in the same position and in scale on the film, continuing the walk as an animated stick figure. The “virtual” McCay then stepped onto Gertie’s open lower jaw, and the dinosaur lifted her head to allow him to step onto her back, whereupon they rode off into the distance, in classic cowboy-movie style.4 One of the very earliest examples of the inte-gration of film in theater was thus also the first to use ideas of close timing to “cheat” a sense of “liveness” and dialogic interactivity between the live performer and the media imagery, prefiguring numerous digital theater performances that utilize essentially the same technique. Equally, McCay’s “walk into the screen” to transform him into a virtual counterpart is a much-used technique (and a much-loved effect) in current digital theater.
The pioneering experiments conjoining film and theater between 1900 and 1915 provide the starting point and inspiration for Opera (2000) by one of the leading digital theater companies in the United States, the Builders Association. The company describe the performance as reinterpreting the early-twentieth-century experiments “using the current explosion of club-oriented ambient and ‘drum and bass’ music and video. Opera combines these two elements ‘sampling’ fragments of theatrical history through the lan-guage of contemporary DJ and VJ culture.”5The performance uses a system of MIDI trig-gers that are activated by the onstage performers and offstage technicians to prompt video samples and sound loops in real time. In drawing parallels between the film-theater experiments of the early 1900s and recent techno and club culture events, the Builders Association explicitly links past and present technologically driven enhancements of performance spectacle. In doing so, it also implicitly places contemporary digital perfor-mance developments in relation to an equivalent stage of highly embryonic experimen-tation; both periods of performance history share the same opportunities and struggles inherent in adopting and adapting “new” technologies to reconfigure and advance estab-lished theatrical forms.
In the 1920s, film projection was incorporated into many cabaret and music hall per-formances, and performers continued to experiment with and refine illusory conjunction effects. These included the French magician Horace Goldin who juggled with a combi-nation of actual and filmed objects; and Robert Quinault, who created dances that syn-chronized live movement with slowed-down film versions of the same actions.6In Russia, particularly after the 1917 revolution, Italian futurism became highly influential, and it spawned Russian futurist performance companies such as The Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS). Their controversial theater production of Gogol’s The Wedding (1922) integrated film projections in what the publicity poster pronounced an “electrification of Gogol,”
and what one of the actors described as “putting a plug and electric wire into his [Gogol’s]
posterior.”7 Eisenstein incorporated his film Glumov’s Diary (1922) with theater, circus acts, sketches, agitprop, and song in A Wise Man (1922);8 and from 1923 the Russian
“Blue Blouse Group” followed his example in numerous popular club-theater perfor-mances. RoseLee Goldberg estimates that at its height, the Group involved more than
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100,000 people across clubs throughout Russia, and in many ways marked “the ultimate realisation, on a grand scale, of Marinetti’s variety theatre.”9
Frederick Kiesler
Frederick Kiesler’s 1922 multimedia design for the Berlin production of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, written in 1921) was one of the most extraordinary and high-tech of the early 1920s.10Using kinetic elements including moving side screens and an eight-foot iris that opened and closed to blind the audience with spotlights, Kiesler believed the mise-en-scène ensured that “from beginning to end, the entire play was in motion. . . . It was a theatrical concept to create tension in space.”11The monumental stage backdrop was an impressive and elaborate mix of visual elements drawing on graphic design, cubism, constructivism, and the geometric abstract paintings of Kandinsky. It incorporated flashing neon lights, a circular film screen, and a rectangular screen that rep-resented a type of closed-circuit television monitor for the factory director to observe and vet visitors approaching the factory. For this, a backstage mirror arrangement reflected and “projected” the live image of (offstage) visitors who walked in accurate perspective, as if towards the factory’s spy “camera.” When their admittance to the secret factory was authorized, the factory director used a remote control device to shut the screen window, and the visitors walked onto the stage from the wings.
