Olivia Grecea
Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania
monica_grecea@yahoo.com
The use of virtual images in performing arts. Key references
Abstract: Using virtual images on the stage is commonplace in contemporary performing arts. A glance at the twentieth century shows that ever since virtual images became available, they have been quickly integrated in performing art works, due to their flexibility and the richness of functions. An analysis of the basic reference points in the use of virtual images, both in Europe and in the USA, provides a background for understanding the theatre makers’ fascination towards this discourse.
Keywords: Theatre; Virtual images; Video projections; Experiment; Cinema; Installation.
Introduction
When I sit alone in a theatre and gaze into the dark space of its empty stage, I’m frequently seized by fear that this time I won’t manage to penetrate it, and I always hope that this fear will never desert me. Without an unending search for the key to the secret of creativity, there is no creation. It’s necessary always to begin again. And that is beautiful.
Josef Svoboda
This paper aims at providing the fundamental historical reference points of the usage of video projections in the field of the performing arts. It is centered on defining the becoming of a recognized, wide scale used tool, in order to demonstrate the need for a spectacular practice-based approach. Beyond purists’ objections, invoking the specificity of performance, tied to presence and physicality, it cannot be denied that large-scale use of virtual image denotes the makers’ familiarity to this method and their interest in expanding the sphere of traditional spectacular tools.
The evolution of technology and the rhythm of importing new technologies into the stage stem from the perception paradigm of the contemporary man, for whom the rhythm of life and, implicitly, the rhythm of the action on the stage, is alert; the quantity of information per time is much bigger than at the beginning of the century, the audience attention is distributed to more channels simultaneously.
Therefore, virtual images and the stage opening they create correspond to a need for providing continuous updates to the stage, a need for synchronizing it with the contemporary audience expectations.
Pioneering
In the 1920’s an explosion of interest in virtual images on stage overwhelmed the European theatre; it was promoted by Germany (through Erwin Piscator, then Brecht) and Russia (through Eisenstein and Meyerhold).
An anticipation of the actual use of virtual images on stage can be found in – Eisenstein’s and Meyerhold’s works, both of whom tried to give to the theatrical performances the rhythm and dynamism of a film, a tendency manifested in approaching theatre making by using instruments derived from those utilized in film-making. Concepts such as editing, foreground versus background and dynamics are used in connection with space and acting, leading to an alert, sequential performance, which reflects the /fragmentation of time and space unity.
The necessity of deconstructing space, of giving it a number of significations determined Meyerhold to collaborate with constructivist painters, such as Liubov Popova, that created complex set designs. Constructivist set designs were true machineries, as they contained a number of levels, tied together through staircases, platforms or even functional elevators, the purpose of which was to define a number of spaces. Another revolutionary proposition of Meyerhold and his collaborators was the modular set design, able to create new spaces through combinations and permutations of existing elements (to give a concrete example, the wheeled platforms in the performance D.E.).
Theatre and film director Eisenstein also used virtual images as a mise en abyme of the stage; in his staging of A wise man by Aleksandr Ostrovski, performed in 1923 at the Proletkult Theatre in Moscow, one of the characters, Glumov, came out of the projection screen into the studio; the illusion was created by using video projections followed by the actual appearance of the actor, that entered the studio screaming and holding a film roll. Eisenstein became acquainted to film through his theater work, at first working as a set designer at the Proletkult Theatre, then becoming a main set designer. For the staging of A wise man, Eisenstein made a short film entitled The diary of Glumov, and placed at the end of it the aforementioned scene. He used extensively “the dynamism of early Soviet film” for the – “cinema was seen as the art-form of a dynamic new society. These interests fed into his arguments for a theatre of attractions built primarily on dramatic narrative for sustaining interest.”[1]
The concept underlying Eisenstein’s film theory is the “montage of attractions” that is, introducing among the images referring to the dramaturgy of the action, arbitrary images, that create the greatest psychological impact on the audience, due to their relationship with the dramaturgical images. Eisenstein was interested in breaking the chronological element of a film in favor of the manipulation of the audience. The latter was to absorb the filmmaker’s message indirectly, due to the psychological context created by the image editing of the “arbitrarily selected independent attractions”.[2]
In Germany Erwin Piscator formulated a practice-based theory concerning the virtual image, by establishing 3 possible functions it can take in a theatrical context.
The video projections were able to work as elements that defied the convention, as elements that distanced the audience from the dramaturgy of the performance, a comment from outside the stage, a meta-discourse. However, Piscator used virtual images in other directions as well. For him, theatre had its functionality; it was a vehicle for sending out a political message. Sympathetic towards the working class, although not a communist, Piscator was preoccupied by the way through which a theater performance could instigate the audience, by conveying radical messages.
His stagings include experimental elements, such as movie fragments or fragments from news that were projected in cinemas before a movie screening, used in performances in order to create realistic mass scenes or to suggest/present a certain landscape. Fascinated by technology, Piscator utilized optical, acoustical and mechanical mechanisms in order to create sophisticated stage machinery: sound distribution systems (equivalents of today’s speakers), light flashes (similar to stroboscope lighting), revolving stages, and the sound of air horns (as a signal of air raids).
Though it is difficult to speculate on the impact that a staging signed by Erwin Piscator might have had on the audience, his celebrity (before returning to Germany, he worked for some years in New York) accounts for a favorable critical reception of his performances. Piscator is one of the iconic theater personalities of the 20th century.
Dada was also a source of inspiration for Piscator; however, he considered this movement insufficient, as he dreamt of a theater connected to the struggle of the proletariat. As a formal element, video projections, as well as the concept of editing, were fundamental to his work, as is collage to Dada. Piscator collaborated on several occasions with the visual artists Hemult Herzfelde and John Heartfield, who worked on editing films used in performances. A famous example of their joint effort is the film in which the traces left by 5 airplanes overflying Guernica were processed as to create the illusion of the 5 fingers of a skeleton hand.
For Piscator, virtual images could perform 3 different functions: the didactic film that conveyed objective, factual information, related to the production subject, to the audience; dramatic film that worked as an alternative to the actual acted scenes, played in real time, when their rhythm was too slow and the dramaturgical action could have been replaced with synthetic frames; the function of the filmic comment was similar to that of the Antic chorus, as it was used to accompany the dramaturgical action punctually, underlining certain elements of the performance, launching critics and accusations and interfering with edifying information.
In what concerns stage instruments, Piscator brought in a small dimension auxiliary projection screen, used for screening factual data or titles, similar to the TV screen.
Josef Svoboda and the incorporation of technological innovation
One of the promoters of virtual images on stage is the Czech visual artist and set designer Josef Svoboda. Apart from over 700 set designs he created for theater and opera productions, he created, together with Alfred Radok, the multimedia installations Polyekran and Lanterna magika for Bruxelles World Fair in 1958.
As a set designer, Svoboda used the most recent scientific discoveries in the fields of mechanics and optics in order to create complex performative spaces, different from the conventional theatrical spaces; he is one of the theater figures that contributed to the popularization of video projections as en element pertaining to the theatrical discourse.
However, his most revolutionary works are the installations Lanterna magika and Polyekran. Lanterna magika combined live action with projections using the actors’ bodies and stage objects as screens Projections were used to cut out the actors’ silhouettes, to sculpt them and to maximize their visual impact in the context of the whole installation.
Working for Polyekran, Josef Svoboda and Alfred Radok combined movement with image, trying to create the optical illusion of spatial volumes and movement while using mechanical machinery.
The installation consisted of a rectangular wall made entirely out of projection screens inside of which there was a projector. While an image was projected on each projection screen, these screens glided simultaneously over the inside or the outside of the wall. Combining the visual and the movement factor, these theatre makers created a dynamic effect comparable to the contemporary 3D installations.
Josef Svoboda is considered to be one of the key set designers of the 20th century, due to the innovations brought to the stage technique. Together with Alfred Radok, he created the theater company Lanterna Magika in 1973, focused on exploring the possibilities of combining film and theater.
The fundamental concept of his work is polyscenicness, that he opposed to the static theatre, where the audience gazes down at actions performed on stage: by means of film, Svoboda played with time-space operations, trying to deconstruct an image, to show it from different angles, to break the narrative continuity specific to theatre works, and to transform this linearity into sequential moments.
His approach to set design is comparable to Piscator’s and Meyerhold’s perspective on scenography, as all of them tried to build a machine for the actors to use. In Svoboda’s work, “film provided a heightened sense of the context of the drama, introduced supplementary material in the manner of Piscator’s choric use, juxtaposed extra-diegetic inserts with the staged action and enlarged details of the stage action and figures.[…] He utilised film to reveal the subjective experience of characters […]. He also developed a greater interactivity between the onstage actors and figures in the film world.”[3]
Josef Svoboda explored the opportunities of using film in a theatrical context, taking the experiments of Russian avant-garde movement further on.
