Theatre and Performance Practices
General Edi tors: Graham Ley and Jane Milling Theatre, P11blished Performance and Christopher Baugh Theatre, Performance and Technology Deirdre Heddon and Jane Mi ll ing Devising Performance Helen Nicholson Applied Drama Michael Wi lson Storytelling and Theatre Technology
Forthcoming Greg Giesekam Staging the Screen The Development of Ph ill ip B. Zarrill i, Jerri Daboo and Rebecca Loukes From Stanislavski to Ph ysical Theatre Scenography in the Twentieth Century
CHRISTOPHER BAUGH
LIBRARY Bard Graduate Center Studies m The Der.orat1ve Artf
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KINETIC STAGE MACHINES OF JOSEF SVOBODA 83
advance with the play. .. . I don't know how far this idea can be put into The Scene as Machine, 3 practice; but the idea itself is first-class, and if it were carried out it would revolutionise the art of scene-designing; for there has always been an antagonism between the movement of the plot and the immobility of the The Kinetic Stage Machines of scenery; if the scene could change in harmony with the development of the 1 Josef Svoboda plot, this would provide an entirely new source of expression. Svoboda's practice and hi s writing about the organization of 'theatri cal space' continuously and consistently addressed this issue. His professiona l practice began in Prague in 1943 with a producti on of Holderl in's play Empedocles at the Smetana Museum thea tre, a nd he was still active as an international scenogra pher, and also as the Artistic Director of the Laterna Magika theatre in Prague, until very shortly before his death in 2002. The longevity and the artistic consistency of the principles that underpin his practice are important, and they serve as an interesting extension of the scenographic work o f In several ways, the work of Josef Svoboda (1920-2002) represents Meyerhold and his coll aborators, and of Neher and Brecht. Further something of a culmination of the scenographic ideas that have been more, Svoboda was remarkably focused and a rticulate in interview, considered in the context of Craig, Appia, Meyerhold a nd Neher. discussion and in his several publications. He was also a committed The sheer output and wide range o f hi s theatre, coupled w ith the teacher and spent many of his final years touring the world attending comprehensiveness of vision make it appropriate tha t his work should seminars and dialogues and giving master-classes. In these, he was be considered across rhe distinctions that have been chosen as al ways very open in acknowledging the debt of influence and inspira chapters in this book. In this chapter, and by way of introduction, tion that he received from earlier theatre a rtists, and in locating his I want to introduce Svoboda's central concern for the kinetic potential work and ideas within a continuum of developing practice and theory. of scenography and for his creation of what he called a 'psycho He saw the ideas and practice of the earlier a rti sts as establishing the plastic' space. I hope to suggest that the movement of the scene framework of principle and concept of scenography fo r w hi ch he (whether reali zed by physical movement or by movement of light) had the theatrica l infrastructure, and the opportunity to develop the represents the fina l breaking down of the unhelpful dichotomy that technology to implement and develop it. H e responded especiall y to had been noted by earlier artists- characters and dramatic action their commitment to the importance of the imagination; their abso move, but a re usually set against an immobile background and within lute fa ith in the importance of theatre within a civilized community; a fundamentall y sta tic environment- the scene may be a machine, and their beli ef that the theatre artist should work from a power but it does not move. In a later cha pter that focuses upon lighting a nd ful sense of a rtistic and socia l ' necessity'. He concluded a se mina r its technologies, I shall return to a further consideration o f Svoboda's 'Towards a Visua l Dia logue', in London in May 1998, by saying: contribution and a consideration of the way in which light served both as a material of construction within the scenographic machine Of course I was influenced by Craig - he was an artist who understood the and as the techno logy that gave kinetic force to the stage. necessity, the necessity of the imagination, and the necessity that theatre is In 1910 the painter Rene Pi ot visited Craig in London and was an art. Europe needs many, many, many more Craigs todayl shown his model of scenic screens. He reported back to the director of In addition, during the la te 1960s and through the 1970s when the Theatre de I' Art, Jacques Rouche: Svoboda was a rguably at his most proli fic and influentia l, his work, as Craig wa nts his scenery to move like sound, to refine certain moments in the it increasingly became familia r to the West, became synonymous play just as music follows and heightens all its movements; he wa nts it to with the establishment of the word 'scenography', where hitherto
