Appia's Theory of Acting: Eurhythmics for the Stage.

Clark M. Rogers

WHILE MUCH LEARNED INK HAS BEEN SPILLED TO EXPLAIN THE REVOLUTION IN
SCENE design and lighting pioneered by Adolphe Appia during the late nineteenth century,
comparatively little has been written regarding the actor's place in his new theatre. Actors were
naturally concerned and often admittedly puzzled over the trend away from realism. One of them
wrote that "since it is upon the shoulders of the actor that the final burden has to be carried, I
think it is now due to him to find out just what his position is, or is going to be." Actually, Appia
himself proposed specific changes in the actor's art, changes based on his view of the theatre as
a synthesis of all the art-forms in free association. He shared with Gordon Craig the opinion that,
in order to achieve a harmonious whole in theatrical production, there had to be strict controls
placed on the actor. While Appia hoped that the actor's body could become a depersonalized
instrument, Craig wrote that he would replace the actor with a perfect pliable uber marionette, a
logical reductio ad absurdum of the new theory. "Do away with the actor", Craig promised, "and
you do away with means that which a debased stage-realism is produced and flourishes."

When Appia and Craig met for the first time, at the International Theatre- Exposition at Zurich in
1914. Craig understood that the theater united them and that music separated them. Jean
Mercier reported that since Craig spoke no French and Appia did not know English, the two men
communicated by drawing pictures and designs on a restaurant table cloth during lunch.

Craig wrote his name on the table cloth and next to it that of Appia. He drew a complete circle around
Appia on which he wrote the word "music". Admirable symbol of truth! These two pioners of contemporary
dramatic art rested their reforms on the same base -the actor. But Craig was free in reform; the reform of
Appia was dominated by a major force -music.

Profoundly influenced by the Wagnerian opera, Appia used music as the point of departure for
his ideas relating to production. "Music," he wrote in the 1898 preface for Music and the Art of
the Theatre, “has been the inspiration of this book." His main goal was to restate the
fundamental aesthetics of the theater in such a way that the actor, playwright, director, and
scene designer would be aided by the unifying power of music. Like Wagner, Appia viewed
music as a direct expression of man's inner being, and he saw that it could be used as the major
regulating device in the theatre. With regret Appia conceded that the spoken drama was
probably permanent; however, he insisted that "the art of staging can be an art only if it derives
from music."

While he agreed with Wagner's concept of the supreme art as a synthesis of all the possibilities
of art (Gesamkunsteerk), Appia was critical of what he believed to be Wagner's essential
weakness. That is, he believed that Wagner was wrong to rely on the popular stage conventions
of the day in presenting his music drama "He did not conceive of a staging technique different
from that of his contemporaries. In order to avoid Wagner's failure, Appia proposed the
development of "word-tone drama" (Wort-Tandrama) in which the separate elements (music,
language, actor, setting, and lighting) are synthesized through the mutual subordination of these
elements. Such a harmonious union would, in Appia's view, be made possible through what he
called a "hierarchy of expression." The music in word-tone drama would be used for a double
purpose: (1) to illuminate the meaning of the drama (le drame interieur), and (2) to define the
time of each action. Consequently, the author-composer sets a definite limit on the movements
of the actors by composing specific music to be followed. All liberty is taken from the performer,
music controls his every action, his every utterance. "If music did not so profoundly alter the
natural time-durations of life,” noted Appia, "it could not force the actor in renounce his ordinary
activity in order to become a means of expression." The Swiss aesthetician was convinced that
the drama controlled by music could be "the supreme illusion, which rational analysis cannot
enter... The transformation which deprived the actor of his personal, arbitrary expression was
essential if he was to become a medium of true art.

What the actor loses in freedoms will be gained by the stage designer, and the setting, in giving up all
pretense at scenic illusion, becomes an atmosphere in which the actor can be totally expressive.

As early as 1895 Appia had foreseen the need for some kind of "musical gymnastics" to give the
actor training in time and proportions. He wrote that the success of the performer in his
word-tone drama would require "an abnormal versatility and flexibility that is independent not
only of the actor's individual temperament, but also of those proportions which he shares with
every other human being." The actor, he believed, should be trained in gymnastics as well as
voice and diction because such work would provide great "rhythmic suppleness" and would
allow the actor to obey "complex rhythmic patterns" in following the directions of the
poetic-musical text. His ideas were partly influenced by the popular developers of aesthetic
dance and modern ballet; at that time the Russian Ballet, Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and,
later, Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman were demonstrating the beauty of rhythmic movement.
Appia himself explained in 1923 that under the influence of the physical culture movement, the
dance gradually freed itself from labored and mechanical technique: "Dancing rose to the rank of
a self-expressive art."

