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The following texts are excerpted from Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York and Evanston: Harper Row, 1968)
We breathe in, we breathe out, inward turning, alone, or outgoing, working with others, for an experience that is cumulative through collaboration. Theater is the latter kind. My interest is the stage where it is possible to realize in a hypothetical way those projections of the imagination into environmental space which are denied us in actuality.
The theater of the dance in particular adds the movement of bodies, in relation to form and space, together with music. There is joy in seeing sculpture come to life on the stage in its own world of timeless time. Then the air becomes charged with meaning and emotion, and form plays its integral part in the re-enactment of a ritual. Theater is a ceremonial; the performance is a rite. Sculpture in daily life should or could be like this. In the meantime, the theater gives me its poetic, exalted equivalent.
FRONTIER
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Louis Horst
1935
Frontier was my first set. It was for me the genesis of an idea -- to wed the total void of theater space to form and action. A rope, running from the two top corners of the proscenium to the floor rear center of the stage, bisected the three-dimensional void of stage space. This seemed to throw the entire volume of air straight over the heads of the audience.
At the rear convergence was a small section of log fence, to start from and to return to. The white ropes created a curious ennobling -- of an outburst into space and, at the same time, of the public's inrush toward infinity.
This set was the point of departure for all my subsequent theater work: space became a volume to be dealt with sculpturally.
APPALACHIAN SPRING
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Aaron Copland
1944
New land, new home, new life; a testament to the American settler, a folk theater.
I attempted through the elimination of all non-essentials, to arrive at an essence of the stark pioneer spirit, that essence which flows out to permeate the stage. It is empty but full at the same time. It is like Shaker furniture.
HERODIADE
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Paul Hindemith
1944
The most baroque and specifically sculptural of my sets.
Within a woman's private world, and intimate space, I was asked to place a mirror, a chair, and a clothes rack. Salome dances before her mirror. What does she see? Her bones, the potential skeleton of her body. The chair is like an extension of her vertebrae; the clothes rack, the circumscribed bones on which is hung her skin. This is the desecration of beauty, the consciousness of time.
CAVE OF THE HEART
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Samuel Barber
1946
A dance of transformation (as in the Noh Drama). Medea, priestess of the mother goddess, slays the offspring of her union with Jason and is transformed and finally consumed by, the flaming nimbus of the setting sun (her father).
I constructed a landscape like the islands of Greece. On the horizon (center rear) lies a volcanic shape like a black aorta of the heart; to this lead stepping stone islands. (Jason's voyage, the entry bridge of drama). Opposite (stage left) is coiled a green serpent, on whose back rests the transformation dress of gold (metal).
RRAND INTO THE MAZE
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Gian-Carlo Menotti
1947
The theme, based on the story of the Minotaur, is the extremity we must all face: ourselves.
I tried to depict the way, or the labyrinth, as the interior spaces of the mind by means of rope, as I had done in Frontier. But this time the effect was altogether different: a space confined like the cave of the mind.
THE SEASONS
Choreography: Merce Cunningham
Music: John Cage
1947
I saw The Seasons as a celebration of the passage of time. The time could be either a day, from dawn through the heat of midday to the cold of night, or a year, as the title suggests, or a life-time.
In the beginning there is darkness or nothingness (before consciousness). It is raining as the light grows to bare visibility, to die, and then to revive again, pulsating and growing ever stronger.
Suddenly in a flash (magnesium flash), it is dawn. (All this is done with light machines). Birds (beaks for boys, tail feathers for girls) dance to the morning.
The light becomes hotter, the throbbing heat becomes intense, until with violence it bursts into flames (light projections throughout).
Autumn follows, with strange, soft moon shapes, then the cold of winter. It is snowing; lines of freezing ice transfix the sky (ropes), and the man of doom walks into the dark.
Although The Seasons was presented only three times, I have always felt it to be one of my best contributions. The costumes were comic and sad -- like the human condition -- somewhat like Mack Sennet bathing costumes, like birds with and without tail feathers. The beaks of red cellophane cones, mounted on white circular disks, were held in the dancers' teeth.
ORPHEUS
Choreography: George Balanchine
Music: Igor Stravinsky
1948
Never was I more personally involved in creation than with this piece which is the story of the artist. I interpreted Orpheus as the story of the artist blinded by his vision (the mask). Even inanimate objects move at his touch -- as do the rocks, at the pluck of his lyre. To find his bride or to seek his dream or to fulfill his mission, he is drawn by the spirit of darkness to the netherworld. He descends in gloom as glowing rocks, like astral bodies, levitate: and as he enters Hades, from behind a wildly floating silk curtain the spirits of the dead emerge. Here, too, entranced by his art, all obey him; and even Pluto's rock turns to reveal Eurydice in his embrace (she has been married to Death, as in the Japanese myth of Izanagi-No-Mikoto and Izanami-No-Mikoto).
With his music Orpheus, who is blinded to all material facts by the mask of his art, leads Eurydice earthward. But, alas, he is now beset by doubts of material possession. He tears off his mask and sees Eurydice as she really is, a creature of death. Without the protection of his artistic powers, he is even weaker than ordinary mortals, and he is torn apart by the Furies. But his art is not dead; his singing head has grown heroic as his spirit returns; and as a symbol of this resurrection, a flowering branch ascends to heaven.
SERAPHIC DIALOG
Choreography: Martha Graham
Music: Norman Dello Joio
1955
I depicted the life of Joan or Arc as a cathedral that fills her consciousness entirely. To do this, I constructed a transparent edifice of brass tubing--articulated like a church steeple, as I had done for The Bells, a ballet in 1944 for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but with a different purpose. The construction was a precise operation, made possible by my friend, Edison Price.
KING LEAR
Director: George Devine
Lear: Sir John Gielgud
Cordelia: Peggy Ashcroft
1955
I designed a system of mobile set elements which moved around with someone inside or behind them -- allowing for twenty-six continuous changes of environment and mood.
There would be variety, harmony, a sudden break -- music at times, or other noises. Sometimes the action would start with the sets moving in, to continue and move out as the pieces likewise travel across the stage.
In spite of two trips to England, I never saw a performance of Lear. Instead, I was deluged with an avalanche of abuse from the press: one critic said, 'It may be that the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have dominated the imagination of Mr. Noguchi ...even the tragedy of three contrasting forms of madness -- the real and terrible lunacy of Lear, the feigned insanity of Edgar, and the harmless idiocy of the Jester -- becomes unimportant, unintelligible gibberish against this colossal chaos.' But there was also some warm praise, as from the critic who wrote, 'Mr. Noguchi has succeeded magnificently; it is not too high a praise to say that his ignorantly-abused decors are fully worthy to go alongside the most rewarding interpretation of a great play by a great player that we are ever likely to see'.
Had I gone beyond my depth? And yet I had utter confidence that I understood Lear -- with a fearful joy.
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