82 84 THEATRE PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY KINETIC STAGE MACHINES OF JOSEF SVOBODA 85
'stage designer' o r 'theatre designer' o r even 'stage decoratOr' had that have influenced the practice and especially education fo r theatre been the most commonly used terms. The wo rd 'scenographer' is now worldwide from the 1960s until the present day. universall y accepted and is used to describe the a rtists who have In many ways Svoboda's work and approach might a lso be thought responsibili ty for all the visual and aural contributions o f theatre and of as a culmination of the ideologies of essentia lly modernist theatre perfo rmance: the stage setting and properties, costume design, li ght artists of the first half of the twentieth century. His a pproach was ing and sound design. T o those who 'discovered' the work of Svoboda coherent and he was committed to rationa lity and scientific precision. during the late 1960s, it a ppeared to represent a degree of synergy and In searching for new solutions he was as radical in the rejection of integration that went far beyond a seemingly straightforward bringing past ones as any architectural or product designer at the Bauhaus of together of visual and aural ingredients. The musical metapho r of the 1920s. As his principal chronicler and biographer, Jarka Buria n, accompaniment has fr equently been used to indicate what might be says: 'Svoboda himself, educated as a n archi tect and later a Pro fessor the proper partnership between scenographic support and the actors, of Architecture, has an inherent sense of discipl ine and is impa tient and as we shall consider later, the fl exibili ty of stage lighting has been wi~h any sign of di letta ntis m; he respects the past a nd has tirelessly consistently involved in enabling such a relationship. H owever, as stnven to understa nd and perfect his medium on a scientific basis. •2 C ra ig discovered (at great cost to his ultimate reputa tion) wi th the And ye ~, as Burian also shows, it is probably too simplistic to screens setting for Hamlet in Moscow, the achievement of a seamless summanze Svoboda's achievement in this way. Rational, scientifi c, movement o f scenes was a considerable challenge to the available ordered, structured, coherent- most certa inly, but he a lso displayed a stage technologies. None the less, Svoboda a lways considered move post-modern tendency and will to mix medi a and to juxtapose; to ment of all kinds - both phys ical and atmospheric - to be essential, fr.eq u e~tl?' inc.orporate a self-reflexive theatricality; and as Ruggero and com mitted his work to finding some resolutions to the 'antago B1anch1 1dennfied, an a bi lity to create 'a neo-Baroque style that nism between the movement of the plot and the immobility of the expresses an artist's enchantment with the contemporary world of scenery' to which Piot referred. perfected technology and media and his desire to share hi s enchant Svoboda's ambiti on for scenography was that it should embrace the ment with the spectator'.3 complete reali zation and staging in time of performance (the language In 1999 whilst working on a model proposal for a n asserti vely is inadequate to encom pass this a ll -em bracing totality, but a lthough :modernist' stagi ng of Verdi's La forza del destino for the opera stage still reta ining the static quality of placement, mise en scene comes 111 the Verona a rena, he was also creating a complex media installa closer). To achieve this he focused attention upon the conceptualiza tion in the Laterna M agica theatre. This was a production that he had ti on of a production idea that, in itself, would become the majo r 'written' in coll aboration with the choreographer Igor Ho lovac, call ed acti vity of realization involved in determining the mise en scene - in Past (The Trap), which explored the interface between the spaces of a this sense a logical extension o f ;v!eyerhold's concern to stage the real and a virtual world. The technology behind the scenography was d ramatic action of Hedda Gabler a t St Petersburg in 1906. T he fullest a modern re-working of the nineteenth-century 'ghost' illusio n known possible coll aboration of a rtistic materi a ls and means impl ied in as 'Pepper's Ghost'. It consisted of a bare stage space, dominated by a this am bitio n must, of course, be simila rl y paralleled with human vast screen of 50 per cent reflectivity made of tightly tensioned plastic collaboration amongst the ream o f scenographers, acto rs, and with maten al that spanned the enti re stage width and was angled a t 45 the entire producti on team. The implementation o f 'scenogra phy' in d ~g rees .ro ~h e floor of the stage. Through sophisticated moving and the fullest sense of Svoboda's meaning and the employment of sn ll prOJection from both in front a nd behind, this screen enabled the 'scenographers' have profound effects upon a ll aspects of the produc a ppearance, disappearance and ha lf-appearance of actors and objects. ti on process and the technical management of the theatre. It has It