Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1967 - 54

Certainly the use of technology reveals something about
what we think of human values. That concerns me greatly. I
find that what it implies as far as human meaning is concerned in theatre is frightening to me because it is cold and
inhuman-a certain kind of 1984 world that I find frightening.
WILFRED: I would like to contrast two productions that I
have been working with. I come from Denmark, you may remember. In 1907, when I was in college, I took it upon myself to produce a play with no wall outlets. We had no electricity. There were seven characters in the play. I picked ten
boys from the group. I gave each of them a powerful flashlight and a piece of cardboard and each actor had his own
light man who could follow the actor and, by moving the
cardboard slowly away from the flashlight, bring up the light
or dim it down. I had ten of them because one had the job
of pointing his flashlight to the white ceiling, thus giving a
diffused light over the stage at times; but it came and went
gently and slowly.
I assure you that production lives in me because all of them
worked together as a team, the Iight men with actors. The
light was alive.
Now, let me take another play. I did it with Thomas Wood
Stevens at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. This is Ibsen's
Vikings at Helgeland. The Vikings, in two groups, meet on
the coast of Norway on a promontory. The ocean brings
them in. Now, how do you begin a visual selling for a
thing like that? The dawn appears over the ocean, and the
ocean should have the first word. I opened the curtain in
darkness, and I began with a long, rolling breaker far out,
projected, and another and more; and then slowly, you got
a sequence of lights and a boat house necessary for action.
Only then, the first lines were spoken. However, in the two
or three minutes that had preceded, I took my own good
time to create an atmosphere for the beginning of the play.
In the second and third acts, we have the inside of the
Viking Hall in Norway. Now, where is the light? Right down
front stage, I had a one-foot parapet going around, looking
like a central fireplace. In that fireplace, I had eighteen projectors, approximately. From the keyboard of the Clavilux in
the orchestra, I could direct flickering light on any actor
within that room, and also I could change the tempo of the
flicker. There were moments when the entire hall was alive
with light and then a moment when Guna rushed out to kill
Toro. Things happened outside. There was suspense. I made
everything stop in its tracks, and all of the flickering died
away. It was static glow, expectation; thus the fire became
an actor. We also had the ride of the dead men to Valhalla.
Well, that has been overdone so much in the opera that I
tried to do something else. Everything I had in the play began from stage right to stage left. All the drift of clouds, all
the movements of things, all the roll of the waves, were
from right to left. Then the ride of the dead men became a
rolling mass of clouds, with flashes of fire from the other direction, the only contrast in motion, and those Vikings who
had been standing so far apart, and so self-important, I moved
them in because they were suddenly face to face with the
supernatural, and for the first time they did not feel so
confident of themselves. They stood there, and these
"things" swept by.

BOWMAN: I think that this is a good time to take a break.
[Recess]

BOWMAN: After a carefully planned fifteen-minute session, we have decided we would like to develop Mr. Glenesk's statement made some
minutes before the break. Would you like to rephrase that point of view,
Mr. Glenesk 7
GLENESK: I am concerned about the people, the social function of the
theatre, as well as the social function of the church. I think that in many
areas they match, iust as in the arts and in technology, both the artist
and the technologist have an element of techne in them. It seems to
me that in New York alone we have the question of why we have empty
theatres, with sometimes very good work going on. Also of course,
there is the other question of empty churches (where maybe not such
good work is going on. I don't know).
ARMSTRONG: It's at least of equal caliber.
GLENESK: If we had some of the talents of some of the distinguished
gentlemen here working in the sanctuaries, it might pull up some of the
attendance in the pews. In any case, it is important to use some of the
ideas that have been around in my tradition in asking some of the basic
questions that people are asking and want to involve themselves, and
feel and encounter and to be on the receiving end or the feedback end,
as audience or as congregation or as assembly, or what have you.
Now obviously this is not happening, or they would be packing the pews
of the theatres as the Greeks did or the people in the pit. They are the
people that I am interested in. I am wonderi"g why this is not happening.
BOWMAN: It was E.K. Chambers who grubbed about in the records of
the church about medieval times and determined that, at some point during the Fourteenth Century, there was a Corpus Christi celebration in
which six people were trampled to death. It is that kind of involvement
that you had in mind.
SNYDER: Why is it happening outside of the theatre? The reason it is
happening in the dance halls and in the parts-outside of the establ ishment-is because most of it is happening with younger people, and
younger people are more interested in a very different kind of mystical
sense experience. It is an involving experience, and it has to reach them.
This is a level which they can appreciate without necessarily intellectually comprehending the message. The message is essentially non-intellectual. It is a message which is experiential.
LEE: The theatre, the "New York" theatre or the "contemporary" theatre, is not performing a social function. It is a kind of in-group; and
when the theatre doesn't have social function and when young people
and middle-aged people are not really interested or only vaguely inter·
ested, then the theatre is in that state when even the most perfectly executed opening of a curtain "ain't going to make it." People are not
going to come and see it, and it is not going to make theatre.
KLUVER: This morning in the technology seminar a few men who were
interested in building theatres were talking about the theatre as an object. I found this quite frightening. Theatre will die if that is what it is.
Some of them made the suggestion that there are new materials with
high strength-weight ratios on the market today with which you could do
things, but people did not seem to want to listen. You can build theatres
with honeycomb materials, all these new steels, and so on, which could
have a fantastic shape and form, and where the whole thing is treated
as furniture. The point about the technology today and the way we can
move around is that we have so many possibilities, and we should make
use of them. We should avoid setting up a frame that is so rigid that
we can't make use of it. Maybe tomorrow, we will want a rigid frame
again, but it seems to me that today we should enjoy this freedom that
we have. We should make this freedom possible in a few of the theatres that are being built in all of these cultural centers.

Then, I ended the play with three or four rolling breakers
before darkness fell slowly-an important contrast-and the
curtains closed on darkness.

REI BACK: I would like to suggest that there is a theatre outside of the
theatre that contributes by its mere presence. People coming to this
theatre may hear others who have come say, "I am involved in this as
a human being. You are going to broaden my consciousness, not necessarily with drugs, but with what you are going to show me; and what
you are going to show me need not be an entertainment, need not be
an intellectual experience or an experience, but just something that I
can enjoy and which will enlarge my feeling as a person." Now this experience, while mystical and introverted, is consciously to the good of
the person.

Now of the technology in these two productions, the one
with the flash lights and the Viking one, you can take
your choice.

In the Lumia theatre of Mr. Wilfred a person can go in and be fascinated for hours by what he sees and by his own interrelationship with what
he sees. I noticed in a show held at the Howard Wise Gallery that
many people would stop and watch for hours at a time; they were relat-

Iusm I THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

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