Walt Disney: Fulfilling the Dreams of the Modernist Avant Garde. An Essay.
For a lot of university students this is the first week of exams. I thought in honour of that I would share an essay I wrote where I connected Walt Disney to the Early 20th century Italian Futurists (as opposed to the "futurist" thinkers that Walt often gets connected with), Russian Constructivists and the Bauhaus art school. Long read, but it interested me, so maybe it will interest you.
The 1964 New York World's Fair featured five major attractions created by Walt Disney and his team of Imagineers: The Magic Skyway, Circlevision 360, The Carousel of Progress, it's a small world (sic) and Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln (Barrier ch.9). While each of these attractions were created to advertise large corporations such as Ford, Kodak and General Electric, to bring attention to foundations such as U.N.I.C.E.F or states like Illinois, it is my belief that these "shows" as they are referred to by the Imagineers (Chytry), represented a marked step in truly achieving the goals of modernist performance creators such as Edward Gordon Craig and Richard Wagner. I assert that the use of non-human performers is a crucial element to the creation of a unified theatrical experience and that the works presented at the World's Fair were an important step in line with the goals of modernist performance movements of the early 20th century. In this paper I will specifically look at it’s a small world (sic) and Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln in the context of the goals and missions of various modernist movements and artists, particularly the use of technology as central performer. As well, I will discuss the requirement of complete control over a performer and environment to achieve an immersive artistic experience aesthetic. I'll begin by considering the history of “constructed actors” as they are called in puppetry (Blumenthal 234). I will then observe some of the key players in the late 19th and early 20th century modernist performance work creators such as Richard Wagner, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Edward Gordon Craig. I will then compare my findings with the aesthetic of it's a small world (sic) and Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln based on my personal experiences as well as critical reviews of both of these presentations.
In Art of Theatre on New Media Platform & Audience Viewing Experience, the writers suggest that theatrical performance is among the worlds oldest art forms and continues to exist not only because of an ability to survive through technological change, but also because of an ability to adapt to and adopt these changes in technology. Similarly it has been suggested that theatre is a unified art form, drawing together many varied art forms. This level of unification of many disparate forms was believed by a number of artistic creators to require a complete control over all the facets of a production. One such creator was Richard Wagner. Wagner was a composer who called for live performance to be an experience where music, lighting effects, movement, acting and even visual art all worked combined (Salihbegovic 390). While Wagner was not the first person to propose and act upon this concept of unified theatrical experience, his idea of of Gesamkunstwerk or ’Total Theatre’ did deeply influence future artists. In his manifesto-essay The Artwork of the Future he described his goal as being an immersive environment where ‘the spectator transplants himself upon the stage by means of all his visual and aural faculties.' This level of control over experience was of such importance to Wagner that in 1876 he had a playhouse custom built for his production of The Ring Cycle. This playhouse allowed Wagner two things: complete control over the mechanics of the space and ‘democratization’ of the audience experience (Salihbegovic 392). Instead of a multi levelled playhouse as had been the standard, Wagner’s playhouse had only one level of raked seating. This ensured that the entire audience was viewing the production in approximately the same way with no divide of class as had been the norm. Wagner also demanded that the orchestra be hidden from sight as to allow the music to seem to be part of the world that the audience was being transported to through the design of the theatre. He called the space that was created between the seats and the proscenium the "mystic gulf" where the world real world became the world of the performance (Moore 5). In these performances music, environment and even changes of set would take a starring role while the performers would be asked to blend in with the set or even perhaps be regarded as less important. This can be seen in an example by Ulric Moore from a 1929 article from The Journal of Speech where he recounts the written stage directions: "Gradually, while Parsifal and Gurnemanz appear to walk, the scene changes imperceptibly from left to right." Moore goes on to describe an extremely intricate scene change seeing the characters move into the setting of a mountain. The grandiosity of these movements require performers to be very specific and consistent about their movements. It can be seen from these examples that Wagner's goal was, through specificity and a unity of all the artistic forms merged together to create an experience which his audience could deeply believe in. These ideas of Gesamkunstwerk or ’Total Theatre’, a unity of many performance forms continues to appear throughout the work of the early 20th century modernist movements.
