British Institute Archivist Alyson Price went to Spain in November to attend the opening of an Edward Gordon Craig exhibition in Spain:
Last week I went to Madrid for the opening of an exhibition on Edward Gordon Craig at La Casa Encendida. The exhibition, 'Edward Gordon Craig. Space as Spectacle', shows very clearly why Craig is counted the most influential theatre designer of the twentieth century. Craig didn't put on many plays (the exhibition has some of the designs for his revolutionary production of 'Hamlet' with Stanislavsky staged in Moscow in 1912) but his ideas spread through his magazines, particularly 'The Mask' which Craig published in Florence over the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The British Institute lent 42 items to the exhibition and these were displayed alongside loans from the Archivio Contemporaneo of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, the Theatre Museum in Vienna, UCLA in California and the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris which supplied most of the material. The show is spread over three large rooms, one of which is devoted to Craig's use of stairs in his set designs and this includes interactive material (the Casa Encendida works a lot with children as well as the child in all of us) and Craig's own voice taken from interviews done in the fifties for the BBC.
Our collection was given to us by Dorothy Nevile Lees who collaborated with Craig on 'The Mask'; she painstakingly built up the collection over years, donating it piece by piece to the British Institute. It was very moving to see the material she collected, that we have taken care of, now displayed in an exhibition devoted to the man she loved. The opening was well attended and with a public very different from the one I see at openings in Florence - and you have probably guessed that the food on offer was the best of local tapas.
La Casa Encendida is on the south side of the city, in walking distance of the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. In fact, in the Reina Sofia there's a connection with Craig - a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron of Craig's mother, Ellen Terry.
Last week I went to Madrid for the opening of an exhibition on Edward Gordon Craig at La Casa Encendida. The exhibition, 'Edward Gordon Craig. Space as Spectacle', shows very clearly why Craig is counted the most influential theatre designer of the twentieth century. Craig didn't put on many plays (the exhibition has some of the designs for his revolutionary production of 'Hamlet' with Stanislavsky staged in Moscow in 1912) but his ideas spread through his magazines, particularly 'The Mask' which Craig published in Florence over the first three decades of the twentieth century.
The British Institute lent 42 items to the exhibition and these were displayed alongside loans from the Archivio Contemporaneo of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, the Theatre Museum in Vienna, UCLA in California and the Bibliotèque Nationale in Paris which supplied most of the material. The show is spread over three large rooms, one of which is devoted to Craig's use of stairs in his set designs and this includes interactive material (the Casa Encendida works a lot with children as well as the child in all of us) and Craig's own voice taken from interviews done in the fifties for the BBC.
Our collection was given to us by Dorothy Nevile Lees who collaborated with Craig on 'The Mask'; she painstakingly built up the collection over years, donating it piece by piece to the British Institute. It was very moving to see the material she collected, that we have taken care of, now displayed in an exhibition devoted to the man she loved. The opening was well attended and with a public very different from the one I see at openings in Florence - and you have probably guessed that the food on offer was the best of local tapas.
La Casa Encendida is on the south side of the city, in walking distance of the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. In fact, in the Reina Sofia there's a connection with Craig - a photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron of Craig's mother, Ellen Terry.
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