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23 Lisa Philips, “Architecture of Endless Innovation,” in Frederick Kiesler, exhibition catalogue, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art & W. W. Norton & Co., 1989, p.16.
24 As Prieto López
points out, Piscator decided to commission Gropius after it became evident that working with Kiesler, then in New York, was not an option. See J. I. Prieto López, op. cit., p.160.
(thus suggesting the identity of both). Some people compared the movie-going experience at the Film Guild Theatre to “being inside a camera”.23
In 1927, in the wake of both Kiesler’s approach and the Bauhaus’ own theatrical aspirations, Walter Gropius’ Totaltheatre pushed the principles of dynamic scenography to analogous scales. Originally conceived for a project commissioned by Erwin Piscator a year before,24 the Totaltheater became a landmark reference in the history of “immersive theatre.” In Gropius’s design the stage scenery not only played a continuous role, but it also activated the rows of seats and the house’s structural elements, enacting the fusion of building and stage-house at the architectural level, and cast and audience at the social level. Different turntables could rotate both stages and rows of seats in multiple directions, redistributing the performance and the viewers in space. Passive and active structures blurred into one another: the public, willingly or not, was dragged into the movement of the whole. The workings of this architectural machine went well beyond the needs of theatrical performances, and offered a venue “for hosting political rallies, conventions, meetings,”25 whose protocols and formal features would have ended up being reshaped by the Totaltheater.
All these immersive, moveable, multi-theatrical structures display similar key features: at one level, the vision of a barely manageable totality where countless actions are happening simultaneously, performed by humans or machines or both in cooperation; and added to this, a reformulation of modern life as part of a vast contraption, which in turn becomes the environment for existence itself, within which Le Corbusier’s Wohnmaschine is but another gear in the machinery. In the theatrical enactment of this totality, there is no boundary between all these dramatic subjects, whose cooperation ultimately results in constant role-reversals. The archetype of this totality – and the object being multi-theatrically represented – is the City. Total Theatre in any of its forms is but a densely compressed scale model – synthetic miniature version, stage scenery – of the City.
Mention must inevitably be made here of Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), if we want a primeval image of that dynamic totality. Ruttman’s Symphony
25 Íd., p.171.
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