ABSTRACT

The Übermarionette by Edward Gordon Craig is a complex and difficult concept and scenic practice. The studies have much questioned on what was the operational dimension to which Craig alluded with that term, not having remained certain traces of a practical experiment. This essay does not deal with this much-debated topic but focuses on the theoretical dimension that Craig produced, first in The Actor and the Übermarionette but also in other related writings such as The Artist of the Theatre of the Future. What emerges, to a careful observation of Craig’s theoretical production, is that the discourse rather than talking about an actual puppet theatre or providing guidance on the actor’s acting puts the question of the body. The Übermarionette should be taken, according to this view, as the metaphor of a body that transcends the limits of the organic and tends to a state of perfection that, to stand in Craig’s words, is suspended between life and death, understood the latter as a place of fulfillment and liberation and not as suffering and loss. There would be, therefore, in the theory of Übermarionette, the tension towards a forcing of the limits of the organic that leads Craig to formulate the idea of a body that goes beyond the body. It is a hypothesis that we can verify if we read in parallel a series of writings that Craig produces between 1907 and 1912 and especially if we consider as a theoretical whole the first three issues of «The Mask» in which, with a singular interweaving, a first part of The Artist of the Theatre of the Future, The Actor and the Übermarionette and the second part of The Artist of the Theatre of the Future are published. If to this singular plot we add the introductory text of the first issue of «The Mask», Geometry and the engraving of a perfect human body, inscribed in the square and in the circle, taken from the illustration by Cesare Cesariano for Vitruvius' De Architectura, it emerges a theoretical effort directed towards the symbolization of the body and its transcendence. Thus highlights, thanks also to another engraving of 1907, that this year represents in Craig’s theoretical path the moment of a new and strong attention towards the dimension of the symbol that finds in the Übermarionette its clearest manifestation.

BIOGRAFIA

Lorenzo Mango insegna Storia del Teatro moderno e contemporaneo presso l’Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’. Ha scritto Edward Gordon Craig (Carocci 2021), Il Novecento del teatro. Una storia (Carocci 2019), L’officina teorica di Edward Gordon Craig, (Titivillus, 2015), La scoperta di nuovi sensi. Il Tattilismo futurista (CUE Press, 2015), Il principe costante di Calderón de la Barca/Słowacki per Jerzy Grotowski (ETS, 2008), La scrittura scenica. Un codice e le sue pratiche nel teatro del Novecento (Bulzoni, 2003), Teatro di poesia. Saggio su Federico Tiezzi (Bulzoni, 1994). lormango57@gmail.com