Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1993 - 32

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great ke.!'board for light lind space, so
objective and adaptable in character
that it 1V0uid respond to an)' imaginable vision ofa stage director; a flexible bui/ding, capable oftransforming
and refreshing the mind b), its spatial
impact alone. I
"In my Total Theater," Gropius continues, "I have rried to create an instrument
[this] flexible by the use of simple, ingenious mechanisms." Designed for Edwi n
Piscator in 1926, the Total Theater was
never built, initially due to the economic
collapse of Germ;ny in the late 1920s
and later by the advent of totalitarianism
which forc~d both Piscator and Gropius
to escape. The Gropius project has, of
course, stimulated thearre architects ever
sll1ce.
Stage designers in the middle 60 vears
of the twentieth centurv have had their
own stimulating influences to follow.
The work of the Swiss designer and theoretician Adophe Appia is well-known
particularly in regard to \'\fagnerian
music-drama. The performance space he
created for the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute
in Hellerau (near Dresden) and which
was in use during the years 1912-1914 is
also remarkable.
In this room there is no separation
between dancers and audience. The hall
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is descri bed as "vast rectangle wi th walls
and ceiling draped with white cloth."
The scenic elements at one end are all
standardized forms, all of them "moveable": steps, cubes, paralle!pipeds. They
can be rearranged as desired (although,
one may suspect, not as easily as with a
set of child's blocks.) The light in the
photographs looks shadowless. This
space for rhythmic gymnastics and dance
was to have a continuing influence on
theatre space in the rwentieth century. Is
this space the first "black box"?
nother decisive theoretician of the twentieth century is the
designer and writer
Gordon Craig; here
we want to note a
sketch from 1944 (see Figure 4), quite
late in Craig's career (tWO decades after
the body of his work had already been
most influential). The tirle of this sketch
is "how the performance emerges ... in
the beginning is the actor ... " \'\fe need to
look also at the famous sketch by the
Bauhaus artist Oscar Schlemmer, drawn
in 1924, which bears the tirle "the stage
as an empty space in which all possibilities are possible" (see Figure 5).
Such influences may be traced onward
into the influential Ford Foundation pro-

ject of 1962, The Ideal Theater: Eight
Concepts. The collaborators in this project were eight teams of architects and
theatre designers. The written introductions in the book published by the Ford
Foundation were prepared by the designer Peter Larkin and contain the continuing use of the descriptors "multiform"
and "modular." Indeed, almost all of
these projects were for "convertible" theater forms (as, for example, the project by
architect Peter Blake and designer David
Hays).
In the same year, C. Ray Smith, in
introducing "A Symposium on the
Multi-Form Theater" for the February
1962 issue of Progressive ~rchitecture
l\ lagazine, used the phrase 'ill/committed
space" defining this space as a "box room
that is not committed to any stage form,
but is provided with portable platforms
and seats to approximately any of the hisrorical stage forms or ro achieve new
arrangements." This is, I think, an early
use of the word "box" as a quintessential
element of physical thearre description,
and Smith's text may be said to convey
the essence of what today almost universally is called the "black box" space. The
thorough application of black paint or a
set of black draperies on the walls of this
box eliminates any influence of the existing architectural space. Unfortunately,

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1993