Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1976 - 17

For two other operas and a ballet Svoboda used
essentially supplementary, often abstract, projections with
more attention to traditional elements of stage setting.
The new variations created by Svoboda for these works
are hardly traditional, although certain prototypes from
his own earlier work may be recalled, such as Pelleas and
Melisande (1969) and As You Like It (1970), in which he
flooded the stage with projected color. Of central interest
in all these productions is the nature of the projection
surface. Crumpled wire screening was of great significance
in the two earlier productions, whereas in Tristan und
Isolde (Bayreuth 1974), Figures 14A & B, Svoboda made
a major advance in his use of stretched cords as a projection surface. He had used stretched cords before (e.g.,
the Wiesbaden Tristan in 1967, the London Three Sisters
in 1967, and Yvonne in 1970) but had either not
projected on them at all or had limited his projections to
occasional indications of locale. In the Bayreuth Tristan,
however, he based the entire scenography on a virtual
saturation of the cords by impressionistic, richly evocative
colored projections to capture visually the inner world of
Eros and Psyche that is the core of this most Wagnerian of
operas. Svoboda's previous work with stretched cords had
made him aware of certain optimal conditions, such as the
3/32" diameter of the cords and their perpendicular
placement slightly less than 1" apart in rows (minimal
four, ideally eight) a meter apart. Svoboda considers the
stretched cords, in principal, a new form of cyclorama,
one that has many advantages: it has no folds, it can be
walked through, the actor disappears as he walks through

it, you can light through it, and you can make it virtually
disappear when counterlighting through it at the proper
angle and intensity. Above all, it approximates threedimensional, stereo projection; in fact, Svoboda considers
it akin to a transition to holography. It is, he says, like
projecting into molecules.
A fol io cyclorama was used to enhance the sky effect
in Acts I and III, but was not used for the forest setting of
Act II. A dappled, autumnal, shimmering effect created
by real but soft-focused images of trees and vegetation at
the beginning of Act II establishes the real world. Then
this fades to more muted, more abstract colored textures
that blend into very dark beige, almost black tones, until
deep in the love scene a midnight blue begins to dominate
and evolves into virtual black again, with occasional
extremely subtle abstract shifts of tone. In Act III the
single most important scenic element is a tree, and
Svoboda used a new technique to create its crown. A
cluster of shorter cords of irregular length, weighted by
pieces of metal of the same diameter as the cords, was
lowered in front of the other cords, and these shorter new
cords received special pointillistic images that Svoboda
hand painted on glass for the projection slides. At the end
of the opera, to suggest the lover's transcendence of the
world, Wagner has the tree disappear, an effect accomplished in this production by changing the nature of the
light on the shorter cords. First, the intense light beams of
four additional projection units (with only light blue
filters) were cast on the special cords, and then the
pointillistic slides from the four original projectors were

Fig. 14a. Tristan and Isolde, Act II. Photo by Josef Svoboda.

USITT

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

SUMMER. 1976

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