The circular film screen was used to back-project prerecorded film sequences of the robot factory workers. The use of a moving camera to film these sequences created an engaging illusion whereby “since the camera was walking into the interior of the factory . . . the audience had the impression that the actors on the stage walked into the per-spective of the moving picture too.”12After the first few performances, Berlin police raised concerns over the potential fire hazard posed by the film projection system, and Kiesler constructed a trough of water above the screen. Thereafter, the film sequences were pro-jected onto a waterfall, creating a “beautiful, translucent effect,”13and securing the pro-duction’s place in history as the first to marry media projection and flowing water.
Among recent performances and installations following Kiesler’s lead are Blast Theory’s Virtual Reality performance Desert Rain (1999), whose title evokes its central metaphors of a desert terrain (a computer game–style representation of the battleground landscape of the first Gulf War) that is projected onto sprayed, running water, like a sheet of rain.
The water-projection technique is “doubled” to evocative effect in Paul Sermon and Andrea Zapp’s A Body of Water (1999) where high-pressure showerheads create a water curtain in the middle of a large shower room in a disused coal mine in Herten, Germany, which is projected onto from both front and rear (figure 4.1). From one side, visitors see a color projection of life-size, live images of some audience members in the colliery, who are visually composited (using chromakey techniques) with visitors interacting with them as they watch from the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisberg. The telematic link and blue screen effects between the two sites enables a visitor in one location to appear on the water
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curtain projection together with a visitor in the other location, and to virtually scrub one another’s back, as though together in the shower itself. Moving round the space to the other side of the water screen reveals another projection, old black-and-white archive footage of the shower room when it was operative and was used by over a thousand men each day. The “life-size documentary images of naked coalminers showering just as they once did in the very same place”14 and their complementary action of bukeln (the local term for scrubbing each other’s backs) is a powerful “realist” contrast to the colorful and cheerful virtual playacting of the telematic conjunctions on the other side. The two images do not overlap, although only a thin sheet of water separates them. Sermon notes the cor-respondences between the installation and Eisentein’s use of the Moscow Gas Factory as a determining social narrative:
The visuals, together with the site-specific smells and sounds of coal dust and running water, as well as the location of the installation in the old mining complex, underline Eisenstein’s concept of a metaphor that is reinforced by the reality and the given evocative aspects of a space. In A Body of Water, the simple yet complex act of “telepresent showering performance” turns into a collabo-rative re-experience and reflection of the former authentic social and working space.15
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Figure 4.1 Paul Sermon and Andrea Zapp’sA Body of Water (1999) uses fine water spray as a projec-tion surface, a technique first employed in 1922 for R.U.R.
His collaborator and partner Zapp draws attention to the metaphoric aspects of the water screen, and the way it acts as a meeting point connecting past, present and future:
The flowing medium forms the heart of the installation and metaphor; it transports the public interaction and at the same time it reflects the area, the Ruhrgebiet, as a pulsating web of rivers and waterways. All the visual and conceptual layers meet here. On the one hand, the viewers are confronted by the new era, the interactive platform of networked communication, as a possible future. Yet on the other, they discover the ghost-like shadows of the past miners showering in the water—a flashback to the abandoned space and its former working culture.16
Erwin Piscator
In the 1920s, documentary footage was also employed with marked effect when Erwin Piscator brought edited newsreel film into the theater space to emphasize the political dialectics of his devised documentary production In Spite of Everything (1925). According to Hugh Rorrison, Piscator thereby contrived for the first time in theater’s history “a dialectical interplay of factual material, for example setting off political intent (patriotic speeches in the War Credits debates in the Reichstag) against its military consequences (atrocity footage of the slaughter on the Western front).”17Piscator himself wrote how his combination of theater and film transformed the dramatic framework so that a didactic play (Lehrstück) could be developed from what might appear on the surface to be a spectacle-play (Schaustück).18