The most significant influence on Appia's theory of acting, however, came not from the dance but
from eurhythmics, a system of education in the arts based on rhythm, musical theory, and
gymnastics. In 1906 Appia attended a demonstration of eurhythmics and was delighted to find
that his theories of controlled management of the human body through music found explicit
realization in the experimentation of his contemporary Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. As a professor of
harmony at the Geneva Conservatory, musician and composer Dalcroze had criticized the
conventional method of beginning musical instruction with an instrument and theoretical
explanation. What was needed, insisted Dalcroze, was a study of music through physical
participation so that the student's mind, ear, and body were simultaneously involved in the
music. To that end, he began a series of experiments, eventually devising special gymnastics
which, he claimed, enabled his students to transform music into bodily movement. The
revolutionary ideas of this young instructor were not readily accepted by the authorities in
Geneva. Moreover, the active nature of Dalcroze's class soon led to the students' practice of
wearing skimpy costumes, without shoes and stockings. The more conservative members of the
faculty objected to the radical nature of the training, while the Geneva Calvinist Society objected
to the students' dress. Beryl DeZoete, a follower of Dalcroze, later reported that officials at the
conservatory "would not stand for such pernicious nonsense; there was something immoral in
the suggestion that bare feet and unhampered bodies could have anything to do with musical
education."

Opposition grew so strong that Dalcroze was dismissed from the faculty in 1904. However, he
lost no time in founding his own school with makeshift facilities elsewhere in Geneva. Within a
year he presented a demonstration of his work at the music festival in the Canton of Solothurn,
Switzerland. At this convention his demonstration aroused interest not only among musicians but
among educators in general. Journalists disagreed over the proper classification of the system:
some thought it was more like dancing than musical training, while others viewed it as really a
system of gymnastics and not dancing at all. Dalcroze himself maintained that neither of these
categories described what his method really was. In a lecture from the stage of the Lyceum
Theatre in Lon- don, he declared that he taught music, not dancing. On another occasion he
explained that eurhythmics differed fundamentally from dancing because it did not interpret
music but translated music into exact space durations, so that the music and the bodily
expression became one whole. Since pupils were taught to follow and analyze rhythms by using
their bodies as instruments, eurhythmics was less like dancing than it was like playing the piano
or any other musical instrument. The basic time of the music was usually beaten by the arms,
while the legs and body expressed time-values or the duration of notes. Thus, one step, or
spatial progression, was allowed for each note in the musical accompaniment, but at the same
time the value of the note was analyzed and expressed by a variety of movements, such as
knee-bends and bodily gestures, without progression.

Appia later recorded his recollection of the first eurhythmics demonstration he attended in
Geneva:

The public was full of curiosity, but in no way suspected the range of what they [Dalcroze and his students]
presented to it. The master often had to leave the piano and come to the front of the podium to beseech
the audience not to take that for the theatre... and to recall for them that it was a question of a new
pedagogic attempt, of an attempted transfusion of musical rhythm into the organism...

The study of eurhythmics was, according to Dalcroze, as important for actors as it was for
musicians. He did not conceive of separate forms of rhythm for music, movement, gesture, and
speech. There was only one rhythm, and, while it was best developed through music, its
"impression" on the body through musical sources would inevitably lead to "expression" in
movement and speech. Dalcroze eventually stated eight theoretical conclusions upon which he
built his system:

1. Rhythm is movement.

2. Rhythm is essentially physical.

3. Every movement involves time and space.

4. Musical consciousness is the result of physical experience.

5. The perfecting of physical resources results in clarity of perception.

6. The perfecting of movements in time assures consciousness of musical rhythm.

7. The perfecting of movements in space assures consciousness of plastic rhythm.

8. The perfecting of movements in time and space can only be accomplished by exercises in
rhythmic movement.

Appia was so impressed with eurhythmics that he wrote a letter to Dalcroze, whom he had not
yet met. He explained that Dalcroze's work as a teacher and his own work as a scenic artist
were curiously based on the same idea: "the exteriorization of music." Praising the eurhythmist
for effectively foreseeing future trends in the composition and performance of music, he
confidently stated that the system would result in a true renaissance in all the arts. Its
significance for actors was suggested in Appia's comment that "... the life of the body tends to
anarchy, then to ugliness; and it is music which must free it by imposing its discipline." Dalcroze
was delighted by the interest and understanding expressed by Appia and replied immediately,
explaining that they shared a common goal: "To give back to the body its good harmony, to make
music vibrate in it -as to make music an integral part of the organism..." Dalcroze wanted "to play
on this marvelous keyboard which is the muscular and nervous system in order to make plastic a
thought measured in space as in time..." Recalling the resistance that his idea had received over
the years, Dalcroze thanked Appia for his encouraging letter and concluded with an invitation for
the scene designer to dine with him at his home.

