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DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN FUTURIST PERFORMANCE

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Mladen Ovadija

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama in the University of Toronto

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1+1 anada THE DRAMATURGY OF SOUND IN FUTURIST PERFORMANCE

A PhD Dissertation by Mladen Ovadija, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama in the

University of Toronto, 2009

ABSTRACT

An examination of concepts of sound in futurist theatrical theory reveals that

it was the perception and adoption of sound as matter in futurist poetry, arts and

performance that gave birth to an authentic dramaturgy. In their initial explorations of

acoustic material, Futurists imagined and evolved a dramaturgy of sound that not only

informed a range of their artistic endeavors but finds relevance in the current discourse of

contemporary theatre and performance. The path of their recognition of sound's

materiality is mapped through the analysis of the theory in futurist manifestos and its performative implications, the instances of dramaturgy of sound in futurist performance.

Futurists returned to the primal forces of sound and used onomatopoeia in poetry initiating a new theatricality that moved its focus past the text (representation)

towards the performance (presentation). They replaced verbal meaning with vocal

expression and discursive language with oral, acoustic gestures revealing the corporeal

essence of sound. Following the poetic principles of analogy, iconicity and synaesthesia,

Futurists theorized sound as independent aesthetic matter and devised theatre in which it became equal to the plastic and kinetic elements of stage and performance. This laid the ground for the 'mixed-media' and Bauhaus' 'theatre of totality' reaching towards

contemporary theatrical practice.

11 This assessment of an incipient dramaturgy of sound focuses on seminal contributions of both Italian and Russian Futurists: Filippo Tomasso Marinetti's concepts of onomatopoeia, parole in liberta, the 'lyric intoxication with matter,' or fisicoffolia, celebrated in serate by the bruitist declamation of his Zang Tumb Tumb; Francesco

Cangiullo's hybrid grotesque rendition of Piedigrotta; Fortunato Depero's Colori and similar stage installations and abstract sintesi on which Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero and Enrico Prampolini based their plastic moto-rumorist complex; and Alexei

Kruchenykh's and Vladimir Khlebnikov's creation of zaumny yazyk, a beyond-sense language that informed the Russian Futurists' staging of Victory over the Sun and

Zangezi.

In their recognition of the materiality of sound, evident in the examples cited above and explored in-depth in the dissertation, the Futurists were instrumental in forging a new understanding of the semiosis of sound in theatre that remains viable in current theoretical discourse.

111 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have helped me complete my dissertation. I would like to especially acknowledge the support and guidance that I received from my advisor, Domenico

Pietropaolo, and my committee members, Veronika Ambros and Stephen Johnson, and thank Joanne Mackay-Bennett for her editorial help. I salute them all with a few parole in liberta scattered with no punctuation in a futurist manner:

attention liberta knowledge support own aurality advice guidance detail parole thanks matter senses help speed flux support encouragement thanks parole vocal moto-rumorist discussion own inspiration scarrrabrang detail dynamics liberta futurist scholarship own suggestions journey consult collaboration parole non-passeist support thanks

My journey would not have been possible without the love of Biljana, Jelena,

Perla, my family and many friends who believed in its purpose.

Most profoundly, I am inspired by those whose creativity and endeavours I admired but who will not be able to read this dissertation: my sister Perla Ovadija,

Bozidar Pejovic, Smajo Karacevic, Pierre Nuic, Ranko Ibrulj, Goran Ajanovic, Hasan

Tijanovic, Marko Kovacevic, Gordana Muzaferija and Andjelka Gatalo.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter One: The Avant-garde and Conceptions of Sound

1.1. Why Futurism, Why Sound? Rebellion and Noise 8

1.2. Sound and Noise under Scientific Surveillance 20

1.3. The Synaesthetic Power of Sound 31

1.4. Hybridization of Art Forms in the Avant-garde 36

1.5. Sound and Meaning - Theatre Idiom vs. Discursive Language 42

1.6. The Century of Sound Saturation 47

1.7. Perception and Cognition: the Aural and Temporal vs. Visual and Spatial 53

1.8. Sign and Sound in the Land of Semiotics 58

1.9. The Materiality of Sound on the Contemporary Stage 65

Chapter Two: Words-in-Freedom, Sound Poetry and Performativity of Futurist Serate

2.1. Introduction 70

2.2. Bruitist Renditions of Manifestos and Sound Poetry at the Futurist Serate 74

2.3. Sound-Text Art, Sound Poetry and Connections with Dada 80

2.4. Destruction of Syntax and Dynamic Declamation ofZang Tumb Tumb 96

2.5. Onomatopoeia, Analogy and Iconicity 111

2.6. Futurist Poetry Principles in Theatre Performance and Theory 120

Chapter Three: Zaum: a Language Beyond Sense and an Idiom of the Abstract Theatre

3.1. Word-as-Such: Sound as Meaning, Content as Form 123

3.2. Sound Resources of Rechetvorstvo (Word-Making) 127 3.3. Universal Roots of Zaum: Incantation and Glossolalia 136

3.4. Sound Symbolism, Chopped-up Words, Play of Vowels and Consonants 145

3.5. Artidilatory, Ludic and Concrete Aspects of Sound in Zaum 149

3.6. Futurist Sound From Poetry and Music to Painting and Theatre 156

3.7. Victory Over the Sun: Theatrical Execution of the Poetics of Zaum 167

3.8. Zangezi: an Anti-Babel Tower/Sculpture Made of Zaum 177

Chapter Four: Dramaturgy of Sound from Futurist Sintesi to the Total Theatre 190

4.1 From Onomatopoeia, Analogy and Iconicity to Plastic Moto-rumorist Complex 193

4.2. Piedigrotta 's Hybrid Form: a Transition from Serate to Theatrical Sintesi 198

4.3. Luigi Russolo's L 'arte dei rumori and Its Role in Futurist Performance 205

4.4. Dadaist Concept of Noise: The MERZ-stage as a Prelude to Total Theatre 214

4.5. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Futurist Theatrical Sintesi 223

4.6. Marinetti's and Mansata's La radia: An Announcement of Pure Acoustic Art 234

4.7. Marinetti's and Cage's Concepts of Silence in Music, Poetry and Performance 240

4.8. Depero's abstract sintesi Colori: a Synthesization of Synaesthetic Theories 245

4.9. Plastic Moto-rumorist Complex, Bauhaus and Mixed-means Total Theatre 249

Conclusion 259

Appendix-List of Figures 268

Bibliography 294

VI 1

Introduction

The Futurist dramaturgy of sound developed as part of the historical avant- garde's search for an idiom to replace the worn-out language of bourgeois literature, art and ideology. This need for a new idiom resulted from a crisis of representation in a contemporary art that was unable to face the fragmented reality of the modern world.

The mimetic replication of reality that had been produced by the institutionalized and autonomous art was no longer sufficient. The avant-garde artists radically disputed all aesthetic rules of such art demanding that art becomes one with life. This required the immersion of art in its material, not only in the object, story or action it presented - that is, reality or life - but also in the very elements of the artwork - sound, paint, sculptural mass, objects, actions, and lights. Thus the art material started to be treated as self- sufficient and its materiality became of utmost importance for the artistic immersion in life. It is the futurist recognition of the materiality of sound in their poetry, plastic arts and theatre performance that provided the basis for a dramaturgy of sound researched in this dissertation.

In theatre, futurist theorists and performers focused on the primal emotions provoked by the perception of materiality, both real and apparent, in a synergy of all theatrical means: language/voice, movement, sound and light. They were more concerned with the theatricality of material presence than with the logic of representation. In their stage idiom, the referential function is replaced by the performative: futurist theatre turned the representation of the dramatic text into an often- 2

aggressive happening where the audience's senses were attacked mercilessly thereby

drawing everybody into the whirl of life. These provocative goals of futurist

performances were achieved through the onomatopoeic declamations of poetry, the

bruitist renditions of the serate and the collages of sound, noise and the alogical speech

of theatre syntheses. Rather than representing something to someone, they preferred

direct, sensory contact with the audience through the exposure of themselves in the act

of performance. They abandoned the semantically organized logocentrism of the text and

dramaturgy of the plot in favour of a self-displaying phonocentrism that replaced verbal meaning with vocal expression, and discursive language with acoustic gestures.

The futurist treatment of sound, conceived at the beginning of the 20th

century, incited a novel dramaturgy and aesthetics of sound that still reverberates in today's experimental theatre and performance art. In order to trace the path of the

futurist recognition of the materiality of sound and the development of their theoretical

concepts my dissertation explores futurist manifestos, sound poetry, plastic arts, theatre

and its theory especially when they bear performative implications in regards to sound.

As my dissertation demonstrates, sound in futurist performance acquired a significant role: when perceived as matter and no longer solely used as a means of expression in an intuitive vocal utterance, sound has been recognized as an autonomous material of theatre production. Once sound has been understood as an independent material and made equal to any other material participating in the semiosis of the work of art, or

specifically, of theatre, rather than a means of signification and communication, I hypothesize, there followed the development of a genuine dramaturgy of sound, which has had an impact on contemporary theatre. 3

The primary corpus of my dissertation draws from manifestos, works and performances of the Italian and Russian Futurists: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Luigi

Russolo, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Velimir Khlebnikov as well as other poets, playwrights and artists from futurist circles who contributed to the ensuing notion of sound's materiality. The relevance of the anticipated findings is tested against contemporary theatre theory and practice. My research method is based on current theoretical discourse in aesthetics and the phenomenology of sound, the renewal of the aurality figure in post-modern cultural studies and the semiotics of theatre.

Taking part in the historical avant-garde's radical rupture between text and performance, Futurists turned to the theatrical presentation rather than representation of the play. They substituted the referential function of their theatrical idiom with the performative one, in which "messages were (not) formulated but rather reactions evoked and provoked [... and where] not the semantic but rather the pragmatic dimension dominates."1 Thus, Futurists shifted from verbal meaning to vocal expression and from the syntactic structure of discursive language to the sound substance of human utterance departing from the logocentrism of Western culture in which 'life is incrusted by petrified, degenerated, (merely) verbal language' as Antonin

Artaud has stated. Their goal was to liberate sound, that is, to make it an independent material that, in its 'pragmatic dimension' together with the visual, plastic and kinetic elements of the stage would be integral to Marinetti's concept of an 'abstract theatre of pure form and tactilism.'

' Erika Fischer-Lichte, "The Avant-garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Theatre," in Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde, ed. James Harding (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 92. The innovative use of vocal sound that started with the renouncing of denominational language in futurist poetry spread to the stage. Whereas vocal mimesis of sound pertains to orality, a creative effort to seize the world of phenomena through the power of sound, onomatopoeia and vocal gesture were used by futurist poets in order to create an idiom where sound was liberated from the yoke of signification and where sounds and meanings were not alienated. The orality of futurist expression played an important role in stage experiments that rebelled against passeist theatre as well. In such stagings a vocal gesture became a self-sustained perceptual event bearing its full sense in its sensorial essence as opposed to the representation of the textual/verbal content. Here, a vocal gesture communicated the performer's body/voice directly to the audience's senses. The performative/theatrical relevance of this tendency can be explored along the lines of Roland Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice as a sensual bridge between the body and the performance, the performer and the audience.

Accordingly, Futurists' focusing on the sensorial features of the vocal utterance as a physical gesture can be explored along the lines of Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of a 'pulsational theatre' that liberates and communicates the libidinal energies.

In addition, futurist approach to sound in art has been influenced by Henri

Bergson, specifically by his concept of la duree (the duration that replaces physically measured time) that was based on his observation of an unbreakable continuum of time and space. In Creative Evolution, for example, Bergson regards our universe not as made but rather as one that is continually being made. The world is perceived as an everlasting flux of becoming, similar to music and sound, and accessible through the category of aurality. This notion made Futurists aware of sound's capacity to express 5

the dynamism, interpenetration, speed and fluidity needed for the artistic expression of

the new sensibility of modem time they proclaimed crucial. Thus Bergson's work gave

theoretical support to the Futurists' endeavours to express the fluidity of the fragmented

world.

The ability of sound to grasp reality without bringing it to a halt was

'discovered' by futurist painters Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra and

others, who made use of the idea of aurality in their concepts of 'plastic dynamism',

'simultaneity' and 'painting of noises, sounds and smells.' Thus conceived in painting,

sound acquired plasticity and became ready to by treated as an independent element of the spatiotemporal medium of theatre. This prompted an artistic method: a dramaturgy that deals with sound as sculptural mass in the temporal flux (like in the art of informet), or as series of juxtaposed sound formations (like in the collage or constructivist art). In theatre, its goal was to make a dramatic, non-narrative, audio- visal and kinetic stage art form. This represents an outcome of the avant-garde hybridization of art forms in which sound creation, installed in an exhibition or put on

stage, merges with other sensory attractions, movements and objects. Such creative method based on the inclusion of aurality in the field of visual arts corresponds to the methods of Italian futurist painting and sculpture, Russian Cubo-Futurism, Rayonism and Constructivism, and more recent art movements like Fluxus, Informel, and Abstract or Gestural Expressionism. This transgression of sound into the plastic sphere is notable in the experimental stage designs of Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero and Enrico

Prampolini and in the concept of the plastic moto-rumorist complex.

2 A term introduced by Balla and Depero in "The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe" (1915). 6

These dual concepts of orality and aurality, adopted in Futurism for their

expressive and material features, provide the groundwork for my discussion of two

aspects of the dramaturgy of sound developed in futurist performance and theatrical

design. One, inherited from the futurist lyrical intoxication with matter that gave birth

to onomatopoeia and the theatrical use of physical madness, fisicofollia, pertains to

voice, vocal gesture and the orality of performance. The second, later applied by

Marinetti in the manifesto "The Abstract Antipsychological Theatre of Pure Elements

and the Tactile Theatre" that defines "an abstract and alogical pure drama of pure

elements [...] and an alogical and surprising combination of blocks of typical

sensations,"3 pertains to the recognition of the materiality of sound, considered an

independent element of the stage. Both concepts reappear in Antonin Artaud's theatre

of cruelty and bodily presence, in the Bauhaus' total theatre of audio-visual stage

mechanics, and in the mixed-media and abstract theatre performances of our day.

My dissertation will examine the materiality of sound and its genesis from means to matter by tracing its use in futurist performance and its conceptual

development in art and theory. Beginning with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's onomatopoeia and liberation of words in the sound poems like Zang Tumb Tumb, it will

examine the illogical sound dialogues in the futurist serate, the use of sound, colour and noise in theatrical sintesi, particularly in Piedigrotta by Francesco Cangiullo, and Luigi

Russolo's 'liberation of sounds' in his manifesto "The Art of Noises." The extension of the field of music to all sounds by Russolo's arte dei rumori contributed to the dramaturgy of sound in the abstract theatre and the futurist concept of plastic moto- rumorist complex. The dissertation will also retrace Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir

3 F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus (New York: Clarendon Press, 2006), 391. 7

Khlebnikov's creation of zaumny yazyk, a 'beyond sense' language based on primordial speech and glossolalia, a language in which 'the word is no tool for thinking anymore but material for art.' The poetic principles oizaum language determined the theatricality and kinetic sculptural character of their futurist stage works Victory over the Sun and Zangezi produced by Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matiushin and Vladimir

Tatlin. 8

Chapter One: The Avant-garde and Conceptions of Sound

1.1. Why Futurism, Why Sound? Noise and Rebellion

Like all the avant-garde artists of early 20th century Europe, Italian and

Russian Futurists rebelled against history, the permanence of aesthetic values, and art as an institution. They sought man's presence in a world where art and life were not

separated, questioned the notion of masterpieces and renounced the myth of progress of civilization by declaring it a repetitious advancement to an apex by imitating and replicating past paradigms. Their manifestos were thundering indictments against tradition: "We must shake the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges... Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!"1 And: "The horn of time blows through us in the art of words... Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc. etc., must be thrown overboard from the Ship of Modernity."

The 'negative' anti-bourgeois tendency of the avant-garde was a reaction to the inadequacy of traditional art confronted with an increasingly industrialized and mechanized world. The new fragmented and destabilized world picture brought about

'the shock of modernity' (Baudelaire/Benjamin) and 'the cinematic experiences of daily life' (Marinetti). The teleological path of history as the overriding narrative executed by the bourgeois state had produced disappointing results. After the first decade of the 20th

1 F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 23. 2 D. Burliuk, V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh and V. Mayakovski, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 51/2. 9 century, the European nations were about to start a slaughter of their own peoples in the

First World War where a massive loss of human life was a part of state strategy. The time for the riot against bourgeois establishment was ripe. As Matei Calinescu has argued, this was: "the moment when socially 'alienated' artists felt a need to disrupt and completely overthrow the whole bourgeois system of values, with all its philistine pretensions to universality."3 Dissatisfaction with all forms of traditional art had been expressed through artistic manifestos and happenings that mushroomed across Europe:

Expressionists portrayed a world where 'man exploded in front of man,' Futurists energetically propagated the nationalist war frenzy, and Dadaists refused to serve in the carnage and opted for absurdism and nihilism.

Elsewhere, mainstream Parisian theatres were still producing Eugene Scribe's well-made plays, the Milanese audience enjoyed the grandiloquence and the pathetic heroism of Giuseppe Verdi, Giacommo Puccini and Gabrielle D'Annunzio, Richard

Wagner's notion of Gesamtskunstwerk continued to hold sway with the Germanic theatre world while Konstantin Stanislavski directed naturalist pieces of fine psychological detail for the Moscow Art Theatre. Although Aurelien Lugne-Poe and Andre Antoine, Georg

Fucks and Edward Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein had started to experiment inside the theatre, the avant-garde artists were far more vociferous in their demands: they insisted on the complete overthrow of art removed from life and organized into disciplines. Ignoring the conventional borders between artistic disciplines, avant- garde developed a hybrid art form often drawing on ideas that came from outside the theatre and art institutions.

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 119. 10

Italian Futurism was perhaps one of the boldest and most disruptive but surely the noisiest art movement of the historical avant-garde. Its creator and promoter,

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" as a paid advertisement on the first page of Paris' most influential daily Le Figaro, on

February 20, 1909. Already a recognized symbolist poet, Marinetti had established his fame as 'the caffeine of Europe.' He was the author of the poetry collections The

Conquest of the Stars and Destruction, the editor of the journal Poesia, a loud declaimer of poetry, and a rather notorious playwright of scandalous pieces in the style of Alfred Jarry such as Le Roi Bombance and Poupees Electriques. Marinetti's manifesto announced the movement with a calculated bang, typical of Futurism's aggressiveness towards the public. In it, he wildly pronounced the principles and poetics of the new art: "We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness... Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep... The poet must spend himself with ardor to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements... We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians."4

The manifesto begins with a lyrical story of a neo-romantic flare that indicates the new futurist sensibility. The story tells of the night of'feverish insomnia' suffered by the poet and his friends exhausted with the boredom of a petty bourgeois life. On the call of 'the mighty noise of the huge double-decker trams' and 'famished roar of automobiles' they rush out to the streets of the metropolis enchanted by its clamour.

They jump in their automobiles, "snorting beasts" with "torrid breasts [...] like serpents of explosive breath," as prophets of speed and noise for whom "a roaring car that seems

4 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 22. to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory ofSamothrace."5

This noisy character of the manifesto arose from the artists' intuitive and sensual confrontation with the primeval force of sound that ushered in a new world.

The artificial amplitude of sound is one of the great inventions of the 20th century. Modernity may be defined as the coming of the human capacity to make inhuman noise. The great shock of the modern city and of the modern warfare that was in extrapolation were not so much the experiences of their disorientating energy and speed, as their sheer noisiness, the appalling, exhilarating, omnipresence of man-made or mechanical sound: of cars, sirens, gramophones, loudspeakers, cannons, airplanes and industrial machinery; all the dinning cacophony of the modern.6

The primordial convulsions of the emerging industrial world made noise almost impossible to listen to and an overpowering sight difficult to watch in its red hotness. For the Futurists, it was equivalent to the sight of chaotic magma that the old

Titanic gods had been facing before the Earth solidified in the shape available to the

Apollonian gaze of the new Olympian gods. Only the Dionysian music of intoxication, still unrefined by reason, could echo this powerful sound-image of the world creation, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Birth of the Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. For

Nietzsche, after Schopenhauer, music was superior to all other arts since it did not represent a phenomenon, but rather the 'world will' itself. He regarded music as the non-representational bridge to the chaotic world of the unknown and to the creative impulse itself. Marinetti's 'lyrical obsession with matter' and fisicoffolia expressed by the Futurists' use of sound and noise was undeniably inspired by Nietschze's conception of Dionysian music. Nietzsche's influence on Marinetti and the Futurists has been well documented by Giovanni Lista, Donald Marinelli and Giinter Berghaus, but they did not discuss the role of the Nietzschean notion of music in the shaping of

5 Ibid. 22. 6 Steven Connor, "Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic," in Emotion in Postmodernism, eds. Gerhard Hoffman and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1997), 152. 12 the futurist conception of sound. This aspect of Nietzsche's influence deserves to be examined as one of the sources of the futurist dramaturgy of sound and corresponding theory.

Obviously, the Futurists were more inclined to the unbridled, Dionysian dance than to the sober Apollonian narrative. Their preference for the aural rather than the visual paradigm of the world promoted bruitism as a way to express their intoxication with the "reality [that] vibrates around us, hitting us with bursts of fragments, with events among them embedded one within the other, confused, entangled, chaotic."7

Hence, surrounded by the din and commotion of a big city, poet Marinetti trumpeted prophetically in "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism:"

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep- chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.8

This clench between machines and men, typical for the inhabitants of the modern industrial city, was reflected in all avant-garde movements. They all had an urban and, consequently, an international character. But their offensive anti-traditional vocabulary often outraged members of European artistic circles. As composer Camille

Saint-Saens wrote to Marinetti:

7 F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra, "Synthetic Theatre Manifesto," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 182. 8 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 24. 13

Sir, You predict that in ten years you will be thrown in the wastebasket; in my opinion one could do so now! Unleash the forces of the unknownl Open the floodgates of the impossible! Add to the fervor of primordial elements! All this rigmarole is perfectly ridiculous and I beg you not to continue sending me your review. I fear fisticuffs, which you extol; I am seventy years old and I wish to die in peace. 9

More elaborate though always-heated pronouncements of Futurist theory

followed in the later manifestos addressing all aspects of art and life, literature, theatre,

dance, music, painting, sculpture and cinematography. Most significant for my

dissertation topic are the poetry and theatre manifestos that emphasized the role of

sound in the artistic process. In chronological order they are: "The Manifesto of Futurist

Playwrights" (F. T. Marinetti, 1911), "The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature"

(F. T. Marinetti, 1912), "The Art of Noises" (Luigi Russolo, 1913), "The Variety

Theater" and "Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in- freedom" (F. T. Marinetti, 1913), "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells" (Carlo

Carra, 1913), "Chromophony - The Colours of Sounds" (Enrico Prampolini, 1913),

"The Futurist Synthetic Theater" (F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, Bruno Corra

1915), "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe" (Gacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero,

1915), "Futurist Scenography and Choreography" (Enrico Prampolini, 1915),

"Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation" (F. T. Marinetti 1916), "The Abstract

Antipsychological Theatre of Pure Elements and the Tactile Theatre" (F. T. Marinetti,

1924), and "La Radia" ( F. T. Marinetti and Pino Mansata, 1933).

9 Camille Saint-Saens' letter quoted in Anne d'Harnoncourt, Futurism and the International Avant-gard (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1980), 11. 14

Most of these manifestos pertain to the first period of the movement that

lasted from its inception in 1909 until the end of First World War. The 1920s were all too burdened by political strife, dissension among the artists, and loss of members during the war and co-optation of Futurism by the fascist state. The glory of the national academics conferred on Futurists with much pomp and circumstance was apparently very dear to Marinetti, as if he has forgotten his fierce critique of Verdi,

Puccini and D'Annunzio for their operatic lacrimoniousness and grandiloquence.

These first texts appeared in a frenzy of establishing a new movement's credo.

Written in a short period of time, they express both an obvious aspiration to abolish traditional art values and an attempt to formulate a new approach to the artistic material. Driven by the futurist sensibility, they advocated a total immersion into the new vibrating reality. The same was demanded and expected from the audience.

Futurist artists literally put a spectator in the midst of a picture, sculpture or performance event by the concrete form of their works. For that purpose, the painters used curved force-lines to emphasize speed and energy of objects penetrating the atmosphere. Following the proclaimed goal of the futurist renewal of sensibility, the spectator, together with the artist, was drawn into the whirl of art/life, into the dynamic and fragmented reality of interpenetration of matter and senses.

In the manifesto, "The Exhibitors to the Public," published in the catalogue of the 1912 collective exhibition in Paris, futurist painters defended their use of the force- lines: "[It is] the force-lines by which is obtained an absolutely new power of objective poetry. Perspective, such as it is understood by majority of painters, has for us the very 15

same value which they lend to an engineer's design. [...] The simultaneousness of states

of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art."10

Apparently, Cubists' attempts to distort visual perspective proved insufficient for the Futurists. A 'new power of objective poetry' expressing dynamism of perpetual movement was needed. Hence, after the Cubists had shattered the conventions of perspective distorting the object in space, futurist painters and sculptors, who acquired a poetics of flux and dynamics based on aural paradigm of perception, destabilized the object in time. Their force-lines were meant to reveal movements of the unstable objects reverberating with their surroundings.

Besides the dissolution of objects in the atmosphere expressed by the force- lines painting, the simultaneity of states of minds required active inclusion of all senses.

As Carlo Carra claims:

We Futurist painters maintain that sounds, noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colours just as lines, volumes and colours are incorporated in the architecture of a musical work. Our canvases therefore express the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises and smells found in theatres, music-halls, cinemas, brothels, railway stations, ports, garages, hospitals, workshops etc. etc.''

For the Futurists, sound was the sensory material best suited for such an endeavour and the realization of such poetics. Consequently, sound and noise became essential figures in their artistic pronouncements and their vocabulary teemed with terminology from the musical and aural field. Furthermore, the use of force-lines to stir up surrounding objects around the spectator who gets drawn into the middle of the painting can be regarded as another implication of sound perception per se. According

10 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, "The Exhibitors to the Public," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 47. 1' Carlo Carra, "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, 112. 16 to Walter J. Ong, the distinction between the visual perspective of literacy and the aural perspective of orality is similar to the difference between being in front of a landscape of objects as opposed to being in the middle of life since "sound situates man in the middle of actuality and simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of things and in sequentiality."12

This concurs with Don Ihde's phenomenological argument of sound where he describes sound as "too rich in its surrounding spatiality: it cannot disappear from sight, sound surrounds us. [...] Sound is fullness and in Parmenidian fashion a complete."13

Based on the notion of 'sound's fullness,' Ihde constitutes "a phenomenology of auditory field presence" that equates this presence to "being as a 'whole,' 'witout end,'

'one,' 'continuous,' [...] and complete on every side, like the mass of well-rounded sphere."14

Ihde's notion of 'auditory field presence,' had been already intuitively discovered by futurist painters and sculptors and reflected in futurist sound poetry that through its vocal rendition made an impact on theatre performance. The futurist poetry/theatre performer entered in the midst of the art/life action without seeking the support of logical or psychological motivations traditional dramaturgy could provide.

His goal was to achieve fullness of life and immediate presence in the world, rather than the illusion of life and a mirror of the world. Such presentational orientation and attempt at a direct contact between art and life led him to replace traditional mimesis with the restless exploration of physicality - his own body, movements and vocal utterances. In his oral performance, the futurist performer attempted to create 'a special

12 Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 72. 13 Don Ihde, Sense and Significance (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973), 28. 14 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 80. 17 sort of reality that violently attacks the nerves' (a theatrical reality), and reach a new interpenetration of art and life that would absorb both him and his audience.

Contemporaneous to the work of Italian Futurists, the first Russian futurist manifesto of rupture with bourgeois art and culture, "A Slap in the Face of Public

Taste," appeared in December of 1912 in Moscow. Cubo-Futurists David Burliuk,

Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky signed it. Like their Italian counterparts, they called for a revolution in art practice and liberation from the inertia of contemporary art conventions, institutions and literary authorities. Their entire arsenal of invectives aimed at bourgeois art was already a currency in (or was drawn from) the Italian futurist manifestos. And again, their main target was a fossilized language that had been emptied of life energies and as such was useless for art. Russian Futurists were similarly resolute in their demands as exemplified in this excerpt from "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste:"

We order that the poets' rights be revered: 1. To enlarge the scope of the poet's vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words. 2. To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.15

Russian Futurists sought a new language released from its enslavement to rational thinking what made Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov create a zaumny yazyk (an idiom beyond sense or a transrational language) and argue for its use in poetry in several manifestos. Their transrational, emotive and intonational speech consisted of freely combined word roots, phonemes, sounds of unknown foreign words harvested from the language of schizophrenics, folk incantations, baby talk, glossolalia, and onomatopoeia. In the "New Ways of the Word: The Language of Future, Death to

5 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 51-2. 18

Symbolism", published in the collection The Three, illustrated by Kazimir Malevich,

St. Petersburg, 1913, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov claimed:

Before us there was no verbal art, there were the pathetic attempts of servile thought to present everyday reality, philosophy and psychology [...] but the art of the word did not exist. THE WORD IS BROADER THAN THE THOUGHT The word (and its components, the sounds) is not simply a truncated thought, not simply logic, it is first of all the transrational (irrational parts, mystical,

aesthetic).16

Russian futurist verbal art linked the phonetic characteristics of words to a

new sense and sensorial charge. On the sound structure of shared primordial phonemic roots, as Khlebnikov claimed, we can build a new language accessible to all humanity.

Khruchenikh, on his part, looked for zaum in primitive chant structures and incantation

of archaic idioms and the glossolalia of religious mystics such as the flagellant Varlaam

Shishkov who, when in ecstasy, would chant in a language previously unknown to him:

"namos pamos bagos / gerezon drovolmire zdruvul / dremile cherezondro fordei..." 17

Following the same intuitive impulse, Kruchenykh had been able to declare the unintended birth of his famous zaum poem: "On April 27, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I instantaneously mastered to perfection all languages. I am here reporting my verses in Japanese, Spanish and Hebrew:"

ike mina ni sinu ksi iamakh alik zel go osneg kaud mrbatul'ba vinu ae ksel ver turn dakh giz shish 18 16 Ibid. 72. 17 Ibid. 73. 18 Ibid. 213. 19

Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov's demand for the poetic material of new words, based on their active sound substance rather than strict meaning calcified by the

signifier-signified attribution, parallels Marinetti's concepts of free words, the abolition

of syntax and the wireless imagination. Although Russian Futurists were loath to admit

any influence by, or connection to, Italian Futurists, and vice versa, the two Futurisms

converged on many points of theory, art, poetics, and performance. Current art history,

in fact, establishes a parallel in the development of painting, sculpture, and theoretical writings on the visual arts of the two movements. In their mutual recognition of the materiality of sound, a similar correlation can be found in the poetry and theatre of the

Italian and Russian Futurisms. Thus, Russian poetic experiments in this field called for

an aesthetic inquiry into sound as an elementary material of language and art. What the

Italians intuitively threw at us in their quasi-Nietzschean proclamations at their boisterous serate, the Russians turned into a serious theory of the materiality of poetic language based on its phonetic essence. Consequently, sound treated primarily in regards to its prosodic value (in poetry) and expressive vocal value (in performance), and the introduction of the aurality/orality paradigm in Futurism proved central in the movement's contribution to the avant-garde's negotiation and controversy with the logocentrism and teleology of discursive language. 1.2. Sound and Noise under Scientific Surveillance

Jacques Attali, in his study Noise: The Political Economy of Music, regards noise in the context of its colonization and cultivation by music. The ordering and transformation of the raw noise into discernible tonality is a perpetual historical process, almost as important for society as the development of means of production.

The credo of his book is that "listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power that is essentially political."19

According to Attali, the cultural conditioning of sound that has turned noise into music has passed through the historical phases of (a) listening, (b) sacrificing, (c) representing, (d) repeating and (e) composing.

More than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies. With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. [...] Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. 20

Although Attali's study of noise is primarily a socio-historical analysis, the author is aware of the ritual force of noise as the Dionysian reflection of the world. He

admits that "our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise."21 Futurists, who understood that very well, reacted to noise noisily, to life with live performance. Performances like Marinetti's Zang Tumb

19 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 2. 20 Ibid. 5. 21 Ibid. 3. Tumb threw onomatopoeic sound bombs and vocal bursts of shrapnel fire at the audiences who responded with rotten tomatoes - a fair exchange between anarchistic avant-garde artists and a bourgeois public. At least, in their performance at the serate, there was no fake representing, repeating and selling passeist goods to the consumerist audiences. As Balilla Pratella wrote in his "Manifesto of Futurist Musicians:" "well- made music [is] the falsification of all that is true and great, a worthless copy sold to a public that lets itself be cheated by its own free will."22

Attali, however, envisioned a new epoch of sound composition that "heralds the emergence of a formidable subversion, one leading to a radically new organization"23 that will overthrow the establishment of a society of consumption and repetition ushered in by normative music. Obviously, Attali pleads for a program of social transformation - 'a formidable subversion' - following the concepts drawn from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School of social science and cultural studies. But the subversion in art practice, initiated by the futurist bruitism and alogical sound performance that carried on in works of Dadaists, Artaud, the theatre of the absurd and contemporary performance art, is of quite another sort. It grew out of the futurist intuitive, onomatpoeic noise creation that responded to surrounding noise with the exploitation of raw sound in its materiality, fluidity and dynamics. Even though this subversion was a consequence of the futurist artist/performer's elementary struggle with the material and form of sound that replicates new technologies, warfare, traffic, communications, electricity and machines; it represented more an artistic creation than a conscious attempt to impose the aurality paradigm as a part of a liberating cultural

Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 30. Attali, Noise, 7. 22 agenda. In other words, in their dealing with noise and sound, Futurists strove for pragmatic, performative value rather than for ideology. Of course, significant socio­ political implications of the futurist aggressive bruitism deserve to be studied for the assessment of the movement's social impact and its historical evaluation, but my dissertation is primarily concerned with the dramaturgy of sound as a futurist contribution to the contemporary theatre aesthetics. Aesthetically, Futurists and

Dadaists, who were on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum regarding war and technical progress, produced similar bruitist sound poetry and performance events.

A look back at the state of affairs before the Futurism and avant-garde disruption of logocentrism in language and tonality in music will show that the subversive aspect of bruitism had always been kept under the surveillance of the dominant culture's preference for verbal syntax and a harmonically-ordered musical idiom. The belief that all phenomena are detectible, observable, and explainable in terms of Cartesian logic, the ideology of Enlightenment and positivism determined the understanding of sound at the turn of the century. Despites new dimensions of hearing and listening that erupted with modernity, traditional science remained definitely under the spell of rationality and harmony. As Jonathan Sterne observes in The Audible Past:

As there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an 'Ensoniment.' A series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices rendered the world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening. Between about 1750 and 1925, sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practices, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music. Hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of receptivity and capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics. Through listening techniques people harnessed, modified, and shaped their powers of auditory perception in the service of rationality.24

Johnatan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 3. 23

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894), one of the most notable scientists of the 19th century and a pioneer of the philosophy of science, published a book called On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the

Theory of Music (1863), that remians a canonical resource for traditional musicology well into the 20th century. Helmholtz conceived his theory of music as an amalgamation of "the boundaries of physical and physiological acoustics' and ''musical science and aesthetics."25 His theory of music stemmed from an empiricist philosophy of science that correlated the aesthetic perception and laws of nature and a belief in the civilizing, cultural power of science. His book explores in detail the subject matter of physical acoustics and proposes a theory of sounds regarded as motions of elastic bodies. It further develops the investigation into physiological and psychological aspects of sound as a sensory stimulus and its perception.

As a devoted empiricist, Helmholtz even constructed experimental devices that demonstrate how the series of impulses which produce a vibration of the air, if repeated with sufficient rapidity, generate sounds and tones. If rapid impulses recur with perfect regularity and in precisely equal time, sound becomes a musical tone.

When related to other tones in harmonic intervals, interpreted mathematically as the ratios of small whole numbers, such tones become material for musical composition. In contrast, irregular agitation of the air creates only noise and would not be considered desirable for musical composition. In his physical acoustics, Helmholtz already made use of a vocabulary of "the theory of harmony that speaks of the scale, intervals,

Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), 1. 24 consonances, and so forth." But what earned him prominence in musicology and aesthetics was his exploration of the physiological and psychological processes of the perception of musical sounds in the human ear.

Connecting physical acoustics with physiology and psychology, and a theory of sound with a theory of sensations, Helmholtz was able to analyze the perception of sound as a formative element of human emotions caused by the sensory reception of musical movements. He argued that "the properties of musical movements which possess a graceful, dallying, or a heavy, forced, a dull, or a powerful, a quiet or excited character, and so on, evidently chiefly depend on psychological action."27 This interdependence of psychological action, that is audience reception, and the physical movement of sound, that is performed music, introduces Helmholtz's argument into the field of aesthetics. Thus his book became the foundation of a comprehensive theory and aesthetics of music.

Helmholtz devised scientific tools for understanding and analyzing music which he defined as an art form consisting exclusively of concordant or harmonic sounds rhythmically expressed in time. All measurable elements of sound used in music: pitch (including melody and harmony), rhythm (including tempo and meter), sonic qualities of timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture were taken over by the musicology and aesthetics of music at the beginning of the 20th century awaiting the

Futurists' furious renewal of sensibility.

The positive science of physical acoustics could easily measure the intensity, pitch, tempo, reverberation and the diffusion of sound because these measurements

Ibid. 1. Ibid. 2 25

conformed to a spatial concept of the world. But one of sound's quintessential features,

its continuous temporality and imminence, was excluded by such considerations. "The

scientific study of sound," Don Ihde states, "makes sound rational or measurable. [...]

Sound is reduced to or transformed into a visual pattern that becomes scientifically

intelligible."28 The scientific effort to access the phenomena by discursive means

(reflected in the logocentric narrative in art as well) is consistent with the visual metaphor of the world provided by Cartesian logic and Enlightenment thought.

Positivist scientists have forgotten that sound is strictly speaking invisible: while

"visual phenomena tend to be spatially oriented: auditory phenomena tend to be temporally oriented."

In his seminal theoretical work, Orality and Literacy (1982), Walter J. Ong

speculates on the differences between oral and chirographic (writing) cultures and gives primacy to the oral literature (a somewhat oxymoronic name for the creative practice of dealing with words and sounds of a not-yet-literate man). "Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality." This statement postulates one of the main theses of the sound-text poetry theories in their search for a genuine sound-art idiom. It also permeates the Futurists' use of primordial language and onomatopoeia in poetry and performance.

Ong analyzes physical features of sound, such as its temporality and materiality, prior to their oral, vocal and verbal implications in literature:

There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence and no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action,

28 Ihde, Sense and Significance, 25. 29 Ibid. 27. 30 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 8. stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. We often reduce motion to a series of still shots the better to see what motion is. There is no equivalent of a still shot for sound. An oscillogram is silent. It lies outside the sound world.31

With this spatiotemporal distinction sustained by physical features of sound

and vision, arises the significant cleavage between the visual and aural paradigms of the world. The notion of two opposing but never-fully-separated aspects of the phenomenal

world - sound and silence, movement and immobility, time and space - favored a new

discourse in the field of arts and humanities up to and including the recent renewal of

interest in aurality in postmodern cultural studies.

The aural paradigm took prominence in philosophy and art theory beginning with the work of Henri Bergson (1859-1941). At the turn of the century, together with

Nietzsche, Bergson was at the cusp of the European philosophical thought and had a considerable influence on contemporary arts, theory and science. He criticized the

Cartesian dominance of the sense of sight that provides an essentially static world-view and deals with unchanging objects discernible in space. Instead of the 'spatialized time,' reduced to a succession of moments mechanically discerned in order to be measurable by chronometer, Bergson introduced the notion of la duree that determines our being in time which is the constant flux of the universal phenomena. Our consciousness participates in the world's dynamism at the interstice of memory, intuition and perception. In contrast to a static world-view, an aural world-view grasps this dynamic process. According to Bergson, duration, that is, the unbreakable process of 'coming into being', the continuity and interpenetration of time and space and the

31 Ibid. 33. 27

notion of perpetual change cannot be grasped in terms of space but only as la duree.

Taking his cue from Bergson, Don Ihde elaborates the essential features of sound:

The ever-changing presence of sound is time-full. Sound is in normal situation never static. It is coming into being and its passing from being is continual in its variations. [...] The constant temporality of sound presence is almost total.32

Indeed, Bergson himself uses the notion of the flow of music as a pragmatic

illustration of his conception of la duree: "There is neither an immutable substratum nor are there distinct states that appear and pass like actors on a stage. There is simply the continuous melody of our interior life, a melody that runs and will run indivisible,

from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence."33

Bergson's theory of consciousness that claimed the superiority for intuition over intellect had a significant impact on Futurists. They accepted Bergson's notion of elan vital that incites the "creative impulse" and "living energy", present in both artistic creation and human life. In truth, Bergson claims, while one of art's missions is to 'set us face to face with reality itself,' traditional, socially accepted art masks reality from us. Facing, if not transgressing it, reality was the ultimate goal of Futurism and the entire avant-garde art.

F. T. Marinetti and the Italian futurist painters, especially Umberto Boccioni, were profoundly immerged in Bergson's complete "dissolution of every material 'state'

(seen as mere inertia) into the flux of duration [la duree]" while the concept of simultaneous and interpenetrating reality executed in their paintings represented "the most pregnant analogue of Bergson's thought."34

32 Ihde, Sense and Significance, 28. 33 Barden, Garett, "Method in Philosophy," in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 38. 34 Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 537. The visual paradigm of the world as a stable and discernible picture of reality

in the sense of Apollonian clarity has a long philosophical tradition. Aristotle in

Metaphysics affirms: "Above all, we value sight; disregarding its practical uses, we

prefer it, I believe, to every other sense, even when we have no material end in view.

Why? Because sight is the principal source of knowledge and reveals many differences between one object and another."35 Similarly, Rene Descartes praises sight: "All the

management of our lives depends on the senses, and [...] that of sight is the most

comprehensive and the noblest of these." Descartes maintained that cognition of a

distinct object was a source of knowledge and thus reinforced the authority of vision as

our most truthful sense. Cartesian rational thought brought about clarity and

distinctness as favorable attributes of the ensuing Western philosophical tradition. In the same vein, the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment used prevalently visual metaphors. The very name of the movement that strived to spread knowledge and

establish an optimistic, positive and rational view of the world is a visual metaphor: it

suggested bringing light into a heretofore-mystified picture of reality.

In contrast, the use of sound in the arts lived in its Dionysian predisposition of disturbance and a blurred but not less true image of reality. Thus futurist intoxication with the chaotic noise of the 20th century world produced bruitist art - a modern

Dionysian sound-image. And, in futurist performance, the noisy vocal gesture brought about carnal and libidinal aspects of the Dionysian utterance. Apparently, sound's physical source, movement, friction and explosions of air in the cavities of the performer's body always already contained these somatic aspects of performance.

35 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. John Warrington (London: Dent, 1956), 51. 36 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianopolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 65. Sound, wrote Aristotle {De anima, II. 8), is a kind of pathos, a suffering. The air is battered, stretched, percussed when there is sound. The voice never simply appears, but is expressed, its shape formed out of resistance. What resists the voice? The heaviness, the reluctant inertia of things, the world's weary wish to hold its peace. The voice must overcome this lethargy deep down things. It is a striving, and a disturbance: it subjects the world to strain.37

Here sound, in its basic material feature - a physical disturbance of the air that makes it audible (Helmholtz) - when applied to the formation of voice as an utterance of the body, becomes compelling emotional, sensorial and spiritual substance. As well, it provides for the physicality of performance. (It is worth noting that Aristotle's remark on sight as a source of knowledge comes from Metaphysics while the one on sound as suffering comes from De Anima). The Aristotelian musing quoted by a postmodern theorist of sound Steven Connor, is reminiscent of Roland Barthes' argument concerning the grain of the voice, which became a paradigmatic figure for the actor's bodily presence in the performance.

Roland Barthes regards a vocal utterance or a vocal interpretation of an aria as a wider and more concrete phenomenon than a mere reproduction of a text or an exact rendition of a musical phrase. Barthes attends to the grain of the voice "in a dual posture, a dual production of language and of music" where he finds a locus of "the

•jo encounter between a language and a voice," that is, between performance and performer's body. It is "cantor's body brought directly to your ears [...] from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages. [...] The grain is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue."39

Steven Connor, "The Strains of the Voice," 38 Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 269. 39 Ibid. 270. 30

Thus what Aristotle describes as the pathos and suffering of physical sound becomes ajouissance that voice conveys in the erotic exchange between the performer and spectator. The materiality of sound incarnated in the actor's body gives a corporeal, sensuous dimension to the performance achieving an extra-textual communication or reciprocity that Artaud sought for in his theatre of presence. As French psychoanalyst

Pierre Fedida claims:

Reciting or singing in front of the others entails showing them something of one's body; it also means discovering, in a flash a given diffuse sensibility of our body [...] The voice is bodily matter - a pre-objective element quite unlike the objectivity of our ocular relation to the person and their capacity to represent themselves.40

Clearly, the presentational ability of sound/voice here contrasted with the representational features of the visual is rooted in Ong's distinction between the oral and the written. The search for a 'pre-objective' sound in speech, a perpetual becoming of voice, is found in the Marinettian onomatopoetic declamation of futurist 'serafe,'

'fisicoffolia' of the variety theatre and alogical sound/verbal practices of the Italian theatre sintesi. At the same time, the return to the orality and sound substance of language in Russian futurist poetry followed this very impulse towards vitalism of the primordial orality.

Pierre Fedida, Le Corpse, le text at la scene (Paris: Delarge, 1983), 252. 31

1.3. The Synaesthetic Power of Sound

Both synaesthetic and vibrational conceptions of sound gained prominence in the avant-garde artistic circles at the turn of the century. The popularity of these ideas was prompted by the mystical teachings of Esoteric Buddhism and Anthroposophy by

Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Influenced by their notion of synaesthesia,

Nikolai Kublin, one of a few Cubo-Futurists who welcomed Marinetti to Moscow, wrote a manifesto entitled "What is the Word?" In the text, he declared that every vowel has its own special pitch and assigned colours to the hard consonants. The idea was not new but had been explored by Symbolist poets: Arthur Rimbaud's poem

"Voyelles" ["Vowels"] provides a well-known case in point:

Voyelles A noir, Eblanc, /rouge, L/vert, Obleu: voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes: A, noir corset velu de mouches eclatantes Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles...

Vowels A black, E white, /red, (/green, Oblue: vowels, I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins: A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies that buzz around cruel smells...

Alexei Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, creators of zaumny yazyk, also assigned colours and other tactile features to the vowels and consonants in their newly coined words. The Cubo-Futurist poets affirmed: "We understand vowels as time and 32

space (a characteristic of thrust), and consonants as color, sound, smell,"41 while painter Mikhail Larionov argued:

Obviously, a blue spread evenly over the canvas vibrates with less intensity than the same blue put on more thickly. Hitherto this law has been applicable only to music, but it is incontestable also with regard to painting: colors have a timbre that changes according to the quality of their vibrations, i.e., of density and loudness. In this way, painting becomes as free as music and becomes self-sufficient outside imagery. 42

Many other Futurists interested in synaesthesia were particularly drawn to the relations between sound and colour. In Italy, Enrico Prampolini published a manifesto titled "Chromophony - the Colour of Sounds."

We conceive painting as an aggregation of chromatic vibrations. [...] The aim will be to encourage the optical appreciation of fine distinctions, atmospheric subtleties, and rhythmic influences of the atom, and to be able to express in chromatic terms the sound waves and the vibrations of all movements within the atmosphere. 43

The idea of the 'vibrational' character of artistic material adopted by Futurists has its source in Wassily Kandinsky's experiments with language, sound and image as conduits of innerer Klang — an 'inner sound' reverberating between the artist, its object and spectator, between soul and nature. From his experience in work on canvas he contrived the idea of the 'inner sound,' which the painter senses in each object and reproduces it for the viewer. Kandinsky wanted to develop an abstract painting technique that would function in the same way as 'musical sound acts directly on the soul and finds an echo there.' The communication between the object, artist and

41 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 52. 42 Mikhail Larionov, "Pictorial Rayonism," in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902- 1934, ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 101. 43 Enrico Prampolini, "Chromophony - the Colours of Sounds," in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio, 115. 33

spectator depends on the emanation of mystical vibrations, claims Kandinsky. In his

memoir, he recounts that once in the years of his Moscow youth, during a concert of

Wagner's Lohengrin at the Court Theatre, he saw, in a sort of hallucination, violin

timbres and deep tones of the basses and wind instruments as colours.44 This early

fascination, he admits, inspired his exploration of synaesthesia later elaborated in his

essay On the Spiritual in Art (1911). Already, in 1909 Kandinsky began an experiment

to find the linkages among colour, music, and human movement. Hence, he engaged

Russian futurist composer Thomas De Hartman to write "a radically antidiatonic, polychromatic score for his minimalist stage piece The Yellow Sound."45 Although published 1912 in the Blaue Reiter Almanach, in Munich, the work waited sixty years to be performed for the first time 1982 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The Yellow Sound was an abstract play of colour and sound. Performers on the stage were merely bearers of color and movement as is evident in its script.

The people resemble marionettes. [...] The wigs and faces are the same colour as tights, [...] first there appear gray, then black, then white, and finally different-coloured people. The movements of each group are different. Many of the groups are illuminated from above with stronger or weaker lights of different colours. 46

Although these sounds included human utterance, Kandinsky required "the sound of the human voice to be pure, i.e.: without being obscured by words or meaning of the words."47 This resulted in almost complete elimination of dialogue, plot and sequential action as we can see in the stage directions for Scene 1. It was obvious that the

Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982), 364. 45 Mel Gordon, "Songs from the Museum of Future: Russian Sound Creation 1910-1930," in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 203. 46 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 280. 47 Ibid. 263. 34 complementary use of music and noise together with light and movement was supposed to create, not a drama but a kinetic performance that combines visual and aural art.

The stage must be as deep as possible. A long way back, a broad green hill. The music begins straightaway, first in high and then in low registers. The background becomes dark blue in time with music. Behind the stage we hear a chorus, without words, which produces an entirely wooden and mechanical sound without feeling. After the chorus finishes, a general pause: no movement, no sound. Then darkness. Lights. Five bright yellow giants (as big as possible). Very slowly, they turn their heads toward one another. The giants' very low singing, without words becomes audible.

Kandinsky elaborated his theatrical theory based on sound in the introductory essay to The Yellow Sound, entitled "On Stage Composition." He argued that although every art has its own language, externally discernible by means it uses - sounds, colours, and words - those means are essentially the same in their inner identity or their 'inner sound' attained by the human soul through vibrations. "Three elements are used as external means but for their inner value: (1) musical sound and its movement; (2) bodily spiritual sound and its movement, expressed by people and objects; (3) colour-tones and their movements (a special resource of the stage). Thus, ultimately, drama consists here of the complex of inner experiences (spiritual vibrations) of the spectator."49 In spite of their external, idiomatic, differences, these elements together create a play's dynamic structure, which produces and emanates 'inner vibration', or 'inner sound' that resonates in the spectator's soul. Kandinsky's theory of stage composition was significant for the avant-garde theatre in two aspects. First, it established a dramaturgy of basic stage elements: music, body/spirit and colour as three sounds and their kinetic relationships; and, secondly it left the ultimate sense of play to be conceived by the spectator's

Ibid. 281. Ibid. 264. 35

imagination. The Yellow Sound was a practical application of such abstract structuring of

aural, kinetic and visual elements whose interplay forms a theatre piece.

With the establishment of the concrete form of sound/image performance,

Kandinsky contradicted the plot and character-based structure of 19th century theatre. He

described the current theatre practice as insufficient since it represented "in general the

more or less refined and profound narration of happenings of a more or less personal

character," while "the cosmic element was completely lacking."50 Hence, he abolished

any anecdotal content of the dramatic plot from his theatre. Here Kandinsky's ideas

coincided with the Nietzschean critique of individuation that has led to the decadence of

tragedy into psychological realism of bourgeois theatre. Similarly, one of the first of

Marinetti's theatre manifestos stated futurist disgust "with the contemporary theatre

(verse, prose, and musical) because it vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruction

(pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction of our daily life; a finicking, slow

analytic, and diluted theatre worthy, all in all, of the age of the oil lamp;" exalting as an

alternative a theatre of "all the new significations of light, sound, noise, and, language,

with their mysterious and inexplicable extensions into the least explored part of our

sensibility."51

Kandinsky conceived his synaesthetic theatre was with an ambition to create a

Gesamtkunstwerk of a kind. However, he expressed disapproval of Wagner's representational mode in theatre as too narrative and programmatic, and his leitmotifs as too repetitive. While admitting that Wagnerian musical drama "created a link between movement and progress of music," Kandinsky argued that: "the inner sound of movement

50 Ibid. 267. 51 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 117. 36 did not come into play. [.. .Because] in the same artistic but still external fashion Wagner subordinated music to the libretto, that is, [...] the hissing of red-hot iron in water, the sound of the smith's hammer, etc., were still represented musically."52 Kandinsky here actually sought concrete sound in its unmediated form, an action in itself, instead of the musical representation of something behind an action. Apparently, the same feeling of the concreteness of sound motivated Russolo's demand for the enlargement of the scope of music by inclusion of noise. Kandinsky's treated human voice also as a concrete sound since in The Yellow Sound he demanded it to be pure, 'without being obscured by words and meaning.' Instead of the psychologically motivated exaltation or weeping of a character, Kandinsky envisioned the vibration of bodily sound and its movement as basic elements of stage performance. The concreteness (or materiality) of the theatrical sign and denial of psychology, proposed by Kandinsky, represent two facets of the same disruptive tendency the Avant-garde and Futurism showed towards logocentric poetics and conservative art.

1.4. Hybridization of Art Forms in the Avant-garde

Marjorie Perloff defines the time of the historical avant-garde as a "climactic moment of rupture [...] The moment when the integrity of the medium, of genre, of categories such as 'prose' and 'verse' [as well as drama and theatre] and most importantly, of'art' and 'life' were questioned."53 The theatre of the avant-garde spoke this language of rupture and dissociation with existing cultural and artistic practice.

52 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 261. 53 Marjorie Perloff. The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, 38. 37

Instead of representing literature and drama, it moved towards an idiom of gestures,

either vocal or physical, by which the performer inscribed his immediate presence on

stage. No longer dominated by the literary text, the anti-textual idiom focused on the

theatrical event (performance, happening, kinetic installation) as its only raison d'etre. It was consciously an anti-art form based on the poetics of discontinuity and the hybridization of form.

In that sense, futurist evenings - serate futuriste - should also be explored as a hybrid form that made an initial impact on the theatrical endeavours of the movement.

These multimedia events contained declamations of poetic free-word, reading of manifestos, installations of paintings and sculptures, and presentations of the new noise music all put together in the form of an aggressive performance happening. It was the poetry readings in Parisian symbolist circles of poet Gustave Kahn and actress Sarah

Bernhardt at which Marinetti earned his declaimer's fame that inspired the first serate.

