Thesis
Technology in Theater
Back in the misty mists of time early man gathered around the communal fire.
As they told stories, men and women used the highest technology of the time, fire, as an aid in their storytelling. Perhaps they used fire to illuminate and give life to the images of animals they drew on the cave walls.
The Ancient Greeks used various forms of stagecraft in their dramas, most notably the Deus ex Machina or "god from the machine" in which an actor portraying a god would be lowered to the stage by means of a crane in order to resolve a conflict in the plot. In Medieval Mystery plays, gunpowder was used to represent the devil, even to the point of rigging an actor's costume so that fire would shoot out of his bodily orifices1.
By the 16th Century, Italian set designers had developed the use of flat scenery to depict various backgrounds. Within the next century, Opera became popular in part because the use of technology turned what had been an upper class/intellectual art form into a popular spectacle. 2 I know that I personally was never interested in Opera until I actually attended a performance of "The Barber of Seville" at the Metropolitan Opera. As one scene changed, a house rotated out of the way and a donkey cart with a live donkey rode across the stage.
In the 18th Century, it became possible to have a sky moving across the ceiling of a theater. Mirror effects were used, for example to project the image of a ghost onstage3. By the end of the 19th Century, around the same time the motion picture arrived, the limits of representational reality in theater had been reached and the concept of Naturalism began to appear. Sets became simpler. Actors stopped directly addressing the audience. The plane that the audience viewed was seen as a "fourth wall" that could be ignored by the actors.
In the 1920s, Constructivists such as Meyerhold sought a non-representational arrangement of playing space that celebrated technology and the worker. Expressionist theater attempted to use abstraction as a means of conveying an emotion or idea. Karel Capek's 1921 play RUR, which coined the phrase "robot", was also the first play to use a motion picture projection as a scenic element.4
By the time Television appeared, theater had become somewhat conservative in its use of technology. At the same time, innovative art movements such as "Happenings" and Fluxus attempted to use video technology to express their ideas. The theater stopped being the only place that dramatic theater could take place. An example is the staging of Whitman's Prune Flat at a film studio, the Filmmaker's Cinematheque in which images of actors were projected onto themselves.5
With the widespread use of computers, theater has adopted new technology. At first used as a method of handling stagecraft, computer media is now used as part of the performance process. Recently, the concept of "Digital Theater" has arisen, defined by Wikipedia as "the coexistence of "live" performers and digital media in the same unbroken space with a co-present audience."6 Digital Theater is generally seen as having narrative content to differentiate it from Performance Art, which seeks to provoke the user into exploring an artistic statement. Digital Theater is also defined as taking place in a single location as opposed to "Desktop Theater" which includes web-based role-playing, games and collaborative storytelling.
The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre is one theater company that has endeavored to use computer technology as an integral part of their productions. Initially, the company used computers as a way to visualize productions before building costly sets. Now The Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre has been experimenting with what it calls "digital puppetry," which involves the combining of computer generated images with a live performer to create a new dramatic entity7.
The Builder's Association uses video and computer graphics alongside live actors in order to bring out the complex relationship between humans and computers. In their recent production of SUPER VISION, The Builder's Association presents a series of vignettes on the theme of privacy in the digital age. Digital information in the form of numbers, words and graphs are projected onto the stage. Live actors communicate with virtual ones existing as digital video8.
Blast Theory, a UK based art and performance group, uses a range of media such as video, computer graphics and the web to tell a story. They have used video projections as a way to create sets that transform the context of the theater experience9. Their work has been described as closer to cartoon than theater.
The Wooster Group is known for using video and digital media in their plays10. Their aim seems to be to set up a kind of interaction with the dramatic text of the live performance. Sometimes the projected video reinforces the action onstage and other times it is in direct conflict.
Improvisational Theater troupe Neutrino uses digital video in order to construct a completely improvised movie while the audience watches. In order to do this, a group of actors solicits a suggestion from the audience and then disperses. The actors leave the theater accompanied by a technical crew who use digital video cameras to tape them performing scenes. The technical team then races back to the theater where they quickly edit the scenes together and present it to the audience11.
The theatrical duo of Kraft & Purver has experimented with using video in different ways. At times they project video as a backdrop. Other times they project images directly onto the actors to make a statement or set a mood12. Ed Purver is currently developing an interactive video system that enables an actor to control a video projection in real time.
These groups differ in their methodologies, but they all seek to use technology to enhance and alter the theater experience. It's too early to tell how much technology will infiltrate the somewhat conservative medium that is dramatic theater. But it's unlikely that the use of video and digital media will be just a fad. More likely is that these tools will take their place alongside stagecraft such as recorded sound and computer controlled lighting as methods of enhancing the theater experience and augmenting the powers of the actor.
I should add that comedian Drew Carey has been experimenting with combining comedy improvisation with graphics on television. However his program, "Drew Carey's Green Screen" achieves the melding of improvisational performance with the multimedia content by shooting performers against a green screen and then combining the Improv performance with animations in post-production13. What I am after is the production of a multimedia performance that combines disparate elements live before an audience.
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Copyright Henry Harvey 2006.