was frivolous, eclectic a nd at rimes seemingly fl ippant, and refer been the tOtali ty of Svoboda's vision of the kinetic possibi lities of entia l to all of the Svoboda ' trademarks' of mysterious projected scenography and hi s active engagement with complex new technol imagery, and yet it was fundamentall y seri ous a nd disturbing in its ogies to achieve this, and his ability (most impo rtantly in colla bora presentation of the real/non-real worl d of modern computer living. tion w ith others) to make a ' palette' out of the total means of theatre, Whil st Svoboda is therefore capable in many ways o f being call ed 86 TH EATRE. PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY KINETIC STAGE MACHINES OF JOSEF SVOBODA 87 the ultimate modernist scenographer, his work frequentl y under to Svoboda, be a kinetic place of performance, not in the historical cut the idealistic modernist sense of trying to create the ' perfect' or the sense of changing scenes to change locations, but a kinesis tha t w ill definitive design fo r a production. Perhaps a keen sense of the tem create and change the qualities of li minality withi n the environment of porary, and circumsta ntia l, nature of the 'gap' into w hich he threw his the stage. scenographic propositions encouraged the self-refl exivity that marks As has been d iscussed, a li mina l stage space, such as the formal his work. space of the No theatre, the platform of Shakespeare's theatre, or the W ithin the context of this immediate discussion, Svoboda's vision of forestage of the eighteenth-century playhouse, is one that is both the resources of theatre serves to a mplify, extend a nd a lso to transcend scenic and forma l; it is simultaneously representational and presenta the metaphor of scenography as a 'machine for performance' as ti onal, rhetorical and ill usionary. But for Svoboda this was a space presented so fa r through the work of Craig, Appia, Meyerhold and that, through performance, would be transformed in time as the Neher. T his is, of course, not to say that Svoboda is ' better', or more performance progressed. W ithin the large, urban lta li anate theatre sophisticated, simply that his longevity and his position as senior buildings within which Svoboda spent his career, his kinetic sceno scenographer in a very substantiall y funded state theatre system, and graphy converted the box of the proscenium arch stage into an his major role in the education of future scenographers, all owed him architectonic structure that was fitting and apt for the presenration o f the o pportuni ty to experiment with newly available technologies the play, and that kineticall y reflected the emotional movement of the and structural soluti ons in a manner that had previously not been drama -what he termed a 'psycho-plastic space'. Svoboda said that attempted. For example, his desire to find new surfa ces to receive and he a lways began hi s work of making a scenography by staring into the to transmit pro jected images, or the need to move la rge sections of void o f the empty stage. He would a ttem pt to project himself and staging smoothly and silentl y, necessitated both the establi shment his thoughts about the drama into the 'possibilities of the void ' - not of a highly skilled research team at the workshops of the Narodni in order to attempt a conversion o f the space into, say, the Verona Di va dlo in Prague, and also the need to build relationships with indus of Romeo and juliet or the Elsinore of Hamlet, but to make a space tria l research and manufacture that were quite new to the making that would become the dramatic space of their performance. And of theatre. fu rthermore as a pa rtner in tha t performance, it could not rema in Beyond the opportunity to put into practice and develop some a static space; it had to be one that would refl ect the movement of the solutions proposed by the early artists, Svoboda's over-riding of the drama. and crucia l contribution has been to reali ze the consequences for The kinaesthetic energy was to be generated by the interplay of scenography and technology of the time-based nature of performance. performa nce a longside a ll the resources of scenography. For example, Actors move, narrati ve moves, emotions, feelings a nd acti ons move, he described a scenography for a proposed production of Faust in and, of course, meaning and significance move and change w ithin 1970 with director Alfred Radok, in which a crucial conceptual performance. If the scene aspired to be a true machine fo r and of understanding was that Mephistopheles and Wagner, Faust's student performa nce, then it too should be capable of movement. Of course, and domestic servant, were one and the same person, and, of course, since the Renaissance work of Bernardo Buonta lenti a t the court of one and the same actor. T he stage box was an empty a nd seemingly the Medici, and Inigo Jones at the Stua rt court, the endeavour of the void space, shaped only by huge, very dark brown, barely distinguish stage had been to enable movement, and to provide the frisson of a ble wall