At around the same time, a feeling of dissatisfaction with music culture brought together Adolphe Appia and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva. In 1906, Appia discovered the Jaques-Dalcroze method of rhythmical musical education at a student performance. At the time, both musicians had been working on theoretical and practical studies of the significance of movement in understanding and enhancing musical expression. What Appia saw was something entirely new: music was being turned into body language; a fascinating unity of musical, physical and mental movements; music joining together time and space. Jaques-Dalcroze had taken solfège – voice coaching and ear training exercises – and used it to develop his own exercises and musical compositions to help his students overcome “arrhythmia” by means of physical movement. That was not all: his “musical education whereby the body itself mediates between sounds and thoughts, becoming an immediate means of expressing our feelings” ultimately aimed to release people’s subconscious creative potential, freeing them from the social taboos of their time. Eventually, the Jaques-Dalcroze method was to make an important contribution to modern expressive dance, and Appia’s concept of space was to revolutionise stage design.
Appia attended the courses held by Jaques-Dalcroze at the Geneva Conservatory for several years and saw them as a confirmation of his own beliefs in the expressive possibilities of music and the stage: “The living, mobile body of the actor represents movement in space (…) the other arts can play no part in the scene without movement." Confronting contemporary theatrical production and stage design, Appia explored the field of space and movement. In his sketches of stage settings for Richard Wagner’s music dramas, he picked up on Wagner’s ideas, but ignored his stage instructions, developing a stylised three-dimensional open stage with modern lighting, in which the actor moved around. This was a departure from the two-dimensional proscenium, fixed spatial structures, cluttered backdrops and trompe-l’oeil images merely simulating depth and moods. Under the influence of Jaques-Dalcroze, Appia created his famous “Espaces rhythmiques” in 1909/1910: equally accomplished spatial structures with abstract, intense clarity and strict geometry, made up entirely of vertical and horizontal lines, steps and slopes, the atmosphere enhanced by the use of light and shadow; light “vibrations”.
