The occasion of this preface is not one to discuss the details of that new technique further than to suggest to the public, and to those critics who might be interested to make its implications clearer than the author and director of a production has time or opportunity to do, that the exacting time limits of presenting dramatically a theme involving many dissociated ages, through many hundreds of symbolic participants and leaders, are conditions which themselves impel the imagination toward creating a technique as architectural as music, as colorful as the pageant, as dramatic as the play, as plastic as the dance.
That my own work has attained to such a technique I am very far from supposing. I have, however, clearly seen the need for attaining to it, whatever the difficulties, if a great opportunity for democracy is not to be lost. To see that much, at a time when the vagueness of amateurs, however idealistic in desire, is obscuring the austere outlines of a noble technical art looming just beyond us, may perhaps be of some service.
As visual hints to the structure (Inner and Outer) of the present Masque, the charts here published may be suggestive to the reader. To the reader as such it remains to point out one vital matter of technique, namely, the relation of the dramatic dialogue to the Masque’s production.
Even more than a play [if more be possible], a Masque is not a realized work of art until it is adequately produced. To the casual reader, this Masque, as visualized merely on these printed pages, may appear to be a structure simply of written words: in reality it is a structure of potential interrelated pantomime, music, dance, lighting, acting, song [choral and lyric], scene values, stage management and spoken words.
Words spoken, then, constitute in this work but one of numerous elements, all relatively important. If no word of the Masque be heard by the audience, the plot, action, and symbolism will still remain understandable and, if properly produced, dramatically interesting. Synchronous with every speech occur, in production, effects of pantomime, lighting, music, and movement with due proportion and emphasis. Such, at least, is the nature of the technique sought, whether or not this particular work attains to it.
A Masque must appeal as emphatically to the eye as a moving picture, though with a different appeal to the imagination.
Because of this only relative value of the spoken word, there are many producers [theoretical and practical] who believe that the spoken word should be eliminated entirely from this special art of the theatre.
Artists as eminent and constructive in ideas as Gordon Craig, and many whom his genius has inspired, advocate indeed this total elimination of speech from the theatre’s art as a whole. For them that art ideally is the compound of only light and music and movement. The reason for this, I think, is because the sensibility of those artists is preëminently visual. Moreover, they are relatively inexpert, as artists, in the knowledge of the technique and values of the spoken word. Being visually expert and creative, they have, by their practical genius, established a world-wide school of independent visual art [assisted only by mass sounds of music].
For them this art has well nigh become the art of the theatre. Yet it is not so, I think, and can never be so, to that watching and listening sensibility for which all dramatic art is created—the soul of the audience. That soul, our soul, is a composite flowering of all the senses, and the life-long record of the spoken word [reiterated from childhood] is an integral, yes, the most intimate, element of our consciousness.
The association of ideas and emotions which only the spoken word can evoke is, therefore, a dramatic value which the art of the theatre cannot consistently ignore. It is chiefly because those artist-experts in word values, the poets, who might contribute their special technique to the theatre’s art, turn elsewhere creatively, that the field is left unchallenged and open to the gifted school of the visualists. The true dramatic art—which involves ideally a total coöperation—does not, and cannot, exclude the poet-dramatist. Shakespeare and Sophocles lived before electric light; if they had lived after, they would have set a different pace for Bakst and Reinhardt, and established a creative school more nobly poised in technique, more deeply human in appeal.