surfaces to the back and sides. The stage fl oor was steeply excitement as the scenic worl d dissolved and reformed before your raked and apparentl y fl agged with stone. A crucia l feature of this fl oor eyes. The eventual lowering of the curtain to conceal m ovement and was tha t beneath the stage were to be fitted felt-covered 'dampers' change on the stage was a late nineteenth-century practice to mask the that could, by the action of silently o perati ng pistons, be made inability of contemporary technology to render movement and change to press against the under-surface of the stage and render it silent. aesthetically pleasing, and to provide a 'shutter-like' revelation of the As Faust prepared his occult pentagra m down stage to 'conjure' worl d on stage. But the movement of the scene proposed by Svoboda diaboli c forces, the stage would echo with the sound of his and is of a different a nd quite a particula r kind. The stage must, according Wagner's footsteps. Wagner, however, would not engage or assist in -
KINETIC STAGE MACHINES OF JOSEF SVOBODA 89 88 THEATRE. PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Faust's conjuring practices; he would turn and make to leave, walking thre.e~d im e n s i ona l space a nd its ability to relate with the psychological up stage, and his echoing footsteps would be hea rd. As he reached the reaht1es both of the dramatic action and of the audience. But the farthest limit of the stage he would turn and walk back down the qualities of such dramatic space must be controllable: space may be stage in total silence to stand befo re Faust -everyone in. the t~ eat re cheerful space if it needs to be so, but it may also be a tragic space would know that in that transition of sound from echomg no1se to should the drama change. Good scenography can therefore transform silence he had become Mephistopheles. Who and what had created itself synchronously with the progress of the action, with the course of this scenography and its meaning? Is this set design, lighting design, its moods, and with the development of its conceptual and dramatic sound design or costume design? Is it the work of the actor in the bare line. As identified by Craig and Appia, space, time, rhythm and light space? It is, of course, a ll of these, and, argued Svoboda, illustrates his a re ~he co ~e elements that possess this dynamic ability, moreover they 4 understanding of the word 'scenography'. a re mtang1ble elements and they indicate the essential characteristics This illustration furthermore exemplifies Svoboda's belief that the of scenography. Svoboda would qualify these quali ties by calling them stage should use technologies to retain a sense of distance from 'dramatic space', 'dramatic time', 'dramatic rhythm' and 'dramatic representation. In other words he consciously used the strangeness, light', and it must be the scenographer's function to know how to the mystery of effects and their frequently complex technologies to generate and to manipulate the synthesis of these elements that make keep the scenography on the level of the inner feelings and meaning of ' ~ime-space' -:- what Svoboda calls the fourth dimension of the stage - the play. Svoboda's stage existed as a place of transformation and smce dramatiC movement implicates both space and time. magic, a place that would employ high technology to generate H ow is Svoboda's understanding of the stage a 'machine'? Lyubov mystery and metaphors of complex human experience, although he Popova took the brutally stripped, and ' li berated', stage of Meye r did not use the stage to valorize technology o r simply to display its hold 's theatre and made a construction of timber, metal components powers. His fundamental concern was to use technology to reveal the and minimal paint for The Magnanimous Cuckold in 1922. Actors human condition of the drama: to explore the ability of theatre to ran, walked and manipulated the ' machine' in their performance: the make an authentic new reality on the stage that ' testified to more stage framework and its apparatus remained assertively that, and im portant discoveries about the huma!' spirit than any [individual] together, actors and construction became an orchestrated device to technical characteristic could provide' ..) illustrate and represent the themes and ideas of Crommelynck's play. Importantly also, Svoboda's stages would remain profoundly Svoboda's scenographies include the potential for all of this but he modern in appearance, and although he may frequently make refer considerably expands and re-fi gures the constructi onal elemen,ts avail ence to past forms and styles, for example using sections of skilfully able to the machine maker. Naturally, with his extensive reliance painted represe ntationa l imagery, the audience were never in doubt upon the use of light and projected imagery, these represent significant as to the absolutely contemporary nature of the art that they were materials, but it is also his distinctive view of the stage both as a experiencing. T he scenes would most certainly never pretend