Since they were conceived in a form of arte-azione (action art) serate soon became futurist rallies in which poets, painters, sculptors and musicians fought against passatismo of conventional art. By their confrontational attitude they were causing audience hostility rather than appreciation. The activism and assertiveness of Futurists in the serate find their origin in the oral features of manifestos as direct public addresses as well as in free- word poetry's need for unique vocal performance aimed at confrontation with the audience. The serate were organized in theatres around Italy proving that 'only theatrical entertainment [was] worthy of the true futurist spirit.' Painters, sculptors and musicians, beginning with aserata at the Teatro Ciarella in Turin on March 8, 1910, joined these loud and noisy events. Very often cited, Grande serata at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on

March 2,1913, contained Giovanni Papini's speech against the city of Rome, Umberto 38

Boccioni's talk on futurist painting and sculpture (in front of the exhibits on stage), and

Marinetti's declamation of poetry such as Palazzeschi's poem Lafontana malata with its

onomatopoetic zaum-like verses:

Clof clop clogh, cloffete cloppete clochete

chchch

All of this was introduced by the symphonic rendition of Inno alia vita (Hymn

to Life) by maestro Balilla Pratella that on later occasions would include a performance

of Russolo's noise intoners - intonarumori (first introduced at the Teatro Strochi in

Modena three months later, on June 2, 1913). And, inevitably, Marinetti's own vocal

bellicose cacophonous Zang Tumb Tumb would have been a highlight of many serate,

especially on the European tours of the futurist 'circus.' The concrete and provocatively

entertaining form of a hybridized art appalled the audiences who came to hear a lecture or

poetry reading, see an exhibition or watch a theatre piece but instead found themselves

witnessing a provocative mix of installation, happening and performance.

Michael Kirby maintains that serate represented the origins of futurist

performance that led to Marinetti's praise of cafee concerto in his "Variety Theatre

Manifesto." In the serate, the fundamental notions of Futurist performance, its insistence

of sensory appeal, immediacy and presence, had been developed. In the very essence of

Futurist artists' confrontational rapport with the audience, we recognize the avant-garde's theatrical gesture of crossing the line between the performer and spectator involving both

in the immediacy and vulnerability of the performance act. This mutual vulnerability had

a catalyzing effect on the transference of sensibilities that replaced the conventional communication of narrative points in contemporary theatre. It opened the field of theatricality in which the materiality and presentational poetics of body, movement, light and sound dominates.

A more convincing case of transgression across the borders of conventional artistic genres is found in Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, the Woman's Hope, performed in the Vienna Kunstschau courtyard on July 4, 1909.54 The piece's poster in fauvist colours based on Kokoschka's already notorious self-portrait found its reflection in the performance itself. Namely, its colours were transferred in thick traces of paint on the performers: nerves and blood vessels appeared on their bodies as if their skin had been literally turned inside out. This extroversion of man's inner self executed by visual means, by pragmatic use of material, not only adheres to the expressionist theatre's demand that on the stage 'man explodes in front of man', but also shows the artist's preoccupation with the raw material of his art. With their faces made up as primitive masks, actors produced untamed cries, moans and grunts rather than clearly pronounced lines of verbal dialogue. Similarly, the auditory aspect of the performance was not only an instant of expressionist iSchreV (scream) acting, but also a deeper plunge into primitive, pre-verbal vocal utterance, with sound used as raw material. The raw vocality of the performance was amplified by the sound of accompanying archaic instruments, dissonant and rough, closer to noise than to music, expressing an uncomfortable mixture of pleasure and pain on the stage. The aural qualities of Kokoschka's piece conformed to the recognition of sound's materiality, a cornerstone of the futurist dramaturgy of sound.

The performance scandalized the audience who were disgusted by the illicit energy,

54 See a detailed case study of the performance by Dorothy Pam in The Drama Review, TDR, 67 (September, 1975): 5-12. cruelty and provocative content of the play. The event was a telling example of a nascent theatre art determined "to challenge the criteria of what constitutes a scenic work of art

and to create performances that were not just interpretations of dramatic texts, but

autonomous, transient events that attained power and impact from their temporal and physical immediacy."55

Doubtless, the physicality of performance and use of raw materials of sound and colour of the play bore significant implications for a new theatrical idiom of the avant- garde. In addition, it is important to emphasize that Murderer, the Woman's Hope was a play by a painter: a typical case of the historical avant-garde where stage performances very often had been produced by the visual artists, poets and musicians outside the institutional theatre. The creators of such performances were more concerned with the material of their art - sounds, objects and images and the kinetic sculptural environment of the stage - than with the plot, character, denouement and other elements of traditional drama and its mise en scene. Their works emerged from the awareness of the failure of illusionist mimetic theatre and its standard production practice that caused a crisis of representation. Hence, avant-garde theatre artists turned to aural and visual creation, montage and interpolation of heterogeneous materials in a work of art that would replace the linear narrative structure of the traditional literature and theatre.

The cross fertilization of the ideas, concepts and procedures among hitherto different art disciplines was a dominant process in the theatre of Futurism and avant- garde. One may say that this process actually specifies the theatre of the historical avant- garde. It establishes a trend of aesthetic hybridization that extends to today's mixed

55 Giinter Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 23. 41 media, performance and postmodern theatre. Dietrich Schneumann makes the case for

aesthetic hybridization as one of the major concepts of the historical avant-garde that has been revamped in the neo-avant-garde: "The questioning of traditional borderlines between arts and a lively interaction, including the transfer of new techniques and aesthetic principles from one art to another, became, not accidentally, one of the outstanding features of avant-garde's art production."56

The review of futurist theatre provides ample evidence of such transfer of ideas and practices. Thus, painters Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Russolo, Balla and Gino Severini together with poets, actors and musicians, created and performed boisterous multimedia serate that inform the theatricality of Cangiullo's Piedrigrotta and later alogical futurist sintesi written and performed again by painters like Boccioni, Balla and others.

Marinetti's conceptions of futurist theatre as described in his manifestos are closer to the ideas expressed in his poetry than in his playwriting. Balilla Prattela's new enharmonic music, Marinetti's onomatopoeic declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb and his own canvases equally inspired painter Luigi Russolo to write the daring program of "The Art of Noises" and construct noise intoning instruments. Kruchenykh's opera The Victory over Sun was a theatrical extension of his and Khlebnikov's zaum poetry by painter Kazimir Malevich and composer Mikhael Matyushin. Khlebnikov's supersaga Zangezi was designed, staged, and performed by his friend, Constructivist artist Vladimir Tatlin. Wassily

Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract painting, wrote the play The Yellow Sound together with its introductory essay "On Stage Composition" elaborating the vibrational essence of sound as a foundation of art and theory of theatre. Nikolai Kublin promoted the notion of synaesthesia amongst Cubo-Futurist influential painters such as Elena Guro, Natalia

56 Avant-garde/Neo-Avant-garde, ed. Dietrich Schneumann (New York-Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 27. 42

Gonchareva and Mikhail Larionov advocating an artistic expression in prevalently aural

metaphors. Russian avant-garde poets and linguists like Andrei Bely, Osip Brik, Roman

Jakobson and Victor Shklovsky often spoke of poetic creation based exclusively on

sound, that is, the phonetic material of language. Carlo Carra's "The Painting of Sounds

Noises and Smells" and Enrico Prampolini's "Chromophony - the Colours of Sounds"

exemplify a synaesthetic approach in the theory of visual arts that draws its vocabulary

from theories of sound and music. While futurist painting acquired notions of fluidity,

loudness, temporality and interpenetration of time and space from concepts of sound,

futurist sound acquired thickness, opaqueness, weight and palpability of paint and

sculptural mass. The process was mutually enriching. The avant-garde hybridization of

art forms and use of synaesthesia not only induced the Futurists' emphasis on a sound- based dramaturgy but also triggered off viable repercussions in today's theatre theory and performance.

1.5. Sound and Meaning - Theatre Idiom vs. Discursive Language

The focal point of the avant-garde's struggle against the existing art practice was its rejection of logocentrism and discursive language employed in literature, poetry, drama and entire Western cultural production at the end of 19 century. Such art and language embodied the basic vehicle of perpetuation of the bourgeois culture's

'pretensions to universality', precisely that the historical avant-garde wanted to abolish.

Referential and strictly communicative features of language received harsh criticism in futurist manifestos, on both Italian and Russian sides what the following excerpts from the writing of Marinetti, Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov well illustrate: 43

Syntax was a kind of codebook... a sort of interpreter or boring tour guide... poet-seer will know how to free himself from the syntax that is traditional, heavy, restrictive, earth-bound, with neither arms nor wings, because it is merely intelligent.57

In a truly inspired state, the primitive man (an insane person or a poet) must express his emotions in novel pronouncements and rhythms far from everyday frozen language with its conventional attachments that link precise meaning with articulation.58

Antonin Artaud, wrote one of the most well-argued diatribes against worn-out

language, an argument that was taken over by the new avant-garde:

We must agree words have become fossilized, words, all words are frozen, strait-jacketed by their meanings [...] Under these conditions it is no exaggeration to say that in view of their clarity defined, limited terminology, words are made to stop thought, to surround it, to complete it, in short they are only a conclusion.59

Obviously, the production of meaning that depends on linguistic codes already inscribed in the unchangeable and arbitrary pairing of the Saussurean 'signifier' and

'signified' proved to be unsatisfactory for the expression of revolt and rupture with the cultural and artistic status quo. Discursive language and its closure into the teleological schemes of representation were deemed to be a bad repetitious scenario not at all appropriate for an art that wanted to change the world. Therefore, avant-garde and futurist theatre artists and poets felt trapped between langage and parole (language as a cultural denominating system and speech as an act of individual expression). They felt trapped between a representational and a presentational mode of expression or between

'enunciated discourse' and 'enunciating gesture,' as semiotician Patrice Pavis defined this theatrical dichotomy. Accordingly, the Futurists who insisted on the theatricality of

57 F. T. Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literatrure," F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, 2006), 112 58 "The Word as Such," Collected Works ofVelimirKhlebnikov, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), vol. 1,257. 59 Antonin Artaud, "First Letter on Language," Collected Works, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), vol. 4, 83. 44 material presence rather than on the logic of representation, aimed at the authentic enunciation through voice and gesture. Actually, in futurist performance, vocal utterance itself became a gesture. Besides being a vehicle of communicating the 'enunciated discourse', voice in its presentational effort, acquired features of a self-realizing vocal gesture.

Futurists were looking for "a freedom that brings more ontologically fluid immediacy to the events in the theatre [... and] a theatre that is not so much the realization of a fixed work constituted through performance as the unfolding of a unique event."60

They wanted to achieve a direct, sensory contact with the audience rather than to represent something to somebody. Voice, sound and noise proved to be excellent sensorial material that allowed them to focus on the primal emotions provoked by the perception of language's materiality embodied in the sounding of the word.

Their radical shift from the word's meaning to its sounding was critical for the avant-garde revolution in poetry and theatre performance. It meant "a full scale revisioning of the word as a desired destination when purified of its cultural bondage to meaning. As part of this complex transformation of the semantic paradigm, the materiality of the sign emerged as a central, almost primitivistic preoccupation."61

Consequently, Italian and Russian Futurists renounced denominal language in its signifying perimeters, turned to its sound substance and drew a new idiom from examinations of non-semantic, acoustic properties of speech and human expression. They invented new onomatopoeic words, staged non-verbal utterances like shrieks, grunts,

60 David Graver, The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-garde Drama (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 58. 61 Steve McCaffery, "From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem," in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Kirby Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 155. 45 sighs, groans, and laughs, and produced the most innovative vocalizations and sounds thus establishing a novel speech in poetry and a genuine idiom of vocal gesture in performance. This 'discovery' resulted from their abandonment of the semantically oriented logocentrism in favour of a self-displaying phonocentrism achieved through the acoustic gestures independent of conventional verbal content. Hence, instead of taking part in the representation of drama, the sound and voice creation in futurist performance sustained a theatre of immediate acoustic events. Such treatment of sound by Futurists paved the way for a new theatrical idiom where the referential function would be replaced by the performative one.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti insisted on love for matter expressed in free-words, onomatopoeia and non-syntactical chains of analogies held together by a wireless imagination. The proclaimed ambiguity of the onomatopoetic word unleashed from the grip of meaning did not frustrate him since such words exhibited sonority of the emotion or thought and thus reached out to the world. Its poetic effectiveness and performativity was contained in its sounding instead of its meaning.

This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency towards onomatopoeia. It matters little if the deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry itself to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or the noise- summaries, and will permit us soon to reach the onomatopoetic psychic harmony, a sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought.62

Similarly, Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh's zaumnyyazyk evolved from still alive 'sound patches' floating in the otherwise worn-out language and from a primordial Ur-sprache where sounds and meanings were not alienated. Their poetry making relied on phonemic rather than syntactic or signifying quality of words: they insisted on the 'word as such' as independent artistic material based on its sound

62 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 106. 46 substance. Khlebnikov claimed: "the word is no tool for thinking anymore but material for art," while Kruchenykh delivered magic of sounds, incantations, and curses.

In Andrei Bely's 1909 essay "The Magic of Words" there is a preference, akin to Marinetti's, given to the sounding over the meaning of words:

Every word is a sound. The flux of special and casual relations outside me first becomes intelligible to me by means of the word. [...] The musical force of sound is resurrected in the word, as we are once again captivated, not by the meaning, but by the sound of words. [...] Creative word - lies hidden in the sound and image level of expression. 63

Evidently, both Bely and Marinetti suggest the aural features of words to be crucial for the poetic prosody. But their elaborations of the 'sound and image level of expression' and 'the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought' reach further towards the understanding of sound's performativity and a theatricality that enables sound to materialize on stage. While futurist poetry resurrected sound in/by the word, futurist theatre restored its materiality in/by the performance of vocal (oral/aural) gesture as opposed to the mere transfer of textual content. Admitting words' intrinsic performativity locked in their sound potential and not in their signifying value, Futurists broke ground for sound to become an element of theatre performance independent of any narrative or traditionally dramatic value.

The theoretical examination of futurist poetry and its prosody, material and form has had a powerful impact on the contemporary theories of art and theatre. The artistic practice of Russian futurist poets was closely followed by the theory of linguists like

Victor Shklovsky, Osip Brik and Roman Jakobson, poets Alexander Blok and Andrei

Bely and others, who initiated one of the most influential schools of literary theory and

63 Andrei Bely, "The Magic ofWords," Selected Essays of Andrei Bely, ed. and trans. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 98. 47 criticism of the century - Formalism. Their scientific analysis of the art forms, first of all poetry, became a means of deconstruction and introspection at the heart of artistic material. It enabled the discovery of a tight interconnectedness and, finally, essential identity of 'form' and 'content.' The 'form', understood as a result of formation and construction of the material was a true feature of the Cubist and Constructivist work of art, of course. But, in accordance with the aural paradigm of the world, one can also consider the materiality of sound, however fluid, temporal and immediate, as 'form.'

Although habitually considered rather as matter and energy than a structure, sound may be understood as both 'form' and 'content' parts of the Formalist equation. Recognizing sound's materiality, futurist art and theory acquired notions of temporality, dynamism and simultaneity and expanded them as vital elements of the arts in general, that is, of poetry, theatre, dance, painting, and sculpture.

1.6. The Century of Sound Saturation

Douglas Kahn's comprehensive study Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (1999) gained prominence in contemporary art theory with regard to its elaboration of the orality/aurality figure. Its assertions affirm some of my dissertation's motives in the exploration of Futurist sound:

Sound saturates the arts of this [20th] century, and its importance becomes evident if we can hear past the presumption of mute visuality within art history, past the matter of music that excludes references to the world, past the voice that is already its own source of existence, past the phonetic task-mastering of writing. 64

64 Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 2. 48

Indeed, in the visual arts discourse, today finally 'unmuted' by the inclusion of temporality, simultaneity and fluidity in place of mere spatiality and objecthood, we hear a futurist contribution. In the concreteness, bruitism and atonality of today's music, we hear Russolo's 'art of noise' that denied exclusion of the sea of non- harmonic raw sounds, noises from the sphere of music. And in contemporary sound- text poetry, we hear the vocal gestures and phonetic poetry-making instigated by

Futurist conceptions of onomatopoeia, 'word as such' and a beyond sense language that preferred orality over literacy.

This all was prompted by the historical avant-garde revolution of art faced with a genuine phenomenon of the time: 'sound saturation' at the beginning of the 20th century.

The great shock of the modern city and of the modern warfare that was in extrapolation were not so much the experiences of their disorientating energy and speed, as their sheer noisiness, the appalling, exhilarating, omnipresence of man-made or mechanical sound: of cars, sirens, gramophones, loudspeakers, cannons, airplanes and industrial machinery; all the dinning cacophony of the modern. 65

The explosive development of machinery, electricity, transportation and communication destabilized and fragmented the picture of the world and brought about

'the shock of modernity' that Benjamin diagnosed in Baudelaire's writing. Futurists witnessed the birth of the metropolis, a beast devouring the working man and a glittering attraction for the flaneur as a place "where thousands of actors of different temperament, habit and character competed for the major parts." That was the stage of the first Futurist manifesto and a subject of Luigi Russolo's composition for noise

65 Steven Connor, "Feel the Noise: Excess, Affect and the Acoustic," in Emotion in Postmodernism, ed. Gerhard Hoffman and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1997), 152. 66 Gunter Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 23. intoners "Awakening of a City," the first direct response to the wonderment of the metropolitan life expressed exclusively by means of sound.

It fell to Futurists who were knights of this new world of merciless change, speed and violence to renew the sensibility of modern man embraced by the burning dynamism of the industrial revolution. In the 'cacophony of the modern,' Futurists sensed the excitement of the swift changes in the world around them that needed to be reported to the audience in order to renew its sensibility. Marinetti's onomatopoetic poem, Zang Tumb Tumb provides such report from a front line. Here is an account of the poet's declamatory performance held at the London Dore Gallery 1914.

Antiquity exploded. Tradition ceased to breathe... the noise, the confusion, the surprise of death, the terror and courage, the shouting, curses, blood and agony - all were recalled by that amazing succession of words, performed or enacted by the poet with such a passion of abandonment that no one could escape the spell of listening. 67

The noise as a motive from outside entered the body of the performer who was now onomatopoetically reverberating with the sound of the world and the futurist obsession with surrounding noise made its way into the bruitism of the vocal interpretation of sound poetry. The artist's performance of vocal gestures outgrew the representation of a drama, a poem or a story and became an echoing cry of his presence in the world. At the very core of the futurist intuitive and primitivistic need for onomatopoeia lies a connection with what Walter J. Ong considers a basic feature of oral poetry and literature - the cry.

To consider the work of literature in its primary oral and aural existence, we must enter more profoundly into this world of sound as such. [...] Here, instead of reducing words to objects, runes, or even icons, we take them simply as what they are even more basically, as utterances, that is to say, as cries. All verbalization, including all literature, is radically a cry,

67 Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Futurism (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1978), 104. a sound emitted from the interior of a person, a modification of one's exhalation of breath which retains the intimate connection with life which we find in breath itself, and which registers in the etymology of the word 'spirit', that is, breath.68

Marinetti's performance of Zang Tumb Tumb was one of the main attractions or disturbances of the Futurists' tours throughout Europe. Saved as a recording69, its

CD copies still circulate among sound-text poets as an inspirational and influential source. The book, though, in its verbo-voco-visual entirety, is equally inspirational for the concrete poetry, lettrism and graphic design artists. Zang Tumb Tumb / Adrianopoli ottobre 1912 /parole in liberta, a poem of 159 pages, was published in Milan in 1914.

The book's pages are the iconic compositions made by a new typographic technique intended for vocal performance. The typeset and visual disposition of the pages contained hints for the poem's oral interpretation and the generation of sounds/noises.

Zang Tumb Tumb describes the battlefield of Adrianopolis in the war between

Turkey and Bulgaria, one of the Balkan wars that preceded the European conflagration of the First World War. Its aim was to report telegraphically and to transmit vibrationally the battle, the first in war history to use aviation, and to become a wireless observer of the grand panorama of the battlefield. The poem included onomatopoeic sounds of battle, airplane bombardment, explosions of grenades, and fusillades together with human and animal shouts, screams, shrieks, wails, hoots, howls, death rattles and sobs. The visual notation of these noises required a typographical revolution to be made in order "to treat words like torpedoes and to hurl them forth at all speeds; at velocity of

Walter J. Ong. "A Dialectic of Aural and Objectve Correlatives," in The Barbarian Within and other Fugitive Essays and Studies (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968), 28. 69 "The Battle of Adrianopolis" is recorded in April 1924 forZa Voce del Padrone as R6916 [78rpm] and later reissued on CD's Musica Futurista and Futurism andDada Reviewed. 51

stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules, atoms."70 A variety of

typographical characters were introduced as a pictorial representation of bursting

sounds of the battlefield. The verbo-voco-visual clash of parallel sounds and images

carried great performative potential - it made these conventionally separate sensations

to motivate one other. Thus, the non-linear text/picture page layout of Zang Tumb Tumb

explodes into an onomatopoeic vocal performance, often emphatically carried out by

the poet himself at the futurist serate. Besides producing a soundscape of a war theatre reciting the poem, Marinetti, in several of his manifestos, further elaborated his notion

of onomatopoeia as a device. This calls for an examination of the role of onomatopoeia in the remotivation of the sign in language and performance that I will address further

in my dissertation.

Another answer to the 'sound saturation' of the century was Luigi Russolo's manifesto L 'Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises, 1913). It extended Marinetti's verbo/vocal experiments with parole in liberta to the broader field of sound. Russolo actually wanted to create 'sounds in liberta'' and include them into music performance via specially made instruments called noise-intoners. These were supposed to be able to express the new futurist sensibility of uninterrupted simultaneity and dynamism of the industrial revolution.

As it [sound] grows ever more complicated today, musical art seeks out combinations more dissonant, stranger, and harsher for the ear. Thus it comes closer to the noise-sound. [...] Noise/music must represent the spirit of crowds, of great industrial complexes, of trains, of ocean liners, of battle fleets, of automobiles and airplanes. It must add to the great central themes of the musical poem the domain of the machine and the victorious realm of electricity.71

70 Walter J. Clough, Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement: A New Appraisal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969), 52. 71 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 50. 52

Russolo believed that contemporary music reduced to tonality and harmonics robbed sound of its ability to express life in its entirety and arouse the true emotions.

He claimed that harmonic music is restrictive and deaf to the sea of sound we live in that waits to be expressed. "We must break out of this limited circle of sounds [proper musical sounds] and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds."72 Therefore, Russolo constructed a series intonarumori - noise-intoners, first presented in Teatro Storchi in

Modena on June 2, 1913. An intonarumore looked like a sound-box with a large funnel and produced a wide array of sounds, which could be tuned and rhythmically regulated by means of mechanical manipulation. These instruments were capable of producing a large variety of timbres, some resembling the sounds of nature or machines (thus names such as the howler, the roarer, the crackler, the rubber, the hummer, the gurgler, the hisser, the whistler, the busters, the croaker, and the rustler). In addition, these mechanical sounding intonarumori made entirely original sounds similar to today's electronic synthesizers and samplers. Russolo was thus able to produce diverse rhythms and pitches, "thirty thousand different noises," as he claims, "not simply by imitation but by combining according to our fancy." Using intonarumori, Russolo also examined microtonal and improvisational structures, free from traditional harmonic music composition and developed a new graphic notation technique. Although viewed as an eccentric at his time, Russolo introduced a few aesthetic concepts still relevant for contemporary music and the art of sound: atonal and microtonal musical structure, musique concrete, sound environment, and soundscape.

The great drive of the musical avant-garde in the twentieth century has been towards the liberation and autonomisation of noise from the formalizations of

72 Ibid. 25. 73 Ibid. 29. 53

musical sound. Perhaps the great initiator of this tradition, which runs through the work of Edgard Varese, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez and John Cage was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who called, in his manifesto of March 1913, for an art of noises which would liberate the musical possibilities of noise in general, especially the diverse and unsynthesisable complexity of sound in the city.74

"The Art of Noise" brought about the liberation of music from the tyranny of rhythm and tone by the prevalent use of timbre that is the real, raw sound of the thing, or the thing's onomatopoeia. Determined by its irregular, blurring character, noise was also a means of disarticulation used in avant-garde art to counteract bourgeois order. It represented, in terms of the communication theory, an impediment in the rational, codified communication between the transmitter and recipient. As such it was closer to the material and energetic nature of the reality that Futurists wanted to explore. The tension between the code and its irregular material realization in the onomatopoeic vocal utterance or the production of atonal, arhythmical sound by intonarumori was intrinsically theatrical. Thus noise, in its communicational and material aspect, played against the clarity of message or harmony of music and significantly enriched the anti- bourgeois weaponry of the avant-garde art and theatre.

1.7. Perception and Cognition: the Aural and Temporal vs. Visual and Spatial

The contrast between the clarifying and analytic tendency of vision and the destabilizing and irrational power of sound has had a dramatic impact on the development of the cognitive and sensorial capacities of human creativity. In the visual arts, the objecthood of the represented structure and space has forever been played

Connor, Emotion in Postmodernism, 156. 54

against the fluidity and temporality of life attainable only in performance. The

Apollonian dream of clarity and vision, dominant in Western civilization, and spread by

acculturation throughout the whole world has dominated over the Dionysian inebriation

of music and dance. While indigenous oral cultures still provide human connection

with environment through a 'sound alignment' of language and the sound symbolism of ideophone words,75 in our culture of work, trade and state authority, communication relies on visual certainty with its codification embedded in printed words and signs.

Recently, in the age of 'simulacra' and the environment of a shattered world image, hungry for the authenticity and identity that is no more, we witness 'thepostmodern

renewal oj aurality'.' This contemporary trend is described in Martin Jay's study

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. The book scrutinizes vision's allegedly superior capacity to provide access to knowledge by a number of influential modern and postmodern French thinkers including Henri

Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz, Luce Irigaray,

Emmanuel Levinas and others. In their work, Martin Jay discovers a focus on aurality that probes metaphysical schemes of language and dominant cultural narratives. Their

'prioritization of the aural over the visual' introduces postmodern thought as 'a mode of hearing, of entendre, which will not allow for an easy slippage into 'understanding.'

Amongst these instigators of 'the postmodern renewal of aurality,' Roland Barthes,

Jacques Derrida and Jean-Francois Lyotard hold an especially important place in this dissertation: their writings have both informed and inspired my exploration of sound in avant-garde and futurist theatre.

75 See Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004). 55

The postmodern mistrust in the signifying process and its replacement by the hearing process harks back to the avant-garde struggle against closure of sign in discursive language. Steven Connor situates the beginning of this tendency of dissipation of an authoritative visual paradigm by an uncertain aural paradigm in the historical avant-garde. He asserts: "the auditory or acoustic has often been experienced and represented, not as a principle of strength, but as a disintegrative principle. Indeed, it was precisely this aspect of the aural which may have recommended it to the arts of dissolution practiced by Futurism and Dadaism."76 Through this assertion Connor recognizes Futurism and Dadaist art practice as the source of the postmodern insistence on aurality, but he points more to its implications in cultural theory than to its implications in contemporary theatre. Erika Fischer-Lichte connects the cultural and theatre revolution and regards the antitextual gesture of the avant-garde as a disturbance of the same kind. She considers the switch between the language of literary drama and the idiom of theatre performance parallel to the avant-garde turn towards orality/aurality. "The revolution of the theatre can only occur as cultural revolution if it succeeds in developing a 'language of the theatre' with which not messages are formulated but rather reactions evoked and provoked - in other words in which not the semantic but rather the pragmatic dimension dominates."77 Accordingly, I will focus on the pragmatic and performative repercussions of the futurist experiments in the field of sound. I will follow experiments that traveled on the path from the use of sound as an expressive means to the recognition of its materiality that made possible a genuine

Steven Connor, "The modern auditory I," in Rewriting the self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 213. 77 Erika Fischer-Lichte, "The Avant-garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Theatre," in Contours of the Theatrical Avant-garde, 92. 56

dramaturgy of sound. Thus sound in futurist performance has come full circle from a

means of representation to palpable matter that contains performative power in itself.

The renewal of aurality has applications for postmodern theatre and theory as

well. Patrice Pavis admits:

At a time when technology and Western civilization have attained a perfection in writing and in space conquered by the gaze and by signs, there no longer remains but the invisible refuse, difficult to locate and to notate, of the voice, of which we are incapable of grasping visually, thus systematically, the 'grain' (Roland Barthes) or the pulsion. By insisting on the vocal signifier, on the orality dimension in theatrical practice, theatre is less interested in the utterances (visible, comprehensible and made concrete in a scenic space) than in the enunciation (place of the enunciating subjects, noises and failures of their production). Theatre thus has a voice at court [my emphasis, M.O.]. 78

Most of historians and critics have not addressed the futurist legacy in the field of sound in theatre. Up to now, only theoreticians of sound art like Steve

McCaffery, Douglas Kahn and Steve Connor, for instance, have paid close attention to the futurist use of sound. They have identified Futurists as the pioneers in the development of sound poetry that also inspired an innovative approach to arts and theatre in post-structuralist theory. Investigating the path from 'phonic to sonic' in the development of sound art that extended vocal gestures into acoustical ones, Steven

McCaffery alleges that futurist and avant-garde sound poets and performers "freed the word from semantic mandates, redirecting a sensed energy from themes and message into matter and force."79 This conception of vocal sound as 'matter and force' is inherited from the Futurists' rendition of bruitist poems like Zang Tumb Tumb in which sound poetry demonstrated its potential as theatrical performance. The perception of sensed energy that turns into matter and force in the verbo-vocal performance is allied

78 Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: PAJ Publishing, 1982), 190. 79 Steve McCaffery, "From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem," in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, 155. 57

to Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of theatre as the confluence of libidinal traffic of

energies or 'pulsational displacements' instead of the production of representative

replacements.

Marinetti's manifestos of poetry and theatre often show similar or

corresponding ideas making futurist theatre theory very much indebted to the theory of

poetry proper. The brevity of the theatre syntheses undoubtedly draws from the form of

poems and the futurist poets' frequent use of analogy. Additionally, the termfisicqffblia

or physical madness concerning stage performance, coined in "The Variety Theatre

Manifesto," can be understood as a performative counterpart to the previously

conceived term 'lyrical intoxication' concerning poetic inspiration used in "Destruction

of Syntax - Wireless Imagination - Words Set Free." "Lyrical intoxication," explains

Marinetti in the manifesto, "allows us, or rather forces us, to deform and reshape words;

to lengthen or shorten them; to reinforce their center or their extremities by increasing

or diminishing the number of vowels and consonants. [...] I now declare that lyricism is

the rarest faculty of intoxicating yourself with life, filling life with your own

intoxication." In futurist performance the 'lyrical obsession with matter' served as the

most powerful antidote for the psychological paradigm of the naturalist theatre. Thus

this concept conceived in lyrical poetry gained crucial significance in futurist theatre

where "the dirty thing and dirty word psychology," has been eliminated by 'the

authority of instinct and intuition."81

Fisicoffolia - physical madness - became a key word for the total inclusion of the performer in the act of performance that embodies a carnal, libidinal, pulsative, and

80 Stung by Salt and War: Creative texts of the Italian Avant-gardist F. T. Marinetti, ed. Richard J. Pioli, (New York: P. Lang, 1987), 52. 81 F.T. Marinetti, "Variety Theatre Manifesto," in Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 183. 58

energetic sense of presentation. In the same way as the word in poetry was freed from

the syntactic and signifying yoke by the onomatopoetic vocal gesture, the performance

was absolved from representation by physical madness as described in '"The Variety

Theatre Manifesto,' [...] a giant and expanded metaphor for the futurist theatre."82 "The

variety theater does not deal in illusion as a play or opera does. It does not tell a story or

represent anything. It tends to be rather than to refer," or just as Michael Kirby

laconically comments, "the trapeze artist flies without representing flight."83

1.8. Sign and Sound in the Land of Semiotics

"The radical redefinition of the theatre, which the avant-garde began at the turn

of the century, fundamentally transformed the two categories 'text' and 'performance'

and thereby produced a new, highly charged dynamic between them," maintains Erika

Fischer-Lichte: "The history of European theatre can be understood as a record of shifting

R4

dominance between these two competing dramatic categories." Concurrently,

Christopher Innes wonders whether "the central issue in studying drama today is how we

evaluate physical aspects of performance: theatre as bodily expression, as opposed to the presentation of written words."85 The Futurists participated in the avant-garde redefinition of the theatre by shifting dominance to the performative side. With the concepts of 'lyrical obsession with matter' andfisicoffblia, they sought a theatre that would reflect 'a special sort of reality that violently attacks the nerves.' Extremely defiant

82 Kirby, Futurist Performance, 20. 83 Ibid. 22. 84 Fischer-Lichte, Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde, 79. 85 Christopher Innes, "In the Beginning was the Word: Text versus Performance," in The Performance Text, ed. Domenico Pietropaolo (Ottawa: Legas, 1997), 9. 59

towards the dramatic text, Futurists aimed at performance as bodily expression. Their

anti-textual attitude meant also a development of the vocal gesture generated in the poetry

as a consequence of the futurist renewal of sensibility, the movement's technophilia and

return to the primitive forces. Onomatopoetic sound mimesis of exploding shells,

whistling shrapnel or a heavy engine roar sought a primitive non-verbal vocal gesture that

stretched the limits of performer's utterance in which his physicality was at stake. This

kind of performance adheres to Artaud's proposition that 'a sign language of theatre would consist of noises, cries, gestures, poses and signs which would only include words

as 'incantations.'86

Analyzing the avant-garde theatre's return to primal ritual forces and

incantatory language, Christopher Innes discusses the particular use of language by

Balinese dancers that "gave Artaud a working example of the concrete language, intended

for the senses and independent of speech, which has been such an influential concept in

avant-garde theatre." In Balinese dance, Artaud saw a theatre that not only "eliminates words but expresses a state prior to language" presenting "a sacred physical impulse which is before words:"

What little dialogue Balinese spectacle contained was in an archaic tongue that apparently neither performers, nor the Balinese audience (let alone the French spectators), nor even priests understood. It thus became an incantation. The only other vocal communication was on the level of pure sound, so that meaning was transmitted on a physical level through attitudes.87

Varlaam Shishkov's mystical glossolalia that inspired poet Kruchenykh represented a similar practice of ritual language. The protagonist of Khlebnikov's

supersaga Zangezi, a speechmaker and human interpreter of the birds, insects, gods, and

86 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. M. C. Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 70. 87 Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1966), 15. 60

stars, spoke zaumny yazyk made of similar concrete, pre-textual vocal incantations. The

same pre-semantic qualities of vocal performance can be found in the onomatopoeia of

Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tumb, the grotesque vocalizations of Cangiullo's Piedigrotta, and

the alogical speech of Balla's theatrical synthesis To Understand Weeping. One cannot

underestimate the role of switching channels from a logical and understandable wording

to an alogical and incantational voicing in the formation of a new theatre idiom. The

dramaturgy of sound found its base in this creative counterpoint.

R. S. Gordon puts forth similar argumentation in his attempt at a reappraisal of

futurist theatre.88 He explains the anti-textual return to the primal state of sign in

Futurism quoting Jacques Derrida's essays on Artaud's theatre of pure presence where

"gesture and speech have not yet been separated by the logic of representation."89

In theatrical illegibility, in the night that precedes the book, the sign has not yet been separated from the force. It is not quite yet a sign, in the sense in which we understand sign, but is no longer a thing, which we conceive only as opposed to sign. [...] It [non-representational theatre] is neither a book nor a work, but an energy, and in this sense it is the only art of the life. 90

Gordon gives evidence of a significant coincidence in the two theatrical poetics

without pretensions to draw big conclusions on futurist influences on Artaud. But his

reappraisal makes ground for further exploration of presentational stance of futurist

theatre, especially in its dramaturgy of sound. Namely, if Gordon's attribution of the

Artaudian notion of 'neither object nor sign but a force' to the futurist theatre is valid; it might be even more relevant for futurist sound.

88 See R. S. Gordon, "The Italian Futurist Theatre: A Reappraisal," Modern Language Revue (London) 85.2 (1990): 349-361. 89 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 240. 90 Ibid. 189,247. Sound is a pure energy of futurist theatricality of presence. Sounds and vocal gestures are capable of turning text into performance just in the extent they succeed to betray words' denotative function. The vocal gesture acquires materiality and earns dramaturgical currency exactly by dissociating itself from the mere textual meaning.

Furthermore, since sounds are occurrences i.e. temporal perceptual events with no repetition they form nothing but a non-representational performance. Now the question arises whether to approach such a perceptual event as an act of theatrical semiosis or a mere performance device with no representational meaning. The semioticians faced this issue when examining a non-textual theatre idiom based on the synergy of sound, light, movement, objects and people on the contemporary stage. Since the communication of meaning was here seriously put in question, they came up with a notion of such theatre idiom as, so to say, a cloud of 'floating signifiers.' Whether this cloud was travelling towards any signification was left to the audience to decide.

Thus Erika Fisher-Lichte describes the performance of avant-garde theatre as a fabric of floating signifiers where the text is just one material among others. Rather than signification, she focuses on the correlation of rhythm and space, time and body, mostly employing the aural paradigm in her analysis. For her, perceptual and temporal concerns are notably more pronounced than signification in a "language of the theatre with which not messages are formulated but rather reactions evoked and provoked." Futurist theatre epitomizes such an immediate perceptual event aimed to provoke the audience's participation.

In his discussion of the relationship between avant-garde and contemporary semiology, Patrice Pavis argues: "the present success of performances can be explained

1 Ficher-Lichte, Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde, 92. 62

by the rediscovery of the temporal 'event' aspect unique to the theatre." In that respect,

sound's inner material qualities make it ideally suited to carry the performance in its

temporality and immediacy aspect. Sound or sounding is by nature a temporal

performative event. An 'aural object' lives as long as it sounds, and it literally does not

point to any meaning outside itself. As Steve McCaffery puts it "sound - the event and

not the servant of semantics - becomes a possible antidote to the paradox of sign. That a

thing need not be a this standing for that but immediately a that [.. .makes sound] free of

the implications of the metaphysics of linguistic absence."92

Eventness and temporality of the performance are features of the aural paradigm

of the world in contrast to the visual one. This opposition is crucial for the understanding

of the crisis of sign and the controversy between discursive language of written text and

performative idiom of the avant-garde theatre.

If the concept of language, sign or specificity is thus in a state of crisis, crystallizing, but also blocking avant-garde thought, this is probably because it has linked its fate too closely to the notions ofmise en scene and spatiality. [...] A domination of another avant-garde, that of time, rhythm and voice, is seeking to break. Perhaps one should see in this mutation the failure or at least the limits of semiology based solely on a Cartesian examination, measurable, geometric and in a word, spatial, of the theatrical performance. [...] Insistence on stage visuals as opposed to text too hastily dismissed the temporal, continuous and pulsational aspect of the theatrical performance [my emphasis, M.O.].

Patrice Pavis clarifies that the avant-garde shift between the text and

performance happened in the spatial field of the mise en scene but, at the same time,

acknowledges the arrival of another avant-garde based on the aurality principle. Thus,

Steve McCaffery, "Some Notes Re Sound, Energy, and Performance," in The Poetry Reading, A Contemporary Compendium on Language and Performance, ed. Stephen Vincent and Ellen Zweig (San Francisco: Momo's Press, 1981), 283. 93 Patrice Pavis, "Avant-Garde Theatre and Semiology: A Few Practices and the Theory behind them," in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: PAJ Publ., 1982), 186. 63

Pavis quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard's criticism of Artaud for stopping halfway in his denial of discourse.

He turned towards the construction of a 'tool', which was to be yet another language, a system of signs, a grammar of gestures, hieroglyphs. [...] Silencing the body through the theatre of the playwright, a form of theatre dear to middle-class Europe of the nineteenth century, is nihilistic; but making it speak vocabulary and a syntax of mime, songs, dances, as does the Noh, is another way of annihilating it: a body "entirely" transparent, skin and flesh the bone that is a spirit, intact from any pulsational movement, 94

event, opacity.

Lyotard finds that a codified theatre idiom would betray the performance and leave its core - body and spirit intact. Yet, if we follow the aurality paradigm, it should be understood that the vocal gesture still maintains immediacy and fluidity of sound and therefore denies any codification. It retains all the features of the grain of the voice and its opacity in both Pour enfinir avec lejugement de Dieu, Artaud's radio drama of primal vocal energy, cries, groans, guttural sounds and glossolalia, and Zang Tumb Tumb,

Marinetti's onomatopoeic rendition of his free-word poem.

Moreover, pulsational movement, eventness and opacity are primary characteristics of the sound and this is exactly what the futurist emphasis on sound in performance brings forth. The sound/noise, as an exemplary manifestation of the

Bergsonian indivisible movement and as an event by itself, entails a durational axe of the theatrical event. Sound prevents the solidifying of'floating signifiers' into a grid, which would make them transferable into a syntactical language. By refusing its transliteration into a code, sound keeps its opacity. We cannot see through the skin and flesh, and understand the bones by any analytic discourse or, in case of naturalist drama/theatre, by any psychoanalytic technique - they will leave them intact. On the contrary, we can sense 94 Jean-Francis Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union generate d'editions, 1973), 100, quoted in Pavis (1982). 64

pulsations of the body thrown at us by the pulsational medium of sound - sound as matter

and energy.

Helga Finter also introduces the aural paradigm in semiological discourse while

analyzing the avant-garde's tendency to disarticulate Cartesian logocentrism. She speaks

of 'the theatricalization of voice' that 'brings the signifying process to light at the expense

of our fixation on meaning [... by] dramatizing the formation of the being man in/by

languages."95 It means that human utterance itself, vocalization of thought or feeling or

any other kind of human sound production like onomatopoeia, glossolalia and similar

may be considered as a performance through which man attains presence. The

performer's presentation by the voice is such a drama of coming into being 'in/by

languages.' Finter's positioning of the vocal performance in the formation 'in/by

languages' conforms to Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice where the voice is

situated between body and language.

In addition, Finter finds that the experimental theatre of the new avant-garde, of

Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson "centers its preoccupation not on

the text, but on an orality that, on the one hand, takes the written (the seen) as spoken

sounds and transforms sight into hearing and kinesthesia and, on the other hand, takes

tone and sound as spatially written, thus transforming hearing to sight."96 We deal here

with another concept of orality/aurality that regards voice as a concrete sound that can

cross the sensory borders due to its own materiality. In such theatre, voice acquires an

independent quality like colour in abstract painting or sound/noise in concrete music.

Voice thus becomes a sound independent of its source: independent of a human psyche

95 Helga Finter, "Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Teatricalization of Voice," Modern Drama, 26 (1983), 501. 96 Ibid. 504 65 and a body that suffers or enjoys. Human sound joins inanimate sounds, colours, shapes, movements and thus becomes one among the material elements of the performance. But it does not enter into the mix: it lives its own material life.

1.9. The Materiality of Sound on the Contemporary Stage

As Patrice Pavis noted, after 'the encounter between mise en scene and artistic language' in terms of the spatial organization of visual signs, the time has come for 'a domination of another avant-garde, that of time, rhythm and voice, which is seeking to break.' This avant-garde relies on the concepts developed in the futurist dramaturgy of sound and recognition of its materiality in performance which continue to inspire a current theatrical discourse. Pavis finds experience of materiality in theatre when the spectator perceives various sensory materials that are still on the side of the signifier, not trying to reach the signified but energetically pulsating from the stage.

Whether it is a question of the presence and corporeality of the actor, the texture of his voice, or some kind of music, colour or rhythm, the spectators are at first submerged in an aesthetic experience and the material event; they do not have to reduce this experience to words, they savour rather the 'erotic in the theatre process' without trying to reduce the performance to a series of signs.97

Undoubtedly, sound in Futurism was such a pulsational element of performance based on its dynamism and temporality. Besides, the Futurists inscribed another aspect of the materiality of sound into the theatrical or artistic sign: that of its fluidity, which is its essential physical feature. This was also manifest in the arts of flux and informel in the

97 Patrice Pavis, "The State of Current Theatre Research," Applied Semiotics/Semiotique appliquee, vol. 1, no 3 (1997), 213. 66

1960s, when Tadeusz Kantor, one of the most prominent theatre authors of the new

avant-garde, for some time embraced the idea of the art informel in his theatre. The

informel painting of gestural expressionism and lyrical abstraction adopted in Kantor's

theatre, no doubt, comes from the same intuitive source as Marinetti's 'lyrical obsession

with matter' and the onomatopoeic echoing of sound material, since it "involves getting

into the thick of worldly events, plunging into material, profoundly sensing the empirical

dimension and colliding with drama of existence." In his manifesto "The Informel

theatre" (1961), Kantor sought "REALITY in its elementary state: MATTER that is freed

from abiding the laws of construction."99 This raw matter should be sensed in all

elements of performance; in the actors' bodies ready to be moulded; in their speech and

vocal articulation "[that] resembles the remotest, the wildest forms (howling of the pack

of dogs) and crudest sounds (cracking of bones)."100

Tadeusz Kantor's performance piece Dead Class (1975), for example, can be

compared to the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism. As the

artist of informel danced around and within the pictorial space, Kantor stood on stage,

conducted actors and sculpted an energetic performance/installation. In his performative

act, Kantor sculpted with the help of sound (of a valse francais) a human pyramid that

constantly crumbles, a pyramid of elderly classmates, with dummy infant doubles

attached to their bodies, who try to reincarnate happier days. There was no representation

of a play here but just the convulsive pulsation of matter (actors/sounds/objects/space) that struggles to acquire some meaningful shape. All performance elements entered into a

Roberto Passini, L'Informe nell'arte contemporanea (Milano: Mursia, 1989), 7. 99 Tadeusz Kantor, A Journey through Other Spaces: Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, ed. Michal Kobialka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 51. 67

dynamic relationship that creates tension and rhythm, governed by the dramaturgy of

sound extended to the sculptural stage space.

This conception of 'sculptural dramaturgy' stems from futurist recognition of

temporality, dynamism and materiality of sound as well. It suggests a dramaturgy that

unfolds the performance by kinetic sculpting of its elements in space according to the

deployment of sound in time determined above all by duration, Bergsonian la duree in

which there is a continuum of time and space. Thus the notion of la duree, embraced in

futurist art and in Cagean music and performance as continuity of sound, noise and

silence, also provides the ground for the dramaturgy of space. The whole theatrical event

is shaped as a composite spatiotemporal stage construction. The dramaturgy of sound

therefore can be also regarded as a dramaturgy of space or a sculptural dramaturgy that

served as a source for the creation (or at least conceptualization) of the plastic moto

rumorist complex of futurist stage similar to the Bauhaus theatre experiments.

Wassily Kandinsky, whose The Yellow Sound (discussed earlier) represents a pioneering effort in such stage composition, applied a similar idea in the 1928 Bauhaus

stage production of Pictures at an Exhibition at the Friedrich Theatre in Dessau.

Althought based on Modest Mussorgsky's orchestral suite of the same name, the piece

turned out to be anything but programmatic and went far beyond the painted or musicalized content of an exhibition. It transformed aural into visual attractions and vice

versa communicating an abstract sound-image from stage. Kandinsky admitted in his

diary: "The entire staging was abstract... I used two dancers in addition... I too did not 68 proceed in a programmatic way, but rather used forms that swam before my eyes on listening to the music."101

The floating, gliding and standing of the forms, the alternation of colours according to their types and intensities, appeared as a dramatic procedure full of suspense. The image was in constant motion, and every moment was experienced as an image. At the moment the movement came to stop, the construction of the composition was completed: this was a dramatic climax. The affinity with the artistic form of the play as such was revealed here in a surprising way. 102

This Bauhaus kinetic piece performed by two marionette-like dancers and big floating screens was the kind of theatre envisioned by Edward Gordon Craig. But, actually it was Mussorgsky's music and its temporal deployment that gave impetus and rhythm to the visual kinesis of the piece. Furthermore, according to Kandinsky's sound- based theory of art, there are only external, idiomatic, differences between visual, aural and kinetic elements. They all together create a play/performance's dynamic structure that emanates 'inner vibrations' or 'inner sound' resonating in the spectator's soul.

The independence of sound, as both performative and constructive material explored in futurist theatre experiments, is also characteristic of the work of Robert

Wilson. Wilson wanted to 'channel switch' the audio and video, two sensations that had been framed in the separate fields of aurality and visuality by the traditional arts. He explained that in a silent movie, one imagines sound while in a radio play one imagines pictures without limits. Therefore, since there is an external/internal image and sound in both, 'channel switching' becomes possible. Wilson was thus trying to juxtapose 'a radio image over the film's voice,' radio drama and silent movie maintaining their autonomy.

Wilson's 'operas' or architectural stage compositions had been created under his own,

101 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 750. 102 Annabelle Melzer, Dada and Surrealist Performance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 21. 69 and futurist dramaturgy of sound's, synaesthetic dictum expressed in his interview on the

1986 staging of Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller:

You don't have to listen to words, because words don't mean anything. You just enjoy scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feeling they all evoke. Listen to the pictures [My emphasis, MO.]."103

Thus, figures, objects and the entire stage have been set in a kinetic constellation of aural and visual icons. The traditional plot/character development of a play has been abandoned in favour of an abstract, spatiotemporal theatrical piece. In that sense, Robert

Wilson's idea of synaesthetic/synthetic theatre can be regarded as a contemporary counterpart of the futurist dramaturgy of sound and the futurist transposition of the principles of analogy and iconicity from sound poetry to theatre that will be examined further in the dissertation.

Frederick J. Ruf, Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 67. 70

Chapter Two: Words-in-freedom, Sound Poetry and Performativity of Futurist Serate

Dramatic art without poetry cannot exist, that is, without intoxication and without synthesis..' Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

2.1. Introduction

Avant-garde painters and poets explored notions of simultaneity between visual and the aural images of letters and words. Wassily Kandinsky, for example, published a book of woodcuts and verses, Kldnge (Sounds, 1912) while Guillaume Apollinaire experimented with his ideogrammes lyriques {Calligrammes, poemes de lapaix et de la guerre 1913-1916), a melange of art and writing that might be considered a verbo-visual composition. Indeed, Symbolist poets were the first to free the word from its merely descriptive function. Stephane Mallarme's poem, Un coup de Des jamais n 'abolira le

Hasard (1892), was an early example of the typographical revolution that Marinetti promoted in his poetry and manifestos of words-in-freedom. In these experiments, the word became an element of a verbo-visual collage where its aural and graphical values became more significant for the poetic expression than its referentiality. Futurists shared a basic preoccupation with the phonetic structure of poetry with Symbolists. But while

Symbolists strived for the indispensable, suggestive word that exhibits 'correspondences' between reality and an ideal world, Futurists rejected their 'passeisf poetic ideals. While

Stephane Mallarme wanted to get to the essence through a purified, difficult, melodic language in order to foreground the absent, the symbol, not the thing, Futurists were preoccupied by the thing itself, by the matter and materiality of the content of their

1 F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R.W. Flint (New York: Farrar, 1972), 113. 71 poetry, that is, by unrefined sound. Futurist poetic inspiration did not exist anywhere else but in the here and now - in the reality that flies speedily and loudly into a future that has already begun. In their vision there was no room for sublimation or projection of reality onto a distant ideality. They wanted to grasp a future that was already presenting itself through the intensities of life and the commotion of the modern world: booming traffic, speedy communications, mechanization, electrification, and a new scientific understanding of matter and energy. The futurist renewal of human sensibility demanded from their poetry a direct, unmediated engagement with the world and a heightened expressiveness aimed at the readers'/spectators's senses. Marinetti wanted to combat the grace, affectation and static ideal of Mallarme's 'indispensable' words: "I want rather to seize them brutally and toss them in the reader's face [...] Today we no longer wish to order words syntactically before throwing them out in breaths."2 Words-in-freedom were not meant to be mere prosodic devices that relied on sound as a conduit of poetic meaning but to become markers of vocal gestures, elements of percormance thrown out in breaths.

Most of the futurist manifestos and poems in the period before the end of First

World War exhibited a 'lyric intoxication with reality' using an emphatic verbal iconicity in both sound and print that revolutionized literary production and inspired contemporary text-sound art. But their entry on stage came on call for arte-azione. Intrinsically confrontational oral features of their texts got fully articulated in the stage renditions that made performative core of the futurist serate. The theatricalization and politicization of the act of reading in the midst of the visual art exhibits provided a precedent for

2 Stung by Salt and Water: Creative texts of the Italian Avant-Gardist F. T. Marinetti, ed. Richard J. Pioli (New York: P. Lang, 1987), 52. 72 contemporary avant-garde installations, happenings, conceptual and performance art events. These theatre evenings, called seratefuturiste, were rowdy places where poets had to fight for the audience. If they wanted to disturb and surprise the spectator, as they declared, they had to heighten their vocal expression until it was loud enough. They had to produce noise in both senses of the word: spoiling the harmonic sound of "musical" poetry and impeding the usual channels of verbal communication. Obviously, traditional poetic prosody, even in free verse, which Marinetti had practiced earlier, was insufficient.

Marinetti rejected free verse because it "pushes the poet fatally towards facile sound effects, a banal playing with speech, monotone cadences, [and] foolish rimes."3 Futurist poetics, on the other hand, strived for dynamism, simultaneity and compenetration unatteinable by free verse. Words-in-freedom dynamited the chains of logical speech and syntax. The ensuing structural and prosodic changes of poetry empowered the futurist declaimer at the serate, most notably Marinetti himself, to execute a vocal performance of a poem relying exclusively on the unleashed sounds of its words. Onomatopoeia, incantations, newly coined words, glossolalia and non-verbal utterances were employed at serate for the sake of their performative attributes and formed the nucleus of futurist theatricality. In dynamic declamation, Futurists explored and exhibited the strength of verbal material whose qualities were certainly aural rather than lexical; they concentrated to sound rather than to the sense.

In trying at the same time to make poetic language more expressive through expanding its material potential, the Italian Futurists were setting out to create a medium with more immediacy and sensual impact. In semiotic terms, they were moving language from the arbitrary in the direction of motivated (Saussure), or from symbolic to the iconic (Pierce).

3 Ibid. 48. 4 John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the first avant-garde, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 26. 73

John J. White wrote a book on literary Futurism, generally focusing on poetry, but his argument reveals the contribution of futurist poetics to the theatre as well.

According to White's analysis, the acoustic and visual expansion of the sign through

onomatopoeia, free expressive orthography and typographical revolution increased the

iconicity of futurist poetry. This expansion created a medium able to reflect the intrinsic performativity, immediacy and sensual impact of the poetry producing aural and visual

icons. Furthermore, in the field of sound poetry, this had pragmatic implications on the dynamic declamation that turned verbal meaning into vocal sounding. The shift from verbal to vocal in poetry performance met another requirement of avant-garde theatre: the rejection of textual representation in favour of a presentational stage idiom.

The printed poetry of' words-in-freedom sought typography able to reflect visually all particularities of the diversified sound features and stand as icons of the now reshaped words in order to suggest their most appropriate elocution. The bold agitation

sought in the manifestos was emphasized by various typesets in futurist propagandist pamphlets as well what made them an ideal fit with the poetry's oral features. Just as futurist poetry was written and printed as a score for vocal performance, futurist manifestos were meant for rhetorical renditions at arte-azione gatherings. They both represented the scripts for hybrid, mixed-media events - serate - the centre ring events of the futurist circus that took place in playhouses. These theatrical evenings promoted the movement's poetics through the reading of manifestos and provocative exhibitions of anti-traditional art forms in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and performance. Giovanni

Papini, translator of a selection of Bergson's texts published in 1909, called for the acknowledgment of Futurism's theoretical significance. "Futurism," he wrote in 74

Lacerba "has made people laugh, shout and spit. Let us see if it can make them think."5

Apparently, the mission of arte-azione events could not be exhausted by mere provocation, their strategy was to promote the futurist understanding of the world intuited through a new sensibility.

