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Edward Gordon Craig: Innovator and Pioneer Edward Gordon Craig was an Englishman, that throughout his career, excelled in many different areas of art. He was an actor, a theater director, a critic, a publisher, an editor, a book illustrator, an essayist, a self taught artist, and most notably a pioneer and revolutionary of theater technology and concept. He was the second child of a relationship between the actress Ellen Terry and Edwin Godwin, an architect and scene designer. Initially, Craig tried following in the footsteps of his mother by becoming an actor. At the age of six, he made his first stage appearance in a production of “Olivia,” for Sir Henry Irving’s company at the Lyceum Theater in London, which his mother was leading lady. After some time, the limitations of an actor’s life began to dawn on him. Craig had dreams of creating a new kind of theater. His mission to transform the theater would occupy him throughout the remainder of his life and created conflict with the interests of the commercial theater. However, his innovations and theories brought him respect and appreciation from the imaginative theatrical artists of his time, as well as from generations that would later succeed him. Craig wanted to free the theater from its dependence on realism. He wanted to separate literature and the actor to create a unified artwork. Craig demanded a theater in which reality would be transcended and interpreted by symbol, rather than being reproduced by traditional representational methods. His productions were generally very simplistic marked with a unity of concept. For Craig, outlines, forms, color, and lighting were a way of conveying atmosphere. In his crusade to free the theater from its Victorian trap of realism and sentimentality, Craig’s creation of simplified images conceived through lighting and images out of planes of dark and light, were probably his most noted contribution to the theatrical world.
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