to ' building board' and as a crucia l component of the machine itself transport the audience to any far off place or time. It was Svoboda's that distinguishes hi s work. The key to understanding this distinc view that it was through a n assertive modernity that the stage tion may li e in the fact that Svoboda made a lmost every one of his achieved its relationship with its audience and accordingly acquired scenographies in large, extremely well equipped proscenium a rch its 'licence' to become a liminal space: '[o)nly that which is con theatres. Almost eve ry other innovative theatre artist of the twentieth temporary on stage can thoroughly interest the spectator and affect century has begun his or her work with a rejection of this form, him strongly . ... Contemporary art should present a ground pla n of alongside the rejection of the approach to mise en scene that has been li fe, the li fe-style of its time.'6 The inter-relationships of scenic details associated with it. and their capacity for association with contemporary life outside the It may well be that Svoboda wanted to maintain the capability of theatre created, from the abstract and undefined space of the stage, the theatre experience that the proscenium a rch form can offer, to a tra nsformable, kinetic and dramatic space. Svoboda's continued absorb and emotionally involve the spectator- but not as Louther use of the phrase 'psycho-plastic space' identifies the links between bourg or Stanislavski woul d have wished. In a scenography by --
90 THEATRE. PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY KINETIC STAGE MACHINES OF JOSEF SVOBODA 91
Svoboda the spectator is absorbed inro the mental world of the acrion of the drama as opposed ro merely irs location. As in a Stanislavski mise en scene, the specrarors a re invited to 'lose' themselves, but not to take on the role of voyeurs into a supposedly real scene being played out on st
in thrall to an unseen and unstoppable authority. In this way, the myths and gods of Wagner's music drama, and more importantly their significance and power, were shared with an audience through Svoboda's kinetic machine. More recently Svoboda twice worked with Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro, Milan, in 1989 and 1991 , to stage Parts 1 and 2 of Goethe's Faust, and these were rare occasions when Svoboda worked outside a proscenium stage. As with ma ny of his most successful scenographies, hi s work consisted of a fundamentally si mple and single component within the overall machine. In this case he conceived a vast hanging of fabri c held in a deep spiral above the large thrust stage of the Piccolo. The fabric seemed to be the self-colour of an unbleached and an undyed material, and it had a uniform, somewhat ' un-ironed' appearance. At once, by its size and height, it was oppressive, but by its spiral form it looked planned, controlled and controll ing. Its shape tantali zed and beckoned, a nd lured you tighter and tighter into its spiral track. As a metaphor it was a powerful si mulacrum of divinities that simultaneously anract, tempt and ultimately control. In practice, as a 'machine' suspended above the stage it served to receive a bewildering array of projected images and undermined the organiza tion of its spiral structure to become whatever Faust, and Goethe, wished. This was achieved primarily by the fullest possible integra tion of light within the mechanics of the scenic machine - light both created and changed space, and therefore the structure of the machine. By taking the empty void of stage space and not simply buil ding a machi ne to stand on the stage, Svoboda persistently converted the entire space into larger, endlessly transformable machines. His scenography brought together the moving scenes of Craig and the constructed, self-referentia l theatricality of Meyerhold, and he extended the 'Neher/B recht-like' quality of creating a 'text' of per formance us ing the materials and technologies of theatre as a pa lene Figure 18 Josef Svoboda: the projection becomes a mat~ ri al reality-:- . of opportunities. T hat palette of materials became dominated by Goethe, Fa ust, Teatro Piccolo, Milan, 1989 and 199 1; d1rected by G1org1o the theatre's ability to employ the atmospheric, un ifying and trans Strehlcr (Sdrka Hejnovd) forming accompaniment of light as proposed by Appia. It was the acceleration of technological development during the last half of the platform tilted high, the mi rrored underside of the platform revealed century that enabled him tO conceive of that light in ways that went another world deep beneath the stage that was the source of bot!~ the beyond ill umi na tion, colour or effect, and which allowed him to treat electronic and the mythic power. T he scenography was aggress1vely the light as a material reality and therefore as a structural com modern in that it seemed to be a naked display of technology and ponent within the stage machine. hidden powers of control, a nd as such it was as mysterious and awe some as the operation of some ballistic mi ssile sil o that seems to be