Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Technology in the Twentieth Century (review)

Reviewed by: Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Technology in the Twentieth Century Kathleen Irwin Christopher Baugh . Theatre, Performance and Technology: The Development of Technology in the Twentieth Century. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. Pp. 262, illustrated. $26.95 (Pb). Christopher Baugh's fascinating study provides a comprehensive and stimulating overview of the impact of technology on the course of twentieth-century scenography. A scenographer himself, Baugh explores both the historical tyranny of established stage practices and the periodic renewal engendered by subverting these dominant forms. His investigation of how the stage functions as a place of performance and a technologically supported machine geared to generate meaning fills a certain void in the study of scenography. Beginning his examination in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Baugh addresses both the scenographer's desire to render, within the proscenium frame, an accurate representation of an outward reality and the obvious limitations of this problematic pursuit. Ultimately, the drive for a mimetic realism onstage was overcome by a search for psychological truth, erupting in what Baugh describes as a "millennial frenzy of artistic rejections and manifestations for change" (28). As scenographic practice evolved through the formative years of the twentieth century, the primary challenge for theatre artists became to articulate a relevant notion of theatrical space and to achieve a cogent representation of an inner reality within the material constraints of the stages of the time. Visionaries such as Craig, Appia, and Meyerhold did much to re-envision the look of the stage, and their efforts were fuelled by burgeoning technological innovations in lighting and hydraulics. Furthermore, through the [End Page 453] proliferation of the recorded image, new ways of comprehending time and place were formulated that affected scenographic vocabularies immeasurably. Questioning the very purpose of scenery as a mimetic device and the fundamental relationship of stage and spectator, their work exemplifies Baugh's claim that the history of the contemporary stage is the history of the rejection of former practices, aesthetic approaches, and ways of perceiving the world. Central chapters covering the iconoclasts mentioned illustrate the growing recognition that the real act of theatre takes place in the liminal space between stage and spectator—and that scenography is the space of "imaginative possibility" generated where the mind of the artist and the perceiving eye unite. Addressing Piscator, Brecht, and his designer Caspar Neher, Baugh evocatively analyses the mid-century shift in representational strategies across all disciplines, from a focus on materiality to one on action, social engagement, and place-related performance. Guiding the reader through the twentieth century, Baugh braids together changing modes of scenographic expression, aesthetic approaches, and technological innovations. For example, the struggle to produce sufficient incandescence to light the stage and seamlessly control the level, contours, colour, and quality of light provides insights into the scope of the experiments of Appia at Hellerau, Fortuny in Venice, Gray and Ridge in Cambridge, and Gropius at the Bauhaus. Rejecting the pictorial representation of scenic space in favour of architectural space (configured of neutral ramps, stairs, and platforms) and heavily supported by new technology, these designers illustrate the struggle to find an alternative scenographic identity and an entirely new aesthetic. The touchstone of innovative practice throughout this period became to define a scenic space that was fully integrated within the place of the performance, the architecture of the theatre—and thus to bridge the historic abyss between spectator and performer. In Czech designer Josef Svoboda, Baugh recognizes a singular artist who worked to address the antagonism between the movement of the plot and the immobility of conventional three-dimensional scenery, the central conundrum expressed earlier by Craig, Appia, Meyerhold, et al. Svoboda's focus on the total conceptualization of a production, the implementation of scenography in the fullest sense of that word, anticipated what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls postdramatic theatre, a term that efficiently covers a range of performance styles that do not necessarily take dramatic text as an initial or defining impulse. [End Page 454] Having explored the advent and explosion of technology over the twentieth century, Baugh asks an intriguing question: Why have so many contemporary theatre artists rejected formal theatre architecture and sought to locate new...

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