Edward Gordon Craig is another such creator that was deeply interested in the concept of a unified performance experience. In Towards a New Theatre, a guidebook for a touring exhibit on Craig, Brian Arnott describes Craig as an english scenographer beginning around 1893 who felt that the state of lighting and scenography was bland and lifeless. Craig broke from the tradition of attempting to specify space through set by using grey draping on the edge of the stage and colouring them with pools of light. This effect, instead of specifically representing the space literally would suggest an undefined expanse that a performance can occur in. In Craig’s book, The Art of Theatre when referencing the difference between the performer, the colours of the space, and the and the rhythm of the music he writes “One is no important than the other, no more than one colour is more important to the painter than the other” (Arnott 13).
A key piece to be noticed in the description of these creators is that their focus does not lie with performers. In fact, the work that they did had performers blend in and be a part of the larger performance. In his essay the “early 20th century distrust of the actor.” Gunnar Sorelius asserts that these attempts to push a performer to the background were a hallmark of 20th century modernism. He then makes reference to the use of puppets in many modernist pieces as a way to eliminate a performer from the stage. He points out that the dramatists such as Wagner and Craig have an inherent difficulty in that they are speaking to the audience through another human, the actor. I sympathize with the worry that I assume these creators would have had: that the overall experience that they were seeking to deliver would be altered by the decisions made by an actor. One of the first ways to get around this issue was to give the actors unnatural movement or costuming that would force them into a particular way of performing. This was seen in performances such as the Bauhaus mechanical dances. In these dances performers were given mechanized and abstract movements and silver masks to put over their faces. These performers would have movements similar to mechanical objects that would also be brought out on stage with the intention of the essence of the performers meshing with the essence of the machines (Salihbegovic 396).
Through this, we begin to see the evolution of seamlessly merging the performer and the mechanical innovations of the time. The further evolution suggested is replacing actors altogether with a “constructed actor.” This term comes from the world of puppetry (Blumenthal 7). Though puppeteering has been an artistic practice for centuries, the marionettes of the early 19th century were not always suited for the challenge of creating a fully articulated performance. However, as Eileen Blumenthal points out in her book Puppetry: A World History, constructed actors are able to share the stage with human actors. As well, part human, part constructed characters were created through the use of masks. The Russian artist Vladamir Mayakovsky used masks and papier maché performers to present over the top or highly symbolic characters, such as the presentation of a 13 ft. high Amazon to play his girlfriend. With masks, Mayakovsky and his contemporaries were able to achieve a fully articulating character that was also able to immediately present a particular form via the face presented by the mask (McQuillen).
It is important to note that while these creators aimed for a complete and united vision of theatre performance, they continued to largely use live human performers. It was recognized that when an audience is presented with a puppet or a mask that an audience reacts in a different way than when they are presented with a living person. A puppet or a mask has the ability to change the way a person is perceiving what is before them. When a performer presents an audience with a created performer it is found that an audience will react with less familiarity, but also has the ability to have an audience approach that performer with fewer expectations of what their reaction should be (McQuillen). In my opinion, an intelligent and skilled artist can use this knowledge to obtain an effect they want, either by making an audience feel that they are observing something foreign and odd or by allowing an audience to put aside their preconceptions of what a performer should or should not be doing and be open to what the created performer is communicating. It is perhaps because of this realization that Edward Gordon Craig coined a new term for what he was seeking in an performer: Über-marionette. He said that “The über-marionette will not compete with life - rather it will go beyond it. Its ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in trance - it will aim to clothe itself with a death-like beauty while exhaling a living spirit”(Sorelius). Craig does not specify whether this statement defines a particular style of performance he is calling for from his actors or if he is speaking literally at created performers who not only inhabit the essence of human life but be more than a human can. My understanding is that in order to create the effect of unity in his productions, Craig is seeking to have a performer, be it flesh and blood or created, that can not only emulate human experience but heighten it by seamlessly being part of the performance space around it. Observing the fascination that modernist artists of varying backgrounds had with robotics and the merging of the actor and atmosphere of performance, I would expect that, had the technology been available, these artists would have leapt at the chance to evolve their masks and marionettes into mechanical performers. In a sense, a replacement for human actors.
