.
126 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 272.
127 Breton, Theatres, 17.
128 Forsythe in Loriers, “The Choreographer and the Architect: Bockenheimer Depot Theatre, Frankfurt,”
53.
129 Spier, William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point, 146–7.
130 Latz and Latz, ”Imaginative Landscapes Out of Industrial Dereliction,” 73.
131 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 587.
132 Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, 2.
133 De Certeau and Giard, “Ghosts in the City,” 133.
134 Giles Gilbert Scott, who also designed London’s industrial icon, Battersea Power Station, the ubiquitous
red pillar phone box, and Liverpool Cathedral, referred to the single Bankside chimney stack as a
 “campanile” (ecclesiastical bell-tower), deliberately placed on axis with Sir Christopher Wren’s
cathedral.
135 Architect, Charles Renfro, used this term when presenting the High Line as performative space in the
lecture series for Now/Next: Performance Space at the Crossroads (Architecture Section: Prague
Quadrennial, June 2011).
136 Hannah, “Body Space,” in Cluster 74–7.
137 The Royal Exchange, which was bombed in World War II during the Manchester Blitz, was again
damaged in 1996 by an IRA explosion, requiring subsequent refurbishment of the theatre.
138 De Certeau and Giard, “Ghosts in the City,” 133, 141.
139 Benjamin, Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde: Aspects of a Philosophy of Difference, 123.
140 Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, 108.
141 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, 65.
142 Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, 196.
143 Ibid.
144 Michaud, “Social Criticism and Utopian Experiments,” 310–11.
145 In 1929, the Czech critic Karel Teige publicly criticized Le Corbusier for his “ideological-metaphysical-
aesthetic intentions,” to which the architect responded by asserting his architecture as a “purely
spiritual event of composition,” citing the Eiffel Tower which, although used for nothing when opened
in 1889, was and remains a “temple to calculation.” Le Corbusier, “In Defense of Architecture,” 612.
146 Appia, “Actor, Space, Light, Painting,” 114–15, in Appia and Beacham, Texts on Theatre, 115; Gropius
and Taut, “New Ideas on Architecture,” 46–8, in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century
Architecture, 46. Buildings such as Peter Behren’s AEG Turbine Factory (1908) became commonly
known as “cathedrals of work.”
147 This was brutally revealed by the collapse of the World Trade Centre Towers on 11 September 2001. The
quasi-spiritual utopian ideal endures in the rebuilding of another towering edifice in its place, One
World Trade Centre, which was frequently, referred to in the media throughout its planning phase as
the “Freedom Tower” and “Cathedral of Hope.”
148 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 320.
149 Ibid.
150 Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 15, 20, 29, 30.
151 Ibid., 46.
152 Nietzsche, “On Immaculate Perception,” 121–4.
153 Stein, Picasso, 11, quoted in Jay, Downcast Eyes, 213.
154 Brecht in Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils, 125.
155 Weiss, Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia, 101.
156 Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, x.
157 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 68.
Chapter 4

Abject space
Toward an architecture of cruelty

To speak of the unspeakable violence of space will necessarily be to disturb

the terms of traditional discourse and make available new ways of talking. It
is not simply a matter of addressing a different aspect of space. Rather it is a
matter of finding a different form of address.
– Mark Wigley, Violence Space

The problem is to make space speak, to feed and furnish it; like mines laid in
a wall of rock which all of a sudden turns into geysers and bouquets of
stone.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

In his guest editorial for the 1993 Assemblage issue on “Violence Space,” Mark
Wigley refers to “a loud silence,” maintained in the intervals between catastrophic
world events, “that masks the more nuanced and ongoing relationships between
violence and space.”1 Insisting that this strategic silence must be broken in order
to confront the complicity between brutal incidents and architecture, he calls our
attention to “the more subterranean rhythms” that organize the spaces of
violence. The unspeakable nature of violence requires a “different form of
address,”2 here found in irrational and abject performance architectures proposed
by the Dadaist and surrealist avant-garde, principally in the writings of Antonin
Artaud who was often rendered speechless despite being a poet and performer.
This paradox was reinforced in his texts, which defied language itself.
Advocating a Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud was determined to mine spatial depths
in order to reveal and release an inherent violence as a restorative force. His
address took the form of a scream; so extreme it filled what Slavoj Žižek names
the “hole in reality which designates the ultimate limit where ‘the word fails.’ ”3
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, as performance and architecture, sought to
activate spatial volatility in order to confront and combat cruelty. This paradox is
reinforced in his writing, which defies language itself. His manifestos reveal an
architecture of cruelty as the site of recovery; constituted by a body in peril, form
without a centre and space in fragments. By mining Artaud’s spatial speech, an
open-ended treatise can be constructed, triggered by the spectre of an explosive
body at the turn of the 21st century, which offers a space where his infamous
scream is encouraged to reverberate.

Violence takes centre stage

The festival must be a political act.
And the act of political revolution is theatrical.
– Jacques Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of
Representation”

The explosive body in question is embedded in the still image of an empty theatre
viewed from the stage (Figure 4.1). It could be an auditorium found in any
number of existing performing arts venues around the world, with its plush red
seats codified in orderly rows, raking back from an orchestra pit separating the
audience from the stage and framed by a featureless proscenium arch. The upper
level of seating overhangs the stalls slightly and drops into a side balcony that
gives way to a monochromatic stretch of wall with clearly marked exit doors.
Upon closer examination, however, there are dark forms slumped in the seats,
locating the theatre in a time and place of crisis. These are the dead bodies of
Chechnya’s infamous “black widows,” strapped with bomb belts, whose haunting
presence deliberately provides a cautionary tale from the authorities that had
prevented their detonation (while sacrificing over 120 audience members, absent
from the image). The banality and passivity of the room is haunted by a spectre
of explosive violence.4
 On 23 October 2002, Chechen rebels, having infiltrated the musical
performance of Nord-Ost, seized the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow, disrupting
and transforming the show into a prolonged international spectacle of terror that
ended with Russia’s Spetsnaz soldiers storming the building, after pumping in a
narcotic gas that killed over 170 people. In the midst of the second act, thirty-five
armed guerrillas and eighteen “black widows” burst into the auditorium and onto
the stage firing guns and declaring themselves Chechens “at War.” At this
moment the spectators assumed that the gunmen in combat gear and ski masks,
which joined the performers dressed as World War II soldiers, were part of the
show.5 Within seconds they were unsure as to what was theatrical artifice and
what was real, who was a performer and who was a terrorist, who was spectator
and who was hostage. Audience members became part of an event that shifted
the stage from site of cultural expression to site of warfare, and in this moment
the space they occupied was also called into doubt. No longer an arena for the
fleeting acts of entertainment, the 1,100-seat auditorium held captive over 800
spectators, performers, theatre workers and terrorists in a three-day standoff that
became a significant historic event ending in tragedy after special forces raided
the gas-filled building, executed the rebels and dragged out hostages who, unable
to be administered an antidote in time, perished from suffocation or poisoning.6
The auditorium, masquerading as a house for leisure and amusement or, in this
case, a Palace of Culture, was revealed as a carceral space for all its occupants,
emphasizing its intrinsic disciplinary nature. The violent event disclosed the
architecture’s inherent violence, found in its conformity rather than its radicality.

Figure 4.1 Post-siege media image of the Dubrovka Theatre, Moscow (2002)
 Formulating a theory of performative spatial agency in which building is
‘actant’7 – playing a critically active role in the incident – this final chapter takes
the 2002 Moscow Theatre Siege as an early 21st-century catalyzing event when
terror literally took the stage; returning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s confrontational
void through Georges Bataille’s writings against architecture and Artaud’s
Theatre of Cruelty. As a Lacanian “irruption of the Real,” the siege exposed the
volatile gap between architectural and theatrical realities, and is akin to the
experience Artaud attempted to create for himself and his audiences in his final
‘failed’ performances. For Lacan these brutal occurrences mark “where thought
becomes witness to a performance of the real.”8 In summoning the presence of the
Real (as in that which defies symbolization and language), such traumatic events
uncover the hidden within a culture’s system of meaning by disturbing and
momentarily displacing the symbolic order: revealing its lack. The incursion that
stormed the prescribed limits of a house of entertainment manifested the ultimate
intrusion – that of death. This is also linked to the horror of the blood sacrifice,
the practice of which Bataille saw as fundamental to human experience. Inherent
to the ritual enactments of ancient theatre, the sacrificial offering was originally
centred on the altar in the choros and in the Dubrovka theatre siege it was
represented in the contemporary spectral figure of the terrorist “black widow” –
the Chechen female suicide bomber who combines maternity, materiality and
mortality in corporeal explosivity.
An alternative approach to the standard modernist theatre that was besieged in
October 2002 is found in the avant-garde strategies of the Dadaists and surrealists
who enacted experimental modes of addressing the unspeakable through their
staged revolts, which began as early as 1896 when Alfred Jarry’s Ubu bellowed
“Merdre” (a revolt against the bourgeoisie) and ended in 1947 with Antonin
Artaud’s roar of “CACA” (a revolt against the divine and the corporeal body) in
Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done With the Judgement of
God). Operating through what Weiss calls ‘An Aesthetics of Excess,’ their
scatological and infantile cries were employed as “a mode of disorganization by
means of excess, waste and irrationality,”9 effectively destabilizing theatre
practices and the spaces designed to house them. It is on the limit where the
avant-gardists sited themselves in the years between the two World Wars:
inhabiting what Kristeva names “borderline states” that simultaneously provoke
disgust and fascination. And it was at the limits where they wished to physically
place their performances, deferring to visceral experience rather than the
visuality of the object.10
If the limit of architecture is in its dissolution – where it is no longer, static,
secure or durable – then abjection (an undermining condition that elicits
revulsion and disturbs social order) transforms the object from stable entity to
unstable action. Through an “act of exclusion,” the abject becomes the outcast
contaminant capable of infecting and affecting those within its ambit.11 This
contaminating presence, which soaks, leaks, deforms, decays and erupts, indexes
the “fluid states of structures” that are political, social, cultural, psychological and
physical.12 Asserting paradoxical conditions of in-betweenness, the abject
indicates “a non-respect of structure.”13 Oscillating between the sacral
indeterminacy of the absolute and the rational forces of the abstract, abject space
provides a subversive material site where things are done and undone. Elizabeth
Grosz refers to such interstitiality as “the space of subversion and fraying […] of
the bounding and undoing of the identities which constitute it.”14 Through
performance at the limits, abject space also answers her call to “make architecture
tremble” or, more appropriately, shudder.15
Abject space offers an avant-garde model that also addresses the gendered
inheritance of space alongside the repeated trope of birthing, which began with
Nietzsche’s desire for a rebirth of tragedy and Edward Gordon Craig’s empty
space of theatrical reproduction. It exposes architecture’s impossible quest to
safely house bodies and ideals by undermining its physical and philosophical
structures. Calling upon the writings of Bataille and Artaud, who were cast out of
the surrealist movement – (r)ejected for their abjection and thereby abjected16 –
the active gesture of expulsion becomes a performative force in establishing an
architecture of cruelty that considers how violence can be spatially incorporated
to create a site resistant to such theatricalized spectacles as the Dubrovka Theatre
siege, which not only constituted a moment of political crisis, but makes apparent
architecture’s complicity in such violent events.
In order to counter this banal violence designed into architecture, an
alternative architectural violence is required that transgresses cultural
expectations and thwarts spatial brutality. Tschumi discusses this as
transformative and pleasurable in his essay “Violence of Architecture”:
 The integration of the concept of violence into the architectural mechanism
– the purpose of my argument – is ultimately aimed at a new pleasure of
architecture. Like any form of violence, the violence of architecture also
contains the possibility of change, of renewal. Like any violence, the violence
of architecture is deeply Dionysian.

Such carnal and immersive intensity can be found when considering the objectile
as abjectile.

Spatial violence
1) There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no
architecture without program.
2) By extension, there is no architecture without violence.
– Bernard Tschumi, “Violence of Architecture”

The notion of spatial violence as a mute incorporation of power into the built
environment has been voiced by a number of theorists who critique architecture’s
complicity with bureaucracy. Bataille, echoing Artaud’s insistence on “no more
masterpieces,”17 wished to eradicate architectural monuments, which (as static,
dominant and authoritarian forms) “impose silence on the multitudes” and
“inspire socially acceptable behaviour, and often a very real fear.”18 This
consideration of the disciplinary nature of built form was also taken up by Michel
Foucault, who aligned the history of powers with the history of spaces,19 seeing
architecture as an embodiment of abstract discursive forms of power, permeating
the material realm of flesh, activity and desire by defining, regulating and
limiting our quotidian practices. For Henri Lefebvre the “logic of space” conceals
an authoritarian and brutal force that conditions the competence and
performance of the subject who can experience it as an obstacle of “resistant
‘objectality’ at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall.”20 Lefebvre’s
objectality, as a silent oppositional force, stands in contrast to Deleuze’s objectile,
discussed in the introduction as the continuous and explosive phenomena of form
and matter mobilizing the built environment as an object-event. Rather than a
contained event, the object contains the event of its own annihilation.21 This
transformation of architecture from a disciplinary machine to an open-ended
volatile form of space-in-action was what Artaud sought in his quest for a
Theatre of Cruelty, not just as art form but also as built form. Bataille’s notion of
the informe (formless) – “a term that serves to bring things down in the world” –
further challenges the built form and architecture’s will to make the world safe
and sound.22
Foucault’s description of the disciplinary shift in public punishment and its
attendant spatiality – from a scenic, collective model to a more coercive, internal
model – could also be describing theatre architecture.23 He begins his discussion
on “panopticism,” as Artaud begins his on a Theatre of Cruelty, with the profound
impact of Europe’s Great Plague. Foucault outlines how the Plague affected the
gaze, which became an instrument of control during this state of extreme crisis.
Fixing individuals into “segmented, immobile, frozen space” provided a means of
maintaining order in the face of the epidemic’s confusion and disorder.24 The
“collective festival” of the Plague, which Artaud celebrated as a revelation
through “total crisis,”25 was reversed by the “political dream” to isolate and
contain it.26 Such a “festival” was also present in the shared spectacles of public
executions and torture that reinforced the spectacle of power through the
complicit and communal witnessing of the crowd. The cessation of torture and
execution as a civic performance led to the 18th-century aspiration for a more
humane theatre of punishment, foreclosing on communal participation. This was
articulated in the architectural figure of Jeremy Bentham’s proposal for the
Panopticon, a prison of the enlightenment, which Foucault describes as “a
marvellous machine that, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces
homogenous effects of power.”27 The Panopticon was designed as a circular
edifice to house prisoners in layered cells lining its perimeter who are observed
from a central tower. Because the controlling gaze is concealed within the
watchtower, the prisoners are unable to discern if and when they are being
observed. This model also served as an exemplar for asylums, hospitals, military
barracks, workplaces and educational institutions. With the demise of the
outdoor public festival, architecture was co-opted as a disciplinary mechanism to
internally school its inhabitants; described by Denis Hollier as “not just a simple
container, but a place that shapes matter, that has a performative action on
whatever inhabits it, that works on its occupant.”28
 The architectural rendering of Bentham’s Panopticon (1791), through the
bifurcation of its circular plan, resembles a theatre (Figure 4.2). As a semicircle of
cells wrapping around a central zone it suggests a cross between an antique
amphitheatre and a baroque horseshoe auditorium. Foucault describes the
peripheral cells “like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor
is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”29 This theatrical analogy
turns the cells into stages, forming multiple performance zones within the space
and re-turns a manifold gaze onto the stage. As discussed in the first chapter on
the glory machine, the replication of the stage as tiered boxes throughout the
baroque auditorium presented a constant threat to an isolated and focused
singularity of theatrical production because the framed performance could no
longer control or regulate the view. If the enlightened prison, asylum, workplace
and school reduce the collective and fragmented nature of the crowd to “a
collection of separated individuals” as a form of discipline, the smaller
communities that performed for each other in the 18th- and 19th-century theatres
complicated this separation.
As articulated in this book’s first chapter, the revolution waged against the
300-year-old model of the baroque horseshoe theatre was, paradoxically, an
attack on the power of the audience encircling the room on a range of levels and
communal clusters. A dynamic force that enclosed itself and intersected with the
stage frame, this collective was made up of individuals, which merged with
gilded decoration and lavish detail to form a combined spectacle of audience and
architecture that effectively competed with the stage action. The assault on this
distracting, dynamic and lively organism of the Italianate auditorium led to the
eventual eradication of balconies, colonnades, ornamentation, promenade spaces
and boxes, all in the name of a more democratic, less aristocratic and hierarchical
space. However, this happened at the cost of multiple viewpoints, positions from
which to assert a presence or recede out of sight, pockets of private activity
within the larger collective and the living wall of audience that energized itself as
a formidable assembly, fragmented and united in its own embrace. Not unlike the
prison that disciplined inmates through spatial distribution, coded activities,
visibility of force and control of time, the new theatre model – established in the
name of reform – was a mechanism of disciplinary power that spatially regulated
bodies, limiting their activities and interactions within the assumed openness of
leisure, culture and entertainment.

Figure 4.2 Elevation, section and plan of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon penitentiary. William Reveley
(1791)

Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus provided a more effective disciplinary

apparatus for isolating individuals within the auditorium, playing into the hands
of the Modern Movement and conventional theatre as a model for forming well-
behaved spectator-citizens. Rather than an audience self-regulated by its own
multiplicitous communal gaze, a rigid architecture focuses the public’s singular
gaze toward the stage and stage alone, reinforcing Lefebvre’s notion of a phallic
“logic of visualization” that spatializes power.30 Since Wagner denounced the
multilevel bourgeois Italianate auditorium as monumental and over decorated,
modern performance space representing the status quo has developed into a rigid
and lifeless container that depends on the staged event to enliven it. Within the
darkness of this seemingly passive vessel a homogeneous plane of well-organized
viewers, each contained in their separate seat, gazes transfixed toward the light at
highly composed images enacted within the technological frame of the
proscenium stage. Notwithstanding claims to a “democratic” form, this principal
model for theatre architecture reduces the potential impact of audience and
architecture on the event. Enacting a violent gesture against any potential
disruption, it disciplines behaviour of the spectators, who can be likened to
Plato’s chained prisoners in a cave, watching shadows dancing on the walls,
oblivious to the material world of light and reality outside.31 Analogous to
Lefebvre’s image of that fist desperately clenching sand, it constitutes an
aggressive act against the threat of dispersion.32
The archetypal 20th-century civic auditorium persists in its construction of the
supposed homogeneity of modernism’s abstract space, effecting what Lefebvre
calls “a brutal condensation of social relationships” by reducing spatial practice to
conform to its neutrality, transparency and functional logic.33 This is enforced to
detail through building laws and strict regulations for places of public assembly:
authoritative and authoritarian codes that fortify spatial control in the name of
health and safety, often foreclosing on architectural experimentation and
resistance. Bernard Tschumi discusses such constraints in an interview regarding
his designs for two large concert halls in Rouen (2001) and Limoges (2007), where
the contractual prerequisites of performers and the exigencies of surveillance
systems present often insurmountable obstacles.34 Tschumi’s response was to
focus on the peripheral zones surrounding each hall, going as far as reproducing
the auditorium plan in both venues, albeit experimenting with asymmetry in
Rouen.
The repeatable format of the global public auditorium reinforces behavioural
expectations from venue to venue and even from country to country. As an
inveterate model, with established conventions for staging, managing and
producing performances, its rigid imperatives of efficacy (maintaining social
structures), efficiency (maximizing organizational outputs) and effectiveness
(optimization of function) place demands on the architect, performers, audience
and management to “perform or else”: reinforcing Jon McKenzie’s contention that
cultural, organizational and technological performances are interconnected
disciplinary mechanisms.35 The resulting global cookie-cutter phenomenon was
played out to tragic effect in Moscow in 2002, with the terrorists exploiting the
predictability of defined spatial practices and the Russian Alpha Forces utilizing
an identical auditorium, the Meridian Palace of Culture, to rehearse their siege.36
The violent and silent act of spatial conformity – revealed by the hyper-
violence of both terrorist and counter-terrorist operations – requires another
form of violence to break the rigidity of convention. Linked to the extreme
conditions of Bataille’s sacrifice and Artaud’s cruelty, this performative violence
acknowledges and ecstatically engages with the inherent brutalities of human
existence experienced and expressed at the limits: “The violence of power,” as
Lefebvre pronounces, “is answered by the violence of subversion.”37 In the theatre
this began with Alfred Jarry and was reinforced by the deliberately provocative
Dadaist and surrealist performances.

Bravo! And Boom, Boom!

Every man must shout: there is great destructive, negative work to be done.
To sweep, to clean. The cleanliness of the individual materializes after we’ve
gone through folly, the aggressive, complete folly of a world left in the hands
of bandits who have demolished and destroyed the centuries. With neither
aim nor plan, without organization: uncontrollable folly, decomposition.
Those who are strong in word or in strength will survive, because they are
quick to defend themselves; the agility of their limbs and feelings flames on
their faceted flanks.
– Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918

As modernist theatre architecture became more rigid and pacifying between the
World Wars, the avant-garde continued to call for radical spatial changes. An
inherent volatility in their manifestos and performances aimed to liberate theatre
from its traditional confines, generating architecture “against itself,” which Denis
Hollier refers to as “a performative loosening of space.”38 Jarry’s anarchic and
flatulent King Ubu, wielding a toilet brush, had already provoked the audience to
the point of riot in 1896 through his grotesque buffoonery and utterance of the
word “Merdre!” (variously translated as “Shite!,” “Pschitt!” or “Shittr!”) in a
symbolist production that refused the transcendental aspirations of the
movement. This initiated a move toward a destruction of the architectural object
and its prescribed boundaries, which was eventually followed by the wild
theatrics of the Dada movement during and after World War I in Zurich, and
taken to Paris by Tristan Tzara at the invitation of the surrealists in 1920: “The
passive consenting spectator must give way to a hostile participant, provoked,
attacked and beaten by author and actors.”39 The suspended time of the
symbolists, subsequently regulated by the machinic beat of constructivist time,
fell into a chaotic arrhythmia elicited by the “ecstatic sickness” of the post-World
War I artist, for whom language and vision had also failed. This resulted in
experiments in simultaneity as a concurrent plurality of actions that were
condensed into the instantané.
The performance site was no longer limited to the conventional theatre and co-
opted the grotesquery of the cabaret. Yet, as Annabelle Melzer writes:

For all their innovative work in performance, the Dadaists still guarded the
line that separates actor from audience. It was not the proscenium that they
protected (for they had no need of a picture frame of any sort to confine a
theatre of illusion) but the slightly thrust stage of the presentational
performer: a stage which allows the performer at times to address the
audience directly and then again to withdraw to a position where the
audience must regard him as separate from itself.40

This cabaret stage prefigures the contemporary stand-up comedian’s podium,

which is usually sited within an ambience heightened by alcohol and a
fragmented sociality. The vulnerable performers who share the intoxicated
atmosphere still stand apart on a raised dais with their backs to the wall, enabling
them to provoke the audience by playing with its ambivalence while holding its
immense and dangerous power in check. The cabaret performers of the Dadaists
and surrealists, led by Tzara whose Soirées – staged in rented rooms, private
homes, cafés, meeting halls and conventional theatres – pushed the boundaries of
performance to awaken an innate violence within the spectators who eventually
stormed the physical boundaries of the stage.
One notorious audience incursion occurred in the last Zurich Soirée directed
by Tzara in 1919, which was staged in a traditional Italianate proscenium theatre
and ended the first act with a discordant performance of twenty texts
simultaneously spoken, sung, whistled, sighed, stuttered and yodelled by twenty
performers: a cacophony that was matched by vocal reactions from the audience.
This poème simultané was followed by Walter Serner’s recitation of his
anarchistic credo “Final Dissolution” that transformed the agitated audience into
a mob: leaping off balconies and climbing onto the stage brandishing pieces of
balustrade they had torn from the galleries, the enraged spectators chased Serner
offstage and stamped on his props. The show resumed after the interval and
finished without further incident, an effect intended by Tzara, who, Hans Richter
maintains, “organized the whole thing with the magnificent precision of a ring-
master […] the public was tamed.”41 Tzara deliberately conceived the Soirée to
free the actors, scenic elements and technical equipment from the “cage” of the
proscenium theatre into a space that included the spectators: immersed in the
dissonance of monstrous odours, images and sounds.

