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13 Edward Gordon Craig, Towards a New Theater. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1913, p. 6.
14 Íd., pp. 10-11.
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cycles affecting these “ever-perishable” buildings, as Muñoz terms them, are also regenerative. This architecture’s time- like structure is a Moebius strip that begins at the end or goes back towards it in order to then reverse back to the future from which it is born. It is safe to say that through the principle of endless construction, the act of building becomes emancipated from architecture and its functions. Both its making and its unmaking being unfinished, the building remains in a kind of intermediate existence. Should this field of activity, this area of endless work, be called sculpture?
Stage scenery as actor
Things posing as houses: that’s what stage sets are. Outlining the history of stage sets and their role in shaping theatrical writing at a time that might be considered foundational, Edward Gordon Craig remarked: “Once upon a time, stage scenery was architecture. A little later it became imitation architecture; still later it became imitation artificial architecture. Then it lost its head, went quite mad, and has been in a lunatic asylum ever since.”13 Craig briefly recapitulates scenography’s history of madness as follows:
After the Greek and Christian theaters had gone under, the first false theater came into existence. The poets wrote elaborate and tedious dramas, and the scenery used for them was a kind of imitation architectural background. Palaces and even streets were fashioned or painted on cloths, and for a time the audience put up with it. (...) After the Shakespeare stage passed away, the daylight was shut out for ever. Oil lamps, gas lamps, electric lamps, were turned on, and the scenery, instead of being architectural, became – pictorial scenery.14
According to Craig, real architecture generates real drama and real emotion, as opposed to painted or “pictorial” scenery that inspires pretense in the audience as well. Without advocating a kind of naïve representational realism, Craig’s position was “realistic” inasmuch as he wanted to push the theatre towards the spaces of sheer life, where the same sun shines over actors and public: