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.
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.