This performance decided the role of our theatre, which will entrust the
stage direction to the subtle invention of the explosive wind; the scenario in
the audience; a visible direction by grotesque means: the Dadaist Theatre.
Above all, masks and revolver shots, the effigy of the director. Bravo! And
Boom, Boom!42

Tzara’s reference to the perilous presence of “real” firearms in the theatre was
later echoed by André Breton who, in his Second Surrealist Manifesto (1930),
famously referred to the simplest surrealist act as: “dashing down out into the
street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into
the crowd.”43 Yet it was in the theatre itself where Breton had witnessed this
potential violent mayhem, on 24 June 1917, at the opening of Guillaume
Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, considered the first performance of
“surrealism” (a term announced six weeks previously in the author’s program
note for the ballet Parade). Having opened two hours late to a frustrated house,
the show began with a grotesquely obese woman entering the stage, unbuttoning
her blouse and revealing two gas-filled balloons that she threw at the audience.
This scene caused an uproar in the already tumultuous crowd. Breton recounts
how his friend Jacques Vaché, who was dressed in an English officer’s uniform,
drew a gun on the audience at intermission, which Breton wrestled from him
before it was discharged.44 Here was an intense moment in which the Real made
a fleeting entry into the theatre, leaving a profound impression on the person
who became the self-appointed leader of the new movement.
This early event also coincided with Apollinaire’s proposal for radically
reworking the site of theatre so as to surround the audience with tumultuous
performances. In the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias: Breasts of
Tiresias (1917) he wrote:

A circular theatre with two stages

One in the middle and the other like a ring
Around the spectators permitting
The free unfolding of our modern life
Sounds, gestures, colours, cries, tumults
Music, dancing, acrobats, poetry, painting
Choruses, actions and multiple sets.45

Melzer points out that Apollinaire’s scheme coincided with Pierre Albert-Birot’s
Theatre Nunique, which also proposed a centralized audience surrounded by a
rotating performance platform on the periphery.46 This notion of enveloping the
audience in the performance was critical to Artaud’s auditorium architecture for
his Theatre of Cruelty as discussed later in this chapter.
The Dadaists and surrealists harnessed elements of shock and surprise to
bridge the traditional divide between performers and spectators, even as the
audience was obliged to perform their rage in reaction to the spirit of madness
shrieking from the stage. As the Modern Movement progressed, Bataille and
Artaud, with their theatrical and theoretical tendencies to abjection and excess,
were at the forefront of those challenging architecture’s imperative to construct
unified stable edifices. In Surrealism and Architecture, Thomas Mical suggests
that to think of architecture surrealistically is to consider it an incomplete
discipline, perceived not as “the history of style, but the history of lacks, desires,
supplements and new desires” suppressed by the austere constructions of
architectural rationalism: “The voided spaces of modernity are frequently
reductivist, abstracted, hygienic, homogenized and continuous – designed to
suppress the individuated, coarse, theatrical, perverse or the traumatic.”47
However, it was those excommunicated surrealists, Bataille and Artaud – whose
abject tendencies offended Breton – who more profoundly challenged the modern
architectural object.
Nadir Lahiji pits Le Corbusier’s “modernity of discipline” against Bataille’s
“modernity of desire,” pointing out that Le Corbusier was the first architect to
read Bataille’s Accursed Share, which the author gave him around 1950.48
Bataille’s notion of an unproductive expenditure in his “general economy,” which
included war, luxury, games, monuments and sacrifice, challenged the Modern
Movement’s primary focus on utility and rationality. Spatial volatility and abject
confrontations held the possibility of destabilizing architectural objectivity
through what was harboured in the dark recesses below the surface of perception.
Tzara’s call “[t]o sweep, to clean” was a desire for purification, but unlike that
proposed by the Modern Movement it was cleansing through “uncontrollable
folly, decomposition.”49 Bataille and Artaud took up this attempt at purification
through putrification, challenging the sanitizing agendas of modern
architecture.50
When invited to make a speech at a Paris Conference on “Architecture and
Dramaturgy” in 1948, Le Corbusier professed to know “little or nothing” about
theatre, choosing to present his observations on the “spontaneous theatre” of the
lived world and proposing open stages throughout cities in which impromptu
performances can occur.51 He reinforced his belief in the inherent health of a
clean, airy architecture through an advocacy for outdoor theatres as “an attempt
to introduce air into the first machine age” and completed his talk by proposing
that the roof of the United Nations building, which he was involved in designing,
become a performance space open to the elements against the backdrop of the
city. In 1925, in La Peinture Moderne, co-authored with Amédée Ozenfant, Le
Corbusier had equated his disgust in the deviance, decadence and eroticism of
decoration with the theatre, ballet and music hall.52 This continued the legacy of
a modernist revulsion for the ornamental initiated by Adolf Loos in Ornament
and Crime (1908), which was equated with the erotic, primitive, infantile,
feminine, degenerate and excremental: a smearing of surfaces with supplemental
matter.53
Abjection: eROTic object54
The urge to ornament one’s face and everything within reach is the start of
plastic art. It is the baby talk of painting. All art is erotic. […]

The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first
work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist, in order to rid himself
of his surplus energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone
woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her.

[…] But the man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the
walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate.
– Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime”

Thus human abjection results from the material impossibility of avoiding

contact with abject things: it is but the abjection of things passed on to those
who are exposed to them.
– Georges Bataille, “Abjection and Miserable Forms”

For Loos and Le Corbusier, the architect and his work were healthy, vigorous and
upright; they asserted smooth white objects that resist “the ornament disease”
through an austerity that claims longevity: “the form of an object lasts, that is to
say remains tolerable, as long as the object lasts physically.”55 Purity was
“generalized, static, expressive of the invariant.”56 And yet Tschumi exposed this
impossible ideal through the rotten object of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1929–
1930) in his Advertisements for Architecture (1975), referring to a photograph
taken in 1965 of the architectural masterpiece – its discoloured plaster crumbling
to reveal a decomposing concrete substrate – is accompanied with the following
text: “The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in
which it is” (Figure 4.3).57 Tschumi elucidates further in his essay “Architecture
and Transgression” by describing his own embodied experience of the building’s
“squalid” spaces before its subsequent restoration as the sleek modernist
masterpiece first conceived by Le Corbusier: “stinking of urine, smeared with
excrement and covered with obscene graffiti.”58 Representing a “moment of
architecture” this decomposition was a simultaneous composition of life and
death, achieved at the structural and habitable limit of the building.
The abject – whether erotic, primitive, infantile, feminine, degenerate or
excremental – confronts us with the limits of our ‘proper’ bodies and the
buildings designed to contain them, revealing both as contaminants. Matter is no
longer static and invariant but always in motion, evading classification and
meaning, eluding both the frame and form. This returns us to the more
distributive agency of materiality as ‘actant,’ referred to by Jane Bennett in
Vibrant Matter as “thing-power”: exposing all objects and materials as active
organisms with varying temporalities of movement, often as disturbingly
invisible as visible. A heightened awareness of nonhuman powers that circulate
around and within us serves to undermine and dissipate onto-theological
binaries, inducing what Bennett calls “an aesthetic-affective openness to material
vitality”:59
Figure 4.3 Bernard Tschumi: from Advertisements for Architecture (1975)

Source: Courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects

By “vitality” I mean the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms,

metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also
to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities or tendencies
of their own.60

As something active, mobile and fluid, the abject indexes the instability and
reality of that which is covered and held in by an ostensibly smooth skin,
exposing the organism’s vulnerability to contamination. The abject, located along
a continuum between the viscerality of bloody birth and the rot of cadaverous
death, is also linked to desire through jouissance, an ecstasy that transcends the
dissolving subject. However, modernism’s sleek white erections are perpetually
under threat of contamination and/or collapse. As Camille Paglia pronounces
“[e]very male projection is transient and must be anxiously, endlessly renewed”:
the upright male becomes threatened by the recumbent female, having entered
“in triumph” but withdrawn “in decrepitude”61 – echoing Loos’s reference to “A
horizontal dash: the prone woman, A vertical dash: the man penetrating her.”62
Architecture, implicated in abstract space – described by Lefebvre as the reign of
“phallic solitude and the self-destruction of desire” – is threatened by mundus:
“In its ambiguity it encompassed the greatest foulness and the greatest purity, life
and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination.”63 This is the realm of
the fleshy maternal body wherein lies the monstrous abyss discussed in the
chapter on absolute space. It also returns us to Craig’s theatrical womb, which
denied the unpredictable materiality of body and architecture in performance
space. The inside of the maternal body, described by Kristeva as “desirable and
terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject,”64 threatens the
immaculate conceptions of Craig and Le Corbusier.65

Palace of Culture
To appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder.
– Bernard Tschumi, “Advertisements for Architecture”

In Architecture for the New Theatre (1935), editor Edith Isaacs writes that “in the
art of theatre, which uses for its completion all of the other arts, the building that
serves it should be a way to freedom rather than a house of bondage.” She
centralizes this as “the problem” faced by theatre architecture, “not only as an
arrangement of mass and form, and not only as a functional unit, but as a social
unit.”66 The exigencies of creating an efficient, civic space were further
complicated by the new “dream of the great playhouse,” which, by the 1920s, no
longer contained only dramatic presentations, but also “concerts, mass meetings,
choruses,” such as were housed in Russia’s Palaces of Culture.67
The Dubrovka Theatre represents an undistinguished architectural model for
public performance that has developed and proliferated globally since the early
20th century. It was constructed between 1968 and 1974, as the Palace of Culture
attached to the First State Ball-Bearing Factory in Moscow’s working-class
district. Soviet Palaces of Culture, associated with state agencies and industry,
were designed as clubhouses for workers to assemble and practice their
recreational activities and hobbies. The auditorium, one of many spaces within
the complex, provided facilities for amateur performing arts events, lectures and
meetings. These Palaces, designed to “enlighten, educate and entertain, while
promoting revolution in daily life,”68 were funded by taxes collected by the trade
unions, which also provided elected management and staff. However, since the
collapse of the Soviet Union such organizations struggled for income, renting the
spaces to outside productions such as the Nord-Ost musical.
The most architecturally celebrated Palace of Culture in Moscow is situated
nearby, adjacent to the Simonov Monastery, and was conceived as a secular
workers’ temple in relation to it. Originally one of the largest and most lavishly
appointed of the state clubs, it is now associated with the ZIL automobile
company. Designed by the Vesnin brothers in 1930 and completed in 1937, the
Moscow Proletariat Palace of Culture is recognized as a significant example of
constructivist architecture and what Bernard Smith calls “the last gasp of the
Soviet avant-garde” in pre-Stalin Russia.69 A modernist masterpiece with high-
level windows that sculpt the auditorium’s sinuous forms, the interior (Figures
4.4a and 4.4b) encapsulates Alexandr Vesnin’s principle of “liquid space,” which
facilitated people breathing “freely and easily” in its “open character.”
The unadorned auditorium of Vesnin’s Proletariat Palace of Culture stands in
radical contrast to a well-known set Alexandr designed for Tairov’s production of
The Man Who Was Thursday, inserted into the proscenium arch of Moscow’s
Kamerny Theatre in 1922–1923 (Figures 4.5a and 4.5b). Rather than open and
fluid, the sceno-architecture is a multilevel structure of collaged spaces,
suggestive of a layered and unstable urban machine within which the performers’
bodies are integrated. As constructivist stage “devices,” such complex mobile
sceneries stood in radical contrast to the auditoria that housed them. They were
asymmetrical, vertiginous and fragmented structures: epic in conception and
intimate in scale. In contrast, the auditoria were passive, symmetrical and
unyielding. However, the competition designs of the Vesnins from the early 1920s
reflect the dynamic structures of constructivist stage machines in proposed
architectural projects, illustrating how, as they began to build for the authorities,
their work became more rigid and unified. This coincided with a move away
from dynamic constructivism toward the more controlled aesthetic and logic of
international style. As Victor Burgin notes with respect to Lissitzky’s claim to the
avant-garde annihilation of Euclidean space, “The mirror of perspectival
representation was broken only in order that its fragments, each representing a
distinct point of view, be reassembled according to classical geometric principles
– to be returned, finally, to the frame and the proscenium arch.”70
The guiding principle of the Palace of Culture to inculcate through
entertainment, and the Modern Movement’s resistance to adopt and adapt avant-
garde theatre constructions, throws into sharp relief a broader 20th-century trend
to codify, instruct and manage through a commanding architecture. The theatre
as a disciplinary space – collecting and controlling spectacle and spectators
within its severe hold – is clearly illustrated in media images of the Moscow
theatre siege with the hostage audience corralled into their rows of numbered
seats while the rebels guard the limited number of visible exits, taking advantage
of a clear overview from the stage and vantage points in the auditorium. This
same super-visionary control worked against the rebels when the Russian
authorities pumped the debilitating gas into the hermetically sealed singular
space, revealing how all were incarcerated within it. The familiar, prosaic
auditorium represented the static and dominant monument, critiqued by Bataille
for “enforcing […] order and constraint.”71 Its spatial will to “command and
prohibit” was what Bataille and Artaud railed against, and which Artaud wished
to literally and psychically explode, freeing the theatre from its burden of
representation and architecture from the weight of its monumental gravitas.
Figure 4.4a The Vesnin brothers’ Proletariat Palace of Culture (ZIL) in Moscow (1930–1936): view from
balcony

Figure 4.4b The Vesnin brothers’ Proletariat Palace of Culture (ZIL) in Moscow (1930–1936): view from
stage
Figure 4.5a Aleksandr Vesnin’s design for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1922–1923), dir.
Alexander Tairov: set model. Courtesy of the A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

Figure 4.5b Aleksandr Vesnin’s design for G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1922–1923), dir.
Alexander Tairov: in performance. Courtesy of the A.A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, Moscow.

This seemingly irrational desire to enact such subjective violence on the

auditorium seeks to counter what Žižek names the objectivity and “true form” of
“systemic violence” inherent to the “normal state of things”:

At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of
 crime, terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step
back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly
visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable
agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates
such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains
our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance.72

For Žižek, “direct attacks and suicide bombings [are where] violence and counter-
violence are caught up in a deadly vicious cycle, each generating the very forces
it tries to combat.”73 For me, as an architect specializing in performance space, the
visible subjective violence of the Moscow theatre siege exposed the invisible
objective violence inherent to theatre architecture as a disciplinary social
mechanism. And it was this systemic brutality, which initially proved effective
for the rebels, that was co-opted by the authorities with tragic results. However,
what follows is an alternative and restorative approach to violence and
architecture, found in Artaud’s spatial speech, which ultimately aligns with the
potential for pleasure, renewal and the “deeply Dionysian,” addressed by
Tschumi.

Enter Artaud (Flinging Bombs)

[Artaud] aims to provoke in the theatrical event, at any price, a frisson that
shakes the spectator out of his passivity, out of the softening seduction that
anesthetizes him by way of the pleasant, the picturesque and the decorative.
The theatre of diversion must give way to a corrosive theatre that will gnaw
away at the shell that is constricting it and give us back a forgotten aspect of
the spectacle. This is the theatre of cruelty.
– Andre Green, “The Psycho-analytic Reading of Tragedy”

Antonin Artaud wished to undo the theatre of representation and, in order to

accomplish this goal, recognized the need to dismantle it spatially. However, the
artist, who suffered from schizophrenia (and from being ahead of his time), never
realized his theatre in practice. He attempted to perform it on three significant
occasions: in a lecture on The Theatre and the Plague at the Sorbonne in 1933
(where he shocked the audience by enacting his own death);74 at a poetry reading
in 1947 at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (where he had to be led quietly away
after three hours, having deviated into free speech); and in his final work that
same year, a radiophonic piece entitled To Have Done with the Judgement of God
(which was pulled from the radio prior to airing in 1948). On all three occasions it
was Artaud’s glossolalia and screams that defined his performances. Glossolalia,
described by Allen S. Weiss as “a type of speech or babble characteristic of certain
discourses of infants, poets, schizophrenics, mediums, charismatics,” constitutes
language at a level that is both material and gestural.75 Such expressions were
critical to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as catharsis and exorcism “to rid himself of
God’s influence and judgment.”76 But it was in his scream that Artaud attempted
to shatter theatrical and spatial conformity – the shriek ultimately planned to
reverberate in the sublime sound-space of the airwaves, repudiating the built
environment entirely.
In her essay “Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre,” Helen Finter points
out that what some saw as “the unbearable exhibition of a mental patient was for
Artaud the unprecedented attempt at exploding the boundaries of a theatrical
event.”77 His “manifestation of the Real” on the stage of the Vieux-Colombier
highlighted the impossibility of making himself heard in the theatre, claiming
that only bombs could produce the desired effect.78 The scream, like a bomb, was
an attempt to tear the fabric of representation through a cruel intrusion on the
stage, described by Alenka Zupančič as “a ‘materialization’ of something
concealed or repressed […] the intrusion of some ‘foreign reality.’ ”79 This
interruption of the stage fiction by an “alien reality” disturbs the clarity of the
spectator’s vision with the unexpected act that summons the Real into reality,
momentarily rupturing the field of symbolically constructed representations with
something that exceeds it. Lacan has referred to the Real as an “impossible”
condition associated with the preverbal, thereby transcending language because it
is lost when we enter into language. Artaud, who resisted the representational in
the theatre and rejected the logic of language, resorted to the scream, described
by Weiss as “a fine skewer,”80 to pierce reality and theatrical space. However, his
suppurations of reality were also to expose it.
Artaud’s scream became a spatial weapon against the Aristotelian mimetic
theatre, actively disrupting its focus on the fictive, repetitive and imitative. The
full force of its sonorous authenticity triggered his demand for a theatre that
utilized reality rather than representation as its principle medium, allowing
architecture to play a more active role in performance itself. As Una Chaudhuri
contends, “[i]f the real can be represented by the real itself, then representation
does not have to settle for the limits and frames that constrict it in all the other
media.”81 For Artaud spectacle had to act “not as reflection, but as force.” While
his scream triggered a spatial disruption, rather than literal explosions, his
writing performed a complex theatrical architecture of eruption through what
Derrida refers to as his “Spacing [espacement] […] the archi-manifestation of
force, or of life.”82

An architecture against architecture

[A]bandoning the architecture of present day theatres, we shall take some
hangar or barn, which we shall have constructed according to the processes,
which have culminated in the architecture of certain churches or holy
places, and of certain temples.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

Artaud’s writing resonates with the invocation of an architecture that is

troubling, unsettling and resistant to representational theatre and the well-
established canons of its architecture. It is also more complex than that which he
explicitly outlines in his first manifesto of the “Theatre of Cruelty” (1932) in The
Theatre and its Double, where he calls for a ritualistic hangar/barn with a
vertiginous, layered structure eliminating the centrality of the stage within the
auditorium:

So composed and so constructed, the spectacle will be extended, by

elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the theatre and will scale the
walls from the ground up on light catwalks, will physically envelop the
spectator and immerse him in a constant bath of light, images, movement
and noises.83

As with Nietzsche’s desire for a Dionysian theatre, Artaud wished it to re-

establish an immersive space with a more direct relationship between spectator
and spectacle. This meant eradicating not only the distinction between stage and
auditorium but also the monumentality of the building, allowing it to host a
constant magic, orchestrated by the “master of sacred ceremonies.”84 Such a space
was the product of both the theory of performance and also of the feverish mind
of a diagnosed schizophrenic.
Louis Sass, in Madness and Modernism, saw Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty
providing a defence against “the devitalisation and derealisation that pervaded
his being.”85 While his desire to “eclipse the mind through ecstatic sensation and
fusion with the ambient world” was never realized (or materialized), he
psychically occupied such a zone. The paradox of Artaud is that he wished to
create that which he was escaping from, to hurl himself into there, where he
feared most. He longed to immerse himself in the dissolution that haunted him.
The architecture of his desire was therefore like his physical being; “this
dislocated assemblage […] this ill-assembled heap of organs […] like a vast
landscape on the point of breaking up.”86 Spatial dis-order was a means of
reordering the artist’s own fragmented psyche and that of the greater social body.
In a discontinuous and disintegrating space the spectator is de-anaesthetized in
order to force a cure. Therefore, theatre for the tormented Artaud provided a
fiercely transformative place of healing.

A site of recovery
In the true theatre a play disturbs the senses’ repose, frees the repressed
unconscious, incites a kind of virtual revolt and imposes on the assembled
collectivity an attitude that is both difficult and heroic.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

Over sixty years after Antonin Artaud’s treatise on the Theatre of Cruelty, Ben
Okri writes in A Way of Being Free that the “reality of what we are doing to one
another is explosive. […] There is much to scream about. […] Something is
needed to wake us from the frightening depths of our moral sleep.”87 This cry of
rage echoes Artaud’s demand for the public to “be terrified, and awaken.”88 His
scream, which ricocheted through the last century, continues to hang hauntingly
in the air.
While cruelty may conjure up associations with blood, pain and distress,
Artaud was concerned primarily with its qualities as rigidity and unrelenting
severity. For him “[t]here is no cruelty without consciousness and without the
application of consciousness.”89 As he wrote to Jean Paulhan, in his first letter on
Cruelty (1932), “[it] signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible
and absolute determination.”90 He wished “to return the etymological origins of
speech which in the midst of abstract concept, always evoke a concrete
element.”91 This focus on concretizing the abstract illustrates the pursuit of
cruelty’s palpable materiality found etymologically in cru or “raw flesh.” Hence
the body (individual, collective and constructed) becomes the principal site in the
Theatre of Cruelty. The conflation of the concrete and the abstract posits praxis
as the all-consuming and unfulfilled desire for Artaud. Practice was a physical
manifestation, of theory: “I go from the abstract to the concrete and not from the
concrete toward the abstract.”92 Transforming the abstract into the concrete is
also central to architecture, realized through built thought. The focus for Artaud
is therefore on the act of orchestrating the body within the material space of
performance, the unity of which is dismantled to incorporate such a body.
The sleep, from which Okri and Artaud bid us wake, is the sleep of our
indifference. Okri talks of the “proverbial axe to crack the ice and make the
frozen blood of humanity flow again.”93 Artaud saw such cruelty in Vincent van
Gogh’s brushstrokes that appeared to take to inert objects in a frozen world with
a carver’s blow, “unsealing their impenetrable trembling.”94 These manoeuvres of
the artist are both violent and curative. Faced with an increasingly mechanized
world that was mobilizing technology for mass destruction, Artaud sought to
find a restorative place, manifesting itself as a cruel and vengeful machine. By
1946 (following his confinement during the catastrophic World War II), “cruelty”
for Artaud was no longer sheer necessity but truly cruel: “the gallows, the
trenches, a crematorium oven, or insane asylum. Cruelty: massacred bodies.”95 In
1947 he wrote; “there is nothing left to do but gather the body together, I mean
PILE UP BODIES.”96
That same year architectural historian Sigfried Giedion wrote Mechanization
Takes Command, which documented his witnessing the assembly- line slaughter
of animals. The complete indifference in the act of automated butchery strongly
affected him, as did the inhaled odour of blood, which remained within his body,
continuing to rise from the walls of his stomach long after the viscera had been
washed away from those of the abattoir. In a post-war environment, Giedion
considers such inurement toward mass technological killing, claiming it may be
lodged deep in the roots of our time: “It did not bare itself on a large scale until
the War, when whole populations, as defenceless as animals hooked head
downwards on the traveling chain, were obliterated with trained neutrality.”97
This statement remains pertinent today yet, as Artaud wrote, “Only perpetual
war explains a peace which is only a passing phase.”98
Artaud’s theatre becomes a site of recovery from the overwhelming cruelty of
the world. This notion of a curative theatre is the central premise in Hélène
Cixous’s essay “The Place of Crime the Place of Pardon,” in which she affirms
theatre as a place for revealing the wickedness and cruelty of the world: the site
where we, as a collective gathering, can become more human in order to confront
the quotidian nightmares of mediatized reality and the powerlessness we
experience in the face of its horror:

In truth we go as little to the theatre as to our heart and what we feel the
lack of is going to the heart, our own and that of things. We live exterior to
ourselves in a world whose walls are replaced by television screens, which
has lost its thickness, its depths, its treasures and we take the newspaper
columns for our thoughts. We are printed daily. We lack even walls, true
walls upon which divine messages are written. We lack earth and flesh.99

The challenge then is to create a distinct location, as a world apart, where terror
is evoked in order to contemplate, accept and meditate upon the act of death and
therefore our own mortality. Cixous is also seeking a space of palpable
materiality. The “divine messages” she calls for can be found in Théâtre du
Soleil’s Cartoucherie, where Cixous has collaborated on performances since the
mid-1980s and where inscriptions from each show accrue as a palimpsest on the
venue’s walls. However, her notion of deep surfaces suggests a more complex
spatiality where walls thicken into complex border conditions, providing
shadowy zones for circulation systems, cavities for material accumulation and
permeable constructions from which to appear and disappear. It is past such
spaces that visitors to the Cartoucherie move when they enter the auditorium
from the dining foyer in which a communal meal is shared before the show:
through a shifting indeterminate zone where props and settings are stored,
research images displayed and where one can view, through tattered canvas or
gauzy layers, the performers preparing below the seating block.100
Echoing Artaud, Cixous claims “we live under the same sun of blood,” and
speaks of the “naked stage” which “returns to us the living part of death or the
mortal part of life.”101 She writes of the necessity for a certain theatre “because it
allows us to live what no genre allows us: the difficulty, the pain we have being
human. Evil. What happens at the theatre is the Passion, but the passion
according to […] this enigmatic, tortured, criminal, innocent human being that I
am, I who am thou or you.”102 We come to the theatre, as a place of both crime
and pardon, to confront pity and terror and have the enigma of human cruelty
revealed to us. Like Artaud, Cixous sees the theatre as a “temple without dogma
and without doctrine […] where our torments and above all our blindnesses are
played.”103 However for her the “curtain” remains as a border condition and the
spoken word retains its primacy, whereas Artaud seeks to rupture the veil of form
and language – tearing down the curtain, dismantling the stage and surrounding
the audience with action.
It is the orchestration of earth (stage), flesh (participants) and true walls (built
environment) that establishes an architecture of cruelty as the site of recovery.
But what are the particular qualities of this architecture? Artaud wrote that the
“secret of theatre in space is dissonance, dispersion of timbres and the dialectic
discontinuity of expression.”104 This statement not only challenges the primacy of
the visual but, through the repeated use of the prefix dis- (from the Latin dis-:
apart, asunder), operates on space by tearing it apart. Over fifty years later,
Derrida refers to “strong words in [Bernard] Tschumi’s lexicon,” especially those
beginning with de- or dis-: “These words speak of destabilization, deconstruction,
dehiscence and first of all, dissociation, disjunction, disruption, difference. An
architecture of heterogeneity, interruption, non-coincidence.”105 Tschumi devotes
a chapter in his book Architecture and Disjunction to this linguistic phenomenon.
In “De-, Dis-, Ex-,” he claims that the separation of people and language has de-
centred the subject and society itself. Nothing, including architecture, is stable
anymore.106
Adopting a language of radical gesture, Artaud saw the theatre as “the most
effective site of passage for […] immense analogical disturbances” that formed a
unity between the concrete and the abstract. This includes spatial gesture here
investigated through the dis-eased body, ex-ploded space and a de-centred
architecture.

