Book chapter> Space Notations: Dynamic Crystallographies in Architecture and Dance

In 1924 Frederick Kiesler plans in Vienna, the “International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques”, there he will also build the “Space Stage” project. The “Space Stage” will be one of the first projects dealing clearly with the ideas that Kiesler will develop along his whole creative career: spatial continuum, and endlessness. These two concepts are also present in the investigations about dance and movement that Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman were developing together between 1913 and 1920. They will continue separately this research: Mary Wigman as the most important exponent of the Ausdruckstanz movement, and Rudolf von Laban as the studious of the movement and its dynamic chrystalographies- Choreutik. The interesting issues about the creation of space from movement, the unity between the space of the body and all the environment that surround it, and the continuous transformation of reality, will be reflected in the graphic documents and notations proposed by each of them. Shortly, their ways of working with space and movement of the body, including notation and registration, will be extremely interesting in their comparison. The article go deep in how the body space notations made by Laban, show the same instable substance which appears in Kiesler’s drawings when he develops the furniture and the artefacts which belong to the Endless House. Equally, it will manifest how the manipulations of the space of the body, as is known by us, made by Kiesler in the Juillard School of Music, are related directly to the same body experiences developed by Mary Wigman. But the article describes with special attention the conclusions thrown by the detailed comparison of the series of sketches drawn by Kiesler about the Endless House- specially the ones from the sixties- and the different notations made by Mary Wigman, about Orpheus und Eurydike, more or less at the same time. Both series unify in only one common spatial substance body or bodies and surroundings, and both register the transformations that are taking place. Space, will be seen as a kind of magma in continuous transmutation, as it is affected by diverse energies and flows, we won’t be able exactly to say in which moment the action, which now finish one configuration, began; neither for how long this stage will stay; neither which one will be the next. But what we know is that this spatial amalgam has virtually an infinite number of possibilities that, in any moment, can come to life. Mary Wigman will work mainly with masses, spatial masses made by an indifferent accumulation of bodies and surroundings, all merged. These masses will be transmuted from an external point of view. Frederick Kiesler, will give more intensity to the successive lines, scrawls and clusters that tense the space substance. Lines that create inhabited situations, which are made and unmade, intense or dissolved, but that are always felt from an inside point of view. As Laban would say talking about dance and architecture: in an endless succession of choreutic phrases.

(In the following link to download the pdf, you can see the original publication in German)

Author: Mª Auxiliadora Gálvez

Year: 2012

Gálvez Pérez, Mª Auxiliadora: Raumnotierungen.Dynamische kristallographien in architektur und tanz, In: Frederick Kiesler. Theatervisionar- Architektukunstler. Österreichisches Theater Museum&Brandstatter. pp.148-163. ISBN 978-3-85033-682-6.

A Gálvez T1_Kiesler Wigman