Visual Accompaniment in Light

Adolphe Appia, the first important pioneer in stage lighting, writes in his Die Musik and die Inscenierung (1899) about the forest scene in "Siegfried": "We must no longer try to create the illusion of a forest, but instead the illusion of a man in the atmosphere of a forest. When the forest trees, stirred by the breeze, attract the attention of Siegfried, we, the spectators, should see Siegfried bathed in the moving light and shadows and not the movement of rags of canvas agitated by stage tricks." With the invention of the clavilux the projection and control of three-dimensional form in motion has become possible and this instrument was used in the production of Ibsen's "The Vikings" at the Goodman theatre, Chicago, in March 1928. Each of the four acts began and ended in complete darkness and out of this forms and figures were lifted only as they were meant to occupy the attention of the spectator. The second act, a nocturnal ban quet of vikings in a Norse hall, was lit entirely from a battery of instruments in the central fireplace, and mobile firelight, slightly stylized, followed the action, constantly bringing out areas of importance while subduing all else, increasing and decreasing in intensity and tempo and retarding only once into a static glow to intensify a moment of suspense. The light conditions changed so constantly during the entire act that the player was unable to lift his hands from the light-keyboard for a single moment. The ride of the dead warriors to Valhalla, generally obtained in opera by moving lantern slides, was here done as an abstract essence o blackness galloping toward light amid flashes of steel and blood.

Thus lighting, having assumed equal importance with music in the theatre, will need a new type of creative artist whose main task will be the fusion of the movements of actors and groups with the space surrounding them in such a way that the two come to form a mobile, at all times perfect, frame around the spoken word. The lighting of static settings and the more or less inde pendent "flooding" and "spotting" of the actors will give way to the one difficult problem : the aesthetic treatment with light of mobile form in space.

The New Stage.

It is probable that such progress will greatly simplify the mechanical requirements of the stage of to-day, at the same time permitting such freedom as the gradual change from one scene or act to the next without a break or a single mechani cal operation. The new stage in its simplest form would then merely consist of a raised platform in front of a large white sur face. No proscenium or curtain would be required as the proper use of light would frame each scene and darkness mark the be ginning and end of each chapter of the play, the conventional division into acts and scenes no longer being necessary. Such a stage has been evolved by the American designer, Norman Bel Geddes.

It will be well for those who are to build the theatres of the future to reflect over Appia's prophetic words, uttered in the clos ing years of the last century : "An object or an actor takes on a plastic quality only through the light that strikes it, and the plasticity can only be of artistic value when the light is artistically handled." (See also LIGHTING AND ARTIFICIAL ILLUMINATION : Lighting in Practice.) (T. WO