Theatre, Performance and Technology

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 ... - 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'.

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