Piscator provoked anger from the management of the Berlin Volksbühne theater when he controversially inserted film of Lenin in his staging of Ehm Welk’s play Storm over Gotland (1927), set in medieval times, as well as specially shot footage of five of the actors marching toward camera. As they march, their period costumes transform in a series of cinematic dissolves, placing them as characters within four historical left-wing revo-lutions—the Peasants’ War, 1789, 1848, and 1918. The sequence epitomized Piscator’s conception of the play as itself “an episode in the march towards communism,”19 and its ultimate censorship by the Volksbühne led to Picator’s resignation after three years at the theater.20
The year 1927 was a historic one in which the use of an onstage screen to project photo-graphs and moving film images reached new artistic heights. In France, Paul Claudel’s Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (1927) experimented with using the screen as a “magic mirror”
to enhance the atmosphere and intensity of the text and, according to Frederick Lumley, to “open a road to dreams, remembrances and imagination.”21 Claudel wrote of the immense visual power, but equally the subtlety and sophistication of the stage projection screen in its ability to suggest, entice, and capriciously transform meanings. Where Pis-cator’s film-theater was intellectual and politically didactic, Claudel’s was sensory and psy-chological, disrupting notions of time and affecting audience “sensation”; and conceiving the projected body in relation to “shadows” and “ghosts” of the past and the future:
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Why, when a flood of music, action and poetry entrances the minds of the audience, reply with a false heaven as crude and trivial as a café mural? Why not utilise the screen as a magic mirror where all sorts of shades and suggestions more or less vague and designs may pass, follow, and eliminate each other. Why not open the door of this troubled world where the idea gives birth to sensation and where the ghost of the future unites with the shadow of the past?22
But in the same year it was Piscator who provided the definitive early-twentieth-century multimedia theater production with his film-theater treatment of Ernst Toller’s expressionist “Stationendrama” Hoppla, Wir Leben! (Hurrah, We’re Living! 1927). Statio-nendramas progress through discrete self-contained episodes, in much the same way that hypermedia fictions and other online experiences including web-surfing do; and it seems apt and pertinent that this episodic structure served Piscator so well in creating one of the most historic precursors to digital theater. As in hypermedia dramas (and the medieval passion plays from which the dramatic term derives), the individual sequences in Stationendramas bear some connection to one another, but are distinct and do not progress through a conventionally logical, accumulative, or fluid dramatic structure. Nor do they conform to Aristotelian ideas of a unity of action, time and place. The “stations”
through which the expressionist protagonist progresses (Karl Thomas in the case of Hoppla!) act as fateful signposts and crossroads where the forces of fate, choice, chance, and human will converge. They are points of revelation, reflection, and decision, and their paradigmatic equivalence to the hyperlinks, portals, and navigational nodes of today’s computer-mediated experiences is clear. In Hoppla! Karl Thomas is released after eight years in a lunatic asylum, and becomes increasingly disillusioned when he discovers all his former revolutionary friends have conformed to bourgeois values, including Kilman, who has become a government minister. He plots to murder him, only for a right-wing assassin to succeed in the task before him. But Thomas is mistakenly arrested for the crime and is again declared insane. He hangs himself inside his cell minutes before his inno-cence is discovered.
For Piscator’s production, Traugott Müller’s complex set design comprised six rooms housed in two vertical scaffolding structures at either side of a central projection screen.
The rooms’ decor dispensed with painted backdrops in favor of mobile, transparent screens onto which film and slides of alternate locations—prison cells, living rooms, hotel rooms, and offices—were back-projected. This technique of using projection in place of tradi-tional scenographic materials (wood, fabric) has been used to place performers within changing locations throughout the history of multimedia theater ever since, and has now reached new technological heights in three-dimensional digital designs by companies such as George Coates Performance Works.
