dossiê kandinsky kandinsky beyond painting: new perspectives Lissa Tyler Renaud Guest Editor DOI: https://doi.org/10.26512/dramaturgias.v0i9.24910 issn: 2525-9105 introduction This Special Issue on Kandinsky is dedicated to exchanges between Theatre and Music, artists and researchers, practitioners and close observers. The Contents were also selected to interest and surprise the general public’s multitudes of Kandinsky aficionados. Since Dr. Marcus Mota’s invitation in 2017, I have been gathering scholarly, professional, and other thoughtful writings, to make of the issue a lively, expansive, and challenging inquiry into Kandinsky’s works, activities, and thinking — especially those beyond painting. “Especially those beyond painting.” Indeed, the conceit of this issue, Kandinsky Beyond Painting, is that there is more than enough of Kandinsky’s life in art for discussion in the fields of Theatre, Poetry, Music, Dance and Architecture, without even broaching the field he is best known for working in. You will find a wide-ranging collection of essays and articles organized under these headings. Over the years, Kandinsky studies have thrived under the care of a tight- knit group of intrepid scholars who publish and confer. But Kandinsky seems to me to be everywhere. In my reading, for example, his name appears unexpectedly in books on a wide range of topics: philosophy, popular science, physics, neuroscience, history, Asian studies, in personal memoirs of people in far-flung places, and more. Then, too, I know more than a few people who are not currently scholars or publishing authors evoking Kandinsky’s name, but who nevertheless have important Further Perspectives, being among the most interesting thinkers on Kandinsky, having dedicated much rumination to the deeper meanings of his life and work. You will find remarkable entries under this heading. Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia – LADI – UnB – Vol. 9, Ano 3 10 Dossiê Kandinsky As we all know, the Internet is a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, non-specialists and specialists alike have spread a narrow version of Kandinsky, rife with misinformation, some of it scurrilous. Did he play the violin, break with his parents on becoming an artist, was he a devotee of theosophy, was he anti-Semitic, was he tragically isolated in Paris? No; all no. On the other hand, the Internet allows us access to rich Materials and Links, even global ones, we could not otherwise see: documents, articles, videos, visual resources. You will find an unusual selection of these under this heading. 7 It is ironic that Kandinsky’s work is divided here into separate sections in order to talk about his nothing-if-not-interdisciplinary preoccupations in the arts. And, for example, which section does his much cited music-painting- dance experiment go into? This kind of quandary persisted throughout the development of this Special Issue and, as a result, you may find some hybrid material under headings where you might not expect them, and some overlapping of content. Also ironic: those of us here to shed light on Kandinsky’s interdisciplinary thinking nevertheless write about that thinking in the respective vocabularies of our separate fields. Essays referring to his mysterious, idiosyncratic stage concoction The Yellow Sound are a case in point. You will see that in Theatre, it is a “play” or a “script”; in the Music section, this piece is called an “opera”; in Dance, the same piece is a “ballet.” Contributors who are art historians call it a “composition” — as indeed (along with the word “construction”) Kandinsky himself largely did — the same word he used for some of his crucially important paintings. From my perspective as a theatre practitioner and scholar as well as an art historian, it is a further irony that Kandinsky’s stage-related work receives more attention from outside the field of theatre than in it. More than anything, this speaks to the theatre’s historically fitful relationship with its avant-garde. Kandinsky’s contributions to the stage are every bit as revolutionary as his contributions to painting, but have never been seriously mined for their treasures. Note that Kandinsky was well read in both classical and contemporary dramatic literature (Goethe, Kleist, Ibsen, Chekhov, Maeterlinck, et alia), and well aware of experimenters of his time, such as Isadora Duncan, Dalcroze, Volkonsky, and far beyond. His messages to the theatre still await the level of legitimacy from the theatre that they receive in this issue. 