Dis-eased body
If the essential theatre is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but
because like the plague it is a revelation, the bringing forth, the
exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the
perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are
localized.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

A curative space requires a body in peril: a body shaken by a fever that torments
it in order to restore it to health; a body “convulsed and pacified.”107 Artaud
likened theatre to the Plague, bringing to the surface the rot and filth of society as
an abscess to be lanced. Like the Plague, his theatre was “a total crisis” that
cleanses both performer and spectator in their collective experience. The body is
a society and the Plague a delirium, intensifying energy and allowing
communication. Through his Plague analogy Artaud was demanding that theatre
become a reality rather than a representation, although in a world apart. As in
spaces associated with disease, a complete, intense and separate world is created
and shared. Unlike modernism’s rationalized therapeutic spaces it is not a
carefully patrolled, hermetically sealed, hygienic environment but a visceral,
porous and unstable site that documents its pathology as a spatial archive,
chronicling the effects of time and events through a layered archaeology.
Like many artists who suffer physically and mentally, Artaud saw disease as a
visitation, a curse and a judgement, while art celebrated the transcendence of
mortality in the face of death.108 Disease, which presents the ultimate threat of
death, isolates, exposes, intensifies and transforms character. Its delirium creates
a lucidity that heightens consciousness, forcing the victim to see terrible truths
about the nature of human existence. It deranges the senses, stimulating great
passions and energies, bringing new awareness to the survivor. As with
Nietzsche, who wrote “what does not destroy me, makes me stronger,”109
suffering and insanity was a necessity for learning the truth.
Artaud’s restorative theatre aimed to reconcile life with a universe out of
control, working with “the underlying menace of a chaos [is] as decisive as it is
dangerous.”110 Contemporary theatre had become decadent because, captivated
by illusion and representation, it had broken away from gravity, “from effects
that are immediate and painful – in a word from danger.”111 Acknowledging and
embracing the danger and difficulty inherent in live practice, Artaud wished to
create resistant work, transforming the passive spectator into an active creator. A
theatrical environment that also physically resists and provokes, challenges the
relationships and preconceptions of the body of its audience, which is exposed
and acknowledged as a collective of individuals, physiologically affected by
performance: disturbed, discomforted and displaced … dis-eased.
The dis-eased body in the theatre is not the “black widow” co-opted into terror,
nor the hostage threatened by her explosive body, nor the nervous systems
overcome by toxic fumes filtering through the ventilation system. Rather, it’s that
of the performers who enact a resistance to containment, transferred to the
collective and individual bodies of the witnessing audience. Such performances
also have the potential to infect, and accordingly affect, the built environment.
The dis-eased body in the theatre is therefore a feverish body unleashing itself in
space; a contaminated body, and body as contaminant, threatening to erupt
through the borders of its own skin and refusing to be contained within the
playhouse. Performance becomes a burning and active projection, storming the
limits of body, audience and building. Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in
Pain, writes that the human is a projecting creature and that creating may be
expressed as the reversing of interior and exterior body linings in order to
animate the exterior world.112
In weakening the literal and psychological frames of the theatre, definitions of
inclusion and exclusion can be confounded. The dis-eased body in the theatre
exposes corporeal and spatial limits, resulting in a turning inside out, which flays
the body of the building, realigning it so that interior and exterior fold in on each
other to create a more labyrinthine space. This encourages the return of the
disorienting pre-Plague labyrinth dismantled by the Enlightenment; the space of
continual transformations discussed by Weiss as ideal for nightmares, dreams and
reverie: embracing all possible conditions and contradictions, transforming waste
matter into something of communal value; “It is pure difference itself.”113
Lefebvre reminds us that, as an invaginated space, the labyrinth also has material
existence as the womb, restoring “the priority of the original mystery, of the
maternal principle, of a sense of envelopment and of temporal cycles.”114 This dis-
easy site, with its thick fleshy walls, is neither inside nor outside. Like Bracha
Ettinger’s shared Matrixial Borderspace, it represents a site before language: a
partial object for partial subjects, its limits appearing and disappearing, always
becoming.115 As spatial volatility and material force, the objectile is rendered
abjectile. Acknowledging the world as an uncontainable theatre of matter in
motion, reinforces a contiguity between bodies, objects and environments:
rendering them vibratile, porous and resistant entities.
Two specific projects of the historical avant-garde attempted to build this
abject and performative dis-ease through material spatial propositions – Kurt
Schwitters’s Merzbau installations, also referred to as his Cathedral of Erotic
Misery (1923–1943), and Kiesler’s Endless Space proposals, which began with the
Endless Theatre (1924–1925). Schwitters’s Merzbau interventions, which he
referred to as “spatial growths,” were fragmented assemblages grafted into
various existing buildings by the artist who was forced into a constant state of
exile (Figure 4.6). Chaotic and incomplete, they began as a work of mourning for
the artist’s dead son. Always in the process of being made and remade but never
completed, the feverish archival assemblages were constructed of found materials
– flowers in urine, death masks, fetish altars, recycled partial objects – taking on
their own life as dripping parasitical matter, accumulating and decomposing over
time, while thickening and spatializing the surfaces to which they adhered. This
emphasis on an organic spatiality is also found in Kiesler’s Endless Theatre
(Figures 4.7a and 4.7b), unveiled in 1926 at the New York International Theatre
Exposition, which combined the immersive qualities of Craig’s dramatic space
with the mediatized architecture found a year later in Gropius’s Total Theatre.
Kiesler proposed a mobile-flexible architecture suspended within the double skin
of an egg-shaped shell structure. As an open space designed to respond to the
theatrical event as well as the crowd in motion, his theatre was comprised of
intersecting platforms, bridges and spiralling ramps, dedicated to an “elasticity of
building adequate to the elasticity of living.”116 From this responsive environment
Kiesler developed his theories of “Correalism” and “Biotechnique,” played out as
forms contiguous with both body and cosmos. As an expanding and contracting
material dream-space, his architecture evokes Plato’s impressionable model of
chora, outlined in Timaeus as an all-embracing “receptacle of becoming.”117 This
mutable space-matter is also aligned to the ancient theatre’s choros, which
Nietzsche referred to as the “womb” that gave birth to drama; a “primal ground”
melding dream into communal being by presenting “itself to our eyes in
continual rebirths.”118

Figure 4.6 Kurt Schwitters’s Hanover Merzbau (1930)

Source: Photo: Wilhelm Redemann. Bildagentur fur Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin

The chaotic and incomplete environments of Schwitters and Kiesler proffered

four-dimensional matrices that responded to the avant-garde’s insistence on a
more fluid, irrational, sensory and temporal architecture; Tzara had called for the
“soft tactile depths” of “prenatal comfort,” and Chilean surrealist artist, Roberto
Matta, demanded the body be folded in “wet walls” that mould its profile to suit
our “infinite motions.”119 A significant difference between the Cathedral of Erotic
Misery and the Endless Theatre is that the artist introduced a parasitical and
performative friction into his environment as a living erotic system, whereas the
architect’s “organic architecture” refused to submit to the more disturbing
realities of fleshy desire, structural failure and material decay. Kiesler’s spatial
elasticity aimed, like Plato’s chora, to be eternal and indestructible, invoking the
womb but denying its mater-reality.
Performance theorist Johannes Birringer utilizes the term “decomposition” to
refer to this emergence as resistant matter that denies singularity of authorship
and form, privileging “the temporary, the transitory, the dynamic yet
perishable.”120 Linking production and destruction, growth and decay, “as if art
were a metabolizing system,”121 this more organic understanding favours process
over product and thereby destabilizes architecture as the construction of complete
and cohesive forms. Brook’s Théàtre des Bouffes du Nord (Figures 4.8a, 4.8b, 4.8c,
4.8d and 4.8e), described by Carlson as a theatre “under erasure,”122 provides a
useful instance of a venue that bears witness to its complex history as baroque
proscenium theatre (1876–1951), turned abandoned, burnt and derelict site (1952–
1974), turned experimental site for Peter Brook’s CICT company (1974–).
Discovered by Brook as a burnt-out carcass, gutted and stripped of much of its
ornamentation, this long-abandoned theatre was renovated in order to retain its
character as a space-in-motion, presenting – through the scenographic
enhancements of Chloe Oblensky – an apparent corporeal submission to time
through peeling paint, deteriorating details, scarred surfaces and the exposure of
structure and services. Past productions are deliberately and delicately layered
into the archaeology of the space, illustrating the “way in which the ephemerality
of the performance can leave a trace on a permanent character of the space.”123
Figure 4.7a Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater (1926): plan. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York/Scala, Florence

Figure 4.7b Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theater (1926): section. Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art,
New York/Scala, Florence

For Artaud, the body of the building, like the physical body it houses, doubles
as the social body, which is neither whole nor clean, nor ever at a standstill.
Gathered for the event, this collective body is actively complicit within a culture-
in-action. Dis-eased, the audience is no longer composed of passive witnesses,
but, as a communal body-in-peril, becomes implicated in the force of the event.
Architecture, as inert matter, is disturbed, weakened and thrown into
convulsions. This feverish space then vibrates to the point of explosion, as an
event triggered by the burning need to place the body at risk.

Ex-ploding space
The problem is to make space speak, to feed and furnish it; like mines laid in
a wall of rock which all of a sudden turns into geysers and bouquets of
stone.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

While the silence masking spatial violence is unacceptable, the fallacy of

architecture as static, solid, enduring and mute must be detonated. Artaud forces
space to speak by exploding it. He takes the established inert form of the theatre
auditorium and renders it a dismembered body. His scream shatters, lacerates and
eviscerates space, much the same as his magic spells waged war on the surface of
the page with their scratches, tears and burns. The reverberations ensuing from
this performative scream put space into action, bringing it to the point of
explosion.
Writing between the World Wars, Artaud stated: “We are not free. And the sky
can still fall on our heads. And the theatre has been created to teach us that first
of all.”124 This allusion to the sky raining danger is probably associated with the
use of flight and machinery in warfare, where landscape and bodies were torn
asunder by explosions. As Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Storyteller,” the shock
of World War I had shifted European perceptions and “in a field of force of
destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”125 The
madness and mechanization of the war had called reality itself into question and
profoundly affected the surrealists who took objects and brought the forces of
“atmosphere” concealed in them “to the point of explosion.”126 Yet Artaud’s
writing on explosive space also foreshadowed the catastrophe that occurred just
over ten years after he penned The Theatre and its Double, when devouring blasts
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki annihilated form, atomized bodies and incinerated
space. The horror of this and its effect on “spectral conformity” haunts his later
essay on van Gogh, filled with “violent suns,” landscapes of “hostile flesh”127
erupting in “conflagration […] bombardment […] explosion.”128 In a letter to
Breton, written in 1947, Artaud maintained that the only language society now
understood was “bombs, machine guns, barricades and everything else that
follows”129; reflective of our own time in which we are ruled by constructions of
global terror. His calls for revolt and restoration constitute important demands
when so much is at stake.
For Artaud violent eruptions perform a loosening of space through shock. His
“supernatural explosions”130 shatter space into spaces, creating “a living
whirlwind that devours the darkness.”131 This by-product of explosive energy
fragments and fills the empty spaces with movement, light and sound. Sonorous
reverberations generate “possibilities for extensions beyond words, for
development in space, for dissociative and vibratory action upon the
sensibility.”132 The echoes that result from explosive reverberations have an
immediate architectural application. Built form becomes a conductor,
transmitting vibrations to the “organism” that is individual body and collective
public. Architecture takes on a conductive role, transferring the sound and
movement of performance directly to the witnessing body through structure and
materiality. This resonant quality also emphasizes acoustics “from the stifled
silence to the headlong representation of a spasm and from individual speech
mezzo voce to the weighty and resonant storm of a chorus slowly swelling its
volume.”133 Artaud’s proposed industrial hangar/barn was intended to evoke “the
architecture of certain churches, or holy places and of certain temples,”134 with
their highly reverberant qualities (designed to accommodate chanting rather than
spoken word). Defying a clear articulation of language and space they circulate,
replicate and delay sound, creating vibratory effects continuous with both the
body and the building.
Figure 4.8a Bouffes du Nord, Paris: view to stage
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 4.8b Bouffes du Nord, Paris: upper gallery

Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.8c Bouffes du Nord, Paris: inside proscenium
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.8d Bouffes du Nord, Paris: wall detail
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.8e Bouffes du Nord, Paris: wall detail
Photo: Marc Goodwin

The volatility of Artaud’s writing invokes the explosive and dynamic Carceri
etchings of 18th-century artist and architect Giambattista Piranesi (Figures 4.9a
and 4.9b), upheld by Tafuri as the historic precursor of the avant-garde,135 and
whose work Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier celebrate as “prophetic of
surrealistic juxtapositions and cubist deconstructions of Euclidean space, already
indicative of different attitudes to history and an imagination no longer bound to
a firm cosmology.”136 The fragmented imagery of these Prisons of the Imagination
presents “the first deliberate use of montage in architecture to explode and de-
structure the homogeneous space and linear time implied in perspective.”137 The
Carceri strongly influenced Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein who wrote an
essay in 1946 on the fluidity of Piranesi’s forms, exploring their dissolution and
fragmentation.138 By exploding the elements of an early etching Prima Parte
(1743), Eisenstein proved Piranesi’s technique in the later Carceri Oscura (1753),
where the earlier image had flown apart. Eisenstein referred to this technique as
“ecstatic transfiguration,” taking the form of “dissolution”; detonating and hurling
architecture in all directions, to set a dynamic and multiplicitous space in motion.
The viewer of these works becomes implicated in a fractured environment that
proffered an architecture resistant to the domination of the absolutist enframing
vision of the time. Applied to the theatre, such dissolution implies not only the
fragmentation of the scenic space behind the proscenium, suggesting a spatial
field that extends beyond the limits of its frame, but the annihilation of the frame
itself so that the unstable multi-layered architecture extends into and beyond the
auditorium, foreclosing on a discrete and hermetic interiority. Tafuri maintained
that the vertiginous and perilous Carceri constitute “theatres in which are staged
the acrobatics performed by an apostate anxious to drag his own spectators into
the universe of ‘virtuous wickedness.’ ”139

Figure 4.9a Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carcere oscura con antenna del suplizio de’ malfattori (1743)
Figure 4.9b Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘The Gothic Arch’ from Carceri d’invenzione (ca. 1749–1750)

Diana Agrest writes:

Piranesi’s ‘explosive’ vision compromises not just the architectural system

per se but rather a system of relationships, of contiguity and substitution.
[…] This kind of explosion implies in some way the dissolution of the limits
of architecture, of the ideological limits which enclose different architectural
practices.140

Piranesi’s vertiginous prisons, improvised on the page, also serve to question

incarceration. The role played by the figures who appear to move freely up
zigzagging staircases, across wooden galleries and bridges, through layers of
arches and past festoons of rope is unclear; all seemingly mirrored to infinity, as
they defy containment. The images suggest a continuation of space in three
dimensions, threatening to envelop the beholder. Perspective is literally shattered
on the page, drawing the viewer into the frame. The vanishing point has
exploded, multiplied and vanished, taking with it the horizon that contained the
body. There is no longer a commanding overview, either from the stage or of the
stage. As multiple sites, the stage is asserted when the performers claim it,
establishing manifold focal points for the viewers to contend with.141
Bernard Tschumi’s design for the National Studio of Contemporary Arts
(1992–1998) in Le Fresnoy, France (Figures 4.10a and 4.10b), established a
vertiginous and fragmented spatiality for creative encounters within an
institution that encourages the performing, visual and plastic arts to “cross their
aesthetic concerns, question and examine each other, let their peripheral zones be
occupied, their no-man’s-lands explored, their borders transgressed.”142 The
architect responded to the brief by retaining most of the abandoned buildings on
the site – a motley collection from the 1920s that once comprised a complex for
popular entertainment – and placing an immense “electronic roof” over them
from which he suspended an intricate system of walkways, platforms, galleries,
stairways and building services (Figure 4.11). This architecture in/between
becomes an event itself, staged by the complex mechanism of the intervening
shelter, which provides an inverted stage for the projection of media images. As
existing and new elements cohered beneath the great roof during the design
process, Tschumi focused on the intervals that materialized between them – “the
voids, the interstices.”143 Recalling the suspended platforms and mediatized
surface of Kiesler’s Endless Theatre, this hanging labyrinthine network creates
what the architect calls “a tension between the event inside the box and the box
as container of the event.”144 His hangar-like structure forms the “single site”
called for by Artaud within which a complex series of systems for circulation,
performance and technical services jostle with the roof-scape over which they
hover. There is something of the perilous in Tschumi’s acrobatic architecture that
seems appropriate to an institution inviting its participants to take risks.
However, the organization of Le Fresnoy’s interior spaces would have benefited
from incursions of this challenging spatial network, which occurs only in the
upper exterior zone rarely accessed and utilized by the buildings’ occupants as
the architect had intended.
Figure 4.10a National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Le Fresnoy: upper walkways
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.10b National Studio of Contemporary Arts, Le Fresnoy: upper stairs
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Piranesi’s carceral spaces foreshadow Artaud’s spatial language, just as

Tschumi’s in/between spaces articulate it. They liberate both the body and the
built form through a spatial violence, de-forming an architecture in which the
centre is constantly shifting and fracturing. Spectators are incorporated within
the montaged mise-en-scène, contributing to the creation of a reality in this real-
world-set-apart; what Artaud calls “the world tangential to objective reality.”145
The tangential experience is an anamorphic one where, no longer distanced from
the action, the audience’s peripheral vision is constantly called into play.
Recalling Nietzsche’s choric spatiality, the witnessing body is actively immersed
in a fragmented environment, perceiving the action and space in fissured form.
Derrida writes that in Artaud’s participatory event “the distance of vision is no
longer pure, cannot be abstracted from the totality of the sensory milieu; the
infused spectator can no longer constitute his spectacle and provide himself with
its object.”146 Not everything is directly revealed, nor is it entirely
comprehensible. The controlling overview of the modern auditorium is resisted
when the centrality and singularity of the stage and its performer are
destabilized.

De-centring architecture
The action will unfold, will extend its trajectory from level to level, point to
point; paroxysms will suddenly burst forth, will flare up like fires in
different spots. […] For this diffusion of action over an immense space will
oblige the lighting of […] a performance to fall upon the public as much as
upon the actors – and to the several simultaneous actions or several phases
of identical action in which the characters, swarming over each other like
bees, will endure all the onslaughts of the situations and the external assaults
of the tempestuous elements, will correspond the physical means of lighting,
of producing thunder or wind, whose repercussions the spectator will
undergo.147
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

Abolishing the stage and auditorium, Artaud storms the established boundaries
between the viewer and the viewed, asserting a “single site” that resists passive
inhabitation. Yet, as an exploded space, the site is neither singular, nor primarily
visual. Architect Daniel Libeskind in his conversation on theatre and “The End of
Space,” proposes “a space which is not a space of theatre, but a space to be found,
a space which has neither been colonized by either planning, architecture, nor by
the history of theatrical production.”148 Artaud’s evocation of a hangar/barn is
akin to now iconic, found-space industrial sites such the Wooster Group’s
Performing Garage in New York, Théâtre du Soleil’s Cartoucherie outside Paris
and Sasha Waltz’s Radialsystem V in Berlin. These places (originally constructed
for repairing vehicles, producing weapons and pumping sewerage) are associated
with mechanization, war and waste, offering “cruel” sites of recovery. However,
Libeskind continues, “Space is not one, but space is plural, space is a
heterogeneity, a difference.”149 How does this fragmented and multiplicitous
spatial reality house or un-house the dis-eased body?

Figure 4.11 Tschumi’s Studio of Contemporary Arts (1992–1998) Le Fresnoy Conceptual sketch

Source: Courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects

For Agrest:

The relationship between architecture and the human body becomes

particularly important at the moment in which the issue of the centre, a
preoccupation that filters throughout the history of art and architecture in
its many symbolic roles, acquires a special meaning.150

The explosiveness of the 20th century signified the end of a constructed view of
space: the end of a body’s central position in a space marked by a vanishing point
in the perspectival picture frame; and therefore the end of scenography (as the
framed perspectival construction that simultaneously distances and centralizes
the viewer in the event). Through disembodied technological warfare, vision was
intensified, culminating in the blinding light and atomization of form in Japan, in
August 1945. As Paul Virilio efficiently states, the “masses no longer believed
their eyes.”151 This visual disenchantment enacts an enucleation that violently
loosens sight from its governing position, allowing other senses to come into play.
Martin Jay points out that such a loss of faith in ocular proof definitively
overthrew Cartesian perspectivalism,152 thereby de-centring both the “eye” of the
spectator and the “I” of the performer.
Artaud’s de-centring of the stage and traditionally symmetrical auditorium
prefigures the deconstructivist architectures of Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Coop
Himmelblau, in which Anthony Vidler describes the displaced body as follows:

its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its
forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizable
human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the
monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity but in the
intimation of the fragmented, the morselated, the broken.153

As a reinscription of the body into architecture, Artaud’s fragmentation

challenged the “L’homme-type” of Le Corbusier’s Modulor (a proportional scale
for harmonious design based on the male human figure): also suggesting that, like
the body, architecture can no longer be recognized as a discrete, intact object.
Such dismemberment of the theatre space serves to deploy action “on all levels
and in all perspectives of height and depth.” It establishes a dangerous and
difficult space, “utilized not only in its dimensions and volumes but, so to speak,
in its undersides,”154 This spatial plurality also implies a fleshiness of both built
environment and the corporeal presence of the audience. The eradication of the
stage removed a fixed centre now capable of shifting and multiplying throughout
the space. Through dis-memberment the body could be re-membered, and in its
remembering be healed.
The absence of sets in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty relies on the power and
presence of hieroglyphic bodies and objects, and particularly the existing
environment, to contribute actively to the event. Resisting representation, the
fictive place of the performance is conjured up by the mise-en-scène, described
by Artaud as “a language in space and in movement.”155 The existing
environment, enfolded into this mise-en-scène, therefore shifts within the
consciousness of the participants, playing an active role in the performances as
“poetry in space.”156 Translating Artaud’s demand for “active presence” to
architecture dynamically incorporates the built environment into the event via its
multidimensional spatial reality. The building refuses to disappear when the
lights are dimmed, becoming a resistant objectile that must be considered within
performance. This is aligned to what Derrida calls Artaud’s “nontheological
space,” in which the violent force of performance participates within and against
the overt violence of traditional space through “Spacing […] the production of a
space that no speech could condense or comprehend.”157 The architecture was not
to be neutralized by staging conventions, but encouraged to contribute with its
own architectonic commentary.158
Artaud’s “new notion of space”159 was therefore predicated on the active and
resistant presence of a performative architecture, which can be found in two
theatres far-flung from the European and American centres of Western
performance space: Teatro Oficina in São Paulo (Figures 4.13, 4.14a, 4.14b, 4.14c,
4.14d and 4.14e), Brazil and the Hannah Playhouse (Figure 4.12) in Wellington,
New Zealand.
Teatro Oficina – a “guerrilla theatre” associated with the radical Tropicalist
movement and its tradition of encouraging active public participation in socio-
political performances – has undergone three incarnations since its long narrow
site was occupied by revolutionary law students in 1958. The original proscenium
arch theatre was transformed by Joaquim Guedes into a transverse format – two
seating areas facing each other across a central stage – that was destroyed by fire
in 1966.160 Flávio Império oversaw its restoration as a Brechtian end-stage venue
with in-built revolve and tiered concrete seating, which provided an important
hub for resistance during Brazil’s military dictatorship before being closed down
by the authorities in 1974, sending its director, José Celso Martinez Corrêa (a.k.a.
Zé Celso), into self-imposed exile. Zé Celso returned in 1978 and, two years after
the government declared an amnesty for socialist dissidents, the theatre reopened
in 1984, under the aegis of the state culture secretary: designed by Lina Bo Bardi
(who had worked with the company as a scenographer) and Edson Elito. The
architects collaborated closely with Zé Celso, referencing the company’s radical
and urban character – “continuing the space of the revolution of the 60s”161 – by
ripping out the entire interior and transforming the narrow site into an alleyway
that accommodated sky, earth and city: “To tear the walls, natural light to come
inside, the Black Box to leave. Urban space. Cosmos.”162
As a theatrical slot in the city – comprised of glazed wall and garden, a
skylight roof that slides open, vertiginous scaffolding towers of galleries and a
long central pit furrowing through the site’s steeply ramping floor – Teatro
Oficina (now occupying Rua Lina Bo Bardi) establishes spatial dynamics that
demand mobile performances and a more embodied engagement from viewers
who, required to constantly realign their focus, are invited to experience the
space on a range of levels and in varying conditions. Bo Bardi, who also designed
sets for theatre (including some of Oficina’s more rebellious productions during
the military dictatorship), was interested in creating a pedestrian street for
performance (reminiscent of those in São Paulo’s oldest neighbourhood, Bexiga)
at a time when urban development was dominated by cars. Drawing on the
terreiro of Afro-Brazilian Candomblé rituals – a sacred field designated for social
congregations, festivals, fights and reunions, continuing to represent a site of
resistance – she established a “terreiro electronico” in which state-of-the-art
equipment and projections compensated the multiple and fractured views of
performances dispersed along the fifty- metre performance passage
accommodating garden (earth), fountain (water), operable roof (air) and central
gas line with tap (fire) in this “scenic architecture” where no one can hide.163

Here, there is no place for spectators but only for actors: the public,
technicians, architecture and objects are literally on stage, along with the
official actors. This revolutionary scheme destroys the myth of the theatre as
a “box for dreaming in,” and suggests a real, possible way of life very close to
that of everyday people in the street.164

Such challenges for audience and performers can also be found in the Hannah
Playhouse, which was built for Wellington’s Downstage Company in 1973 and
designed by architect James Beard in consultation with scenographer Raymond
Boyce. As one of a handful of asymmetric performance spaces in the world, the
playhouse is both flexible, inviting a range of actor-audience relationships, and
resolutely architectural with its concrete towers, cranked galleries and walls of
diagonally slatted timber. The venue was originally designed as a restaurant
theatre with a flexible rostra system that created a limitless range of terraced
formats for dining and multiple staging. The peripheral labyrinth of its
surrounding ambulatory enhances the flexibility, providing an interstitial zone
that momentarily disorients the public as they move from the quotidian world to
one that folds the fictive world of the performance with the inescapable and, to
many who have worked in it, challenging character of the theatre’s architecture.

