ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the interdisciplinary investigations of the celebrated modernist painter Wassily Kandinsky. It considers dance as a major part of his experiments in Munich in the immediate pre–First World War period. It does so by examining his collaborations with other artists, and with the dancer Alexander Sacharoff and the composer Thomas de Hartmann in particular. Kandinsky’s interdisciplinary stage composition The Yellow Sound was not realised in his lifetime, but it provides a focus for a reconsideration of Kandinsky’s interdisciplinarity from the point of view of dance studies. In his attempt to express a forward-looking, spiritual, and intellectual response to modern life, this chapter argues, Kandinsky blurred the boundaries between the disciplines of painting, music and dance.
