Page 191 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

photos, but the discourses (though they are actually citations, such as music) unfold within the scene, which lies within the action, and the action in turn is encapsulated in the film, and the photographs are arranged all around it at the exhibition venue... The action reshuffles the stage scenery as perpetuum mobile, and in that mobility lies the actors’ (the agents’) work. Curiously enough, in Spanish the word for both the motive behind a crime or the motivation for the character’s actions in a play is móvil (”mobile”). Action is essentially displacement. In historical terms, it is safe to say that Piscator’s scenographic conceptions definitively and irrevocably consecrate the stage scenery as theatrical subject – a figure that had already featured in Frederick Kiesler’s electromechanical set for the staging of Karel Čapeks W.U.R. (R.U.R.), in Berlin in 1923:
The diaphragm opens up slowly: the film projector rattles, swiftly beginning to function; onto the circular surface a film is projected; the opening closes. To the right, as part of the scenery, a statuette-device. It opens and closes [...] The seismograph (in the middle) moves in bursts. The turbine control (center, bottom) turns continuously. The number of finished products changes. Blare of factory sirens. Megaphones convey orders and replies.20
Newly arrived in America three years later, Kiesler includes in his International Theatre Exposition a model of his Endless Theatre, a stage set of spiral flows where “the drama can expand and develop freely in space”. The structure was “an elastic building system of cables and platforms developed from bridge building”.21 This theatre’s egg-shaped outer shell anticipates the design of Kiesler’s most famous unrealized project, the Endless House, on which he worked for four decades.22 In the Endless House’s seamless interior, the principle of continuity pushes each space to become something else: ceilings become walls that become floors that become staircases, casting a master spell on the whole structure. Finally, Kiesler also designed the Film Guild Cinema, built in New York in 1929, which he billed as “the first 100% cinema,” i.e. one specifically conceived for movies. The design was based on a megaphone-shaped auditorium where traditional elements such as the proscenium had been suppressed, enhancing the importance of the screen, whose central surface resembled a huge diaphragm or an eye
20 Íd., p. 57.
21 Richard Schechner, “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre. Axiom Three,” in Jane Collins & Andrew Nisbet, eds., Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 97.
22 Commissioned by New York’s MoMA, and using numerous notes and drafts, Kiesler finished a model of his Endless House which was shown at the 1960 exhibition “Visionary Architecture.” As extant photos document, the model was itself an unstable work in progress that began as a floating egg-like form and then mutated into cavities and bulbous shapes. The 2015 “Endless House” exhibition at MoMA attests to the influence of Kiesler’s processual design on later architects and artists. See Jason Farago, “Review: ‘Endless House’ Expands the Definition
of Home,” The New York Times, 28 August 2015.
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