LIGHT AS SETTING
In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the
theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By
the first decade of the twentieth century it had become atmosphere.
To-day it is taking the place of setting in many Continental theaters.
To-morrow it may be part of drama itself.
In 1893 a Swiss doctor named Adolphe Appia published a little book in
French on the production of Wagner’s music-dramas; six years later he
elaborated his ideas in a volume published in a German translation as
_Die Musik und die Inscenierung_, the first and perhaps the greatest
book of theory on the new art of the theater. Among other things,
he discussed lighting at great length. He made a very important
observation. He noted that the lighting of the stage of his day was
hardly more than mere illumination—something to make all objects
equally bright and visible. It was quite as necessary, he believed,
to make certain objects more visible than others, and to make them
more living, more dramatic. At the time the lighting apparatus of the
theater was crude, because the electric light was in its infancy.
There were only small electric bulbs, arranged in rows for footlights
below and borderlights overhead, to supply flat illumination, and arc
lights, which were movable and could be made to “spot” out figures
more brilliantly. Appia recognized in these last the means for making
the figure of the actor brilliant and dynamic. With his eye on these
spotlights he made an unheard-of demand. He asked for shadows. He said
that light and shade gave three dimensions to the player and three
dimensions to the setting (provided, as he suggested, the setting be
made plastic instead of flat). By means of light he wanted to link the
living actor and the dead setting. He went further than using shadows
and animating the background. He proposed that the play of light
throughout an act should express the mood and action. He wanted it to
change with the development of the play. He made elaborate analyses
of the Wagner music-dramas to show how the light could play a part—an
active part—in the setting and the action.
During the next decade, the beginning of the twentieth century, an
Italian named Fortuny began the first practical work of progress
in stage lighting. Not very permanent work, perhaps, but certainly
valuable because it struck out in new directions. His devices have
all but disappeared from the German theater; but only because they
have been replaced by improvements along the lines he indicated.
Fortuny tried to improve the quality of the light by using indirect
illumination. He threw light from powerful arcs against colored bands
of silk, which reflected it onto the stage. This had two advantages.
The light was diffused and broken up. The color could be controlled at
a distance by cords that moved the various silk bands past the light.
Fortuny also tried to improve the surface on which the light fell. He
devised a domed silk sky or _Kuppelhorizont_, into which the greater
part of his diffused light was thrown, to be diffused still further.
Incidentally he hoped to achieve a better sky-effect. Disadvantages
hampered both his devices. Indirect lighting required far more current
than direct and created a great deal of heat. The dome was produced by
exhausting air from between two curved surfaces of silk, the outer one
fastened to a folding frame of steel; creases and joints showed in the
silk and air was likely to leak in and collapse the sky.
In the course of another ten years engineering ingenuity supplied
substitutes for both these elements of the Fortuny System. Most
important was the discovery of how to manufacture incandescent bulbs
almost as powerful as arc lights. Such bulbs, equipped with frosted
glass and glass mediums or color screens, could not only supply light
sufficiently diffused in tone and under easy control, but they also
produced the shadows, as well as the light, which Appia wanted. The
sky-dome became literally a fixture in the German theater when some
one decided to make it out of plaster instead of silk. To-day the
high-powered bulb and the plaster sky are everywhere in the German
theater. Schwabe in Berlin and Phillips in Holland have succeeded
in making bulbs of the enormous power of 3,000 watts or 6,000
candle-power, bulbs about three times as strong as any incandescent
lights used in America in 1922. The dome, or some variety of it, is
found in practically every German theater. Linnebach estimates that
there are twenty true _Kuppelhorizonts_, cupping the whole stage with a
curving dome; ten permanent _Rundhorizonts_, plaster cycloramas curving
like a great semi-circular wall around the stage; and thirty canvas
cycloramas which are quite as large as the _Rundhorizont_, and some of
which are so hung as to make a most convenient and efficient substitute
for either variety of plaster sky.
The most interesting and significant departures in the use of light
on the Continental stage have to do with this substitute for the old
backdrop. It began as an imitation of the sky, an attempt to put one
more piece of Realism into the theater. It has got to the point now
where its really interesting and important uses have nothing whatever
to do with realistic fake-heavens. It is being employed as a formal
element in a stage design, or else as a surface on which to paint
scenery with light.
Perhaps it was economy, perhaps a flash of genius, but it occurred to
the Germans that there was no particular necessity of lighting the
dome or cyclorama. In these huge stages it stands at least sixty or
seventy feet back of the footlights. It is possible, therefore, to make
it a dim emptiness by merely turning off the lights that ordinarily
shine upon it, or to give it some vague neutral quality from the light
upon the stage which is reflected onto the _Horizont_. In _Othello_
at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Jessner uses his cyclorama, an
ordinary canvas one, as a formal background bounding the space in which
his strictly conventionalized indications of settings are placed. Thus
it is in some scenes a pale neutral wall, in some a curious violet
emptiness, in others a faintly salmon background, in still another a
yellow light against which figures move in tiny silhouettes. At the
Volksbühne in _Masse-Mensch_ the dome becomes a misty void in one of
the dream-scenes; and then upon this void move vast, mysterious shadows
in circling procession.
