INTERNATIONAL THEATRE EXHIBITION
STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM 1922
Only a few years after World War I, artists gathered at Stedelijk Museum to share their radical ideas on what theatre could become. The International Theatre Exhibition was not just any exhibition, it was a place where views were shared and dialogue happened. They agreed that the then dominant theatre of the bourgeois was too superficial, solely copying life and aiming to entertain. The 1922 theatre exhibition contains visions and ideals of a theatre of the future, revolutionary at the time.
Designer of the exhibition and prominent figure of the Amsterdamse School, Hendrik Wijdeveld (1885), was convinced a new era for the theatre would commence soon. He was a socialist, dreamed of a utopia and was very critical on the traditional theatre. Theatre was like a religion for him, and the theatre building was a cathedral in his ideas. His network was big and included internationally renowned artists as Adolphe Appia, and he invited him and similar thinkers to present their works at the 1922 exhibition.
Though the objects shown in the exhibition were not realistic, the importance of the objects lies in the dream of what theatre could be.
Wijdeveld included masks* as he claimed that masks are of symbolic nature and show universal emotions, rather than the individual emotions of the naturalistic bourgeois theatre.
The exhibition was also created in the hopes that audiences would slowly become more familiar with these radical ideas on scenography. Audiences were invited to attend lectures about the theatre of the future that were organized around this exhibition.
The 1922 International Theatre Exhibition was the largest theatre exhibition ever shown at the time and toured in the UK and the US after premiering in Amsterdam. It paved the way for the current theatre and its scenography.
“The New Theatre that Wijdeveld and the other organisers of the exhibition dreamt of never came about, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that the renewers at the exhibition prepared the ground for a theatre were visual and spatial elements were treated completely different than before. In that sense the exhibition sure showed many a possibility.”
SOURCE: Eversmann, Peter G.F. (2007) ‘The International Theatre Exhibition of 1922 and the Critics’ In: K. Beekman and J. de Vries (eds.) Avant-garde and criticism. (Series: Avant Garde critical studies, 21)
Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, pp 67-90.
*This exhibition and our reconstruction of the exhibition contains masks of colonial origin. We are in ongoing dialogue about the colonial history of the masks.