Movements by Drawing: Avant-Garde Set-Design and Sound Landscapes

The article deals with the study of visual images produced by the movement through the drawing’s set-design realized between 1920 and 1930, moment of theatre revolution, which saw the cooperation of different sectors of art, including photography, painting, architecture, cinema, dance, sculpture, and music. The visual values that triggered the theorization of the artistic avant-garde and, subsequently, the production of the scenographic drawing, in form and space, constitute a corollary of dynamic systems, a metaphor of the deconstructed movement through the figuration of the idea and at the same time signification of the interpretative distortion. The aim is to deepen the issue of movement expressed through the possible variations of the drawing. The study of the avant-garde set-designs that formed part of the structure characterizing the mobile theaters, allows to shed light on the role the graphic expression played in functional, compositional and aesthetic terms by self-propelled components, machines and images within the formalization process of the new theater. These elements constituted a new visual grammar no longer directed to the search for representative or symbolic values, but to the pure signification of itself, latent of a conceptualization process that traced a sign correspondence between object and subject in the drawing.