Shadows on the dome carry us to a final development of lighting
in Germany—the “projection” of scenery, the substitution of light
for paint as a means of expression. Many minds have worked and are
working on devices to be used for this purpose, but the most important
mechanisms find their home in Dresden at the theaters of Linnebach and
of Hasait.
As might be expected, Linnebach’s is the simpler. He has a dome in
his theater, the State Schauspielhaus, and upon this dome or through
varnished silk from the back, he throws, by means of a very simple
lantern containing an arc light but no lenses, the designs painted on
glass. This lantern and the transparent method of projection were used
in America with much success by Lee Simonson when the New York Theater
Guild mounted Shaw’s _Back to Methuselah_ in the spring of 1922.
Linnebach has made the mountains of _Wilhelm Tell_ with projection and
the settings of Grabbe’s _Kaiser Heinrich VI_, and of the expressionist
dramas _Das Bist Du_, _Gas_, and _Jenseits_.
Hasait’s simplest method of projection brings you up sharp against the
true origins of the thing, and they are almost as old as drama. The
puppeteers of old Java had shadow-marionettes centuries before the
technical director of the Dresden State Opera made shadow-settings.
For Weber’s _Oberon_ and for Mozart’s _Zauberflöte_, Hasait provides a
plastic arrangement of inner proscenium and steps, with a translucent
curtain at the back. From one side of the curtain he projects a design
in shadows by means of a frame hardly two feet wide across which are
fastened various thicknesses of gauze. The light that comes through
the clearer portions of the gauze is one color, while from a light on
the other side of the translucent curtain he stains the shadows with a
second color. The hue of both these lights can be changed quickly or
slowly as desired, producing harmonies and contrasts of color.
The other devices used by Hasait for projection are embodied in
a scheme of stage equipment called the Ars System by the Swedish
company that controls the patents for its exploitation abroad. The
basis of the system is a canvas cyclorama. This cyclorama runs on a
semi-circular track hung from the gridiron high above the stage. At
one end of the track is a great roller upon which the cyclorama may
be wound up, to get it out of the way during an elaborate change of
scene. It takes only half a minute for the cyclorama to be run out on
the track ready for use. The track itself may be swung downward from
its two front corners to permit particularly large drops to be hoisted
or lowered; but it is wide enough and deep enough not to interfere with
the ordinary use of the gridiron. The cyclorama is made of common light
canvas, but it is so cut and joined, and hung on a slight slant that
it takes up of itself the bulges and wrinkles ordinarily produced in
our cycloramas by a change in weather. The invention of this cyclorama
is in dispute between those ancient but courteous rivals, Hasait and
Linnebach.
With this cyclorama goes an elaborate system of lighting manufactured
by Schwabe. There are floor lamps, contained in wheeled chariots, to
illuminate the bottom of the cyclorama. Above the proscenium opening
hangs a battery of different colored lights—seventy-two in the
Stockholm State Opera—which play directly upon the cyclorama, and three
high-powered bulbs to light the stage floor. Besides these, the Ars
System, as installed at Stockholm, includes three special projection
devices also hung above the proscenium, all the adjustments of which
are controlled electro-magnetically from the switchboard. One of these
is the large cloud-machine, an arrangement of two tiers of eight lamps
each, raying out from a common axis. These tiers can move at different
speeds and in different directions, while each lamp can be turned up
and down and sideways at will. These projectors each house a 6,000
candle-power bulb and hold a photograph or drawing of a cloud. The
complex motion of these static clouds when projected on the cyclorama
gives an effect of every-varying cloud formations. Almost absolute
Realism can thus be obtained. A second and smaller and less flexible
cloud-machine with a single central lamp and reflecting mirrors is, for
some reason, included in the equipment.
Besides these cloud-machines there is a battery of three high-powered
bulbs and lenses, by means of which designs painted on glass slides may
be projected after the fashion of a magic lantern upon the cyclorama
or any object on the stage. This is the really important feature of
the Ars System from an artistic standpoint. Its possibilities are
extraordinary. Harald André, chief _régisseur_ of the Stockholm Opera,
has experimented little as yet with this device, utilizing it only in
one ballet. But he has speculated much on the opportunities that it
presents for uniting a large group of theaters, similarly equipped, in
the exchange of scenic designs for the productions in their repertory.
André believes that the economy of projected scenery is important
artistically, as well as financially, because it will permit of
experiment with many new works at slight expense, and of the rapid
reproduction of the successful pieces in many cities at once.
From the absolute, artistic viewpoint of the effect obtained,
projection is most satisfactory, though as yet almost undeveloped.
Americans who saw the translucent projections of Simonson’s designs
in _Back to Methuselah_ realized how little these drops had the
visual disadvantages of the painted variety. They enjoyed a certain
incorporeal quality. The landscapes were not defined like huge oil
paintings in false perspective. They went into some new category which,
for the moment, defeated our analysis. Such projections may in time
take on the shallow pretense of painted backdrops, though I am inclined
to doubt it.