On the central screen, film narratives and images of war, boxing matches, monetary crises, dancing, and newsreel montages, were sometimes projected during the stage action, and at others constituted a discreet interlude during blackouts between scenes. Two
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specially produced films opened the production. The first was an edited sequence of news-reels juxtaposing the First World War with the German Revolution, and incorporated specially filmed footage of the actor playing Thomas, locating him as a participant in both events. For the second,
The film screen in front of the set went up, the gauzes came down for the projected décor, and the scene in the condemned cell started. This was followed by the most effective part of the produc-tion. A huge clock on the screen intermittently ticked away the years from 1919 to 3 November 1927—that is, right up to the opening night, another bid for topicality—while news-flashes from Karl Thomas’s lost years flashed on the screen. Political events like the communist risings in the Ruhr, Lenin addressing a mass audience, the rise of Mussolini, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the elec-tion of Hindenburg as German President in 1925, were punctuated with shots of dancing legs, boxing matches, and the frivolity of the 1920s. Loud jazz underscored the excitement of the eight-minute film, and at the end of it Karl Thomas’s attempt to rehabilitate himself started.23
Piscator used a range of technical effects including loudly amplified radio broadcasts, and the theater’s first use of ultraviolet light, which illuminated (only) the white skele-ton-bone markings on the black costumes of performers for a macabre dance of death fol-lowing the assassination, choreographed by the celebrated dancer Mary Wigman, a protégé of Rudolf Laban. Film footage ran for approximately half of Hoppla!’s overall production time, and was particularly important for its opening and climactic sections. Following Thomas’s arrest, as Toller remarked at the time, “by the aid of the film he [Piscator] could show dozens of prison cells and soldiers silently marching up and down outside so that they were as oppressive to the audience as to the prisoners themselves.”24In the final scene, prisoners in different cells within the three-tier set tap on the ventilation pipes to pass messages to one another as Thomas prepares his noose. Written transcripts of their com-munications are projected in motion onto the front gauze. A visually stunning climax is reached with the inclusion of a film projection of the Milky Way in the twenty-five-foot high center section of the set, a dense, exploding cloudburst of stars.
Nicholas Hern argues that Piscator’s use of film was “partly for the sake of documen-tary precision and partly to render the composite impact of eight years’ technological advance on the bewildered mind of Karl Thomas.”25Lumley presents an alternative per-spective: that Piscator felt Toller’s social satire was not radical enough, and employed film primarily to provide the political and dramatic punch the play lacked.26While acknowl-edging the innovation and impact of Piscator’s methods, Lumley goes on to warn of what he perceives to be the dangers of theater’s incorporation of film, adopting a theater purist tone typical of many critics past and present: “The effect can be used in moderation to great effect (Piscator’s methods were a sensation), but beyond a certain point the method becomes a trick as precious as a toylike Cinerama. It is no substitute for good drama, and the temptations it offers for crude sensationalism are only too apparent.”27 Toller was
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equally skeptical about the effect of the use of film in the production of his play, and later described Piscator’s attempt to unify theater and film as “a mistake,” since he considered that “the two arts followed different laws.”28
Critical references to multimedia performance work in the following thirty years are rare, and it appears that after a few years of experimentation with film at the end of the 1920s, theater returned to its traditional live roots, with only occasional and normally relatively incidental inclusion of film. The political climate of the 1930s dampened or explicitly repressed avant-garde activity, with economic depression in the United States and elsewhere, the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, and Germany, and the 1934 dictat by arts minister Zhdanov that Russian art should solely dedicate itself to socialist realism.
From 1939, the trauma of the Second World War, and its long aftermath of political remappings and socioeconomic reconstruction, marked a twenty-year hiatus in multi-media performance, and indeed, avant-garde performance in general. RoseLee Goldberg’s history of performance art is indicative of this, devoting over one hundred pages to the period 1909–1932, but less than four pages to cover the period 1933–1951.29
Robert Edmond Jones and the Multimedia “Theater of the Future”
Although little multimedia theater actually took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, throughout that period Robert Edmond Jones toured the United States to preach its gospel with what Frederick C. Packard Jr. describes as a “missionary zeal.”30Jones, one of America’s leading theater designers, toured the country between 1941 and 1952 deliver-ing lectures with such titles as “The Theatre of the Future” (1941). Jones’s vision, which he first discussed in a contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929 entitled “Theory of Modern Production,” was the fusion of theater and cinema. “In the simultaneous use
Although little multimedia theater actually took place during the 1940s and early 1950s, throughout that period Robert Edmond Jones toured the United States to preach its gospel with what Frederick C. Packard Jr. describes as a “missionary zeal.”30Jones, one of America’s leading theater designers, toured the country between 1941 and 1952 deliver-ing lectures with such titles as “The Theatre of the Future” (1941). Jones’s vision, which he first discussed in a contribution to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929 entitled “Theory of Modern Production,” was the fusion of theater and cinema. “In the simultaneous use