7 Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia – LADI – UnB – Vol. 9, Ano 3 11 Dossiê Kandinsky All re-constructions of history are connect-the-dots endeavors. In Kandinsky’s history, some connectable dots are missing altogether; some “dots,” pieces of information or contexts, are still hidden or passed over — matters without which the true picture of his life and work remains partial. Dr. Jelena Hahl-Fontaine (formerly Hahl-Koch) has connected more “dots” than any other Kandinsky scholar. Kandinsky’s involvements in art, music, theatre, dance, writing; his historical context, personal life, travels and thinking — all find their right place under her charming, multi-lingual, fearless scrutiny. I have revered her work since the 1980s, flying to her lectures and amassing a library of her books and articles. For me, her willingness to contribute to my Contents is a marvelous part of the story of this Special Kandinsky Beyond Painting Issue. Dr. Hahl-Fontaine is also the one who suggested the Moscow conference contributors you see in the Table of Contents. Her suggestion was especially interesting because Kandinsky’s years in Russia, from the outbreak of WWI to his joining the German Bauhaus in 1922, have been a somewhat weak link in our knowledge. Compared to information about his time in Germany and France, information about his “Russian Years” has been far less freely available to us. This has gradually changed in the years since the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although the Russian Contributors in this issue know each other in Russia, they are still mostly new to us, and their papers give us an interesting window onto the questions they are asking about where Kandinsky fits into their post-Soviet, Russian arts landscape. And thereby hangs a tale from my own experience. When I began my doctoral studies of Kandinsky in the early 1980s, Kandinsky was little known inside Russia. To see a stage work of his, it was to Germany I went, to see the re-construction of his Dessau staging of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Materials pertaining to his work and life in Russia — still incomplete today for various reasons — circulated tenderly among devotees, in hit-or-miss translations, sometimes at great expense or arriving in the mailbox in dog-eared photocopies from distant countries. Russian speakers in the West were luckier, but for the rest of us, by expanding one’s search farther and farther afield, one could collect quite an impressive amount of clandestine documentation. Then in Moscow, in January of 1991, I saw one of the first exhibitions of the avant-garde artists who had fallen foul of official ideology after the 1917 Revolution, and whose work — including Kandinsky’s — had been thereafter unknown in Russia. On that same 1991 trip, with my translator in tow, I knocked on the door of Kandinsky’s Moscow apartment and was greeted by a quite ordinary tenant who claimed not to know Kandinsky’s name. On the way down the stairs, to Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia – LADI – UnB – Vol. 9, Ano 3 12 Dossiê Kandinsky my astonishment I could see where someone had tentatively removed a small area of paint on the wall, below eye level and partly obscured by a hand railing, exposing what was clearly Kandinsky’s folk-style decorative painting underneath. It took several more years before the word was out, and there were efforts made to preserve that same painted wall and others on the stairwell, as well as to add to the building’s exterior a beautiful plaque stating that Kandinsky had lived there. By 2010, when I gave a talk on Kandinsky’s theatre works and poetry at the St. Petersburg State Theatre Arts Academy (now the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts), the difference was palpable. My audience was hearing the information for the first time, but afterwards, there was eager discussion, and an invitation to give an impromptu class on Kandinsky’s spatial analysis for directors and actors in the Advanced Directing Studio. Where Kandinsky is concerned, certainly we are now collectively in a different era of understanding than we were in the 1980s or ‘90s. 7 I also want to direct your attention to parts of this larger publication, Dramaturgies, which is hosting this Kandinsky Beyond Painting issue. Word is that Brazil is currently among the great creative centers of the world, and composer Marcus Mota must be one of the reasons. Please see his orchestrations, composed for Kandinsky’s paintings. Anabela Mendes, eminent Kandinsky scholar of Portugal, has also translated Kandinsky’s poems and plays from the original German. 7 In conclusion, I would like to thank the Contributors. In particular, Clay Gold stayed with the project from the first day to the last. Everyone else I haven’t yet mentioned also communicated with me across time zones, re-working drafts and keeping to deadlines while traveling, through emergencies, and with difficult schedules. I think together our writings for Kandinsky Beyond Painting: New Perspectives can give the world new perspectives on Kandinsky. Today, Kandinsky’s theatre and related work is the subject of fascination in countries around the world, generating not only conferences, publications, and dissertations, but also exhibits, stage works, collaborations, discussions and friendships.