From 1900 until Appia's death in 1928, the two men were in close communication. In fact, Appia
was for ten years a member of the staff at Dalcroze's school of eurhythmics at Hellerau,
Germany. Although his stuttering and shyness prevented him from lecturing regularly, Appia held
informal sessions with students. And in April, 1912, he read at Hellerau his essay entitled "Du
Costume pour la Gymnastique rythmique." It was at Dalcroze's school that Appia had his most
significant opportunity to work on the practical details of staging music drama. Not only did he
design sets for eurhythmic recitals and demonstrations but he also collaborated with Dalcroze in
staging a number of pageants for patriotic festivals. "In this partnership," explains Walther
Volbach, "Appia supplied the ideas while Dalcroze, the more practical man, executed them."
Frank E. Washburn Freund, in the English Stage Year Book of 1914, graphically describes and
iliustrates Dalcroze's theatre, which was actually the great hall of the school at Hellerau.
Designed by Heinrich Tessenow, the hall combined the stage and the auditorium into one large
unit. The stage itself "consisted merely of a platform divided into three parts and connected by
flights of steps, which lent themselves splendidly to effective groupings and processions." Both
the performer and the spectator were lighted by the same lambent glow produced by hundreds
of light bulbs behind translucent walls and so arranged that they could create various gradations
of light. The effect created was called by Alexander von Salzmann, who developed the system
for Dalcroze, "Tageslicht ohne Sonne."
That Dalcroze shared some of Appia's interest in scene design is evident in his numerous
remarks regarding the expressive possibilities of stage lighting. He spoke of light as "the sister of
music," explaining that effective combinations of sound and light could "provide actors with
undreamt facilities of expression." That he was fiercely loyal to Appia is also apparent. When
Stanislavsky and Craig collaborated in the 1911 production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art
Theatre, Dalcroze was in the audience. Fuming with rage he wrote to his friend about "the
Englishman who claims to revolutionize theatrical decorative art...." Craig had managed to
create some beautiful settings, but, according to Dalcroze, they were all copied from Appia: "I
have the impression that this man must have seen your designs but did not know how to use
them."

In 1914 a journalist wrote that Dalcroze and Appia "hope that the outcome of their endeavours
will be a new style of acting." Particularly successful productions staged by Dalcroze during his
association with Appia were Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice and Claudel's Annunciation, both
performed as a part of the Hellerau festival of 1913. The settings, lighting, and performance of
the actors were closely in line with Appia's ultimate theories. At the Milan International Theatre
Exposition of 1923, Appia described the arrangement of his ideal theatre as being "the same as
that of the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute." It is no wonder that Edmund Stadler concluded that "the
spiritual father of the theatre at Hellerau was Appia, although Tessenow had been signed for the
architecture and Salzmann for lighting."

The chief characteristic of Appia's theory of acting was the importance he gave to technique.
"Technic can not err," he once wrote, "its laws and their connections exceed our understanding;
if we despise those laws, it is we who err. He believed that actors should submit to a principle of
order, because its dictates were greater than their own personal intuitions: "The human body, if it
voluntarily accepts the modifications that music demands, assumes the rank of a means of
expression...." The actor, he maintained, needed the kind of rhythmic training that would
transfuse his body with the elements of music: "Everybody knows that Jaques-Dalcroze has
discovered a way to do this," Appia once remarked. "His body rhythm proceeds from within to
without..." As a result of rhythmic training "our body becomes a marvelous instrument of infinite
resources." Through eurhythmics Appia saw clearly a new chance for the theatrical art: "... there
I found the answer to my passionate desire for synthesis!"

In 1923 Appia explained that the final evolution of his theory was toward an art which took the
living and moving human body as its object as well as its instrument. He hoped to create an
architectural style which used the living body of the actor as its sole point of departure:
eurhythmics seemed to provide a technical means to reach this goal of "living art." "In our time,"
he wrote, "the Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze is the only discipline which takes this mysterious
road. Its beauty is a result, never an end." The application of the principles of acting suggested
by eurhythmics would result in a revolution in theatrical art:

The body, at the behest of music, commands and orders space. Little it cares for age-old conventions, for
deep-rooted customs -all must be cut to its measure, all must adopt its pattern. Is not man the measure of
all things?