2.2. Bruitist Renditions of Manifestos and Sound Poetry at the Futurist Serate

A typical futurist serata was orchestrated by the sound of futurist poetry in performance and the orality of the manifestos. A serata would often begin on a serious note, with hymns like Inno alia vita - sinfonia futurista del maestro Balilla Pratella or

Inno allapoesia nuova by Paolo Buzzi. During the evening, the readings of the manifestos would heat up the atmosphere with their confrontational stance and unabashed boasting. According to Michael Webster, the antagonistic tone of the manifestos reflects their intrinsic orality.

In this [oral] context 'stirring the audience up' by direct address, pathetic exhortations, and emotional and humorous exaggeration is not at all uncommon. Such a practice has the immediate character of an event, is descriptive and propagandistic rather than narrative, and leads naturally to the theatricality baiting of the serate futuriste.'6

Webster derives this argument from Walter Ong's distinction between orality and literacy based on the confrontational attitude of the former. Ong claims that orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle where language is a mode of action rather than simply a countersign of thought. He holds that "writing fosters abstraction that

5 Quoted in Joshua Taylor, Futurism, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 10. 6 Michael Webster, "Words-in-freedom and the Oral Tradition," Visible Language, 23 (Winter 1989), 69. 75

disengages knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another."7

Ong provides examples of words as actions or oral events from folk proverbs and riddles,

tongue-lashings, ancient rhetorical practices, as well as exhorted verbal confrontations

taken from oral literature including the Iliad, Beowulf, the Bible, and medieval European

romance. The confrontational attitude and use of the psychodynamics of orality of

futurist manifestos, Webster posits, places them in the wider genre of oral-literature.

Marinetti's reply to a letter by Gino Severini illustrates this attitude:

I have read your manuscript [...] it has nothing of manifesto in it. [...] I advise you to.. .rework it [...] recasting the whole new part in the form of Manifesto. [...] I think I shall persuade you by all that I know about the art of making manifestos, which I possess, and by my desire to place in full light, not in half\\$\t, your own remarkable genius as a futurist.8

When advocating 'the art of making manifestos,' Marinetti had in mind his own

uncompromisingly emphatic style of writing for 'the pleasure of being booed.' "We make

use of every ugly sound, every expressive cry from the violent life that surrounds us,"

Marinetti exclaimed: "We bravely create the 'ugly' literature... Each day we must spit on

the Altar of Art."9 Promoting the manifestos' succinct style, he doesn't mince his words:

"It is stupid to write one hundred pages where one would do."10 His arrogance and direct

address in reading manifestos often grew to open hostility, while his sound poetry

illustrations aided his theoretical expositions. One of the first examples of words-in- freedom, the poem "BATTLE (WEIGHT+ STINK)," containing tactile analogies and

mimetic onomatopoeia of vocables bursting with sound, was part of the "Technical

Manifesto of Futurist Literature."

7 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 44. 8 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 81. 9 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 89. 10 Ibid. 125. 76

.. tuumbtuumb alarms Gargaresch bursting crackling pus Tinkling knapsacks rifles clogs [...] filth whirlwind orange blossoms filigree misery nuts squares maps jasmine + nutmeg + rose arabesque mosaic carrion stings bungling [...] tatatata rifle-fire peec pac puun pan pan mandarin tawny wool machine-guns rattles leper's hovels sores forward... n

A further example of the sound expressiveness of manifesto writing and reading is found in Carlo Carra's'The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells":

Reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrreddest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuuut. Greens, that can never be greener, greeeeeeeens, that screeeeeeem,

yellows, as violent as can be; polenta yellows, saffron yellows, brass yellows12

In this case, besides the sound enhancement achieved by multiplying vowels and consonants that prompted emphatic vocal rendition, the words-in-freedom brought a palpable pragmatic support for Carra's theoretical elaboration of synaesthesia in the manifesto. Indeed, the synaesthetic transgressions of art disciplines' limits were at the core of the new, futurist sensibility and its 'lyrical intoxication with matter.'

Thus the seriousness of a serata shaken up by the colourful manifestos would often turn into a radical form of variety cabaret through ludic provocations/poems by

Aldo Palazzeschi and freewordist novelties by Luciano Folgore, Auro d'Alba and

Francesco Cangiullo. A benign entertainment would be replaced by a subversive ridicule of the audience's complaisance that provoked a violent reaction from the stalls. The cacophonic declamation oiZang Tumb Tumb by Marinetti, absurdist renditions of proto- sintesi Piedigrotta and the Funeral da un critico passatista by Francesco Cangiullo, and parodic onomatopoeia of Discussione sul Futurismo di due critici sudanesi by Giacomo

Balla were advertently most irritating. Here is how Balla's imaginary Sudanese critics talked about Futurism:

1' Pioli, Stung by Salt and Water, 41. 12 Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 112. 77

Farcionisgnaco gurninfuturo bordubalotaompimagnusasfacataca mimitirichita plucu sbumu farufutusmaca sgacgnacgnac chr chr stechestecheteretete maumauzizitititititititi...'3

This type of offensive nonsense induced stupour in the audience making its belated reaction even angrier. Of course it was all part of the strategy for the renewal of

sensibility that could be achieved through the immediacy of a noisy declamation rather

than the appeal to reason of a conventional lecture. In a report of the Grande serata futurista held on December 12,1913 at the Florentine Teatro Verdi, and printed on the

cover page of Lacerba,14 two columns list the antagonistic camps. On the stage side there were 2 poets (Marinetti and Cangiullo), 3 painters (Boccioni, Carra and Soffici), 1 anti-philosopher (Papini), 1 immoralist (Tavolato), and 1 occasional volunteer. On the hall side there were 5000 enemies - clerics, bourgeois, students, liberals, aristocrats, the virtuous, journalists, policemen, and vulgar people. Two more columns list arms, states of mind, allies, wounded, and the results of the battle on both sides.

Apparently, a bellicose attitude was expected from both sides. Futurists, who were mounting the stage for the 'pleasure of being booed,' included this in their strategy.

The futurist declaimer now served as an object the audience could react against. The reading set in motion a mechanism that went far beyond the appreciation of an artistic creation. The text functioned as a score, the reciter as a conductor, and the audience as the orchestra. The main task of the declaimer was to challenge the spectators and to provoke them into reactions of an unpremeditated kind.15

Some of the serate ended with Marinetti's scolding of local, passeist practices, like in his addresses to Venice, Florence or Rome, for instance. In those cases, the

Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista (Lausanne: La Cite / L'Age d'Homme, 1976), vol. 1,49. Also 14 See Appendix, Figure 1. 15 Giinter Berghaus, Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 33. 78 audience erupted with hostility. Futurist artists considered their animosity a rewarding experience since they delighted in the 'pleasure of being booed' proclaiming that 'it is not possible today to influence the warlike Italian soul, except through the theatre.'

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti performed his famous onomatopoeic poem Zang

Tumb Tumb at the Dore Gallery in London on April 28, 1914, during one of many international tours of futurist propaganda.

Dynamically and synoptically I declaimed several passages from my ZANG TUMB TUUMB (the Siege of Adrianople). On the table in front of me I had a telephone, some boards, and matching hammers that permitted me to imitate the Turkish general's orders and the sounds of artillery and machine-gun fire. Blackboards had been set up in three parts of the hall, to which in succession I either ran or walked, to sketch rapidly an analogy with chalk. My listeners, as they turned to follow me in all my evolutions, participated, their entire bodies inflamed with emotion, in the violent effects of the battle described by my '"words-in-freedom.'' There were two big drums in a distant room, from which the painter Nevinson, my colleague, produced the boom of cannon, when I told him to do so over the telephone. The swelling interest of the English audience became frantic enthusiasm when I achieved the greatest dynamism by alternating the Bulgarian song "Sciumi Maritza" with the dazzle of my images and the clamor of the onomatopoeic artillery.16

The poet's description reads like a casebook of a theatrical performance. All the features of a stage script are included, only, in this case, the stage spilled into the audience space as if it were an act of environmental theatre. Zang tumb tumb with his stage directions affixed represented a straightforward performance text for the event of a dynamic and synoptic declamation. Stage props, in actuality, visible noise instruments, lay closeby. Sometimes the telephone played a role in the stage action of the communication from the battlefield, but it was also often used to cue English painter

Christopher R. W. Nevinson who provided sound effects behind the scene. The three blackboards marked blocking points of the mise-en-scene deliberately aimed for a

16 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 145. 79 disorienting effect by making the audience turn and follow the performer's abrupt change of pace and direction. From the point of view of physical performance, Marinetti's declamation fits with the description offisicoffolia as discussed in "The Variety Theatre

Manifesto." Furthermore, his simultaneous use of onomatopoeic words-in-freedom and their rapidly chalk-sketched visual analogies were transpositions of the free orthography and the sound content of the poem onto the stage. The iconic audio-visual material already existing in the poem provided a dramaturgical potential that was applicable to theatrical performance. And one should not forget the musicality of the piece that culminated when 'the dazzle of my images and the clamor of the onomatopoeic artillery' provided a melodic and rhythmic counterpoint to the deep, slow refrain of a Bulgarian folk song, Sciumi Maritza Okrvavljena (River Maritza Murmurs with Blood).

r

Marinetti's London declamation followed the performances of Zang Tumb

Tumb at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome and his recitations in February 1914 at St.

Petersburg and Moscow. Accounts of these performances also confirm their spatial presentation and the prevalent use of onomatopoeia that together with the accompanying non-vocal sound made the poem fully theatrical. Accordingly, Michael Kirby concludes that futurist poetry can be regarded as an inherently theatrical genre: 'Words became animated, poetry became theatre.'

Most theatre historians regard serate as embryonic of later developments of the synthetic theatre and the theatre of surprise. Several of them find similarities between futurist theatre poetics and poetry as a quote from Donald Marinelli's book The Origins of Futurist Theatricality illustrates: Marinetti wanted plays to achieve the dynamic effect a poem creates in just a few stanzas, just as he wanted poetry to have immediacy of theatre. Futurist 80

theatre had to strive for the synthesis inherent in poetry. Since the poem is supposed to be the innermost, lyrical expression of poet's thinking it is freed from the demands of technique that Marinetti claims hampers the theatre playwright whose art form currently 'distorts and diminishes an author's talent.17

Not only did synthetic theatre inherited its extreme brevity from poetry, but it

shared its immediacy with poetry as well. Obviously, the poem's 'innermost, lyrical expression' could serve as an antidote to the veristic dramaturgical technique Marinetti warned against in his address to futurist playwrights. Indeed, in his "Manifesto of Futurist

Playwrights," published in 1911, after scolding the stupidity of passeist dramaturgical techniques, Marinetti states: "Dramatic art cannot exist without poetry, that is to say, without rupture and without synthesis. [... It is] a synthesis of life in its most typical and significant tendencies."18 Thus the poetry of 'brutal and immediate lyricism' together with the theatrical attempt at reaching 'a synthesis of life' liberated unexpected verbal sound energy in performance. As immediate performance events such bursts of sonority were conduits of the avant-garde's impetus toward a new idiom of the anti-naturalistic, anti-illusionistic theatre.

2.3. Sound-Text Art, Sound Poetry and Connections with Dada

The performance of futurist poetry at serate makes part of a long history of sound poetry, recognized today as a distinct genre of literary production based on sound creation such as text-sound art, concrete poetry, lettrisme, simultaneism, l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e,

17 Donald Marinelli, Origins of Futurist Theatricality: The Early Life and Career ofF. T. Marinetti (University of Pittsburgh, 1987), 299. 18 Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 482. 81

verbo-voco-visual art, etc. Steve McCaffery finds the sources of the new genre in the

continual presence of sound patterning in traditional poetry that spans from Aristophanes

and Rabelais to Christian Morgenstern and Lewis Carroll. It also incorporates the

sound/aural creation of euphonic idiomatic structures in indigenous oral cultures:

incantations, primitive chants, syllabic mouthing and lexical distortions that are

concerned more with sound alignment than with the world vis-a-vis cognitive logical

structuring of perceptions.19 Besides primitive 'white magic' in the participatory rites of

cyclical renewal of the world and instances of'unintended' poetry, sound poetry includes

nonsensical children's rhymes and word games, glossolalia, mnemonic counting aids and

other kinds of rhythmical utterances that go with shamanic mantras, language acquisition,

accompaniment to the work process, or ludic, carnivalesque noisemaking. Futurists,

Dadaists and Surrealists had revisited all these forms in their sound poetry experiments.

Both Italian and Russian futurist poets broke new ground for contemporary

"sound poetry that manifested itself in several diverse and revolutionary investigations into language's non-semantic, acoustic properties."20 But before evaluating the futurist

contribution to this field, one needs to review of the way in which sound in poetry extended beyond its use as a prosodic device (versification, rhythm, rhyme, euphony, assonance, alliteration and other literary figures). Thus, a 'liberator' of noise Luigi

Russolo, for example, not only pressed for the enlargement of the scope of the musical sound but also envisioned a range of possibilities in vocal sound.

Language has a richness of timbre unknown to the orchestra, which should prove that nature itself had recourse to the timbres of noise, when it wished

19 Sound alignment and ideophone language practices are discussed in the anthropological studies: Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2004). 20 Steve McCaffery, "Introduction," in Sound Poetry: a Catalogue, ed. Steve Mccaffery and bpNichol (Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978), no pagination. 82

to increase and enrich the timbres of the magnificent instrument of the human voice. [...] For centuries, poets did not know how to derive from this very effective source of expression in language. [...] Only the futurist poets, with their free words, were able to hear the entire value of noise in poetry.21

Only sound poetry of Futurism, finds Russolo, is 'capable of giving its message

a human resonance.' This could be achieved, he thought, exactly when the vocal sound

dissociates from verbal meaning and becomes an aesthetic object in its sensorial-

perceptive materiality. Only then the vocal utterance will bring forth and let us hear the

'value of noise in poetry.'

In order to name such an intermedium between literature and music, words and

sounds, Richard Kostelanetz coined the term 'text-sound art.' In truth, however non­

sensical, asyntactic and alogic a sound poem might be, even when dealing with non­

verbal sounds, there is always a text preceding it. Such text is based on phonetic aspects

of language, closer to musical or noise expression and primarily intended for

performance. It deals with phonemes or vocables and their aural and visual features,

sound of words and shape of letters that together determine units of sound-text rather than

units of grammatically structured meaning. Marinettian sound poetry that insisted on both

onomatopoeia and free orthography as its expressive means can be regarded as a kind of

sound-text art.

Jon Erickson proposes that sound poetry operates through "a denial of

signification toward an ideal of the unification of expression and indication."22 This

disruption, typical of the avant-garde, breaks out with the logocentrism and points to an impulse towards presentational stance in theatre. On the other hand, the amalgamation of

21 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 56-7. 22 Jon Erickson, "The Language of Presence: Sound Poetry and Artaud," boundary 2, vol. 14, no. 1/2 (Autumn, 1985 - Winter, 1986), 279. 83

'expression and indication' embodies the performative potential of sound poetry.

Erickson determines sound poetry as an interlocutionary act, a vocal action or a gesture

aimed at the audience. Influenced by Jacques Derrida's elaboration of Artaud's theatre of

presence, Erickson calls the idiom of sound poetry 'emotive language or language of presence, as opposed to a language of signification - language of absence.' He holds that

this idiom has a pronounced bodily character.

This language should be incantatory, summoning forth the power of presence within every fiber and organ and nerve of the human being, uniting the spiritual with the physical, tapping into dormant and primal creative energies, and emanating outward to connect with the listener.23

The corporeal aspect of sound language lies in the deep recesses of a pre-lingual

intonational expression that was able to elicit immediate physical response. A return to

the primitive forces in painting, poetry and music was a significant aspect of the art of the

historical avant-garde. In 'primitive' cultures, always regarded as remainders of

mankind's infancy, the avant-garde looked for immediacy of artistic expression.

Replications of naive art by indigenous people and the spontaneous creativity of children

served as remedies against the dryness of the academic and museal art. Richard

Kostelanetz thus used a child's 'tongue-twister' to explain the principle of text-sound art

in which sounds create their own coherence apart from the meaning of words:

If a Hottentot taught a Hottentot tot to talk 'ere the tot could totter, ought the Hottentot to be taught to say ought or naught or what ought to be taught 'er?

The subject of this ditty is clearly neither Hottentots nor pedagogy but the related sounds of "or" and "ought." What holds this series of words together is not the thought or the syntax but those two repeated sounds. Though superficially playful, text-sound art embodies serious thinking about the

Ibid. 281. possibilities of vocal expression and communication; it represents not a substitute for language but an expansion of our verbal powers.24

Hugo Ball's verses without words or sound poems were the fruits of the

Dadaists' childlike but serious understanding of our verbal power. Ball's poetry, like all

of Dada art, decimated the belief in logical language expression. Their anarchy and

childishness was a sane reaction against so-called intelligent and sensitive people 'buried

beyond recognition' beneath tones of journalistic lexical garbage that provided a rationale

for the conflagration of the First World War. As a reaction to this historical nonsense,

Dada was born when several young men, mostly draft-dodgers, like Marcel Janko, Hugo

Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp, formed the first Dadaist group

in Zurich 1915. Revolted by the slaughterhouse of the Great War, and disgusted by

bourgeois culture and the social system that had generated it, they started organizing

boisterous artistic soirees at the Cabaret Voltaire and published the international review,

DADA, in 1916. In his Dada diary Ball writes: "Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that

is spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not

succeeded in winning our respect. What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its

cannons? Our big drum drowns them."25 While the childlike syllabic mouthing 'da-da' may have baptised the movement of political dissent, Ball talked of children's playful

innocence as serious business:

A child's innocence, I mean, borders on the infantile, on dementia, on paranoia. It stems from the belief in a primeval memory [...] unreached by logic and the social apparatus emerge in the inconsiderate infantility and madness, where all inhibitions are removed. This is a world with its own form; it poses new problems and new tasks, just like newly discovered continent.26

24 Richard Kostelanetz, "Text-Sound Art: A Survey," Performing Arts Journal, vol. 2 (1977), no. 2, 62. 25 Ibid. 61. 26 Gunter Berghaus, "Dada Theatre or the Genesis of Anti-Bourgeois Performance Art," German Life and Letters, vol. 38, no. 4 (1985), 297. 85

Convictions similar to Ball's are found in futurist poetry manifestos both in

Italy and Russia. They were concurrent with the avant-garde's return to primal forces beyond the rational. Dadaist poetry, Ball thought, should harvest words from the

'instinctive' and not 'rational' creation. He wanted to destruct language as a social organ and transform it into an idiom capable of expressing the most profound human experiences. With this idea he started writing Dadaist sound poetry with words that were used primarily as vocables according to their auditory expressive merit. Instead of words as signifying units, he employed sounds as magical incantations to form a new sentence of an "innately playful, but hidden, irrational character."27

As an admirer of Kandinsky, Ball followed his theories when conceiving his sound poetry - Lautgedichte, but also admitted Marinetti's influence in his diary entry on

July 9, 1915.

Marinetti sends me Parole in Liberta by himself, Cangiullo, Buzzi and Govoni. They are just letters of the alphabet on a page; you can roll up such a poem like a map. The syntax has come apart. [...] There is no language any more. [...] Disintegration right in the innermost process of creation. It is imperative to write invulnerable sentences. Sentences that withstand all irony. The better the sentence the higher the rank. In eliminating vulnerable syntax or association one preserves the sum of the things that constitute the style and the pride of a writer - taste, cadence, rhythm, and melody.28

Ball understood Marinetti's destruction of syntax as a pretext for the making of an incantantional sentence that remains impervious to logic. He praised the futurist circle around Marinetti for taking the word out of the frame of the sentence. They "nourished the emaciated big-city vocables with light and air," said Ball, "and gave them back their

27 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 68. 28 Ibid. 25. 86 warmth, emotion, and their original untroubled freedom." But, in Ball's view,

Kandinsky's theory of inner sound was even more important for the art of sound poetry.

In 1917, he wrote an essay on Kandinsky analyzing his theories in detail. Ball regarded the founder of abstract painting as a prophetic figure of our industrial, mechanic, electrical age, the age he describes in a quite futuristic, rebellious and noisy manner:

God is dead. A world disintegrated. I am dynamite. World history splits into two parts. There is an epoch before me and an epoch after me. [...] The electron theory brought a strange vibrancy into all planes, lines, forms, and the mass culture of the modern megalopolis. Individual life died out, melody died. [...] Power was measured no longer in terms of single human beings, but in tens of thousands of horsepower. Turbines, boiler houses, iron hammers, electricity, brought into being fields of force and spirits that took whole cities and countries into their terrible grip; new battles, collapses and ascensions, new festivals, heaven and hell. [...] Our age has found its strongest types in Picasso the faun and Kandinsky the monk.30

Ball finds seminal features of the avant-garde art in general, and sound poetry in particular, in Kandinsky's art and theoretical work. He claims that:

The whole secret of Kandinsky is his being the first painter to reject - also more radically than cubists - everything representational as impure, and to go back to the true form, the sound of a thing, its essence, its essential curve.31

Consequently, Ball sought poetry that would do away with language in the way the painting discarded the object and adopted the anti-representational stance and abandonment of the figurative in avant-garde painting in order to get connected with the art's innermost source: 'the sound of a thing' that gives the word/object 'its essential curve.' Kandinsky's mystical theory that explains essence of art as a vibrational flow of energy from object through artist to spectator certainly had an impact on Ball's inclination towards aurality. And his notion of 'inner sound' led many avant-garde artists

a Ibid. 68. 30 Ibid. 222. 31 Ibid. 226. 87

- among others, Italian Futurists Carlo Carra and Enrico Prampolini or Russian Rayonists

Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncherova - to approach painting as a vibrational phenomenon akin to music or sound.

Inspired by Kandinsky's stage work Der gelbe Kldng (The Yellow Sound), in

which the author was "first to discover and apply the most abstract expression of sound in language, consisting of harmonized vowels and consonants,"32 Hugo Ball launched his own version of sound poetry in a cabaret performance. In his often-quoted journal entry

for June 23, 1916 he wrote:

I have invented a new genre of poems, Verse ohne Worte [poems without words] or Lautgedichte [sound poems], in which the balance of the vowels is weighted and distributed solely according to the values of the beginning sequence. I gave a reading of the first one of these poems this evening. I had made myself a special costume for it. My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk... I was carried onto the stage in the dark and began slowly and solemnly:

Gadji beri bimba Glandridi lauli lonni cadori Gadjama bim beri glassala Glandridi glassala tuffm i zimbrabim Blassa galassasa tujfm i zimbrabim

The description of Ball's historic performance at Cabaret Voltaire demonstrates the same awareness and concern for stage presence that Marinetti had expressed in the account of his London appearance with Zang Tumb Tumb. Clearly the act of recitation was dictated by the performativity of the poem's sound content. Therefore, "the stresses became heavier, the emphasis increased as the sound of consonants became sharper" and

Ball started to worry how to balance his "method of expression" with "the pomp of [my] staging." Since he was 'embalaged' in an abstract cardboard costume and since there was

Ibid. 236. Ibid. 70. For Gadji beri bimba see Appendix, Figure 2. 88 no plot or character on which he could count as the dramaturgical prompts for the interpretation, he had to resort to the dramaturgy of sound and the balancing of vowels and consonants in the sound-text. Through his Zurich experiments, Ball grew to be aware that such poems were suited primarily for performance, not "for the spectacles of the collector but for the ears of living human beings. [...] Reciting aloud has become the touchstone of the quality of a poem for me," he confesses later in the diary. Actually, Ball mentioned two more poems recited one after another at the same occasion with Gadji beri bimba: the Labadas Gesang die Wolken (Labada's Song to the Clouds) and the

Elefantenkarawane (Elephant Caravan) whose rhythm and sound shaped his performance and determined his stage movement:

I turned back to the middle... flapping my wings energetically. The heavy vowel sequences and the plodding rhythm of the elephants had given me one last crescendo. But how was I to get to the end? Then I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of liturgical singing that wails in all the Catholic churches of East and West.35

The arc of the performance, in terms of its musical shape, starts and finishes at the note of solemnity matching Ball's predisposition for mysticism. But there was something physical in it as well: his 'voice had no choice,' as he put it. One could speculate whether the script, in this case, the score of vocables for an ideally technical execution, preconditioned Ball's performance or perhaps his hesitance was a result of his struggle with the uncertainty of senseless acoustic material. There was nothing to be represented in the sound-text of Gadji beri bimba. One had only to immerse oneself in its phonetic material, thus maintaining its iconic and motivated relation to reality, and to perform or present, however unstable, oneself on stage. This alteration of the logocentric

4 For Elefantenkarawane see Appendix, Figure 3. 35 Ibid. 71. 89

text into alogical vocalization conceived in futurist and Dadaist performance prepared the

ground for the postmodern renewal of aurality. Steven Connor explored this trend in the

essay "The Modern Auditory I" as an inversion that came after centuries of Cartesian

dominance of a fixed point-of-view perspective in Western thought.

For, perhaps because of the very dominance of the visual paradigm in conceptions of the self, the auditory or acoustic has often been experienced and represented, not as a principle of strength, but as a disintegrative principle. Indeed, it was precisely this aspect of the aural which may have recommended it to the arts of dissolution practiced by Futurism and Dadaism.36

Ball's poetry, as well as futurist sound poetry, was part of this 'disintegrative' practice that shifted the artist's orientation from the static, figurative reassurance of the

cognitive eye to the uncertain temporality and flux of the sensitive ear. Consequently, ambiguity became a prevalent figure in postmodern art and theory. The futurist and

Dadaist interest in the phonetic ambiguity found in words have been inherited from Paul

Sheerbart and Christian Morgenstern's pure sound poems, which Hugo Ball might have heard in the cabarets of Berlin. Christian Morgenstern's parody of D'Annunzio was included in the opening night program of the cabaret Uberbrettl (1900), alongside a scene from Schnitzler's Anatol, a pantomime Pierrot play, a shadow play and a mixture of poems and chansons. His mordant, intriguing, darkly humorous poems in Galgenlieder

(Songs from the Gallows), 1905-1910, belonged to the genre of poetry of 'subversive nonsense and superior sense.'

Morgenstern turns language inside out and discovers new shapes and invented meanings. The procedure often undoes metaphors of millennial standing [... and offers] a rare insight into that occult interrelation between signifier and signified that has long preoccupied linguists and philosophers.

36 Steven Connor, "The Modern Auditory I," in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997), 213. 37 Walter Arndt, "Forward," in Songs from the Gallows (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), xii. 90

Some of his nonsense verses, like the linguistically innovative sound poem Das

Grosse Lalula, relied solely on the aural quality of vocables and became seminal for the avant-garde poetry of sound.

Kroklokwafzi? Semememi! Seiokrontro - prafriplo: Bifzi, bafzi; hulalemi: quastibastibo... Lalu, lalulalulalula!38

Paul Sheerbart's 'phone-poem,' Kikakoku, one of 66 intermezzos in his station novel Ich Hebe dich! Ein Eisenbahnroman (I Love You! A Railway Novel), 1897, was composed on similar premise.

Kikakoku! Ekorolaps ! Wiso kollipanda opolosa. Ipasatta ih fuo. Kikakoku proklinthe peteh. Nikifili mopa Lexio intipaschi benakaffro - propsa pi! propsa pi!39

These entirely incomprehensible verses inspired Dadaist experimentation with non-sense verbal patterning that cannot be taken as a mere provocation aimed at a bourgeois audience. In truth, Dada poets tried to undertake a much more responsible task: to enter into 'the occult interrelation between signifier and signified' through a new sound idiom. Raymond Federman analyzed the language of Dada and found that this new sound idiom makes 'intermedia of words.' Historically, there is no novelty in Dada practice: Russian futurist zaumnyyazyk was already far ahead with its experiments with sound texture and neologisms. Marinetti's program for the poetry of parole in liberta and Dada poetics had a similar rationale: to put absolute emphasis on

For Das Grosse Lalula see Appendix, Figure 4; also 39 For Kikakoku see Appendix, Figure 5; also 91

sound, to enter the inner structure of language and break its discursive hold.

Nevertheless, Dadaist poetry, more than previous practices and arts production of

simultaneous poems, formed the basis of today's mixed media. Dadaist words, sounds

or any other material participating in their artistic production were demystified and pushed beyond any signifying border. Seemingly absurd and nihilistic at first glance, they represented bearers of human presence in 'a new poetic language - a true intermedium of words.' "Dada poetry was less a negation than an affirmation. In it, a new reality emerged, not that of reason, not that of intelligence, not that of sentiment, but the obscure source of man's authentic self,"40 asserts Feldman.

This idea adheres to Artaud's call for an authentic theatre language in which incantation, cry or vocal gesture would play a pivotal role. "A perpetual game of mirrors, in which a color passes into a gesture and cry into a movement, leads us without rest along rough paths we find hard to follow, plunging us into a state of uncertainty and unspeakable distress which is truly poetic,"41 wrote Artaud.

The 'rough path' of theatre performance that he suggests in The Theatre and its

Double meant descending "in the night that precedes the book, [where] the sign is not yet separated from the force. It is not yet exactly a sign... but it is not any more a thing."42 And that was exactly what the sound poets were doing. In the intermedium between a thing and a sign, there was a large field of poetic material that sound poetry was exploring in an attempt to express man's authenticity. Whether intuitively drunk with the Dionysian substance of sound, or predisposed to absurdist, alogical and

40 Raymond Federman, "The Language of Dada: Intermedia ofWords,"Dada/Surrealism 2 (1972), 22. 41 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 96. 42 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 189. 92 abstract sound/verbal creation, sound poets were pleading for an immediate presence that Derrida finds in the Artaudian vision of theatre.

The performative implications of sound poetry were demonstrated by the simultaneous rendition of the poem L'amiral cherche une maison a louer - Poeme simultan par Richard Huelsenbeck, MarcelJanko, Tr. Tzara performed at Cabaret

Voltaire in 1916. It was a contrapuntal recitative, a high-energy performance in which three Dadaists simultaneously declaimed, sang, whistled, and uttered verses in German,

French and English with the added vocalization of non-verbal sounds. They were delivering their lines, chants or just coughs, sighs and grunts in such a way that the resulting cacophony brought about unexpected effects of clashing sounds and words.

According to Dadaist credo, the numerous aleatoric possibilities of such multivocal expression made each performance a singular, unrepeatable play of chance.

HUELSENBECK Ahoi ahoi Des Admirals gwirkles Beinkleid schnell zerfallt Teerpappe macht Rawagen

JANKO (chants) Where the honny suckle wine twines itself around the door a sweethart mine is waiting patiently for me

TZARA Bourn Bourn Bourn II desabilla sa chair quand les grenuilles humides comencerent a bruler j'ai mis le cheval dans l'amedu

HUELSENBECK und der Conciergenbauche Klapperschlagengriin sind milde ach verzert in der Natur chrza prrrza chrrrza

JANKO (chants) can hear theweopour will arround arrund the hill my great room is

TZARA serpent a Bucarest on dependra mes amis dorenavant et c'est tres interesent les grilles des morsure equatoriales

HUELSENBECK prrrza chrrrza prrrza Wer suchet dem wird aufgetan Der Ceylonlowe ist kein Schwan Wer Waser braucht find

JANKO (chants) mine admirably comfortably Grandmother said I love the ladies I love the ladies

TZARA Dimanche: deux elephantes Journal de Geneve au restaurant telegraphist assassine

HUELSENBECK hihi Yabomm hihi Yabomm hihi hihi hihiiii TZARA rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu rouge bleu 93

S1FFLET (ianko) • • —• —• • CLIQUETTE (Tzara) iniriiii rrrrrrr n 1111111 in in 111 r rrrrrrrrr iriniiii GROSSE CAISE (Huels.) OOO OOOOO OOOOO OOOO OO43

The fragment of the text presented here undoubtedly shows that L 'Amiral

cherche une maison a louer is a performance script for stage rather than a poem to be read from a book. Its text is a score for simultaneous recitation printed on two pages of an open book with lines running across the whole width in order to accommodate a plentitude of words, syllables or noises conveying the sound texture of the poem.

Visually, it looks like a scorebook with staved notation. In addition, underneath the lines of the noisemakers Whistle, Cliquette and Big Box, there are signs for various levels of loudness and musical tempi. The cacophonic shape of the poem is further emphasized by the aleatoric combinations of sounds in the sliding lines that caused their beginnings to fall on irregular places.

Stephane Mallarme's Un coup de Des jamais n 'abolira le Hasard (A Throw of a Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, 1892) is a great predecessor of this kind of graphic layout for a poem.44 Mallarme played with the chance meaning of words resulting from the clashes of simultaneous flows set in motion by a non-linear typography with lines of different lengths, sometimes just a word, sliding against each other. He spatialized the poem's syntax moving nouns and verbs from their usual positions in the verse. Obviously it was precedent for similar efforts made by futurist and Dadaist poets who conceived tavole parolibere and poeme simultanee in order to give visual shape to their synaesthetic experiments with the text-sound content. Another futurist attempt at importing musical principles into poetry through its graphical layout was Francesco Cangiullo's book

For L 'Amiral cherche une maison a louer see Appendix, Figure 6. For Un coup de Des jamais n 'abolira le Hasard see Appendix, Figure 7. Poesiapentagramata in which 'staved poems' are set out on the lined paper like musical scores.45 In the same vein, his Canzone pirotecnica of 1915 included musical notation.

The invention of the simultaneous poem harkens back to Henri-Martin Barzun who introduced the term of simultaneisme in his essay "The Aesthetics of Dramatic

Poetry" (1912). It marked a technique of musical polyphony applied to the creation of literary/dramatic pieces used in his book of poetry Voix, rhythmes et chants simultanes

(1913). Barzun's pieces were to be performed one against the other, poems (or dramatisms, as he called them) against songs, sometimes helped by the use of a phonograph or another sound source.

At the same time, Guillaume Apollinaire started to use the term simultaneity in reference to the visual arts when describing the Prose du Transsiberian (1913) by the poet Blaise Cendrars and painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk.46 In Cubist circles, its painting- text composition was considered a quintessentially simultaneist work. Almost two meters long, the picture/poem consists of a sheet of folded cardboard on which the text and a swirl of vividly coloured forms flow in parallel arrangement depicting a train ride as an abstract evocation of a stream of consciousness travel account. Apollinaire praised the work's simultaneity allowing a spectator to see it the way an orchestra conductor might read superimposed notes on sheet music, which is, simultaneously, deciphering both the graphic art and written elements at the same time.

This type of simultaneity can be also explored in the juxtaposition of present and past images in paintings, poems and theatrical sintesi representing the parallel states

45 Vox Poesia pentagramata see Appendix, Figure 8. 46 Sonia Delaunay-Terk was a wife of Robert Delaunay, a painter and propagator of simultaneisme whose supposedly innovative Orphism was a subject of a bitter controversy between Cubists and Futurists at the time. 95 of mind (stati d'animo). Furthermore, the 'simultaneity of centrifugal and centripetal forces' in the futurist visual arts' theory stands for the pictorial 'dynamism' of Umberto

Boccioni.

However, while Apollinaire's praise for the simultaneity of music and its graphic chart allowed for the supremacy of sight, Dadaist simultaneous poetry was based on the disarticulation of any possible chart by chance noise. In sound poetry performances at Cabaret Voltaire, accompanied or being interrupted by the clamour of bells, wind instruments, rattles, drums, boxes, keys and cans, the voice had to fight with the noise in order to be heard. In contrast to the Futurists' intoxication with the din of modernity, the endangered vox humana remained a dominant concern for Hugo Ball. In his diary, he greeted the first presentation of the poeme simultane on March 29,1916 describing it as the 'elegiac, humorous, and bizarre' clash between the human voice and the threatening noise.

In such a simultaneous poem, the wilful quality of an organic work is given powerful expression, and so is its limitation by the accompaniment. Noises (an rrrrr drawn out for minutes, or crashes, or sirens, etc.) are superior to the human voice in energy. The 'simultaneous poem' has to do with the value of the voice. The human organ represents the soul, the individuality in its wanderings with its demonic companions. The noises represent the background - the inarticulate, the disastrous, the decisive. [...] In a typically compressed way it shows the conflict of the vox humana with a world that threatens, ensnares, and destroys it, a word whose rhythm and noise are ineluctable. 47

Ball's vision of a modern, noisy, industrial world was diametrically opposed to

Marinetti's. Although these two seminal avant-garde figures were on different sides of the ideological spectrum, their contribution to the poetics and art of sound is enormous.

Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 57. 96

Their relation may be described in terms of Ball's characterization of Kandinsky and

Picasso - one was a monk, the other a faun.

2.4. Destruction of Syntax and Dynamic Declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb

Zang Tumb Tumb by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is one of the boldest experiments in futurist poetry. The poem was a result of the newly invented technique of parole in liberta aimed at poetic expression of'an intuitive psychology of matter' achieved through onomatopoeia, destruction of syntax, imagination without strings, and free expressive orthography. Ever since he had rejected vers libre and Symbolist poetics,

Marinetti experimented with onomatopoeic sounds and iconic typography that brought him closer to rawness of reality, but "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" was a watershed in his literary output: after 1909 he began to write mainly in Italian, aggressively challenging the dichotomy of art and life. In the 'allegorical' novel about his futurist life, Gli indomabili (The Untamable, 1922), Marinetti summarizes his poetics.

Words-in-freedom are an absolutely free expression of the universe beyond prosody and syntax, a new way of seeing the universe, an essential estimate of the universe as the sum of forces in action [motion] that intersect at the threshold of consciousness of our creative ego, and are recorded simultaneously with all the expressive means at our disposal. [...] Words-in-freedom orchestrate colors, noises, sounds; they mix the materials of language and dialect, arithmetic and geometric formulas, musical signs, old words, altered or recoined, the cries of animals, wild beasts, and motors.48

Liberated from the prosody and syntax of standard poetry, Marinetti's words-in- freedom stood iconically for the world of phenomena as their sound-images or ideograms. In Zang Tumb Tumb, the orchestration of colors, noises and sounds in a

Marinetti, Selected Writings, 164. 97 synaesthetic oneness of sound had been achieved through an onomatopoeic mix of the linguistic material and dislodged verbal and numerical signs. The poem expressed an intuitive insight into the modern world of swift changes, the world of constant flux with which our consciousness plays a simultaneous game of hiding and revelation (of an always/already present future). It called for the poet's, reader's or declaimer's involvement rather than a relaxation in the posture of a beholder with a fixed point of view. Bergsonian concepts of la duree and consciousness as memory that gets always/already renewed by its participation in the flow of life can be seen at work here.

Undoubtedly, sound could be regarded as the essential conduit of such an immersion in the life forces required from a ''parole in liberta' poem. Besides, Marinetti proposed the use of 'all the expressive means at our disposal' simultaneously. This idea promulgates a synoptic, synthetical or hybrid art form composed of diverse sensory attractions.

Consequently, the visual forces of the typographical revolution function as an echo of the noise and vocal forms of words-in-freedom, while the dynamic declamation of a poem reaches out to visual elements and movements in its stage rendition.

Zang Tumb Tumb, a book with the title drawn from the noise of howitzer fire, reports on a months-long siege of the Turkish city of Adrianopole by Bulgarian troupes in

1912 conflagration of the Balkan nations, a prelude to the First World War, that Marinetti witnessed the as a war correspondent for the French newspaper Gil Bias. After his return to Milan, Marineti started assembling the poem using free expressive orthography and synoptic free-word tables that depicted the battle in iconic details made of printed words dispersed on oversized, foldable pages. In 1913, Marinetti began publishing fragments of

Zang Tumb Tumb and its synoptic tables in Lacerba. He also began performing dynamic 98 declamations of the Bombardamento that soon became a main attraction of futurist serate. Finally, in 1914, the 159-page-long book, Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopoli ottobre

1912, parole in liberta appeared in Milan, printed and published by Marinetti's Edizione futuriste Poesia. It is worth noting that during the same period Marinetti wrote and published his three major poetry manifestos: "Technical Manifesto of Futurist

Literature," "Destruction of Syntax - Wireless Imagination - Words in Freedom" (which he included together with Zang Tumb Tumb in a later publication of the book Les mots en liberte futuristes) and "Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and Numerical Sensibility."

The poem and three manifestos demonstrate a parallel development of Marinetti's poetics and its practical application and, as such, they should be analyzed as reflections of each other.

The book was printed in a dramatic graphical layout with different typefaces, some designed by hand, surging unevenly along horizontal, vertical, diagonal and curved lines, which increased or decreased in size and boldness. The text burst onto the page in front of the reader's eyes offering rich and diversified declaimatory material for a vocal performance that would for sure assault audience's ears. Steve McCaffery calls it "the earliest successful, conscious attempt to structure a visual code for free kinetic, and voco- phonetic interpretation."50 Without a doubt, in all of its facets - in the abundance of vocables intuited or invented to mime the noise of artillery shelling, commands, shouts, the decay and dying, in the dynamic declamation of the score motivated by the sound material, and in the battle's visual reflection in the new explosive typography - Zang

49 For the cover of Zang Tumb Tumb see Appendix, Figure 9 50 Steve McCaffery, "From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem," in Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adelaide Kirby Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 151. 99

Tumb Tumb was an absolute novelty. The battlefield of besieged Adrianopole, through aural and visual means, gave the impression of a sound image of metal and human forms shattered by a huge explosion. In a hybrid form of visual display of sounds and performance score, Marinetti dispersed iwords-in-freedom' in a telegraphic literary representation of the speed and dynamism of the new world. By virtue of its verbo-voco- visual complexity, Zang Tumb Tumb has been recognized for its epochal achievement in sound-text art in much the same way as Picasso's Guernica has been singled out in the history of avant-garde painting.

Zang tumb tumb has at least five textual versions with different titles, and an author's late recording of the 'dynamic declamation' Battaglia di Adrianapoli produced by La Voce del Padrone, Milan, 1926. Two basic texts were called Adrianopoli assedio orchestra and published in Lacerba in 1913. The very title of these first versions clearly demonstrate that Marinetti was aware of possibilities for the orchestration of a poem, not only as an onomatopoeic sound report from the battlefield but also as an extension beyond mimetic rendition, towards an independent cacophonic structure of noises that apparently inspired Luigi Russolo to conceive his art of noises.51

The book consists often segments that follow the poet's travel by train and car at high speed through the catastrophic post-earthquake landscape of Calabria52 to the front line. It contains a very elaborate table: tavola parolibera - carta sincronica dei suoni rumori colori immagini odori speranze voleri energie nostalgie tracciata dall'aviatore Y. M. The table depicts the flight over the site of the mobilization of soldiers and displays, as listed in the title, material perceptions of physical reality: sound, noise, colour, shape and smell tied together in a chain of analogies with human

51 White, Literary Futurism, 179. 52 The 1908 Messina earthquake killed 60,000 to 200,000 people in Sicily and Calabria. This tragic event caused a delay in publication of the first futurist manifesto and Marinetti dwelled on it as a comparison to the Futurism's violent tectonic power. Suite rovine di Messina by G. P. Lucini was often recited at the futurist serate. 53 For Tavola parolibera dall'aviatore Y.M. see Appendix, Figure 10. sensibilities: hopes, wants, energies and nostalgias traced by the aviator Y.M. Its

graphical organisation exhibits the futurist tendency to supplant real matter for human

feelings. The groups of analogical words appear in a form of mathematical equations placed on both sides of a vertical arrow that divides geographical space (on the left there

are the Rodopi Mountains and Maritza River). This arrow also run between different kinds of sounds, noises and colours: it separates 'an egg of golden silence' of the military balloon and a drone of the airplane on which the air scout, Y.M., suffers 'nostalgia of

Paulette Quartier Latin' and the sound of a piston-bugle at Mustafa Pasha's quarters.

Marinetti's aural predisposition is evident in these small verbal pictures almost all of which represent sounds: 'yellow noises', '30 red sounds', 'a cascade of verdant sounds',

'a parabola of blue sounds', 'a rose-coloured seesaw of languid sounds' and so on. The recognizance mission of aviatore Y. M. thus became a truly aural adventure of a futurist immersion in a soundscape.

The report on war correspondents and pilots, good company for an adventurous futurist, is followed by a second report or a quasi-scientific insight in the battle -

lbattaglia sotto vento-vetro.'' This segment is based on the title's word game 'vento- vetro' (wind-magnifing glass). It is a combination of the 'objective' weather report and closer scrutiny of the battle at Cheittam Tepe fortress and Hadirilik Turkish headquarters through the magnifying glass. The battle is examined not the way apasseist poet burdened by the human psychology might have, but more like a modern physicist like

Einstein might have. Marinetti observed the war theatre as a battlefield of elementary physical forces rather than as a human affair with which we should empathize.

We systematically destroy the literary T in order to scatter it into the universal vibration and reach the point of expressing infinitely small 101

and the vibrations of molecules. E.g. lightening movements of molecules in the hole made by a howitzer (last part of the 'Fort Cheittam Tepe'' in my Zang Tumb Tumb). Thus the poetry of cosmic forces supplants the poetry of the human.54

According to Marinetti, a particular goal of free word poetry was the

incorporation of the infinitesimal that surrounds us. Nevertheless, he warns: "It is not as

scientific material but as an intuitive element that I want to introduce the infinite molecular life into poetry."55 Thus the cosmic forces come into the realm of humanity through the intuition of the poet. In the same manner, Marinetti remembers his earlier war-report-poem La Bataille de Tripoli, 1911 where he

observed in the battery of Suni, at Sid-Messri, in October 1911, how the shining, aggressive flight of a cannonball, red hot in the sun and speeded by fire, makes the sight of flayed and dying human flesh almost negligible.56

Marinetti's fascination with the speed and glisten of a cannonball exhibits how the lyrical intoxication with matter replaces the sentimentality of human compassion. But the last two segments of the book Treno di soldati amalati and Bombardamento, although based on the same poetics of matter, display much more human involvement by their emphatic use of verbo-vocal onomatopoeia and the concomittant physical engagement of the declaimer. In the "Train of Sick Soldiers," performed at the serata in Florence,

Marinetti describes a bout of dysentery with the mixture of hyperbole and medical pedantry: 'an avalanche of milk 6000 lactic ferments in the tumultuous onslaught of the visceral battle... a furnace insurrection of putrefying microbes... sane or dead...' and continues with onomatopoeia of the pure sound.

Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 156. Ibid. 156. Ibid. 157. (A COUNTERPOINT OF LYRIC ONOMATOPOEIA OF TRAIN NOISE) Tlactlac ii ii guiii Trrrrrrrtrrrrr Tatatatoo-tatatatoo (WHEELS) cuhrrrrr cuhrrrrr guhrrrrr (ENGINE) fufufufufufu fafafafafafa zazazazazaza tzatzatzatzatza 40 km per hour 45 km = rising pressure.. .57

The indications in parentheses reveal the method of noise composition of the poem written for the performance. Its sound vacillates between the heavy noise of the train and artillery shells and the chains of verbal analogies. The text of the next page is based on contrasting sensory attractions. Thus 'a dream of 1500 sick men,' written in large letters on the left, is paralleled by a separate column listing a chain of pleasant tactile sensations 'leisure elegance travel speed.. .rain nets... freshness station bed

sheets... [and] fresh frozen orange juice.' This page is countered by a secondary chain that lists smells like 'fecal odour of dysentery + mixed stink of plague sweats + tanfo

[touch/smell?] of cholera ammoniac' and so on. This clearly echoes the requirements of

"The Thechnical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" where the poet is asked to 'substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter" and to introduce in literature "three elements hitherto overlooked":

1. Sound (manifestation of the dynamism of objects) 2. Weight (objects' faculty of flight) 3. Smell (objects' faculty of dispersing themselves)58

Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le 'eroiche serate' (con antologia di testi) (Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2002), 145. This and all other qoutes from sources in Italian are translated by Antonio Mosca. 58 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 88. 103

The crescendo comes when the war onomatopoeias intensify as the poem moves toward the final bombardment. A short fragment below (shown in Italian original so that the original sound is maintained) serves as an illustration: zang-tumb-tumb ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta stop uuuuuuuurlaaare degli ammalati nel crrrrrrrrrpitare delle palle fischi schianto di vetri rotttttti sportelli bersagli Adrianoplole interamente accerchiata treno abbandonato dai meccanicci e dai soldati rabia degli shrapnels bulgari5

The text verbally denotes and onomatopoetically revives the hiss of the projectiles, the crackling of bullets and the crash of shattered glass mixed with the screams of sick men in the train abandoned by mechanics and soldiers under the hail of

Bulgarian shrapnel. Such a dramatic scene with a sound score in only a few lines of onomatopoeia, repeated several times in a similar form in the Bombardamento, must have been an additional physical challenge for the performer. His larynx, vocal cords and whole speaking apparatus would have been put under extreme stress in order to resonate and produce a mimetic vocal picture of inanimate sounds. This physical, bodily involvement required was dictated by futurist "growing love for matter, the will to penetrate it and know its vibrations, the physical sympathy that links us to motors, and push us to the use of onomatopoeia."60 Thus, by a very conscious endeavour, a poet enters the sound substance and dynamism of the world reflected in onomatopoeia while a performer, most often the poet himself, turns into a miming sound machine in order to reproduce such worldly noise. It does not mean that the poet or performer should abandon his humanity. He bravely and humbly, although quite noisily, expresses his own lyricism that stems from the Dionysian intoxication with the surrounding world.

Bertini, Marinetti e le 'eroiche serate', 146. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 88. "Since noise is the result of rubbing or striking rapidly moving solids, liquids or gases, onomatopoeia, which reproduces noise, is necessarily one of the most dynamic elements of poetry,"6 claimed Marinetti. Therefore he demanded the declaimer to

'metallize, liquify, vegetalize, petrify, and electrify the voice,' grounding it in the vibrations of the matter itself expressed by parole in liberta. The grounding of the vocal performance in the sound of the matter itself involves transgressing the mimetic representation of nature and realistic narrative and leads to a concrete/abstract acoustic art that treats vocal utterance in the same way as it treats any other sound.

The manifesto "Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation" contains similar instructions for the performer's movement. His gestures should be "sharp, rigid, and geometrical like pistons, wheels, cubes, cones or spirals to express the dynamism and geometrical splendor of parole in liberta."62 The performer should attempt for mask-like blank and dehumanized facial expressions. A poem should be performed by several people uttering onomatopoeic sounds while wielding noise-making instruments

(hammers, saws, bells and horns) and correlating their body movement with their lyrical incantations. All these instructions apply to Dadaists' poemes simultanees as well: it comes as no surprise that Marinetti's texts were read at the first soirees of Cabaret

Voltaire in Zurich, 1916. This concept of abstract physical performance, together with

Balla's, Depero's and Prampolini's experimental sound/kinetic set designs, inspired the experiments of the Bauhaus' 'total theatre', the mechanization of the actor - super marionette and the hybridization of man and machine on the contemporary stage. At the root of these experiments lie futurist sound poetry and its 'growing love for matter.'

61 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 156. 62 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 145. The intensification of language expression in Zang tumb tumb was

accomplished by the tension between the visual features of the printed word and the aural

features of the uttered vocable. Here is an example of Marinetti's 'redoubling of

expressive force of words' through a euphonic or cacophonic orchestration.

Timmmpani Flauti clarini dovunque basso alto uccelli Cinguattare beatitudine ombrie cip-cip-cip brezza Verde mandre don-dan-don-din-beee tam-tumb tumb tumb - tumb - tumb - tumb -tumb Orchestra pazzi ba- stonare professori d'orchestra questi bastona- tissimi suooooonare suoooooonare_ Graaaaandi...

Verbal forms with duplicative phonemes in Zang Tumb Tumb like

'timmmmmpani, suoooooonare, infiniiiito, sventrrrrrrare' serve to reinforce the

expressiveness of words and at the same time give the performer a kind of 'notation' for

his onomatopoeic declamation. This 'notation' at first seems applicable only to the

rhythm of the utterance, but if we look closer to the character of vowels and consonants

that are duplicated or multiplied, we can see that there is a stress on pitch variation as

well. Depending on the place and mode of their formation, these phonemes get different

pitches and particular intonations that make a sound picture of the poem. For example, the extension of the 'o' - a back vowel by formation and one of the deepest tones in the human vocal register - in the vocable 'suoooooonare' musically and noisily deforms the

original word. The 'o' has been prolongated in order to achieve a contrapuntal relation with the similarly deformed word 'infiniiiito' in which the highest pitched vowel 'i' is

stretched. The same kind of contrapuntal relation has been established between two 'in

continuo' utterances: the trills of the tongue in the pronunciation of 'sventrrrrrrare' and the series of bilabial explosions in the articulation of'timmmmmpani.' Zang Tumb Tumb reaches the apex of onomatopoeia and verbal sonority in the

segment of the Bombardamento where Marinetti, as he says, opens 'attentive ears eyes

nostrils' to the piercing notes of the battle. After a chain of abstract nouns as analogies of the basic features of the fighting - 'violence ferocity regularity fury breathlessness' -

enter the sounds of the battleground.

taratatatata of machine-guns shriek breathlessly under bites slappps traak- traak whip lashes pic-pac-pum-tumb oddities jumps height 200 m. of fusillade Down down to the bottom of the orchestra ponds muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff rearing of horses flic flac zing zing shaaack hilarious neighing eeeeeee... tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac (slowly) Shumi Maritza o Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc (fast) croooc-craaac (slowly) shouting of officers slamming like brass plates pan paak there ching BUUUM ching chaak (very fast) chia-chia-chia-chia-chiaak down there up there all around high up watch out above the head beautiful Flames flames flames flames flames flames flames destruction of the forts beh- hind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by te­ lephone Hallo Ibrahim Rudolf Hallo Hallo63

The layout of the page above (transposed as an example) leaves no doubt that

Marinetti's typographical innovations were supposed to prompt an oral performance of

Italian futurist poetry, ed. Willard Bahn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 186. the poem. "The text activates the acoustic dimension of language with the buzzing of

explosives, while the blank spaces represent a pause, a moment of silence for the eye and

for the ear."65 The white gaps on the page otherwise saturated with letters of different

type and size, are not only empty spaces, when read in the visual/spatial mode, but also

silences, when read in the aural/temporal mode. The verbo-voco-visual clash of parallel

sounds and images makes these conventionally separate sensations vibrate together. Thus

the poem's performative rhythm relies on the interplay between a scarcity and a

redundancy of signs at the interstice of the temporal and the spatial axes. Since these two

axes typically determine a theatrical performance, the structural principles applied in

Zang Tumb Tumb can be said to convey principles of futurist theatre as well. These

tensions developed between the densities of the concrete materials of poetry, between

sound and sight, are evidently present in contemporary experimental theatre, happenings

and performance art.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an unrelenting reformer of Bauhaus theatre, quotes

liberally from Zang Tumb Tumb in his post-war book Vision in Motion (Chicago, 1947),

illustrating the constant efforts on the part of the avant-garde 'to liberate literature from

the disparateness of the eye and ear.' Moholy-Nagy held that Apollinaire's ideograms

and Marinetti's poems were "tradition-breakers which freed experimenters to create

quick, simultaneous communication of several messages."66 He credited Apollinaire with breaking new ground by the superimposition of differently- sized words and letters that made them almost 'audible.'

64 For Marinetti's own description of a performance of the above fragment see page 8. For a fragment of the original layout see Appendix, Figure 11. 65 Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), 45. 66 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1969), 306. 108

These ideograms [...] actually dynamited convention. Apollinaire introduced the 'annoyance-use' of words with physiological connotation. He also scoffed at normal syntax, discarded conventional printing with the horizontal-vertical axis; he sought an 'eye-opener' with which to startle a complacent citizen. The eye-ear sensation (about 1913) is only one of his innovations... he also introduced the poetry of'simultaneity', meaning synchronization - happening at the same time - a time coordination of space and action, [...] cubist collage and film montage.67

Apollinaire experimented with verbo-visual correspondences in his

calligrammes and ideogrammes concurrently with Marinetti's exploration of a 'free

expressive orthography.' Although Futurists considered Apollinaire a part of the inimical

Cubist camp and a mouthpiece of Cubist ideology in the frequent public polemics and

controversies, his L 'antitradizione futurista earned a place in the book of futurist

manifestos published 1914 by Lacerba. That was a translation of his 1913 French

freewordist text of 'synthetic manifesto' in the style of the tavole sinotice listing the ideas

that deserved to be destroyed as opposed to those that should be advanced - their authors

awarded shit and roses, respectively.

