Good vibrations: Avant-garde theatre and ethereal aesthetics from kandinsky to futurism

Abstract

Western avant-garde theatre practitioners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were fully absorbed in the rich brew of occultism and science that characterises ‘vibratory modernism’. Seeking theatrical means to transpose the affect of their dramas to higher dimensions of feeling, thought and receptivity, they eagerly drew from spiritualist, occult and scientific ideas. Crucially, several lines of the theatrical avant-garde followed William Butler Yeats in conceiving of the shroud masking the true world of spirit specifically as a ‘trembling veil’ that, itself vibrating, could be disturbed and penetrated by other vibratory phenomena. As with the adaptation of scientific ideas in other arts between 1880 and 1930, many theatre artists were keen to find resonances between the sciences of X-rays, radioactivity, Hertzian waves and telegraphy and prevailing occult, parascientific, and theosophical notions.