Figure 4.12 Section and plan of the Hannah Playhouse, designed by James Beard. Wellington, New Zealand
(1973)
Figure 4.13 Performance in Teatro Oficina, São Paulo, Brazil

Source: Teatro Oficina Archive

Figure 4.14a Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: “Rua Lina Bo Bardi” theatre street
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.14b Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: view to entry
Photo: Marc Goodwin
Figure 4.14c Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: scaffolding galleries
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 4.14d Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: view to opened retractable ceiling
Photo: Marc Goodwin

Figure 4.14e Teatro Oficina, São Paulo: side wall

Photo: Marc Goodwin

Venues such as Teatro Oficina and the Hannah Playhouse are dependent on
performance-makers who are willing to be provoked by the emphatic materiality
and severe geometries of a scenic architecture. The Wellington auditorium has
been under threat for some years with suggestions proffered to gut it of the
timber walls and balconies, paint the outer walls and concrete towers black, and
thereby establish a parallelogram black box studio. Perhaps impermanence is
inherent to these matrixial spaces that deny a suspension of time and place in
favour of challenging spatialities that cannot be extinguished with the lights. This
is evident in two more recent pop-up spaces: NO99’s Straw Theatre (Tallinn,
May–October 2011) and the Jellyfish Theatre (London, August–October 2010).
The first, designed by Salto Architects, was for all intents and purposes a black
box studio with end-stage seating. However, designed as a functional installation
and durational public performance in itself, its defining feature of straw bale
walls spray-painted black – “ordinary building material that embodies within it
archetypical power along with the beauty of texture”165 – presented an earthy
spatiality that forecloses on any architectural neutrality. A year earlier this raw
tactile quality was taken even further in the Jellyfish Theatre, designed by
German architect and conceptual artist, Martin Kaltwasser, for The Red Room
film and theatre company in cooperation with London’s Architecture Foundation.
A bricolage constructed entirely from reclaimed and recycled materials donated
by the community, the 120-seat theatre was a politically charged project
challenging theatrical conventions and the conventional politics of the day, in
this case climate change.166 Whereas the Straw Theatre’s principal fabric
provided ideal material for sound and light isolation, the Jellyfish’s leaky
patchwork construction, reminding us of the revolutionary barricades, eschewed
conventional expectations of a hermetically sealed auditorium. While its
transverse seating arrangement and multiple entries reflected the project’s
emphasis on porosity and accessibility, the exterior curvature and seemingly
haphazard construction belied a rigidly symmetrical and orthogonal interior.
Deliberately enacting an “aesthetics of resistance,”167 this ecological ark briefly
appeared and disappeared within a Southwark schoolyard, its junkitecture
claiming a sustainable approach and yet, like the art form of theatre itself, the
built form involved maximum effort (in human labour) for minimum outcome (in
durability): a paradox inherent to performance that confounds architecture’s
raison d’être, especially in relation to architecture for the “cultural industries.”
One of the most compelling performance spaces operating as an abject de-
centred model, has emerged from the studio, TMA, of New York-based architect,
Toshiko Mori who maintains, “rather than working with forms, we work with
forces.”168 TMA’s ecologically inflected design of the Thread (2015) – artist
residency and cultural centre in Sithian, Senegal – presents us with a dynamic
evental space, parametrically defined by an undulating thatched roof that shapes
two oculi framing open courtyards, which are utilized as gathering spaces for
markets, classes, performances and meetings as well as interactions between
visiting artists and the community. The performative organic roof, forming ever-
shifting spatialities, confounds any spatial symmetry in the reflected plan and
operates as an abjectile par excellence: collecting water, providing shade, directing
breezes, harbouring organisms and choreographing constellations of action.
Like the dis-eased and de-centred body, the architecture of cruelty is neither
comfortable nor yielding, neither safe nor sound. As a material embodiment of
Artaud’s spatial speech, it is fractured, without boundaries, discontinuous, open
to fluidity of motion and accessible to the carnality of the spectacle. The illusions
of the scenographic theatre have been dissipated in favour of an architecture
apprehended directly for what it is rather than what it represents. Discovered in
transformed buildings that have passed their used-by-date, the open networks of
deconstructed architecture, improvised constructions or found sites that bring
specificities of their historical, mythological and banal clutter to the event, abject
space seriously questions the well-established conventions of theatre venues and
the relationships their architecture defines and regulates. Yet, despite the
buildings cited throughout this chapter, an architecture of cruelty is yet to come
close to matching the more radical performances that have eventuated since
Artaud’s call for a Theatre of Cruelty, many of which still rely on the proscenium
arch to construct their imagery.169 Again, like Brecht’s Theatre am
Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, an architecture inherently resistant to the art form,
highlights the potency and politics of such challenging practices. Yet the invisible
objective violence of theatre’s disciplinary machine was made visible by the
subjective violence of the Moscow siege; confronting us with the paradox of
cruelty, with which Artaud’s lifelong project sought to grapple.

Cruel machine
And just as there will be no unoccupied point in space, there will be neither
respite nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility.
– Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

As a cruel and impossible mechanism Artaud’s theatre was to be “rebuilt” upon

“extreme action, pushed beyond all limits”170 with its true and only value found
in an “excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger.”171 This Theatre of
Cruelty is not one of bloodshed or martyrdom but a cruel apparatus built to
combat cruelty, through what Derrida refers to as “the irruptive force fissuring
the space of the stage.”172 And within this opening, the Real, as a traumatic
surplus, makes its unbearable presence felt.
The invasion of the Dubrovka Theatre in October 2002 staged an “irruption of
the Real” by storming the prescribed limits of a house of entertainment. It
presented a moment when theatrical and lived realities coincided to reveal the
ultimate intrusion – that of death. The stage became what Alenka Zupančič calls
“A Perfect Place to Die,” taking advantage of “the public setting par excellence,
where everything that is said is intended for the audience.”173 The realm of this
particular stage then expanded, through international media coverage, into a
phantasmatic global platform upon which a festival of politics was played out.
Although the Moscow theater hostage crisis is isolated as a discrete event, its
retelling defies a clear synopsis. In their analysis of the siege, Adam Dolnik and
Richard Pilch task themselves with its reconstruction through the multiple and
conflicting accounts from media, witnesses and participants, all which “differ
significantly in their description of virtually every aspect of the incident.”174 This
highlights the impossibility of a coherent evocation of something experienced
from a range of varying perspectives and is aligned to Žižek’s assertion of the
factual unreliability confusion and inconsistency that defines “truthfulness” in
the narrative of a traumatic event.175 Unlike the physical space stormed by
Chechen rebels and Russian forces there is no totalizing overview to the event
that also resists a discrete spatiotemporal containment. Dolnik and Pilch cite it as
an “expressive act” which, like a theatrical production, was planned, rehearsed
and enacted. But unlike the conventions of theatrical shows, any prearranged
scripting of action was always err to the unpredictabilities of re-action, despite
the number of possible scenarios that may be taken into account and practiced.
The selection of this site by the rebels was highly strategic, not only for its
centrality and proximity to the Kremlin, but because it guaranteed a large
collection of people within a space ideal for “barricade hostage-taking.”176 As a
political act, the Moscow Theatre Siege co-opted the inherent violence of theatre
architecture, revealing its complicity in controlling public space, and was cruel in
the most obvious sense of the word. Violent in its very conformity, the building
played an active role in the hostage taking of audience, performers, technicians,
terrorists and authorities. Through its function to organize and discipline both
performance and public, it facilitated the spectacle of horror, resulting in a
tragedy that was neither truly theatrical nor constructive. The distanced frame,
clear sightlines, ordered seating and carefully controlled exits also enabled the
political spectacle to be played out by both sides to tragic effect. Within less than
four months, the theatre was renovated for a short-lived remounting of the
musical production Nord-Ost:

Mr Vasilyev [Nord-Ost producer] said there was nothing in the theatre that
would remind people of the dreadful day when the rebels struck as the
 interior had been completely redesigned … But security guards will be
present at the theatre and audiences will have to pass through metal
detectors before entering … The seats – previously dark red – are now light
blue. The orchestra pit, which the hostages had to use as a toilet, is now level
with the audience.177

This restoration, which maintained the auditorium’s original layout, was limited
to technical improvements, a change in colour scheme and increased surveillance.
The orchestra pit that was previously sunk below the stalls was raised so as to
literally bury an excremental site where the rebels killed the first of four hostages.
It continues to operate as a spatial divide, now bound by a moveable wall for the
security of the musicians. The violence was quickly covered over and the
moment of rupture, when real terror entered the theatre, failed to open up a
debate regarding the problematic role played by the existing architecture in this
event. Instead the increased presence of security systems – providing a strong
reminder of that “dreadful day” – reinforces the perpetual state of crisis in which
terror remains an ever-present spectre, further instrumentalizing violence in the
built environment.
Measures taken in the name of security continue to ignore the subterranean
rhythms that evade architectural discourse, barricading in both building and
thought. Alternatives have to be sought to the confinement of body and psyche
that tends to prevail as a solution against incursions of violence. Bataille and
Artaud, in highlighting that the performing body is an inherently uncontainable
entity, revealed architecture’s impossible task to provide secure containment. Yet
in this impossibility lies the condition of possibility for combating violence. Out
of their writing an architecture of cruelty emerges that suggests alternative
strategies, not only for theatre architecture specifically but public space generally.
This architecture of cruelty is both discrete and permeable. Its labyrinthine
qualities disallow a unified overview and demand an active engagement of the
observer to comprehend its complexity. By destabilizing the body in a four-
dimensional layering of movement systems, voids and interstitial zones, it rejects
the notion of a fixed and controlled centre. Its vibrant materiality, alternating foci
and overlapping realities bring the slow time of built form into play with the
varying temporalities of performance and fictive space. As a performative force,
the spatial volatility of architecture as abjectile provides potential resistance to
invasion and attack.
In The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson reminds us that 130 years
ago Nietzsche insisted we open our eyes and “take a new look at cruelty”178; a
demand addressed by the ensuing historical avant-garde, especially Artaud,
answering the philosopher’s call for “an artist in and transfigurer of cruelty”
(Nietzsche ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ Hollingdale, p. 160). While the Moscow
theatre siege constituted yet another cruel event in the unproductive and entirely
destructive proliferation of terrorist and counter-terrorist events that mark the
21st century, this chapter has endeavoured to offer an alternative model resisting
such incursions through a restorative architecture that adopts a new approach to
performance space: one that requires acknowledging, confronting and addressing
the spatial bondage enacted by auditoria, to which Isaacs referred over eight
decades ago, epitomized in the Dubrovka Theatre as a globally replicated
modernist auditorium. Adopting Breton’s insistence on “a non-slavery to life,”179
my argument also reflects Nelson’s entreaty to attend to the varying agitations
and effects of “pure cruelty” … “(such as precision, transgression, purgation,
productive unease, abjectness, radical exposure, uncanniness, unnerving
frankness, acknowledged sadism and masochism, a sense of clearing or
clarity)”;180 many discussed here through performative spatial tactics of the
Dadaists, surrealists and ensuing architects – paradoxically enacting what Tafuri
calls an “explosion of architecture out towards reality,” thereby shifting the
discipline “from form to reform.”181
In his meditation on the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, Mark Wigley
writes on how such events explode the myth that architecture offers security and
protection:

The terrorist is the exact counter-figure to the architect. Indeed architects

can learn more from the feared criminal than the celebrity designer, more
from threats than affirmations. The terrorist mobilises the whole
psychopathology of fears buried beneath the architect’s obsession with
efficiency, comfort and pleasure.182

I would add that such events are also cautionary tales against architecture’s will
to longevity, fixity, stability and literal “crowd control,” and the recent barricade
mentality – curtailing our freedom of movement and expression in the very name
of ‘freedom’ – is proving futile (from single entry bottlenecks into Broadway
theatres to the need for walls between territories). Having traced the genesis of
the anti-baroque auditorium from Wagner’s will to control and focus the unruly
audience through architectural modernism’s desire to rationalize space, this final
chapter utilized the Dubrovka “event” to expose theatre architecture’s
participation as a spatial actant in the social event, which, in crisis, reveals its
primary mode as a disciplinary mechanism for enacting cultural citizenship. Far
from being liquid or porous, auditorium architecture persists as an unyielding
spatial predictability and homogeneity, which compels many contemporary
performance-makers to flee its hermetically sealed and highly controlled interior:
escaping the dead air of the theatre for the plein air of found spaces and the
multiple and fragmenting stories they harbour. These performances in found
spaces tend to seek and work with dis-easy, de-centred and ex-plosive spatialities:
embracing the specific multiplicity of site as abjectile.

Notes
1 Wigley, “Editorial: Violence Space,” 7.
2 Ibid.
3 Žižek, “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” 239.
4 This still image taken from video footage is one of many that could once be found on the internet,
staged for the camera by the Russian authorities who emptied the auditorium of the dead bodies of its
citizens. The explosive body simultaneously represents a threat and a cautionary tale.
5 A spectator recalls thinking, “what a clever theatrical concept” when she saw the rebels enter from the
foyer. Reed (dir.), Terror in Moscow, HBO Documentary.
6 The rebels themselves were also taken captive by the space; unable to escape once they had entered
(many as members of the audience) and taken it over.
7 This refers to Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett’s references to the ‘actant’ – human and
nonhuman – as a mediating, transformational and/or intervening agent, which is therefore
performative in its active and operational role within the event.
8 Lacan, Television, 36.
9 Weiss, The Aesthetics of Excess, 22.
10 Kristeva, “Fetishizing the Abject,” 16.
11 Bataille, “Abjection and Miserable Forms,” 11.
12 Kristeva, “Fetishizing the Abject,” 16.
13 Ibid., 18.
14 Grosz, Architecture From the Outside, 93.
15 Ibid., 6.
16 The word “abject” comes from “abjectus,” the past participle of the Latin verb abicere: meaning “to cast
off” and originally meant “rejected.” Therefore, as verb and noun, it becomes action and artefact.
17 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 74.
18 Bataille, “Architecture,” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 21.
19 Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, 149.
20 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57.
21 Peter Eisenman discussed this as the “catastrophe fold” in “Unfolding Events,” Written into the Void, 17.
22 Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, 31.
23 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
24 Ibid., 195.
25 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 30–1.
26 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198.
27 Ibid., 202.
28 Hollier, Against Architecture, x.
29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
30 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 98.
31 Plato, “The Allegory of the Cave.”
32 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 320.
33 Ibid.
34 Tschumi in Khan and Hannah, “Performance/Architecture,” 56.
35 McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. McKenzie establishes the performance
imperatives of efficacy (cultural), efficiency (organizational) and effectiveness (technological), which
expand the performance field out of theatre and into the politics of everyday life.
36 The architectural firm Raninsky, Kamensky and Yurova concurrently planned the Dubrovka and
Meridian Palaces of Culture (1968–1974), which have identical auditorium designs. The Russian Alpha
forces trained in the Meridian prior to their storming of the Dubrovka. See Theatrical Russia,
www.rosteatr.ru/.
37 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 23.
38 In his discussions on Georges Bataille’s writing, Denis Hollier cites Tschumi’s reference to his design of
Parc de la Villette as architecture’s own paradoxical storming of itself. Hollier, Against Architecture, xi.
39 Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, 43.
40 Ibid., 61.
41 Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 77–80.
42 Tristan Tzara’s 1919 note in Chronique zurichoise from Oeuvres Complètes, 1:564, quoted by Carlson,
Theories of the Theatre, 343.
43 Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” 125.
44 See Brandon, Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917–1945, 11; and Matthews, André Breton: Sketch of an
Early Portrait, 59.
45 Apollinaire, “Preface and Prologue to The Breasts of Tiresias,” 169. Also quoted in Melzer, Dada and
Surrealist Performance, 126.
46 Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance, 126.
47 Mical (ed.), Surrealism and Architecture, 1–2, 6.
48 Lahiji, “ ‘… The gift of time’: Le Corbusier reading Bataille,” 121–2.
49 Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” 12.
50 Bataille’s articles “Slaughterhouse” and “Museum” expose the false sacralization of cultural institutions,
which, as temples without sacrifices, lack the violence and loss found in the slaughterhouse.
Reproduced in Leach, Rethinking Architecture and published in Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, 1:205,
1:239.
51 Le Corbusier, “Corb on Spontaneous Theatre,” translation of his 1948 speech, published in The
Architectural Review, 80–2.
52 Ozenfant and Jeanneret, La Peinture Moderne, 168, cited in Beatriz Colomina, “Where Are We?” 161.
53 Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 19–24.
54 Tschumi connects the erotic with the abject as an architectural “pleasure of excess” in “Architecture and
Transgression” (1976) in a section titled “eROTisism.” Reproduced in Architecture and Disjunction, 70.
55 Loos in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, 20, 22.
56 Ozenfant and Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” 151.
57 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 64.
58 Ibid, 73. Colomina refers to Tschumi’s architectural advertisement for a decomposing Villa Savoye in
relation to the canonic media image in which photography performs the definitive moment of
architecture and everything thereafter is a decay of that image. Colomina, “Art, Architecture,
 Advertising and the Media.”
59 Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, x.
60 Ibid., viii.
61 Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence, from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, 20.
62 Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 19.
63 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 309, 242.
64 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 54.
65 The material presence of the Chechen “black widow” patrolling the perimeter of the Dubrovka theatre or
centred in its stalls and wired to a bomb presents the ultimate abject figure: she is the mythical mother
in mourning, her “black wrath” provoking action, transforming sorrow to fury and fury to murder
(Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 43). The body as a bomb assumes form as informe. Her explosive
materiality recalls not only the avenging characters of Hecuba, Medea and Clytemnestra to the stage,
but also embodies the blood sacrifice of the ancient theatre. As sacrificial victim the “black widow” is
both sacred and accursed. Her presence returns the sacrificial altar to the theatre: a site for slaughter
and purification. Chechen insurgents first utilized these female suicide bombers, or Shahidka, in 2000 to
kill Russian Special Force soldiers. Many of the women have lost family members in the struggle and,
although conflicting theories abound as to their motivations, they undertake the task (whether
voluntarily or through coercion) for “religious, nationalistic, economic, social and personal rewards”
(Ganor). The goal is to achieve martyrdom, whereby their sins are removed and they are welcomed into
heaven. This brings honour and, often, financial remuneration to their family. However, they are
primarily utilized for the powerful psychic charge elicited by the spectacle of a destructive sacrificial
woman. As the veiled and armed insurgent whose very body is a bomb, she forms a powerful trope for
the limit reached by the melancholic shrouded stage of the early 21st century, which continues to assert
definition and containment, while those resisting it have long left the building, ironically in search of
sites more resistant to the smooth running of make-believe.
66 Isaacs, Architecture for the New Theatre, 10.
67 Ibid., 12.
68 Ziegeweid, “Faded Dreams,” Moscow Times, 5 August 2005.
69 Smith, Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth-Century Art and Ideas, 206.
70 Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” 45.
71 Bataille, “Architecture,” 21.
72 Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 1.
73 Ibid., 68–9.
74 “He was in agony. He was screaming. He was delirious. He was enacting his own death, his own
 crucifixion.” Nin, The Diary, 1931–1934, 191–2.
75 Weiss, “ ‘K,’ ” 152.
76 Ibid., 153.
77 Finter, “Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre: The Legacy of the Theatre of Cruelty,” 48.
78 Ibid.
79 Zupančič, “A Perfect Place to Die: Theatre in Hitchcock’s Films,” 79.
80 Artaud in Weiss, “ ‘K,’ ” 158.
81 Chaudhuri, Staging Place, 23.
82 Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” 46.
83 Ibid., 124–5.
84 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 60.
85 Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, 238.
86 Ibid., 240.
87 Okri, A Way of Being Free, 52.
88 Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume 1 1931–1934, 192.
89 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 102.
90 Ibid., 101.
91 Ibid.
92 Artaud, “The Trip to Mexico,” 362.
93 Okri, A Way of Being Free, 52.
94 Artaud, “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” 495.
95 Artaud, Oeuvres Completes: Vol 1 (Part 1): 1946, 11.
96 Artaud, Selected Writings, 494.
97 Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, 245.
98 Artaud, Selected Works, 507.
99 Cixous, “The Place of Crime, the Place of Pardon,” 341. Cixous’s article affirms the theatre as a
restorative site for re-enacting traumatic events that continue to be played out on the world stage
through global media. However, while the newspaper columns have been replaced by the thinness of
glowing screens, these proliferating digital objects have been adopted by performance ensembles such
as Germany’s Rimini Protokoll and the UK’s Blast Theory as a means of reconnecting with the
inscribed walls, earth and flesh (generally away from the theatre proper) that allow us to contact the
pity and terror withheld by old and new media. See Hannah, ‘Scenographic Screen Space’.
100 While the Cartoucherie’s four halls can be divided into the workshop, entry/dining foyer, auditorium
and intervening rehearsal hall, these spaces have been reconfigured over the years into multiple
 performance sites through promenade performances.
101 Ibid., 340.
102 Ibid., 40–1.
103 Ibid., 342.
104 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 113.
105 Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture,” in Tschumi, La Case Vide – La Villette, 15.
106 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 85.
107 Artaud, Selected Works, 507.
108 Jeffrey Meyers discusses this at length in Disease and the Novel: 1886–1969.
109 Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 467.
110 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 51.
111 Ibid., 42.
112 Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 284.
113 Weiss, Aesthetics of Excess, 15.
114 Lefevbvre, The Production of Space, 233, 240.
115 Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace.
116 Kiesler, “Manifesto of Tensionism,” 49.
117 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, 67.
118 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 65–6.
119 Tzara and Eschaurren, quoted in Phillips, “Introjection and Projection: Frederick Kiesler and His Dream
Machine,” 141. Tzara, D’un certain automatisme du goût, 82; translated in M. Jean (ed.), Autobiography
of Surrealism, 339. Echaurren, “Sensitive Mathematics – Architectures of Time,” 43; translated in Jean,
Autobiography of Surrealism, 339.
120 Birringer, “FutureHouse, Blind City: A Life,” 85.
121 Ibid.
122 Carlson, Places of Performance, 200.
123 Brook cited in Todd and Lecat, The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments, 195.
124 Ibid., 79.
125 Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 84.
126 Benjamin, Reflections, 182.
127 Artaud, Selected Writings, 488.
128 Ibid., 504.
129 Artaud in Hayman, Artaud and After, 58.
130 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 130.
131 Ibid., 102.
132 Ibid., 89.
133 Ibid., 112–13.
134 Ibid., 96.
135 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth.
136 Péréz-Gomez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, 77.
137 Ibid.
138 Eisenstein, “Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms,” 65–90.
139 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 95.
140 Agrest, Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice, 52.
141 In 2003 I explored this notion of a fractured performance landscape through an installation design for
the Prague Quadrennial’s central thematic exhibition, “Srdce PQ / The Heart of PQ,” which I refer to in
this book’s Conclusion. For more information see Hannah, “Containment and Contamination: The
Heart of PQ” in The Senses in Performance, and “Building Babel: Making Architecture Tremble” in
Space and Desire.
142 Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 21.
143 Ibid., 42.
144 Ibid.
145 Artaud, Selected Writings, 155.
146 Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” 53.
147 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 97.
148 Libeskind, “The End of Space,” 86–91. Also in Libeskind, The Space of Encounter, 68.
149 Ibid.
150 Agrest, Architecture from Without, 177.
151 Cited by Jay, “The Disenchantment of the Eye: Surrealism and the Crisis of Ocularcentricism,” 193.
152 Jay, “The Disenchantment of the Eye,” 212–13.
153 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern, 70.
154 Ibid., 124.
155 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 45.
156 Ibid., 38.
157 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 237.
158 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, 161.
159 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 124.
160 In 1982 Lina Bo Bardi realized this transverse format in the concrete and wood theatre she designed for
Centro de Lazer Fábrica da Pompéia (Pompéia Factory Leisure Centre), now known as SESC Pompéia,
which was developed through in-situ experimentations undertaken by Bo Bardi’s design team from her
onsite office.
161 Corrêa, “Oficina: Theatre Bone the Hard One to Crack,” n.p.
162 Ibid.
163 From a meeting with Edson Elito in São Paulo, (13 August 2014), translated for the author by Evelyn
Furquim Werneck Lima and Lidia Kosovski.
164 Oliveira, Lina Bo Bardi: Obra Construida Built Work, 185.
165 Straw Theatre, http://pohuteater.no99.ee/straw_theatre (accessed 5 March 2015).
166 Online video: “A Salvaged Stage in the Heart of Southwark” Topher Campbell: Artistic Director of The
Red Room, www.theredroom.org.uk/projects/jellyfishtheatre (accessed 5 March 2015).
167 “With their subtle, critical, and complex buildings and structures Köbberling/ Kaltwasser work on an
aesthetics of resistance against our life surroundings with its unidomensionality.”
http://archiv.ruhrtriennale.de/www.2012.ruhrtriennale.de/en/programm1/kuenstler/koebberling-
kaltwasser/index.html (accessed 14 July 2016).
168 ‘Interview with Toshiko Mori’: by Vladimir Belogolovsky for Architecture Daily (25 April 2016),
www.archdaily.com/786190/interview-with-toshiko-mori-rather-than-working-with-forms-we-work-
with-forces (accessed 14 July 2016).
169 Here I am thinking of companies such as Italy’s Rafaello di Sanzio and Spain’s La Fura dels Baus.
170 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 85.
171 Ibid., 89.
172 Derrida, “The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” 53.
173 Zupančič, “A Perfect Place to Die,” 81.
174 Dolnik and Pilch, “The Moscow Theatre Hostage Crisis: The Perpetrators, Their Tactics and the Russian
Response,” 578.
175 Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 4.
176 Ibid., 589. Dolnik and Pilch argue that, in staging a successful nationalistic musical, the theatre was also
a place that guaranteed middle-to-upper-class hostages, reinforcing the perception that any citizen can
become a target.
177 BBC News, “Moscow Musical Fights Back,” 6 February 2003.
178 Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, 3. Nelson is citing Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886),
159.
179 Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, 156.
180 Nelson, 6.
181 Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” 56–7.
182 Wigley, “Insecurity by Design,” 69–85.
Conclusion
Making architecture tremble