The clash of verbo-voco-visual features representing a concrete image of the

aural and visual values in an arrangement of dynamic exchange can be found both in parole in libertd and proclamations of their principles in the manifestos. It is particularly true for Zang Tumb Tumb, with its strings of analogies and explosive vocables put together in a telegraphic form. Moholy-Nagy credits Marinetti:

Marinetti added a great number of new elements to contemporary poetry; sound effects; verbalization of sound and sight correspondences; sound collage, etc. An acoustic collage (onomatopoeia) adapting the visual technique of the cubist collage and the simultaneity of Apollinaire is shown best in his "Apres la Marne, Joffre visite le front en auto."

Ibid. 301. Ibid. 304. 109

In this case 'correspondences' were no longer mystical as in Symbolist poetry

but rather a result of the influence of Cubist and futurist collage and their superimposition

of material elements. In his comparative study of futurist art and poetry, Zbigniew

Folejewski links Marinetti's liberation of words in free typography with Moholy-Nagy's

own conception of a kinetic art form. He regards the visual display of words in futurist

poetry and tavole parolibere as a creation of "a potent, dynamic, multilevel, multi-color,

multi-letter expression of what Moholy-Nagy later termed a new vision of the world, a

'vision in motion'."69

A 'synoptic table with lyric values,' Apres la Marne, Joffre visite le front en auto,10 has been included among a few of the boldest examples of typographical iconicity

of words-in-freedom at the end of the book Les Mots en liberte futuristes (1919).

Marjorie Perloff analyses it as "linguistic mimesis, that is, [according] to the principle that linguistic and visual signs can directly represent and express material sights and

sounds."71 In the middle of the page there is a possible title of the text: ' Verbalisation dynamique de la route', while in the bottom right corner onomatopoeic car ride continues: 'mocastrinar fralingaren doni doni doni x x + x vronkap vronkap x x x x x angolo angoli angola angolin vronkap + diraor diranku falaso.' The whole area of the page swarms with the bullets and shrapnel of letters and short words coming from all sides. Several huge hand-designed letters 'S' represent the curves of the route or wriggling trenches, while big letters like 'M' confront the letters 'W and 'V, the former, according to Perloff, being phallic and the latter, feminine signs.

69 Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980), 35. 70 For the table Apres la Marne see Appendix, Figure 12. 71 Marjorie Perloff, "Grammar in Use: Wittgenstein / Gertrude Stein / Marinetti," South Central Review, vol. 13, no. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1996): 35-62. 110

One sees the curves which motorcar followed in the 'dynamic verbalization' of the route of Joffre in the right hand corner. The general's conventional speech to the soldiers is translated into typography. His words are torn to pieces by the accompanying noise of machine guns and cannons. A large number of soldiers is represented by the logarithm column in the upper left, they echo general's shouting 'Vive la France! Mort aux Boches!'72

Aereoplane Bulgare73, a two-page section from Zang Tumb Tumb, also found a place among representative examples in Les Mots en libertefuturistes. SOLEIL +

BALLON (SUN + BALOON) are two words set in the largest typeface on the page.

Above, still quite big, there is a subtitle: 'Indifference of the two suspended round forms' and on top is a title: 'Bulgarian airplane.' Sun and balloon are captives of the three vertical strings of letters that connect them to the flat horizon and read: 'giant flames, flame columns and sparks spirals' and ascend to the sky from 'burning Turkish villages.'

The biggest of all is bold capital letter 'T' at the beginning of the onomatopoeic line:

'Trrrrronrrronning of a Bulgarian (pla-pla-pla-pla-pla-pla) monoplane + slow snow of small flyers' [my emphasis, M.O.]. On the second page in small type, the content of the flyers that calls for the inhabitants of besieged Adrianopole to surrender unconditionally.

There are neither big explosions not loud battle noises, just the silent indifference of the sun overlooking the 'slow snow of small flyers' that echoes compellingly in the listener/beholder of the verbo-voco-visual poem.

Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 310. F'or Aereoplane Bulgare see Appendix, Figure 13. Ill

2.5. Onomatopoeia, Analogy and Iconicity

The principles of parole in liberta were laid out in the "Technical Manifesto of

Futurist Literature" published in Lacerba, May 11, 1912. The manifesto required that the poet 'must destroy syntax and scatter one's nouns at random, just as they are born.' It asked for the removal of the punctuation and linear narrative that was standing in the way of spontaneous vocal expression. The new literature was to be written in chains of unexpected analogies that corresponded with each other through the remotest associations brought about by 'imagination without strings.'

Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things. An orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by means of most extensive analogies.74

These extensive analogies were to be mostly made of nouns; adjectives and adverbs were supposed to be abolished (though they still appeared in the text ofZang

Tumb Tumb); and the verbs, only in infinitive, were to be used sparsely. Marinetti saved the infinitive mode of the verb from his syntax-cleansing because only it could provide

'the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it.' Luciano Folgore in "Synthetic Lyricism and Physical Sensation" (Lacerba, 1 Jan. 1914), even suggested that if the verbs were abolished altogether "physical sensations will inevitably dominate poetry."75 For the intuitive perception of reality and the dominance of physical sensations there was no need for a verbal denotation of a definite action. Futurists believed that onomatopoeia as a sound image of action could 'replace the infinitive verb' and thus 'enliven lyricism with the crude and brutal elements of reality.' In the parole in liberta, the action was brought

74 Marinetti, Selected Writings, 85. 75 White, Literary Futurism, 189. 112

about by onomatopoetic mimesis: "wagons pluff-plaff [...] horses flic flac zing

zingshaaack [...] battalions marching croooc-craaac" in Bombardamento; or by the

onomatopoetic sound structure of nouns that already contains the action: "Gargaresch bursting crackling pus Tinkling knapsacks rifles clogs nails cannon horses" in BATTLE

(WEIGHT + STINK). The material poetics of' words-in-freedom gained substantiality by resorting to nouns whose dynamic attributes have been attained through their sound markers rather than verbal denotation. The inflected verb, Marinetti thought, would just pull the expression towards the representational. The bare noun, with or without verbs in the infinitive, act more freely through the performativeness and expressiveness already present in its sound materiality waiting to be activated by the onomatopoeia. Futurist poetry's notion of the inherent dynamism of sound opened up the field of dramaturgy of sound in performance.

Onomatopoeia was the crucial word in Marinetti's conception of the futurist sound alignment with the chaotic world of modernity. It represented not only an expression of the lyric intoxication with matter but also a source of the disruption of language described in the manifesto "Destruction of Syntax - Wireless Imagination -

Words Set Free" published in Lacerba, May 11 / June 15, 1913.

Our lyric intoxication must freely deform, reshape words, cut them, stretch them, reinforce their centers or their extremities, augment or diminish the number of their vowels and consonants. [...] This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency toward onomatopoeia. It matters little if a deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or the summaries of noises, and soon will permit us to reach the 'onomatopoetic psychic' harmony, the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or pure thought.76

Pioli, Stung by Salt and Water, 50. 113

Marinetti treated words not as fixed lexemes participating in a codified language

structure but as malleable material that could be reshaped by the onomatopoetic reflection

of noises. He atomized language structure into particles of sound in order to free words

from syntactical meaning and sounds from their lexical strings. His incision into language

structure inspired Russolo to do the same with musical structure. Marinetti did not worry

about the possible ambiguity of a word, what mattered was the onomatopoetic summary

of noises as a 'sonorous but abstract expression' of the human perception of reality,

emotion or thought. It seems that onomatopoeia, for Marinetti, stands for a sound mimesis

of the world covering all manifestations of life. This coincides with Don Ihde's notion of

a human "desire to hear the voiced character of the world: all sounds are in a broad sense the voices of things."77 This desire, in the way of science, calls for the establishment of a phenomenology of sound based on the auditory dimension of our experience as "a listening to the voiced character of the wordless sounds of the world."78 For Futurists, this meant a Dionysian immersion in the world of sounds by 'lyrical intoxication.' But, what exactly, onomatopoeia, or the artistic expression of the intimacy between the world

and a vocal mimetic rendition of its sounds, does? It translates reality and life into performance. It sets words free by returning them to themselves, to their primal expressive oral/aural function opposed to logos and psychology.

Linguists define onomatopoeia as the word usage in which words imitate sound of the object or action they denote.

There is one area of language where the relationship between the word and the auditory experience is close by nature rather than by conscious artifice. Some words have been formed by an attempt actually to represent the sounds which

77 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 83. 78 Ibid. 84. 114

they describe. They come nearer than other words to being the thing represented, as well as being a referential signal. Sounds here correspond to meaning by imitation and not because of a common agreement within a speech community that they will so correspond. There is a sense of 'cat' in meow which is not found in the word cat itself [my emphasis, M.O.].7

The auditory miming of things brings about a sense not obtainable by the ordinary sign-referent relation. The onomatopoetic utterance meow reincarnates something essential in the denotated thing, being or action. It does not need linguistic codification to be understood. It is a sound image that in terms of Charles Pierce's logical semiotics refers to its object as an icon which is 'like [some] thing and used as a sign for it.' An icon exhibits in itself the properties the referred object or action must have to be denoted by it. In the case of the Futurists' intense use of onomatopoeia as an extension of vocal expression in poetry, we can talk about the phonosymbolic organization of poetic language that, as Patricia Violi suggests, "brings us right to the heart of one of the most controversial, yet central, questions for any linguistic and semiotic theory: the

on arbitrariness of the linguistic sign." The question remains whether poetic language, particularly the idiom of sound poetry, can be based on a logocentric practice of regular linguistic communication.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary; motivation plays a limited role in a language-based or codified nomenclature of terms that signify as many things they denote. The linguistic sign links not a thing and its sound, but a concept and an acoustic image. Onomatopoeia based on natural sounds was regarded by de Saussure as a marginal case in linguistic practice. But in Marinettian sound poetry there is no Cartesian mediating 'concept' between the thing 79 Raymond Chapman, The Treatment of Sounds in Language and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell and Deutsch, 1984), 38. 80 Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language, ed. Patrizia Violi (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 7. 115 and its acoustic image. In words-in-freedom the acoustic image directly corresponds to the thing as its acoustic icon. Charles Pierce relates iconic sign to the category of

Firstness that is the mode of being without reference to any subject or any object, manifested by quality, feeling, freedom, or multiplicity. Aren't these features of Firstness the quintessential qualities of the futurist immersion in the swirl of life forces? Pierce's category of Firstness is reminiscent of the primordial unity, a source of Dionysian music that inspired the futurist lyrical intoxication. For the Futurists, onomatopoeia in poetry and fisicoffolia (physical madness) in theatre were consequences of their 'growing love for matter' and as such meant the return to iconocity as an expression of the Firstness of being. In his "First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetics," poet and painter Ardengo Soffici declared that "the word would not longer be a mute symbol of convention, but a live form among live forms, one that becomes one with the material of representation."81

Vocal onomatopoeia as iconic sign carries the sound that is contained in its object, in the thing itself. But words-in-freedom poetry not only imitated natural and mechanical sounds directly but also created a sonorous mimesis of sensations. The poet's intuitive onomatopoeia shaped the auditory experience for the audience. These sounds employed in a concrete context of a poem were perceived as sound objects or sound events par excellence. Aesthetically, the audience's experience provided a possibility for artfulness of onomatopoeia and broadened the perspective for its abstract use. Therefore,

Tommaso Marinetti defined four types of onomatopoeia: (1) direct, imitative; (2) indirect, complex and analogical; (3) abstract, that expresses complex and mysterious sensibilities; and (4) the fusion of different onomatopoeias in physical concordance. He

Quoted in White, Literary Futurism, 25. 116

also supplied the examples for analogical and abstract onomatopoeias to give us insight into the essential features of a parole in liberta poem.

Marinetti explained that the analogical onomatopoeia doum-doum-doum-doum created 'a rapport between sensations of weight, heat, color, smell, and noise' attributed to 'the circling sound of the African sun' and it's orange weight in the poem Dunes.9,2 In the same poem, the poet asserts, "the abstract onomatopoeia ran-ran-ran corresponds to no natural or mechanical sound but expresses a state of mind."83 It is hard to discern the difference between these two onomatopoeias in linear print, but looking closely at the typographical arrangement of the pages of Dunes, reveals the meaning its verbo-voco- visual structure conveys.

The first page begins with a shrill of consonants 'karazouc-zouc-zouc / karazouc-zouc-zouc' that soon changes into an endless legato of vowel extensions in

'dunes duuuuuuuuuuns soleil dunes dunes dunes.' This is followed by a vertical string of

' doum-doum-doum-doum'' that runs stubbornly between two columns of chains of analogies. One lists: 'precipitating, blinding, eternal, blinding, mechanical, blinding...' while the other depicts: 'noise of rotating sun', 'sonorous stuffing of the sky', etc. This abstract juxtaposition of sounds and words gives an impression of a heavy, hot day in the desert.

On the fourth page of the poem, the onomatopoeic sequence, RAN RAN RAN makes a similar column but this time it is juxtaposed by surreal lines, possibly uttered by an exhausted, delusional person: 'to model sand... to polish somnolence to polish... open arteries... joy of paying a thief... compatibility of nails... Vi kilo of cheese... 226 kilos of

For sample pages of Dunes see Appendix, Figure 14. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 102. 117

female flesh...' This reflects "the noisy, unconscious expression of the most complex and

mysterious motions of our sensibility," as Marinetti claimed. Both of these

onomatopoeias apparently are detached from their primary role of miming natural or

mechanical sounds: they became abstract elements of an aural and visual composition of

aparole in libertd poem. John White's allegation confirms it:

The notion of 'iconicity' has the added advantage of bringing together the Futurists' interest in onomatopoetic effects, in non-conventional spelling, and in 'expressive' free-word layouts. Above all, it helps reveal the connection between what was the starting-point for many of these innovations - the challenge of onomatopoeia - and the later, more sophisticated devices visual poets went on to create.85

The onomatopoeia that was initially introduced to enliven 'lyricism with crude

and brutal elements' became 'provocatively unrealistic' as White draws from his analysis of sound in Marinetti's Bombardamento. It not only indicated the real world but also

added the harshness of "the primitive (in contrast to decorative and mimetic preoccupations of those whom the Futurists opposed)"86 to the sound poem. This mutual reinforcement of primitivism and abstraction in the art of poetry, painting and theatre was not a chance occurrence but rather a consequence of an aesthetic program devised in futurist manifestos.

Since the term onomatopoeia does not include any reference to sound (Greek root of the word denotes name coinage), Raymond Chapman has suggested using the term 'echoic'87 for this kind of word formation based on its sound iconicity. This brings us even closer to Walter Benjamin's notion of a human mimetic capacity that occurs and realizes itself in sound rather than in linguistic codification. Benjamin discusses

84 Ibid. 102. 85 White, Literary Futurism, 28. 86 Ibid. 31. 87 Chapman, The Treatment of Sounds, 38. 118 onomatopoeia as a primal source of linguistic meaning that was formed by human mimetic sound alignment with the world. He claims "the context of meaning veiled in the phonetic elements of a sentence represents the basic resources in which, in a flash-like instant, something mimetic can reveal itself out of a sound." In performed onomatopoeia, in its vocal utterance, there is no 'name coinage' as its literal name would suggest.

Onomatopoeia is not directed at the name of an object, at a signification of a referent, but it 'echoes' its sound substance in a playful or terrifying incantation. This sound event is not yet a coded signifier that is unmistakably linked to its object. It just participates in now forgotten 'primitive' correspondences of man and nature. Benjamin regards modern language based on Cartesian logocentricity and colonized by lexical practice of de Saussurean arbitrary pairing of words and objects, as a huge graveyard - an archive of dead onomatopoeias, which is 'the most accomplished archive of insensible mimesis.' Futurist awakening attacks on common sense by onomatpoeic noise aspired at a revival of such mimetic capability in modern man.

Iconicity seems to be at work any time language is 'reinvented' or 'created', either consciously, as is the case in poetry and literary texts, or unconsciously, as in children's acquisition, language change and creolisation of pidgins. [...] Analogy and iconicity appear to be crucial elements for the remotivation of the linguistic sign. 89

The primitive rejuvenation of language by onomatopoeia, glossolalia or a sound idiom beyond sense figures in both Italian and Russian futurist theories. It makes a part of the futurist project of the reconstruction of the universe intuited through a new sensibility.

But, while onomatopoeia represents the least arbitrary of signs in which the sound

88 Walter Benjamin, "On Mimetic Faculty," Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 335. 9 Violi, Phonosymbolism and Poetic Language, 9. 119

remains closest to its referent like primal articulations of a primitive language, its use

does not mean the return to a chaotic state. Marinetti declares: "A new beauty is born

today from the chaos of the new contradictory sensibility [...] that I call Geometric and

Mechanical Splendor."90 The appearance of this new splendour breaks new ground for

the crystallization of the sound poem into a new abstract structure. In the manifesto,

Marinetti also conceived "synoptic tables of lyric values and graphic analogies"91 in

which the verbal and visual dimensions were to be superimposed in an abstract

typographical composition.

Apparently, the manifesto "Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the

Numerical Sensibility" reached out from the poetics of'words-in-freedom1 towards other

artistic media. That same year Balla, Cangiullo and Carra created dipinto parolibero a

new kind of painting and collage technique inspired by the synoptic tables full of letters,

numbers and graphical symbols. In terms of performance arts, these ideas gave impetus

to the manifestos of the 'synthetic theatre', the 'dynamic synoptic declamation' and the

dances of the shrapnel, the machine gun and aviatrix that followed. They all share the

abstract intermedial character and a reverence for the mechanical and geometrical

splendour and the synoptical tables of lyrical values.

yu Marinetti. Selected Writings, 101. 91 Ibid. 102. 120

2.6. Furturist Poetry Principles in Theatre Performance and Theory

Poetic principles of analogy and iconicity, both in poetry and visual arts, were instituted by the theory and artistic practice of the historical avant-garde. These principles were born from the scientific exploration of physical matter which is now perceived as an uncertain field of forces and vibrating particles underneath the mantel of objecthood. The

Cubist disruption of perspective and the futurist dynamism of time and space are not only applicable to the external surface of the object and its spatial relation with the beholder but to the internal qualities of the artistic material as well. It is precisely these inner qualities, regarded as a field of energy, that are seen to contain a broad range of phenomenological possibilities. If the beholder was no longer central then art's pretensions were no longer necessarily cognitive and anthropocentric. Released from the centripetal hold of human perspective, artistic materials entered into the most unexpected analogical relations among themselves (and with the humans) and lived a drama of things outside human psychological or emotional concerns. On the other hand, human drama became part of a larger drama of matter but could no longer claim its former central perspective. In the Western Cartesian world, anthropocentrism has been sustained by logocentrism. The avant-garde fought against its rigidity and teleological direction, the historicity embedded in language and selfish perspective of bourgeois humanism. This does not mean that the art of the historical avant-garde - Cubism, Futurism, abstract art, and most of all Dada - did not have deeply human motivations. Malevich's new painterly realism, as he admits, comes straight from the colours burning inside the man. Dadaist 121 nihilism comes from man's position among things, neither tragic nor comic, but only absurdly and happily being lost in a world that does not care.

Giovanni Lista establishes a theoretical parallel between futurist drama demands for elliptic, brief forms of theatrical sintesi and the principle of liberated words connected by the unexpected analogies in the poetry of parole in liberta.

By replacing unitary logic and narrative structure of the naturalist drama, the assembling of futurist sintesi followed the same vitalistic intentions. Now, to the word set free the scene set free had to correspond; or theatrical kernels, that is, the most esteemed constitutive elements of the theatrical and dramatic language had been presented in their autonomy. The elementarization of stage signs came to abolish all principle or conceptual finality of the play in order to affirm the continual and indiscernible flow of reality.

Lista corroborates the atomization of verbal structure based on analogical ordering of single words (nouns and verbs in infinitive) in futurist poetry and its extension to futurist theatrical structure. The atomization of dramatic texture into independent theatrical kernels (nceuds thedtraux) and dramaturgy of 7a scene en liberte' as a structural fragment of the performance obviously take after poetics of parole in liberta. This opens the path towards a novel dramaturgy of abstract/concrete theatrical material and structural elements. Although this tendency could be understood as the result the influence of Cubist and abstract painting, its primary source, I hypothesize, lies in the futurist sound poetry and its performance. The recognition of the materiality of signs/sounds and the atomization of artistic material in nceud thedtraux is a result of the iconicity principle found in futurist poetry. More specifically, if the analogy serves as a principle of the collage of theatrical knots, now almost tangible in their shape, it is the iconicity and the power of onomatopoeia to remotivate signs that provides a concrete

92 Giovanni Lista, La scene futuriste (Paris: Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1989), 142. language of performance. In addition, fluidity, temporality and immediacy of sound poetry introduce the 'indiscernible flow of reality' in a theatrical context and prevent the

closure of the performance into a conceptual/textual finalization of the play. As the revitalized word wrested from its logocentric matrix and entered into the flux of performance, futurist theatre acquired its own language based on the materiality of sign and readable by an appropriate dramaturgy, a dramaturgy of sound. Chapter Three: Zaum: a Language Beyond Sense and an Idiom of the Abstract Theatre

3.1. Word-as-Such: Sound as Meaning, Content as Form

Russian Futurists, budetlyanskye - poets of the future: Khlebnikov,

Kruchenykh, Kamensky, Mayakovsky and others initiated profound revolutionary

changes in poetic practice that preceded or paralleled avant-garde experiments in painting, music, theatre and, later, film. The flywheel of this revolution was the revival

of the elementary, raw material of art, be it the word, sound or the painterly mass and

colour. In the fight for de-sublimation of the transcendental aspirations of traditional poetics, the Futurists resorted to the building blocks of the work of art as their central concern. This tendency was not entirely new. Despite their severe criticism of earlier poetics, especially the Symbolist, the Futurists often advocated some of the processes originally initiated by the Symbolists and Impressionists at the turn of the century. For instance, while Symbolists insisted on the musicality of sound and verse to encourage

'correspondences' between distant synaesthetically-linked phenomena, Impressionists studied the science of vision and promoted the fragmentation of colour in order to achive an impressionistic rendering of the object on the canvas. Both movements were interested in the spiritual and scientific impact of the artistic material (sound and colour) on our senses. By focusing their attention on what we literally hear and see in the work of art, they were at the forefront in the shift from the figurative in art and the narrative in language to the concrete use of colour and sound adopted in Futurism and 124 the historical avant-garde. That process was further deepened by Cubist experiments with the dismemberment of monolithic perspective. As Anna Lawton acknowledges, this trend of thought was reflected in the theoretical writing and manifestos of Russian zaum poets, Cubo-futurist, Rayonist, Neo-primitive and Constructivist artists:

The Symbolists sought to attain knowledge through mystical correspondences with the world beyond. The Impressionists revealed the immateriality of people and landscapes, their normally hidden ethereal qualities. The Cubists, devoid of mysticism and relying on scientific knowledge, placed the aesthetic object in a new dimension, a dynamic relationship of space and time. This search for essence of things generated a specific concern with form and produced a heightened awareness of the given medium and its potential.1

Russian poets who searched for an art that could penetrate the essence of things were called rechetvortsi (word-makers), a name based on their use of 'the word- as-such' liberated from its syntactic and signifying mandates. The poets proclaimed samovitoye slovo (the self-sufficient word) as their exclusive poetic material. They saw the glimmer of "the Summer Lightening of the New Coming Beauty of the Self- sufficient Word,"2 and 'threw' "Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy [...] overboard from the Ship of Modernity" in their first rebellious manifesto Marinetti style, "A Slap in the

Face of Public Taste" (1912). In their experimentation with a poetry shaped by verbal texture, futurist poets revealed the intrinsic potential of poetic language's material substance, its sound. Sound appeared to be the given medium of their art. They no longer considered the word a fixed unit in a language's standard vocabulary, but a unit of sound that resounds with all other sounds of nature and culture: from birdcalls to astral talk, from initial language acquisition, mumbles and cries to the ecstatic speaking

' Anna Lawton, "Introduction," in Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 8. 2 Ibid. 52. in tongues. In their poems, the elementary unit of poetic creation was a vocable, a

phonetic image of the word, a primarily oral/aural phenomenon.

The word, an aural composite of consonants, vowels, syllables and phonetic

roots, was now treated as a sequence of sounds and letters (phonemes) rather than a unit

of meaning. Emphasizing the phonetic features of language, the poets now entered into

a new play of sound creation that replaced the verbal communication of the external, referential meaning. Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh practiced the decomposition of

existing words by a morphological and, more often, a phonetic shift (sdvig) that brought

with it a new way of interpreting the world. This induced poetic creation as a sculpting

or constructing a new form (a sound poem) from its intrinsic oral/aural material rather than a reflection of its metaphorical meaning. This kind of poetry making was diametrically opposed to the Symbolists' use of poetic images, the "constant predicate with a changeable subject,"3 as Potrebnya has described it.

Alexandr Afanasievich Potrebnya (1835-1891), one of the leading Russian philologists, pertaining to the psychological school of linguistics, regarded poetic language as a special class of perception of reality. His theory of poetic language as

'thinking in images' was widely accepted in the analysis of Symbolist poetry that prevailed before the futurist and Formalist conceptual overthrow. Thus, while futurist declarations and pamphlets renounced the poetics of Symbolism, a young linguistic scholar, Victor Shklovsky, felt the need to promote 'the palpability of the word' and the literal features of futurist poetry contrary to Potrebnya's concept of 'thinking in images.'

3 Krystina Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambience (Tha Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1968), 18. On December 23, 1913, in a futurist Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg,

Shklovsky delivered a lecture "The Place of Futurism in the History of Language,"

establishing a "connection of the devices of the Futurists' poetry with the devices of

general linguistic thought-processes" and recognizing the materiality of the linguistic

sign embedded in its aural substance. Shklovsky's lecture, published later as a pamphlet

called The Resurrection of the Word, today is considered a seminal Formalist text. In

the text, he discussed the difficult, semi-comprehensible language of futurist poetry that

demanded the 'resurrection of things' and the return of sensation of the world to man.

Shklovsky found one of the roots of such language in heightened vocal articulation

"when we wish, through a surge of tenderness or malice, to caress or insult a person,

[...] then we crumple up and break up words to make them strike the ear, so that they

should be seen and not recognized."5 Besides this psychosomatic reference, he pointed to links with the incantational practice of the Yakut Turkic or Slavonic languages and

ancient oral poetic practice. Shklovsky quoted from a large diachronic array of examples in which the re-sensibilization of the eroded everyday words was achieved through poetic means that relied on sound. He also discussed the notion of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, which have had an important impact on futurist sound poetry.

The possibility of the revival of words had been already implied in

Shklovsky's definition of "artistic perception in which the form is sensed (perhaps not only form, but form as an essential part) [my emphasis, M.O.]."6 The interplay between sensory material and artistic form, Shklovsky asserted, was at the heart of the principle

4 Victor Shklovsky, "The Resurection of the Word," in Russian Formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation, ed. Stephan Bann and John E. Bowlt (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 41. 5 Ibid. 46. 6 Ibid. 42. of poetic equivalence between form and its perceived sensory content. Its concrete

material - sound, provided the content in poetry. Such acknowledgment, drawn from

futurist poetic practice, and applicable to the visual arts, coincides with my thesis on the

dramaturgy of sound or the dramaturgy of independent material that replaced

dramaturgies of plot and representation. As Krystyna Pomorska writes in her analysis

of Russian futurist poetry as the creative ambience of Formalist theory:

The material itself plays the expressive role in poetry; consequently, there is no opposition between material and form, hence material is equated with form [my emphasis, M.O.]. Instead, the opposition which occupies the Futurists in their polemics is that of pair: mimetic (imitative, 'objectful') as opposed to non-mimetic ('objectless').7

Like the poets who recognized sound as the substance and content of their

artistic form, futurist visual and performance artists focused on the materiality of their means and eschewed figural and representational modes in their works. This trend extends to Larionov, Gonchareva and Malevich's painterly theories of the Rayonism,

Suprematism and 'objectless' art that would also give shape to the Russian futurist theatre works that I will discuss later in this chapter, opera Victory over the Sun and supersaga Zangezi.

3.2. Sound Resources of Rechetvorstvo (Word-Making)

Painter Kazimir Malevich named the Russian art movement Cubo-Futurism combining two categories invoked by its two separate aspects: spatiality and temporality.

Traditionally, spatiality was understood as a discipline-specific feature of sculpture and painting, temporality of music and poetry. One was based on visual perception, the other

7 Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 120. on aural perception and their consequent world-views. Congruent with the avant-garde's

attempts at the hybridization of art forms, this two-part name was an apt description of the Russian cross-disciplinary use of artistic methods. Russian futurist experiments in rechetvorstvo (word-making) marked a revival of the spiritual and scientific interest in synaesthesia and the exploration of space and time in the first decades of 20th century.

The new chopped-up words of their poetry were counterparts to Cubist dismembered figures, the signs of a new expressiveness in plastic and spatial arts, while its prosody, based on phonemic roots, rhyme, stress and rhythm, indicated the temporality and fluidity of the aural field of perception.

The 'arbitrary' and 'derived' words of the Futurists have been born. They either create from an old root (Khlebnikov, Guro, Kamensky, Gnedov) or split up by rhyme, like Mayakovsky, or give incorrect stress by use of the rhythm of verse (Kruchenykh). New living words are created.8

In addition, their dealing with the concrete sensorial material of sound mediated the sensual, palpable form of these 'new living words' in poetry. The temporality, immediacy, flux and dynamism of Cubo-futurist poetry, the same distinctive qualities of Italian parole in liberta, demonstrated the futurist inclination towards the aurality/orality paradigm of the world's perception.

Russian Symbolist and Impressionist poets, followers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, were inspired by the imaginative and creative power of sound as well.

But the Futurists were the first to invent a new idiom that did not communicate poetic messages by syntactically-ordered phrases but by phonetically-sculpted words. At first,

Futurists had been publishing their work alongside their predecessors who only later became their opponents. Hence, two early examples of poetry in trans-rational language

Ibid. 46. 129

"The Thickets Were Filled with Sounds" and "Incantation by Laughter" by Velimir

Khlebnikov were published in Nikolai Kublin's 1910 almanach, Studiya Impresionistov

(The Studio of Impressionists). The first of these poems still followed regular syntax

exhibiting a timid return to the primitive and sensual connection with the natural sound.

The tangled wood was full of sound The forest screamed, the forest groaned With fear To see the spear­ man beast his spear

The poet hears onomatopoetic sounds reverberating in the roots of words

'scream' and 'groan.' They permeate the forest, traditionally supposed to be mystically

silent. At the same time, the long vowel'/:' reiterated in all words of the last verse fear,

see, spear and beast, emphasizes this 'silence' pregnant with "unattended sound" as

John Cage would put it. Charlotte Douglas remarks: "Khlebnikov seems to have heard

within himself not just one voice but hundreds, and was able to make out beneath their

clamor the pure sounds of language forming themselves into patterns, resonating with

the sounding string of humanity."10 Khlebnikov here deepened the Symbolist notion of

'correspondences' by showing how they can be invoked by affinity of sounds of the human language with the speech of the universe. These sounds of man and nature are

melodically intertwined in his pre-zaum verses from 1912 as well:

When horses die, they sigh, When grasses die, they shrivel When suns die, they flare and expire When people die, they sing songs

9 Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, transl. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), vol. 3, 34. My use of the poem's translation does not deny the obvious primacy of Russian verses in the literary analysis. In this case, however, lacking the original, I took the liberty to discuss Paul Schmidt's translation that followed the phonetic principles of the original sound composition corresponding to the topic of my dissertation - use of sound in poetry and performance. 10 Charlotte Douglas, "Introduction," in The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, ed. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 27. 130

Kogda umirayut koni, dyushat, Kogda umirayut travy, sokhnut, Kogda umirayut solnci, oni gasnut, Kogda umirayut lyudi, poyetpesni "

Although we can clearly hear the predominance of sound, this poem contains

no semantically-disengaged words; it is not yet a trans-rational poem. It was as if

Khlebnikov was probing his material resources in order to discover a new idiom that

would reverberate with his poetic impression. He used sound repetition in an almost

abstract/concrete manner that later will be developed in zaum poetry. More specifically,

while each verse begins with two identical words and the first three verses keep a

masculine rhyme on '«/' in order to lull the reader with its steady rhythm, the last two

words 'poyetpesni /sing songs' carry a shift in sound that erases the earlier-

established rhythmic and phonetic scheme of the poem. This shift brings with it new meaning that can only be communicated by sound.

Studying sound repetition in Russian verse, Formalist literary critic Osip Brik

found that "sounds and sound harmonies are not merely a euphonic extra but are the

10 result of an autonomous poetic endeavor." Underneath the prosodic devices like

assonance and alliteration, masculine and feminine rhyme, rhythmic structure and metric scheme of the verse, Brik discovered the dominance of sound composition in its own right. His exploration of the prevalent use of phonetic devices corroborates the idea of the autonomous sound material that constructs something that goes beyond the poetic image. However the interrelationship of sound and image may be regarded, one thing is certain: the orchestration of poetic speech is not fully accounted

1' Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, vol. 3, 38. 12 Reading in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 11. 131

for by a repertoire of overt euphonic devices, but represents in its entirety the complex product of the interaction of the general laws of euphony. Rhythm, alliteration, and so forth are only the obvious manifestations of particular instances of basic euphonic laws.13

Brik's concept of the autonomy of euphonic devices was amply proved by

futurist poetic practice. Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Vasilyi Kamensky, Elena Guro and

others transgressed the boundaries of versification and rhythm precisely by the literal

creation in/of sound and the extension of its use beyond mere prosodic device.

Acknowledging the material features of sound, they jump-started the energies of words

that were hidden beyond sense in the language's primordial connections with things,

with nature and culture.

Lev Jakubinskij, in his essay "On Sounds in Verse Language" (1916),

claimed that in practical language "resources (sounds, morphological segments, and so

forth) have no autonomous value and are merely a means of communication."14 The

opposite predisposition, he alleges, determines the poetic effort "to find language

systems in which the practical aim retreats to the background (it does not necessarily

disappear altogether), and language resources acquire autonomous value."15 This was a

patent feature of futurist poetry that, as suggested by Brik, experimented with 'the

obvious manifestations of particular instances of basic euphonic laws.' The language resources used in such experiments were strongly, if not exclusively, inclined towards the literal use of sound. Instead of communicating 'poetic images' or discursive thoughts, Futurists produced pure sound images as autonomous material that became the very form of zaum poetry. Interrelated with abstract painting and atonal music, this

13 Ibid. 11. 14 Ibid. 9. 15 Matejka, Reading in Russian Poetics, 9. 132

kind of poetry awakened similar tendencies in theatre. Thus the dramaturgy of sound

developed and inspired a theatricality where the material expresses/performs its own

story and brings about its own sense.

Zaumny yazyk, proposed by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov, was an idiom

located beyond conventional 'sense', where autonomous material made poetry of pure

sound possible. It was intended to be an anti-language expressing the futurist anti-

Symbolist stance. Aleksei Kruchenykh first used the term trans-rational (zaumnoe) in

the Novyeputi slova (New Ways of the Word: The Language of Future, Death to

Symbolism, 1913).

Before us there was no verbal art. There were the pathetic attempts of servile thought to present everyday reality, philosophy and psychology [...] but the art of the word did not exist. [...] The word (and its components, the sounds) is not simply a truncated thought, not simply logic; it is first of all the trans-rational (irrational parts, mystical, aesthetic).16

A new poetry, claims Kruchenykh, is no longer under the yoke of philosophy

and psychology. It operates in a field of aesthetics that is irrational and mystical, that is beyond rational concepts. It makes a clear distinction between the principles of a

discursive logic of language and the material aesthetic of sound and calls for the rupture between practical language and the poetic idiom.

Symbolist poet Andrei Bely, a novelist and literary critic who created a rich opus based on sound patterning, "not only influenced the Futurists, or was influenced by them but also helped them to develop Futurism and, on a higher level co-operated with them."17 For Bely, every word is a sound before it is anything else. He envisioned

16 V. Khlebnikov, A. Kruchenykh, "New Ways of the Word: the Language of Future, Death to Symbolism," 1913, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, ed. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1988, 71. 17 Vahan D. Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism 1910-1930 (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1974), 31. 133 the revival of the poetic word through the 'emancipation of material' and sound creativity inherent in language. Here is how Bely elaborated on the essential role of sound in language in his essay "The Magic of Words":

The musical force of sound is resurrected in the word, as we are once again captivated, not by the meaning, but by the sound of words. In this state of enthusiasm we unconsciously sense that the deepest vital meaning of the word - namely, to be a creative word - lies hidden in the sound and image level of expression.18

The powerful creativity of language draws from the "imaginal speech [that] consists of words that express the logically inexpressible impression I derive from the objects surrounding me. Living speech is always the music of the inexpressible,"19 alleges Bely. The poet, and man in general, uses words to name things but, first of all, he utters sounds, spoken words - sound symbols of his relationship with the environment. The union between human existence and his surroundings arise in the sound of the word that "connects the speechless, invisible world swarming in the subconscious depths of my individual consciousness with the speechless, senseless world swarming outside my individual ego."

The sonorous interpenetration of man and the surrounding world described by

Bely is typical of the new futurist sensibility on both Russian and Italian sides. In addition, Bely's dynamic picture of the word's liberation: 'The word sheds its concept- casing and then sparkles and glitters with a virgin, barbaric display of colors,' resembles Marinetti's and Boccioni's fiery theories of poetry and painting. Indeed, most of the futurist concepts of independent sound structure of poetic language can be traced back to Bely's ideas. Benedikt Livshits, a theorist of the Cubo-Futurist

18 Selected Essays of Andrei Bely, ed. Steven Cassedy. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 98. 19 Ibid. 93. 20 Ibid. 94. 134 movement from its inception, regarded Bely as his true predecessor. In his memoir of the futurist years in St. Petersburg, The One and Half-Eyed Archer, Livshits confessed that at the very beginning he did not understand Khlebnikov's 'exposure of roots' and

'columns of unprecedented words.'

This was truly virgin territory that Bely skirted with his Symphonies. [...] The virgin soil had to be dynamited; trails had to be blazed through the dense jungle, while the support was mobilized from visual arts (above all painting): it was the visual arts that the banner of emancipation of material had been raised over forty years ago.21

Livshits' "The Liberation of the Word," one of the essential programmatic texts of the movement, appeared as an introduction to the almanac Dokhlaya luna (The

Croaked Moon, 1913) where brothers David and Nikolay Burliuk, Elena Guro,

Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits and Aleksei

Kruchenykh identify themselves as 'Futurists' for the first time.

The criteria of its [poetry's] value lie not on the plane of the mutual relationship between reality and consciousness, but in the realm of autonomous word. [...] Here our poetry is free, and for the first time we do not care whether it is realistic, naturalistic or fantastic; except for its starting point, it does not place itself in any relationships with the world and does not coordinate itself with it; all other crossing points of this poetry with the world are a priori accidental.22

Livshits' qualification of futurist poetry is akin to Bely's conception of poetic

speech in the following.

Poetic speech is speech in the true sense of the word. Its tremendous significance lies in the fact that it does not actually prove or demonstrate anything with words. In poetry the words are grouped in such a fashion that their totality gives the image. The logical significance of this image is entirely indeterminate.23

21 Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1976), 56. 22 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 80. 23 Bely, Selected Essays, 97. 135

Livshits here still hesitates to define poetic 'indeterminacy' as a deliberate reach into an alogical beyonsense24 idiom but rather clarifies it as the poet's involvement in the materiality of the word. He proposes that the poet creates his work driven "by plastic affinity of verbal expressions, by their plastic valence, by verbal texture, by rhythmic problems and musical orchestration, and by the general requirements of pictorial and musical structure."25 The poet deals with words as aural and visual material possessing its own texture instead of selecting words that would create an appropriate metaphor or a poetic image. The words in poetry do not necessarily represent some external reality but live life on their own. Conceived as such, words acquire material cohesion determined by their intrinsic 'valence' and

'texture.' Livshits' vocabulary, used in the manifesto, is made up of theoretical terms used in all three: poetry, music and painting. Such cross-referential terminology was typical of futurist art theory since the Russian avant-garde scene was a melange of artists, poets, scientists and critics who often transgressed the boarders of their art disciplines.

A prominent translator of Russian futurist works into English Paul Schmidt's coinage beyonsense is used instead oizaum. I adopted and used it throughout my text. 25 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 80. 136

3.3. Universal Rooots of Zaum, Incantation and Glossolalia

Velimir Khlebnikov's Zaklatje smehom (Incantation by Laughter, 1910) is widely quoted as an example of a poem made of one word or rather of a number of derivatives from the one word's root. The poem invigorates Khlebnikov and

Kruchenykh's contention that "from now on a poem could consist of a single word, and merely by skilful variation of that word, all the fullness and expressiveness of the artistic image could be achieved."26 Here is how the root smekh (laugh) sparks into a multitude of expressive forms enlarging the concept, action, attributes and sensiblity of the word:

O, razsmeytes', smekhachi! O, zasmeytes', smekhachi! Chto smiyutsya smekhami, chto smeyaitvuyut smeyalno, O, zasmeytes' usmeyalno! O, rasmeshishch nadsmeyal nykh smekh usmeynykh smekhachey! O, issmeysya rassmeyalno smekh nadsmeynykh smekhaczey!

Oh, laugh forth, laugh laughadorsl Oh, laugh on, laugh laughadorsl You who laugh in laughs, laugh-laugh, you who laughorize so laughly. Laugh forth, laugh laugh belaughly! Oh, oflaughdom overlaughly, laugh of languish laughadorsl Oh, forth laugh downright laughly, laugh of super laughadorsl

The poem sounds like a peasant song for a square dance at a fairground. It is made of newly invented or incanted words thrown together by a country jester's jolly recollection of possible prefixes and suffixes of a simple Slavic vocable. The unbridled incantation goes on like a competitive word game played at a carnival of sounds. Its

26 Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902-1934, ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1976), 55. 27 Alexander Kaun, Soviet Poets and Poetry (Berkeley, 1943), 24. See Apendix, Figure 15, for the whole poem. 137

restlessness is an antidote to the trimmed language of unilateral signification. The poem

thus fights the 'monologism' of genre in the manner of Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the

grotesque in Gargantua and Pantagruel. That is why Paul Schmidt feels its content as

"permutations of the word laugh into a weird scenario full of prehistoric chortles."28

Nils Ake Nilsson compared the poem with its historical counterparts and

found a connection between "Incantation by Laughter" and the Russian 'Neo-

primitivist' trend towards genuine folk poetry. Nilsson rejects its similarity to a

Marinettian 'integral onomatopoeia' or Dadaist aleatoric poetry, but allows that Hugo

Ball's '' Lautgedichte"1 (sound poems) are easier to compare with Khlebnikov's verses

than 'parole in libertcC because they maintain a vague likeness to the recognizable

language. In Ball's Gadji beri bimba, words imitate a sensible language by the sound

repetition of possible language roots: 'laulaa\ 'blaulala' and llaulatomini\ words that

resonate with Christian Morgenstern's celebrated nonsense poem, Das grosse Lalula.29

However, Nilsson does not admit a closer similarity between Ball's hypnotic litany in

simulated language and "Incantation by Laughter" because the latter uses phonetic

roots of a comprehensible living literary language.

It is the incantational attitude that allies Ball and Khlebnikov's sound poems,

alleges Nilsson. Ball describes his chanting recital at the Cabaret Voltaire as a

shamanistic performance that aimed to put the audience in a trance-like state. He also

confesses impact of the power of the cadence in the sound of zaum-like words on the performer that turned him into 'a magic bishop':

28 Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurism, ed. Paul Schmidt and Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 20. 29 Nils Ake Nilsson. "How to Translate Avant-garde Poetry: Some Attempts with Khlebnikov's 'Incantation by Laughter.'" Velimir Khlebnikov: A Stockholm Symposium (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1985): 133-150. 138

Then I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation. [...] I started to chant the vowel sequences like church recitative. [...] Then the lights went out and I was carried off the stage, my body bathed in sweat, like a magic bishop.30

Khlebnikov's incantation is comparable to Ball's chant of Gadji beri bimba?x

Similar to a folk jester who asks verbal riddles or a shaman who chants hypnotic tunes, both poets shift sound patterns and play on the liminal edge between surprise and recognition: They use the immediacy of sound gestures and their perception as poetic devices. Whether Khlebnikov wanted to encourage the verbal creativity of his friends,

Futurists - ismekhachi\ as Nilsson claims, or not, his "Incantation by Laughter" is a shamanistic chant for the supposed audience - its power relies on its 'primitive' sound and rhythm. It is a sound poem from the mouth of the man of oral culture whose only means of expression was vocal performance.

Krystyna Pomorska also finds that "Incantation by Laughter" "mainly alludes to the folk incantation, of which the important property is that language in it becomes both the tool and the object - two functions concentrated in one act."32 Apparently, the prosodic device - ''the tool' and verbal/aural material - 'the object' unite in the poem making the sign palpable as Formalist doctrine had proposed. Pomorska rightly points out the structural dominance of the verbs in imperative mode that motivates the incantational attributes of the poem. These attributes are equivalent to the features of oral folk literature. In oral cultures, asserts Walter Ong, an utterance, that is, a word, onomatopoeia or a cry, is a direct communication between the sounds of nature and man and thus attains a unity of the human 'life/world.' Unlike a written sentence, which

30 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 71. 31 Ball's sound-shaped peformance is also discussed earlier in the dissertation: see p. 88! 32 Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 97. 139 in modern Western society carries word-concepts, oral culture "situates knowledge within a context of struggle" and keeps it in the social context of telling and listening

"embedded in the human life/world."33

Ong's discussion of folkloric practices of verbal games and the exchange of proverbs and riddles illuminates the incantation of smekhachi / laughadors in

Khlebnikov's poem. He finds that these forms of oral folklore "are not used simply to

store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat: the utterance of a proverb or riddle challenges the listeners to top it with an opposite or contradictory one."34 This aspect of challenging the audience found in the oral cultures became an exquisite weapon of futurist art, poetry and theatre. In their vocal assault of the audience, Futurists made use of the unwritten rules of oral culture. The mutual relationship between speaker and listener worked to lure the audience into participating in the theatrical event. This tendency, deeply rooted in so-called 'primitive' oral cultures and accepted by Futurists, lent a ritualistic and participative nature to the theatre of the historical avant-garde.

Perhaps paradoxically, what defines this avant-garde movement is not overtly modern qualities, such as the 1920s romance of technology: George Antheil's 'aeroplane sonata'', Carlo Govoni's 'poesie elettriche' or Enrico Prampolini's 'theatre of mechanics'' - but primitivism. [...] Focus on myth and magic, which in theatre leads to experiments with ritual and ritualistic patterning of performance. [...] In theatrical terms this is reflected by a reversion to 'original' forms: the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece, shamanistic performances, the Balinese dance-drama.

The incantatory character of Balinese theatre, its semi-comprehensible chant and codified dance movement that seemed to mime nothing from ordinary behavior

33 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002), 44. 34 Ibid. 44. 35 Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre, 1892-1992 (London: Routledge, 1966), 3. fascinated Antonin Artaud. It inspired his search for an idiom that would 'consist of noises, cries, gestures, poses and signs which would only include words as

'incantations.'36 Khlebnikov's zaum poem My churaemsya i charuemsya (We enchant

and recant, 1914) embraces the notion of such an idiom.

My churaemsya i charuemsya Tarn charuyas', zdes' churayas', To churakhar', to charakhar', Zdes' churil', tarn charil.''

The entire poem is a sound game between 'char' and ichur\ two juxtaposed phonemic roots that denote two antonyms: enchantment, allurement, captivation versus limiting, warding off, protecting. A semi-comprehensible chant, a repetitive mantra of two contrasting but similarly sounding forces char and chur makes a dramaturgy of the poem. This sound pattern calls for an expressive rendition that makes the verbal oppositions active. The minimal phonetic variation of the two phonemes stimulates the reader/performer to exaggerate the pronunciation, pitch, loudness and rhythm in order to distinguish them. Thus situated halfway between a poem and a theatrical event, incantation My churaemsya i charuemsya, reveals its intrinsic performative potential. It sounds like a pre-rhetorical oral performance, the kind used in shamanic mantras or children's games that is based on a rhythmical repetitive chant that pulsates between redundancy and sparseness. Like oral culture's 'primitive man,' who participated in the world of the eternal cyclical creation through ritualistic sound repetition, our poet chants and un-chants, charms and un-charms through the magic of sound, a rhythmical repetition of the sound of the changing world. Khlebnikov wrote:

36 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. M. C. Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 70. 37 Velimir Khlebnikov, Snake Train: Poetry and Prose, ed. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1976), 59. 141

Spells and incantations, what we call magic words, the sacred language of paganism, words like 'shagadam, magadam, vigadam, pitz, patz, patzu' - they are rows of mere syllables that the intellect can make no sense of, and they form a kind ofbeyonsense language in folk speech. [...] The magic in a word remains magic; even if it is not understood, it loses none of its power. [...] Its strange wisdom may be broken down into the truths contained in separate sounds: sh, m, v, etc. We do not yet understand these sounds. We confess honestly. But there is no doubt that these sound sequences constitute a series of universal truths passing before the predawn of our soul.38

In this same field of 'sequence' of sounds that 'we do not yet understand,' sounds bearing 'universal truths,' the zaum poetry is located. This gave rise to a new prosody or dramaturgy of sound in place of the conventional one. Avant-garde theatre at the beginning of 20th century relied on thus conceived dramaturgy aimed at the ritualistic inclusion of the performer and the audience in the theatrical event. A dynamic interaction with the surrounding world through the shamanic incantation, impossible in an explanatory and representative idiom, became a credo of the artistic practice and the programmatic goal of Italian and Russian theatre manifestos.

The 'strange wisdom' contained in sounds, as Khlebnikov put it, appeared in

Aleksei Kruchenykh's soulful poem Vysoty (Heights), composed exclusively of vowels.

The poem was included in the "Declaration of the Word as Such" (1913) as an example of the language of the universe {vselenskii yazyk). It contained no consonants but all the vowels from the Orthodox liturgical chant Symvol veri (Credo):

Veruyu e u yu v yedinogo i a o boga o a otza vsederschitelya o a e e i e ya tvortza o a nebu i zemli e u i e 39 i i y i e i i y

38 Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, eds. Paul Schmidt and Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 152. It seems that the interplay of wind instrument-like tones of these vowels was

nothing like the soothing musicality of the Symbolist verse but rather a dramatic

introspection of the spirituality of the Russian church singing. As if Kruchenykh

wanted to enter "a very specific place in which a language encounters a voice, [...] a

double production of language and of music" that Roland Barthes has called the grain

of the voiced The contemporary performance theorists often use this Barthes' notion

when discussing the bodily, carnal and erotic aspect of the performer-audience

relationship. Considering the deeper stratum of voice/tone formation, Barthes notices that "the single skin lined the performer's inner flesh and the music he sings."41 That

single skin lines Kruchenykh's inner need to return to roots in his zaum vowel

composition, Heights, and the Russian church chant, Credo. It is not only a return to the lexical and phonetic roots typical of futurist poetry or to visual simplicity as in

Larionov and Malevich's rough paintings akin to the primitive peasant iloubok> woodcuts, but also a return to spiritual roots felt through "the pleasure in poetry [...] found in the articulations in the original dance of the speech organs."4 It is worth noting that Barthes himself illustrates the grain of the voice with the example of a

Russian church bass:

Listen [...] something is there, manifest and persistent (you hear only that), which is past (or previous to) the meaning of the words, [...] something from the depths of the body cavities [...] and from the depths of the Slavonic language, as if a single skin lined the performer's inner flesh and the music he 43 sings.

Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980), 76. 40 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 269. 41 Ibid. 270. 42 Viktor Shklovsky, "On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language," transl. Gerald Janecek and Peter Mayer, October, Vol. 34, (Autumn, 1985), 20. 43 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 270. That is exactly what zaum wanted to communicate: something 'past (or previous to) the meaning of the words.' Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov believed in a language of sounds that would voice the truth of the body and truth of the world, an idiom that would carry emotions and thoughts, beyond rational concepts. Their poetry strived to immediately communicate both the sensory experience of human body and the deep mysticism of nature.

Glossolalia, the mysterious human ability to speak in forgotten languages, is another source of zaum poetry and futurist experiments with sound that would bring forth primordial meanings. Today, glossolalia is defined as incomprehensible speech uttered in a state of trance or schizophrenic derealization, but it has an ancient mythical history as well. In early Christianity speaking in tongues was considered a gift, a vehicle through which the Holy Spirit announced itself to the Apostles. Andrei Bely, whose impact on futurist poetry I discussed earlier, wrote Glossolalia: A Poem about

Sound (1922).44 Although conceived as a poem, it was an essay on the origins of language in which Bely examined Indo-European roots and the role of sound in word- formation and the communication of meaning. He alleged that we no longer understand sound combinations contained in the phonemic roots we use. Influenced by Rudolf

Steiner's anthroposophy and the principle of eurhythmy in art, Bely regarded word- formation, or as he termed it, zvukoslovie (sound-wording), as the result of physical gestures of the tongue producing sound. These voice gestures reflect 'archetypal movements' and could be compared to the gestures or movements of an eurhythmist. It complies with the eurhythmic principle that establishes a mysterious link between the

44 See Thomas R. Breyer, Jr., "Andrej Belyj's Glossalolia: A Berlin Glossolalia," Europa orientalis, XIV, 2 (1995), 7-25. physical rhythm of nature and human emotional or spiritual states. This principle, first

applied in dance, governs every aspect of creation and therefore of speech, non-verbal

sound or music and, by extension, every aspect of artistic expression. Viewed in this

light, glossolalia can be considered a rhythmical, albeit incomprehensible, verbal

response to the mystical power of unknown archetypal forces.

Aleksei Kruchenykh regarded glossolalia as a genuine expression of an

ecstatic soul that could be used as a model for the futurist zaum poetry. He admired the

members of the sect of flagellants called Khlysty who would reach mystical ecstasy and

speak in unknown tongues to the point of physical exhaustion. In several theoretical

texts about 'word as such' and zaumnyyazyk, he quoted an example provided by

ethnographer and writer Varlaam Shishkov, who himself practiced Khlyst rituals:

nosoktos lesontos futr lis natrufuntru kreserefire kresentre fert cherosantro ulmiri umilisantru.45

This trans-sense chant would come to the lips of members of the underground

church sect active from late 17th century - Russian Spiritual Christians, called Khlysty.

The sect's commonly accepted name Khlysty is actually a corrupted form of Khristy -

Christ's men. Thus the name of one to whom they were devoted, was verbally deformed by the denunciation of what they did to themselves, khlyst - whip. Ironically, this neologism confirms Khlebnikov's theory that the initial consonant denotes the meaning of the word so that its shift represents a most powerful phono-poetic device.

