Edward Gordon Craig's two Collaborators: Michael Carmichael Carr and his Dutch Wife Catharina Elisabeth Voûte

Afew months after he settled in Florence, Italy in 1907, Edward Gordon Craig launched the construction of his model stages and marionettes, the experiments on his different staging projects, and the publication of his journal The Mask, bringing forth and putting into practice his dreams and ideas of a new art of the theatre. Working with him was a group of artists and workers of multiple nationalities. Among them was a young couple, Michael Carmichael Carr (1881-1929), a Californian-born artist, and his Dutch wife. Over a century, while numerous studies of Gordon Craig as one of the founding fathers of modern Western theatre have appeared, Carr was remembered more for his euphonious name than for his professional career that has gone scarcely documented; worse still, his Dutch wife has remained nameless and has continued to be called Carr's "Dutch wife" whenever she was mentioned along with her husband.¹ Drawing on archival materials and other rarely used sources, this article for the first time documents the Carrs' collaboration with Craig and shows its significance in our understanding of Craig's work in some of the most productive years of his artistic career.

In March 1910, in an interview with The Kansas City Star, Carr, who had returned from Italy to the United States and had been teaching at the Fine Arts Institute, Kansas City, revealed his experience of working with Craig on his projects and provided an eyewitness account of Craig's staging experiments. Carr recalled that, for more than a year, he worked day and night with Craig on "a mighty plan to set topsy-turvy the whole world of drama; a plan to drag from the stage all things but light and motion". According to Carr, Craig rented an abandoned ancient monastery called "Il Santuccio" in Florence, "surrounded himself with a working force of artists, and set about the building of his dream". In this working force almost a dozen nationalities were represented and there were women as well as men, "all wrapped in the same love for art, and all eventually more or less imbued with Craig's enthusiasm". Carr and his family, then living in a village away from Florence, joined the Craig forces in the monastery. At all times, Carr said, he was in charge of the actual work and the band of workers. Carr provided details on the construction of Craig's wood figures with graceful and rhythmical expressive motions. For example, he thus portrayed the figure of a nun carrying a book:

There was a nun, who carried a book. When she moved, the book rose slowly in her hands, while her head, as in prayer, bent in perfect rhythm to meet it. It was her only motion. Certain movements were found to express certain emotions and certain depths thereof. In a way, the brevity or length of the movement ruled the shallowness or depth of the emotion. All was uniformity of mechanism, inevitably perfect.

("Perfect Drama" 3)

There was also the figure of "a furious woman, with staring eyes, tossing hair, and vicious curling lips":

By her side hung a lean, inhuman hand, cloaked in hinged and hollowed draperies. Spasmodically, the draperies quivered, the hand emerged, and, reaching far out, clawed through the air, in a horrible gesture of rage. Silence only made it the more terrible. It was everything furious; everything relentless, the whole of cruelty and hate. A world of acting could not have been so expressive.²

("Perfect Drama" 3)

Carr also described the construction of Craig's model stages and the use of lights, screens, and columns. He gave a detailed account–with an illustration–of the performance of a play called Thanksgiving:

A play was staged–a play with only silent marionettes, and moving shafts of light, and golden screens. It had no plots, as plots are known–no hero, villain, heroine, or schemes–only a long procession winding in and out among the screens. In it there were, perhaps, a hundred marionettes. Some were young men, with...