Aside from the modernist aesthetic of the artwork of his films of the 1950’s (largely credited to the conceptual work of American artist Mary Blair) (Gormley), based on the research above it would seem that Walt Disney was deeply informed by the work of the Modernist movements for his non-filmic endeavours. In addition to being an animator, Walt Disney is regarded as an innovator of spaces and environments that are created with the intention of eliciting particular emotions from his audiences (Chytry.) At the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, Disney and his company of Imagineers created five presentations, all supported and presented by corporations, states or foundations. Michael Barrier in the biographyThe Animated Man: The Life of Walt Disney, quotes Disney as saying that the World's Fair projects were built “to benefit Disneyland”(ch.9). To that end, most of these productions, specifically The Carousel of Progress, Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln, and it’s a small world (sic) were built with the intention of testing out Disney’s wildest technological ideas at the expense of the sponsors producing them. The major focus of these technological ideas were his robotic performers, which he called audio-animatronics (Barrier ch.9). A hallmark of Disney’s parks and of the shows that were created for the Worlds Fair were the complete separation from the outside reality (Chytry). In his paper Walt Disney and the Creation of Emotional Environments Josef Chyrty refers to these spaces as “emotional environments.” Similar to Wagner’s playhouse or Craig’s grey draped sets, when a person steps into the space they are separated from the outside world and brought into a completely immersive world that could be whatever was required of the performance. Disney took these practices and implemented them deeply into the World’s Fair projects.
Two of these emotional environmental projects were Great Moments of Abraham Lincoln and it’s a small world (sic). I have experienced both of them. Abraham Lincoln is built into the space representing a theatre of the mid-19th century. A curtain opens and the audience sees a created performer in the image of Abraham Lincoln. He stands up in a very lifelike way, pushing himself off of the chair to get up and then adjusting his waistcoat. Disney had used the opportunity of the Worlds Fair to refine the technology to a specificity of movement that had not been seen before (Barrier ch.9). The Lincoln audio-animatronic surveys the room and takes a deep inhalation before launching into the famous Gettysburg Address. Patriotic music swells and the lighting becomes more focused on him as the speech moves forward and becomes impassioned, with lights, sound, and performer all acting as one. Despite the level of detail in his movements, no one in the room is under the impression that this is a breathing human being standing before them. As some of the criticisms of the time mention the figure is “obviously dead.”(Barrier) While “dead” is not my experience of the created performer, I agree that it is not the feeling of a living human, but something different. The performance that I witnessed is one that uses a created performer as a method to encourage a feeling of security, pride and optimism through the words, sounds and image of a man who invokes thoughts of patriotism. I believe that the audio animatronic in Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln is the über-marionette that Edward Gordon Craig spoke of; “not … flesh and blood but rather the body in trance.”
In contrast to Abraham Lincoln at the World's Fair was it’s a small world. With artistic design and execution headed by Mary Blair, bright and upbeat production draws from the colours and shapes of modernist art movements (Barrier ch.9). The front facade is a cubist representation of a castle. There is no attempt at naturalistic life in the vein of Abraham Lincoln. Instead the created performers inside have simple robotic movements presenting them swaying side to side as they sing the title song. A small boat carries the audience through the many small rooms that divide the space. Each room and the characters within it is intended to present the different regions of the world, the title song playing synchronized in a language of the region that each room is meant to represent. The created performers are no more the focus of the piece than the backdrops, set, lights or music that they are performing with. The feeling is bright and optimistic. As opposed to the Abraham Lincoln presentation where the audience had a singular focus, the Lincoln performer, small world surrounds its audience with stimulus, almost too much to look at in a single sitting.