If we desired and dared an architecture corresponding to the nature of our

soul (we are too cowardly for it!) – our model would have to be the
labyrinth!
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollonian state: here it

is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the frenzy of the great
will which aspires to art. The most powerful human beings have always
inspired architects; the architect has always been under the spell of power.
His buildings are supposed to render pride visible and the victory over
gravity, the will to power. Architecture is a kind of eloquence of power in
forms – now persuading, even flattering, now only commanding. The
highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The
power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does
not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all
opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws
– that speaks of itself as a grand style.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Over 100 years after Richard Wagner stood on a rain-drenched hill in Bayreuth to
inaugurate the construction of his new theatre – claiming that architecture’s
greatest and unfulfilled challenge was to accommodate the powerful and
provisional nature of performance – Jacques Derrida asked, “What might be a
Wagnerian architecture?”1 To answer this question, Derrida turns to Friedrich
Nietzsche, who initially believed Wagner’s project could bring about a rebirth of
theatrical art in order to face joyfully the catastrophic forces of modernism.
Derrida’s question, and that of this particular study, could therefore be, “What
might be a Nietzschean architecture for the artwork – as both event and space –
which the philosopher had hoped Wagner would fulfil?”
This of course is an impossible task as Nietzsche was rarely explicit about
architecture, and his philosophies have been severally appropriated and
interpreted to shape both conservative and radical agendas in all aspects of art
and politics. However the spatialization of his thinking has served to undermine
the proper place of architecture, just as his writings on tragedy aimed to
destabilize theatre as bourgeois entertainment. As Nadir Lahiji points out, in the
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, Nietzsche did inspire a
new form of architectural thinking as spacing through the notion of building
thought,2 but the philosopher’s simultaneous ungrounding of thought influenced
the theatrical avant-garde, which went on to test alternative sites for housing the
event as event.
The Getty Institute broached the question of Nietzschean architecture in a
conference held in Weimar (1994) and a subsequent publication entitled Nietzsche
and “An Architecture of Our Minds” (1999), which refers to his suggestion that
the “labyrinth,” provides a fitting architectural prototype to match the modernist
soul.3 However, as Gary Shapiro notes in a review of the anthology, none of the
contributors addressed Nietzsche’s writing on the Greek theatre in The Birth of
Tragedy, “which is probably his most extended treatment of an architectural
work.”4 The introduction to this book did attend to such a task, probing the
philosopher’s spatial speech as one that promotes the undermining of
monumental form and Apollonian aesthetics in favour of acknowledging
unstable terrain, advocating the real over the representational and emphasizing
choric ground that integrates performers and audience as opposed to the
distanced view of the stage and the trickeries of its machinery. While the
boundaries between the real and imagined architecture of Nietzsche’s
philosophies create an evasive territory, nowhere is this slippery spatiality more
relevant than in the theatre which is predicated on the co-presence of real and
imagined spaces. Nietzsche’s writings also reveal a distance between radical
propositions for possible architectures and the architectural profession’s
complicity in the powers that prevent their realization.
In Twilight of the Idols (a riff on Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, the last of his
four operas in the Ring Cycle), Nietzsche “sounds out” legendary characters and
iconic figures, including the architect, who occupies the same section as the
artist.5 However, the artist as actor, mime, dancer, musician and poet – once one
and the same figure, combining Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies – is
separate from the architect, portrayed as a wilful character implicated in the
construction and expression of history’s powers. Lefebvre later elucidates by
stating that “monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness
of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and
collective thought,” thereby managing “to conjure away both possibility and
time.”6 Lahiji points out how the philosopher’s critique of a ‘will to architecture’
(echoed by Bataille as domineering and disciplining) was appropriated by
modernism’s heroic architects who interpreted it as reinforcing the master-
builder as ideologist.7 Although Nietzsche was mindful of architecture’s potential,
as a form of power, to mediate between the creative and destructive forces upon
which his philosophy was built, the Nietzschean architect (working for the status
quo) forecloses on Nietzschean architecture (working against the status quo),
once more revealing the gap between modernism’s architectural avant-garde and
those in its theatrical counterpart who tested alternative sites for housing the
event as event.
By mutually incorporating power systems, architecture defines, regulates and
limits our daily practices,8 and, as handmaidens to power, architects are
responsible: a claim reinforced by Lefebvre’s reference to the authoritarian, brutal
and phallic “logic of space,”9 discussed earlier in this book. Such spatial hostility is
acutely evident in the West, since the defining spectacle of 9/11, after which
freedom of movement and expression is purposefully curtailed – locally and
globally – in the very name of “freedom.” Designers of public space are more
actively complicit in architecture’s role to silently and subtly condition the
competence and performance of the subject; especially in this age of a
constructed “war on terror” that maintains a continual state of siege. As
Nietzsche wrote of the architect: “His buildings are supposed to render pride
visible, and the victory over gravity, the will to power.”10 Yet in our current age of
liquescence – where nothing is stable, where fiction constantly folds into reality,
and where sedentary structures can no longer house the mediatized spectacle of
daily life – this fatal resolve is countered by a desire to create more porous, open-
ended, transparent and ephemeral environments.
Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects has discussed how contemporary
architects are presented with solving a “highly oppositional problem” that
negotiates between promoting transparency and social connectedness in
architecture “while in reality producing opacity or the type of protection
necessary for the various performance criterion of the [required] security.”11 Like
many of his contemporaries, Mayne rises to this challenge by camouflaging
security elements within the structural form and décor of buildings. However,
masking the fortifications is a scenographic ploy in the most banal sense,
diminishing neither the architectural rigidity nor power’s hegemony. Two
decades later 9/11’s ‘grand narrative’ continues to sanction authoritarian spatial
control, foreclosing on ease of access and expression while asserting architecture
as the art of constructing and reinforcing boundaries. This barricade mentality
need not involve the obvious gestures of fortification or more covert manoeuvres.
We live in an era of more ephemeral barriers; from data codes that restrict our
access on and offline; to fleeting constructions of plastic tape and synthetic
webbing, which file us into obedient rows in institutional, cultural and corporate
spaces; to the more overt portable concrete fences that surround public buildings
or divide contested territories. A proliferation of signs dictates our civil behaviour
while CCTV cameras, communication interceptions, facial and body heat
recognition, as well as hidden drones, form a network of supervisory eyes and
ears. And the theatre is not immune to this. As argued in the last chapter, the
porosity of a more abject spatiality provides an antidote to authoritarian
objectality. This is demonstrated through a recent shift through bank design
where tellers are no longer trapped behind bulletproof glass but situated on open,
internal island counters around which the public flows, passing through multiple
entrances, proving that porous spaces, albeit digitally monitored (and with less
ready cash on hand), are more resistant to attack. Yet the catastrophes, wreaked
by nature and humanity – and more and more by a combination of both –
marking the first two decades of this millennium, tend to demonstrate the desire
to shore up the borders, step up the surveillance, and generally regulate material
and immaterial space: that of thought as much as physical habitation. Eisenman’s
reference to catastrophe’s potential to unfold ‘the new,’ expounded by Kwinter as
‘evental,’ remains our primary challenge.12
This book concludes by returning to its origins with Wagner, Nietzsche and the
ancient Greek amphitheatre, reviewing the absolute, abstract and abject event-
spaces of the historical avant-garde that combine forces to establish a
Nietzschean architecture, which challenges the Nietzschean architect. Integrating
architecture’s concrete objectality with its philosophical “other” allows us to
return to event-space as an aspatial spatial condition: positing an emergent,
contingent and weak architecture that harbours the catastrophe, simultaneously
housing and un-housing events.
Five significant events have been utilized in this study to outline radical event-
spaces that integrate historical, theatrical and quotidian forces: the philosophical
event (God’s death), the ceremonial event (laying a foundation), the aesthetic
event (spatial conception), the urban event (street-corner collision) and the
catastrophic event (a terrorist attack). The sixth and final event is a distinctly
dramatic one, encapsulated in an early 21st-century play that addresses theatre’s
ancient origins in order to enact the fall of the heroic architect and his
monumental architectures.

Nietzsche’s architect(ure)
THIS IS A GOAT! YOU’RE HAVING AN AFFAIR WITH A GOAT!
YOU’RE FUCKING A GOAT!
– Edward Albee, The Goat

The first scene of Edward Albee’s play, The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia? (2000),
introduces the central character, Martin Gray, a 50-year-old architect at the
height of his career. As a globally recognized practitioner, he has won the coveted
Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest international award (often referred to as “the
Nobel Prize of architecture”) and has also been commissioned to design the
“World City.” Gray is truly a Nietzschean architect; he is powerful and
monolithic, persuasive and cajoling; he designs not only the gorgeous home in
which we find him, but entire cities. Flushed with success he is being interviewed
for television in a space that aesthetically reflects his exceptional talent, taste and
accomplishments. However, he soon reveals a fatal flaw – the architect has fallen
deeply and sexually in love with a goat.
The play’s first act is an unnerving comedy, unravelling Martin Gray’s
downfall as he confesses (off camera) to his best friend, who is conducting the
interview, how, when looking for a piece of land to build a country retreat, he
saw and became besotted with the animal he calls Sylvia. Comedy shifts to
drama in the second act after the architect’s dark secret is revealed to Stevie, his
wife of twenty-five years, who insists on hearing the details of the affair while
she proceeds to annihilate the immaculately arranged room and its precious
collection of objects. The third and final act is pure tragedy as Martin sits amid
the ruins, contemplating his fall only to be further devastated by the entry of
Stevie with the slain corpse of his ruminant lover.
Recalling Nietzsche’s formulation in The Birth of Tragedy, the tragicomedy of
The Goat brings together the Apollonian plastic art of architecture with the
Dionysian excesses of forbidden lust in performance, simultaneously exposing
and bridging the rift between the two disciplines. In 2003, the play was published
with an added subtitle, Notes toward a definition of tragedy. Evoking the goat-
song of the Dionysian dithyramb – an ecstatic choral hymn performed around
the sacrificial altar – the play returns us to the ancient setting of Western drama
where tragedy began. Here, where the bestial world presses hard on the human
world, threatening a relapse into animal existence, the “tragic hero” is
traditionally a scapegoat – exiled from the human herd and punished for our own
unacted desires. S/he becomes a sacrifice, a form of purification that expels the
unclean, improper, alien and excessive, “appeasing the forces that rule the world
and keeping at bay the fears they inspire in us.”13
We are therefore invited to inhabit the choros of Nietzsche’s formulation: the
space of shared ritual encounter, centred on the victim/offering whose sacrifice
brings together the “sacred” and the “profane” as distinct and interpenetrating
worlds. As a space of sacralization and desacralization the choros is also the site
of purification and slaughter. Through the ephemerality of both living matter and
the artwork we are confronted with tragedy within which lies the spectacular
and abiding catastrophe that endures beyond its moment – a moment of rupture
that reveals how something is irreparably broken. The architect searching for a
site to build his utopic idyll found, instead, a goat and a love beyond good and
evil, “beyond the rules” as he acknowledges.14 As a result his house becomes a
broken ideal, a zone of destruction, which, after its precious contents are
annihilated and his lover slain, renders the architecture an austere mausoleum –
a modern temple befitting the tragic sacrifice.
Gray, the antihero, has not so much fallen in love with a goat as with the
divine. In seeking “utopia” he found carnal love and a relationship that is
“epiphanic, inspired, spiritual – with a soul, between souls.”15 While this tragedy
presents a clash between the divine love of marriage and the lowest form of
bestiality, Gray’s object of desire is also a deification of nature, found in his quest
for an escape from the “steel and stone” of the “World City.” Gray, the
monochromatic modern architect who failed to find utopia, has set off a chain of
events that strip him of his once dependable role as rational creator and building
scientist. His excesses are to be punished through the “transfiguring experience”
of the forbidden affair.16
Together with our protagonist, the once heroic architect and world builder, we
are forced to confront the void through the unnatural. His bestial act opens up
the abyss of the unmentionable into which he falls. This is reiterated by his son,
Billy, in the last act, who claims that while his father was masquerading as ideal
family man and master builder he was “underneath the house, down in the cellar,
digging a pit so deep!, so wide!, so … HUGE! … we’ll all fall in and … never … be
able … to … climb … out … again – no matter how much we want to, how hard
we try.”17 Gray’s heroic achievements, coupled with calamity, threaten the
dissolution of home, family, career and status. The abyss under the house also
reveals the ungrounded ground of utopian modernism, undermining the ideals of
middle-class family life and sound architecture. This also exposes the inherent
weaknesses in the very space where the play is staged.
As a cautionary tale, The Goat brings the master of abstract space, who seeks
escape in the absolute space of a utopian elsewhere, face to face with the abject
space of his catastrophic desires. However, Albee’s play also represents the
persistence of the well-made play in the well-made theatre, which the historical
avant-garde attempted to undermine and destroy over the previous 100 years. But
what if, in the final image of the architect confronted with the sacrifice amid his
debris, we were to find ourselves with him in the wreckage of the house that is
the theatre itself? What if all that remained was the exposed modernist
auditorium, stripped of its accoutrements, revealing its machinery – its entries
and exits, technical bridges, floor traps, winches and control systems –
simultaneously exposing and uniting performers and audience? What if the
tragedy that was the fall of the architect enacted the fall of modernist theatre
architecture, restoring the space of the event to that of the ancient sacrifice,
reflecting its viscerality in the spectre of the slain beast, (no faux prop) daily
slaughtered and hoisted dripping by the butcher-priestess-wife at the point where
stage meets auditorium? As a scenographer, this would be my approach to
staging Albee’s play: an exposition of not only the disciplinary reality of the
space that contains the event, but also its relationship to the ancient skene,
theatron, deus ex machine and sacrificial altar, brutally sutured back together by
the choric space of embodied experience and participation. This restores the
theatre to its complex status as secular temple, fantastical machine and house of
terror. Acknowledging the active role architecture plays in the dramatic event can
enhance the theatrical experience through the spatiotemporal forces that many
theatre practitioners would rather render still, silent and in the dark.
This book began by outlining how architecture, as “simultaneously space and
event,”18 is shaped by the forces of history, saturated with plurality and multiplied
by an accelerated succession of actions and temporalities. Focusing on
architecture as an active field rather than the autonomous object reveals its
performative forces and their effect on bodies, the imagination and history. Sited
in the theatre, event-space calls into question both the materiality of architecture
and the immateriality of performance. As a condensed and concentrated realm,
the space of the event more readily recognizes the real world as a space of
virtuality, “saturated with spaces of projections, possibilities and the new,”
allowing the unrealized and unthought to emerge.19 Negotiating between space
and event, material and immaterial, real and virtual, monumental stasis and
dynamic shifts in time, the theatrical avant-garde of the early 20th century aimed
to work productively with these combative factors housed in performance space.
As modernism’s philosopher of crisis, Nietzsche took centre stage in calling for
a radical reworking of the space of the event. His own stage was neither centred
nor framed before a baroque or even modernist auditorium. Nietzsche’s alter ego,
the madman who declares God’s death and therefore the end of mimetic
representation, occupies what Derrida names “the space of dis-traction.”20 As “the
one who is spacy, or spaced out,” he cannot be housed and is obliged to wander.21
Carrying a lantern like a failed prop in the blinding light of day, this madman
appears in the chaotic marketplace; a theatrical figure calling to account those
who gather around him as implicated in great events. His declaration (of God’s
death) is also a demand that the public (as God’s murderers) realize their
complicity in the creation of history. Like Dionysus, Nietzsche came to shatter
form. Replacing perspectival construction with the multiplicity of perspectivism,
he wished to transform the “herd” into a reflective community that is no longer
dominated by a singular totalizing reality but could occupy and create multiple
realities with varying interpretations of existence. Rather than distant viewers in
the theatron they were choric participants returning to the agora; those
wanderers who strayed from the proper site of theatre, once held in suspicion by
Plato.
A new sense of public space within the industrialized metropolis also
challenged the hermetically sealed confines of the theatre interior. Un-housing
performance into the complexity of this new environment as a fragmented
modernity became the project of the historical avant-garde that followed
Nietzsche. Although Wagner, like his erstwhile philosopher friend, sought to
return the communal joy of the ancient outdoor gathering space, his insistence on
a unified singular vision kept him indoors, where he solidified his vision into a
deeply interior space that negated “the monumental pile” in favour of a new
provisional monumentality. While Wagner was formulating a space that
eradicated the theatrical elements of an exhibitionary architecture and its public,
Charles Garnier was constructing an event-space in Paris that shaped into a
spectacular event in itself. Wagner’s emphasis on isolated individuality and
immobility opposed Garnier’s emphasis on fluidity, display, communality and
variety, which was also at work in Gottfried Semper’s architecture. Wagner’s
project deliberately marginalized the role of the architect, serving hegemonic
power represented in the composer’s royal patron, Ludwig II, who preferred his
own monumental metropolitan theatre. However, as the ‘provisional’
Festspielhaus became a lasting monument its functionality and austerity soon
appealed to the rational aesthetics of the Modern Movement. Yet Wagner’s new
monumentality lacked the complexity and open-endedness demanded by shifting
spatiotemporal perceptions, which radical artists and a more active public wished
to explore.
Wagner reworked the ancient theatron to hold the spectators’ attention within
a darkened auditorium that focused their gaze onto a newly strengthened picture
frame into which they could project their perception. However, the dominance of
this perspectival scene was soon challenged by the French symbolists who aimed
to loosen the performance from its framed confines by utilizing darkness on stage
as well as in the auditorium. Privileging the sonic over the scopic, their liquid
gloom expanded the performance realm out from the stage where picturesque
scenery no longer held any sway. This led to an alternative monumentality,
proposed by scenographers, Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, which
folded the scenic in on the architectural, just as the ancient skene utilized
architecture to set a universal scene. Their nonrepresentational architectonic
landscapes created a more ambiguous spatiality: oscillating between the material
and immaterial. As universal rather than mimetically specific sites, they offered a
range of interpretations and locale shifts achieved through performance
suggestion, audience imagination and the insertion of simple iconic objects. Akin
to Solà- Morales’s concept of “weak architecture,” the event-space of Appia and
Craig weakened the architectural borders with a sympathetic scenography in
order to establish a more participatory space. Clear boundaries were further
undermined by rhythmic atmospherics – activating space through sound, light
and gesture in motion – that integrated viewers and viewed within a more
immersive site reminiscent of the ancient choros. The theatre of Appia and Craig
was a laboratory for their research into spatial interaction and mobile structures
as well as a secular cathedral in which the public congregation could, through the
artwork, commune with the divine.
The socialist agenda of the constructivists, and others advocating a radical
utopia, aimed to return theatre space to the dazzling reality of the industrialized
marketplace in which they also established a new cathedral to dramatic
mechanization and cultural production. However, that secular temple elicited its
most potent theatrical charge when exposing the impossible and failing nature of
the machine it purported to be, heightening the pervading sense of alienation in a
spectacular form. The ancient deus ex machina returned to the theatre, but as the
mechanism for revealing rather than resolving the flaws of a technological
universe. Attempting to construct new environments, regimes and identities, the
socialist avant-garde was caught between the rigidity of utopia’s idealism and the
fragmentation and complex layering of a relative existence in which body and
machine had become ensnared. Their shocks and montage techniques played
with the fragmented theatricality of cubist cinematics, which architecture’s
Modern Movement futilely wished to rationalise and discipline.
Modernism’s disciplinary desire was critiqued by the anarchic gestures of the
post-World War I Dadaists and surrealists whose shock effects recognized the
devastation wreaked by technological warfare, dismembering the body and
disenchanting the eye. This catastrophe returned the “agonistic sacrifice” to the
avant-garde theatre through what Poggioli refers to as “the fatal obligation of the
individual artist.”22 Artists such as Artaud sought to match history’s volatility
with an equally explosive space that rendered form formless, annihilating the
commanding overview of the Enlightenment in favour of a more sensorial and
labyrinthine space in which performance could assail a public enfolded in its
chaotic embrace. However, while this spatiality was vertiginous and disordered, it
was also porous, contingent and emergent. The activism, antagonism and
agonism of the theatrical avant-garde, together with a return to Nietzschean
nihilism, undermined the unified global image of a purified and rational
monumentality that architectural modernism strove to create, by deliberately
destabilizing its foundations.23
A move against the faux constructions of mimetic representation is a defining
feature of the absolute, abstract and abject event-spaces outlined in this study;
encapsulated in the symbolist refutation of illusionistic scenery, the constructivist
move toward machinic abstractions and the surrealist belief in hallucinatory
territories that spatialized the unconscious. In storming mimetic representation
the avant-garde was also laying siege to the structures that housed and
constructed dissimulating worlds, insisting on a more integrated relationship
between the theatrical and the everyday. This ‘postdramatic’ overthrow of
modernism’s well-made play – asserted by Hans-Thies Lehmann as a “visual
dramaturgy” withholding any dramatic unification of time, place and action24 –
is now effortlessly practiced by performance-makers and accepted by audiences,
yet is still to be similarly explored by architects who tend to cling to the idea of a
well-made theatre. As Lehmann articulates, our contemporary theatre no longer
constructs a “purely fictive cosmos,” having lost faith in the dramatic “formation
of illusion” when faced with the very ‘real.’25 And it is reality that theatre as art
form now seeks in built form, far from the prescribed stage, in order to
accommodate today’s more inter-textual, inter-cultural and interdisciplinary
utterances.