[Illustration:
_Das Rheingold: Valhalla._ A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti. The
gods are grouped in deep shadow on a conventionalized arrangement of
rocky levels in the foreground. The castle becomes slowly visible in
the sky beyond, built of beams of light, hanging in the air like a
great cumulus cloud. At the National Theater, Munich.
]
In the case of the Valhalla of _Das Rheingold_, as projected in
Linnebach’s production at the National Theater in Munich, the ethereal
quality of this kind of “painting” again stands out. The scene is most
successful when the lighting is dimmest. In the central portions of the
second and fourth scenes, when the stage is fully lighted, the image
of Valhalla holds its own against the illumination of the foreground,
but the foreground itself fails dismally to match the beauty of the
gods’ castle. When the plastic foreground is not to be seen, Valhalla
hangs in the heavens like one of the shapes of Wilfred’s Color Organ,
a thing that seems to have three dimensions. When the lights upon
the stage floor bring out the rocks of the foreground, Valhalla loses
the reality of three dimensions. It still seems truer, as well as more
beautiful, than the rocks in front. In fact it shows up pitilessly the
trivial canvas life of those boulders. But it loses the impression
of depth, which it had at first created. This was doubtless a false
impression, a foolish illusion.
The projected setting is certainly in another dimension spiritually
from those two ordinarily employed in old-fashioned scene painting.
It is not in any of the planes of stage-rocks or houses. It does not,
however, war with the human figure, curiously enough. It seems likely
that the artist or director using projected design must formalize his
foreground, as Simonson did, or else hide its commonplace actuality
in shadow. Ordinary stage pretenses cannot stand beside the spiritual
plastics produced by light.
As for the cloud-machine, so long as it is trying merely to reproduce
nature it is utterly unimportant. Something imaginative must be done
with it before it can expect serious consideration. In the productions
of André at the Stockholm Opera there are at least two hints that
the cloud-machine can be used for the purposes of art. One of these,
rather poorly managed, is the use of designed clouds instead of natural
clouds in one of the scenes of _Samson and Delilah_. The other, not
perfectly executed by any means, but most suggestive, occurs in
Verdi’s _Macbeth_. There in the first scene André sets a wild storm
sky in motion. He uses negative or black photographs of clouds instead
of positive or white, and he starts them moving from on high and at
the sides, sweeping in and down upon the witches. As these dark shapes
descend in tumult, it seems as though the black earth were drinking
black clouds, curious and evil portent of the powers of the infernal.
Movement in projection has obviously great possibilities as part of
the action of new drama. In Kaiser’s expressionist play _From Morn to
Midnight_, produced by the Theater Guild, Simonson used Linnebach’s
lantern to make the tree in the snow scene change into a skeleton, an
effect that Kaiser was able to foresee only as a shifting of snowflakes
upon naked boughs.
Light itself seems destined to assume a larger and larger part in the
drama. It is a playing force, quite as much as the actors. It can be
a motivator of action as well as an illuminator of it. Jessner at the
State Schauspielhaus in Berlin uses it as an arbitrary accompaniment
and interpreter of action. Lights flash on or off as some mood changes.
They create shadows to dramatize a relation of two men. They seem to
control or to be controlled by the action. The extent to which a change
of light may express the dramatist’s conception is most interestingly
suggested in the scene of Macbeth’s death in André’s production of the
opera. It is an uncommonly well handled scene in all respects, perhaps
the best example of this director’s fine imagination. The fight between
the armies begins in a gray light before the walls of Dunsinane. There
is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The
quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of
the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a
blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict,
then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see
their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd
clears for a moment. And then the grayness of morning breaks sharply
into dawn as evil goes out of the play. An obvious symbolism, perhaps,
but obviousness is not so great a failing in the theater. The fault of
the scene is only in André’s over-emphasis upon the light, or rather
his under-emphasis upon the cause of the light—the death of Macbeth.
At the moment when the light goes on, there should come some supreme,
arresting gesture, something to absorb every atom of our attention
so that we may wonderingly discover the light as a thing caused by
Macbeth, not by an electrician.
Such a scene suggests wide possibilities. Light as the compelling force
of a play; light as a motivator of action; light and setting, not as a
background to action, but as part of it, as something making characters
exist and act; light as an almost physical aura of human bodies; light,
therefore, in conflict. Physical contacts are not a necessity of the
theater. Under Jessner, the murderer of Clarence in _Richard III_ does
not try to seem to stab him; he simply plunges the dagger at him. That
is enough. In _Francesca da Rimini_ as Duse sometimes gave it, I have
heard that when the husband killed Paola with his sword the space
of the whole room separated them. It was as if the sword possessed
an aura, and as if the aura slew. In _Masse-Mensch_ the crowd of
revolutionaries go down to the mere rattle of machine guns before the
curtains are drawn to show the soldiers.
If light can do such things, even if it can do no more than signal the
downfall of evil or set Valhalla glowing in the heavens, it will take a
place in the theater that no other product of inventive ingenuity can
reach. Light, at the very least, is machinery spiritualized.