Adolphe Appia

Adolphe Appia (1 September 1862 – 29 February 1928) was a Swiss architect and theorist of stage lighting and décor. He was the son of Red Cross co-founder Louis Appia.

Early life Adolphe Appia was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, in a "strictly Calvinistic home". :7 He attended boarding school at the Collège de Vevey starting in 1873 at the age of 11, where he remained until 1879. Appia saw light, space and the human body as malleable commodities which should be integrated to create a unified mise-en-scène. He advocated synchronicity of sound, light and movement in his productions of Wagner's operas and he tried to integrate corps of actors with the rhythms and moods of the music. Ultimately however, Appia considered light as the primary element which fused together all aspects of a production and he consistently attempted to unify musical and movement elements of the text and score to the more mystical and symbolic aspects of light. He often tried to have actors, singers and dancers start with a strong symbolic gesture or movement and end with another strong symbolic pose or gesture. In his productions, light was ever changing, manipulated from moment to moment, from action to action. Ultimately, Appia sought to unify stage movement and the use of space, stage rhythm and the mise-en-scène.

Appia was one of the first designers to understand the potential of stage lighting to do more than merely illuminate actors and painted scenery. His ideas about the staging of "word-tone drama", together with his own stagings of Tristan und Isolde (Milan, 1923) and parts of the Ring (Basel, 1924–25) have influenced later stagings, especially those of the second half of the 20th century.

For Appia and for his productions, the mise-en-scène and the totality or unity of the performance experience was primary and he believed that these elements drove movement and initiated action more than anything else (Johnston, 1972). Appia's designs and theories went on to inspire many other theatre creators such as Edward Gordon Craig, Jacques Copeau and Wieland Wagner.

Works

La mise en scéne du théatre Wagnerien (Paris: Léon Chailley, 1895) Musique et mise en scéne (Munich: Bruckmann, 1899) L’œuvre d’art vivant (Geneva: Atar, 1921)

See also the articles about Appia written by Prince Serge Wolkonsky (in Russian Wiki)

Filmography Adolphe Appia, Visionary of Invisible (1988), a film by Louis Mouchet