Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2014 - 43

Reference photo of woman and slide
templates for body positioning when
making pose slides.
is a Mayrhofer catalog dated 1895, rubber-stamped "Universal
Electric Stage Lighting Company. Successors to the Mayrhofer
Stage Lighting Company." This booklet lists various items for
both optical and electro-mechanical weather, fountain, and fire
effects, alongside the productions for which they were originally created. On the final page, the following appears, almost
as a hasty afterthought:
Complete or Partial Outfits for
Electric Dance Lumineuse
Electric Skirt Dance
Rope Dance, etc., etc.
Contracted for.

Commercial opportunities
W. Kranz. This was no mere technical demonstration but had
been specially devised for the Urania Astronomical Society of
Berlin as a piece of theatre, reproducing a solar eclipse over
the Havel Lakes. Carnegie was so impressed that he invited
the inventors to use their techniques in the form of a protoscience fiction spectacular at his new concert venue, Carnegie Hall. All of the original scenery and special equipment
were shipped over from Europe, and the science popularizer
Garret P Serviss, author of the science fiction novel Edison's
Conquest of Mars, was commissioned to write a new script
incorporating lunar landscapes. Scientific American for April
9, 1892, described the show in great detail and heralded it
as a "triumph of science and scenic art." It was this event
which helped to convince many theatre owners and producers that the future lay with electrical power. Mayrhofer stayed
on in New York and established the Mayrhofer Electric Stage
Lighting Company with a new partner, W. L. Kilpatrick. In the
first few years the firm appears to have been somewhat peripatetic, finally taking up residence at the Star Theatre, where
Mayrhofer was able to employ the services of the specialist
tinsmiths, Anton and Johann Kliegl.
Despite Mayrhofer's celebrity and prowess as a lighting designer, it seems likely that he was no great shakes as a
businessman, and in 1896 the Kliegl brothers bought him out.
The earliest catalog-one of many in the Rubin collection-

Numerous newspaper accounts from the turn of the century describing both professional and amateur serpentine-dance performances refer to all manner of images, old and new, which
were cast onto white frocks, from the kind of spinning-pattern,
mechanical chromotrope effects used by lantern exhibitors in
the mid-nineteenth century, to new, simple, specially designed
images of flower heads, birds, and butterflies.
Soon the catalogs of established US-based lantern slide
suppliers, such as the firm of T. H. McAllister, as well as the
manufacturers of the new cinematographic equipment ( in particular the Joseph Menchen Company of Kansas City and New
York and the Harbach Company of Philadelphia) began to feature lists of particular images and effects for brand new forms of
projection performance. The most startling of these fresh ideas
was the cloak act, which employed the black-art techniques of
nineteenth century stage illusionists. The pose artist would venture onto a darkened stage, entirely shrouded in a big black
cloak. Standing center stage and accompanied by appropriate
mysterious music, she would fling open the cloak at intervals
to reveal a bright picture on the white lining. Then she would
quickly close it. When she opened it again she revealed a new
image, the lantern operator having swiftly changed the slide in
the few seconds allowed. The cloak artist usually wore a white
leotard or fleshings beneath her cloak. Sometimes the undulations of her own body would form a part of the picture. Alternatively, a demure second lining was displayed in front of the
performer concealing the body . One of the foremost exponents
of the cloak act was the French variety performer Juliette Lotty,
who billed herself as Mademoiselle Lotty. She toured throughout Europe, Australia, and both South and North America at the
turn of the nineteenth century and was acknowledged as much
for her own figure as the designs cast upon it. As witnessed by

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Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2014

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