Khlysty's spiritual/physical rituals, according to rumors in the official Orthodox

Church, often ended in sexual orgies. The very connection between body and soul,

45 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 65. characteristic of the Russian closeness with paganism, made glossolalia and other forms of irrational sound creation even more attractive to the Futurists. They were particularly interested in a myriad of spontaneous vocal responses to the somatic impulses - cries, groans, laughs or chants articulated in the living body - sounds that worked to disarticulate the language of conventional communication. The physical and ritualistic tendency of the avant-garde theatre draws from this notion of the voice as a carnal gesture - a non-referential utterance that communicates the body of the performer rather than a lexical message.

3.4. Sound Symbolism, Chopped-up Words, Play of Vowels and Consonants

Aleksei Kruchenykh, the main propagator and practitioner of zaumny yazyk, came from rowdy camp of the bohemian painters known for their Neo-primitive wild colours, 'unrefined' figurative art, distorted perspective and dynamic expansion of forms. Benedikt Livshits acknowledged the painterly motivation of Kruchenykh's zaum claiming that the poet seems to have grafted the principle of artistic distortion onto language 'by equating the stroke on the canvas with sounds or phonemes, both of which were to him free from 'reality': which apparently liberated him from it.'

Kruchenykh wrote most of the zaum declarations, often with Velimir

Khlebnikov, but the latter was more renowned for his poetry. Kruchenykh's manifestos tried to persuade the reader to accept zaumny yazyk or beyonsense language: a trans- mental, transrational, trans-sense, metalogical, nonsense verbal practice that "allows the crunching of words to fulfill a definite phonetic (or other) task." The idiom itself had begun its life in early Khlebnikov's experiments from around 1906 to 1908 and

Kruchenykh's poem Dyr bul shchyl (in Pomada, 1913). There is substantial difference between Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov's approach to zaum. While Khlebnikov tried to

find a universal sound idiom in the phonetic roots beyond the limits of a particular

literary language, Kruchenykh fought restlessly for the innovation of sound poetry most

often transgressing into proto-Dadaist alogical and absurdist nihilism. While

Khlebnikov tended to get to a higher sense of the language saved in Slavic phonetic roots, Kruchenykh tried to release language from the entanglements of signification through 'primitive coarseness' and 'poetic irregularities' that reveal its live sound lying underneath the frozen words of everyday, practical use. Word as Such, a 15-page pamphlet published in Moscow 1913 contains a theoretical elaboration of the new poetics by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov followed by several illustrative examples of zaum poetry.

The Futurian painters love to use parts of the body, its cross section, and the Futurian wordwrights use chopped-up words, half-words, and their odd artful combinations (transrational language) thus achieving the very greatest expressiveness, and precisely this distinguishes the swift language of modernity, which has annihilated the previous frozen language. 47

Kruchenykh's poem Dyr bul shchyl was the main piece of evidence.

Dyr bul shchyl Ubeshshchur Skum Vy so bul r I ez

Quoted in Gerald Janacek, Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego State University Press, 1996), 302. 47 Lawton, Russian Fuuturism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 61. 147

This poem, made of not even chopped-up words but of elementary phonemes,

that is, letter-sounds and consonant clusters, served as an example of zaum word

creation in many futurist manifestos and, later, in Shklovsky's theoretical elaboration

"On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language," and in other Formalist and contemporary

literary studies. The poet explained, "In art, there may be unresolved dissonances -

'unpleasant to the ear' - because there is dissonance in our soul by which the former

are resolved. [...] All this does not narrow art, but rather opens new horizons."48 The

roughness of sound resulted from the intuitive use of expressive consonants since they

"render everyday reality (byt), nationality, weight - vowels, the opposite: A

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE," admits Kruchenykh.49 In Khlebnikov's zaum poetry,

consonant sounds were dominant as well: they were bearers of masculinity, strength

and the meaning of the word. The word's byt was determined by its initial consonant.

Hence, the shift (sdvig) in consonant structure became the decisive factor in

Khlebnikov's new coinages. In the case of Kruchenykh's Dyr bul shchyl, there is a more intuitive approach to the sound content, which is comparable to Filippo Tommaso

Marinetti's 'lyric intoxication with matter.' Nilsson historically connects the

appearance of Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Writers" in 1912 and the mushrooming of Russian word manifestos and zaum poetry that followed in 1913. He

allows that "the poem [Dyr bul shchyl] could be read as an interesting illustration of the

[...] idea of Marinetti and Soffici: the final goal of art is to lose itself in life, the sounds of poetic language become congruent with sounds of life."50 Nilsson even goes into further details suggesting that the first sound of the last line 'r' could stand for the roar

48 Ibid. 68. 49 Ibid. 67. 50 N.A. Nilsson, "Kruchonykh's Poem Dyr bul shchyl'," Scando-Slavica, vol. 24 (1979), 145 148

of the engine, while the last 'ez' might represent letting off steam from the whistle.

Knowing that the Russians held Marinetti's onomatopoeia in low esteem this seems

unlikely. In addition, Kruchenykh's manifesto "The New Ways of the Word" published

the same year clearly rejects the mechanical onomatopoea of Italians:

Our goal is simply to point out irregularity as a device, to show the necessity and the importance of irregularity. Our goal is to underscore the great significance for art of all strident elements, discordant sounds (dissonances) and purely primitive roughness. [...] The Italian 'amateurish' Futurists, with their endless ra ta ta ra ta ta [...] mechanical tricks - soulless, monotonous - lead to the death of life and art. [...] Our verbal creativity is generated by a new deepening of the spirit, and it throws new light on everything.51

Dyr bul shchyl was certainly conceived as an experiment with discordant

sounds whose primitive roughness enters deep into the aural substratum of the

language. It contradicts the mechanical mimesis of modern, industrial, urban noise prevalent in Marinettian onomatopoeia.

In the manifesto, Kruchenykh prides himself on producing Dyr bul shchyl, a poem in which there is more Russian spirit than in all of Pushkin. Truly, the poem's rough, cacophonic consonant instrumentation replaced the euphonic beauty and

smoothness of Symbolist poetry. That is why Pomorska links its harsh sound with the aesthetics of the 'rough surface' and the surprising perspective of Cubist painting. But in regards to the poem's Russian spirit, there is another element she notices. Namely,

Pomorska alleges that through the search for '"heavy sounds', that is, especially chosen phonemes, mainly 'difficult' consonants ('jest eshche horoshie bukvi, r, sh, stick'

['these letters are beautiful, r, sh, shch' - Mayakovsky]), Futurists began to copy the sound patterns of Turkic languages."52 Unaware of the language pattern he used,

51 Ibid. 75/76. 52 Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 120. Kruchenykh aimed at an Ur-Sprache that would tear through the ear like 'a formidable

chanf as he called Dyr bul shchyl. But at the same time, together with other Russian

futurist poets, he believed in the expressive power of phonemes from the languages of the Steppes of Central Asia where tribal, 'pagan' sound was still connected with life.

Boris Eichenbaum states that Futurists desired to sense anew the oral substance of the

word - "not the word as a symbolic sound, but the word as a direct articulation which has a real meaning: the loud oratorical word had to replace the soft, intimately lyrical

language." On account of the loud orality and harsh melody of their poetry, Futurists

embraced pagan, Scythian, Asiatic heritage as the core of Russian authenticity and, in that sense, Kruchenykh dared to describe Pushkin's language as inferior to Dyr bul shchyl.

3.5. Articulatory, Ludic and Concrete Aspects of Sound in Zaum

Dyr bul shchyl's phonetic structure displays another vital feature of the dramaturgy of sound, its articulatory aspect. Nilsson claims that the explicit disposition of the consonants determines a particular speech pattern to be used in its vocal rendition. More specifically, while analyzing the poem's euphonic form, Nilsson discovered that the energy levels of the lines vary considerably. While the first line of the poem contains the explosive cluster 'shchiP, the last line flattens out to the reduced energy of the hissing sound 'ez.' In addition, after exploring the list of all consonants and vowels of the poem in regards to their place of articulation, Nilsson concludes that:

"An oral rendering requires full exploitation of the speech apparatus and a constant

53 Quoted in Barooshian, Russian Cubo-Futurism, 64. 150 changing from one position to another. It reminds one of the 'speech mimic.'"54 The articulatory aspect of the phonetic structure in Dyr bul shchyl thus provides a locus of new vocal play based solely on the physicality of the pronunciation. It means that the poem's phonetic construction incorporates the question of its physical performative potential in its oral, articulatory aspect. That, again, allows for consideration of zaum as an idiom of bodily gesture in terms of Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice.

As early as in 1916, in his essay "On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language,"

Viktor Shklovsky pointed to the performative potential inherent in zaum poetry.

In the enjoyment of meaningless trans-sense language the articulatory aspect of speech is undeniably important. It may even be that in general the greater part of the pleasure in poetry is to be found in the articulations in the original dance of the speech organs.55

This dance of the speech organs is the speech of performer's body offered to the audience in an act of performance, not an act of representation. It is a language of carnal play, physical action of the tongue, contractions of speech organs, movement of the air in the cavities of the body - it is an utterance of sound, not an articulation of concept-words aimed somewhere else.

Shklovsky explains zaumny yazyk following the theory of German psychologist and physiologist Wilhelm Max Wundt (1832-1920). Wundt examined the links between sounds and words, notably onomatopoeia, a form that he considered as the source of all language. In the cognitive process man encounters things and iconically represents them in pictograms and ideograms but "after the pictorial elements of words disappeared, the meaning of words became linked solely to their sounds [that]

54 Nilsson, op. cit., 144. 55 Viktor Shklovsky, "On Poetry and Trans-Sense Language," trans. Gerald Janecek and Peter Mayer, October, vol. 34, (Autumn, 1985), 20. 151 gave the words their sensual tonality."56 This 'sensual tonality' was what Futurists were

searching for in their effort to establish a beyonsense idiom. It adheres to the anthropological insight into oral, ritual practices based on the rhythmical empathy between a performer and his audience. The sound incitement of a 'formidable chant,' as

Kruchenykh called his Dyr bul shchyl, is communicated at the psychosomatic level of the rhythmic sound repetition rather than at the referential level of the story telling.

Shklovsky thus theoretically evaluated zaumny yazyk as a consequence of language development. According to Shklovsky, sound and word creation beyond logic and syntax were not to be regarded as an eccentric discovery by rebellious poets, but rather as the extraction of qualities already extant in language's 'sensual tonality.'

It appears to us that the closest neighbors to onomatopoetic words are 'words' without concept and content that serve to express pure emotion, that is, words which cannot be said to exhibit any imitative articulation, for there is nothing to imitate, but only a concatenation of sounds and emotion - of a movement in which the hearer participates sympathetically by reproducing a certain mute tensing of the speech organs.57

Believing that the listener sympathetically participates in the original dance of verbal gesture by his own 'mute tensing of speech organs,' Shklovsky points out the almost-physical touch inherent in the concatenation of sounds and emotion, that is, the voice. In this way Shklovsky comes close to Roland Barthes' argument that "every relation to a voice is necessarily erotic, and this is why it is in the voice that music's difference is so apparent - in its constraint to evaluate, to affirm."58 Music/sound is not an affirmative statement of any textual thesis: it is just an immediate sensory attraction, in case of an air or a verse carried by, or rather embedded in, the voice. Barthes finds

56 Ibid. 8. 57 Ibid. 9. 58 Roland Barthes, "Music, Voice, Language," The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 280. 152

that the music-carrying voice is 'a supplement, a lapse' which remains unrevealed by

any historical, sociological, aesthetical, technical consideration of music. In voiced

sound there is always something more than a sung air or a recited verse: 'something

non-spoken which designates itself: the voice.' Similarly to the voiced sound in

Barthes' description, the self-sufficient word in zaum poetry does not affirm anything,

in fact it recoils from meaning: it is not a statement - it is a vocal gesture. It

communicates itself through the voice, which is delivery of the body to the body by

means of sound. Shklovsky regards the zaum word as an expression of pure emotion or

intuition, a result of the concatenation of sounds that makes both the speaker's and the

listener's speech organs dance, rather than as an imitative execution of a poetic image.

Therefore, its idiom is more oral/aural than lexical. In "Music, Voice, Language,"

Barthes speculates that such an idiom is already inscribed in the musicality of the text - one need just to pronounce it as is and not to articulate it as a part of speech. Here

Barthes regards vocal pronunciation as a physical act of vocal utterance opposite to the verbal articulation that strives to appropriate meaning through syntax.

Music is both what is expressed and what is implicit in the text: what is pronounced (submitted to inflections) but is not articulated. [...] Articulation, in effect, functions abusively as pretence of meaning: claiming to serve meaning, it basically misreads it. [...] To articulate is to encumber meaning with a parasitical clarity [... while] the pronunciation maintains the perfect coalescence of the line of meaning (the phrase) and the line of music.59

This interrelationship between music/sound, voice and language is quintessential to the futurist idea of making poetry. The poetic substance of zaum relies implicitly in sound of broken phonemes and inflection of naked roots dismantling the syntactic lexical structure. Precisely by escaping the 'pretence of meaning' Futurist

Ibid. 283/4. 153 poets were able to liberate words. Words were reduced to their phonemes, stripped bare of their signifying fetters, revealing their music/sound in new and fresh pronunciation:

'the perfect coalescence of the line of meaning and the line of music' as Barthes put it.

Through this fresh pronunciation they conceived things anew. Thus zaum innovation in sound of poetry participated in Shklovsky's ostranenie (defamiliarization), a poetic device that seeks fresh insight into the essence of things.

The ludic features of the entire music/voice/language interaction in the rendition of poetry are also originated by sensual 'dance of speech organs' pertaining to the articulatory aspect of Futurist poetic language. One of Kruchenykh's transrational poems, published in Explodity, 1913, and consisting solely of the phonemes: "i / che / de / mali / gr / iu / iukh /ddd/ddd/se/v/m [...] lili Hub biul "60 provides a useful example. Its cheerful gibberish is similar to the zaum poems of painter Elena Guro often created from children's babble or rhymes. The raw simplicity of naive primitive sketches by Larionov, Rosanova, Matiushin or Malevich who illustrated her poetry books reflected a similar play with words. Kruchenykh, Shklovsky and others often quoted Guro's poem Finlandia as an example of zaum.

Lulla, lolla, lalla-lu Liza, lolla, lulla-li Khvoi shuyat, shuyat Ti-i-i, ti-i-i-u-u...

Elena Guro employs the euphonic devices of children's spontaneous speech creativity: syllabic play, repetition of formulas, corruption of words and so on, in order to make the poem emanate its own pleasure and meaning. The poem begins with a lullaby rhyme whose melodic play of syllables suggests its Finnish phonetic origin:

50 Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism : A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), 65. 61 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 61. 154

'lalla-lu lulla-li...'' (The phoneme 'laula' in Finnish denotes singing.) Then, through the repetition of girls' names: Anna-Maria and Lisa followed by the questions: This! and

Not! the poem acquires a form of a children's counting/asking verbal game. And finally, when needles on the pine threes or leafs on the birch-trees talk, they 'shuyaf instead of 'shumyaf as it should be in standard speech. In the English translation, they

'whisser' instead of 'whisper.' Once again, children's corrupted pronunciation is used to undermine the lexical regularity and to emphasize the creative aspects of verbal play.

Vasilyi Kamensky's poetry of anarchic verbal play has the same ludic sense of

Guro's. Characteristically, "he believed that the phoneme 7«' expressed femininity, movement and excitement. [...] Perhaps no one felt sound as an aim in itself, as a unique joy as much as Vasilyi Kamensky,"62 a poet, aviator and songsmith who expressed 'KAKoFoNy of the SOU1 / Symphony of the MoTOrS' in sounds like these:

Zgara-amba Zgara-amba Zgara-amba / Amb Amb-zgara-amba Amb-zgara-amba Amb-zgara-amba Zgara-amba / Amb Shar-shor-shur-shir Chin-drakh-tam-dzzz.63

Kamensky's cheerful play of sounds in this poem goes beyond imitating children's linguistic creation. His is poetry of sheer enjoyment. Actually, his method rightly poses the question: why should this kind of play with syllabic sound patterns be limited to children's naivety, spontaneous playfulness or religious ecstasy? The poet here treats syllables as sound 'patches,' that is, not necessarily linked to word roots, and

62 Barooshian. Russian Cubo-Futurism, 101. 63 Ibid. 100. 155 practices what Khlebnikov defined as free play with word-dolls. These dolls or patches of sound could be transformed and moved around like any other element of composition. They are independent of the onomatopoeia as an iconic reflection of the object's sound, children's babble, religious ecstasy or emotional breakdown. They do not aim at the mimetic reconstruction of anything but build an independent structure or a fluid sound form on its own merit. They are object-less. In that respect, zaum poetry announced the arrival of Dada and concrete/abstract art.

A similar consideration of independent euphonic effects can be found on the

Italian side. Namely, Aldo Palazzeschi's later sound experiments went beyond the onomatopoeia, like dripping water in La Fontana malata (Clof/clop/clogh), and developed into a sort of free play with patches of sound reminiscent of Guro's infantilism and Kamensky's play with words/dolls. In E lasciatemi divertire (And Let

Me Have Fun), he played with 'little trifles' that are 'the refuse of other poems':

Bilobilobilibilobilo, brum! Filofilofilofilofilo, flum! Bilolu. Filolu. U. It isn't true they don't mean anything, They mean something. They mean... As when someone Begins to sing Not knowing the words. A very vulgar thing. Yet, I like it. Aaaaa! Eeeee! Iiiii! Ooooo! Uuuuu!64

Folejewski, Futurism and its place, 167. 156

The poem suggested the abstract play of sounds that only singing, a musical component of the speech, could provide. Besides its affinity with Russian zaum sound composition, Palazzeschi's poetry displays a structural principle of aleatoric creation practiced by Dadaists who, following the advice of Tristan Tzara, cut up words from the page with scissors, shook them around in a bag and drew out a chance poem.

3.6. Futurist Sound from Poetry and Music to Painting and Theatre

The hybridization of arts practices and reciprocal influence between contemporary poetics, techniques and methods of poetry, painting, sculpting, music and performance arts reflected the crisis of artistic expression at the beginning of 20th century. The Symbolists 'helped destroy poetry as thinking in images [while] the

Futurists in their turn discarded the philosophic mysticism of their predecessors and replaced it with a strongly technical approach.'65 That meant the recognition of materiality of sign/sound - the concept and practice that spread from music to poetry and painting and vice versa. Krystina Pomorska suggests that Russian Futurists developed an aesthetics of 'the word from the aspect of sound as the only material and theme of poetry'' under the Cubist influence.

The sound is equated to paint, geometrical lines and figures, and it becomes an independent phenomenon to be experienced and enjoyed as the only poetry, real and pure. Thus the Futurists fought for the 'pure word', not loaded with any referential or symbolic function with respect to the object. "The word at liberty" was supposed to operate with its own structure, and the associations between sounds should evoke 'new objects', sometimes called 'zvuko-obrazV [sound images].66

Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 121. Ibid. 78. 157

The conception of sound objects or 'sound images' followed the theory of art

built at the intersection of temporal and spatial axes. In the manifesto, "A Trap for

Judges" (1913), Futurists proclaimed "letters [as] only vectors of speech," considered

vowels as time and space (due to their ability of thrust), understood "consonants as

colour, sound and smell," and "for the first time brought to the fore the role of verbal

mass and made it perceivable."67 Thus the manifesto introduced principles of plastic

dynamism from Futurist painting theories in the arena of poetry and carried

synaesthetic concepts from the writings of Kandinsky, Kublin and Burliuk brothers.

The manifesto admitted closer ties between poetry and painting through the concepts of

'vectors of speech', the expansive quality of vowel sounds, and 'verbal mass.' Vladimir

Markov cites painter David Burliuk's poem as one that stresses visual features of the vowels:

The a-sounds are wide and spacious; The /-sounds are high and adroit; The «-sounds are like empty pipes; The o-sounds are like the curve of a hunchback; The e-sounds are flat, like sand banks. Thus I have surveyed the family of vowels, laughingly.

If Kruchenykh 'grafted strokes of his brush' onto his poetry, then, similarly,

Burliuk's poem grafted the sound of vowels onto their visual appearance. These notions were accounted for in Russian Futurist poetry books, mainly made of stenciled handwritten letters and unrefined illustrations as the visual extensions of poems, in the same vein Italians applied more sophisticated revolutionary typesets on parole in libertd. Predecessors of these experiments were Mallarme's and Apollinaire's attempts at 'visible lyricism' like Un coup de Des and Calligrammes that followed the

67 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, 53/54 68 Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), 287. synaesthetic 'correspondence' between the phonetic features of language and the

chromatic features of music. The same was present earlier in Rimbaud's Voyelles, or

Baudelaire's Correspondences.

Contemporary musical concepts had a significant impact on the proximity of

poetry, painting and theatre in Russian Futurism. This is evident in Nikolai Kublin and

Aleksandr Scriabin's synaesthesia of sounds and colours, both of which were similar to

Kandinsky's elaborations of an 'inner sound' and a 'stage composition' based on it.

Thus, Nikolai Kublin, the main impressario of the Russian avant-garde, envisioned a

single art that would encompass word, music, and the plastic arts. Kublin was a pioneer

of important trends of avant-garde music and sound creation such as the use of smaller

intervals in microtonal music, atonal musical composition and abstract sound/noise art.

His essay in the Blaue Reiter Almanac, advocated a music that would be free and

independent like sounds in nature, liberated from the five-line notation and prescribed

tonality and metre. Kublin also called for the introduction of smaller tonal intervals in

musical composition, like a quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth and so forth, concurrently

to Pratella's and Russolo's endeavours for the establishment of enharmonic music and

the art of noise. In his word-sound manifesto called "What is the Word" (1914), Kublin

even devised a synaesthetic alphabet where he assigned each vowel its own pitch and

each consonant its own colour. On the synoptic table of these colour-sound

correspondences, the phoneme G, for example, matches a Yellow-Black colour and denotes Selfishness, while K matches Black and denotes Hate. 69

See the complete table in Mel Gordon, "Songs from the Museum of Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)," Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 206. 159

Earlier, in the book Free Art as the Basis of Life: Harmony and Dissonance

(1908), Kublin suggested that all art and life depend on the dynamics between harmony

and dissonance. "Complete harmony is death... In music, the plastic arts, and literature,

concord calms the spectator, but discord excites him. [...] It is possible to determine

concords and discords in the spectrum, in the scale of colors, just as in musical

scales,"70 declared Kublin. And again, in agreement with the concept of synaesthesia,

Kublin listed elements of creation:

Blue. Thought in word, sounds and colours. Drawing is melody. Red. Mood. The sounds of colours. The colours of the word. The colours of sounds. Scales. Ornament.7I

Matiushin and Malevich's work on the score, sets and lighting for zaum opera

Victory over the Sun by Khruchenykh seems to be an almost literal application of

Kublin's concepts transposed to the theatrical environment.

Aleksandr Scriabin devised an even more detailed colour-sound scheme and a notation for audio-visual composition intended to be executed on a specially

constructed colour/light organ {clavier a lumiere). Following Scriabin's code, the musical note C matches the colour Red, and represents Human Will, C-sharp is Violet, representing Creative Spirit, D isYellow, representing Joy, and so on. This was practically employed in his symphony Prometheus: A Poem of Fire (1910), in which a light keyboard projected colours on the screen according to Scriabin's intuitive music- color code. His unfinished symphonic poem Mysterium - Poem of Ecstasy, was meant to be a colossal multimedia spectacle of dance, scent and light performed in India, at

70 Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 13. 71 Ibid. 16. 72 Gordon in Wireless Imagination, 209. The article also brings a compiled table of Khlebnikov's universal phonetic/colour alphabet. See p. 216. the foot of Himalayas, but was never executed. It was the composer's intent to write music of hidden correspondences between human senses and spiritual planes that

through ecstasy would attain mysterious liberation. Scriabin's music and multimedia

attempts were inspired by theosophical beliefs like Kandinsky's sound/colour theatre pieces.

Ideas like Kublin's and Scriabin's resonated in the Russian futurist theatre dramaturgy of sound, light, colours, volume and mass applied in the staging of Victory over the Sun and Zangezi. Additionally, the beyonsense idiomatic structure of these pieces relied on zaum poetry's practice in which words - like tones in music or colours in painting - were treated as material with its own mass, texture and structure governed by the concrete material laws. The closeness of verbal/musical and painterly/sculptural expression has been expressed in Bobeobi Sang the Lips (1910), a poem in which

Velimir Khlebnikov calls for painting by/in sound.

Bo-be-o-bee sang the lips Ve-e-o-mee sang the eyes Pee-e-e-o sang the brows Lee-e-e-ey sang the look Gzi-gzi-gzeo sang the chain Thus on a canvas of certain connections Outside of space there lived the Face. It is as if the poem is flowing over a painting's surface touching it with its ear and enjoying it through its mouth. It listens to its masses and colours and pronounces its sounds revealing the painting that achieves the 'transposition of the visual sequence into the sound sequence' (Pomorska). Khlebnikov's verses began with entirely new clusters of sounds that evoked new sound-images (zvuko-obrazi). "What strikes us here first of all is that the vocables such as bobeobi, veeomi, lieej, gzi-gzi-gzeo not only do

For the original of Bobeobi Sang the Lips see Appendix, Figure 15. not have any meaning in Russian codified language, but their construction is alien to

Russian phonology,"74 alleges Pomorska. The initial vocables in each verse enabled a

verbo-vocal and audio-visual synergy independent of any linguistic strains. As if the

entirely new colours and textures emerged from the poet's sound palette. The synergy

of Khlebnikov's zvukopis (painting by sound) in zaum is reminiscent of Cubo-futurist

painterly masses from which the form of their canvases emerges, as Malvich put it. Or,

as Pomorska has stated: "canvas of some correspondences [by] a Cubist painter, [is]

transposed by a poet into another medium - sound. The latter operation has to do with

the programmatic futurist (and generally vanguard) syncretism of the arts. [...So] the

'transrational language' acquires its 'meaningfulness' in the structure of the poem."75

In Khlebnikov's synaesthetic reflection "Let them read on my gravestone"

(1904), there is an ontological claim for the literal materialness of sound and colour. In the text, he proposes the wholeness of 'only one, but a great one' sense instead of the

synergy of five senses.

There exist certain quantities, independent variables, which as they change transform senses of the various classes - for example, sound and sight or smell - one into the other.

Thus by changing certain existing values, the blue color of cornflower (I mean the pure sensation as such) can be continuously varied through areas of disjunction we humans are unaware of and be transformed into the sound of a cuckoo's call or a child's crying; it becomes them.76

Not only are there correspondences between colours and sound, alleges

Khlebnikov, but also there are different sensations that pour into each other as one and the same fluid material we do not account for. It is something to be perceived beyond

74 Pomorska, Rusian Formalist Theory, 99. 75 Ibid. 99. 76 Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of Russian Futurism, ed. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 117. sense, but, at the same time, it is real and palpable matter in which all three reside - 'the blue color of cornflower,' 'the sound of a cuckoo's call' and 'a child's crying.' The poet's claim that a sensation becomes material [Note the original emphasis!] involved a shift of artistic production and reception from the metaphysical field of aesthetics to the ontological field of creation where art and life merge. The sounds and colours no longer stand for 'poetic images' (as mediations) but instead materialize giving and gaining life and shape to and from an ontological art (of creating matter). It is not that 'blue' metaphorically represents 'crying,' but that the colour 'blue' is the sound of'crying.'

By an act of expression or utterance colour becomes sound and sound becomes colour: the same applies to light, movement, mass and all the other elements of poetry, painting, sculpture or stage performance. Transgressing the limits of conventional expression, sensations, and media, the historical avant-garde, Futurism and Dadaism, gave birth to exciting and genuine works of art.

In his essay Pictorial Rayonism, 1914, Mikhail Larionov tries to scientifically justify the link between sound and colour.

Obviously, a blue spread evenly over the canvas vibrates with less intensity than the same blue put on more thickly. Hitherto this law has been applicable only to music, but it is incontestable also with regard to painting: colors have a timbre that changes according to the quality of their vibrations, i.e., of density and loudness. In this way, painting becomes as free as music and 77

becomes self-sufficient outside imagery.

Mikhail Larionov's and Natalia Goncharova's theory of 'rayonism' in painting can be compared to Boccioni's ideas about plastic 'dynamism' and fluidity as a simultaneous action of centrifugal and centripetal forces. For them, objects reverberated in their environment, emanating and reflecting rays back and forth in a

Ibid. 101. 163 dynamic interplay of light and colour. Rather than representing objects, their paintings were expressions of the play of light, colour, saturation, masses, depth, texture, and so on. In the "Rayonists and Futurists: A Manifesto" (1913), they claimed that they created painting free from concrete forms, existing and developing according only to painterly laws! Their conception of free painting parallels Livshits' call for free poetry to have an a priori accidental connection with reality.

Liberated from signifying and figural baggage, words in poetry and objects in plastic arts reacquired their sensorial potential and tactility. Thus the brothers Burliuk spoke about "roughing up the texture of the text to make it 'palpable' through an unorthodox use of the verbal material,"78 while Kruchenykh considered the 'verbal texture' ('faktura s/ova') one of the main resources of zaum poetry to reclaim the tactile quality of words through the orchestration of the "various textures of words - tender, heavy, coarse, dry, and moist [...] by rhythm, semantics, syntax, and graphics."79

In his programmatic text "From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The

New Painterly Realism" (1915), Kazimir Malevich wrote: "The most precious things in pictorial creation are colour and texture: they form the pictorial essence which the subject has always killed. [...] Painters should abandon subject matter and objects if they wish to be pure painters." The zaum poetry manifestos called for an a priori accidental relationship between words and objects, creation beyond sense and use of sound in the same way one uses colour and texture. Their alogical art of zaum echoes

Malevich's claim that "a painted surface is a real living form' and his creation of supreme abstraction that revolutionized arts in 20th century.

78 Lawton, Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 14. 79 Ibid. 37. 80 Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 130. I have transformed myself in the zero of form and through zero have reached creation, that is, suprematism: the new painterly realism - nonobjective form. [...] Everything has disappeared; a mass of material is left from which a new form will be built. In the art of suprematism, forms will live, like all living forms in nature. The new painterly realism is a painterly one precisely because it has no realism of mountains, sky or water... Hitherto there has been a realism of objects, but not of painterly, coloured units. [...] Any painterly surface is more alive than any face from which a pair of eyes and a smile protrudes.81

However, Malevich's 'suprematism' and abstract painting have not been

detached from human life and reality. Even when 'everything has disappeared' the

painter remains immersed in the palpable material searching for a 'living form.' This

Malevich's search shares its roots with the 'lyrical intoxication with matter' - the

source of both the onomatopoeia of Italian sound poetry and the plunge into the swirl of

life by force lines in Italian painting. Explaining 'why people's faces are painted green

and red in pictures', Malevich admitted: "Painting is paint and color; it lies within our

organism. Its outbursts are great and demanding. My nervous system is colored by them. My brain burns with their color."82 Malevich's 'descent' beyond zero of form

and Marinetti's 'lyricism - the rarest faculty of intoxicating yourself with life, filling

life with your own intoxication' are points at which two poetics of transgression of borders between art and life intersect.

In his essay "On Poetry," Malevich wrote: "Poetry is the expression of form,

subject to rhythm and tempo. [...] Sometimes the poet is compelled to create poems devoid of natural forms by the storm of pure and naked rhythm rising within him."83

The energetic, pulsational, gestural aspect of poetry in his interpretation comes from sound's ability to release the performative potential of words by the vocal expression

1 Ibid. 133/4. 2 Ibid. 129. 3 Kazimir Malevich, Essays on Art, ed. Troels Andersen (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1968), vol. 1, 73. 165

that tells something that cannot be told by words [concepts]. 'I weep' or 'I grieve'

cannot express anything, argues Malevich, "All words are merely distinguishing signs

and nothing more. But if I hear a groan, I neither see nor sense it in any definite form. I

recognize pain, which has its language - a groan - and in the groan I hear no word."84

There is no word in the semantic or syntactic sense to be heard in groan; it is

the word in statu nascendi, a word in the process of becoming, a pre-textual word

getting its being born from its phonemic roots as zaum poets had described. A groan, a

vocal gesture, a sound that is not yet a word becomes the language of the avant-garde

performance that "springs from the NECESSITY of speech more than from speech

already formed. But finding an impasse in speech, it returns spontaneously to

gesture."85 That is the language upon which Artaud's notion of theatre has been

conceived, an idiom of stage presence through which the body is delivered to the body

in an eternal debauchery of skin. It is a language where Marinetti's 'lyrical intoxication with matter,' Kruchenykh's and Khlebnikov's transgression beyond sense and

Malevich's descent into the black hole of non-figural abstraction converge.

In her essay that explores the theatricalization of the voice, Helga Finter

arrived at the same point. She analyzed Artaud's conception of a pre-linguistic theatre idiom and found its impact on the post-modern theatre of Richard Foreman, Meredith

Monk and Robert Wilson. Artaud's influence on contemporary theatre is customarily attributed to the performances of the physical, ritual and carnal theatre of cruelty practiced in the avant-garde of the 1960s {Living Theatre's performances, Brook's

Theatre of Cruelty season at the National Theatre, Scheduler's Dionysus in 69 etc.).

Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 110. 166

Nevertheless, Artaud's departure from the text for the sake of incantation, speech or vocal gesture, which Derrida regards as an escape from the closure of representation towards an idiom of presence, had an equally important impact on the abstract theatre of mixed-media. Such theatre "disarticulates the logocentric domination which in our culture governs the relation between the different signifying systems (verbal / visual / auditory) and thus brings the signifying process to light at the expense of our fixation on meaning,"86 Finter claims. Instead of instituting a hierarchy of sign systems participating in textual representation, the verbal, visual and auditory elements of performance slip here against each other creating a fluctuating and immediate theatrical event. Theatre performance does not represent plot, characters and actions; it does not mime anything outside itself: it assumes an 'a priori accidental relation to reality'

(Livshits) as promoted in futurist poetry and performance. Here, "it is the question not of re-presenting facts and actions, but of dramatizing the formation of the being man in/by languages."87

The dramatization of man's formation in/by language, Finter found in avant- garde theatre, is closely related to futurist concepts. Defiantly rejecting the logocentric text, Futurists sought the unstable value of words incarnated in the sound of vocal gestures. Recognizing the vocal gesture as 'the voice at play outside of words'

(Khlebnikov) and the materiality of sound as an independent element of performance,

Futurists opened a path for similar experimentation in theatre. Helga Finter describes

'orality's attribute as the presence of a voice situated between body and language'' as a crucial feature of post-modern mixed-media theatre.

86 Helga Finter, "Experimental Theatre and Semiology of Theatre: The Theatricalization of Voice," Modern Drama (1983), no. 26, 501. 87 Ibid. 501. 167

Experimental theatre begins with another distribution of the two audio-visual unities of the sign: it centers its preoccupation not on the text, but on the orality which, on the one hand, takes the written (the seen) as spoken sounds and transforms sight into hearing and kinesthesia and, on the other hand, takes tone and sound as spatially written, thus transforming hearing to sight.88

Thus, orality for Finter becomes a sine qua non of the avant-garde performance. Its main contribution lies in a disorientation of the linear syntactic text and its transformation into the audio-visual form of postdramatic theatre. The abandonment of the representative form and the plunge into the materiality of sound, colour and mass, initiated by futurist poetry and painting, transfigured the signifying process in performance into a semiotic endeavour of 'switching channels,' a method

Wilson holds viable for his theatre. The dramaturgy of a theatre where audio-visual composition and kinetic sculpting overtake the development of textual plot as a way of semiosis may be considered an extension of the futurist dramaturgy of sound.

3.7. Victory Over the Sun: Theatrical Execution of the Poetics of Zaum

Victory Over the Sun, a futurist opera written and staged by Alexei

Kruchenykh with music by Mikhail Matiushin, prologue by Viktor Khlebnikov and sets, costumes and lighting design by Kazimir Malevich was originally performed only twice on alternate evenings with Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy at the end of 1913.

The piece was an ambitious attempt to go 'beyond the sun' in the creative art of sound, words, music and visuals. It was announced as the First Ever Staging of Futurist

Theatre, December 2-5, 1913, at the summit of the richest season of futurist experimentation in Russia. The project was conceived that summer at the "grandly

88 Ibid. 504. titled First All-Russian Convention of Futurists, apparently just three of them,"

Kruchenykh, Malevich and Matiushin gathered at Matiushin's dacha in Uusikirkko,

Finland. Victory over the Sun appeared after a rich and tumultuous autumn of the St.

Petersburg art scene that witnessed a series of exciting events: 'An Evening of Speech-

Creators' (rechetvortsev) in October at which almost all the zaum poets participated

(brothers Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Livshits, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov and Malevich);

David Burliuk's lecture "On the Futurists" with his reflections on Marinetti in

November, and the last Union of Youth art exhibition in November and December.

Robert Benedetti, who staged the reconstruction of the opera in Los Angeles, in 1980, suggests: "These were times when traditional boundaries and conventions in art were being destroyed and new forms being developed. Victory over the Sun, in fact, may have been the first example of what we now call Performance Art. It was certainly one of the earliest instances of serious multidisciplinary collaboration."90 In spite, the contemporary press simply hated it, which is evident in the acerbic comment in the paper New Time of December 3, 1913:

FUTURIST PERFORMANCE. IN - brr!... SOL! - brr... ENCE! - brrrr. This is futurist language. They will understand me. The public also. P.K-di. 91

But, regardless of its initial failure or success, the production that appeared "three and half years before Satie and Picasso's Parade [...] was one of the first totally modern

John Milner, A Slap in the Face: Futurists in Russia (London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 2007), 23. 90 Robert Benedetti, "Reconstructing Victory over the Sun," The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 28, no. 3 (Autumn, 1984), 17. The recent revivals of the opera took place in 1988, in Helsinki, by Jack Helen Brut theatre group; in 1990, in the Leningrad's Black Square Theatre, directed by Galina Gubanova; in March of 1993, in the Vienna's Kuenstlerhaus Theater, and in June of 1999, in the London's Barbican Centre, directed by Julia Hollander. 91 Alexei Kruchenykh, Our Arrival (Moscow: Archive of Russian Avantgarde - RA, 1995), 66. 169 pieces of twentieth-century performance art [.. .where] performers in stylized geometric costumes danced and sang absurdly before proto-abstract backdrops."92

The theme of rebellion against the sun can be understood as the artists' denial of Apollonian clarity that runs parallel with the futurist divorce from a rational and signifying language in zaum poetry. It was a Dionysian call for the return to the primordial chaos and darkness that can be expressed only through music/sound. Its aurality/orality paradigm of reality brought a necessary fluidity and disturbance in the world of practical rationality and clear visual distinction of things. In "The New Ways of the Word" manifesto Kruchenykh had previously declared: 'we do not serve as the reflection of some sun,' so that the Strong Men of his opera could sing disrespectfully:

"We pulled the sun out with its fresh roots; they're fatty, smelled of arithmetics."93 The subversive intention of the play was made clear by Malevich and Matiushin, in the interview for the St. Petersburg newspaper, Day, on December 1, 1913:

Its meaning is to overthrow one of the greatest artistic values - the sun, in the present instance. Futurists want to break free of this regulated world... to transform world into chaos... to smash established values into fragments... create new values out of these fragments... discovering new, unexpected and unseen links. So then, the sun - that former value - cramps their style and they feel like overthrowing it... it is, in fact, the plot of the opera. The cast of the opera should express this in both language and sound. 94

The plot of the opera: the capture, killing and burial of the sun by the Strong

Men of the future in Kruchenykh's mise-en-scene was executed in an alogical, not always comprehensible dialogue, in the play and actions of symbolic figures, rather than dramatic characters, who recited, sang and moved encased in their cubist

92 Charlotte Douglas, "Introduction," In The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, ed. Paul Schmidt and Charlotte Duglas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4. 93 Victory over the Sun, trasl. Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby. The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 4, (Autumn, 1971), 116. 94 Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, 67. 170 costumes. Moreover, it was a play of the kinetic clash between sculptural and painterly masses, the exaggerated light changes and atonal musical punctuations. Its theatricality was similar to contemporary investigations of stage performance: it looked as if Craig's ubermarionetten were moving and producing sounds in Kandinsky's audio-visual ambience where moving screens reflected the chromatic and tonal changes of light and music. The staging demonstrated the authors' predilection for non-mimetic (objectless) rather than mimetic (objectfull) attitude. This tendency was very much present throughout the whole spectrum of futurist arts: in the theories of Rayonism,

Suprematism and abstract art by Larionov, Gonchareva and Malevich, visual counterparts of the theories of zaumny yazyk by Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov. All of them rejected representation in favour of immediacy, iconicity, literalness and abstraction that have been embraced. This determined the theatricality of the Victory over the Sun. Hence, designer Malevich wrote to composer Matiushin: "We have come as far as the rejection of reason because another reason has grown in us which can be called 'beyond reason' and which also has law, construction, and sense."

Kruchenykh, the writer and director disclosed:

The stage was set up the way I expected and wanted it to be. The blinding spotlights. Malevich's sets consisted of large planes - triangles, circles, and parts of machines. The cast was in masks resembling gas masks of the period. 'LikarV (actors) were like moving machines. The costumes, designed by Malevich again, were cubist in construction: cardboard and wire. This altered the anatomy of a person - the performers moved as if tied together and controlled by the rhythm of the artist and director. [...] What shook the audience particularly were the songs of the Coward and the Aviator (in consonants only) [...and] the chorus of Undertakers, built on unexpected disruptions and dissonances. %

Benedetti. "Reconstructing Victory over the Sun" 17. Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, 67. 171

Victory over the Sun was both conceptually and practically a multimedia work of art 'controlled by the rhythm of the artist and director.' The cacophonic consonant

song, the disruptive and dissonant rendition of the chorus, and the fractured visual features of the stage equally caused the audience's shock. However inexperienced in theatre its authors were, and however uneven its result, the show represented an exploration into the possibilities of kinetic sculpture and total theatre, ideas that were waiting to be developed by the Bauhaus. Although the better part of the script's language can hardly be called zaumny yazyk - its sound vocabulary is used only sporadically, like in the two short 'arias' by the Young Man and the Aviator - the philosophy of the piece and its performance method were undoubtedly derived from the theories and practice of futurist poetry, its indeterminacy and the materiality of its sound. And although the published text contains just 27 bars of the original score, the role composer Matiushin played in the staging, given his background in both painting and music, was very significant. Matiushin was keenly aware of the zawm-infiuenced form of the futurist theatrical presentation in St. Petersburg. In fact, as Susan Compton points out, he did not approve of Mayakovsky's approach to the language of his tragedy because he "never divorces word from its meaning; he does not recognize that the sound of a word is priceless in itself . Accordingly, in the First Journal of Russian

Futurists, he wrote:

Russian youth, without any knowledge of the new theatre experiments abroad presented the first performance on a stage in St. Petersburg of the disintegration of concepts and words, of old staging and of musical harmony. They presented a new creation, free of old conventional experiences and complete in itself, using seemingly senseless words - picture-sounds - new

97 Susan P. Compton, The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912-16 (London: British Museum Publications, 1978), 57. 172

indications of the future that lead into eternity and gives a joyful feeling of strength to those who will lend and ear and look at it. 98

Later in the article, Matiushin thanked the student-performers who "according

to our decisions, spoke the words without music, pausing for long intervals between

each word. In that way, a word, alienated from its meaning, gave the impression of

great strength."99

This testifies to an almost Dadaistic approach to the operatic textual material

at work here. The poster that called for the audition was quite clear in that respect:

"Professional actors please do not bother to come!" Kruchenykh also remembers later

complaints by the former president of the Union of Youth about the actors who "in the performance were not only playing their roles before the spectator, they were

addressing him directly like an orator from the rostrum."100 In Victory over the Sun, then, many of the features of futurist sound poetry were revived: the 'disintegration of

concepts and words' deliberately turned into 'picture-sounds' and defined the performance attitude of the entire show.

The concept of 'picture-sounds' rhythmically tied together in the play

followed Malevich's writing in the essay "On Poetry." Creators of the visual and aural aspects of the play/opera, designer and composer Malevich and Matiushin, corresponded intensively on the principles that were to be applied to Kruchenykh's piece. In these letters, the poetics ofzaum and its provenence from the sound of words was of utmost concern. Thus, Malevich wrote:

The letter is not a symbol for expressing things, but a sonic note (not a musical one). And this note-letter is perhaps subtler, clearer and more

98 K. Tomashevsky, "Victory over the Sun," The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1971), 102. "Ibid. 103. 100 Alexei Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, 69. 173

expressive than musical notes. The passage of sound from letter to letter passes more perfectly than from note to note.101

The artist's belief in the independent value of the 'note-letter' introduces the

possibility of abstract sculpting in sounds. Following Malevich's interpretation, it is no

longer an onomatopoeic syllable, a phonic root from some proto-language or an initial

consonant that carries new meaning, as in Khlebnikov, but rather it is the sound of letter

that becomes a note - an element of abstract sound composition that comes closer to

Kruchenykh's proto-Dadaist conception of zaum. The recognition of the materiality of

sound was just a stepping-stone for Malevich who pursued the notion of abstraction

more than any other Futurist.

Arriving at the idea of sound, we obtained note letters expressing sonic masses. Perhaps in a composition of these sound masses (former words) a new path will be found. In this way, we tear the letter from a line, from a single direction, and give it the possibility of free movement. [...] Consequently we arrive at a distribution of letter and sonic masses in space similar to painterly Suprematism. These masses will hang in space and will provide possibility for our consciousness to move farther and farther away from the earth.102

In Victory over the Sun, the escape from the linearity of 'former words' into

'picture-sounds,' as Matiushin called them, was now a possibility. For Malevich, the

temporal dimension of sound was now subverted into the spatial one allowing sonic

masses to hang in space. The masses that stand, hang, move and flow on stage are masses of sound, light and kinetic objects, performers included, that enter into

spatiotemporal relations and form aplastic moto-rumorist complex, as the Italian

Futurists would describe it. In that way, the futurist dramaturgy of sound transcends

101 Quoted in Gerald Janacek, Zaum, 200. 102 Ibid. 200. 174

into a dramaturgy of a 'sound-image complex that is constantly communicated'

(Kostelanetz) conceived in the theatre of mixed-means.

Hence, the action of the opera derives from the audio-visual performance independent from referential meaning. Just as Kruchenykh used to chop up words and let sound govern the structure of a zaum poem, Malevich encased the performers in

Cubist volume costumes letting light work to alter them and thus revive the visuals of the opera. He "used the coloured spotlights that radically altered the appearance of his costumes to make a colorful and kinetic 'rayonist' composition on stage."103

The sophisticated equipment at Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg, a state- of-the-art lighting system with a central console and movable spotlights, allowed

Malevich to execute his lighting orchestration. The venue of the performance was actually on the site of Vera Komissarzhevskaya's Dramatic Theatre, known from

Meyerhold's earlier Symbolist experiments. In 1913, in order to attract spectators to

American-style entertainment, the theatre underwent a complete renovation. Livshits, who participated in the events, described the show as a kinetic sculpture under the

'tentacles of the spotlights' - an outgrowth of Malevich's unscrupulous destruction of forms:

Turning from the square and the circle to the cube and the sphere with the mercilessness of Savanarola, he proceeded to destroy everything that fell outside the axes that he had designated. This was a zaum of painting, one that anticipated the ecstatic non-objectivity of Suprematism. [...] Bodies were broken up by the beams of light, they alternately lost arms, legs, head, because for Malevich they were only geometric bodies yielding not only to decomposition into elements, but also to complete disintegration in the pictorial space.104

Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, 164. 175

It seems that the switch from a painterly surface to sculptural volume

additionally motivated Malevich. The thrust of vowel sounds and the verbal texture of zaum poetry expanded into an orchestration of the three-dimensional stage in Victory over the Sun. The 'rayonist' lighting of the show aimed at the disintegration of the stage into a picture was characterized by a fluidity of both light and sound.

Susan B. Compton points out the affinity between the opening scenes of

Victory over the Sun and Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound. While The Yellow Sound begins with a detailed description of music, and colour changes from the "dark-blue twilight" to whitish, with "a pale tinge that later becomes more intense dark blue;"105

Matiushin's initial note in Victory over the Sun reads: "Transition with blue and black on the stage with white and black-white walls and black floor."106 In his memoirs,

Livshits described the beginning of the opera as a 'black abyss.' This formal similarity, however, does not say much about possible influences; instead, it is the use of an abstract sound/colour composition that connects Malevich and Matuishin's work with

Kandinsky's. Even "the very stage directions to Yellow Sound can be read as a lighting score," claims Compton and quotes an example:

Soon the music starts, first at a high pitch. Then suddenly and quickly dropping lower. At the same time the backdrop turns dark blue (simultaneously with the music) with wide black edges (like a picture). At the same time, the background becomes dark blue (in time with the music) and assumes black edges (like a picture).

Wassily Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art. ed. Kenneth Clement Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 269. 106 "vjctojy over me Sun," trans. Ewa Bartos and Victoria Nes Kirby. The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1971), 108. 107 Susan P. Compton, The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912-16 (London: British Museum Publications, 1978), 54. Quote from: Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, 271. 176

These mystical sacred-picture-like emanations in the blue twilight resemble ethereal Symbolist and theosophist stagings and Scriabin's colour-sound synaesthesia.

They seemed appropriate for Khlebnikov's prophetic prologue, but the clair-obscur setting soon burst into a violent red as the men of the future appeared on stage. This change is described in an interview with Malevich and Matiushin that appeared in the newspaper, Day:

The prologue ended. Odd war-like cries sounded, and the new curtain again divided in two. From above a piece of cardboard was lowered, covered all over with war-like colors. On it two life-like warrior figures of two knights were depicted. All this in a blood-red color. [...] Now the action began. The most diverse masks came forward and walked... Ear-splitting noises sounded and gunshots rang out.108

There was no direct mention of such stage change in the script but the audio­ visual transposition of Kruchenykh's zaumnyyazyk in the opera actually worked that way. Not along the lines of illustration by means of light, colour and sound that support the plot development, but more as a collage-like juxtaposition of mass and colour.

The change from somber blue to a fiery red that then abruptly switches again to green and black looked like a cut between independent coloured masses and textures in a Cubo-futurist collage. The materiality of what was seen or heard in Kruchenykh's,

Malevich's and Matiushin's staging of Victory over the Sun grew from the verbal texture of zaum - word-sounds of poetry became picture-sounds of the futurist theatre.

Thus intrinsic performativeness of zaum expressed by the dramaturgy of sound/colour shaped a new multi-media stage structure.

Tomashevsky, op. cit. 105. 3.8. Zangezi: an Anti-Babel Tower/Sculpture Made of Zaum

Velimir Khlebnikov's Zangezi: A Supersaga in Twenty Planes was the

author's most serious elaboration of the correspondences between sound, colour, word,

image and structure intended to make sense of human life and history. The 'supersaga'

followed the quasi-scientific calculations of time and space in Khlebnikov's Tables of

Destiny and represented the author's most ambitious use of zaumnyyazyk in the art of

theatre. The script was much richer in the use of zaum verbal material than

Kruchenykh's Victory over the Sun, but its theatrical rendition was less visually

attractive and not so well received by the public.

Khlebnikov's idea of zaum was a mixture of his interest in primordial

language roots and modern scientific speculation. The beyonsense language of the

supersaga strove for a sensible picture of the world based on Khlebnikov's insight in

current discoveries and theories. It was Einstein's general theory of relativity and

Lobachevski's non-Euclidian geometry that inspired his language. It flew with

Bergson's duration rather than the measured time of positivist science.

The 'supersaga' represented a newly-invented literary form whose

construction began with immersion in the material of language and its atomization in zaum poetry. Khlebnikov defined its structure in a short introduction to Zangezi:

A story is made of words, the way a building is made of construction units, minute building blocks. [...] A superstory, or supersaga, is made up of independent sections, each with its own special god, its special faith, and its special rule. [...] Each is free to confess its own particular faith. [...] Thus we discover a new kind of operation in the realm of verbal art. [...] Narrative is architecture composed of words; an architecture composed of narratives is a 'supersaga.'1

109 Khelbnikov, Collected Works, 331. 178

As a result, a concept of language that operates with the self-sufficient word moves to the next level of composition/construction: it produces the structures of

different self-sufficient 'narratives' each confessing its own faith. Thus Khlebnikov juxtaposes various forms of texts, many of them previously written for some other purpose, as building blocks of a new structure. They make a beyondstory that stands between drama, poetry and a theoretical treatise. These blocks, however different in their verbal texture, are the foundation of a unique edifice of 'supersaga' and a unique

audio-visual construction on stage. Its verbal architecture made of single 'narratives' provides for stage architecture of sculptural elements juxtaposed in unexpected, alogical and abstract ways imported from the zaum/beyonsense text.

Zangezi was designed, staged, and performed by Vladimir Tatlin, a constructivist artist known for his never-executed grandiose Bauhaus-like sculpture- building of the Monument to the Third International and, alongside Malevich, the central player of the Russian avant-garde. The premiere took place just a few months after Khlebnikov's death in May of 1923. The sculpture-construction built on stage was made of materials of various textures and shapes that replicated Khlebnikov's structural principles of the supersaga. A theatrical rendition at the Museum of Artistic Culture in

Petrograd was a hybrid product ofzaum correspondences between sound, colour, light and forms and a constructivst set, objects and actors' costumes. Similarly to Malevich's design for Victory over the Sun, Tatlin's preoccupation in staging Zangezi was primarily a sculptural one. However, zaum poetry's influence shifted to theatrical attempts at kinetic sculpturing and multi-media production in this case as well. Paul Schmidt's description of supersagas reveals inherent theatricality of

Zangezi: "These texts were intended, in some sense, as librettos for operas that had yet

to be imagined, but can be guessed at today in the work of artists like Robert Wilson or

Philip Glass."110 The interest of the neo avant-garde performance artists in these pieces

resulted in a few revivals and reconstructions. Zangezi, for example, was adapted by

Peter Urban as an example of acoustic art for broadcast directed by Heinz von Cramer

for WDR Studio Akustische Kunst (1972), and in 1986, Peter Sellars produced a

turbulent American version, co-produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New

York and the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art.

Khlebnikov's previous works for the stage also can be rearded as attempts to

infect drama with the zaum subversion of time and space, alogical and non-syntactical verbal structure and independent sound creation. In the short monodrama, Mrs. Laneen,

for example, Khlebnikov wanted to discover the 'infinitesimals' of artistic language.

The protagonist is therefore fragmented into a number of her sensual perceptions that are literally voiced: they speak for themselves so that instead of the character's voice we hear the dialogue of her sight, her hearing, her recollection, her terror etc. In the play Worldbackwards, Khlebnikov reincarnated the internal thoughts of a man who is being buried. As he escapes from the coffin, the time line of the plot gets reversed so that the man and his wife, Oily and Polly, live backwards from his funeral to their days in baby strollers. Worldbackwards can be regarded as Khlebnikov's effort to achieve one of his programmatic goals - the reversal of unidirectional time which would allow man to control his destiny. These two short plays are shockingly similar to futurist

10 Ibid. xi. 180 theatre isintesV and indicative of the kinship between Russian and Italian artistic endeavours that was so often denied.

Khlebnikov envisioned the shift in sound that would be able to produce a shift in meaning and alter the structure of the universe. He illustrated it by the significance of a switch between vowels '/a'and V in Russian words miach [ball] and mech [sword].

This switch (sdvig) transformed the oval object into the pointed, the soft feeling into the piercing, and made these words' meanings worlds apart. Its poetic application is found in the supersaga The War in the Mousetrap where miach desires to turn into mech and change its rounded limitations for the ability to pierce space like a spear. Paul Schmidt, his translator, commented:

This on-going search for suitable dramatic form illustrates a basic quality of all Khlebnikov's writing: the willingness to allow form to form itself, [...] the sense of wonder at the play of language, of sound allowed to move freely in search of its own sense. [...] That sword becomes word when a consonant vanished gave him a vertiginous sense of the power of language to influence the natural world.'''

