Theatre, Performance and Analogue Technology

Historical Interfaces and Intermedialities

Kara Reilly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137319678
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

This trans-historical collection explores analogue performance technologies from Ancient Greece to pre-Second World War. From ancient mechanical elephants to early modern automata, Enlightenment electrical experiments to Victorian spectral illusions, this volume offers an original examination of the precursors of contemporary digital performance.

Part I

Interrogating Historiography

1

Heron of Alexandria’s ‘Toy Theatre’ Automaton: Reality, Allusion and Illusion

Richard Beacham

The Emperor Nero (37 BC – AD 68) was notoriously known, as ‘imperator scaenicus’,¹ a patron and practitioner of theatre so excessive in his espousal that his personality and reign came to be seen (then and later) as theatricalism ‘run rampant’; wrought up to encompass painting, architecture, public ceremony, political rhetoric, and all manner of both public and private expression. Of course, with a performing Emperor, such a cult of theatricalism was endorsed at the highest level, and emulation (and condemnation) followed. Seneca lamented how ‘Throughout the whole City the private stage (privatum pulpitum) resounds; ‘it is danced upon by both men and women; wives and husbands compete over which displays a more sensuous thigh’ (Nat. Quaes. 7.32.3). Dio, recounting elite behaviour during the reign of Nero, notes dramatic performances, music, pantomimes, and choral presentations, enacted by people of both sexes and all ages, ‘everyone displaying to best advantage whatever talent they possessed, with all the most distinguished people … and everyone taking instruction for the purpose’ (61.19.2). Taking his show on the road, the Emperor undertook a grand tour to Greece, performing (and winning 1808 victories) in the cycle of sacred agons: great competitive festivals comprising (in addition to athletic contests) theatre, poetry, and music. Shortly after the scandalous ‘actor’s triumph’ staged to mark his victorious return, he was forced to take his life in an appropriately theatricalized suicide.

His advisor – and eventual victim – Seneca, in describing the ars ludicra² so fervently espoused by Nero noted ‘to this class you may assign the stage machinists (machinatores) who invent scaffolding that rises of its own accord … and many other surprising devices as when objects that fit together then fall apart, or objects that are separate then join together automatically, or objects that stand erect and then gradually disappear. The eyes of the ignorant are astonished by this; they marvel at all such sudden things, because they do not know the causes’ (Epist. 88.22).

In Alexandria, Seneca and Nero’s scholarly contemporary, the mathematician and engineer Heron, ‘got in on the act’, composing a treatise, the Peri Automatopoietikes, in Book Two of which he described how to construct, as an automaton, a toy theatre capable of presenting the scenario of a drama, Nauplius, through five separate scenic settings.³ Heron’s text survives from a thirteenth-century manuscript and four others, one from the fifteenth, the others from the sixteenth century.⁴ These contain, in addition to Heron’s Greek text, later copyists’ attempts to provide illustrations of the elements detailed by Heron’s original text. His text uses letters to identify the parts of the mechanisms he describes and their functional relationship, and these were accompanied by designs incorporated into the original manuscript, but for the most part severely garbled in the later copies. There is an English translation by Murphy (1996) and an earlier illustrated German translation by Schmidt (1899, 338–453).

The work has attracted relatively scant attention, with discussion focused either upon describing and understanding the very impressive working mechanics of the automaton itself – even characterizing it as one of the earliest examples of ‘programming language’⁵ – or the possible relationship of the scenario to a lost play by Sophocles or, alternatively, to works by other Greek or Hellenistic authors thought to have drawn upon the myth of Nauplius.⁶ The fullest surviving account of this is by Gaius Julius Hyginus (c. 64 BC – AD 17) in his Fabulae (116).

When the Danaans were returning home after the capture of Troy and the division of spoils, the anger of the gods caused their shipwreck on the Cepharean Rocks. They sent a storm and contrary winds because the Greeks had despoiled the shrines of the gods and Locrian Ajax had dragged Cassandra from the statue of Pallas. In this storm Locrian Ajax was struck with a thunderbolt by Minerva … When the others at night were imploring the aid of the gods, Nauplius heard, and thought the time had come for avenging the wrong to his Palamedes. And so, as if he were bringing aid to them, he brought a burning torch to that place where the rocks were sharp and the coast most dangerous. Believing that this was done out of mercy they steered their ships there. As a result many ships were wrecked, and many of the troops and their leaders perished in the storm, their limbs and entrails dashed on the rocks. Those who could swim to shore were killed by Nauplius.

(The Myths of Hyginus, trans. Grant)

Heron’s work is a remarkable and intriguing document, not just for the sophistication of the mechanical apparatus he describes in considerable detail, but also (although this aspect has been neglected) for what we may reasonably infer from it about ancient scenic practice and theatrical aesthetics. Scholars have thus far only touched in passing upon the possible theatre-historical significance of the work, and failed, I believe, fully to recognize the extraordinarily suggestive evidence it may provide for ancient scenic practice and dramaturgy.⁷ Another area suggested by Heron’s work and inviting further study are ancient concepts of visual and cognitive theory (for example the concept and practice of ekphrasis) and the intermedial relationships engendered amongst these and expressions of theatre and theatricalism, including Heron’s miniature stage.

