An Indra’s Web The Age of Appia, Craig, Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Copeau, Artaud

Indra’s web, which gives this book its title, is a representation of the patterns of interconnections between distant phenomena that seem to have nothing in common. According to Buddhist philosophy, everything or every idea that exists or has existed is a nodal point in this web, and takes the shape of a pearl, with each pearl shining more brightly by reflecting all the other pearls. I have used this image to speak of the constellation of great artists at the beginning of the twentieth century: Appia and Craig, Stanislavski, Reinhardt, Vakhtangov, Meyerhold, Tairov, Copeau, Piscator, Brecht, Artaud and so many others. Like all beautiful images, the masters’ web evokes more than one meaning. It refers to this ensemble of masters but also to another, altogether different, characteristic: their ability to capture or to fish.

Here I will only focus on them as an ensemble: a paradoxical web whose interactions have not always been concrete or easy to define. In many cases, they were separated by different poetics or by their adherence to different, sometimes even contrasting, artistic currents and styles. However, the masters shared something that went beyond the simple coming together of like-minded people. They formed an Indra’s web, constituted by phenomena which, although distant, were correlated and interdependent. The influence each exerted at an individual level, while quite powerful in itself, was further multiplied by the reflection of the influence of the others. The threads that link these persons – who in reality were quite distant from one another – have been woven both by the spectators’ gaze (which very quickly identified the masters as a collective) as well as by the immediate and explicit reciprocal recognition that they often showed for each other.

But there are also non-theatrical threads, interweaving phenomena that are not necessarily related to theatre or to the masters themselves, creating relationships where one would have expected to find voids, as was the case in the first decades of the twentieth century. These threads range from theosophy to suffragism, from the Körperkultur movement to political utopia, from Tolstoyan communities to marionettes, from novels to forms of entertainment which until then were considered unimportant, from dance to Art Nouveau and discoveries in biology. We could consider all this simply as the mental horizon of the period, and from a scientific perspective it would be a more accurate definition. But the image of the web brings out the idea of distance and interaction more clearly.

The title of this preface is derived from a famous theatrical image, proposed by one of the first and better-known masters: Edward Gordon Craig. It was he who spoke of the theatre of the future, the inviolate theatre that is yet to be discovered and understood, just like a Mountain.