Building Babel
God … comes down to see their city,
… and in derision sets
Upon their tongues a various spirit, to raze
Quite out their native language, and instead
To sow a jangling noise of words unknown.
Forthwith a hideous gabble rises loud
Among the builders; each to other calls
Not understood. […] Thus was the building left
Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named.
– Milton from Paradise Lost (1667, xii, 48–63)

The great Modernist creators of space seem to have been temperamentally

unsuited to making buildings that should serve as incomplete, responsive
vessels for other creators to fill.
– Steve Tompkins and Andrew Todd: ‘The Unfinished Theatre’

At the heart of this inquiry lies the failure of the 20th-century modernist utopian
project and its futile moves to retrieve a homogenous unity in the face of
existential reality and perspectivism’s multiplicity. The Modern Movement
attempted, through its faith in instrumental rationality, to build a secure world
over a fractured abyss exposed by Nietzsche whose proclamation of God’s death
undermined the ground of philosophy, theatre and architecture. Nietzsche
maintained the necessity for art to recuperate this threat through the aesthetic act
by “looking boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world
history as well as the cruelty of nature.”26 As a monolithic practice, architectural
modernism upheld an ontology of stasis, resisting the “play” of spatial dynamics
in favour of abstract, fixed identities of pure form that foreclosed on multiple and
resistant performances demanded by the avant-garde.
The major difference between the architectural Modern Movement and the
theatrical avant-garde was a seemingly incompatible opposition of a will-to-
construction against the will-to-destruction, although within a Nietzschean
formulation a resolution between the two – as Apollonian versus Dionysian – is
the necessary ingredient to a communal joyfulness combating the alienation of
modernity. Unlike the artist (as destroyer), the architect (as creator) could not
afford to adopt the role of tragic victim-hero, immolating herself/himself to an art
of the future.27 However the architectural avant-garde was linked to its theatrical
counterpart by a creative will that was predicated on the desire to obliterate
history and establish a clean slate from which to valiantly build something out of
the ruins through the utopian tabula rasa. This can be seen in Albee’s architect,
Martin Gray, who is prepared to design an entire new city for a global world.
However, Gray’s downfall reveals the flaws in such a utopian mission and the
impossibility of creating or maintaining a sound and totalizing universe. He is left
amid the ruins of his ideals that expose the pit and history’s layers en abyme.
Hollier comments in Against Architecture that the symbolic order is unable to
reappropriate for itself the heterogeneous void that confronts it.28 Nevertheless, in
the ruination of this modernist ideal inherited from the Enlightenment lies the
condition of possibility for an architecture no longer predicated on the creation
and maintenance of a secure world, carefully constructed to negate death.
Returning to the question of Nietzschean architecture, we find Derrida
contemplating Plato’s chora in his essay on Chora L Works (1985), the well-
documented and contentious collaboration between him and Peter Eisenman on
an unrealized proposal for a garden in Parc de la Villette. Linking chora to the
choral song and choreography, Derrida attempted to destabilize architecture with
the evasive, swift and fluid movement of choral work: “With the final l, choral:
chora becomes more liquid or more aerial, I do not dare to say, more feminine.”29
Referring to Nietzsche’s proclivities to summon and occupy “the abyss of depths
without bottom, music, a hyperbolic labyrinth,” Derrida took the signature grid of
the modernist architect – elegantly skewed by the postmodernist architect – and
transformed it into a sieve: “a kind of shaking implement.”30 Focusing on a spatial
porosity, he aimed to bestow on architecture a disquieting movement as a means
“to appropriate the space with a joyful insolence.”31 However, although Derrida’s
manoeuvre is similar to that proposed by Julia Kristeva, whereby a “floating
structure” challenges the “phobic object,”32 it seems architect and philosopher
failed to operate in chorus. Falling prey to the gap between philosophy’s spatial
language and the constructed space of architecture they were unable to creatively
cohere their differences in a design proposal. Yet, like Derrida, philosophers from
Nietzsche to Grosz persist in their desire to set architecture atremble.33
Rather than dismantle the Apollonian structure “stone by stone,” the goal
becomes subtler, more playful and disquieting: to undermine it just enough to
unsettle those who continue to occupy it. This is the “inspired shudder” of avant-
garde performance, designed to disturb body, ground and building in order to
expose the impossibility of secure ground – and therefore firm foundations – for
philosophy, theatre and architecture. Derrida saw in this destabilization a greater
“play of the structure,”34 which more profoundly affects the bodies it both houses
and un-houses. Wigley clarifies this idea as follows:

To make a building tremble is precisely not to collapse it by subjecting it to

some external force, but to explore it from within, even to consolidate the
structure, imitating its very gesture, faithfully repeating its operations but in
a way that exposes its limits, opening up its structure or, rather finding the
openings that are already there, the concealed points of weakness.35

The open, spatial network that negotiates between the labyrinth, the abyss and
the unstable, floating structure is akin to the unfinished, mythical Tower of Babel;
the ultimate in building failure, which Derrida also contemplated as standing in
for deconstructivist architecture and, principally, the confusion of languages and
impossibility of translation that made space for multiplicity and diversity.36 As an
incomplete construction containing the seeds of its own destruction, Babel (the
place where speech became confused) also discloses its visible structures.
Signifying the failure to build an indestructible edifice for a unified global
culture, it challenges not only issues of communication and translatability but the
very ground upon which it was erected. As a ruin in process, it stands in for the
instability of communication and structural weakness. The Tower of Babel
marked the failure of a totalizing language and the resulting confusion recalls
Artaud’s dissonance, dispersion and discontinuity. The accompanying collapse of
the commanding overview of the phallic tower (and its attendant associations
with singularity, stability and endurance) reduced the structure to a convoluted
(one could even suggest invaginated) labyrinth where vision is no longer
privileged. Homi Bhabha expounds the sensorial nature of the labyrinth with its
de-centred subject as an extension or reworking of the senses. For Bhabha the
descent into alien territory undermines legitimating narratives of the cultural
dominant, encouraging a truly intra/international culture,37 spatially achieved via
the in-between zones where borderline engagements, both consensual and
conflictual, have the power to realign customary boundaries.38 He illustrates this
with the literal architecture of stairwells and interstitial passages; a three-
dimensional spatial network of habitable borders that inscribes and articulates
cultural hybridity. This in-between zone is dynamic, fluctuating and open to
contamination as a creative force.
The undermining of rational form confirms the unfulfilled promise of a
singular monument, which is already and always destined for ruination. As Juliet
Rufford maintains, all architecture is susceptible to the passage of time: “Even
when it does not succumb to fire, flood or war, architecture is death-bound,
precarious.”39 Babel, an unstable, three-dimensional spatial network, operating
above and below ground, offers a range of border conditions and in-between
zones for creative encounter, haunting us with the threat of failure. Unfinished, it
is always in process. Because the structure floats, shudders and sways, we are
aware of its fourth dimension, bringing a more dynamic architectural temporality
into play. Through restless contiguity between the public realm, physical
construction and fictional imaginings, a space-in-flux not only challenges the
stasis and passivity of performance space as hermetically sealed and neutral
container, but also the development of performance events themselves. As Artaud
writes:

It seems, in brief, that the highest possible idea of theatre is one that
reconciles us philosophically with Becoming, suggesting to us through all
sorts of objective situations the furtive idea of the passage and transmutation
of ideas into things, much more than the transformation and stumbling of
 feelings into words.40

Such a move against coherent and abiding structures also re-figures the secular
temple-cathedral desired by avant-garde performance and architecture, which
both fragments and integrates the community, continually opening it up to its
outside, which is both figurative (as “other”) and physical (as landscape).
Integrating elements of the absolute, abstract and abject, Babel provides a spatial
model that has the potential to address issues of globalization, interculturalism
and gender generally ignored by the historical avant-garde. Incorporating the
vertigo of the void, the impossibility of the machine and the fleshiness of the
organism, Babel spatially realigns the historical avant-garde with the postmodern
condition, navigating between fleeting acts of performance and the architectures
that work to simultaneously house and un-house them.
It was this notion of Babel I investigated in my own practice when directing
the design of Srdce PQ / The Heart of PQ for the 2003 Prague Quadrennial (a four-
yearly international exposition on stage design and theatre architecture):41 the
central thematic exhibition that focused on creating “a performance landscape for
the senses.”42 As a site-specific installation within the Middle Hall of Prague’s
Industrial Palace, it sought to challenge, disrupt and eliminate the borders that
traditionally exist in theatre, so new relationships could be explored between the
body and the built. This involved gathering performers from a number of
countries (specifically Russia, Kazakhstan, Japan, Korea, Britain, Canada, New
Zealand, the Pacific Islands, South Africa and the Netherlands) with whom my
team collaborated in 1:1 workshops to create a shared space within which they
could explore the limits of built form and their own bodies. The senses in
performance were housed (and un-housed) via a three-dimensional labyrinth,
constructed of habitable walls, that formed towers embedded within flooring
strips of variable heights creating under-ground and over-ground spaces. A series
of random journeys were created via passages and stairways, leading visitors into
the literal heart of the space, a sixteen-metre-long table (where all the senses
cohere). The towers comprised sensory vessels, which, through their structure
and materiality, acknowledged the uncontainability of the senses they were
allocated to contain. This porous spatial maze negotiated between spectral
overview and dislocated navigation, weaving between inside and outside,
allowing participants to be lost and found within the hall (Figures 5.1a, 5.1b and
5.1c).
Investigating the ‘play’ of architecture, as both container and contaminant,
tower and labyrinth, the site-specific installation took on the role of provocateur
as a “sceno-architecture,” neither scenography (which briefly suspends reality to
formulate a fictive environment) nor architecture (defined by its fixed and
enduring qualities). Instead a temporary hybrid environment was proposed for a
temporary hybrid event – neither exhibition nor theatre. As an inter-cultural,
trans-disciplinary festival it was, on one hand, a utopian idea fated to fail and, on
the other hand, a dystopian experiment where failure was productive. Differing
languages, cultural practices and spatial conventions led to misinterpretations
during the process and the production. Like the mythical city of Babel it proved
an unsustainable dream, resulting in confusion, tension and the pervasive threat
of collapse. Yet it proved a fertile ground for theatrical encounter as design-led
research, allowing this space-time installation to play out ideas, such as resistance
to containment and the embrace of spatial contamination, for more enduring
designs.

Figure 5.1a The Heart of PQ: A Performance Landscape for the Senses: installation in the Central Hall of
Výstavište Industrial Palace (June 2003). Design Director Dorita Hannah with Sven Mehzoud and Lee Gibson

In their article, ‘The Unfinished Theatre,’ Steve Tompkins and Andrew Todd
cite English director Michael Elliot (responsible for the Manchester Royal
Exchange discussed in Chapter 3), who, in his seminal UK radio broadcast
critiquing the concrete brutalism of Denys Lasdun’s Royal National Theatre
(London, 1976) – transcribed under the title ‘On not building for Posterity’ –
questioned the expressed permanence in theatre architecture, insisting on “a more
ephemeral, more demotic, loose fit.”43 Elliot’s claim echoed architect Cedric Price
whose celebrated, yet unrealized, design for the Fun Palace (conceived and
commissioned in 1961 by renowned theatre director and producer Joan
Littlewood) proposed a transformative and responsive event-space, constructed
from a structural lattice of columns and beams, housing programmatic elements
designed as reconfigurable modular units, mobilized to house fluctuating publics
of 10 to 1000 for a “short-life conglomerate of disparate, free-choice, free-time,
voluntary activities, planned as a public launching-pad rather than a Mecca for
East London.”44

Figure 5.1b The Heart of PQ (2003): view of installation in the Central Hall of Výstavište Industrial Palace
Source: photo by Sven Mehzoud
Figure 5.1c The Heart of PQ (2003): landscape performance (choreographer Carol Brown)
Source: photo by Rastislav Juhas.

Price’s open-ended spatiality can be found in more recent venues by two

Brazilian architects, Lina Bo Bardi and Carla Juaçaba: the former’s Teatro Oficina
in São Paulo (built in 1984 and discussed in the last chapter), and the latter’s
Humanidade 2012, a pavilion (2012), briefly sited in Rio de Janeiro during the
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Working with
scenographer/director Bia Lessa, Juaçaba established a layered and translucent
structure, five stories high and composed of multiple unfolding spaces, which
were exposed to the elements in order “to remind users of their frailty in the face
of nature.”45 Akin to my own installation for PQ 2003, the Pavilion was
constructed of reusable scaffolding and recycled composite materials. Analogous
to Bo Bardi’s theatre designed three decades earlier, it favours passage above
stasis. Like Shigeru Ban’s Nomadic Museum (2005), which was temporarily sited
on NYC’s Pier 54 and constructed of shipping containers with columns and
trusses assembled from cardboard tubes, Juaçaba’s ephemeral construction is
most powerful in its presence as a transitory monument. Yet Lina Bo Bardi’s
enduring Teatro Oficina combines the provisional and porous with a sense of
sited security within which work can be researched and developed over a period
of time. This venue seems to echo most profoundly Tompkins’s and Todd’s appeal
for a temporal and spatial elasticity “capable of bringing into focus the
presentness, the thing-ness of the elements that are placed within them” via an
interweave of theatre’s condition of the unstable and ephemeral with
architecture’s “ingrained urge towards permanence and full resolution.”46 Teatro
Oficina – another successful collaboration between architect and performance-
maker – answers Lefebvre’s plea for space to be recognized as a “vast staging”
that unfurls the multiple rhythms enacting rites, codes and relationships; spacing
them through an acting out in the “theatre-city.”47 My own attendance of a
company performance began in the daylight where the audience holding hands
entered from the outer street to climb stairs and circle the various levels only to
go outside again, passing an elevated expressway below which was a shanty
town of cardboard homes whose inhabitants joined in the celebration. Dancing
and singing with the performers, we moved through the neighbourhood where
locals waved from windows and gathered on street corners before returning to
the theatre (also named “Rua Lina Bo Bardi”) and a five-hour performance that
unfolded throughout the space as the growing darkness outside was punctuated
by moving car lights on the expressway viewed through the window wall.48
Emphatically architectural, this is a venue that addresses the vertigo of the void
via a ritualized space, the impossibility of the machine with its electronic terrain
and urban porosity, and the fleshiness of the organism by establishing an
elemental material site for body and community. To a certain extent, Teatro
Oficina realizes Artaud’s desire for a theatre beyond language, or one in which an
‘other’ language emerges from the seemingly incoherent babble.
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote, “The stone is more stone than
before,” lamenting that architecture lacked the “inexhaustible meaningfulness […
that once] hung about the building like a magic veil.” This book has taken an
epoch in which the art form and built form of theatre enacted a major
divergence, severing the meaning and magic from material geometry. While the
art form addressed a pervading psychosis and revolutionary fervour by literally
playing them out, architecture reacted by attempting to make whole that which
was shattered: establishing utopian ideals that had little place for the ideals of the
theatrical avant-garde. As performance became more visceral, architecture
became more disembodied. As art movements split into multiple groups,
architecture tended to focus on the steady progress of its own modernism and the
universal philosophy of a developing “international style.” However, this book has
attempted to illustrate that such contention between creative fields generated a
performative and productive loosening of space, as spacing.
Rather than advocate purely transient, fragile and porous forms of architecture,
Event-Space has focused on bringing a vibratory rhythm back into the stone. Just
as Nietzsche recuperated the Dionysian from an Apollonian hegemony, it’s
critical to undermine architecture’s conventional role throughout history and, by
acknowledging an inherent performativity, render the built environment, and its
inhabitants, complex, active and dynamic. This seems to owe much to a
persistence of choric space – found in Garnier’s foyer, Appia’s Hellerau hall,
Brook’s Bouffes du Nord and Bo Bardi’s Teatro Oficina – particularly due to our
understanding of the lived world becoming more and more dispersed and
disembodied as it combines visceral touch with being virtually in-touch. As
Pedro Gadanho asserts, we face a fluctuating existence of ceaseless change in
which mobility – no longer limited to the physical and infrastructural – is social,
political, economic and psychological:

In this new context, ephemeral architecture is rather to be seen as a critical

answer to the mobility of values, ambiances and fast-changing needs.
Architecture may thus evolve from the notion of a static service –
traditionally related to the slowness of urban construction and identity
transformations – to that of a performance, i.e., a dynamic response to the
accelerated needs of contemporary society.49

Such a performative turn in architecture – demonstrating that performance can

no longer be contained within hermetically sealed cultural vessels – is
manifesting itself on and offline: in the streets, in stadiums and on proliferating
screens. Theatre as a monumental glory machine seems irrelevant and
uninteresting: persisting primarily in the “starchitecture” of opera houses and
concert halls housing that most spatially conventional performing art form –
classical music – which is focused on the controlling fulcrum of a conductor’s
baton.
The dwindling experimentation with movable systems and adaptable formats
that flourished in the latter half of last century is now impeded by time and
labour costs required for spatial transformations, unless substantial construction
and operational budgets can be found, as with the philanthropically endowed
Wyly Theatre (2009) in Dallas, Texas – REX/OMA’s impressive black box “theatre
machine” with automated wagons, elevators and fly systems capable of achieving
a myriad of layouts and opening its perimeter to the city skyline. This kinetic
flexibility is employed on an even more epic scale in New York City’s Hudson
Yard with The Shed (2019), a cultural centre envisioned for increasingly cross-
disciplinary arts practices and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in
collaboration with Rockwell Group. The multilevel complex is defined by its
exterior shell, constructed of steel with translucent foil pillows and retractable
glazed walls, which track in and out of an adjoining plaza. Here, through
industrially scaled open space with a spanning technical deck, is an endeavour to
realize Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, yet without the interior intricacy and social
accessibility inherent to his and Littlewood’s 1960s vision.
Nevertheless, a captivating mechanism, without elaborate automation and
more open to community engagement, can be found once again in São Paulo
“where cultural dynamism and inequality are two sides of the same development
process,”50 and where Bo Bardi’s Teatro Oficina and SESC Pompéia continue to
provide fundamentally provocative performance venues. Centro Cultural de São
Paulo (CCSP), designed by Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Benedito de Castro
Telles, opened in 1982 as a triumph of democratic space in the time of
dictatorship.51 Focusing on urbanity and diversity, the architecture was designed
to attract and accommodate a range of ages and social classes within a place of
both passage and meeting. Embedded in a raised parkland, the centre includes
multiple exhibition and performance spaces, including an open arena known as
the Sala Adoniran Barbosa, which, accessible through doors in glazed walls at
entry level, presents itself as a floor void, opening to the black box studio below.
The passing public is invited to gather around this aperture where they can sit on
the ground with their legs between the balustrades watching spontaneous or
scheduled events and participating in public discussions. As a deliberately open
and robust environment, composed of bridges, ramps, stairs and galleries, CCSP
is continuously populated by groups of young people rehearsing various
movement sequences in front of reflecting windows that line its open courtyards:
returning us to Appia’s century-old call for a new monumentality that recognizes
momentality while incorporating resilience and transience.
If event-space is therefore, as Appia advocated, an open forum for
experimentation and sharing of ideas within a constantly evolving built
environment, then applying it beyond the conventional stage allows us to fulfil
what Todd and Tompkins discuss as a fundamental role of theatre, helping us “to
live more in the present, but also collectively to remember.”52

Notes
1 Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” 336–47, in Leach, Rethinking Architecture,
337. Also reproduced in Derrida and Eisenman, Chora L Works, 95.
2 Lahiji writes: “Nietzsche, the artist-philosopher, regarded himself as ‘a kind of architect of imagination’
and wanted to see the edifice of his own thought as ‘the mind that builds.’ He wanted this ‘art of
thinking’ to be synonymous with an ‘art of building’ in which the verbal noun building would be a
fundamental human activity in creating form.” 6. (The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with
Architecture).
3 Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, 140.
4 Shapiro, “Review of Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds by Alexandre Kostka; Ivan
Wohlfarth,” 101–3, 102. Also see Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing,
411n.8.
5 Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 520.
6 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 143.
7 Lahiji, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture, 8.
8 Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, 149.
9 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 57.
10 Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 521.
11 Architect Thom Mayne discusses striking an architectural balance between security and transparency
in a post-9/11 world. The New York Times (4 March 2007). The webcast event can be found online:
www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/weekinreview/04ouroussoff.html?_r=1&oref=slogi (accessed 15 May
2008).
12 Eisenman, “Unfolding Events,” 426.
13 Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction, 51.
14 Albee, The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia? Notes Towards a Definition of Tragedy, 98.
15 Kuhn, “GETTING ALBEE’S GOAT: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy,” 6.
16 Ibid., 18.
17 Albee, The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia? 101–2.
18 Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 22.
19 Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 78.
20 Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture” in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 336.
21 Ibid.
22 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 68.
23 Renato Poggioli establishes and outlines activism, antagonism, agonism, and nihilism as defining
features of the historical avant-garde in chapters 2 and 4 of The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 16–41, 60–
77.
24 Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 93.
25 Ibid., 22.
26 Nietzsche, “The Birth of Tragedy,” 59.
27 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 67–8.
28 Hollier, Against Architecture, 122.
29 Derrida, “Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” 340.
30 Ibid., 342.
31 Ibid., 341.
32 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 34.
33 For a detailed documentation of the project and its collaborative process see Derrida and Eisenman,
Chora L Works.
34 Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, 279.
35 Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction, 42.
36 The biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:4–9) involved God’s punishment on the
descendants of Noah who aspired to a unified language represented in a single edifice, culturally and
structurally, which they attempted to build high into the heavens. In confounding their speech, God
halted the building and the people were scattered throughout the world, leaving behind a collapsing
edifice in ruins.
37 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 38.
38 Ibid., 2.
39 Rufford, Theatre & Architecture, 11.
40 Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 109.
41 In 2011 this international event’s name was changed to Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and
Space, acknowledging a more expanded field for contemporary interdisciplinary practices.
42 Srdce PQ / The Heart of PQ, Initial concepts developed with Josh Dachs of FDA and Rodrigo Tisi in
2001, were further workshopped with the design team and selected international artists invited to
participate in the event.
43 Tompkins and Todd, “The Unfinished Theatre.” The authors are referring to On Not Building for
Posterity, BBC Radio 3, 23 March 1973: Transcribed by Fred Bentham and first printed in TABS (1973),
32(2), before being reprinted in Mulryne and Shewring (eds.), Making Space for Theatre: British
Architecture and Theatre Since 1958, 16–20.
44 Price, from “Cedric Price Talks at the AA,” 32. See also Price, “The Case Against Conservation,”39–44.
45 Juaçaba, Arquiteta, www.carlajuacaba.com.br/humanidade-pavilion (accessed 30 June 2015).
46 Tompkins and Todd, “The Unfinished Theatre,” 32.
47 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, 96.
48 15 July 2017
49 Gadanho, Architecture as Performance, https://shrapnelcontemporary.wordpress.com/archive-
texts/architecture-as-performance/ Originally published in Dédalo #02, Porto, March 07, 2008.
50 Anheier and Isar (eds.), Cultures and Globalization: Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance, 272.
51 Architect, Luiz Benedito de Castro Telles, says of CCSP: “[while] it is possible to censor theatre, music
and literature … [the dictatorship] was unable to censor architecture because it is difficult to
understand the intentions contained within a design. We made a space to bring people together, a
democratic building developed under a military dictatorship.” Cited by FAU Research Team, University
of Sao Paulo, in “Public Space and the Role of the Architect,” Modernist Case Study Briefing, 9.
http://psarchitect.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sao-Paulo-Modernist-briefing_Centro-Cultural.pdf.
52 Tompkins and Todd, “The Unfinished Theatre,” 34.
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Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures on the corresponding pages.

9/11 attack 26, 300, 311; “grand narrative” 312

abject, etymology 301

abjectile 237, 263, 301, 297
abjection (erotic object) 247–9
“Abjection and Miserable Forms” (Bataille) 247
abject space 233; avant-garde model 237; Moscow Theatre Siege activation 225–6
absolute space 41, 101, 102, 145–6, 312; absolute stage space 105–7; consideration 103; ether, relationship
105–6; idea, development 102–3; monumentality 146–50; spatial abstraction 129
abstract composition 222
abstract space 161–3, 315; abject space, interaction 315; Lefebvre formulation 129
Acconci, Vito 148
Accursed Share (Bataille) 246
Adorno, Theodor W. 83
Advertisements for Architecture (Tschumi) 247, 248
aesthetic-affective openness 249
aestheticity (Fischer-Lichte) 8
“Aesthetics of Excess, An” (Weiss) 236
aesthetic thrill 76
agitation, qualities 225
agit-prop 170
agora (marketplace) 88; public performances 29, 316
Agrest, Diana 278
Albee, Edward 313–17, 320
alienation: architecture 161, 163, 166–7, 199–213; qualities 225
Allegory of the Cave (Plato) 84–5
allusion, usage 105
Alpha Forces (Russian) 242
L’Annonce faite à Marie 142
“Antonin Artaud and the Impossible Theatre” (Finter) 255
Apollinaire, Guillaume xviii, 244–5
Apollonian: architectonics, Nietzschean disputation 193–4; plastic art, Dionysian excesses (combination)
313–16; structure, dismantling 321; vision, rejection 82
Appia, Adolphe 4, 41, 92, 120–30, 171, 198, 131, 133, 135–7, 141–8, 180, 194, 222, 223, 225, 319, 331;
scenographic landscapes 102, 106; universal landscapes 4, 41, 128–9; rhythmic spaces xxi, 105; sacrifice 156
(n127)
Architectonic Scene (Craig) 105, 122, 123–4, 131, 150
architectural: avant-garde xvii, xix, 17, 37, 166–7, 322, acceptable face 180; division/split 168–9; dreamscape
140; modernism xvii, 1, 14, 16, 25, 35–6, 83, 169, 302, 320, 322; opposition 320; performativity 12, 72–3;
scenography 74, 88; strategies 17
architectural scene (Craig) 124
architecture xv–xviii; Apollonian plastic art, Dionysian excesses (combination) 313–16; becoming-
performance 11–18; death-bound characteristics 322; de-centred architecture 261; de-centring 281–97;
event 5–9; explosion 300; function (temple-laboratory) 130–3; “ideological instrument” 168; architecture
in/between 278; mise-en-scène (Garnier) 66–75; moment 247; object, black box negation 104; “paper
architecture” 199; performance model 1; performative i, xiii, 1, 285; performative turn 328; romantic-
idealist/radical-objective tendencies 133–4; trembling 309
architecture against architecture 256–7
Architecture and Disjunction (Tschumi) 260
“Architecture and Dramaturgy” (Le Corbusier) 246
“Architecture and Transgression” (Tschumi) 247
Architecture for the Outside (Grosz) 10
Architecture Foundation (London) 296
“Architecture of Dissidence, The” (Tschumi) 39
Architettura (Serlio) 101, 115; diagram 115
archi-textual event, creation 76
Arena Goldoni 132
“Ark” (Duncan) 115
L’Arlésienne (Picasso) 192
Aronson, Arnold 7, 44n19, 44n21, 111, 152
art/architecture/performance, interdisciplinary integration 174
“Art and Revolution” (Wagner) 86
Artaud, Antonin 4, 33, 34, 38, 51n167, 51n172, 107, 225, 226, 233, 235, 237, 238, 245, 246, 254, 255–62, 266–267,
276, 281, 283–4, 299–300, 302n17, 302n25, 304n80, 305n84, 305n89, 305n92, 305n94, 305n95, 305n96, 305n98,
305n104, 305n107, 306n110, 306n127, 306n129, 306n130, 307n145, 307n147, 307n154, 307n156, 307n160,
308n171, 318, 322, 333n40 ; impact 255–7; writing, volatility 276
artefacts 31, 302; cultural artefact 13
artificiality 113
“Artist, the Savant, and the Industrialist, The” (de Saint-Simon) 35
Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, The (Nelson) 300
“Art of Revelation” (Craig) 116
artwork: architecture, relationship (absence) 89; autonomy, insistence 36; communal artwork, celebration 59;
encapsulation 82; inaugural event, relationship (absence) 54; instinctive force, creation/impact 86; mimetic
nature, Nietzsche refutation 32–3; nature, absorption 88; Nietzschean architecture, defining 309; perceptual
shift 8; presentation (Wagner) 55; pure/undisfigured form 57–8; reality, heightening 37; resistance
manifestos/performances, conversion 38; transience/mobility, resistance 16; total work (totalizing effect)
107; unitarian artwork 82–3; usage 314; violence/pain/conflict, incorporation 31; visions, development 78
“Art-Work of the Future” (Wagner) 59, 82, 83, 88, 194
Askergren, Mikael 87
aspatial spatial condition 312
Asphaleia System 116
atmospherics (aesthetic) 106, 127, 129, 130, 140, 317
Attic amphitheatre, Elizabethan stage (resolution) 87
attractions, montage (Eisenstein) 170–5, 198
audience 4, 6–8, 23, 25, 37, 40, 41, 54, 57–61, 63, 69, 72, 76–8, 82, 84–8, 108, 111–13, 125, 131, 135–8, 145, 172,
175; choric role, return 108; incursion 244; tyranny 76
auditorium 2–7, 17, 24, 27, 30, 31, 41, 42, 54, 56, 59–67, 72–9, 82, 84, 85, 88–91, 106, 110, 116, 117, 121, 123,
130–3, 141–2, 145, 149, 163, 171, 175, 184; fan-shaped auditorium 154; dynamic multiplicity 63
“Author as Producer” (Benjamin) 174
avant-garde xv–xx, 28; actions/performances, impact 39–40; ancient Greek theatre adoption 29; architectural
avant-garde, strategies 17; architectural/theatrical projects 4; artistic avant-garde,
radicality/destructiveness 39; attack 60; constructivist avant-gardes 39; Dionysian element 38; emergence
161–2; Euclidean space annihilation 251; European avant-garde, discourse 226; frenzy, doubling 62;
historical avant-garde, experiments 3, 4, 7, 39, 43, 168, 171, 300; impact 36; intentionality 24; language 115;
mimetic representation 318–21; model 237; modernism, relationship 9, 37; modernité (relationship) 37–8;
Modern Movement 38–9; movements, spirit 28; neo-avant-garde, appearance 131; practices, auditorium
(relationship) 3; precursor 276; problems 38; project 35; socialist avant-garde, problem 318; strategies 236;
techniques, sharing/utilizing 37; temporal/spatial coordinates, withholding strategy 15–16; theatrical
avant-garde 2, performance space resistance 24; theatrical event, defining 109; theatricalization 224;
theatrical resistance, proposals 3; tragic victim-hero, role adoption 225; utopian avant-garde 162–3;
withdrawal 110
avant-garde architecture xx; exploration 39–40; relationship 9
avant-garde artists: collaboration 170; confrontation 102; emergence 62; evolution 62
avant-garde performance 76; demand 320; inspired shudder 321; secular temple-cathedral re-figuring 322–5
avant-garde revolutions: modernism, relationship 2–3; paradigm 24; spatial performativity/performance
space, relationship 10
avant-garde theatre: companies, formation 106; constructions, adoption/adaptation 251–2; homelessness,
impact 201; impact 222
avant-gardism: division 167–70; modernism, relationship 35–43
L’Avventura Novecentista (Bontempelli) 28