Intermedia / multimedia American performance
In the USA, video projections receive an important role starting with the 1960’s, when the intermedia or multimedia performance begins to develop; these terms describe a type of performance that combines a variety of media and a forerunner of performance. Intermedia performance was set on testing the limits and the specifics of arts it put together: “Performance was not exclusively related to the canvas: the cross-fertilization between theater, dance, film, video and visual art was essential for the birth of Performance art.”[4] A famous example is the collaboration established between visual artist and painter Robert Rauschenberg and the choreographers Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay and Steve Paxton, with which he worked on a number of projects.
Intermedia artists worked intensely with video projections, due to their increasing popularity in the 1960s, following the development of capturing and image manipulating techniques. Projections were of interest both for visual artists of the time, and for choreographers.
The intermedia performance is a special kind of work, as it implies different coordinates in relation to theatre: in comparison with a theater play there is no dramaturgy and no narration, as the makers’ preoccupation is to bring different media elements (dance, painting, virtual image) into a common context and to play with the role that the audience takes in this construction.
The preoccupation for synchronizing the used technology and the available technology led to some experimental performances anticipating the interactive performance of the 1990’s, where sound is produced in real time by the computer. The technology itself generated the concept of performance: “It was the artists’ delight in the possibilities of the new technology that became the main event.”[5]
A landmark event of that time is the performance Open score created by the visual artist and painter Robert Rauschenberg at Armory. The room was used as a tennis court by players Frank Stella and Mimi Kanarek. A miniature FM transmitter was placed inside the tennis rockets, together with a contact microphone, communicating with the speakers in the room; every time a rocket hit the ball, the sound was amplified and one of the 48 bulbs which were lighting the space was turned off. When all lights were off, an infrared video camera projected images of the audience on 3 screens in the room. The last part of the performance consisted in Simone Forti’sinterpretation of an Italian love song, as Robert Rauschenberg carried her around the Armory, putting her down in different spots.
Carolee Scheennmann is yet another artist that embraced enthusiastically the use of video. Snows, an installation inspired by the horrors of the Vietnam war, used the juxtaposition of several films, overlaying terrifying images from Vietnam with a winter landscape. Starting as a body artist, Scheennmann is one of the many American artists that started using video in the effervescent 1960’s, experimenting the flexibility of the medium, which encouraged the artists to use its possibilities of manipulating the image fully.
For the theatre theorist Béatrice Picon – Vallin, intermediality is a more appropriate term for describing underground performances in the USA, as it involves a preoccupation for the dialogue between different media that work together in the context of a performance, rather than for the effect of this process on the audience : “il est dommage que le terme intermedia ait remplacé avec le terme multimédia, car la première expression […] paraît impliquer l’interaction profonde plutôt que l’éclatement spectatoriel.”[6]
Conclusions
All the examples provided above illustrate the use of experiment as a basis for the sculpt stage images according to the principles of cinema and to incorporate virtual images or film images into a production. Video has been an adjuvant of makers since the beginning/its invention, as it helps to create an effective set design or gives infinite possibilities of combining spaces.
Both theatre makers and performance artists used virtual images, throughout many decades. A boom, as in a moment of maximum visibility, cannot be identified. As technology evolved, more sophisticated forms of virtual images usage emerged. An inflation of video images can be also observed on the contemporary Romanian theatre stage.
We can affirm that using virtual images on stage derives from an impulse for experiment of production makers, willing to push the conventions of classic productions, that used a stage à l’italienne, and to transform theatre stage in a contemporary space, in the sense of space that continuously adapts to the reception paradigm of contemporary audience.
From the concept of cinefication of theatre (Meyerhold) to the interest in editing as a vector for artistic communication (in film or theatre), with influences steming from visual arts (Svoboda, Rauschenberg) or performance (Scheennmann), virtual images has always been a model of manipulation and flexibility of the artistic space (whether it is a theatre scene, an art gallery or an unconventional space).
Bibliography
Giesekam, Greg, Staging the screen. The use of film and video in theatre, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007
Picon-Vallin, Béatrice, Les écrans sur la scène, L’Âge d’Homme, Collection Théâtre XXe siècle, 1998
Rush, Michael, New Media in Art, Thames & Hudson, 2005
Web bibliography
http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/
Annexes
Polyekran – Josef Svoboda
The performance Open Score of Robert Rauschenberg
Snows – an installation by Carolee Scheenmann
Notes