I believe that Walt Disney was seeking to create a performance that transformed the space that it inhabited. Like Wagner and Craig before him, he understood that in order to have a united performance that matched with his vision he needed to understand and be able to specifically dictate what each moment of that performance would be, from performers to aesthetic. These creators understood that in order to have a consistency of vision and to be able to accurately represent the vision that they had, be it a physical recreation or an abstract symbolic representation, the use of created performers is necessary. Could Walt Disney have used an actor the play Abraham Lincoln? Of course. However, I believe that Walt Disney had a very clear vision of what that performance should look and sound like, and he wanted to offer audiences the experience of witnessing the Lincoln that they had seen pictures of stand up and deliver his words. To me, the greatest triumph of these animatronics is that we are still able to witness that vision of that character today, fifty years later. This search to offer audiences a united and and wholly immersive reality that entirely separates them from notions of our perception of reality and into these worlds of “emotional environments” is deeply aligned with the the the ideals of unifying all artistic elements into a single cohesive whole that was so prevalent in modernist performance art at the turn of the 20th century. Because of that I believe that instead of being remembered as spectacles created for the advertising of corporations that productions such as its a small world and Great Moments with Abraham Lincoln are achievements not only of technology but of the modern art canon.
Works Cited
Arnott, Brian. “Towards a New Theatre: Edward Gordon Craig and Hamlet” Ottawa: National Gallery, 1975. Print
Blumenthal, Eileen. “Puppetry, A World History” Abrams. 2005. Print
Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. University of California, 2007. Kindle file
Chytry, Josef. "Walt Disney And The Creation Of Emotional Environments: Interpreting Walt Disney's Oeuvre From The Disney Studios To Disneyland, Calarts, And The Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow (EPCOT)." Rethinking History 16.2 (2012): 259-278. Academic Search Complete. Web. 19 July 2014.
Gormley, Michael. "Mary Blair Painting In Hollywood." American Artist 76.827 (2012): 30-34. Art Source. Web. 19 July 2014.
McQUILLEN, COLLEEN. "From The Fairground Booth To Futurism: The Sartorial And Material Estrangement Of Masquerade." Russian Review 71.3 (2012): 413-435. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 July 2014.
Moore, Ulric. "Drama As Wagner Saw It: The Universal Art." Quarterly Journal Of Speech 15.1 (1929): 1-14. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 26 July 2014.
Nicoletta, Julie. "Art Out Of Place: International Art Exhibits At The New York World's Fair Of 1964-1965." Journal Of Social History 44.2 (2010): 499-519. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 July 2014.
Nissan, Ephraim, Ricardo Cassinis, and Laura Maria Morelli. "Have Computation, Animatronics, And Robotic Art Anything To Say About Emotion, Compassion, And How To Model Them?: The Survivor Project." Pragmatics & Cognition 16.1 (2008): 3-36. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 25 July 2014.
PARRINDER, PATRICK. "Robots, Clones And Clockwork Men: The Post-Human Perplex In Early Twentieth-Century Literature And Science." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 34.1 (2009): 56-67. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 July 2014.
Sorelius, Gunnar. "The Graveyard Scene In Hamlet As Puppet Theatre And Early Twentieth-Century Distrust Of The Actor." Shakespeare (1745-0918) 4.4 (2008): 367-377. Literary Reference Center. Web. 18 July 2014.
Salihbegovic, Fahrudin. "Multimedia Theatre Before The Digital Age." Scene (2044-3714) 1.3 (2013): 389-403. Art Source. Web. 26 July 2014.
Vinay Kumar, C. M., Chaturvedi Romesh, and Merhotra Shruti. "Art Of Theatre On New Media Platform & Audience Viewing Experience."Global Media Journal: Indian Edition 4.2 (2013): 1-20. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 17 July 2014