Before exploring these topics, and by way of ‘headlining’ what I believe to be their importance, it is useful to remind ourselves of the accepted and orthodox narrative of European theatre history regarding the evolution of scenic practice, which is routinely and invariably cited in every major (or minor) work on the subject. Look wherever we will, and we read confidently and authoritatively stated that the use of perspective scenery (including moveable and changeable stage settings) to depict a unified stage picture contained within the proscenium arch ‘picture frame’ format first arose in Italy in the sixteenth century. Prior to that, medieval and early renaissance stages (including the Elizabethan) deployed a polyscenic stage of juxtaposition, in which scenic elements were dispersed (without regard to the creation of a unified stage picture) variously upon platforms, in a courtyard, market place, or church, on carts, or within a circular enclosure.

Following the advent of perspective scenery (introduced by Girolamo Genga and Baldassare Perruzi around 1513 and illustrated most comprehensively and influentially in Sebastiano Serlio’s De Architettura of 1545), a new type of theatre architecture rapidly evolved: the proscenium arch format. The earliest known extant illustration of such a ‘picture frame’ stage of monoscenic illusion is that of Bartolmeo Neroni deployed in 1560 at Siena for a visit by Cosimo de’Medici.⁸ The earliest changeable scenery probably appeared between 1556 and 1585. In due course this ‘Italianate’ theatre migrated throughout the rest of Europe, appearing prominently in Britain in the first decade of the seventeenth century through the medium of the hugely influential masque stagings of Inigo Jones in the Stuart Court.⁹ Its hegemony remained unchallenged until the early twentieth century when Adolphe Appia first ‘abolished’ the proscenium arch through his experimental work at Hellerau in which there was no barrier between audience and performers, and no attempt to create a ‘stage picture’ containing performers and pictorial scenery within an autonomous perspectivally fashioned space.¹⁰

This received chronology claiming to identify and chart the first appearance of what became the ‘iconic’ proscenium arch theatre is false. Heron described precisely such a theatre (in both its form and function) a millennium and a half before its subsequent reappearance in renaissance Italian courts. As I discuss below, he not only posited the ‘archetypal’ picture frame format, but gave details of other staging requisites including a space beneath the stage floor for the operation of the scenic apparatus; a ‘fly tower’ above for concealing and lowering scenery; the use of an upstage cyclorama to provide spectators with a ‘moving picture’; the deployment of both a backcloth and drop curtains; and a moveable ‘flat’ (in this case depicting the goddess Athena) which transverses the stage on a track: all elements traditionally associated with post-renaissance theatrical practice.

As part of the research undertaken better to understand the nature and significance of Heron’s treatise, and working in collaboration with an architectural student, Janis Atelbauers, I prepared a 3D model interpreting and representing as closely as possible what Heron describes in his text. At some points this required an element of hypothesis and guesswork, but such occasions were rare; to a remarkable degree, Heron’s description enabled us confidently to fashion and depict plausible and functional realizations of the scenic elements and stage architecture he described. Using these, we were then able to prepare animations showing how the Nauplius scenario he outlined would have appeared as it was enacted. These can be seen at:http://richardbeacham.com/projects.html.

We must begin our account and analysis by quoting in full Heron’s summary of the mise-en-scène fashioned for his toy theatre. At the beginning of his text on automata he gives a general account of how such a ‘toy theatre’ could present any play:

… a toy stage with open doors stands on a pillar, and inside it an arrangement of figures has been set up in line with some story. To begin with, the stage is closed, and then the doors open by themselves and the painted representation of the figures is displayed. After a little while the doors close and open again of their own accord, and another arrangement of figures, sequential to the first one, appears. Again the doors are closed and opened and yet another arrangement, which logically follows the one before it, appears; either this completes the planned story, or yet another display appears after this one, until the story finally is finished.

(2.1.1–4)¹¹

He later describes how Nauplius could be staged in the course of five scenes:

Scene by scene, it went like this. When the stage was first opened, twelve painted figures appeared, arranged in three rows. They were made to portray some of the Greeks repairing their ships and busying themselves about launching them. These figures moved, some sawing, some working with axes, some with hammers, others using bow-drills and augers, making a lot of noise, just as would happen in real life. After sufficient time has elapsed, the doors were closed and opened again, and there would be another scene: the ships would appear, being launched by the Achaians. When the doors were closed and opened again, nothing appeared in the theatre except painted sea and sky. After a short tim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Interrogating Historiography
• Part II Industrial Bodies and Dance
• Part III Performing Science and Technology
• Bibliography
• Index