Although this change of meaning due to the change of the initial consonant is reminiscent of explanation of Saussurian arbitrariness of the verbal sign (a dog is not a hog because the sign was arbitrary changed by the switch of d and h), in Khlebnikov's concept of language, the sdvig by sound had a completely opposite meaning.

Khlebnikov's language is live - not a codified system, sound in it 'moves freely in search of its own sense.' It follows the pre-historical, oral roots of language that correspond with natural laws that cannot be arbitrary even if not understandable at first.

It produces vocal utterances, sound signifiers that are iconic counterparts of the possible signifieds. His words are not symbols for something over there, they are elementary

Ibid. xi. Sword and word are Schmidt's analogical translations for miach and mech. 181

movements of sound in space that 'allow form to form itself and thus constitute

language.

This kind of phonetic play is abundant in Zangezi as well, but Khlebnikov's

principal intention was to construct a counter-Babel tower based on 'mudrostyazyka1

(wisdom of language) that would uphold the myth and history of the universe. Through

the acts of the piece people follow prophet Zangezi climbing the tower of knowledge

constructed on twenty planes. Thus, on Plane Six, the believers ask Zangezi to recite his

'self-sounding poems' in beyonsense language.

Describe the horrors of our age in the words of Alphabet! So that never again will we have to see war between peoples; [...] instead let' let us hear the crash of Alphabet's long spears, the fight of the hostile forces R and L, K and G. [...] R rips and resonates, ravages boundaries, forms rivers and ravines. Alphabet is the echo of space. Tellus![...] When K resounded in Kolchak. K was knotted a whiplash of shackles, decrees, kicks, commands and rocks. 112

On Plane Seven, he even foresees a solution for Russia's endless wars by the elimination of the letter/phoneme '/?' in its name: "Imagine the nation became like a

stricken deer... whose wet black muzzle nudges at destiny's gates - it begs for lightness and laughter, for like-mindedness. [...] A tired body longing to be lulled by harmony."113 Khlebnikov free verses are a symbiosis of poetic images and a contrastive play of sound between two interchangeable liquid consonants, R and L. The fluid L takes over from the more rapacious liquid R and "lulls the roar of terror, mends the riven tear."114 An exclusively phonetic game thus reinforced the articulatory, abstract

112 Ibid. 340. 113 Ibid. 340. 114 Ibid. 340. 182

and signifying aspects of word-sounds. For Khlebnikov, the wisdom of language

hidden in the sound of words awaits rediscovery by phonetic exploration. The

motivated connection between sound and its meaning was lost during the history of

mankind because "the languages betrayed their magnificent past, but could be

recreated."115 The separate sounds that exist in language could be reconnected

'naturally' with units of thought and form an 'alphabet of sounds' corresponding with

the 'alphabet of the mind' (azbuka uma).

The play with harsh consonants that is supposed to suspend historical reality

finds its source in the ritual invocation of evil spirits in oral cultures. By this invocation tribal man hoped to appease and tame inimical natural forces as Bely's example of

sound symbolism in grrrom [thunderrr] in the word-formation illustrates.

Thus connections between words, grammatical forms, and figures of speech are in essence charms. By calling the frightening sound of thunder grom, I am creating a sound that imitates thunder - grrr. And by creating this sound, it is as if I were beginning to recreate thunder itself. This process of recreation is at the same time an act of recognition. What I am essentially doing is invoking thunder. ',6

The primal word-formation begins with invocation and onomatopoeic charm, but in Khlebnikov conception of zaum this goes further towards a universal alphabet of the mind that will be able to reconcile nature and history, man and world.

The genealogy of the language in Zangezi is demonstrated by the use of seven levels of idiomatic expression distinguished by Khlebnikov. These idoms are languages of the birds (1), Gods (2) and stars (3), followed by the beyond sense language (4), decomposition of words and new coinages (5), sound-image idiom {zvukopis) (6), and

' '5 Williem G. Weststeijn, Velimir Chlebnikov and the Development of Poetical Language in Russian Symbolism and Futurism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983), 23. 115 Belyi, Andrey, "The Magic of Words," in Selected Essays of Andrey Bely, ed. Steven Cassedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 95. 183 finally, the language of madness (bezumnyj yazyk) found in oral folklore, incantations, conjurations and glossolalia (7). The main character, prophet Zangezi, who represents

Khlebnikov's alter ego, was fashioned after Nietzsche's Zarathustra. He is a sage that understands and speaks all these languages and is the one that unites them all: a language of the world [mirovoy yazyk] he professes. His name also reflects

Khlebnikov's inclination to Afro-Asian roots since it sounds like a mixture of the names of the rivers Zambezi and Ganges, cited as cradles of humankind in the supersaga, Azia Unbound.

Following the structure of the play, we climb from the onomatopoeia of the birdcalls - an intuitive replication of natural sounds: 'Yellow Bunting; Kree-tee-tee- tee-tee-ee - tsuey-tsuey-tsuey-sssueyee.'' - to the languages of gods and stars. The language of stars connects abstract mathematical principles of the motion of cosmic bodies with concrete manifestations of human life - both of them, of course, contained in the sound of words whose meanings we have forgotten. Khlebnikov's reading of and listening to the stars is not a guessing game; it has scientific pretensions explained in his theoretical speculations on the 'alphabet of the stars.' In this alphabet like in the mathematical calculations of time, an interconnection between important historical events, wars, catastrophes, triumphs and defeats is found. That is why the Tables of

Destiny was partially read in Plane Four of Zangezi. However, Zangezi's prophecies are founded first of all on his mastery of sound language: "He has learned to control not destiny itself, but the sounds of destiny. And to the extent that sound and meaning are in perfect accord, he can control the world."117

117 Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 277. 184

The language of Plane Nine: Thought' is a perfect example of such confluence - it reaches out for meaning and announces the power of thought but at the same time returns to the rich tonality of incantation similar to the idiom of gods in

Plane Two. Here is how the shaman and seer Zangezi calls for a ritual prayer:

Sound the alarm; send the sound through the mind! Toll the big bell, the great tocsin of intelligence! All the inflections of the human brain will pass in review before you, all the permutations of OOM\ Look up and see! Join us now, all of you, in song!m

A Hindu-like mantra cyclically repeats the syllable OOM, a vocable that denotes MIND. By its musical and rhythmic sound structure it delivers the message or meaning instantly to the senses of the listener as we can see in the first of four stanzas:

GO-OOM OUR-OOM OOW-OOM FAR-OOM WITH-OOM of me And those I don't know OM-OOM DAL-OOM CHE-OOM BOM! BIM! BAM!1'9

All of the dimensions of zaum are included here. Different phonemic roots are prefixed or suffixed to the main one-syllable-phoneme OOM, reshaping its sound and shifting its meaning. Khlebnikov added notes in the script explaining each of these new coinages. The recurring musical and rhythmical patterns of the mantra in an ur- language tap directly into the subconscious spheres of man - be it a tribesman participating in a ritual or a spectator at an avant-garde theatre event. The ripples

118 Ibid. 345. 119 Ibid. 345. caused by the spatial thrust of reiterated vowels echo the bell's ringing onomatpoetically: BOM / BIM / BAM - the energy of the sound is almost physically tangible. And a heaviness of the deep vowel oo that is «:, its articulatory, sensual features titillate speech organs in a rendition similar to the chant of Russian church bass that Barthes described as the grain of the voice. Whoever has listened to a male choral rendition of the popular Russian folk song Vecherniy zvon (Evening Bell) can imagine and feel the sound of Khlebnikov's zaum chant of MAW (thought/mind).120

The last of Khlebnikov's seven linguistic categories, bezumnyj yazyk

(language of madness), found in the speech of people who are intoxicated, enraged or under emotional stress and in the poetic incantations, conjurations or religious glossolalia, lends itself to the theatrical use. Kruchenykh's textbook for acting students

Fonetika teatra (The Phonetics of Theatre, 1923) represents direct implication of zaumiy yazyk.

In the presence of strong emotions the meaning (concept) of the word is not that important, it is even forgotten; a person in a state of emotion mixes up words, forgets them, says others, distorts, but the emotional side of them at the same is not destroyed (the zaum part); on the contrary the sound image and the sound (phoneme) live as never before, and the more unusual and expressive they are, the better material they are for expressing intense emotions]

Partially holding to the Khlebnikov's categorization of poetic idioms, zaum in

"The Phonetics of Theatre" appears in its technical, psychological and psychosomatic aspect applicable to the actors' education. Kruchenykh instructs actors how to liberate energies and utter expressive sound images that do not keep up with concepts. This comes as a consequence of the Kruchenykh's idea expressed earlier in "Declaration of

Same applies to Kruchenykh poem Vysoty (Heights) analyzed earlier. See p. 141. 121 Quoted in Janacek, Zaum, 301. 186 the Word as Such" (1913), which finds sources of zaum poetry in moments when

'thought and speech cannot keep up with the emotions of someone in a state of

inspiration.' This interconnectedness of states of heightened emotion and inspiration represents the foundation of Marinetti's lyricism of 'intoxicating yourself with life,' as well. In the manifesto "Destruction of Syntax - Wireless Imagination - Words in

Freedom" (1913), Marinetti describes the urgency of speech under stress as liberating power:

Suppose a friend of yours endowed with this lyric faculty found himself in an area of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake, etc) [...] He would begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. [...] He would throw off frenetically from his nerves visual, auditory and olfactory sensations according to their necessary flow. The rush of steam- emotion would burst the sentence's pipeline, the valves of punctuation and adjectival clamps. [...] The narrator's only preoccupation is to render all the vibrations of his 'I.' 122

This characteristic of the sound-text in which the bodily impulses are always/already inscribed in futurist poetry carried a genuine performance potential.

Russian poets practiced the same sound-text creation of parole-in-liberta in zaum poetry. Malevich's essay "On Poetry" fully confirms this.

I consider the highest moment in the poet's service of the spirit to be that of his wordless dialect, when demented words rush from his mouth, mad words accessible neither to the mind, nor to reason. The poet's dialect, rhythm and tempo divide the mass of sound into intervals and make clear the detailed gestures of the body itself. 123

Marinetti's intoxication with life/matter calls for a wordless poetic dialect and fisicoffolia in theatre. In that respect, contemporary performance theory, indebted to

Artaud's writing on language and the theatre of cruelty, finds an early inspirational source in both the futurist theory of poetry and performance. Futurists professed that

Pioli, Stung by Salt and Water, 47. Malevich, Essays on Art, 81. 187 the poet or actor's main concern is not to render a narrative message to the audience but to render all vibrations of his T intoxicated with life, to deliver 'visual, auditory and olfactory sensations according to their necessary flow' (Marinetti) or to express his own rhythm by 'the mass of sound' and 'gestures of the body itself (Malevich) - in other words, to perform or be himself on stage. The poet/actor's performance has the shape of a cry, as Artaud says: "These are intellectual cries, cries born of the subtlety of the marrow. This is what I mean by Flesh. I do not separate my thought from my life. With each vibration of my tongue I retrace all the pathways of my thought in my flesh."124

Executed by the only tool a writer/actor possesses - his body - the performance comes from the wisdom, pain and joy of the flesh that is not separated from thought and emotion but lives in the vocal gesture of sound poetry. The poet fears revealing his

'groan' (Malevich) or cry (Artaud) because in his poetry voice and pure word-sounds

"have no substance, but here is the voice of the poet's being, true and pure, and the poet fears his very self."125 In 'Plane Eight' ofZangezi, the prophet tells his secret to the believers:

Have you heard all I've said, heard my speech that frees you from the fetters of words? Speech is an edifice built out of blocks of space. Particles of speech. Parts of movements. Words do not exist; there are only movements in space and their parts - points and areas. You have broken free from your ancestral chains.

Zaumnyyazyk freed Zangezi's people from the fetters of ordinary verbal signification. Instead, his words represent physical 'particles of speech' and 'parts of

124 Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Girroux, 1976, 110. 125 Malevich, Essays on Art, 79. 126 Ibid. 344/5. 188

movements'- points (the sources of sound) and areas (the spread of sound). Khebnikov

thus acknowledges the materiality of sound and, his prophet, in order to clean language

from fetters of word-concepts, chooses a poetic idiom of word-sounds. The artistic use of

sound's physical features of atomization, temporality and immediacy, professed by

Zangezi, comes from the realm of the futurist creation. Krzysztof Ziarek, who finds the

postmodern vitality of the avant-garde art in its eventness - a "radical refiguration of

experience and temporality as an event,"127 holds Khlebnikov's work exemplary in that

sense. He calls the language of Zangezi - a 'supra-language,' an idiom that produces

words every moment. Such language "built of the same material as the space-time of

experience and history" with its temporal unfolding and deregulated semantics works

"against the imperative of representation, against the reduction of the event to discursive

structures:"128

What in experience escapes representation, what cannot be presented in terms of things or entries, is precisely the happening of being, its event. This happening constitutes the 'matter' of language, the linguistic material beyond the play of signification, or, in other words, beyonsense. 129

Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh's poetics that sought a thorough deconstruction of

language so that its naked roots can be heard can be regarded as an antidote for the

'closure of representation.' The word in zaum comes into being as sound and lives in its

sensory reception. It enfolds from the fluid and temporal substance of sound that cannot be trapped in language codification but lives in the moment of eventness and immediacy,

in a verbal gesture or a vocal performance. Following Jean-Francois Lyotard who argued

that the avant-garde art 'inscribes the occurrence of a sensory now,' Ziarek emphasizes

127 Krzysztof Ziarek. The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 200. 128 Ibid. 200. 129 Ibid. 205. 189 the event-character of the avant-garde art: "The avant-garde work of art locates itself

'before' representation, signification, meaning and truth, and preoccupies itself with the very 'element' in which representing and signifying become possible."1 This 'very element' beyond representation, lies in the evenness and materiality of futurist art and its

'sensory now.' It has been initiated by the dramaturgy of sound in futurist poetry and performance that recognized materiality of language, sound, colour, mass and movement allowing for a new semiosis, a creation through the dramaturgy of material itself.

Ibid. 155/6. Chapter Four: Dramaturgy of Sound from Futurist Sintesi to the Total Theatre

Both parole in liberta and zaum, substantially disturbed ordinary language

operations. Turning the spoken, written and printed word into vocal gestures and

ideograms, Futurists made words verbo/voco/visual sensorial kernels of intrinsic

performative potential. The onomatopoetic bursts of words in such an asyntactical sound

idiom were thrown in the face of an unsuspecting audience assaulting their nerves. But,

besides by its corporeal, sensory dimension, futurist declamation was determined by the

visual setting its script - synoptic non-linear tables of words in freedom. In his anthology

of futurist theatre, Giovanni Lista described Marinetti's synoptic table, Battaglia a 9 piani del Monte Altissimo as a sintesi performance by 'declamators in motion - Marinetti,

Balla and Depero.'' Apparently, poetry declamations at serate had been paradigmatic for

a Futurist synthetic theatre.

At the first place, aurally, these declamations provoked the 'human mimetic

capacity' through its sensory prodding. This is supported by Walter Benjamin's claim that "the phonetic elements of a sentence represent the basic resources in which, in a

flash-like instant, something mimetic can reveal itself out of a sound" and awaken dead correspondences buried in the language - "the most accomplished archive of insensible mimesis."2 Furthermore, the brevity and condensation of all drama in a 'flash-like instant' of futurist sintesi tended to spark intuitive communication with the audience and

' Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976), Vol. 1, 178. 2 Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 335. 191 revive their theatrical idiom. Besides on the essential brevity, the workings of such an

idiom relied on the synaesthetic correspondence of vocalistaions, noises, musical scales,

colours and smells to which, in the futurist synthetic theatre, the plasticity of movements, objects and masses were added through explorations in stage design. Thus the plastic

elements of the futurist stage complex followed the same poetic principles that led words, sounds and letters to achieve their material equivalence with the things they stood for. In the case of verbal and aural material, this was achieved through onomatopoeia so that

sounds/words functioned as icons analogical to the thing. The features displayed in their aural or visual sensory attractions contested their iconicity. The application of these principles to the physical elements of the stage required iconic and analogical structuring of its aural, visual and kinetic content. Consequently, the creative method of the abstract sintesi cleared the way for concrete experiments with the plastic moto-rumorist complex, exemplified in the work of Balla, Depero and Prampolini.

In these experiments, the diversion of the vocal gesture from the syntactic language, at first intuitive and corporeal, spread to the more abstract dealing with sound in space that shared its semiotic potential with other material and plastic elements of the stage. Here is what Derrida writes on the semiosis of such theatre envisioned by Artaud:

For the theatre to be neither subjected to this structure of language, nor abandoned to the spontaneity of furtive inspiration, it will have to be governed according to the requirements of another language and another form of writing. [...] This time, writing will no longer be the transcription of speech, not only will be the writing of the body itself, but it will be produced, within the movements of the theatre, according to rules of hieroglyphics, a system of signs no longer controlled by the institution of voice.3

3 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 191. 192

In The Theatre and Its Double, a book with enormous impact on the new avant-

garde, Antonin Artaud professed a language that requires "expression in space [in which]

objects themselves begin to speak [my emphasis, M.O.]" making the theatre "a sort of

experimental demonstration of the profound unity of the concrete and the abstract" in

which "the overlapping images and movements will culminate, through the collusion of

objects, silences, shouts, and rhythms, or in a genuine physical language with signs, not

words, at its root."4 Although, the futurist demands for a new theatre idiom looked very

similar, this did not mean a complete divorce with vocal gesture and dramaturgy of

sound: the hieroglyphic character of the theatrical sign in futurism never abandoned its

phonetic sources; it always remained moto-rumorist.

In this chapter, the development of the 'physical language' of theatre will be traced through Marinetti's concepts of'abstract onomatopoeia' and 'analogy of the

second order', the rumorismo of the carnivalesque performance of Piedigrotta, Russolo's

and Marinetti's introduction of noise and silence as equal elements of dramatic structure,

and its consequences in Dadaism and John Cage's works. The dramaturgy of sound will be explored in futurist theatrical sintesi, particularly Balla's, Depero's and Prampolini's

futurist-inspired stage work as well as Marinetti's theoretical conception of an abstract theatre of pure elements and tactile sensations.

4 Antonin Artaud. The Theatre and Its Double. New York: Grove Press, 1958,108,119, 124. 4.1. From Onomatopoeia, Analogy and Icomcity to Plastic Moto-rumorist Complex

The use of onomatopoeia, analogy and iconicity undoubtedly rejuvenated the language of Futurist poetry but also gave significant impetus to the structural changes of other contemporary art idioms, especially the theatrical one. It transcended the borders of poetry - from music to the plastic and performing arts - and incited innovations in the idiomatic structure of all futurist art. This echoed Marinetti's call for "an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous [that] can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies."5 Marinetti's request was not limited to poetry but rather asked for further futurist experimentation within the wider complex structures of the plastic arts and theatre. In both their manifestos and their creative output, Balla, Settimelli, Corra, Depero, Prampolini and others questioned how this idiomatic complex could best reflect the phenomenal world and what shape its concrete, pragmatic form would take.

In 1913, concurrently with Zang Tumb Tumb, a chefd'oeuvre of parole in liberta that had established a connection between 'lyrical intoxication' andjisicoffolia,

Marinetti published his major programmatic poetry and theatre manifestos. In this same period, Boccioni's concepts of plastic dynamism, compenetration6 of objects and 'force lines' that put the spectator in the midst of a swirl of fragmented reality outlined Futurist methods of visual arts. All of it was an exploration of the Bergsonian notion of a time- space continuum. At the same time, Prampolini and Carra reflected on the interference

5F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, Ed. R.W. Flint, (New York: Farrar, 1972), 85. 6 This anglicized version ofcompenetrazione appears in Flint and Kirby's translations of Marinetti's texts and I am using it accordingly. 194 between objects and atmosphere based on chromophony, or synaesthesia of sound, noise and smell carried by colour vibrations.

In his comprehensive monograph of Italian futurist theatre, Giovanni Lista proposed dividing the development of the movement's theatre aesthetics into four periods in contrast to the widely accepted division between the first and the second Futurism, before and after 1920. According to Lista, a first period of Futurism, pre-1915, encompasses works defined by dynamism. In a second period, 1915-20, works were defined by moto-rumoristic plastic complex. This second period, Lista suggests, started with Depero and Balla's manifesto "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe," and

Prampolini's "Futurist Scenography and Choreography" in 1915-16 and went on to include their research into abstract plastic art and theatre until 1920.7 A third period during the 1920's was defined by a mechanical art that set as its goal the eradication of the human actor. A fourth period was initiated by the 'aeropittura'1 (the aerial painting and adjacent forms of literature and performance). Although Lista does not mention the abstract tactile theatre and the radiophonic art of pure sound in the 1930s, they would fall into this fourth period.

A diachronic overview of futurist art forms points to an increasing awareness of the materiality of signs, and therefore sound, participating in the semiosis of poetry, art and theatre. It traces the formation of an authentic stage idiom based on the materiality of its means tending towards an abstract total theatre. Marinettian poetics of matter can be followed throughout: from the interconnected experiments with sound in poetry and colour in painting through elaboration of moto-rumoristic plastic complex to the abstract tactile theatre of pure sensation. However, keeping track of the historical development

7 Giovanni Lista, La Scene Futuriste, (Paris: Editions du Centre de la recherche scientifique, 1989), 10. 195

and possible precedents and influences is not of crucial importance here: it is rather a

question of 'simultaneity' and 'compenetration' (if I may use these two favorite futurist

terms) of the ideas, concepts and performance practice that has permeated avant-garde

theatre theory and production from the beginning of the 20th century to our postmodern

years. Attempts at a non-literary 'total theatre' as a dominant line in futurist theatre have

also been explored by Gunter Berghaus. For Berghaus, the synaesthetic ideas of

romanticism, Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Kandinsky's vibrational

theory of the 'inner sound' are fundamentally linked to futurist, Dada and Bauhaus'

avant-garde experiments as well as to the methods of today's live performance events and

art in the domain of contemporary electronic technologies.8

Marinetti's visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1914 provides evidence of this

aesthetic trend in the history of Futurist movement. This visit was an opportunity for the

Russian cubo-Futurists to delineate their artistic endeavours and theoretical beliefs in

opposition to the Italians'. But at the same time, it showed that aesthetic platforms of both movements were basically the same. A telling dialogue between Livshits and the

celebrated Italian guest reported by the former in his famous memoir The One and a

Half-Eyed Archer provides a case in point. This exchange points out the fact that Russian parallel research in the fields of sound and abstract painting and hybridization of artistic media crowned in the staging of the Victory over the Sun by Kruchenykh, Malevich and

Matiusin was similar to Marinetti's search for abstract onomatopoeia in poetry and analogy and tactilism in the plastic arts.

See Gunter Berghaus, "A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of Total Work of Art," Maske und Kothurn, vol. 32, no. 2 (Universitat Wien: Institut fur Theaterwissenschaft, 1986): 7-28. 196

At one moment Livshits was criticizing Marinetti for being inconsistent with

"Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" that proclaimed liberation of words from semantic and syntactic mandates:

Livshits: What is the point of piling up amorphous words, a conglomeration which you call 'words at liberty'? To eliminate the intermediary role of reason by producing disorder, right? [...] When I heard you reciting I asked myself a question: is it worth destroying the traditional sentence, even the way you do, in order to reinstate it, to restore its logical predicate by suggestive moments of gesture, mimicry, intonation and onomatopoeia? Marinetti: Do you know that Boccioni sculpts the same work out of different materials - marble, wood, bronze? Livshits: That's not what I'm talking about. In my view a work of art is a finished one only when it is self-contained, only when it does not seek anything outside itself. Poetry is one thing, recitation is another. Marinetti: Recitation! That's not the point. Recitation is only a transitional stage, a temporary substitution for syntax. [...] The day we manage to put what I call 'wireless imagination' into effect, we will reject the outer layer of analogies. [...] The 'analogies of the second order', will be completely irrational. [...] All psychology must be expelled from literature and replaced by the lyrical possession of substance." 9

Marinetti's concept of declamation was not aimed at the reconstruction of syntax, signification or psychology as Livshits asserted. Marinetti first and foremost cared for the materiality of signs; that is why he immediately reached for an example of tactile painting by Boccioni to defend his use of onomatopoeia. The onomatopoetic declamation was just a transitional stage leading towards the 'analogies of second order,' he explained, in which the material will be exposed in a more concrete and abstract way.

Although Livshits and Marinetti engaged in controversy, it was evident that they both held to the elementary notions established in Futurist art with aim to achieve the

'possession of substance.' Later in the discussion, Livshits talked of Russian art's Asiatic

9Benedikt Livshits, The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, Trans. John E. Bowlt (Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1976), 191. 197

feel for material as exemplified in pointillism and mosaics, while Marinetti elaborated on

the tactile diversity of plastic arts. The former praised Khlebnikov's continuity of the

verbal mass, [and] its 'elemental cosmic essence,' whiles the latter kept talking about the

use of onomatopoeia and analogies as a means of 'lyrical obsession' with matter.

Moreover, from Marinetti's suggestion that the 'analogies of the second order,' liberated by a wireless imagination, will be completely irrational one can discern that he allowed

the possibility of transgression of the parole in liberta over the borders of poetry into the

abstract art. Consequently, the mimetic replacements made by vocal and gestural

declamation were to be substituted by the independent sounds and complexity of stage made of noise, objects, lights, movements and so on. The analogy 'that assembles distant,

seemingly diverse and hostile things', the tendency towards fusion of different onomatopoeias and their abstraction, the exploration of physical elements of 'dynamic and synoptic declamation' aiming at the 'geometric splendor and mechanic sensibility,'

all these elements that appeared in Marinetti's poetry manifestos of the first period were inherently theatrical. It is possible, therefore, to conclude that the transition of performance and staging techniques from futurist serate to theatrical sintesi took root in the sound poetry of parole in liberta. 198

4.2. Piedigrotta 's Hybrid Form: a Transition from Serate to Theatrical Sintesi

The performance of Piedigrotta by Francesco Cangiullo on March 29, 1914, at

Gallery Sprovieri in Rome, was one of the most indicative signs of the change from a

largely synaesthetic approach to a synthetic one in the futurist aesthetics and theatre

practice.10 It coincided with a strategic switch from arte-azione for large audiences at the

theatre halls - serate futuriste to the exhibition performances for more sophisticated

audiences at the galleries -pomeriggi spettacolari (theatrical afternoons). Cangiullo

conceived Piedigrotta as a parole in liberta poem or a tavola parolibera several years before its theatricalization at the site of a permanent Futurist Exposition. The piece got its

name from an ancient Neapolitan carnival that continues to be held in September of each

year. During these festivities, the whole city goes mad, dancing to the noisy tunes of primitive folk instruments playing tarantella on the cobblestone streets and in the piazzas.

One of the participants, gallery owner and impresario Sprovieri compares Piedigrotta

carnival to 'a navy bugle drowning the voice of the individual in the roaring and shouting

of the masses, [...] primordial expression of an innate musicality brought back to life each year and refined into a 'song.'"11

Naturally, Futurists were interested in the eruption of folly and the absolute negation of all taboos and sanity this carnival symbolized. The expression of Dionysian ecstasy erasing the rules of bourgeois order was perfect material for a free futurist play that would subvert passeist literary rules. In the Neapolitan cafe-chantants, Piedigrotta traditionally represented a very popular number. It was a mimetic, gestural and

10 Piedigrotta was repeated in Rome on April 15 and then performed in Naples three more times, on May 14, May 25 and June 4. 1' Gunter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 1900 -1944 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 235. 199

onomatopoeic declamation bursting with joyful sounds in an explosive use of noise,

gestures, free words and musical accords.12 In his pre-futurist career, Cangiullo gained

experience as a popular musician, a composer of Neapolitan canzone and an orchestra director of variety theatres playing in the towns of the Italian and even French southern provinces. In this role, he participated in various renditions of Piedigrotta scenarios. But the staging of the Roman performance event was a collective effort that followed

Marinetti's assertive futurist strategy. In Rome, Marinetti and Cangiullo, who also played on an out-of-tune piano, declaimed the free words of the poem while a troupe "of very famous dwarf artists: Miss Tofa (Sprovieri), Mr. Putipu (Balla), Mr. Triccabballacche

(Radiante), Mr. Scetavajasse (Depero), and Mr. Fischiatore (Sironi)" provided assistance as one could read on the poster.13 The names of the dwarfs in the cast took after the instruments they were playing. For the young Fortunato Depero, it represented a kind of futurist initiation in front of a grotesque, abstract backdrop painted by Giacomo Balla lit by red lanterns.

The print layout of 1916 publication of Piedigrotta}* was a masterly executed graphic design in the manner of Zang Tumb Tumb. The poem appeared in an even more sophisticated version of revolutionized typography that displayed the rich iconography of onomatopoeic effects. The newly-invented letters and signs of different size were indicative of the unleashed celebration of noise and music in the carnival crowd at

Naples. The poem's title was typographically transformed to:

Lista, La scene futuriste, 132. Lista gives a different list of dwarfs - Sprovieri, Revillo, Cappari, Depero, Balla and Sironi with a whistle. (Lista La scene futuriste, 132.) Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le 'eroiche serate' {con antologia di testi), (Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2002), 120-130. See Appendix, Figure 17. "PIEDIGRgRrOoTtTtAesco" (Piedigrotesque), a grotesque festivity in

which all kinds of "TROOOMBE, trooombetoooni, trooombeteeeellle and

trooombettiiiinne" sounded. TARANTELLA, a word reiterated in numerous versions

throughout the text, was shown as an "estensione [of] TUTTA ITALIA" by a huge cone

made of letters rising in size -CONOSSUOOOOOOONO" while its sound ended

with a harsh consonant cluster "KAISERKAZZ." Some lines examplified the poesia pentagramata, another Cangiullo's invention where musical signs are applied to poetry:

"{prestissimo) ujsciujsciujsciujsci 6 scelto un nome eccentrico... eppa >»

(LOIE FULLER VIOLA)."

At some places, between the fisicoffolia of variety theatre and the synergy of

sound, movement and colour, Cangiullo used Loie Fuller's name linked with different

colours from violet to orange in order to graphically emphasize the colourfulness of the

Piedigrotta. It was because Loie Fuller, a famous American cabaret and ballet dancer set

Paris ablaze with her dancing loosely-clothed in huge flying silk sails that produced incredible forms under an array of lights that changed colours. A pioneer of modern free dance, Fuller introduced Isadora Duncan to European audiences. Her dance shared affinities with the futurist desire to remove all intricacies of personal human psychology and emotion from the stage. It was as if the dancer disappeared in the plastic moto- rumorist complex propelled by her movement. Fuller's appearance was enthusiastically received in the futurist circles and significantly influenced the futurist dance and stage, especially Prampolini. Marinetti's manifesto La declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic and

Synoptic Declamation) appeared as an accompaniment to Cagiullo's script. It oulined the

premises of the performance:

Gesticulate in a draughtsman like, topographical manner, synthetically creating in midair cubes, cones, spirals, ellipses, etc! [...] Make use of a certain number of elementary instruments such as hammers, little wooden tables, automobile horns, drums, tambourines, saws, and electric bells, to produce precisely and effortlessly the different simple or abstract onomatopoetic harmonies! I5

The small group of performers presented Cangiullo's 'synoptic table' of free words typographically set in "a pyrotechnic explosion of flashing images and bits of

sounds, voices and onomatopoeia, [...] attempting to give the audience the sound and visual emotion of the Neapolitan crowd that fills streets and alleys and saturates the

environment with its obsessive, rampant presence."16 Making theatrical performance out

of poetry, the procession of dwarfs in grotesque costumes, hats and hairstyles roamed through the gallery causing surprise and commotion in the crowd. They moved around displaying provoking physical gestures; they chanted, yelled and played noisy tunes a la tarantella on their bizarre instruments. The carnivalesque disorder was pouring over into the audience. Sprovieri who was at the historical event blowing a tofa, a big conch, even mentions that they wanted to carry around pizzas on their heads the way local pizza- bakers did in order to add smell to the array of sensory attractions. "The greatest surprise came with the explosions [and smoke] of tricchetracche [firecrackers] between the legs of the audience."17 According to Marinetti, the audience responded with fireworks of shouts, cheers, cries and whole spectrum of unbridled vocalizations of joy provoked by

15 Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 144. 16Danela Fonti, "Depero 'mimismagico' (mimica, declamazione, teatro cabaret, marionette) e motorumorismo,"Depero: Dal Futurismo alia Casa d'Arte, II catalogo, (Milano: Ed. Charta e MART, 1994), 61. 17 Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 236. 202

the declamation that made an onomatopoeic fusion with the instrumental accompaniment

and interruptions. In that sense, the performers/declaimers achieved the ideal

compenetration with the spectators that became their orchestra according to the manifesto's dictum that asked the futurist declaimer to be the orchestrator of the

cacophony of sounds and actions on stage and the booing that emanted from the stalls.

And the chaotic orchestra of sounds, colours, forms, smells, tastes, touches, convulsions, laughter, joy in explosion, boiling, flames, eruptions, grows, grows, grows, until the demoiselles Tofa, Putipii, Triccabballacche and Scetavajasse come out from their infernal circle and give by means of their sound the sensation of their triumphant, folly entertaining, intoxicating, blinding, suffocating, noisy and deafening festival of Piedigrotta}*

Marinetti presented to the public four obscene and vulgar-sounding instruments adding a futurist ironic reading to their legendary provenence:

The tofa, is 'a big shell from which the kids blowing inside, draw a tragi-comic monotonous chant... a ferocious satire of mythology and all the sirens, tritons and sea shells inhabiting the passeist golf of Naples.' [...] The scetavajasse makes 'a genial parody of the violin as an expression of the inner life and sentimental anxiety.' The putipii represents 'a violent irony with which a young and sane race correct and fight all nostalgic venoms of the moonshine.' The triccabballacche effectuates 'a satire of sacrosanct Greco-Roman

processions.' 19

Besides a depiction of the Dionysian aspect of noise music, Marinetti gives every instrument a colour: the tofa gives out a deep blue sound, theputipu is orange, the scetavajasse is pink and green, and the triccabballacche is red. He thus establishes a sound-colour analogy that was of the fundamental importance for the futurist and avant- garde theatre. That also underlines a reason for the Loie Fuller's multi-coloured presence in the synoptic score. This tendency would reach an apex in Depero's theatrical sintesi

Colori that by its literal application became an abstract noise/colour kinetic sculpture. Quoted in Lista, La scene fuluriste, 132. 19 Ibid. 132. The primitive contraptions of wood, clay, tin rattles, cans and shells were

actually noisemakers of a kind that might be consdered idiophone-style musical

instruments. Idiophones are self-sounded musical bodies unable to produce refined and

clear harmonic tunes. They create sound by the vibration of their own body without help

of strings and membranes. The idiophones are classified by the way they operate. The

class of 'struck idiophones' would produce a percussive sound likeputipu, which is

basically a can perforated in the center by a wooden stick, or a percussive sound like

triccabballacche, the assembly or three wooden hammers attached to each other at the bottom. The 'blown idiophones' like tofa or fischiatore produce whistling sound of air

passing through the cavities of their bodies. The 'friction idiophones' produce the

scraping sound like scetavajasse when rubbed with a wooden saw. The instruments used

in Piedigrotta were deliberately chosen because of their non-harmonic sound: their

impure rhythm and cadences created noise tunes appropriate for the rustic tarantella of

the Neapolitan festival. Conceptually, the choice of the instruments played at the Roman pomeriggio spettacolare demonstrates very well the Futurist 'love for essence.' The raw

substance of these objects was a primary source of sound that was closer to enharmonic noise than musical tones. Their tarantellas sounded like an onomatopoetic mimesis of

'real' tunes. Their decision to deal with unrefined sound was concurrent with Russolo's expansion of music to the field of noise in L 'Arte dei rumori, his sound compositions based on timbre rather than tonality and introduction of noisemakers into the orchestra.

The dramaturgy of sound derived from the poetry of parole in liberta and its onomatopoetic performance continued to be at work in the next few pieces held at futurist gallery afternoons in 1914. Giacomo Balla's Discussione di due critici sudannesi sul Futurismo (Discussion between Two Sudanese Critics on Futurism) performed by the

author, Marinetti and Cangiullo, was written in an invented grotesque language

reminiscent of an African dialect. Such use of an African language melody was also heard in Hugo Ball's Karawane and Tristan Tzara's Poemes negres, a combination of pseudo-ethnic poetry and exotic sound scores performed at Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire. In

Balla's case, it created not only a ridiculous barrier to the understanding of futurist art by

Sudanese critics, but also a play with complex vocalizations that made a surprising

cacophonous cantata accentuated by guitar and piano strokes.

Farcionisgnaco gurninfuturo bordubalotaompimagnusasfacataca mimitirichita plucu sbumu farufutusmaca sgacgnacgnac chr cru­ st echestecheteretete maumauzizitititititititi... 20

Cangiullo's Serata in onore di Yvonne was a musical/recitative piece in which the author and Sprovieri declaimed nonsensical parole in liberta accompanied by an onomatopoeic orchestra - two singers directed by Balla producing vocalisations of the

classical orchestra instruments. The next Cangiullo's piece Ifunerali di unfilosofo passatista (Funeral of a Passeist Philosopher) was a mordant attack on Benedeto Croce, the philosopher who developed the aesthetics of Italian classical idealism, delivered on the occasion of an international Futurist exhibition at the Sprovieri Gallery. Cangiullo played a heartbreaking funeral march on an out-of-tune piano while Marinetti chaired the ceremony giving a grand eulogy about potatoes, onions and feathers that crowned the philosopher's head. An enormous clay model of his head was carried in procession by

Futurists Radiante and Depero and then placed on the catafalque. Balla provided an appropriate background sound byhitting a cowbell with a big poet's pen and chanting a

20 Theatre Futurist Italien, vol. 1, 49. 205 repetition out of Russian negation inieeet-nieeeet-nieeeet-nieeef thus inverting the ceremony into a 'rumorist' circus performance.

4.3. Luigi Russolo's L 'Arte dei rumori and Its Role in Futurist Performance

Luigi Russolo's manifesto of 1913, L 'Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises) that proposed the liberation of artistic sound from the realm of harmonic music was a natural continuation of Marinetti's phonic liberation of words in poetry. It called for the inclusion of all noises of the environment, mechanical, electrical and industrial together with natural ones, in the new futurist music - a pioneering effort in the art of sound. The futurist art of sound, which spanned from vocal onomatopoeia of parole in liberta to the deliberate production of vocal noise, so called rumorismo or bruitism, and the creation of

'noise music,' always favored the impure and blurring but highly expressive raw sound that would reflect the dynamism of modern life.

Life in antiquity was mere silence. Only with the discovery of the machine in the 19th Century was noise born. Today noise lays sovereign claim to the sensibilities of mankind. [...] Music today strives towards an amalgamation of the most dissonant, strange and strident sounds. We are approaching music of noises. [...] Musical sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what a familiar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating, and dominating all noises we can enrich men with a new and unsuspected sensual pleasure.21

Russolo's opting for noise instead of tonal music was obviously motivated by the futurist sensibility for an artist's unreserved immersion in life and abandonment of a passeist longing for beauty that had been institutionalized in literature, music and drama.

21 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), 27. 206

His concept followed Marinetti's earlier plead for an anti-poetic 'rapid, brutal, immediate lyricism' expressed by the most cacophonous onomatopoeias. Thus Russolo's decision to use raw sound in place of tonal music represented the realization of the pronouncement from Manifesto tecnico della letteratura (Technical Manifesto of Literature) that asked the artist "to capture the breath, the sensibility, and the instinct of metals, stones, wood, and so on, through the medium of free objects and whimsical motors [...] to substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter."22 In L 'Arte dei rumori, Russolo extensively quotes Marinetti's theories and onomatopoetic declamation of Zang Tumb Tumb, acknowledging that his experiments with noise were "the logical consequence of your [Marinetti, Boccioni and Balla's] marvelous innovations."23

Therefore, Michael Kirby concludes: "certainly there is literalness about Russolo's desire to incorporate everyday sounds into music. This literal approach stems most directly from

Marinetti's parole in liberta."2*

Writing specifically about noise in human language, Russolo alleges that vowels represent sound while consonants represent noise and that there is no sound in life that cannot be imitated by consonants.

By making use of noise onomatopoeias, they [Futurist poets] revealed all the enormous importance of this element of language, which had previously remained the slave of vowels. In the Futurist free words, the consonant representing noise is finally adopted for its own sake; and like music, it serves to multiply the elements of expression and emotion.25

This statement is reminiscent of the anti-Symbolist stance of Russian zaum poets who roughed-up their poems by amassing noisy consonant clusters in order to

22 Marinetti: Selected Writings, 87. 23 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 23. 24 Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance, (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986), 33. 25 Ibid. 57. counterweight the musicahty of Symbolist verse contained in the sound of vowels. When praising the parole in liberta poetry's preference for consonants that produced noise for its own sake, Russolo actually promoted his own program of the incorporation of noises in the art of music. He even went further stating "the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction."26 Unlike music, he affirmed, noise does not illustrate human sentiment or serve as an accidental embellishment of an action, thought or emotion in literature or drama, but:

Noise must become a prime element to mould into the work of art. That is, it has to lose its accidental character in order to become an element sufficiently abstract to achieve the necessary transformation of any prime element into abstract element of art.27

In this way, recognizing the materiality of noise and making it an abstract element of art, Russolo preconceives a dramaturgy of sound that will take part in shaping futurist stage performance. Exploring literary Futurism, John J.White finds that the interaction between the art of noises and poetic onomatopoeia resulted in "a complex of reciprocal cross-fertilizations [that] was to have important repercussions for both futurist theatre and poetry. Marinetti's importance for Russolo is matched by Russolo's subsequent influence on Depero and sintesi playwrights and creators of futurist ballet."28

Indeed the futurist abstract sintesi, as we will see later in this chapter, contained more onomatopoeias or noise than words or music themselves and became the elementary material of the moto-rumoristic complex of the stage devised by Balla, Depero and

Prampolini.

Ibid. 28. Ibid. 87. John J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the first avant-garde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 344. 208

Russolo started L 'Arte del rumori in a form of an epistle to composer Balilla

Pratella, the main authority in the field of futurist music, who already in 1911, in

"Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music" proposed a move away from the concepts of

dissonance and consonance and their resolution as principles of traditional composition.

Pratella thought that traditional composition should be replaced by enharmonic music

based on micro intervals in pitch and continuous sequential changes in rhythm. Only that,

claimed Pratella, would enable music to adequately express the sounds of nature, labour

and the complex din of the modern industrial city. The radical switch to noise as an

elementary musical material, however, was Russolo's merit. Noise's practical application

came about when Russolo and Ugo Piati constructed a number of special instruments

able to produce such sounds. He called them intonarumori - noise intoners - and started

concert tours with them. Meanwhile, Marinetti, who was constantly encouraging Pratella

to apply principles of the futurist revolution in his theory of music, asked maestro to

enrich the orchestration of the opera Aviatore Dro (1914) by incorporating a few of

Russolo's intonarumori in the symphonic ensemble. At the time, composer Maurice

Ravel and Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev also showed interest in Russolo's

wondrous instruments.

A noise intoner was a music box with a large funnel that amplified the sound mechanically produced in the instrument when the performer cranked it. A single

stretched diaphragm regulated by the lever controlled its pitch. The pitch was divided into

semitone, quartertone and even smaller fractions of the continuous enharmonic scale

according to the variations in its tension. There were six families of noises, all supposed to be produced by noise-intoners, presented in the manifesto L 'Arte dei rumori. They

29Marinetti's letter to Pratella qouted in Lista, La scene futuriste, 78. included roaring, thundering, explosions, whistling, hissing, puffing, screeching,

creaking, rustling, humming, crackling, rubbing and so on. The list is concluded by

animate sounds like screams, shrieks, wails, death rattles and sobs. On June 2,1913, at a serata in Teatro Strochi in Modena, Russolo presented for the first time "a burster - scoppiatore [.. .producing] an automobile engine sound with changeable pitch over ten whole tones, a crackler (crepitatore) a sparkling sound, a hummer (ronzatore) an electric motor sound, and a rubber (stropicciatore) a metallic scraping sound."30

Luigi Russolo's first composition for intonarumori in which he realized his idea of noise as music was Risveglio di una citta (Awakening of a City). It had been announced on the poster for a concert of noise intoners at a serata at Teatro dal Verme in

Milan on April, 21 1914 together with Colazione sulla terrazza del Kursaal Diana

(Breakfast on the Terrace of the Spa Diana), and Convegno di automobili e di aeroplani

(A Meeting of Automobiles and Airplanes). Russolo subsequently presented his noise orchestra in Genoa and London and started a European tour with a similar concert program that included Liverpool, Dublin, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Vienna, Moscow, St.

Petersburg, Berlin and Paris. Unfortunately the outbreak of the First World War interrupted the tour.

Risveglio di una citta was a kind oimusique concrete piece although not recorded but composed and executed live by the noise-intoners. It brought to life the soundscape of an industrial city in a conglomeration of noises that made modernity its background. Risveglio was a concretization of Russolo's musical reform that included

"the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an undeniable animalism, the

30 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 32. For a detailed description and analysis see: Hugh Davies, "The Sound World, Instruments and Music of Luigi Russolo: The Expanding Medium," Lmc, vol. 2, no. 2 (1994) at 210 throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of power saws, the starting of a streetcar on the tracks, the cracking of whips, the flapping of awnings and flags."31 Given that most of the adjectives Russolo used to describe noises of the city were of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic provenance, the cacophony of the modern urban/industrial environment was equated with the convulsive breathing of the mythical

Moloch-like monster that devours people. This sound-image is reminiscent of the

German expressionist film Metropolis by Fritz Lang, in which columns of anonymous workers descend into the bowels of such an industrial, mechanical monster of an underground factory.

Russolo's concrete sound composition can be also seen as a prototype of the

'acoustic film', a form of radio drama/documentary that had been produced by German radio artists of the Weimar period. This can be confirmed by a London Pall Mall Gazette correspondent's report of the Awakening of a City performance in Milan.

At first a quiet even murmur was heard. The great city was asleep. Now and again some giant hidden in one of those queer boxes snored pretentiously; and a new born child cried, [...] a far-away noise grew into a mighty roar.. .the huge printing machines of the newspapers... hundreds of vans and motor lorries... the shrill whistling of the locomotives... A multitude of doors was next heard to open and shut with a bang, and procession of receding footsteps intimated that the great army of breadwinners was going to work. Finally, all the noises of the street and the factory merged into a gigantic roar, and the music ceased... I awoke as though from a dream and applauded.32

Walther Ruttman, a prominent expressionist filmmaker whose documentary

Berlin - Symphony of a Great City (1927) represents a seminal work in the aesthetics of film montage, contributed directly to the German radio/acoustic art of the time as well.

His film, showing the fervor of the metropolis - Berlin, was an application of a non-

31 Ibid. 26. 32 Ibid. 5. 211

narrative collage of juxtaposed moving images very similar to the structure of Awakening

of a City that Russolo made solely of sounds. As if being aware of it, Ruttman saved the

optical filmstrip and used it the following year to create an acoustic work for radio

broadcast called Weekend. Here he employed the same montage principles as in the film,

introducing a method later accepted among radio drama authors in the production of so-

called 'acoustic films.' In fact, he was still working with film stock and not with

magnetic tape like radio artists few years down the road. Thus he pioneered a parallel

method of acoustic and visual montage still employed in today's audio-video arts.

These elements of the sound montage and juxtaposition were already noticeable

on the two pages of enharmonic notation for the Risveglio di una cita that Russolo

published together with the manifesto.33 Instead of musical notes on the stave, Russolo

used continuous lines indicating microtonal changes of the pitch. There were six pairs of

parallel staves on a score page on which it was possible to draw lines of notation for

intonarumori of different timbres playing simultaneously. That allowed for the juxtaposition of instrumental timbres, while the abrupt changes of continuous lines

allowed for montage cuts of the sound material.

At the time of Russolo's experiments with intonarumori, Walter Benjamin's

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was in its inception. The upcoming methods of electronic and motion-picture recording by the microphone and

camera were going to be able to capture the fragmented world in its dynamics. They would discover profane noises, up to then 'unattended' as Cage put it, or 'ready made' images and objects scattered around, and construct radio or film pieces by the art of montage. The idiom of montage in audio-visual arts, however, can be regarded as an

33 See Appedix, Figure 18. 212

outcome of the poetics of the immersion into the essence of material expressed through the chain of distant analogies explored and developed in the futurist dramaturgy of sound.

Russolo and Ruttman's compositional concepts have remained vital in

contemporary film art. The film Koyaanisqatsi (in Hopi Indians language: Life Out of

Balance, 1985) produced by Francis Ford Copolla, directed by Goddfrey Reggio, with music by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke is based on the same principle.

It shows an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds: one of urban life and technology and other of the natural environment. Their dramatic clash is expressed by the parallel montage of sound and moving images that meet, then twist together and separate in a continual flux of aural and visual forms. This feature documentary is based on the rhythmical pulsation of its sound/image material rather than on the language of narrative film. Reggio confirms that Koyaanisqatsi is, after all, "an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer."34 Philip Glass's soundtrack is based on concrete noises musicalized in his recognizable repetitive and augmentative style. Robert Wilson's theatre productions or sound/image constructions on stage that also ressemble 'animated objects' are indebted to Glass's musical contribution.

Filmmaker Reggio and theatre author Wilson are artists at the forefront of formal abstraction and the liberation of sound and image from narrative and connotative strings, a process that was started by Futurism in the historical avant-garde.

A series of avant-garde endevours in the field of mechanical sound compositions and 'machine music' by composers such as Alexander Mossolov, George

Antheil, Arthur Honegger and Edgard Varese, have succeeded Russolo's vision of the art of noises, his construction of intonarumori and his concerts of noise. His experiments

4 See Reggio's interview at 213

also provided inspirational background for the musique concrete and essential works of

twentieth century music by Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Krzysztof Penderecki and

Gyorgy Ligeti. Edgard Varese, for example, has described his music as 'organized sound'

based on timbre and rhythm, elements that are more related to noise than to music.

He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varese is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.35

Apparently, the significant futurist contribution to contemporary music went

through the noise-incurred disturbance of its harmonic structure. Moreover, the use of

noise suggested by Russolo has not been restricted to the novelty it meant for music and

its orchestration. It represented a characteristically futurist step further into the core of unknowable matter that poets made by entering under the signifying crust of the word to

reach its sounding. The art of noise enabled concrete sounds to enter into the play of

analogical juxtapositions of sonic masses parallel to the methods of abstract painting. The

concept of noise as artistic material figured prominently in the Futurist, Dadaist and

Bauhaus explorations of theatre, performance and stage thus taking part in the conceptual

apparatus of today's dramaturgy and theory of art.

35Torben Sangild, The Aesthetics of Noise, (DATANOM/UBUWEB, 2002), 9. 4.4. Dadaist Concept of Noise and the MERZ-stage as a Prelude to Total Theatre

The art of noises conceived in Italian Futurism spread to the anarchist and nihilist aesthetics and performance practice of Dada artists from Zurich to the postwar movement's centres: Paris, New York, Berlin and Hanover. Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the performers of the famous simultaneous poem 'Z, 'amiral cherche une maison a louer' at the Cabaret Voltaire (analyzed on pp. 92-93) admits borrowing the methods and terms of bruitism and noise music from Marinetti.

Le bruit - noise with imitative effects, was introduced into art (in this connection we can hardly speak of individual arts, music or literature) by Marinetti, who used a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles and pot-covers to suggest the "awakening of the capital"; at first it was intended as nothing more than a rather violent reminder of colourfulness of life.

It is not clear why Huelsenbeck failed to mention Russolo. Maybe he thought that Marinetti's name sufficed as an epitome for the futurist revolution. In any case, in his own emphatic vocal performance, use of noisemakers and concept of noise as action,

Huelsenbeck shared Russolo's thoughts the expressive power of noise in contrast to the limitations of tonal music. Huelsenbeck was a noisy and arrogant performer who "reads, accompanied by a big drum, shouts, whistles and laughs. [...] His poetry was an attempt to capture in a clear melody the totality of this unutterable age, with all its cracks and

IT fissures, with all its wicked and lunatic genialities, with all its noise and hollow din," wrote Hugo Ball in his Dada diaries. Huelsenbeck's Fantastic Prayers contain verses very similar to parole in liberta: "Plane pig's bladder kettledrum cinnabar cru cru cru /

36 The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 25. 37 Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 56. 215

Theosophia pneumatica/ [...] Or or birribum birribum the ox whizzes round in a circle or contracts for / Casting light hand grenade parts 7,6 cm chauser..." 38 Being imbibed by the noise of the mechanical age himself, Huelsenbeck was able to make a correct diagnosis of the Futurist predilection for noise in En Avant Dada: A History ofDadaism:

While numbers, and consequently melody, are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call to action. Music of whatever nature is harmonious, artistic, an activity of reason - but bruitism is life itself. [...] Bruitism is a kind of return to nature. It is the music produced by circuits of atoms; death ceases to be an escape of the soul from earthly misery and becomes a vomiting, screaming and choking.39

Apparently, Huelsenbeck understood very well the materiality of futurist art, its

Dionysian inspiration and its obsession with the concrete. Accepting Marinetti's and

Russolo's concepts, he suggested that, contrary to the abstract artists, who dealt with the abstract idea of a table to be presented, "the Futurists wanted to immerse themselves in the 'angularity' of things," that is into its material - its wood and its nails.

Along with tables there were houses, frying pans, urinals, women, etc. Consequently Marinetti and his group love war as the highest expression of the conflict of things, as a spontaneous eruption of possibilities, as movement, as a simultaneous poem, as a symphony of cries, shots, commands, embodying an attempted solution of the problem of life in motion. 40

Thus, despite the opposite sides Futurists and Dadaists' took regarding the

First World War - Futurists siding with nationalist warmongers, Dadaists with internationalists and pacifists - Dadaist sound-poet Huelsenbeck, in this fragment, understood the Italian Futurists' love for war. He did not judge it as their inexcusable political attitude but as a consequence of their inclination towards the dynamism of life and its materiality. In Huelsenbeck's reasoning one can clearly see the impact of

38 Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka: First Texts of German Dada, ed. Malcolm Green, et al. (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 55. 39 Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, 26. 40 Ibid. 26. 216

Boccioni's concepts of dynamism, compenetration and simultaneity as well as the futurist

love for matter or 'literalness' that made Russolo include everyday sounds/noises into music.

There were multiple links between Futurist and Dadaists concerning the

simultaneity of sound poetry, visual arts and performance based on the materiality of

sound. Thus, Raoul Hausmann, a central figure of the Berlin Dada, created Seelen

Automobile, a series of sound poems he recited on June 1918 at the Cafe Austria. "The

sound poem is an art consisting of respiratory and auditive combinations," he explained,

"firmly tied to a unit of duration... In order to express these elements typographically I had used letters of varying sizes and thickness which thus took on the character of musical notation."41 Hausmann was already familiar with Marinetti's, Tzara's and

Huelsenbeck's experiments with sound when he learned about Ball's poems without words in 1920. Therefore he decided to go further into the abstraction of sound-art writing optophonetic poetry - optophonetische Gedichte. By optophonetic, Hausmann meant that the phonetics/vocalisation of his poems was determined by the visual appearance of their score made solely of letters in different size and shape, that is, by their optics. Hausmann claimed that his 'alphabet poems' were different from Ball's poetry in which "phonetic system is founded on unknown words, whereas my poems are directly and exclusively based upon letters; they were letterist." They were built on the

'optophonetic' synthetic architecture reflected in the letters of the score arranged in such a way that they conveyed sound.

