Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1970 - 16

city lights of any kind. Even in the country,
a road will be lit in a certain way.
Applying this concept to the theatre,
Rauschenberg would open the back curtain.
The asbestos would go up on silence, and
the light that he employed was all those
wonderful work lights which as theatre technicians we all work with and live by. If you
ever sit out front and look at them, you get
some marvelous shapes, and direction. Instead of the hard theatrical slam of the
stage lights, you had something soft. We
never did the piece the same way twice.
Sometimes I used cue cards, and gave
them to the electricians, but more often I
called it as we went along and used moving
lights. The image suggested was car lights
on the highway in the middle of the night
far away. All of this added up to a total
stage presentation that most people found
amazing. Now they find it more commonplace since it is used frequently.
It is interesting to note that Winter
Branch only works really well in a proscenium theatre. Its impact is one of exploiting
space to an audience that sits and cannot
see the performance and reacts in a certain
way because it expects to be able to see a
performance.
As another step away from performing
in theatres, Cunningham began to do what
he calls a museum event, and later something he calls a gym event. The first museum event was in Stockholm. The audience
was invited in at the beginning and found
dancers among the statuary, warming up or
rehearsing .. Then they began to dance. He
never tried to say "Now we're going to do
a piece called Place." Instead he took the
dance ingredients that he had already created-the trio from one dance, a solo from
another-and he splintered it all over the
space so that the audience found themselves
surrounded.
A gym event is another thing that we
discovered was very useful in college theatres where the stage was tiny. Many campuses have beautiful gyms, and the spaces
are always magnificent. Merce again found
that his best work was not entirely successful with respect to certain repertoire pieces,
because they were designed to be looked
at in a theatrical way. Again he took his
pieces, scrambled them, and made a whole
new event for the occasion. He did this by
either patching up the dance, or doing an
entire new dance called How to pass, kick,
fall, and run.
For example, a gym in a school usually
has baskets along the side of the court.
Under each of those baskets is a blue
circle. Instead of saying to the dancers,
"This is stage right and this is stage left,"
he says, "There will be base A, S, C and
D." The first part of the piece might be

someone running and doing movement from
down left to down right. The dancers move
from base A to base C with the diagonal
being the front. Then, as they turn to run
back, the front is reversed. The dancers
have only one rehearsal and perform the
same night.

Model Railroad has a wide variety of materials designed for model-making, which,
when expanded or purchased in large quantities, can be interesting for stage purposes. My role in this organization is to
take all the insanity that everybody wants to
put on the stage and try to make it work.

Suddenly there was a new kind of amazement. I turned on the mercury vapors they
used for basketball games, and there was
the kind of white Iight that is so flat and so
non-theatrical and makes them look so naked.
I thought it would look awful, but when I
looked again, it was amazing because the
difference between audience and dancers
had vanished. There was no difference, no
separation between the guy sitting in the
bleachers and the dancer out here, except
that the dancers were moving. They were
not pretending that it was about Mary
loves John. It was simply movement happening in space. It showed again how
flexible the dance is, and how many different ways it can be performed, and how
worth while it is to examine the situation
you are in with a fresh eye to produce
something that may surprise you and may
make the experience exciting.

I have to worry about fuses, wires, projectors, lights, light boards, buses to fit it
all into, and much more.

THE TECHNICIAN
AS ENGINEER
Michael Rabbitt
Technical Director,
University of Delaware

y function is to act as a service organizer to the dancers, lighting designers,
set designers, choreographers, theatre
managers, janitorial staff and everyone else.
I'm the one in the middle, who has to satisfy a variety of diverse requests, and try
to translate them into physical reality. To
this end I have to be almost an encyclopedia of where to go, how to do it, and
what to put together to make things happen.
As technicians, we have to explore materials and methods with a slightly jaundiced
eye. Take any device that has been created
for the use of mankind, and I'm sure we
can find a new use for it, or reshape it into
another function. We, also, have to look
at materials as usable devices to create
an environment. What we are working with
on the stage is an environmental system.
I find that one of the handiest things to
use is an architectural file. You can go
through it and find materials that no stage
supply house knows anything about, much
less, how to use. I also explore the various
architectural and scientific magazines. I go
to Scientific American quite often, and to
home craft and wood-working magazines
with their odd-ball tools, and equipment.

Like most drama departments where the
training programs are concerned with traditional theatre, we are concerned with someone who can work spotlights. We are concerned with standard sound systems. We
are concerned with how to build a flat.
What we should be concerned with is
strength of materials, basic chemical engineering, optical engineering, photography,
biological sciences, and the influence of
all this on the human body.
As theatre technicians we often concern
ourselves with the engineering approach as
well as the humanities or the traditional
approach. I have found that engineering
training for a theatre technician gives him
a second way of looking at things. He can
approach a problem that would baffle an
ordinary theatre man, and offer a new approach. Somebody wants a platform suspended in the middle of nowhere with no
visible support. We can approach this, perhaps, with certain welded aluminum systems. Or we can approach it from a system
using monofilament lines and suspension.
Or we take a series of materials and form
a special structural system, provided we
understand the strength of the materials
and the structural relationships.
What I look for in theatre technicians, is
wider training and a wider background in
other arts in addition to the humanities. I
call these arts the engineering sciences.
Most engineers have a way of looking at
their field that is precise, cold, and logical.
I know there is a lot of subjective work that
goes into engineering, a lot of design and
thinking on the subjective level before one
can arrive at a solution to a particular problem.
The question we have raised today with
respect is projectors and similar equipment
is to me a catalogue problem. For the type
of thing we did today, the choreographer
will come and say I want fifteen types of
slides. What I have to do is research into
what the slides are, what I have to shine
them on, and the like. The same goes for
lighting equipment. I know the problem of
what to light on the stage, if I can go out
and pick it out of catalogues. Another area
of interest is the creation of environment,
manipulating the seeming space that you
are in by manipulating materials. To do this
well you need an engineering background.

I]illD THEATER DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

OCTDBER.1970

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