Babel, building 43, 319–32, 333n36

Bablet, Denis 121, 131
Bablet, Marie-Louise 129
Badiou, Alain xvii, xxii, 20, 23, 48n93, 49n115, 109–10, 112, 116, 152n41, 153n78
Ballet Russes 168
Ban, Shigeru 326
Banham, Reyner 15, 46n62, 199, 204, 230n108, 231n119
Bankside Power Station 207
Barba, Eugenio 27
bare stage, demand 142
Barkhin, Mikhail 135, 176
Baroque model, post-revolutionary performativity (relationship) 59–66
Barrow, John 106, 151n22
Basilica (Craig) 118
Bataille, Georges 4, 42, 226, 235, 236, 237, 238, 242, 245, 246, 247, 254, 299, 302n11, 302n18, 303n50, 311
Baudelaire, Charles 37, 62, 73, 108, 152n34
Bauhaus 170, 180–197; building as stage 193; curriculum, exclusions 183–4; establishment 181; festivities
180–94; ideas, manifesto 181, 194; performance, importance 184
Bauhaus Statutes (Gropius) 183
Bau und Bühne 183
Bayreuth (Wagner) 2–3, 30, 40–1, 53, 82–3, 92n7, 128, 222; effect 196; examination 78–83; provisional theatre
53–9
Beard, James 286
“becoming space” 12, 149
Behrens, Peter 133
Benedito de Castro Telles, Luiz 329, 332n51
Benjamin, Andrew 201, 213
Benjamin, Walter 111, 174, 267
Bennett, Jane 22, 48n106, 249, 301n7
Bennett, Tony 65, 212
Bentham, Jeremy 239
Bergson, Henri 16, 109
Berlin Academy for Ancient Music 212
Berliner Ensemble 163
Bexiga 285
Bhabha, Homi 322, 333n37
“Biotechnique” theory 264
Birringer, Johannes 264
birthing: metaphor (Craig) 104; trope 237
Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche) 3, 9, 28, 30, 36, 62, 63, 310; action/audience, merger 85–6; Apollonian
aesthetic 117; arts/theatre, rebirth 107; dedication 78–9; formulation 313–16; “luminous cloud formation”
140
black box 2, 4, 41, 104–5, 131, 141, 144–5, 285, 296; creation 41; dimensions 104; representation 104; technical
black box theatre, opposition 104; “theatre machine” (REX/OMA) 331
black box stage house: advancement 131; constructed void 144
black box studio 2; parallelogram black box studio, proposal 296; reinforcement 145
black void, resistance 143–6
“black widow” suicide bombers 42, 234, 236, 262; material presence 304
Blast Theory 305
Blau, Herbert 40, 52n194, 163, 226n10
blindness, as insight 108
Bloch, Ernst 222
Bo Bardi, Lina xxxii–iii, 285, 307n160, 326–9
Bockenheimer Depot 42, 206, 206
body 179, 184, 192, 195, 223–5, 258–9, 263, 266–7, 276–7, 283–5, 323–5; body-machine 213; destabilization 300;
explosive 234, 261, 302n4, 305n65; feverish 53, 263; grounded 115, 132; maternal 103, 249; performing 29, 32,
41–2, 141, 300; rhythmic 104, 112–3, 150, 156n119; social 258, 262; society (comparison) 262; theatricalized
171; uncontrollable 4
Bontempelli, Massimo 28
Book of Nothing, The (Barrow) 106
Borchmeyer, Dieter 85, 87
“borderline states” (Kristeva) 236
“Bottom Machine” 77
Bouffes du Nord see Théàtre des Bouffes du Nord
Boulevard des Capucines 75–6
bourgeois capitalism 162
bourgeois glory machine: combat (Wagner) 78; disciplining 53; transformation 54
Boyce, Raymond 286
Brandt, Karl 89, 93
Brecht, Bertolt 41, 111, 161, 171, 199; end-stage venue 285
Breton, André 107, 244
British Aesthetic Movement 157n141
Brook, Peter 5, 86, 102, 145–6
Brückwald, Otto 57, 89
Buck-Morss, Susan 204, 231n126
Bühnenbauer (stage builder) 184
Bühnenbilder (stage picturemaker) 184
building, art 330
Building as Stage, The (Feininger) 192
“Building in Empty Spaces” (Bloch) 222
Burgin, Victor 251
buried orchestra, “mystic abyss” 57

“CACA” (Artaud) 236

Calinescu, Matei 37, 222, 232n141
campanile 231
Canté, Edouard 89
carceral spaces 281
Carceri etchings 276, 278
Carceri Oscura (1753) 276
Carlson, Marvin 104, 266
Cartoucherie (Théâtre du Soleil) 142, 259, 282
Cartoucherie de Vincennes, La 205, 205
Casa di Musica (Porto) 149
“Case of Wagner, The” (Nietzsche) 78, 97n96, 151n27
“Cataracts of Dawn, The” (Appia) 126
Cathedral of Erotic Misery (Schwitters) 263, 264
“cathedral of the future” (Appia)133
Cathedral of Socialism (1919) 181, 182
cave, allegory (Plato) 84–5, 107
Centro Cultural of São Paulo (CCSP), 329
Chaudhuri, Una 256–7
Chechen rebels xxiv, 42, 226, 234, 236, 299, 305
choragus 74
Chora L Works (Derrida) 320
choric: role, return 108; space, reemphasis 104
choros (chora) 104, 225, 264, 314, 320; model 264
chorus 132
“Chronicle” (Moreas) 107
chronological time 109–10
church (replacement), avant-garde theatre (impact) 222
CICT see International Centre for Theatre Creation
Circus Schumann 134
city, attractions (montage) 170–5
Cixous, Hélène 259
clappers 76
claque 76
Cocteau, Jean 168
Colomina, Beatriz 169–70, 304n58
colour scheme, change 299
communal artwork, celebration 59
concentration, architecture 85
concrete brutalism 324
“concrete utopian process” 204
consciousness, application 258
constructed void 144
construction, literal/figurative technique 224
constructivists 162, 166–9, 172, 175–81, 195, 222, 225; architects, utopian project 37; avant-gardes 39;
emergence 168; Glory Machine, realization (absence) 199; socialist agenda 318; theatre-makers 41–2;
theatrical movements (association) 3–4
containment, defiance 130
Copeau, Jacques 41, 141–2
corporeal boundaries, Hellerau challenge 141
“Correalism” theory 264
counter-terrorist events, proliferation 300
counter-terrorist operations, hyper-violence 242
Craig 4, 41, 92, 101–133, 142–7, 150n2, 154n77, 155n111, 156n114, 157n141, 171, 181, 222, 226, 237, 319
Craig, Edward Gordon 4, 7, 92, 171, 237; birthing, metaphor 104; scenographic landscapes 106; thinking,
origin 106
Crary, Jonathan 65, 83, 95n47, 156n132, 196
creatio ex nihilo 106
Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre) 200
cruel machine 298–301
Cruel Tale (Villier) 76, 171
cruelty: architecture 225–6, 237, 297; artist/transfigurer 300; theatre 77
Cubism 15, 16, 167–8, 192, 226n13
cubist war 224
cubo-futurists, alignment 171
Culot, Maurice 200
cults/sects, symbolist exploration 118
cultural: artefact 13; industries 296

Dada/Dadaists 7, 38–9, 168, 180, 195, 224, 233, 236, 242–5, 301
Dadaists 180, 224; avant-garde, performance architecture proposal 233; avant-garde strategies 236; cabaret
performers 244; Dada Manifesto (Tzara) 242; performative spatial tactics 301; scenographic environment
experimentation 7–8; shock/surprise, usage 245
Daedalus 120, 223
Dal Co, Francesco 180
dance, Dionysus (association) 112–13
dancing architectures 112–16
dark vortex, challenge 144
Dawn, The (1920) 172
Daybreak (Nietzsche) 309
Deak, Frantisek 76, 108
death, sublime terror 110
de-centred architecture 261
de-centred: body 297; model 297; spatiality 42, 301; subject 322
de-centring, action 260
deCerteau, Michel 207, 213
decomposition, term (usage) 264
deconstructed architecture, open networks 297
“De-, Dis-, Ex-” (Tschumi) 260
defamiliarization, qualities 225
Deleuze, Gilles 11, 14, 18, 20–1; abstraction formulation 128; objectile 14, 46, 238; becoming 15
de L’Isle-Adam, Villiers 41, 75; mechanical theatre, architectural decor 77; Operator 78
“density” (Barba) 27
Derrida 11–12, 20–21, 34, 45, 149, 234, 257, 261, 282, 285, 299, 311, 318, 322–3
Derrida, Jacques 11, 149, 237, 281, 298, 320; Kristeva maneuver, comparison 321
desacralization space 314
Descartes, René (perspectivalism) 283
desire to disorganize 222
Dessau auditorium, appearance 185, 186–92
deus ex machina 40, 63, 318; focus 225; mechanism 29; presence 224; return 318; term, usage 95
Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) 135, 150, 181
Development of the Playhouse, The (Mullin) 86, 98n120
Diaghilev, Serge 168
Dialogues (Waltz) 212
Dido and Aeneas (Craig production) 120
Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) 163
Diller Scofidio + Renfro 212, 331
Dionysian theatre, Nietzschean desire 257
Dionysus, dance (association) 112–13
disappearance, fear 111
disease, visitation/curse/judgement 261
dis-eased body 261–3, 282, 297
“dislocated assemblage” (Artaud) 257
disorganization, desire 222
dis-traction, space 316
divine, artwork (interaction) 317
Dmitriev, Vladimir 172
Dolnick, Adam 298
Dorn, Wolf 135
double proscenium arch 82, impact 56–7
Downstage Company (Wellington) 286
Drain, Richard 162
Dresden Hoftheatre 75
Droste, Magdalena 183
Dubrovka Theatre 234, 250, 300; invasion 298; planning 302; post-siege media image 235; siege 237
Duncan, Isadora 92, 102, 105, 112–121, 131–2, 153n69/73/73, 154n89; “beautiful illusion” 119; collaborations
120; dancing, example 114; inspiration 116; movement 115; temple 116–21; Théâtre du Beau 131, 154n82
dystopian experiment 324

earth/flesh/true walls, orchestration 260

Earth Rampant (1923) 173
Edward Gordon Craig (Bablet) 121
effectiveness, imperatives 242, 302
efficacy, efficiency imperatives 242, 302
Eiffel Tower 223
Eisenman, Peter 201
Eisenstein, Sergei 172–4, 276
“electromechanical peepshow” (Lissitzky) 172
Elito, Edson 285
Elliot, Michael 324
“emancipated spectator” (Rancière) 91
embellage spaces (Kantor) 146
embodied experience/participation, choric space 315
Empty Space, The (Brook) 5, 102, 146
Endless Space (Kiesler) 263
Endless Theatre (Kiesler) 1, 263, 264, 278
“End of Space, The” (Libeskind) 281
ephemeral architecture 328
“epic theatre” (Brecht) 123, 161, 162, 204
Epic Theatre (Brecht) 111
epistemic trauma, exposure 167
erotic object 247–9
L’Esprit Nouveau 169
eternal fixed space, symbolist creation 109
Ettinger, Bracha 262
Euclidean space 109–10; avant-garde annihilation 251; deconstructions 276
European avant-garde, discourse 226
“Evening Round” 126
event: performance (becoming-architecture) 18–28; simultaneity 315–18
Event-Cities (Tschumi) 9–10, 228n51
event dimension: discussion 6;
impact 25
event-space xvi, xviii, xx–xxi, 3–4, 9–12, 18, 24–8, 331; architecture, performance model 1; construction
(Garnier) 316–19; contrast 90; motion, paradigm 9; outcome 312–15; reworking 316; site, flexibility 148–9;
space-in-action 17; term 24, usage 44n35, 45n43
Event-Space (focus) 328
everyday life, theatricalization 174
evocation, usage 105
exclusion, act 236
“exosmosis” (Jarry) 109–10
ex-ploding space 261, 266–83
ex-plosive spatiality 42, 301
“Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” 179
Expressionism xix, 39, 218, effects 181

Factories: Conversions for Modern Culture, The (Trans Europe Halles) 204
fatigue, experience 84
Faust (staging) 85
Feininger, Lux 192
Feininger, Lyonel 182
Feste (Bauhaus celebration) 184
Festebene (festive area) 184
Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre) (Wagner) 2–4, 30–1, 40–2, 53–4, 88–91, 92n9, 108, 146, 222, 241, 319;
antithetical theatres, presentation 89; audiences 84–5; auditorium 81; disciplinary apparatus 241; festival
site (Craig), equivalence 123; glory machine 222; opening 79; orchestra pit 80; passive pilgrims, presence
108; sacralization 84; renovation 93; temple 117
Festspielhaus Hellerau (Appia) 41, 194
“Final Dissolution” (Serner) 244
Finter, Helen 255
First Machine Age 199, 223–4
First State Ball-Bearing Factory 250
Fischer, Theodor 135
Fischer-Lichte, Erika 8
Forsythe, William 138, 140, 145, 205
Fort, Paul 109
fortification, masking (scenographic ploy) 311–14
Foucault, Michel 238
found space 4, 22–23, 201; plein air 301
Frankfurt Ballet Company 141
Friedrich, Caspar David 129
Fuchs, Georg 134
Fun Palace 324
functionalism 224
Fun Palace 328
future, theatrical edifice 88
futurism movement 39
futurists 180; architects 37; cubo-futurists, alignment 171; emergence 168; impact 16–17; movement
glorification 179; opera, alienating effects (incorporation) 172; work, impact 195

Gaia, primeval womb 86, 111

Galli Bibiena, Giuseppe 58
Garnier, Charles 4–5, 54, 59, 89, 316–19; architecture, mise-en-scène 66–75; emphasis 317
Gas Masks (Eisenstein) 173; argument (Tafuri) 201
Gay Science (Nietzsche) 18, 109
Genesis myth, theatricalization 102
Germany, utopian avant-garde 162–3
Gerould, Daniel 107
Gesamtkunstwerk 83, 194; celebration, completion 90
Gesellschaftshau (community building) 135
Getty Institute 310
ghost in the machine 213–25
Giard, Luce 207, 213
Giedion, Sigfried 3, 15, 46n64, 167, 192, 229n86, 258–9, 305n97
Girl with the Cut-Off Hands (Fort) 109
“Glance at the German Operatic Stage of Today, A” (Wagner) 86
Glaspalast 57
globalism 224
global public auditorium, format 242
Globus 144
glory machine 75–8, 222, 239; bourgeois glory machine, disciplining 53; constitution 41; proposal 76–7;
realization (absence) 199; spectacle/surveillance, negotiation 4; theatre architecture rationalization 222;
theatre, comparison 329
“Glory Machine, The” (Villiers) 41, 75–8, 199; conception 75–6; diatribe 77; proposal 75
glossolalia 255
Goat, The (Albee) 313–17
God: death 312, 319; judgement 34–5; mystical silence 225; punishment 333
“Gothic Arch, The” (Piranesi) 277
“grand narrative” 20, 22, 48n90, 312
Great Plague 238
great playhouse, dream 250
Great Stage Machine 194–9
Greek/Christian staging, “rare festival” (Craig) 155n111
Greek tragedy, unitarian artwork 82–3
Green, Andre 255
Gropius, Walter 4, 135, 181, 198; Dessau design 184; interdisciplinary approach 181; stage, fixed part 196–7
Großes Schauspielhaus 134, 134, 194
Grosz, Elizabeth 10
groundbreaking, impact 54
Guedes, Joaquim 285
“guerrilla theatre” 284
Gusarev, Sergei 144
Guthrie Theatre 149

habitable borders, three-dimensional spatial network 322

Hadid, Zaha 283
halls of industry, renovation 207
Hamlet, Moscow production (1912) 131
Hannah Playhouse 142, 284; section/plan 286
Hanover Merzbau (Schwitters) 263
“haunted narrativity” 213
Heart of PQ, performance landscape 324–8
Heine, Heinrich 90
Heisenberg, Werner 106
Hellerau 133–9, 328; architectural dreamscape 140; Deutscher Werkbund 150; Festival Hall, challenges 141;
Festspielhaus 138–9, 140–1, 194; possibilities 141
“heroic age” (Modern Movement) 223–4
Herrmann, Max 8
Heynen, Hilde xx, 39, 169
Himmelblau, Coop 283
Hirsch, Nikolaus 205
historical avant-garde 3, 14–15, 205; destructive gestures 39; emergence 168; event-spaces 312; experiments 7;
impact 300, 315; influence 28; projects 263–4, 316–19; spatial realignment 323
Hollier, Denis 243
Holy Theatre 118
homelessness, affirmation (Nietzsche) 201
horror vacui 110
housed aesthetic event 23
“human agency,” importance 6
Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche) 327
Human Artwork, display (Wagner) 59
Humanity Pavilion 2012 326–7
Hyman, Erin Williams 110
hyperbolic: incorporation 129; labyrinth 320
“Hypothetical Book, A” (Tschumi) 39

iconic images, backdrop 109

ideality, reality (separation) 57
“ideal spectator” (Nietzsche) 104
ideal theatre (symbolist idea) 110
illusion, formation 319
“Immaculate Perception” 224
immanence 116
“immanent condition” (Rajchman) 128–9
Império, Flávio 285
in-betweenness (paradoxical conditions) 236–7
industrialized: marketplace, reality 318; stage, proposal (Meyerhold) 195
Industrial Palace, Prague (Middle Hall of Výstaviště) 323
industrial site 4
“infinite motions” (Matta) 264
informe (formless) 238, 305
inspired shudder 321
interchange station 174
interdisciplinary utterances 319
International Centre for Theatre Creation (CICT) 87, 146, 266
Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatretechnik (Kiesler) 175
“International Exhibition of New Theatre Techniques” (Kiesler) 178
inter-textual/inter-cultural utterances 319
intoxication 31, 38, surrealist preoccupation 42
intra/international culture 322
“invisible orchestra” (Wagner) 86, 110–11; creation 90–2
“invisible stage” 91
“invisible theatre” 41, 90–2
Irigaray, Luce 84–5
Isadora and Raymond Duncan Dance Research Centre (Athens) 119–20
Itten, Johannes 183, 184
I Want a Child (Lissitzky) 175–8
Izenour, George C. 89, 104

Jameson, Frederic 167

Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 92, 105, 115, 121, 125–7, 133, 135, 140
Jarry, Alfred 109, 112, 236, 243
Jay, Martin 283
Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard (Le Corbusier) 167, 170, 168, 223, 231n120, 232n145, 246–7, 284
Jellyfish Theatre 296
Jewish Museum Berlin, architecture (experience) 96
jouissance 249
Jouvet, Louis 141–2
“joyful science” (Nietzsche) 223
Juaçaba, Carla 326

Kahn, Gustave 121

Kahn, Louis 145
Kaltwasser, Martin 296
Kamerney Theatre 174, 251
Kantor, Tadeusz 146
kasperltheatre (puppet theatre) 85
Kharkovsky, Vladimir 172
Kiesler, Frederick 1, 175, 178–9, 263–7; Endless Theater 264; theatre 199
kinaesthetic experience 113, 195
King Ludwig II 55, 79, 89, 93n19, 317
Klee, Paul 183; Weimar Bauhaus curricula sketch 183
Koolhaas, Rem 149
Kopanos, unfinished walls 119
Kristeva, Julia 111, 236, 249, 302n7, 323

Laban Dance Centre 149

Lahiji, Nadir 246, 310–13
Lasdun, Denys 324
Laterna Magika 144
late Romanticism, absolute space 150
Lavinsky, Anton 172
“Laws, The” (Ozenfant/Jeanneret) 168
Lecat, Jean-Guy 86, 146
Le Corbusier see Jeanneret
Lefebvre, Henri 103, 121, 146–47, 161, 167, 200, 213; space, logic 238
“legendary object” 207
Lehmann, Hans-Thies 319
Leningrad Pravda 174
Lenin Tribune 174
Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer (Schlemmer) 180
Levitt Bernstein Associates 212
liberté collective, la 90
liberté individuelle, la 90
Libeskind, Daniel 96n74, 282
life, non-slavery 300
“light organ,” creation 137
“light-producing space” 137
Limoges (Tschumi design) 241–2
“liquid space,” principle 251
Lissitzky, El xix, 170–7, 179, 228n46, 251
literary discourse, theatricalization 108
Littlewood, Joan 324
Littman, Max 133
live performer, perspective 125
“living art” (performance) 125
living, elasticity 264–5
logic of space 238, 311
London Concert Hall for the Purcell Society 131
Looking into the Abyss (Aronson) 111
Loos, Adolf 246, 247, 249
“loud silence” 233
L+T System 178
Ludwig II (King) 55, 317
Lugné-Poe, Aurélien 110
“luminous cloud formation” 140

Machine Age 223

machine á jouer 2
machines á vivre 2
Madness and Modernism (Sass) 257
Magnanimous Cuckold, The (Meyerhold/Popova/Stepanova) 172–3
Mallarmé, Stéphane 105, 110, 148; solitary artist 120
Mamelles de Tirésias, Les (Apollinaire) 244, 245
man-as-machine 223
Manchester Royal Exchange 212, 213, 324; Great Hall 218–19; theatre ceiling 220; theatre galleries 221
Manezh/Manege theatre 144
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (Sant’Elia) 17
“man in space,” (Schlemmer) 181
Mann, Paul 38
Man Who Was Thursday, The (Tairov production) 174, 251; Vesnin design 253
Margravial Opera House 58
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 107, 171
marionettes, artificiality 113
marketplace: agora (marketplace) 29, 88; chaos 316; God death, herald 19; industrialized marketplace, reality
318
Martinez Corrêa, José Celso (Zé Celso) 285
Marxist constructivism 167
Mask, The (Craig) 102
Massumi, Brian 16
master builder 314
“master morality” 83
“materialization” 255
material vitality, aesthetic-affective openness 249
Matrixial Borderspace (Ettinger) 262
Matta, Roberto 264
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 171
Mayne, Thom 311, 330
McAuley, Gay 18
McKenzie, Jon 77, 242
mechanical theatre, architectural decor 77
mechanization, exercise 198–9
Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion) 3, 258
Melnikov, Konstantin 173
Melzer, Annabelle 243, 245
“Memories of Isadora Duncan” (Craig) 112
Mendelsohn, Erich 200
Meridian Palace of Culture 242; planning 302
Merzbau (Schwitters) 263
Metal Party 193
metaphysics 32, 107
metteur-en-scène 116
Meyerhold Theatre 176–7; proposal 177
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 107, 135, 171–3, 185, 194, 196, 199; commission 176
Mical, Thomas 245
micro-architectures, defining 45
“micro narratives” 9
mimetic representation: cessation 316; faux constructions 318–21
mirror, exaggeration 112
mise-en-scène 66–75, 282, 284; defining 125; symbolist 105
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Lahiji) 310
Mnouchkine, Ariane 205
modernism xvii–xx, 1–3, 9–10, 14–17; avant-garde, relationship 9, 37; avant-gardism, relationship 35–43;
homogeneity 241–2; postdramatic overthrow 319
modernist movement 120–1
modernité 37
modernity: romanticism, merger 88; space 161–2
Modern Movement 36–9, 162–3, 167, 224, 245–6, 251; abstract spaces 105; architectural style 132; avant-garde,
168–9, 213; contradictions 168; dynamic space 223; rational aesthetics 317; unity 180
“Modern Painter, The” (Ozenfant/Jeanneret) 168
Modulor (Le Corbusier) 283
Moholy-Nagy, László 195
momentality 147
monochromatic forms, permutations 115–16
“Montage and Architecture” (Eisenstein) 195
“Montage of Attractions” (Eisenstein) 172
monumentality i, xvi, 2, 147–8, 83, 179, 257, 319; new 25, 105, 147–8, 162, 317
“Monumentality” in texts (Appia) 133, 147–8
“monumental pile,” negation 316
More, Thomas 120–1
Moréas, Jean 107, 121
Mori, Toshiko 296
“Morning Light” (Appia) 126
Morphosis Architects 311
mortality, spectre 103–4
Moscow theater hostage crisis 299
Moscow Theatre Siege 225–6, 235, 300
“Motion” (Craig) 41, 105, 110
“moveable space constructions” 195
movement system (Dalcroze) 125–6
moving body, beauty (expression) 136
Müller, Michel 205
Mullin, Donald C. 86
mundus 103–4
Munich Kunstler Theatre, sunken stage 134
music-drama 55; architecture, service 90; impact 78–9
musik-fabrik 212
Mystery-Bouffe 172
“mystic abyss” 86, 110–11
mysticism, hidden realities 107