John D. Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art, (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 37. 217

A poem for me is the rhythm of its sounds. So why have words? Poetry is produced by rhythmic sequences of consonants and diphthongs set against a counterpoint of associated vowels and it should be simultaneously phonetic and visual. Poetry is a fusion of dissonance and onomatopoeia. [...] Spiritual vision, spatial form and material sound form are not poetry in themselves but they all make up the poem.42

Hausmann thus announced the birth of a pure phonism, the ideal of non-

objective, abstract poetry. His sound poems were "manifestations of a pure acoustical materialness" [my emphasis, M.O.], as Nicolaus Einhorn states. As if acting under the

spell of futurist 'geometric and mechanical splendor and numerical sensibility,'

Hausmann "contrasted his gestic and emotional articulation, his body language, with the rigidity of the printed word."43 His abstract vocalizations, like 'bbbfr and 'fmsbw,'

ikperioum' and ipggifmu,,A4 proved to be seminal for the sound poetry of French lettrism of 1950s, while his idea of the 'lawfulness of sound' helped the development of the pure acoustic art. But, in the scope of a dramaturgy of sound, Hausmann's abstract structuring of a poem using its simultaneous visual, spatial and phonetic elements opened up a possibility for a synthetic art no longer motivated only by synaesthetic links, an art that developed independently in the second phase of Italian Futurism.

This 'acoustical materialness' was a crucial component of the sound poems by the Dadaist painter and collage artist, Kurt Schwitters. He had been writing/composing and performing his famous poem Sonate in Urlauten (Sonata in Primordial Sound) or

Ursonate45 in German Dada circles from the 1920s until its final publication in 1932.

Raoul Hausmann, "The Phonetic Poem," Courrier Dada, (Paris, 1958) 43 Klaus Schoning, "The contours of acoustic art," Theatre Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3, (Radio Drama - October 1991), 315. Available for listening at See Appendix, Figure 19. 45Merz, no.13, 1925, comprised a Merz-Grammophon-platte of Schwitters reciting his Scherzo der Ursonate. A later recording, a result of his cooperation with the Suddeutscher Rundfunk Stuttgart in 1932, is preserved in the German Radio Archive in Frankfurt/Main. Fragments of Ursonate, published by 218

Starting from Hausmann's verbo/vocal structure of alphabet poetry, 'bbbW and 'fmsbwt,'

for example, and breaking down of language into a vocal, pre-denotational texture,

Schwitters focused on the exclusively musical characteristics of words and syllables. In

that way, he structured the poem as an abstract vocal sonata according to strict musical

parameters. Sonate in Urlauten was a thirty-five-minute-long performance poem,

conceived in musical form and organized in four movements, with prelude and cadenza.

Here is how Moholy-Nagy describes the poem.

The words used do not exist, rather they might exist in any language; they have no logical, only an emotional context, they affect the ear with their phonetic vibrations like music. Surprise and pleasure are derived from the structure and the inventive combination of the parts.46

When performed, the sonata challenged the audience's perception; listeners

did not know whether it was a musical piece or a poetry rendition. Schwitters essentially

cared most for the creation of a consistent sound environment as a piece of art. His manifesto of 1924, "Consistent Poetry," adamantly made the point that it is absolutely

irrelevant whether or not a poem makes the material of a recitation. Elaborating on his

experience with visual collage technique, Schwitters asserted: "one can recite the

alphabet, a string of purely functional sounds, in such a way that the result is a work of

art."47 He sought a poetry in which a free-counterpoint of words/phonemes would be released from the words and their associations. The consistency of such poetry that would be based on its concrete material/sound is what relates Schwitters' work with the Futurist aesthetics of sound. In the example below, his reductio ad absurdum of the word tisch

(table), recalling Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughter," is followed by repetitious

WERGO, Mainz, is available at In 1958, Lords Gallery, London, produced a record that besides a selection from Ursonate includes his reciting of An Anna Blume. 46 Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets, xxviii. 47 Klaus Schoning, "The contours of acoustic art," 311. 219

onomatopoeia, priimiitittiii. However, the nihilism ascribed to Dadaist creations does not

apply to Sonate in Urlauten whose structure inclines more towards a musical inspiration.

Pages and pages of the script are just strings of vowels and phonemes configured as notes

in a script for vocalization.

Priimiitittiii tisch tesch priimiitittiii tesch tusch priimiitittiii tischa tescho priimiitittiii tescho tuschi priimiitittiii priimiitittiii priimiitittiii too... 4S

The theatrical application of consistent sound/noise poetry was supposed to

appear on Schwitters' MERZ-stage (The artist took the word MERZ from his poster for

Kommerz und Privatbank). It never happened even though Schwitters had been for years building its performance space. That space, the MERZ-BAU, also referred to as the

Cathedral of Erotic Misery, was an environmental artwork in progress, a growing

architectonic construction made of ready-made bric-a-brac objects that slowly devoured

Schwitters' entire two-story house in Hanover. The Merz-stage was a composite artwork par excellence that embraced all arts, media and materials the way Schwitters, by his own words, "combined individual categories of art, [...and] pasted words and sentences into poems to produce a rhythmic design." That called for an intense inter-mixing and fusing of sound, colour, light, material and objects like:

The solid, liquid, gaseous bodies such as white wall, man (sic), barbed wire entanglement, blue distance, light cones... all tones and noises capable of

Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, xxix. See Appendix, Figure 20 [and 20a]. 220

being produced by violin, drum, trombone, sewing machine, grandfather clock, stream of water, etc.49

Kurt Schwitters conceived the Merz-play as an abstract work of art where, "as

in poetry, word is played against word, factor is played against factor, material against

material." In contrast to the drama or the opera "it [Merz-play] cannot be written, read or

listened to, it can only be produced in the theatre."50 He outlined this idea of theatre

already in 1919 in Sturmbuhne, but most notably in his manifesto from 1927 "To All the

Theatres of the World I Demand the MERZ-stage." After absolutely undermining the role

of the text, Schwitters, without mentioning the characters, sarcastically allowed: "Human

beings may also be used, [...] even in their everyday situation." His guidelines for a

Merz-play contained the advice: "Now begin to marry off the materials to each other. For

instance marry the oilcloth to the building society, bring the lamp-cleaner into a

relationship with the marriage between Anna Blume and the concert pitch."51 Was this

not a Marinetti-inspired thought of escaping from a psychological and sentimental T to

the life of matter itself?

Schwitters' project correlates with Futurists' attempts at a composite work of

art following their explorations in the dramaturgy of sound. Futurists' predilection for

tactilism, materiality and abstraction lead them to introduce different media and materials

into performance. These, from their part, entered in the analogical, simultaneous structure

of Futurist theatre of synthesis as independent elements of stage. Thus Futurists

developed theatricality of concrete materials and abstract forms. Hence, it is possible to

say that Bauhaus theatrical theory and practice took a torch not only from the closely

49 Mel Gordon, Dada Performance, (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 100. 50 Ibid. 98. 51 Ibid. 100. 221

involved German Expressionists and Dadaists like Oskar Kokoschka, Lothar Schreyer or

Kurt Schwitters, but also from Italian Futurists like Marinetti, Cangiullo, Balla, Depero

and Prampolini and Russian Futurists such as Malevich, Tatlin and Kandinski. This also

demonstrates just how international the idea of an abstract theatre based on sound/colour/

mass/movement's materiality was. All these avant-garde artists recognized the materiality

of sound (together with the materiality of other means and media of performance) and

broke ground for the hybridization of art forms that constitutes an essential element of

contemporary theatricality.

Tristan Tzara's subversive performances at Dada soirees in Paris illustrate

another way of using noise. These events aimed "to frustrate the passive audition of

expected sounds by the performance of unexpected and usually aggressive sounds. [...]

In Vaseline Symphonic, a work whose title is more scandalous than its content, twenty people sang ascending scales first on the syllable era followed by ascending scales one

third higher on the syllable cri... etc. ad infinitum."52 The audience responded with

chanting in unison, shouts and whistles that only added to the intended cacaphonous pandemonium in the theatre. The likeness of these performance events with the futurist serate is indisputable. Although Dadaists made a scandal of Russolo's inotonarumori

concerts in Paris and boasted that they, not the Futurists, were now the leaders of the avant-garde, Richter had to admit: "We had swallowed Futurism - bones, feathers and all.

It is true that in the process of digestion all sorts of bones and feathers had been regurgitated."53

52 Christopher Schiff, "Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism" Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and the Avant-garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 151. 53 Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art, (Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004), 33. 222

Tzara used a similar method in his plays, writing some lines of dialogue in

'musical' verses for oral interpretation, similar to those in Schwitters' Sonate in Urlauten.

The dialogue was discontinuous; the lines were no longer meaningful exchanges of logical sentences but rather exchanges of vocal gestures carrying different energies and attitudes shaped in sound. Characters in The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine,

Fire Extinguisher (1916; a second play of the same name was published in 1920), bore allegorical names like Mr. Blueblue, Mr. Cricri, The Pregnant Woman, Mr. Absorption and Mme. Interruption. They delivered a script made of mixed material and combinations of logical and pathetic sentences, abstract vocalizations, onomatopoeias, lyrical verses, manifesto proclamations and so on, structured in a theatrical form that 'stands as a metaphor for the circus.' Like Marinetti in the "Variety Theatre" manifesto, Tzara called for a radical renewal: "The theatre. Since it forever remains attached to a romantic imitation of life, to an illogical fiction, let us give it all the natural vigor that it first had: be it amusement or poetry."54 A sample of the renewal that disrupted traditional dramatic dialogue with vocal noise of sound poetry redas as follows:

Mr. CRICRI: there is no humanity there are the lamplighters and the dogs dzin aha dzin aha bobobo tyao...[...] Mr. BLEUBLEU: (incontestably) toubo matapo the viceroys of the nights... THE PREGNANT WOMAN: a big bird alive tyao ty a a ty a o ty a o Mr. CRICRI, Mr. BLEUBLEU, PIPI, Mr. ANTIPYRINE: zdranga zdranga zdranga zdranga di di di di di di di di di zoumbai zoumbai zoumbai zoumbaidzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi dzi55

Erickson, Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art, 76. Mel Gordon, Dada Performance, 55. 223

4.5. Dramaturgy of Sound in the Futurist Theatrical Sintesi

After all the experiences with the propagandistic arte-azione and futurist serate, in 1915 Futurists took a decisive step towards the 'real' theatre. After the experimentation with the onomatopoeic declamations that developed into quasi-theatrical events and the conceptualization of the variety theatre and physical madness that helped rumorist performances a la Piedigrotta, they decided to engage professional actors to play a series of their sintesi. Thus, in 1915 and 1916 the acting companies of Ettore Berti,

Ettore Petrolini, Luciano Molinari and few other capocomici started touring Italy with evening programs of theatrical sintesi. Unfortunately, this move was in a way a step backwards because futurist radical reform of theatre could not be adequately represented on the institutional stage of the time. And since many minor artists were encouraged to write short synthetic plays, which admittedly impacted on their quality, most of the performances on these tours could not be very well received. However, "The Futurist

Synthetic Theatre," a manifesto written by Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli and Bruno Corra, and several short scripts by the main figures and strongest talents of Italian Futurism still remain a source of inspiration for the contemporary theatre. Most important for my research are the abstract sintesi and performance pieces in which sound is an essential component. They represent a continuation of synaesthetic explorations in painting, poetry and music now turned into a synthetic dramaturgy, announced by the manifesto:

The futurist theatrical synthesis [...] will be autonomous will resemble nothing but itself. [...] Above all, just as the painter and composer discover, scattered through the outside world, a narrower but more intense life, made up of colours, forms, sounds and noises, the same is true for the man gifted with theatrical sensibility, for whom a specialized reality exists that violently assaults his nerves: it consists of what is called THE THEATRICAL WORLD.56

Clearly, there is an inclination towards the abstract-concrete art form that will

discover an inherent theatricality in the real world 'made up of colours, forms, sounds

and noises' expressed by 'colours, forms, sounds and noises' that 'resemble nothing but

itself.' Theatre art, then, is not about man and his psychology, suffering or joy, but about

the matter that makes up the world. The theatre works are supposed to be "fragmentary

dynamic symphonies of gestures, words, sounds and lights" that would create "stage

ambiences where different actions, atmospheres, and times can interpenetrate and unroll

simultaneously."57 The new theatre was synthetic, that is, extremely condensed and short,

some were just momentary flashes. It was atechnical, that is, dismissive of the

dramaturgy of the passeist, naturalistic play writing and staging (most of the words in the

manifesto are devoted to this issue) and it was dynamic, simultaneous, autonomous,

alogical, unreal - features that alluded to the achievements of poetry and painting.

Corra and Settimelli who declared a creation of'alogical' art were not the

only ones to import the synthetic theatre's push towards abstraction. Even though

'alogical' was a new word in Marinetti's theoretical vocabulary; it was consistent with

the contemporaneous developments in painting and poetry. Giovanni Lista points out that

Marinetti's contacts with Russian cubo-futurist painters after his 1914 visit to Moscow

and St. Petersburg influenced his adoption of the term 'alogical' for the description of the new dramaturgy.58 Indeed, Marinetti's readiness to steer towards abstraction was

Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 195. Quoted in Gunter Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 178. See Lista, La Scene Futuriste, 196. apparent in his controversy with Livshits during the visit, as mentioned earlier in this

chapter. Thus "The Futurist Synthetic Theatre" manifesto contained many words

reminiscent of Cubo-futurist concurrent discussion on the issue of an 'objectless' art like

'autonomous,' 'unreal' or 'resembling nothing but itself.'

Some of the most interesting synthetic pieces were written by Marinetti, who

relentlessly elaborated the poetics of Futurism, Cangiullo, who had a sense for proto-

Dadaist absurd humour and playfulness, and Giacomo Balla, who engaged in brave

experiments with the pictorial form.

Macchina tipografica (1914) by Balla was a piece of'' onomatopea rumoristd'

with the stipulated duration. There were twelve performers on the stage, with a large billboard reading TIPOGRAFIA as a backdrop, who simultaneously repeated each a

different phoneme:

1st person: settesette... 2nd person: nennenenne... 3rd person: vuuuummuu... 4,h:te.te.te... 5th: miaaaaaanavano... 6th: sta— sta—... 7,h:lalala... 8th: ftftft... 9th: ioriorio... 10th: scsscsscs scsscsscs... 11th: veveve... 12th: nunnnonon nunnnonon ...59

The manuscript of the sintesi has three folios containing a script for vocalization, a design for the backdrop with huge typographic upper-case letters, a

schematic study of the circular movement of the performers' arms with notes for the tempo, and a sketch of the costumes in white, black and orange. The performers on the

Theatre Futurist Italien, vol. 2, 97. See Appendix, Figure 21. 226

stage produced the abstract vocalizations of mechanical noise while mimicking the

rotation of printing machine parts. From Balla's sketch one can see that they looked like

semaphores. There was no emotion to be visible on the actors' faces, and they moved

according to the rules of futurist dance or synoptic declamation that required 'fluency of a

train wheel and of an airplane propeller.' The visual, kinetic and aural elements of the

piece were simple, repetitive and entirely abstract to the point that, if not for the backdrop, one could not decide what they represented. The stage exercise 'resembled

nothing but itself Curiously, according to the different sources, Macchina tipografica has been regarded differently: either as an onomatopoeic poem, a theatrical sintesi or a

futurist ballet. Lista, for example, included the script among ballets in his anthology due to the fact that Balla showed the performance to Diaghilev, offering it to be staged together with Feu d'artifice. Thus the piece might also be regarded as a precedent of the moto-rumorist complex, in this instance performed by people but soon to be replaced by kinetic objects, puppets or machines.

A later work by Balla, the Sconcertazione di stati d' animo (Disconcerted

States of Mind, 1916)60 also used a plastic stage complex of sounds, colours, forms and movements. The language of the piece is reduced to simple phonetic gestures: four differently dressed people on a white stage simultaneously talk, gesticulate and produce abstract vocalizations in four micro stanzas/scenes or tempos. These parts are separated by lines/bars into four quasi-musical 'movements' of a certain length. In the first

'movement,' each performer loudly recites various rounds of numbers: 666, 333, 444,

999 followed by a section where the performers pronounce different letters/sounds: aaa, ttt, sss and uuu. The third part consists of mute gestures: one raises his hat, the other

60 See Appendix, Figure 22. 227

looks at his watch, third blows his nose while the fourth reads a newspaper. While the

previous parts are restrained and serious, the fourth part is a kind of emotional crescendo

in which all characters are very expressive, delivering their lines loudly and

simultaneously:

1st Person: (loudly) sadness - aiaiaiaiaiaiaiai 2nd Person: quickness - quickly, quickly 3rd Person: pleasure - si si si si si

4th Person: denial - no no no no no no 6I

Simultaneity and compenetration of states of mind is expressed in a rhythmic play of sounds and gestures. The human emotion is allowed to come only at the end but

even then it remains abstract and disconnected from the characters whose lines overlap

and lose their meaning.

Storneli Vocali (Vowel Refrains), a sintesi by Fracesco Cangiullo, subtitled

"verses of life - music of death" has a similar structure. Five characters lined up on the

stage reply to the requests of the master of ceremonies. He asks for the refrains of the dying man, the doctor, the relatives, the brother and the crowd. The characters answer each with a different, lengthily pronounced vowel: 'aaaah,' 'eh,' '/»/?,' loh oh oh oh, uh.'

The sarcastic, but at the same time cleanly abstract conclusion comes in the master's mechanically uttered line: 'A.E.I.O.U.'1

In Balla's Per comprendere ilpianto (To Understand Weeping, 1916), two men, one dressed in a white summer suit and the other in a black female mourning-robe, stand before a square backdrop painted half-red, half-green and deliver their lines seriously.

Fourteen lines of dialogue are repeated in nonsensical vocalizations and numbers.

61 Kirby, Futurist Performance, 232. Black: To understand weeping... White: mispicciritotiti Black: 48 White: brancapatarsa

Black: 1215...62

This might have gone on indefinitely and earnestly had the man in black not demanded of the man in white: '12344. Enough! Stop laughing,' whereupon the other replied: 'I must laugh.' There was no realistically motivated laughter or mourning on the stage, just a composition of sound and colour: two parroting performers talking in the style of parole in liberta wearing costumes of contrasting colours - black and white in front of no-less- contrasting painted surfaces - green and red. Materials of sound and colour expressing diametrically opposite states of mind overtook the dramaturgy of characters who might be weeping or laughing for different psychological reasons. The spectator remained puzzled as to whether the piece required any understanding of weeping at all. But through the clash of the visual and aural material, one could perceive a nascent dramatic form.

The use of nonsense language and the production of noise were the central dramaturgical elements of two sintesi by Mario Carli, Stati d'animo and Violenza ("States of Mind" and "Violence," 1916). In Stati d'animo, the stage represents an ordinary promenade cafe in which the ordinary patrons speak an extraordinary nonsensical language. Actually, they express their attitudes appropriately but they use 'inappropriate' vocabulary of abstract vocalizations. This vocabulary apparently serves them well; it expresses their states of mind by means of pure vocal gestures. Thus a speculator bites his fingernails and counts with harsh consonant clusters: "astrr ghrrr frr magnakalacafu..." while a student at the next table speaks with nostalgia and bitterness: "auflin bergin

62 Ibid. 233. ochiputecio..." At the same time a coquette glances at both of them in turn, saying:

"chono chiono psi psi..." while a clerk keeps reading a newspaper repeating: "ito rito marito oro coro coloro." A journalist, a deputy and the lovers follow the same pattern.

Only a poet and a philosopher utter some pseudo-comprehensible words like 'shudder mystery sunrise' and 'casuistry universal perspicuity,' but their utterances sound more

like verbal noise than meaningful lines. The short scene of an everyday, carefree

afternoon abruptly ends with the hurried entrance of a wrestler who overturns tables

screaming 'brututm zum pum!' Two sounds and two actions clash: the indifferent murmur of the cafe guests who were expressing their own moods by means of sound rather than words and the violent, aggressive sounds of the intruder.

In Violenza, subtitled 'symphony', a much more intense soundscape permeates the stage that represents an ordinary street populated by the people. It begins with a roll of the drum and the sound of cymbals in the distance that get louder but remain off stage all the time. This sound backdrop intensifies throughout the whole scene until it reaches a deafening crescendo. Simultaneously, it incites frenzy amongst the people in the street. Vendors loudly advertise their merchandise while a newspaper- vendor shouts out headlines: 'Killing!' 'Bombardment!' 'Disaster!' A man leaves a cafe chased by a waiter: T won't pay! You have to pay!' Children scream, windows are being smashed. The audience hears the off-stage cracks of a whip and the explosion of tires.

Two actors rehearse a scene of a quarrel. The couple starts a violent fight that leaves the woman lying dead on the pavement. Another man chases another woman: 'Magda! If you don't return I'll kill myself!' The man blows out his brain. All is accompanied by the persistent, ominous sound of drums and cymbals reaching its crescendo. Now comes 'a

63 Ibid. 256/7. shiver of disgust,' and everybody hastily leaves in different direction, tables with drinks and fruit-stands are overturned. People flee and, suddenly, the loud, violent soundscape has been replaced by silence in which only the windowpanes tremble. The glow of a bloody sunset appears, and night falls. Soon after a new dawn arrives, and an old man and old woman helped by a boy slowly leave the distant house. They speak about a peaceful life, the old man is happy. 'La violenza non esiste,' he says as the boy innocently points out the corpses.

There is no standard dramatic development in this short play. The actions of the characters seem chaotic, fragmented and unmotivated. But a dramatic structure moulded in sound is its main dramaturgical device. Its conflict and resolution, if those were still needed in an 'atechnical' sintesi, lies in the different aural features of its three tempi, as in Balla's abstract 'Disconcerted States of Mind.' Although Carli did not separate the parts by bar lines, they differ sharply by the intensity, timbre and tempo of their aural content. It appears that the three parts are juxtaposed in the manner of a musical or perhaps an art of noises piece. The irritating, violent soundscape of the first part, which is the longest, ends abruptly when a man and a woman die in the street.

Counterpunctually to the first part, the second short tempo is silent; we just hear a delicate but menacing tremble of the windows at sunset. And the last part is an ironic idyll of subdued sounds with a dialogue between two of the society's "disenfranchised:" the old couple and a young boy.

Stati d'animo and Violenza are examples of theatrical sintesi where compenetration and simultaneity of elements are presented aurally. They are like pieces ofmusique concrete. Taking their cues from Russolo's art of noises, these pieces use 231 contrapunct of timbres, juxtaposition of the aural layers and montage of various soundscapes as a way of expressing the absurdity of their dramatic content.

Kirby finds the same kind of structure in Marinetti's Luci (Lights), in which one character, a man on stage, recounts his life though a chain of distant analogies and five changes of light and sound. In the script, the fragments are called tempi and are clearly numbered as 1st tempo or beat, 2nd tempo and so on. The musical nature of the piece is discernible from the rhythmical changes of light and sound and the clash of their textures - the 'clair-obscure' of back projection of a passing train's windows and the

'very violent light' of the next tempo - presented simultaneously with the changes in intensity of the man's emotion.

In Marinetti's abstract sintesi Lotta difondali (The Battle of the Backdrops), the dramaturgy of sound and lights contributes to the play with the-stage-as-itself, in which protagonists are ubiquitous symbols of theatre - curtains. Their poor theatrical luck is that they are inanimate objects, just pieces of cloth hanging from above. But Marinetti forced them into an interactive play with 'characters.' Although there is a certain dramatic development - a crowd riots offstage and three characters, 'the bully', 'the sensitive' and 'the persuasive' appear - the emphasis of the piece is on the sensorial interference between color and sound, objects and living people.

The first movement, to use musical terminology, unfurls in front of a 'Red backdrop' while we hear the shouts of a rebellious, stampeding crowd offstage. This is followed by 'A minute of silence.' Three characters enter one after another and deliver incomprehensible speeches with different attitudes to the backdrop - scornful, violent and diplomatic. The backdrop changes. Or, one might say, it exits. Another one enters. In the second movement, a 'Soft blue backdrop' appears:

Four mandolins play a sweet note, offstage. A minute of silence. [My emphasis, M.O.] Whispering and repressed laughter, offstage. A scale played on a flute, offstage. The voice of an amorous woman, offstage. A very rending sob, offstage. Three beats on an invisible bass drum. The stage lights dim.

In the dark, the loud snoring of a man. 64

While the first part contains characters and some lines of dramatic speech

delivered as mere vocal gestures (noisy trash of articulate speech), the second one

contains only sound: music, noise and silence on an empty stage. It is at this point that

Marinetti uses sound alone as the dramaturgical element of his play. The merit of the piece is left to the spectator's perception of the quite incoherent, auditive and visual

attractions thrown at him. 'A minute of silence,' twice stipulated in the script also

highlights the dominance of aurality in the play. This kind of rhythmic structuring of blocks of sound, noise and silence will be further developed in Marinetti's radio sintesi.

The 'Red backdrop' and the 'Soft blue backdrop' can be regarded as

characters similar to the chairs or pieces of furniture in Marinetti's drammi di ogetti

(dramas of objects) // Teatrino dell'Amore and Vengono. Confirming dignity of matter, the backdrops remain indifferent and silent against the futility of human rioting or love

affairs. Giving the roles of protagonists to inanimate objects, Marinetti revealed his love

for matter expressed by onomatopoeia in sound poetry. His drammi di ogetti counteracted the centrality of the human figure by the concrete and autonomous presence of matter with aim to diminish anthropocentrism of art as stipulated in his manifestos. The eventual

64 "Marinetti's Short Plays," transl. V. N. Kirby, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 17, no. 4, 124. 233 marginalization of the human figure, achieved in futurist stage design and choreographic

experiments that followed, set a precedent for the Bauhaus' total theatre.

In // Teatrino dell'Amore (The Little Theatre of Love), a drama of objects develops in the background of a dreamy atmospheric love/betrayal plot with real characters: a husband, a wife, a lover and a little girl. The kitchen buffet and the credenza take over the emotional tension of the scene by expressing the 'suffering' of the material.

Here, Marinetti attends to the tactile features and the texture of material: we literally hear the texture of wooden objects that are hyper-sensitive to noise, touch, weight, pressure and moisture. Their lines, quasi-objective reports of physical conditions mixed with onomatopoetic mimesis, are rhythmically interspersed with silence:

THE BUFFET: Cric. It will rain in three quarters of an hour. (Silence.) Griiil. They're opening the gate. (Silence.) Cric Cric. The pressure of the silver service is greater than my cohesion! THE SIDEBOARD: Crac-crac. On the third floor, the maid is going to bed. (Silence.) On the stairs, there's a weight of 154 pounds. (Silence.) Craac.

THE BUFFET: Cric. It's raining.

THE SIDEBOARD: Crac. I'm expanding. (Silence.) 65

The chairs in Vengono (They Are Coming) undergo the whole torture by the majordomo and maids who nervously prepare a reception for the guests who never come.

It is a choreographed piece of subtle violence in which the majordomo, panicking near the end, starts to speak nonsensically: 'Briccatirakamemame.' The silent chairs leave the stage with the help of a side light beam that extends their shadows towards the exit. This synthetic drama of objects, sound and light is 'an early attempt to create a physical event that expresses stati d'animo, a complesso plastico (a plastic complex of stage) that

65 Ibid. 118/119. 234

replaces the dramatic or narrative development with a visual composition of the stage

environment able to emanate energies.

4.6. Marinetti's and Mansata's La radia: The Introduction of a Pure Acoustic Art

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's and Pino Masnata's manifesto of the futurist

radiophonic theatre, entitled La Radia (1933), was a step towards a synthesis of media

and materials, announced by the 'wireless imagination' in the poetics of parole in liberta.

It also meant a continuation of Russolo's concept of the art of noise, realized this time in

the new electronic medium of recording, montage and transmission of sound - radio. The

authors admit its debt to the futurist free-word style that "has removed boredom from the

theatre using alogical surprise syntheses and the drama of objects," but they continue

with a praise for the new and superior medium of radio that will go beyond theatrical and

cinematographic expression still burdened by the naturalism and narrativity. In the realm

of La Radia:

Words-in-freedom, daughters of the aesthetics of the machine, contain a whole orchestra of sounds and sound harmonies (realistic and abstract) which, single-handedly, can assist the colourful and pliable word in its flash representation of that what cannot be seen.66

Marinetti and Mansata abandoned conventional staging for a more abstract

artistic form that uses "the reception, amplification and transformation of vibrations released by living or dead beings, dramas of states of mind, full of sound effects but without words."67 The manifesto's purpose was apparently disruptive: La Radia abolishes stage, unity of space, time and action, dramatic character and "the audience as

66 F.T. Marinetti, Critical Writings, ed. Gunter Berghaus (New York: Farrar, 2006), 413. 57 Ibid. 412. self-appointed judging mass." Instead, it brings about the "compressed dramas

comprising an infinite number of simultaneous actions."69 La Radio, sounds like the

synthetic theatre manifesto squared!

Encouraged by the advancements of recording, amplifying and transmission

technology, Marinetti and Mansata became really futuristic. Not only did they suggest the

inclusion of environmental noise, they included an even wider spectrum of sounds, even

those that cannot be heard by the human ear. These sounds were to be registered by ultra­

sensitive equipment able to catch an infinite variety of possible noise, vibrations of human, animal, vegetal and inanimate bodies, extensions of voice and breath, and

interference between radio stations, celestial bodies or other radio emitters. Thus the microphone, a new tool for capturing sounds and radio broadcast, a powerful means of

immense wireless communication, had become a part of the futurist 'wireless

imagination' which until then relied solely on intuition.

Marinetti's claims for the radiomorphic sensibility of La Radia anticipate some of the claims made more recently for the cybernetic sensibility of postmodernism. La Radia, he declared, would go beyond time and space, since the possibility of receiving broadcast stations situated in various time zones and the lack of light will destroy the hours of the day and night.70

Before Baudrillard's postmodern conception of simulacra, radio began to draw maps detached from the now-deserted lands of reality. It started with the exploitation of its communicational power to cross borders of time and space, which

Marinetti employed as an aesthetic device in his radiophonic synthesis Drama of

Distances. This play was a collage of seven soundscapes, each limited to a duration of

68 Ibid. 412. 69 Ibid. 413. Steven Connor, "The modern auditory I," Rewriting the self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1997). 236

eleven seconds. We hear, one after another, a military march in Rome, a tango danced in

Santos, religious music played in Tokyo, joyful singing in the fields near Varese, a

boxing match in New York, street noises in Milan, and Neapolitan canzone at the

'Copacabana' hotel in Rio de Janeiro.71

In La Radius concept of 'synthesis of pure radio phonic sensations,' a series

of mostly distant but real sound events shaped an acoustic art piece, becomes itself a

listening event. But these real events are put together following the principles of the

dramaturgy of sound. These distant soundscapes and interpenetrating states of mind are

simply made of rhythmically organized noises and sounds. Their dramatic clash resides

in their aurality, namely in the juxtaposition of timbres, intensities and densities of sound.

Every eleven seconds, the listener is forced to adopt a new level of sensibility required by

a new sound attraction. He is, in a way, obliged to pulsate with the drama of material.

Clearly then, the radiophonic synthesis, Drama of Distances, relies more on the

materiality of the sound blocks than on the nature and location of their sources.

Rudolf Arnheim, a gestalt psychologist and art theorist known for his seminal books on film and visual arts, wrote a not-very-well-known book called Der Rundfunk sucht seine Form (Radio Searches for Its Form, 1933). Herbert Read has translated it into

English as Radio: The Art of Sound in 1936. Arnheim's argument in favor of radio, beginning with the depiction of the global sound sphere in which radio operates connecting distant places, emotions and people, is almost identical to the content of Marinetti's sintesi

radiofonica Drama of Distances. However, Arnheim soon gives up of exploring the

'wireless' (as he refers to radio) as a means of transmission and dissemination opting

Theatre Futurist Italien, vol. 2, 57. 237

instead for the "wireless as a means of expression" and ensuing aesthetics of sound that for the first time allowes for "the art that makes use of the aural only."72 The affinity of

Arnheim's thesis with futurist concepts of art of sound/noise and radiophonic creation is totally clear. His notion of the art of sound also stems from the recognition of its materiality.

In wireless the sounds and voices of reality claimed relationship with the poetic word and the musical note; sounds born of earth and those born of spirit found each other; [...] and reality presented itself much more directly, objectively and concretely than on printed paper: what hitherto had only been thought or described now appeared materialized, as a corporeal reality.73

The notions of onomatopoeia and the art of noises in Futurism confer with

Arnheim's approach to sound as 'a corporeal reality', while the idea of simultaneity and compenetration in Marinetti's Drama of Distances, as well as the structure of his four remaining short radio pieces, can be elaborated along the lines of what Arnheim calls the acoustic bridge.

By the disappearance of the visual, an acoustic bridge arises between all sounds: voices, whether connected with a stage or not, are now the same flesh as recitations, discussions, song and music. What hitherto could exist separately now fits organically together: the human being in the corporeal world talks with disembodied spirits; music meets speech on equal terms.

The acoustic bridge brings forth what in La Radia was called a "flash representation of that which cannot be seen" and "an endless variety of concrete versus

7S abstract, of real versus imagined, through a community of sounds.'''' Marinetti's community of sounds delineates the field of a new abstract art proposed by Arnheim.

They agree that there should be a new idiom for a new art. In The Radio: The Art of

Rudolf Arnheim. Radio: The Art of Sound, trans. Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 195. Marinetti, Critical Writings, 413. Sound, Arnheim talks about the 'expressive characteristics' of sound that affect us

directly. They are "comprehensible without any experience by means of intensity, pitch,

interval, rhythm and tempi, properties of sound which have very little to do with the

objective meaning of the word or the sound."

With the advantages of radio technology, the Futurists were able to realize

ideas of a synthetic theatre in a more abstract form of acoustic art in an exclusively aural

medium - radiophony. Thus after the manifesto of 1933, bearing the name of some yet-

unknown muse La Radia, which repudiates all previously existing forms of performance,

Marinetti in 1939 published five short radio pieces called 'radiophonic syntheses.'77

Although he never mentioned Arnheim, probably not knowing of him, Marinetti, in radio

syntheses, employed his principles of a pure acoustic art.

One of them, Unpaesaggio udito (A Landscape Heard) [A SoundScape, would be a right word today] combines several concrete sounds of nature in a musical

fashion. The synopsis at the top of the script reads: "The whistle of a blackbird, envious of the crackling of a fire, ends by extinguishing the gossip of water,"78 promising a dramatic plot, motivation (a blackbird is envious) and resolution. But the babbling of a brook, the crackling of a fire and the cries of a blackbird enter into a rhythmical noise structure. Their durations are strictly measured: the babbling blocks of 10, 8, 5, 19, 25 and 35 seconds are interrupted by cracklings of one second while at the end we hear a blackbird's call lasting 6 seconds. Apparently, it is an atechnical piece, in terms of synthetic theatre, since there is no traditional dramaturgy in it. Instead, it follows the inclination towards materiality of sound. This makes it a distinct piece of acoustic art

76 Arnheim, Radio, 29. 77 Theatre Futurist Italien, vol. 2, 55-57. Two of the pieces are in Kirby, Futurist Performance, 292-293. 78 Kirby, Futurist Performance, 292. 239 corresponding with Arnheim's definition of radiophonic creation "in the field of pure and no longer representational sound. It demands no interpretation of the sound, but only the apprehension of the sound itself and of its expression!"

I Silenzi parlano fra di loro (Silences Speak Among Themselves) consists of periods filled with sound and exactly measured periods of pure silence from eight to forty seconds long. In sounding periods we hear either music - single notes or brief sequences of notes played on piano, trumpet and flute - or noise - the roar of an engine, a baby wailing and so on. The non-sounding passages are treated like the sounding ones in an architecture whose dramatic tension is created by the clash of the blocks of silence and sound. The deliberate temporal extension of silent blocks makes the silence an active element of dramatic sound composition/construction. Marinetti here follows his own idea from the manifesto that sought for a 'delimitation and construction of silence.' Therefore,

Michael Kirby claims, "silence stops functioning as a neutral ground. [...] Silence is heard against the background of sound; silence becomes equal to sound as an aesthetic tool.

Obviously, thoughts of this kind have much to do with ideas of John Cage."

Battaglia di ritmi (Battle of Rhythms) is composed similarly. We first hear the sound of an electric bell ringing for a short while and then we 'listen' to three minutes of silence. Then we hear turning of a key in a lock and again a minute of silence. And that was the whole piece. Curiously enough, there was nothing to be heard at the end of the piece to mark its conclusion, again just silence. Marinetti believed silence did not need a border of sound to be noticed. In his material poetics, silence was not a sign of absence or a break of hearing sensation but an indistinguishable part of the flux of sound, that is

Arnheim, Radio, 196. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 144. 240 matter, in terms of Bergson's philosophy of la duree and Cage's concept of duration as the essence of music that encompasses sound, noise and silence.

The third of Marinetti's radio sintesi that deals particularly with silence is La

Costruzione di un silenzio {The Construction of Silence). Paradoxically this piece does not contain silence at all but only the juxtaposition of four sounds, each coming from a different direction and distance. The four sounds were supposed to create a floor, two walls and a ceiling for an imaginary room delineating a place for silence - a hollow sculpture of sound, as if conceived by Marcel Duchamps.

Marinetti's radio sintesi might have seemed like mere witticisms, but they were really promulgators of a new audio and radio art whose practice we witness now.

Marinetti's play with sound as construction material and his audacious use of long silences expands Russolo's art of noise and once again underlines the notion that aurality encompasses both sound and silence. Therefore, in the realm of aurality, which is larger than the field of harmonic music, the dramaturgy/sculpting of sound/matter becomes possible.

4.7. Marinetti's and Cage's Concepts of Silence in Music, Poetry and Performance

Equal treatment of sound and silence as elements of an audio piece, in Marinetti's radio sintesi may be considered a prefiguration of Cage's sound composition based on the concept of duration which is the only common element of music, noise and silence.

John Cage, whose work has had immeasureable impact on contemporary performance art, composed his music and wrote his poetry convinced that there was no such 241 thing as silence, only our failure to pay attention to sound. After his experience in an

anechoic chamber at Harvard University where the complete absence of sound was simulated, Cage redefined silence as 'nonintentional', 'nonmusicated' and 'nonpitched' sound. The silence he was able to hear in the chamber was the constant high-pitched ring and a low-pitched pulse: the singing tones of his nervous system and the throbbing of his blood.

He announced: "Music is continuous, only listening is intermittent." Music, understood in this sense, covers the whole realm of aurality that besides tonal forms includes noise as well as silence, which are always around us, but it is up to us whether we hear it or not.

Cage's silence is coexistent of sound: a phenomenon simultaneous with noise and music that spread in time, which is continuous and unbreakable in the Bergsonian sense of la duree. Thus noise and music - defined by pitch, timbre, loudness and duration - share duration, as their only common feature, with silence. Cage proposed a musical structure based on duration that best corresponds with nature of material - sound covering the whole realm of aurality. He rejected harmonic structure as incorrect because it is derived from pitch, which does not exist in silence. So instead of talking about contrapuntal composition, Cage, like Varese, talks about the 'organization of sound.' As we can see, this creative method harks back to Russolo's compositions of enharmonic music for noise-intoners. It is also found in the dramaturgy of sound developed by Marinetti in his short radiophonic pieces.

John Cage's paradigmatic silent piece, 4'33" was first performed, on August

29, 1952 in Woodstock, New York, by the young pianist David Tudor. Tudor just opened the score, lowered the lid of the keyboard and remained motionless. Then he repeated the action three times since there were three silent 'movements' of different length in the piece. The lack of performed sound was a metaphor for destructing the ordinary sound- 242

silence opposition. The music piece was liberated from any premeditated composition

and any externally imposed meaning. For the listener it was enough to let himself go: the

environment was emanating the unattended and unintended sounds of silence. These were

sounds of nature and life described by Russolo as "the much poeticized silences with

which the country restores nerves shaken by city life made up of an infinity of noises

[.. .that] have their own timbres, their own rhythms, and a scale that is very delicately

enharmonic in its pitches."81 Cage's intention was, as he says, to 'let sounds be

themselves' and to expose listeners to their own, and the piece's, aurality.

In his sound poetry and short performance pieces of the 1960s, Cage

attempted to escape the logocentric patterning of language in a way Italian and Russian

Futurists had abolished syntax to set words free. After experiments in the coining of

irregular words, punning and allusion, Cage opted for what the sound of the elementary words could offer. Thus he gave up bizarre word coinage and tried to use ordinary language but to explode the syntax, a process Cage regularly referred to as the

"demilitarization of the language. [...] I hope to let words exist, as I have tried to let

sounds exist," said Cage.82 In order to discover 'the music of verbal space' and to deal with words as sounds, Cage looked for the cadence inscribed in the words' natural inflection:

Speaking without syntax we notice that cadence takes over. Therefore we tried whispering. Encouraged we began to chant. [...] To raise language's temperature we not only remove syntax: we give each letter undivided attention setting it in a unique face and size; to read becomes the verb to sing.

81 Russolo, The Art of Noises, 43. Marjorie Perloff, "The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage's 'What you Say...'" Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adelaide Morris (Chapel Hill, NC / London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 129. 83 Ibid. 131. Cage's poetry followed the musical phrasing sensed in the words and tried to exhibit it in the appropriate visual setting. He thus developed vocal performance pieces that use only a single instrument - the human voice - and a single medium - language in its verbo/vocal strucure. These performance pieces consisted of an 'onomatopoeic' futurist-like mimesis of the word's sound structure or of what Barthes calls tonal pronunciation as opposed to logical articulation.

A series of John Cage's sound poems written for performance are called mesostics (his name for a type of centrally aligned acrostics). They contain a vertically readable word or name formed of the letters/sounds in the middle of the verse. Since these verses were now aligned in regards to the unpredictably positioned middle letters, the poems assumed an asymmetrical hieroglyphic form similar to the ideograms of

Japanese haiku poetry. These compositions offered a visual presentation that would let sounds of words exist in a new environment of a verbo-voco-visual art piece. The sounds were reflected iconically by the layout of letters like in Marinettian/?aro/e in liberta tables or Russian zaum books. In that sense, they represented a kind of minimalist version of a Futurist typographical sound poem.

from his Jumping the older one is erik sAtie he never stops sMiling and thE younger one iS Joyce, thirty-nine he Jumps with his back tO the audience for all we know he maY be quietly weeping or silently laughing or both you just Can't

Ibid. 134. 244

The vocalization of verses that actually becomes singing in Cage's performance poems was known in classical Chinese and Japanese poetry. It was by nature of its language freed of syntax and linear printing, the rigid frame imposed on words in Western culture. A follower of Zen philosophy, Cage admittedly found inspiration for his mesostics in the poetry of Matsuo Basho, the renowned haiku master of

17th Century Japan. Basho's poem 'floats in space...only the imagination of the reader limits the poem's possible meanings,' says Cage. The "floating in space" that Cage senses in a haiku poem is comparable to the sensation to which a spectator of Noh theatre is exposed when a performer with subtle modulations of his voice and slow movements of his body chants and sculpts or writes and paints the poem in the air conquering the silence and the emptiness of the naked stage. The meaning of a Noh performance is no less in the sculpture the actor makes in time and space than in the words he utters. The aural, visual, and kinetic elements participate in a Noh performance in a manner reminiscent of Basho's famous haiku:

old pond a frog jumps

the sound of water

Here the everlasting tranquility gets disrupted by a delicate move of a small creature resulting in a sound of the element - water. The sound-event is already inscribed in the shape of ideogram indicating its performance. But the event is not narrated, it preserved materiality of natural occurance, whim or fatalism that produced this 'self- sufficient'sound-sculpture.

In Sculpture Musical, a sound poem that Cage performed in Tokyo in 1986, the 'mesostic' string was made of Marcel Duchamps' words: "sons durant etpartant de 245

different points etformant une sculpture sonore qui dure" (sounds going on and coming

from different points thus shaping a lasting sound sculpture). It was a performance piece

in the spirit of Duchamps' idea to create a Venus de Milo made of sounds around the

listener. The sculpture physically would not exist anywhere else but in sound, or in the

perception of the spectator put in its centre. The immersion of the spectator in the midst

of an art installation inspired by the surrounding feature of sound is concurrent with the

Futurist efforts in painting. In addition, Duchamps' idea of sound-sculpture merges the

object's features of aurality and visuality allowing sound to take the place of light that reveals its volume. Independently, and much earlier, Adolphe Appia based his concept of

stage light and set design on the fluidity common to music and light that served the idea

of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. In theatrical terms, Duchamps' experiments, especially his kinetic sculpture, operated in a space between art and noise. Some of his ready- mades, like legendary Bicycle Wheel (1913), were supposed to move producing sound as

'virtual volume' as Moholy-Nagy put it. The notion of 'virtual volume' produced by

sound could also be used for the description of Balla, Depero and Prampolini's/?/a.sfc'c moto-rumoristic complex and Malevich's sculpting in sound, light and objects in Victory over the Sun.

4. 8. Depero's abstract sintesi Colori: a Synthesization of Synaesthetic Theories

The path towards the synthesis of arts in a futurist theatrical Gesamtkunstwerk that was conceptualized and staged in the works of the second and third period of Futurism - according to Lista between 1915 and 1920 - was initiated by the exploration of synaesthetic 246

correspondences of different sensations like sound, colour and smell first of all in painting.

The manifestos "The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells" by Carlo Carra and

"Chromophony - the Colours of Sounds" by Enrico Prampolini published in 1913

represented a significant move in that direction. Carra maintained that 'sounds, noises and

smells were incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colours' which were able to

form 'dynamic constructions of a polyphonic architectural whole' similar to musical works.

His theory was obviously founded on the comparable physical features of sounds and colours

proposed earlier by Kandinsky and the theory of 'rayonist' painting by Larionov and

Gonchareva. By all these theories the vibration of sounds and colours was to be captured as a

scientifically determined reflection of the atmosphere or environment on the painting. In

Carra's manifesto, there is also a parallelism of the abstract shapes in which colour and sound

objectify.

From the formal point of view: there are sounds, noises and smells which are concave, convex, triangular, ellipsoidal, oblong, conical, spherical, spiral, etc. From the colour point of view: there are sounds, noises and smells Of

which are yellow, green, dark blue, light blue, violet.

The depiction of sounds from the point of view of colour and form and the notion of polyphonic architectural construction in Carra's manifesto announced the

sound/kinetic sculpture of Depero's abstract synthesis Colori. At the same time, this

synaesthetic scheme prompted the development of an abstract moto-rumorist complex of the stage suggested later, in 1915, in the manifestos of futurist scenography, choreography and reconstruction of the universe.

Prampolini went further in expressing atmospheric and emotional states of mind through the synergy of sound and colour he called chromophony. 85 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 114 247

A noise, a sound, a word, while arousing in the atmosphere a pure dynamic vibration, arouses within the volatile imagination of the artist the intuitive chromatic stimulus. [...] Why have I chosen sound in order to define the basis of chromophony? Because it is the fittest expression for classifying these new manifestations of mankind. 86

He tacitly admits the influence futurist explorations in the field of sound and noise exerted on visual arts by offering the following practical example of chromophony:

It is obvious that a motor horn, when it hoots, displaces the atmosphere, which then diffuses rhythmically in a special series of waves, rebounding from any obstacle it comes up against, and, therefore, refracting, breaking up into a myriad chromatic scales; and, in all these simultaneous rhythmic patterns, the atmospheric vibrations will take as many lights and colours as there are.87

Prampolini considers 'painting as an aggregation of chromatic vibrations' in the

atmosphere able to express the complexity of physical and psychic forces in the nature, a pure optical visuality that 'needs no help from culture.' The artist, as well as the spectator, gets hold of the material essence that has its own idiom beyond its cultural codification and

framing. The materiality of futurist art thus provides a base for its path towards abstraction.

In Fortunato Depero's 'abstract theatrical synthesis' Colori (Colours, 1915) , the stage consisted of a pale-blue cubic room with no doors or windows. Inside this abstract room, or box, four abstract individualities, or objects, made abstract movements maneuvered by invisible strings and talked in an abstract incomprehensible language, or babble of noise. The cast was described in rather physical terms as:

1. GRAY - dark-gray, plastic, dynamic ovoid. 2. RED - red, plastic, triangular, dynamic polyhedron. 3. WHITE - white, plastic, long-lined, sharp point. 4. BLACK - black, multiglobe.89

86 Ibid. 118. 87 Ibid. 116. 88 See Appendix, Figure 23. 89 Kirby, Futurist Performance, 278. See Figure 23 in the Appendix. It was not clear whether it was a picture staged according to the laws of

chromophony or a sounding kinetic sculpture. Lista calls it "a visualization of psychic

forces, a kind of ballet of abstract forms and sounds."90 The four individualities were

supposed to produce abstract vocalizations according to their 'stati d'animd' that in turn corresponded to their own shape and colour. Thus BLACK speaks with a 'very profound, guttural voice,' WHITE 'has a sharp, thin, brittle voice,' GRAY utters 'animal-like'

sounds,' while RED is 'roaring and crushing.' Their lines are written in the manner of parole in liberta; BLACK goes: 'TO COM momomoo dom pom... don do-do-do / nonnno do do' etc.; WHITE: 'ZINN-FLINN finnui tli tli dlin' etc.; GRAY: 'Bluma dum du clu umu fubulu' etc.; RED: 'SOKRA TI BOM TAM CO TE' TO' LICO' etc. Near the end they reiterate their lines simultaneously in until a whistle interrupts them. "There is no story; the whole dramatic action is reduced to the presence of four protagonists whose only meaning is to be phonetic-chromatic equivalents; in short pure self-reference."91

Colori represented dramatization and visualization of Depero's onomalingua, an idiom that he derived from onomatopoeia, the brutality of parole in liberta and Russolo's rumorismo (noisiness). Onomalingua, the author defines, is an abstract verbalization of colours, forms, materials, speed, light, temperature, space, states of mind etc. - therefore it is 'universal abstract poetry.' Its structure was a consequence of the futurist research in the field of plasticity, aurality, chromaticity and illumination leading towards the abstract stage machine of objects, words, sounds, lights, movements and other theatrical elements. Most of all, it looked like Kandinsky's staging of Musorgsky's Images From an Exhibition, a later experiment where music

90 Lista, La Scene Futuriste, 206. 91 Danela Fonti, "Depero 'mimismagico' (mimica, declamazione, teatro cabaret, marionette) e motorumorismo," in Depero: Dal Futurismo alia Casa a"Arte (Milano: Ed. Charta e MART, 1994), 63. 249

became the flow of kinetic images or abstract theatrical tableaux that emanated the

'inner sound' of the work of art. In Depero's case, instead of a musical composition in

the background, there was a bruitist structure produced by the objects themselves. Thus

Depero's piece was, in a sense, more theatrically innovative than Kandinsky's. The

sound of the abstract dialogue of the coloured objects/characters was juxtaposed with

the kinetic sculpture of the ambience so that the emanation from the stage equally

depended on its aural and visual aspects. The piece relied on the pulsation of intrinsic

energies of the objects whose dramatic clash developed in the sphere of their aural,

plastic and chromatic features. Colori represents an early, still crude, but for that reason

even more radical, attempt on achieving the psychology of the material and form later

incarnated in the plastic moto-rumorist complex. Unfortunately, Colori shared the

destiny of many of the conceptually best futurist works that have never been staged.

4. 9. Plastic Moto-rumorist Complex, Bauhaus and Mixed-means Total Theatre

To claim that it was futurist notion of aurality and the dramaturgy of sound that

laid the theoretical and practical groundwork for the discussion of the stage design might at

first seem far-fetched. It was visual artists, however, who not only shared with poets a mutual interest in texture, density, verbal/painterly mass, the painting of sounds, noises and

smells, but who came up with the oxymoronic term,'chromophony'' in order to express the synaesthetic vibrational interference between colour and sound. This was a crucial step towards the notion of a 'plastic moto rumoristic complex' (complesso plastico motorumoristo), an idea that was broad enough to encompass all the material elements of 250

theatre, to synthesize, in other words, all that was seen and heard on the futurist stage. The

term was used in Balla and Depero's "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe" and

Prampolini's "Futurist Scenography and Choreography," manifestos that were written in

1915 when Futurist synthetic theatre was first conceived. For Balla, Depero and

Prampolini, the plastic moto-rumorist complex was much more than stage set, lights and

sound: it represented the plastic equivalent of the simultaneity, compenetration and

dynamism of theatrical performance. Futurists employed this theoretical term to describe

the dynamic interplay between the fluid phenomena of light, noise, sound and motion in both time and space. Since noise and motion are two key attributes of the stage where

chromatic atmosphere and matter amalgamate, sound is obviously and inextricably part of

the plastic moto-rumorist complex. From the Futurists' early interest in sound followed a

dramaturgy that was especially attuned to the spatial and kinetic elements of the stage.

To be sure, theatrical experiments such as those carried out by Gordon Craig

and Adolphe Appia as well as Richard Wagner's notion of Gesamtkunstwerk, had greatly influenced futurist artists. Nevertheless, the main inspiration for Depero and Prampolini's work lies in the aesthetic program that had been earlier elaborated by futurist painters and poets. In a letter written at the beginning of his association with the Futurists, Forrunato

Depero sensed the musicality in Boccioni's 1913 exhibition:

Musicality of force-lines, of masses-nightmares, of reflected corners [...] plastic representation of states of mind [...] is not anymore an art-theme, art-decoration, art-portrait, art-photography; but pure search for the harmonic sense of the line-colour-form that stems from the visible-audible-smelled- palpable-tactile; not more an illustrative motif but cerebral tension; sculpture- painting and sculpture-music. (MART, historical archive, Depero Fund, No.6840) 92

92 Quoted in Gabriella Belli, "Depero, sensibilita futurista," Depero: Dal Futurismo alia Casa a"Arte (Milano: Edizione Charta e MART, 1994), 13. 251

The insistence on sound in the plastic arts, as articulated in Depero's letter,

reflects the painter's struggle to express dynamism, fluidity and temporality on the

canvas, a central concern of Futurist painting manifestos from 1913. Depero's and Balla's

"Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe" (1915), however, shows the growing maturity

of futurist art and its ambition to achieve a synthesis to satisfy the novel, but now-

established sensibility. Its significance lies in an effort to embrace all possible forms of

sensory perception and unite them formulating "a new aesthetic object - 'the plastic

complex' which marks a leap from a statement of synaesthesia to a concrete

reconstruction." Balla and Depero acknowledge having been influenced by "the lyrical

appreciation of the universe" in Marinetti's words-in-freedom and Russolo's art of noises

[which] relies on plastic dynamism to provide a dynamic, simultaneous, plastic and noisy

expression of universal vibration."94 Consequently, they define the 'plastic complex' as

"poetry + painting + sculpture + music [...] a noisiest-pictorial-psychic complex

plasticism, [which uses] onomatopoeia, graphic equivalents of noises, phonoplastic

equivalents, psycho-plastic equivalents."95 Balla and Depero state:

We will give skeleton and flesh to the invisible, the impalpable, the imponderable, the imperceptible. We will find abstract elements of all forms and all elements of the universe [.. .and make] a life-work based on variety of materials and most of all on its autonomous character of plastic complex, that is similar to itself. %

In addition, all of this had to be done with joy. Hence, the manifesto proposed

the construction of futurist toys, artificial landscapes and mechanical animals. The

authors professed an abstract but energetic and optimistic art in which the temporal

93 Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 548. 94 Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 197. 95 Ibid. 199. 96 Ibid. 197. elements of sound and motion merged with the spatial media of colour, form, and plastic objects. Accordingly, the plastic complexes are listed as kinetic categories, decompositions, rotations and miracle magic. The objects they imagined and constructed would not only be illuminated but they would be illuminating, colourful and bright. Two such contraptions made by Balla were reproduced in the manifesto, 'Plastic Ensemble

Coloured with Din + Speed' and 'Plastic Ensemble Coloured with Din + Dance +

Gaiety.' Although the actual objects might not seem too bright, the concept of a 'plastic moto-rumorist' futurist stage has remained an inspiration for the contemporary theatre that rather than developing a dramatic plot, sculpts and constructs in space and time.

In the staging of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Feu d 'artifice (Fireworks), Giacomo

Balla made a drama of these constructions that pulsated on stage with the heart of sound, the atmosphere of light and the muscles of abstract forms. It was performed at the Teatro

Costanzi in Rome on April 12, 1917, under the direction of Serge Diaghilev, conducted by Ernest Ansermet. Balla made lights replace dancers and their play replace choreography. Actually, the stage itself became an actor - I'attore-spazio - envisioned by

Prampolini in his manifesto "Futurist Scenic Atmosphere" as "a personification of space in the role of the actor, as a dynamic and interacting element between the scenic environment and the public spectator."97 Stravinsky's music was transposed into the language of the stage by changes of lights. There were 49 light cues for the show that lasted approximately five minutes for which Balla devised a lighting keyboard in the booth. On the stage, he built a complex of prismatic wooden boxes with smaller transparent forms on their tops. The latter were translucent and illuminated from inside.

The synaesthetic coordination of sound and colour was synthesized in a dynamic

97 Kirby, Futurist Performance, 230. interplay of bursts of light and surprising, multidirectional, continuously changing

shadows. Coloured light rays that backlit the asymmetrical architectural construction

made the shadows pulsate towards the audience in the rhythm of Stravinsky's score.

Fortunato Depero's Balli plastici (Plastic Ballets) were conceived in

collaboration Gilbert Clavel (a Swiss author from the circles of Diaghilev and Cocteau)

in Capri and peformed at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome, 1918. In these five short short

theatre pieces multicoloured, stylized, mechanical wooden characters/marionettes/toys

performed absurd actions in an oneiric stage atmosphere. They moved animated mainly

by sound and light. The rhythm of the performance had been created by the exchange

between obsessive silences and sudden shots, thuds, and crazy laughs expressing

'plasticity of noise.' From the point of sound most interesting was a shadow play Ombre

(A Shadow) "a symphony of abstract shapes in black and gray juxtaposed with a light-

play of vivid colours, which offered a visual interpretation of a composition by Bela

Bartok."98

Enrico Prampolini's Scenografia e coreografia futurista (Futurist

Scenography and Choreography, 1915) attempted the "creation of an abstract entity that

identifies itself with the stage action of the play."99 It advocated the abolition of painted backdrops and all the other idiosyncratic elements of the naturalist theatre, including

actors. Instead it introduced coloured lights, noise and moving, electromechanical

architecture - a complete activation of the stage. The temporal elements of sound and

movement, each preserving its autonomy, participated in the construction of the space that now acquired the spatiotemporal complexity of an abstract, autonomous scenic

Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre, 313. Kirby, Futurist Performance, 203. 254 reality. The conventions of naturalist theatre were abandoned for the sake of the revival of the material elements. Moreover, Prampolini's previous pronouncements in his

Chromophony allowed the dramaturgy of sound to enter into the equation of the 'absolute construction of noise and motion' as the dramaturgy of pure material.

The same idea appears in Prampolini's "A New Art? Absolute Creation of

Noise and Motion," 1915, that describes "a chromatic and sounding architecture in motion which unites material qualities of the individual art forms in an abstract, synthetic theatre."100 Prampolini proposes a substitution of painted reality with material reality in order to intuitively perceive the emotive value of material expressed in a rhythmic-spatial architecture of sound and motion.

We, the hypersensitive ones, must feel and experience these unknown forces. [...] We must shape with greater vehemence the impulses and sensations of the infinitesimal world and the universe which surrounds us. This is the foundation of the absolute construction of sound and motion which not only unites in itself the material values of all the arts, but also the sensations which until now have been determined by each individual art form.101

This statement resembles a plunge into the materiality of theatre, into the

"dynamic, fragmentary symphonies of gestures, words, noises and lights," outlined in the manifesto of "The Futurist Synthetic Theatre."

Unlike Michael Kirby and Giovanni Lista who list Adolphe Appia, Alexander

Tairoff and, most of all, Gordon Craig as having influenced Prampolini's work, Giinter

Berghaus believes that Kandinsky played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for

Prampolini. In particular, Berghaus cites Kandinsky's famous essay, "On Stage

Composition," where Kandinsky makes a case for the viability of a dramaturgy of sound.

100 Quoted in Giinter Berghaus, "A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of Total Work of Art," Maske undKothurn, vol. 32, no. 2 (1986), 24. 101 Ibid. 24. 255

Berghaus further links this trend to the Romantic notion of Gesamtkunstwerk found in the

work of Philip Otto Runge who held that a union of arts could only be achieved under the

hegemony of music.

Music uses an abstract language that speaks directly to the heart of the addressee. It stimulates his senses synaesthetically. A Gesamtkunstwerk based on musical principles elicits vibrations in the recipient that are not the result of objective representation but of subjective imagination. The artwork is not a representation of reality (Abbild), but a 'heightened product of nature.' 102

Rather than representing an anecdotal content of the nature, or a certain reality, art/music vibrates through the artist to the spectator in a similar fashion to

Kandinsky's 'inner sound.' This concept also supports futurist Dionysian inclination towards a "lyrical intoxication" with nature. In Marinetti's sound poetry, the lyrical

capacity conducts a 'heightened product of nature' (Runge) through onomatopoeia and thrusts it towards the audience in vocal, gestural acts. Or, in the case of Prampolini's plastic complex, "the rhythms of sound, scenery and gesture [must] create a psychological synchronism in the soul of the spectator."103 The notion of a vibrational transfer of feeling, spirit or essence via an 'inner sound' was a conceptual building block of the abstract stage as epitomized in Kandinsky's 1927 kinetic staging of Modest

Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition in the Bauhaus manner. It clearly shows that

Prampolini and Kandinsky were artistic soul mates.

Prampolini's indebtedness to the dramaturgy of sound can be seen in his comment on the collaboration with Achille Ricciardi in the production of The Theatre of

Colour at the Roman Teatro Argentina in 1920.

For both of us, delivery, mime, music, and stage design converge, not as isolated, predominant elements or as purely decorative motifs, but as values

102 Ibid. 14. 103 FilibertoMenna,Prampolini, (Rome: De Luca Editore, 1967), 111. with equal force they swell into an accord and music stream, [...] a rich, unified rhythm of light, colour, movement, and sound. I04

In the period of second Futurism and later, Prampolini was a leading force in

Italian and European stage design. He wrote "The Futurist Scenic Atmosphere," a

theoretical elaboration of a polyexpressive theatre space without actors, Vattore-spazio

and experimented with The Magnetic Theatre, a kinetic sculpture and a lightshow with

Russolo's intonarumori. These ideas had been developed in his Teatro della pantomima futurista in which Prampolini replaced decor of the stage with an active interplay of the performer and scenery. The human body, objects, lights and sounds unite on stage as

Vattore-spazio that pulsates in front of the audience's eyes inviting spectator to feel

concrete stage material.

Teatro della pantomima futurista did away with the easy and straightforward game of the artist who limits himself to translating or describing in space what the music describes in time. It is a question of renouncing the mimic decorativism, which operates on the surface, in order to enter into the domain of architecture which is concerned with depth. All the elements of music, painting and gesture have to establish between themselves a harmony without losing their independence. I05

In 1927, Futurist pantomimes were successfully staged at the Theatre de la

Madeleine in Paris, and later in Rome, Milan and Turin. One of Prampolini's abstract pantomimes, Santa velocitd (Saint Speed), has neither words nor actors, just scenery and sound. In some ways it can be seen as a finessing of the theatrical, sensory collages of urban life that Russolo and Ruttman put in a noise piece and a film. Here the stage represented a metropolis of neon lights, huge buildings and streets, electric fervour of

'cinematographic' nocturnal life with all accompanying noise. "Only human intervention,

[was] a human song that arrests and subdues the speed. But the song finishes slowly and

104 Enrico Prampolini, L'impero, 11 July 1923. 105 Filiberto Menna,Prampolini (Rome: DeLuca Editore, 1967), 111. 257

the rhythm of speed and modernity take over in an extraordinary crescendo, magic,

immense and deafening."106 The stage action was contained in a dynamic interplay of

coloured lights projected onto an empty stage supported by the sound of Russolo's

intonarumori. There was no dramatic conflict, denouement or resolution - just the

analogically constructed stage poetry of sound and lights.

Ivo Pannaggi's and Giacomo Balla's Balli Meccanici worked on the same

premise but included human performers. While two motorcycle engines that roared in the

wings provided a noise score for mechanical movements, two dancers in spiky, metallic

costumes "executed actions mimicking the cadenzas of engine rhythms."107 A white light that flashed rhythmically accompanied onstage changes in sound and motion, turning at

times into polychrome swirls.

The synaesthesia of sound, colour, light and movement in futurist stage works

like Machina Tipografica, Colori, Feu d 'artifice, Santa velocita and Balli Meccanici and the concept of the stage as an absolute plastic moto-rumorist complex were predecessors of today's 'theatrical', abstract, mixed-means theatre.

Robert Wilson's 'operas,' aural and architectonic stage installations in time and space, provide a contemporary example of the theatre initiated by Futurist experiments where the dramaturgy of sound played a significant role. As Lothar

Schreyer, the first theatre teacher of Bauhaus alleged: 'Art is an artistically logical formulation of optical and acoustic relations. Art comes from the senses and appeals to the senses. It has nothing to do with understanding.' These three sentences provide an apt description of the essence of Futurist theatre expressed in one of the latest Marinetti's

Theatre Futurist Italien, vol. 2, 120. Ibid. Vol. 2,118. See Figure 24 in the Appendix. 258 theatre manifestos, "The Abstract Psychological Theatre of Pure Elements and Tactile

Theatre" (1924). In this manifesto, Marinetti goes beyond the idea of synthetic theatre and approaches the idea of an abstract theatre. He suggests:

An abstract and alogical condensed drama of pure elements which, without any psychology, presents the forces of life in movement to an audience. The abstract synthesis is an alogical and surprising combination of blocks of typical sensations.

The theatre envisioned by Futurists called for an entirely new dramaturgy, not a dramaturgy of plot and character but a dramaturgy of clashing forms, their means of expression and their syncretism in a kind of abstract montage of sensorial stimuli (like

Eisenstein's 'montage of attractions'). As a consequence of sound being one of the most employed sensorial stimuli and attractions in futurist poetry and theatre, a genuine dramaturgy of sound developed in futurist performance. This futurist dramaturgy used sound as material that was independent and equivalent to other plastic and kinetic elements of stage architecture and theatre performance.

Marinetti, Critical Writings, 391. 259

Conclusion

Futurist performance has gone through phases of the impulsiveness, noisiness and immediacy of serate, the brevity, absurdity and disjointed structure ofsintesi and the

"the abstract synthesis of blocks of typical sensations."109 The Futurists' exploration of sound from a means of expression to its use as a material element of performance not only helped shape the formal dimensions of futurist theatre in general but was instrumental to the development of its genuine dramaturgy of sound in particular.

My dissertation first examines Futurists' experiments with the intuitive creation of sound through onomatopoeia and vocal gesture at futurist 'serate.' Born from the chaotic noise of the surrounding industrial world, their initial experiments in sound were a bruitist expression of a Dionysian sound-image. In this phase, the intuitive dissociation of the raw, vocal material from the signification of words found its medium in a sound poetry that relied heavily on the use of onomatopoeia, glossolalia, incantations and non-verbal utterances. With Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tumb, sound's potential in theatre performance was established. More specifically, it was sound poetry's emphasis on sensorial energy that shook verbo-vocal performance at its roots, laying bare its elemental constituents of matter and force. In accordance with Jean Francois Lyotard's notion of theatre as a place of

'pulsational displacements' rather than as a place of the production of 'representative replacements,' futurist sound poetry and performance exposed the semiotic "question of going beyond Saussurian binarism and closure of representation (Derrida)" and suggested

Ibid. 391. "a generalized desemiotics (Lyotard) instead of a theatre of signs,"1' Pavis sees as a crucial issue in the contemporary theatre.

This was further developed in the exploration of a corporeal, physical theatre through the idea oifisicoffolia - physical madness - as outlined in the "Variety Theatre" manifesto and hybrid carnivalesque performances like Piedigrotta by Francesco

Cangiullo. As my research has shown, the dramaturgy of sound was a decisive method of the futurist theatrical sintesi as well. It was particularly applicable to the abstract synthesis, and dramas of objects based on the collage of sound, noise, and alogical speech-play such as: Storneli Vocali by Cangiullo, Per comprendere ilpianto by Balla,

Stati d'animo and Violenza by Carli, and Lotta difondali, II Teatrino dell 'Amove and

Vengono by Marinetti. The play of sound, colour and plastic masses in Balla's Machina

Tipografica and Depero's Colori broadened the field for experiments in abstract stage design of the plastic moto-rumorist complex (Balla, Depero and Prampolini) akin to the

Bauhaus' concept of total theatre.

The dissertation explores a similar trend in Russian Cubo-Futurism in which

Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov's invention of zaumny yazyk (an idiom beyond sense) came as an outcome of the poets' return to the orality and sound substance of language. In order to resurrect the word, ossified by everyday use, they coined new, arbitrary and derivative words based on their phonetic features. The radical shift from the word's meaning to its sounding and its dissociation from the syntactical language was critical for the futurist revolution in poetry and theatre performance. The 'discovery' of the sound substance of poetic language prompted the recognition of sound as autonomous,

'' ° Patrice Pavis, "The State of Current Theatre Research," Applied Semiotics/Semiotique appliquee, vol. 1, no 3 (1997), 203. 261 theatrical matter. My dissertation maps the multidisciplinary 'territory' of this trend from zaum poetry's ties to the linguistics of Russian Formalist school and the painting of

Cubo-futurism, Rayonism and Suprematism, exemplified in the staging of Victory over the Sun by a poet (Aleksei Kruchenykh), a painter (Kazimir Malevich) and a composer

(Mikhail Matiushin) as well as Velimir Khlebnikov's supersaga, Zagezi, by a painter

(Vladimir Tatlin). As my analysis demonstrates, the poetics of zaum transgressed from the field of oral/aural creation to the field of plastic arts and played a critical role in the kinetic sculpturing of these theatre pieces.

The majority of theatre historians have not addressed the futurist treatment of sound, but Giovanni Lista, Michael Kirby and Giinter Berghaus have recognized Futurism and its legacy in the emergence of alogical theatre, abstract total theatre, and the theatre of the absurd, Happenings, performance art and the theatre of mixed means. Theoreticians of sound poetry and audio-art, including Douglas Kahn, Steve McCaffery and Klaus

Schoning, have identified the Futurists as the pioneers of acoustic art. Roland Barthes,

Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, particularly in their writings on theatre, have inspired the postmodern notion of an aurality paradigm, a paradigm instigated by Futurism that has gained currency in the postmodern, art/cultural discourse of Martin Jay, Steven

Connor and Krzysztof Ziarek. This dissertation analyses all these findings focusing on the recognition of the materiality of sound as a core feature of futurist poetics, one that has incited a new approach to dramaturgy and performance. In that respect, my research supports the thesis that the dramaturgy of sound, as concieved by the Futurists, both inspires and informs avant-garde and postmodern theatre. 262

Writing on innovative performance of the alternative theatre in the 1960s,

Richard Kostelanetz outlines a new theatrical form congruent with the futurist ideas.

Mixed-means performances differ from conventional drama in de- emphasizing verbal language, if not avoiding words completely, in order to stress such presentational means as sound and light, objects and scenery. [...] A mixed-means piece usually opens with a sound-image complex that is constantly communicated; and rather than resort to the linear techniques of variation and development, the piece generally sustains or fills in its opening outline. Narrative, when it exists, functions more as a convention than as a revelatory structure or primary dimension. '''

Among the artists who have created mixed-means theatre, Kostelanetz lists:

The Open Theatre Group, Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Eschewing verbal language, the mixed-means theatre juxtaposes visual and aural materials and produces a 'sound-image complex that is constantly communicated.' It turns from narrative pretensions of plot development to a synchronized exposition of different materials. In this sense, its idiom is related to futurist verbo-voco-visual clash of parallel sound/images, syncretism, synaesthesis and abstraction of plastic moto-rumorist complex.

My dissertation investigates the legacy of Russian Futurists' emphasis on the form and material over content and Italian Futurists' intoxication with matter that together significantly contributed to the fundamental tendency of the historical avant- garde to turn techne into praxis, the work of art into action, and dramatic text into performance. Wrestling with matter, sensing its gravity and opacity, in poetry and painting, and acknowledging the sensual materiality of signifiers in performance and stage art, Futurists brought to the fore concerns about the concreteness and materiality of theatrical sign.

1'' Richard Kostelanetz, On Innovative Performance(s): Three Decades of Recollections of Alternative Theatre (Jefferson N.C.: McFarland&Co., 1994), 8. 263

The breakthrough of the futurist dramaturgy of sound was not an issue of artistic technique or craftsmanship. It represented a revision of the conventional referentiality of artistic materials and the foundation of a new aesthetics that deals with matter and form, and so with sound, as interior constituents of the work of art. The question was not how to produce the work of art that would represent an object, signify something or express an aesthetic idea formulated elsewhere in culture, language or theory. The question was how to deal with material itself, that is, sound, as an autonomous, unique field of artistic drama of expression. Consequently, sound in

Futurism was adopted as aesthetic matter participating in the creation of a new theatricality in which each element - sound, lights, objects, audio-visual and stage design

- stood as an independent actor of drama of things. This inevitably brought about a twofold dramaturgy of sound that deals with the corporeality of the vocal gesture and incantation (explored by Artaud, Barthes and Lyotard) and with the abstraction of the

'theatre of totality' (by Kandinsky, Bauhaus and Robert Wilson).

My dissertation traces the use of sound in futurist performance along these two, inextricably linked lines. One is the line of sound's inner intensification, which recognizes its corporeality and connects vocal utterance to the performer's bodily presence; and the other, of sound as an independent, simultaneously concrete and abstract theatrical material. The first tendency stemmed from the futurist lyrical intoxication with matter that gave rise to the use of onomatopoeia, in poetry, and fisicoffolia or physical madness, in theatre. The vocal gesture used in the rendition of parole in liberta developed into a pulsational utterance that communicated body through the emanation of voice in

Barthes' sense of the grain of the voice. It authenticated the performer's presence, on the 264

stage and in the world, through his self-realization in and by language. The second tendency appeared when sound was conceived as palpable matter containing performative power in itself. When perceived as matter, sound became comparable to paint or clay, used as malleable mass in painting and sculpture, and thereby acquired plasticity of an independent element of the spatiotemporal complex of the stage. The dramaturgy of sound could therefore contribute to the structuring or moulding of a total theatrical event - an abstract sintesi or aplasic moto-rumorist complex as examined in the dissertation.

Historically, these two trends of futurist performance evolved along two different streams of the avant-garde theatre development. The first included Expressionist

Schrei (scream) acting, which through Artaud's body/voice utterance and incantation in the 'theatre of cruelty' developed into the the more recent style of performance, by the

New York Living Theatre, for example. A second one followed the futurist use of sound in performance, from Kandinsky's synaesthetic experiments with sound, light and colour, through Bauhaus' abstract 'total theatre' to the more recent mixed-media theatre forms, such as the performances of Robert Wilson and today's audio-visual installations and theatre experiments.

Sometimes these two lines converge. What follows is a case in point: In

September of 1963, Richard Kostelanetz saw the The Brig, written by Kenneth H. Brown and directed by Judith Malina. It was performed by the Living Theater, a theatre inspired by the writing of Artaud because of its emphasis on liberated carnal performance in which sound, movement and other nonlinguistic factors play a major role. 265

The Brig is a music of military noise. As the prisoners individually shout their requests for permission to cross a certain white line, I could hear a fugue developing; then on the right two soldiers are stamping their feet in 4/4 time. The closest analogue in the history of art is Edgar Varese's Ionization (1931), which pioneered in making music entirely of percussive sounds. [...] Throughout the performance something is always moving and something is always sounding. The narrative line is a day in the brig, but there is little narrative action. The form of the performance is spatial, as meaning comes primarily through the repetition of action, rather than the development of plot. Very much as in musical theatre, movements and sounds are effectively integrated into a coherent kinetic whole.'12

Although the intention of the authors was a representative mime of the US marine prison brutality, all the attributes of the performance that the critic describes, specifically, noise, 4/4 time (duration), absence of narration, repetition, movements and sounds in a kinetic whole pertain to the aural paradigm and features of sound that were discussed in futurist theory. Judith Malina remembers: "Reading the disembodied commands, the numbered shouts that evoke the machine but remain transcendentally human outcries, I heard clearly in my ears the familiar metal scraping prison sounds and the stamp of the booted foot on concrete."113 As this whole arsenal of the art of noises was used, Russolo's influence on Edgar Varese's noise composition merges with

MarinettV sfisicoffolia and re-emerges as a perfect example of a concrete stage/performance art in The Brig. Production of such cacophony of sounds and actions is equally applicable to the physical theatre of the human body and the abstract theatre of sound, matter and form - it is found in both streams of the avant-garde theatre's post-

Naturalist development.

112 Richard Kostelanetz, On Innovative Performance(s), 73. 113 Judith Malina, "Directing The Brig" in Kenneth H. Brown, The Brig (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965), 84. 266

In my dissertation, the dramaturgy of sound that opened the field for the

abstract 'theatre of totality' was traced back to the endevours of futurist painters and

sculptors, who, rather than depicting objects and figures, introduced dynamism, temporality and the interpenetration of time and space into their works. In poets' works

"word relationships are transformed into exclusively phonetic sound relationships, thereby totally fragmenting the word into conceptually disjointed vowels and consonants instead of representation of verbal content,"114 as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote in Theatre,

Circus, Variety, 1924. When applied to stage, this fragmentation of material together with the interpenetration of time and space brought about a "theatre of totality, a great dynamic-rhythmic process, which can compress the greatest clashing masses or accumulations of media as qualitative and quantitative tensions into elemental form."115

There is an apparent parallel to this statement in Marinetti's definition of The Abstract

Antipsycho logical Theatre of Pure Elements and the Tactile Theatre, in which blocks of typical sensation clash making an abstract, alogical drama of pure elements. In that way,

Marinetti announced the viability of a dramaturgy that deals with masses of tactile materials and sensations as abstract elements of theatrical performance. This idea has been realized by Balla, Depero and Prampolini in the creation of plastic moto-rumorist complex, a kinetic and sonorous object that synthesizes all dynamic sensations of modern life into an abstract equivalent of natural forms, a theatre work that surpasses the limits of painting, sculpture and architecture. The theatre envisioned by Futurists apparently called for an entirely new dramaturgy, not a dramaturgy of plot and character but a dramaturgy of clashing forms, means of expression and their syncretism in a kind of abstract montage

114 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. "Theatre, Circus, Variety." Oskar Schlemmer, The Theatre of the Bauhaus (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 52 115 Ibid. 52 of sensorial stimuli (like Eisenstein's 'montage of attractions'). Since sound was one of

the most employed sensorial stimuli and attractions in their poetry and theatre, a genuine

approach to sound in futurist performance. Exploring this development through its

several historical stages, this dissertation documented the significant presence of

dramaturgy of sound in futurist performance and proved its viability in current theatrical discourse and practice. zoo

APPENDIX

Figure 1 - A poster of a serata with two inimical camps 270 Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le 'eroiche serate,' Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2002

Figure 2 - Hugo Ball, gadji beri bimba 271 Mel Gordon, Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987

Figure 3 - Hugo Ball, Elefantenkarawane 272 Marcus Greil, Lipstick Traces Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989

Figure 4 / 5 - Paul Scheebart, Kikakoku! Christian Morgenstern, Das grosse lalulal 273

Figure 6 - Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko, Tristan Tzara, L'Amiral cherche une maison a louer 21A Mel Gordon, Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987

Figure 7 - Stephane Mallarme, Un coup de Des jamais n 'abolira le Hasard 275 Stephane Mallarme, Un coup de Des, ed. Francoise Morel, Paris: La Table Ronde, 2007

Figure 8 - Francesco Cangiullo, Poesia pentagramata 276 Francesco Cangiullo, Poesia pentagramata, Casella Editore, 1923

Figure 9 - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang tumb tumb 277 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang tumb tumb, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1914

Figure 10 - F.T. Marineti, Tavola parolibera... tracciata dall'aviatore Y.M. 278 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang tumb tumb, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1914

Figure 11 - Zang tumb tumb 279 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zang tumb tumb, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1914

Figure 12 - F.T. Marinetti Apres la Marne, Joffre visite le front en auto 280 Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980.

Figure 13 - F.T. Marinetti Aereoplane Bulgare SOLEIL + BALLON 281 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Le mots en liberie futuristes, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1919

Figure 14 - Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Dunes 282 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Le mots en liberie futuristes, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1919

Figure 15/16 - Velimir Khlebnikov, Incantation by Laughter / Bobeobi 283 Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980

Figure 17 a/b/c - Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta 284, 285, 286 Simona Bertini, Marinetti e le 'eroiche serate, Novara: Interlinea edizioni, 2002

Figure 18 - Luigi Russolo, Enharmonic music I Intonarumori 287 Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, New York: Pendragon Press, 1986 Figure 19 - Raoul Hausmann, An Optophonetic Poem 288 Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang WarDada, 1920

Figure 20 - Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate 289 The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989

Figure 21 - Giacomo Balla, Maccina tipografica 290 Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976

Figure 22 - Giacomo Balla Scocentrazione di stati d'animo 291 Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976

Figure 23 - Fortunato Depero, Colori 292 Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976

Figure 24 - Ivo Pannagi, Balli meccanici 293 Theatre Futurist Italien, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976 LACERBA "ftwifti&o quindttmaie Q** -a- * (Ml* «t •

Anno I. n. 24 Fitaue, 15 Jicembrc 1913 Cotta. 4 loidi

CONTtENE: GrWc S««u Frturju — MARSNETII. Agli ip«itMcf> — Soma. L. pxtai* lunuou •— PAFM. Coo&o Finmr puutiiu — CARRA. Conoo I. cnlic» — BOCCJOM. Dimoimno fktaut — MMMIH, _jt p«kt>t. fiitoratt — PAIAZZESOH!. C«n concut»u«; E haan«j c U OwceBwU. Graode Serata Futurista

Firtnze - TEATRO VERDI - 12 Dicembie 1913

RESOCONTO iVNTETlCO CFiSlCO E SPIRITUALS) DELLA BATTAGUA

Da una parte («i[ pgJcwc^rsito} D.H'altm parte (a«lt» MU)-. 2 po«*i (.MAniietri, Caagjuilo) 5000 »«i&i«:)' Cttntoi* (pet U a*o«ie c U reiigiooej. Bw$he*t {to diiei* *ic* inogha «iBM«li>. Sttittrnii (per diir^idw Mi&aotu. *obtU*fc *i« pmtcMon). L&erefi (pel *«a«iui«e tl !(»» prwtdkiMe «c.), I *t)loolino occasional* (Sc*rp«Mi), Amiouitki (Wccri |MU de^Li altri). Vtfiuittt (Ctutiftni (>} eiw; iasuluaa c B «ndtc«Q), JifTtli ; Coraggie. 5tr*laa«iua, Diitavolnira. Idee auovn, G&m&faii (tiidi4

Sfctf d'aflitrtO: OitgurfO p« I* be*a*fcti dtuxuaafiic SodE e MapatauaAri (giwraoi, operai) to due o ere paichi e in piatea. Molto eiwa*aa e poca Stati tfattimo: Voglu =U br rJ»*»«. tWmaao »t*- icn*ta. VoigMita ^a*fcne»t« inlaocc»fflhe a. Odt pownaii. RiMnnaxnb po«wn*. EltWtta «J****ere DiaefaaicutfiGse. GcXteW di few, Battunaai lenu to B»fd itmxnt pociu. OtnaMaw lunaaa. VtgUacciMavt eootuuBta. G TOlctano eazurfa. 8i»goa»* )**e *gom- in iibeni. Sie^o de%h iaienm OMBV i mpchori. Pura kfWC I p*iehi (X& Urtl«C«3BD. 4i iu ftwWt Veodeaa contro «ip» teedtt a SBBti. Asiail*. Bonti. PecoftaaL Mmnii. Pefiti: U» ieriw (Mannett)^ Alleatii t-* «w» iaw» * !• 80*** l- Ure. — Aumenio di timpano fxsr tl futtaruaao. — Coarantooi tmmrwfowt ai futummo. — V«rgosnaoo- «au £ gr« parte defc eauriinanfia — Rimprowen tuulD rtciproa &• ^ iprtWori, Fs«k gmemia. (Ai- d* turn i gwraaU aila vigKttctena attfpida de^li spet- I'IMCM i labvwd ma WIIIMW «• *ofe auwaofl « *^- pur^ f>« U ciBi « pen i CJ^). tuoai — Grande poia d« hduriati-

Figure 1 - A poster of a serata with two inimical camps Simona Bertini, Marmetti e k 'eroichv serate,' Novani: Interlmea edi/iioni, 2002 OaJa Performance 40 Dada Performance 41

A Nativity Play Hugo Ball I. Silent Night

The Wind: f f f f f f f f f fff f ffff 11 Sound of the Silent Night: hummummummumrnummummummummum The Shepherds: Hi, hello, hi helloh, hi helloh Hugo Ball performing at the Foghorns, Ocarina, Crescendo (They climb up a mountain) Cabaret Voltaire, July 14, 1916 the cracking of a whip, cries Inset of his sound poem, Kdrawane The Wind: f f f f f f f f f f f fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

II. The Stable

Donkey: ia, ia, ia, ia. ia, ia, ia, ia, ia. ia, ia, ia Little Ox: muh. muh muh muh muh muh muh muh muh muh (Stomping, Rustling of Straw, Rattling of Chains, Kicking, Munching) Gadji Beri Bimba Sheep: bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah Hugo Ball Joseph and Maria: (Praying.) Ramba, ramba, ramba, ramba m-barm, m-barm, m-barm, m-barm, bamba. bamba, rambababababa gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadorl gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini HI. The Apparition o/ the Angel and the Star gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim gadjama tuffm i zimzaila giligla wowolimai bin beri ban The Star: zoke, zoke, soke, zzoke, zzzzzoke, zzzzzzzzxzoooooooke. o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo zoke pach, zoke ptsch, zoke ptsch, zoke ptsch gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen The Angel: (Sound of a propeller, slowly rising, quivering up to great bluku terullata blaulala looooo strength, full of energy, demon, demonic) Arrival: Hissing, bursting asunder, bundle of light in noises zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim Zanzibar zimzalla zam light Machine: flushes white white white white white elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomcn tromtata velo da bang bang affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor All who take part arc falling / first on the elbow, then on the fists so that gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ogrogoooo two wings are produced which hang together. viola iaxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo

IV. The Annunciation tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo ne-gramai bumbalo tuffm i zim gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx Sound of Litany: de da de da de da de da de da dcrum dcrum derum gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen gaga di bling blong (Translated by Henry Marx) gaga blung

Figure 2 - Hugo Ball, gadji beri bimba Mel Gordon, Dada Performance. New York: PAJ Publications, 1987 Zll

Figure 3 - Hugo Ball, Elefantenkarawane Marcus Creil, Lipstick Traces Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989

KflRfiWflME jolifanto bambla 6 falli bambla grossiga m'pfa habla horem £8*8* floranteit higo bloiko russula huju hollaka hollala anlogo bung bfago bung blago bung bosso fataka a aa fi schampa Wulla wussa dlobo hej tatta gorem eschige zanbada uiulubu ssiibuda uluio ssabudu tumba ba- umf kusagauma ba - umf

Hugo Ball; Caravan. Phonetic poem, 1977 The type changes suggest different voices and different forms of expression from low growfs 10 whispers. Z/J

Sheerbart

Kikakoku! Ekoralaps ! Wiso kollipanda opolosa, Ipasatta ihjuo. Kikakoku prokllnthe pel&h. Nikifili mopa Lexio indpaschi benakaffro - propsa pi! prdpsa pi! Jasollu nosaressa flipsei. Aukarotio passakriissar Kikakoku. Nupaa pusch ? Kikakoku bulurti? Futupiikke - propsa pi! Jasollu .,.,,...

Figure 4 / 5 - Paul Scheebart, Kikakoku! Christian Morgenstern, Dasgrosse lalulal

Morgenstem

Kroklokwafzi? Semememi! Seiokronto-prafriplo: BifxL bafzi; hulalemi: Quasii basti bo... Lain lain lain lalu la! /

Hontraruru miromente Zasku zes rii rii? Entepente, leiolente Klekwapufzi lit? IMIU lalu lalu lalu la!

Simarar kos malzipempu Silzuzankunkrei (;)! Marjomar dos: Quempu Lempu SiriSuriSei[J! Lalu lalu lalu lain la! Dada Performance 38 Dada Performance 39 L'amiral cherche une maison a louer Poeme simultan par R. Huelsenbeck, M. Janko, Tr, Tzara

MUEUENBECK Ahol anal Dei Admirals gwirktes Beinkteld sctmell JANKO, chant HdaiM Tcrrpappe math! Ravage n tn da Nachl Where the bonny suckle wine twines itself TZARA arround the door a swetheart mine is wailing jtiiitvufly fur me ! Bourn bourn bourn 11. deshabilla sa chair quand les grenouilles humidts conjmartccrent a bruter j'ai mis le cheva. il:ins riiine du HUELSENBECK and JANKO, chant der Conciergenb3uche Klapperschlangengrfln sind milde ach vtrzerrt in der Natur vltiM jurria chnr/a TZARA can hear the weopour wilt arround arround the hill serpenl a Ducarcst on depeudra ntes amis dorenavanl et my great room is c'Ml trds inleressa.it les grilles des morsures ttyiaioriates

HUELSENBECK prma chrma JANKO, chant , t *er suchel dem wlrd mine admirabsly aufgeian Der Ceylonliiv -e isl Vein Schwan Wer Wnxser hiauchl tind TZARA conlortabiiy Grandmother Mi

CUQUETTE (TZl rrrrrrrrrr rrrrrmrr rrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrr .rrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrr L 'Amirat cherche une maison A louer / dttnt I trtir III atil/orm Mel Gordon, Dada Performance. New York: PA J Publications, 1987 OROSSE CAISE (Huels) OOO 00000 00000 0000 00 It P I III HUELSENBECK JANKO (chant) Im Kloset zumcistens was er ndttg halt ahoi luche ahoi iuche TZARA 1 love the ladies I love to be among the girls 1'ind was er mil id la concierge qui m'a trompe elle a vendit I'apparlcment que j'avals loue And when if's live Darts I'i'glise apres la messe le n£cheur dil a la annksse: Adieu Malhildc HUELSENBECK hSd' 0 sOss gequollncs Stelldtchcin des Admirals im Abendschcin uru uru JANKO (cha»l) uro uru uru urfl «r« tiru uru wromc!e yes ohyesultycs oh yes oh yes yes yes oh yes sir i.'Amiral n'n ricn Inmvc son cinema la (nore de je vous adore $tai| au casino du sytomnre J.'Amirn! «',i ricn inmve prince tiui&r iftr fnnvii

s'at coiffctotftiu*: tf< fheroiqut " e'etait irresistible mots aw term par sa psiite raistm virile en feitdrc /

v COMMEN^AT-iL ET CESSAT-IL aonrdtiftt i;irc nic.ct cto» *|re»nri BpfWH cnftii (ur qudiitw prudiaioit repaiidtie un rarelt SE CH1FFRAT4L

4vi

faux roc tvapart en brume

qui ititp&sa (CkM tuw bt*rnt a f infinity In filinuc

Figure 7 - Stdphane Mai larmd, Un coup de Dis jamais n 'abolira le Hasard SWphone Mallarme, Un coup de />e.s, ed. Fran?oise Morel, Paris: I .a Table Ronde, 2007 - 15

IE TROMBETTE DI PIEDIGROTTA

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'.A.rnbu ro mfi3

Figure 8 - Francesco CangiuOo, Poesfa penfagramata Francesco CangiuUo, Poestapentagramata. Caselia faiitore, 1923 Ill

T. MAB1NETTI FOTUB.STA

ADRIANOPOU OTT0BRE 1912 ty/,. -^ % s?

Figure 9 - Filippo Toramaso Marinetti, Zang tumb tumb Filippo Tomroaso Mariactti, Zang tumb tumb, Milano: Edizione Poesia, 1914 Z/8

Figure 10 - F.T. Marineti, Tavola parolibertL.. traction dall'aviatore ¥M Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zmg tumb tumb, Mibno: Edjzkme Poesia, 1914

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Figure 11 - Zang tumb tiunb Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Zangtumh tumh, Milano: Edizionc Pocsia, 1914

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Figure 12 - F.T. Marinetti, Apres la Marne, Joffre visite le front en auto Zbigniew Folejewski, Futurism and its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980. tttaj (IH] \ : jioSttione mui«Irn*i«. Dome sapwe «be «« 1ND1FFERENZA ncn desideriamo verare sangue. Yogfrnw tal- ? • v»rvi dagSi uomioi del govern© ottomaoo, che * 2 ROTOMHTA S08PE8E SMJO erode!!, ptrfidi * $wstt euort. Vogltam© w avere ana gsnotit su qu*aa peotwli dei Bal- : catii. In che mto vl aMriaoo ridottt i vottri ; ' goTcroa&ti* to Mpew. I quattro stati vowel SOLE + PALLONE irieini harmo oecupito tl vcstro tem'torio BO sock'esse \ •'. - '.'• • fn k tnwwe nuni, AJrianopOli i circuodita

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Figure 13 - FT. Marinetti Aireoplane Bulgare SOLEIL + B distances 3 cuirasses de papier de soie «+• i capitaines de plots b- RAN fondu vomis par le soleil- cadenci qui-frit naviganl equateur Dunes mwlleux maniable minutieux distances Karuouo-zouo-zoue intestinal immense avuglant Kapazoue-xouo-iouo dunes ranran nadl-nadl AAAAaaaaaa (bis) dunes s'Stirer rend OH duuuuuuuuunes soleil dunes dunes dunes ondulation soif dunes dunes dunes dunes angles carri douum douomm angles modeler sables s'emous- ser polir polir somnolence hurlemenls blancs concentri- derboukah ennuiblanc ques de 14 luuuuuuuuunes prieipiU -f- iaine du bruit du vent rond-de-cuirs aveuglant doum de la pens£e arteres £carlates joie de pa­ affoMea se noyer lunes ron- kernel RAN des carries se tordre s'6- doum rembourrage sonore yer a mi voleur le prix du aveuglant du ciel prurit comptabilite des orouera mietter dans le puita (3 m.) doum micanique bruit rotatif ongles 1/2 kilo de fro­ orouera de Bu-Fellah fNUIIlIITmT] aveuglant du soleil souvenirs doum ntage 226 kilos de orouora croucraeroueraruminer de cha- eonsangvin colon neux tam­ CHAIR DE FEMME s i- meauauauauaux aveuglant doum bours des moellea P ton majeur tunnel de sons noirs rales d'une futnee bleue -f- doum de dunes -+- nerfs •+- remords aveuglant dans les montagnes RAN odeur de veau rflti GAR- VENT incandescentes de la -§- nausfes -+- excrements -+- lumiere GOTE DE ROTHSCHILD barracans en fuite excentrique (ampleur 1000 km. caries) T10INEU1

Figure 14 - Filippo Tommaso Marincui, Dunes Filippo Tommaso Marinctli, U mots en liberty futurities, Milsuio: Edizionc Poesia, 1919 192 Figure 15/16 - Velimir Khlebnikov, Incantation hy laughter/Bobeobi FUTURIST POETRY - RUSSIAN 193 2bigmcw Folejewski, Futurhm and its Mitce in Ike Development 0/Modem Poetry: A Comparative V I'm' Klphmk t\ Study and Anthohrgy. Ottawa: University of Ottawa lVcss, 1980 Conjuration by Laughter Oh, laugh forth, laugh laughadors! Oh. laugh on, laugh laughadors! 3anjiHTHe CsiexoM You who laugh in laughs, laugh-laugh, you who laughorizc so laughly, Laugh forth, laugh laugh belaughly! O, paccMcfiTccb, CMexaMH! Oh, of taughdom overlaughty, laugh of laughish laughadors! O, sacMeftTect., cMexaw! Oh, forth laugh downright laughly, laugh of super-laughadors! Hto CMetorea CMexasra, >«ro CMeHHCTsytor CMC»JH>HO, Laughery! Laughery! O, 3acMeftrccb ycMejijiuio! Bclaugh. uplaugh, laughikins, laughikins, 0 paccMemmu Haacvsen-'itHtix — cstex ycMefim>ix Laughutelets, laughutelets! r.McxaWH! Oh. laugh forth, laugh laughadors > O, HCCMeftcn paccMca.itno CMOX Haac.McSiiLtx Oh. laugh on. laugh laughadors! (KAUN) CMCIIBO, cvcftito, ycsaeft, o«Mefl, CMeniHKB, CMeniHKH, CMeiOSMHKH, CMCtOHIMKH, Incantation by Laughter O, paccMefiTCCb, CMexa»tH! O, 3aCMc9Tect», cMexasa! O you laughniks, laugh it out! O you laughniks, laugh it forth! You who laugh it up and down, Laugh along so laughily, Zaklyatie Smekham Laugh it off belaughingly! Laughters of the laughing laughniks, overlaugh the laughathons! O, rassmeytes", smekhachi! Laughmess or the laughish laughers, counterlaugh the Laughdom's O, zasmeytes", smekhachi! Chto smeyutsya smckhami, chto smeyanstvuyut smeyatno. laughs! O, zasmcythes'usmeyal'no! Latighio! Laughio! O, rassmeshishch nadsmeyal nykh smekh usmeynykh smekhachey! Dislaugh, relaugh, laughlcts, laughlets, O, issmeysya rassmeyalho smekh nadsmeynykh smekhac7.ey! Laughulets, laughulets. O you laughniks. laugh it out! Smcevo! Smeevo! O you laughniks. laugh it forth! Usmey, osmey, smeshiki, smeshiki, Smeyunchiki, smeyunchiki. (MARKOV) O, rassmeytes', smekhachi! O. zasmeytes, smekhachi! B06306H Bobeobi

BO6BO6H nciuci, ry6w Boheohi lips were sung Bobeobi pelis' guby BaaoMH nejiMCb saopM Yeeomi eyes were sung Veeomi pelis' vzory nn330 [rennet 6poEii Pieeett eyebrows were sung I Pieeo pelts' brovi JlHsaaft— nejica O6JIHK Ueeey look was sung Liecey — pelsya oblik GaM-gzi-gMO pelas' isep', ran-raH-raao nejiact ufiitb, Gzi-gzi-gieo chain was sung Thus on the canvas of a kind of analogies Tak na kholste kakikh-to sootvetstviy TaK Ha xojicre KSKHX-TO COOTBCTCTBIIJI Vne protyazheniya shilo Litso. Bite nporawcHna JKHJIO JIUIIO. Beyond spatial dimensions a Face lived. Z5H

FRANCESCO CANGIULLO FUTURISTA

Manifesto 'Q. sulla deciamazi ^v ^7^ one dinamica sinottica «^» di MARINETT1 Edizioni futu% ^€fr riste di Poesia Gorso Venezia 61 MILANO 1916

Figure 17 a/b/c - Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta «PlEDIGROTTACANGIULLO» « Iji feO >3' AUROREBOREALI a til "0 nnv 1)3 V \ 11III 1 / PosilllpO V v^neifuva •'.'••: coffine ELETTR1CHE ] VomefO | di "; ' ^

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Figure 17 a/b/c Francesco Cangiulio. Pictligrotta Simona liertini, Marinetri i? le 'erokhe serole, Novara: Inlurlinea edizioni, 2002 1 . HEDlGROrTACANGUliO . m „•',- a',' '"' "•(- * CANOlt^J^HEDkaOTTA-i v

Su PRINCffESSE del MARE Phi su RECJNA (VERDEACERBC* mbu mbumbumbumbu mburobum MS\) di MARE) con Stella marina sulle fiche = seise meduse NDCUNDCUNDCU ^^Q^j ]Sj (>T J Piu su precipiz! di fuochi d'acSfizio = vetrine di tutti i gioiellieri del Mondo rovesciate su P1EDIGROTTA corona di PIED!- 9 CROTTA 0 " (prestissimo) uisei-jjsciujsciujsci « O scelto un aome eccentrico..... » LOIE FOLLER eppT — (LOE FULLER VIOLA) (CANGIANTE) arinaieiatrinabuccMinaramannaggiachitemm OOH ! EEH1 fra cascate mullicolari di « tioccokltini • §4 UA» . (prestissimo) ujsciujaciujsciujsci MERCURIO « 'O lenente m" a ncucdato.....» e r ppT ZT== fl-OIE FULLER AMNStONQ Pp Nebbfe NutrunzoarbslaoUlachillusfaccaitmus EEH] OOH!! sbuffi (prestissimo) ujsdujsciujsciujscs ' accapigtiamento' « O bionda o bella bionda » j IILOLOMOIONCAOZLIOORM compenetrazione eppa ppa ppappappi ' 'ickemmarQTineir.azioazziczxizzesDffciscschifusofttent (LOIE FULLER TURCHINO) EchUliaimmevottehGcai/eumpaaAf UUHH ! UHHI I (ROSSO ndrsci ndrsci ndrsci ROSEO «.Qkianno tramont' *o sole . » SCARLATTO kra '." teretatata tta tta, MELLONE E'icnmmesiteBBanaEssondamancocemmate EHOHAHUU FUOCO tftftftfrftfun 1000 varieta diverse di SJDJU8 j OCCHI D! TREN1 « MAGGIO SI' TU.._. » MELAGRANO frfrfrfrtrfr ROSSO BANDIERA ^ TE ||: TE tete | TE TE | TE tete | TE TE: || (per tatta la vita) MESTRUO Dt VENDEMMIATRK3 frsd Frsp frsci, frsci th-ach ttrach - ttrach ttra R000S5SIHSSSIIIM! tr . ROSSOtMOUUN ROUGE)

I Figure 17 a/b/c - Francesco CangiuJIo, Piedignttta Simona Bertini, Marinetiie k 'eraiche xeroie, Novara: Interlinea cdizioni. 2002 Dal » RiveaHo 41 una citit < per Intonarumori, - L. Rusaolo "Iff

Figure 18 - L.uigi Russolo, Enharmonic music I Intonarumori "l.uigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, New York: Pcndragun Press, 1986

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Raoul Hausmann: Phonetic poem, 1920. Illustrated in Am Anfang War Dada.

Figure 19 - Raoul Hausmann, An Optophonetic Poem Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang War Dada, 1920 einleitung: 1 • itb«rtaltuftg! 1 Fumms bd wd taa zaa Uu, 1 Zituu ennze ziiuu nnzkrrmuu. 03 pogtff, Ziiuu ennze ziiuu linnzkrrmiiu, kwii Ee. ratcete bee bee? rakete bee zee. 63a Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, « d u rdiorbotain g 1 Wm dll ctrrtr beeeee bo, (A) s dll frrrrr beeeee bo fiimms bo, Fiimms bo wo taa zia Uu, HI rrrm beeeee bo fiimms bo w8. Uu zee tee wee bee fiimms. beeeee bo fiimms bo wo taa, rakete rinnzekete (S) 034. bo fiimms bo wo taa zaa, rakeie rinnzekete 3a fiimms bo wo «aa zafi Uu: rakete rinnzekete enter felt: HH| rakete rinnzekete rakete rinnzekete th«ma ! I rakete rinnzekete Fiimms bo wo taa zal Uu, 1 Beeeee pogitf, bd, kwii Ee. fa 1 tli«m« Ttt bowo Dedesnn nn rrrrrc, 3 fiimmsbs li Ee, boworo mpiff cillff too, fummsbowfj lillll Jiiii Kaa? bowor&taa (gejimgtn) fiimmsbSwotaa bciwBrotaazSa Hloma 31 fumrnsbowotaazaa Hinnzekete bee bee nnz krr miiii ? 3 bdwor&taazSMUu ziiuu ennze, ziiuu rinnxkrrmuu, fummsbowotaazaaUu boworotiSzaaUu p6 rakete bee bee. S« fiimmsbowotaSza'SUu pd rtiema <91 ( boworotii&zSaUH pog6 Rrummpff tiitff toooo? « fummsbowStaazSSUu pogo boworStaazaaUu pogtff

157 ! 158 figure 20 - Kurt Schwitters , Ursottale The Dado Palmers and Poets: An Anthology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19X9 K CX BALLA

MACHINE TYPOGRAPHIQUE

12 pcrsonnes ; chacune r^petc pendant 11 minutes de suite les onomatopees bruilistes suivantes : 1" selU sette1 sette1 sette sette selti 2° nenne nenn6 nenne' nenne nenne nenng o 3' vuuuummuuvuiiuuusmtiuvuu S 4° t6,le,te,te,te,te.te,te.te,te.te,te.te " 6° miaaa aaaa navand—miaaaaaaa navand B 6" sta sta———sta sta sta 7" lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala - 8" ftftftftftftftftftftftftftft «. 9* ri6ri6rieHeri6ri6ricrieri6ridrierieri&rid o 10* chchchchchspsspschchchchchspsps *" 11" veVevevdv6viiv£v6viveveV6v4v£v£v£vd 12" nunnn6n6nunnn<5n6nunnn6n6nunnn&n3 BALLA futurists, 1914 Mamiscnt dote de 1914 conserrc am archives Balls. I! comports sur tpois feuilles : le texte des onomatopdes; un croquis de la seine qui devalt constster dans an decor reproduistint en lcttres glg&n- tesques ]

Figure 21 - Giacomo Balla, Machina tipografica Theatre futiirisl Ud'uin. amholngle eritiqw, cd. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1976 zyi

DECONCERTATION D'fiTATS D'AME Qualre personnes vetues diff&remment. Scene blanche. 1" persoruie (crie avec force) § 666 milliards 666 millions 666 mille r > > g 333 333 s 333 a 444 444 » 444 999 999 » 999

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1™ personne (dit avec douleur) 2 ale. ale ale ale, ale ale aie aie aie 2" » (dit avec plaisir) g oui oui oui oui oui oui oui oui oui 3' » (dit avec rapidite) 3 vite vite vite 4' » frfif ouee force) i"non non non n°n non non non non non Les 4 personnes quittent la scene avec rapidite en zig-zag. GIAGOMO BALLA

Figure 22 - Giacomo Balla Scocentrazione di stati d'anitno Theatre Futurist hulien. anthoiogie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homine, 1976

wnmmt jdl<- per ' •tanlema magus ix stent parallel/ e simultance". 1925-J966 (coii. prwata). no no no DEPERO ttttl LOM no no BLOM — BLOM — Bt.OM — (iris prolongi), Blanc (Voix coupante, pareiUe a du. verre) : ZINN - FINN fin ui tli tli dlinn dlinntiflinni

tli tli uuuuuu iii 111 111 nin sm tin ctin iii i i i i i i ziiw zinz dluinz pinnnzzz pinnnzzz COULEURS pinnnzzz pinnnzzz Noir : Blom Blommo Blom in Gris (voix gemissante) : liluina dum du clu (SYNTHESE THEATRALE ABSTRAITE) umu fublu Piece cube-bleue, coropletement vide. — Pas de fen£- flu flu tre. — Porte-decoration, flu flu...Mu....blu bulubu bulu bulu bulu bulu bulii QUATRE 1. Oris, ovoi'dynamique gris INDIVIDUALITES fonce plastique. bulii bulu bulii bulu buKi bulu ABSTRAITES 2. Rouge, polyedrodynamo plasti­ fii 1 ii bulu bulu... (tris prolongd). que triangulaire rouge. liouge (bruyant, fracasscmt) : SORRA TI BOM TAM co (manocuvrees 3. Blanc Pnr, longlineaire - aigupointu, mecaniquement dynamo plastique Wane. t6 to Hco par des fils 4. Noir, muttiglobe noir. TUIT TUAT TUE invisibles) tuiiiiiiliutautautak taut A'oir ..(voix gatturale, tres profonde) : TO COM momomo KTATATATATA TROK-PLOK dom pom grommo BLOMM uoco DLONN tititonk ti titanic no don do-do-do no tititink nonnno do do no PATONTA Klo-klo-klo-klo-klo-klo mommo dommo no TRAIO TORIAAAAKRAKTO. dollomo - doia no

Figure 23 - Fortunato Depero, Colori Theatre Futurist lialien, amlmlogie critique, ed. G. Usta, Lausanne: I.'Age d'Homme, 1976 raissaienl derriere la balustrade oil, par des gestes et des mouvements du corps Us esquissaient le prelude. PANNAGGI lis descendaient dans la salle et executaient des actions mimiques cailencees au rylhme des moteurs, puis ils dtspa- raissaient du cote oppose, en gravissanl les escaliers qui conduisaient au foyer. lis revenaient a nouveau dans la salle, lis repremiient Taction et a la fin ils s'cvanouissaient en degringolant l'echelle qui conduisalt au bar. Materlaux : Carton, papiers brillants polychromes, tuyaux de carton, etoffes. - ,i Couleurs : Blanc, noir, rouge, gris metallique. LE BALLET MfiCANIQUE IVO PANNAGGI Relation par Pannaggi de la creation du Baltet micanique futuriste FUTURISTE qui eat lieu pour le Clrcolo detle Cronache d'Attualita, & 1ft Casa d'arte Sragaglia, via dcgti AvignonesE, Home, le 2 juin 1922, avec Ics daaaeurs russcs Ikar et lyanoy. Le textc de Panaaggl, redige* en 1966, -aTC3en>ahdc™au-T»nCc"a?Etudes Bragaglia de Home a ete publle dans Ataskc nnd Kothurn, n° 4, octohre-d^cembre 1966, Vlenne (numero Le Ballet mecanique futuriste fut concu par Ivo Pannaggi special sur A.G. Bragaglia). en collaboration avec Vinicio Paladini qui opposa au costume mecanique de Pannaggi un costume de pantin humain. A la musiquc fut substitute une polyphonie rythmique *, de moteurs obtenue en orchestrant deux motocyciettes qui etaient placces dans une loge au-dessus de la sallc du res- : taurant de nuit ou se deroulait 1'action principale. En variant l'intensite des bruits, en accelerant ou en ralen- tissant Jes temps, on pouvait manoeuvrer des fugues pro- < longees et insistantes, des rafales syncopes, des glissc- <' merits et des explosions, des arrets et des reprises imme­ diates qui eulminaient en des crescendo rageurs. ? Accouples dans des dialogues plastiques, les deux dan- <•' seurs improvisaient des surprises spatiales en se deplacant "? en long et en large, de haut en bas — ' I Accompagnes par des projectors qui les illuminaient tour a tour de luraiere blanche — ou de virages poly- I chromes quand la choregraphie exigeait des comraentaires I Bella, costume mitallique pour ballet (1926-1927). de couleur — ils allaient de la salle a la galerie et iis appa- 1

118 119 Figure 24 - Ivo Pannagi, Balfi mechanic! Theatre Futurist Italkrt, anthologie critique, ed. G. Lista, Lausanne: L'Agc d'Homme, 1976 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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