Nabis movement 108–9

“naked stage” 260
National Studio of Contemporary Arts 278; conceptual sketch 282; upper stairs 280; upper walkways 279
nature, absorption 88
Navarro de Zuvillaga, Javier 198
Negri, Richard 212
Neher, Caspar 163
Nelson, Maggie 300
neo-avant-garde xxiin9; appearance 131; constructivist predecessors 200–1
neo-liberal status quo 312
Netherlands Dance Company 149
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement 168
“New Bayreuth,” advent 91
New Objectivity 181, 184
Newton, Isaac 105–6
Nibelung, underworld cave 110
Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 9, 15, 18–20, 28–43, 51n162, 53–4, 58, 63, 78, 82–6, 107, 109, 111–3, 262, 275, 301,
311–23, 329–30; architecture 310, 313–21; disappointment 79; focus, perspective (Deleuze) 51; homelessness
201; “ideal spectator” 104; Übermensch 115, void 111, 235
Nietzschean architecture, defining 309–12
Nietzsche and “An Architecture of Our Minds” 310
Ninth Symphony (Beethoven) 58
NO99 296
Nomadic Museum (Ban) 326
no-man’s land 102, 111–12
“nontheological space” 284
non-visible 122
Nord-Ost (musical performance) 234, 250, 299
no-real-thing 149
Nothingness, confrontation 110
Nouvel, Jean 149
“Nowhere” (Jarry) 127

objectality 27, 50n141, 223, 238 (resistance) 89–90, 312

objectile 14, 21, 27, 46, 50, 237–238, 263, 285
Oblensky, Chloe 146; scenographic enhancements 266
“octobrist” proclamation (Meyerhold) 172
“Of all the Works of Man” (Brecht) 199
“of-the-moment” approach 104
Okri, Ben 257–8
OMA 149
“On Actors and Singers” (Wagner) 85–6
“open circle” 135
orchestra pit, abyssal quality 110–11
“organic architecture” 264
originary space, evocation 104
Ornament and Crime (Loos) 246, 247
Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck) 140–1
Ozenfant, Amédée 167, 168, 246

Paglia, Camille 249

“Painter of Modern Life, The” (Baudelaire) 108
Palace of Agamemnon 118
Palace of Culture 235, 242; balcony 252; guiding principle 250–2; importance 250–1; stage, view 252; views 252
Palladio, Andrea 198
panopticism 238
Panopticon 65, 239; penitentiary, elevation/section/plan 240
“paper architecture” 199
Parade: criticism 168; performance 226
Parade (ballet) 245
Paradise Lost (Milton) 319
Parc de la Villette, 12, 21, 45n46, 303n38, 322
Paris Opera House, 4, 41, 59–75, 89–90
passers-by, invitation 329
passive pilgrims, presence 108
Pater, Walter 99
Pearson, Mike 7–8, 24
“peepshow” proscenium stage, challenge 195
Peinture Moderne, La (Ozenfant) 246
Péréz-Gómez, Alberto 276
“Perfect Place to Die, A” 298
performance xv; asymmetric performance spaces 286; becoming-architecture 18–28; importance 184;
participants, spatial possibilities 146; space 10, 34, 87, 135, 147, 174, 178, 246; theory xviii, xxi, 6; zones 239
Performance: A Critical Introduction (Carlson) 6
performative xvii, xx, 1, 8, 12–14, 54, 105, 235, 301
perspectivalism 283
perspectivism 15, 318, 321
phallic “logic of visualization” (Lefebvre) 241
Phelan, Peggy 120, 207
“phobic object,” challenge 321
Piave, Francesco Maria 66
Picasso, Pablo 168, 192
pictorial scene (development) 123–4
picture-frame playhouse, open stage platform (amalgamation) 86–7
Pier 54 326
Pilch, Richard 298
Piranesi, Giambattista 276; carceral spaces 281; explosive vision 278
Piscator, Erwin 4, 135, 195–6
“placebound” architecture 46
“Place of Crime the Place of Pardon, The” (Cixous) 259, 305
Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Carlson) 6
Plague: “collective festival” 238; delirium, comparison 261; Great Plague 238; pre-Plague labyrinth, return
262; surrealist preoccupation 42; Theatre and the Plague, The (lecture) 255; theatre, comparison 260–2
Plato 84–5, 104, 107, 316; cave, allegory 84–5, 107; chained prisoners 241
“play,” event dimension 25
plein air 301
Poelzig, Hans 133–4; circus arena conversion 194–5
poème simultané 244
poesis 150
Poggioli, Renato 102
Point de Folie (Derrida) 11
Political Theatre (Piscator) 196
“polyexpressive and magnetic theatre” 179–80
Popov, Igor 144
Popova, Liubov 171, 172, 174, 181
post-revolutionary performativity, Baroque model (relationship) 59–66
post-World War I: artist, ecstatic sickness 243; avant-garde 180; Dadaists, anarchic gestures 318; performing
body 42
Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu (To Have Done with the Judgement of God) 3, 225, 236, 255
power: homogenous effects 239; relations, frontal expressions 147; will 311
practicables (movable rostra) 137–8
Prado Lopes, Eurico 329
Prague Quadrennial 323, 333n41
Prampolini, Enrico 179
pre-bourgeois values, return 181
prenatal comfort, soft tactile depths 264
pre-Plague labyrinth, return 262
pre-spatial presence 149
pre-World War I Deutscher Werkbund (performance space motif) 135
Price, Cedric 324, 329
Prima Parte 276
Principia (Newton) 105–6
Prisons of the Imagination (Piranesi) 276
privative 129
Production of Space, The (Lefebvre) 103, 121, 167, 213
“programmatic collision” 175
Proletariat Palace of Culture 252–3
Proletkult 170
Proletkult (designer) 172
proscenium: change 148; frame, uprights (repetition) 82; zone 94
Prouen (Projections for the Affirmation of the New) 174
Proun (interchange station) 174
Prounenraum (Proun space) 174
“Psycho-analytic Reading of Tragedy, The” (Green) 255
public, new 83–90
public participation 169, 222
public punishment, disciplinary shift 238
“pure cruelty,” agitations/effects 300
purists, Modern Movement 168

Radialsystem V 212, 282; seating bank 214–17

radiant light, dematerialization 137
radical: gesture, language (adoption) 260; spatial changes, avant-garde continuation 243
Radok, Alfred 144
Rajchman, John 128
rationalist lucidity, abandonment 224–5
Raumbühne (Space Stage), creation (Kiesler) 178–80
“raw flesh” 258
Real, irruption 235
Real, manifestation 255
real/imagined, coexistence 222–3
reality: architecture, explosion 300; constructed nature 166–7; ideality, separation 57
Reconstructing the Future (Appia) 141
recovery: cruel sites 282; site 257–61
Red Room, The 296
Reinhardt, Max 7, 134
relief stage 134
Renaissance: auditorium, effect 88; orientations, absence 16; pictureframe stage 2; trompe l’oeil 108
Renaissance theatres: architecture, origins 28–9; effects machine 63–4; patronage 123
renunciation 128
representation, black hole 91–2
Révolte, La 75–6, 97
REX/OMA, black box “theatre machine” 329
Rheingold (first performance) 79
Rheinhardt, Max 107, 134
“rhythm analysis” (Lefebvre) 121
Rhythmic Gymnastics (Jaques-Dalcroze) 125
Rhythmic Spaces (Craig/Appia) 105, 126, 136; illustrations 126
rhythms: concrete reality (Lefebvre) 121; general theory 155n102
“Richard Wagner at Bayreuth” (Nietzsche) 53, 82
Richter, Hans 244
Rimini Protokoll 305
Ring Cycle (Wagner) 41, 78, 310
Rockwell Group 331
Rodchenko, Alexander 171
Romanticism 88, 129, 150, 151n30
Rouen (Tschumi design) 241–2
“rough theatre,” desire (Wagner) 92n7
Royal Exchange Theatre (Manchester) 213
Royal National Theatre 324
Rua Lina Bo Bardi 285, 329; theatre street 288
Rufford, Juliet 322
Russian Alpha Forces 242
Russia, utopian avant-garde 162–3

sacralization, space 314

sacral sublime, interstitiality 111
Sacred, surrealist preoccupation 42
sacrifice 29, 225–6, 236, 242, 246, 316–7, 320; design process 128, 156n127
sacrificial altar 315
Saint-Simon, Henri de 35, 118
Sala Adoniran Barbosa 329
Salk Institute of Biological Studies (Kahn), 145
Salto Architects 296
Sant’Elia, Antonio 17, 172
Sasha Waltz Company 212
Sass, Louis 257
Satie, Erik 168
Sawade, Jürgen 200
scaenographia 47
Scamozzi, Vincenzo 198
Scene (Craig) 116, 130; etching 117; notes 101
scene/audience, spatial unification 87
scenic: architecture 285; monstrosities 200; picture 56
sceno-architecture 323–6
scenographer, role 148
scenographic environments, experimentation 7
scenography 4, 7, 8, 19, 25, 47n85, 56–7, 63–4, 105–6, 122; architectural 64, 88, 142, 149; end of 284;
sympathetic (Craig) 319
Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz 202–3
Schaubühne Company 200–1
Schiller, Friedrich 86, 125, 184
schizophrenic 255
Schlemmer, Oskar 180; costumes, usage 192–3; mechanization exercise 198–9
Schmitt, Karl 135
School of Dramatic Arts (Moscow) 139, 142
Schopenhauer, Arthur 125
Schwartz, Hillel 113
Schwitters, Kurt 263
Scott, Giles Gilbert 207
screams, impact 255
Screens (Craig) 122
Second Empire city 76
second-wave: avant-garde 14–15; challenge 54–5; theatrical avant-garde 145
secular temple-cathedral, avant-garde performance re-figuring 322–5
self-regulation, usage 212
Semper, Gottfried 55–7, 62–3, 74–5, 85; replacement 89; theatre proposals 93; theatrical atmospheres 130;
theatricality, discussion 96
Semper oper 75
Serlio, Sebastiano 101, 115
Serner, Walter 244
SESC Pompéia 329
Shahidka 304
Shapiro, Gary 310
Shaubühne am Lehininer Platz 200
Shaw, George Bernard 83–5, 128
Shed, The 331
shock (usage/effects) xvii, xix, 3, 17, 21–2, 26–7, 37, 172, 175, 198, 245, 276, 320
Short History of Western Performance Space, A (Wiles) 8
sightlines: compromise 61; exigencies, concessions 185; focus 2, 185; problems 195
signs, proliferation 312
“silence and light,” architectural drama 145
Simonov Monastery 250–1
“simplification” 128
“simplified stage” 123
sincerity, demand 113
Singer, Paris 114, 116, 131, 154n82
“single site,” formation 281, 282
singular artwork, participatory event (perceptual shift) 8
Site-Specific Performance (Pearson) 7
site-specific performances 8, 24, 204; installation 325
skene 122–3, 132, 315, 317
skenographia 47
Smithson, Peter 170
socialist avant-garde, agenda 318
Soirées (Tzara) 244
de Solà-Morales Rubió, Ignasi de 25, 317
sonority, emphasis 108
Soviet avant-garde 250–1
space xv–xviii, xxii, 2–4, 6–35; architecture, becoming-performance 11–18; Duncan creation 113–14; event
316; formulation 316–19; logic 238, 311; loosening 267; new notion 284; performative loosening 243;
rationalization 301; simultaneity 315–18
Space in Performance (McAuley) 18
“space of dis-traction” 316
Space Stage (Kiesler) 178–80
Space, Time, Architecture (Giedion) 167, 192
spacing xvi, xxi, 12–13, 20, 105, 149–150 (espacement) xxiin18, 45n44, 48n97, 256; encapsulation 149
Spangenberg, Gerhard 212
spatial: dynamics, establishment 285; grid, matrix (provision) 115–16; performativity, avant-garde revolutions
(relationship) 10; porosity, focus 320–3; rhythm, universal landscapes (relationship) 121–4; scenario, idea
(Garnier) 96; speech 297; trialectics 45; violence 237–42
“spatial-force constructions” 172
spatiality 42; shift 297; vertigo 318
spatial practice: discipline 65; predictability, terrorist exploitation 242; reduction 241
spectatorial mass, consumer consideration 95
spectator/performer, gap (bridging) 148
Sphere and the Labyrinth, The (Tafuri) 107
Spiral Theatre 144
Spirit of Utopia (Bloch) 222
Srdce PQ/The Heart of PQ 307, 323
stage: absolute stage space 105–7; auditorium, distinction 91; darkening 108; furniture 173; Great Stage
Machine 194–9; living atmosphere, creation 127; music-drama, architecture (service) 90; scenes, veil-like
mist (usage) 151; space 175–80; symbolist stage, darkness (presence) 109–10; virtual city, relationship 171
“Stage as Virtual City, The” (Tafuri) 161, 175
stage frame: arch, relationship 56–7; force, intersection 239–41; repetition 145
Stanislavski, Konstantin 131
starchitecture 328
stasis 15, 26, 83, 127, 206, 223, 233, 322, 324
status quo 311; action/interruption 13; attacks 110; control 147; forms, shaping 66; maintenance 39; neo-liberal
status quo 312; performance space representation 241
Stein, Gertrude 224
Stein, Peter 200
Stepanova, Varvara 171, 174, 181
St. Matthew Passion, The 123; staging model 124
Storefront for Art and Architecture 148–9
“Storyteller, The” (Benjamin) 267
Straw Theatre (NO99) 296
“Street Scene” (Brecht) 41, 162–3, 166, 171, 224
subject, de-centring 260
submissiveness, architecture demand 87–8
suggestion, usage 105, 319
“supernatural explosions” 267
“surprise machines” 172
surrealism xvii, xix, 39, 244–5; theatrical movements, association 3–4
Surrealism and Architecture (Mical) 245
surrealists 180, 224; avant-garde, performance architecture proposal 233; avant-garde strategies 236; cabaret
performers 244; emergence 168; excommunication 246; invitation 243; performative spatial tactics 300;
scenographic environments, experimentation 7–8; shock/surprise, usage 245
Suspensions of Perception (Crary) 83
Svoboda, Josef 143–4
“symbolic gesture,” capability 112–113
symbolism: absolute space 41, 145; focus 41; popularity, increase 112; theatrical movements, association 3–4;
theatrical naturalism, separation 91; theatrical symbolism 106
“Symbolism – a Manifesto” (Moréas) 121
symbolists 41, 91; absolute space, idea (development) 102–3; articulations 144; challenge 317; contrast 151;
cults/sects exploration 118; eternal fixed space creation 109; ideal theatre 110; impressions/atmosphere,
usage 109; modern life rejection 108; sacralized stages 111–12; stage, darkness (presence) 109–10; stage
rendering/transformation 106–7; suspended time 243; “theatre of the mind” 107–12; void, confrontation
111–12

tabula rasa 162–3, 168, 320

Tafuri, Manfredo 107, 161, 175, 199
Tairov, Alexander 107
Tate Modern (London) 207; Turbine Hall 208–11
Tatlin, Vladimir 171, 173
Tatlin’s Tower 173
Taut, Bruno 133
Teatro Oficina 284, 296, 326, 329; entry view 289; “guerrilla theatre” 284; performance 287; performance-
makers, dependence 297; retractable ceiling 292–3; “Rua Lina Bo Bardi” theatre street 288; scaffolding
galleries 290–1; side wall 294–5
techne 150
technical black box theatre, opposition 104
technology, embracing/integration 222
Telles, Luiz Benedito de Castro, Luiz 331, 334n51
Temple (Kopanàs) 41
temple-laboratory, architecture function 130–3
Temple of Dionysus (Parthenon), dancing 118
“tender light,” mobility 110
“terreiro electronico” 285
terror, presence 110
terrorist events, proliferation 300; operations, hyper-violence 242
Tessenow, Heinrich 135
theatre: architecture v–xviii, xix, xx, 1–3, 6–7, 9, 11, 21, 25, 30, 38, 40, 43, 66, 83, 88, p4 n29, 131, glory
machine rationalization 222; architecture, origins 28–9; “cinefication” 177; defining, event (usage) 44;
etherealization 102; etymology 50; “industrialization” 177; internal skin 198; invisible theatre 90–2;
literal/psychological frames, weakening 262; Plague, comparison 261–2; space, dismemberment 284
Theatre Advancing, The (Craig) 132; frontispiece 132
Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm 163, 164–5; Threepenny Opera production 166
The Theatre and its Double, (Artaud) 51, 158, 233, 256, 261, 266, 276, 281, 298, 303, 306, 307, 308, 309, 333
theatre-city 327
Théâtre de l’Art 108
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre 108
Théàtre des Bouffes du Nord 42, 87, 146, 266, 327; inside proscenium 272–3; stage view 268–9; upper gallery
270–1; wall detail 274–5
Théâtre du Beau 116, 131
Théâtre du Soleil 142, 205, 259, 282
Théâtre du Vaudeville 75–6
Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier 142; Artaud reading (1947) 255; stage landscape 143; stage layout, axonometric
142
Theâtre du Vieux-Colombier (Copeau) 41
Théàtre, Le (Garnier) 5, 53
theatre-makers 41–2, 171; architects, collaboration 131, 147, 170, 242, 247, 300–1, 309–13, 315, 317, 320;
problems 86; real/imagined, coexistence 222–3
Theatre of Cruelty 77, 110, 233–4, 238, 256–8, 285; sets, absence 284
“Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation, The” (Derrida) 234
Theatre of Dionysus (Acropolis) 118–19
Theatre of Dramatic Art (Fort Wayne) 145
Theatre of Images (Wilson) 102
Theatre of the Bauhaus, The (Gropius) 192–3
théâtres des machines 198
theatrical atmospheres, promotion 130
theatrical avant-garde 2, 24, 37, 39–40, 318, 330; architectural Modern Movement, contrast 320; influence
(Wagner) 91–2; rebellion 76; Nietzsche’s influence 310
theatricalized city (constructivists) 172
theatrical: naturalism, symbolism (separation) 91; performativity 149; birth 106
“Theatrical Terror” (Hyman) 110
theatrical void 104–5
theatron 132, 225, 315; Wagner reworking 317
theory, etymology 50
third space: event-space designation 11, 45n43
Thousand Scenes in One Scene (Craig) 116
Thread (Residency/Cultural Centre) 297
three-dimensionality, reinforcement 196, 198
Threepenny Opera (production) 166
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 112
Timaeus 20, 264
Tkhor, Boris 144
TMA (Toshiko Mori Architect) 297
Todd, Andrew xxii, 319, 324, 327
To Have Done with the Judgement of God see Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu
tomb (space) 103
Tompkins, Steve 319, 324, 327
“total architecture” 194
“total crisis,” usage 238
totalizing: effect 107; force, resistance 149–50; incident 48
Total Theatre (Gropius/Piscator) 4, 198–9, 213, 264; discussion (Culot) 200; Great Stage Machine 194–9;
illustrations 197; proposal 194; rendition 198
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 109
Towards a New Theatre (Craig) 124
Tower of Babel 321; and punishment 333
Tower to the Third International (1920) 173
tragedy: confrontation, artwork (usage) 314; definition 313–16; revival, Greek 78–9
“tragic hero” 314
tragic victim-hero, avant-garde adoption 225
“transcendental form” 128–9
“transdisciplinary subject” 8
Trans Europe Halles 204, 231n122
“transfiguring experience,” usage 314
Traviata, La (Piave/Verdi) 66–7
Triadic Ballet (Schlemmer) 181
tripartite stage 134, 185, 196
trompe l’oeil 106, 108
troubled art 167–70
“true theatre” 111
Tschumi, Bernard xviii, 10–12, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 39, 44n35n36, 45n46, 69, 96n68n80, 147, 175, 237, 278; lexicon
260
Turbine Hall (Tate Modern) 213
Turner, J.M.W. 129
turning point 58; disruptive Event, comparison 20; event complexities 27; event theory 17–18; social crisis
event usage 24
Twain, Mark 83–4
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) 28, 306n109, 309, 310, 332n5, 332n10
Tzara, Tristan 242–4

Über-marionette (Craig) 113–16, 132, 143, 181; alternative 115

Übermensch (Nietzsche) 115
Ubu Roi (Jarry) 109, 112, 127
Uhlig, Theodor 92n7
“Uncanniness of the ‘Already There,’ An” (de Certeau and Giard) 213
“Unfinished Theatre, The” (Tompkins and Todd) 319, 324
un-housed: aesthetic event 23; senses 323
un-housing: events 312; performance 316–19; tradition 201
unitarian artwork 82–3
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development 326
universal landscapes 101; spatial rhythm, relationship 121–4; universal performance landscape (creation) 127
“unregulated” temporalities 205–6
“ur maternal sea” 91–2
U-shaped: auditoria, transformation 87; choral space 194–5
utopia (More) 120–1; idealism, rigidity 318
utopian avant-garde 162–3

Vakhtangov, Sergei 135, 176

Van de Velde, Henry 133, 134
van Gogh, Vincent 258, 267
“Variety Theatre, The” (Marinetti) 171, 227n29, 227n31
Vasiliev, Anatoly 144–5
Veltruský, Jiří 6
Verdi, Giuseppe 66–7
verfremdungseffekt: alienation effect 163, 166; heightening 166
vertigo 17, 43, 111, 129, 325, 329
“vesica piscis” 94
Vesnin, Aleksandr 171, 174; competition design 251; design 253
Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 48n106, 249, 303n59
Victorian Industrial Age 199
Victory Over the Sun (Lissitzky) 172, 179
Vidler, Anthony 283, 307n153
Vihstutz, Benjamin 8
Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier) 247
violence: centre stage 234–7; eruptions, impact 267, 298; spatial violence 42, 162, 237–42, 267, 282, 285;
systemic 253–4
“Violence of Architecture” (Tschumi) 237
“Violence Space” (Wigley) 233
virtual city, stage 171
“visual dramaturgy” (Lehmann) 319
visualization, logic 241
“vitality” 249
void 5, 19, 26, 32–3, 41, 43, 91, 102–4, 106, 108, 110; black 143–5; symbolist confrontation 111–12
“volcanic improvisation” 116
Volk (free community), gathering 86
von Kleist, Heinrich 113, 132
von Salzmann, Alexander 137
Vuillard, Edouard 109
Výstaviště (Prague) 117, 144, 326

Wagner, Cosima 85, 90, 98n114, 99n139

Wagner, Richard 40–1, 53–63, 59, 78–92, 97n106, 117; ability, Appia impression 128; altruism 87–8; anti-
monumental monument, objectality (resistance) 89–90; audience 84; “invisible orchestra,” 90, 110;
“invisible theatre” 102; Ring conducting 78
Wagner, Wieland/Wolfgang 91, 99n140
Waltz, Sasha 212, 282
Way of Being Free, A (Okri) 257, 305n87, 305n93
“weak architecture,” concept
(Solà-Morales) 25, 27, 32, 312, 317
Weimar Republic 39, 180–1, 184; emergence 162
Weiss, Allen S. 77, 129, 169, 225, 255–6
Werkbund Theatre (Cologne) 134
“What is Abstract?” (Rajchman) 128
Wigley, Mark xxi, 6, 32, 44n12, 51n161, 130, 149, 233, 300, 323
Wiles, David 2, 8, 139, 141
Williams, Simon 90, 129
will-to-destruction 28–35, 322
Wilson, Robert 102, 143
world history, destructiveness 319–22
World Trade Centre, 9/11 attack 300
World War I: avant-garde, emergence 161; commencement 140; Dada movement 243; devastation/destruction
168, 224; Germany, defeat 162, 181; shock 267
World War II: technological slaughter/industrialized killing 3, 225

Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 32, 50n160, 111, 115, 224

ZIL (Palace of Culture) 250–3
Žižek, Slavoj xxiv, 22, 26, 233, 254, 298
Zupančič, Alenka 255, 298