Mobile Theater Design

This book is an homage to that tenacious antagonism, not an instrumental document to validate the subsequent imitators of the Mobile Theater.

Although it is impossible to list everyone who contributed to this effort, there are some people who need to be mentioned by name. I would like to thank Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga for his continued help with this research, for his generosity, commitment, friendship and acuity. Thanks are also due to María Teresa Muñoz for her keen revisions of the manuscripts and our long conversations about the period it deals with. To Angela Kay Bunning for her excellent translation into English. To Ricardo Devesa, editor in chief at Actar, for his confidence in this project from the outset. To José Miguel de Prada Poole and Antonio Fernández Alba for our meetings and conversations about their work. To María and Diego Fullaondo for their warm generosity. To Antonio Cobo for his patient research and friendship. To Francesco Moschini, from the Accademia di San Luca, and Elena Tinacci, from the MAXXI in Rome, for their kindness regarding the reproduction of images. To Arnold Aronson for his valuable insight into Environmental Scenography in North America and for his pioneering work in the field. To Juan José Montijano for his contagious enthusiasm for popular variety theater. To Ken Turner and Tony Murchland for their warmth and sincerity in talking about their lives with a stranger. To Richard Schechner and Joanne Pattavina (Jerry Rojo’s widow), for their generosity with my requests. To Toni Martin for his availability to answer my doubts and questions. To Peter Sciscioli, from Meredith Monk’s Studio, for his kindness and great help. To Gerzy Gurawski for his complicity during a memorable phone conversation. To Antoni Verdaguer for his complicity. And to Raphael Chau, from Jeffery Shaw’s Studio, for his disinterested contribution.

Finally, I would like to deeply thank the many people from the libraries and archives I have consulted for their help over such an extended period of time. This book has been produced thanks to the funding provided by two research projects from the National Research Plan of the Ministry of Education of Spain: Expanded Theatricalities HAR2015-63984-P, and The New Loss of the Centre. Critical Practices of the Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene PID2019-105045GB-I00, but also thanks to the Schindler Prize, gained by my former student Elías Sancho de Agustin and myself, with Elías’s Thesis Project at the School of Architecture of Universidad de Alcala. I deeply thank Elías Sancho, the School of Architecture, and the support of Julio Arce and Rosa Amat, who lead this initiative of the Schindler Group Elevators.

MOBILE THEATER DESIGN BY JAVIER NAVARRO DE ZUVILLAGA FOR THE DEGREE FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION,

LONDON, JUNE 1971

Advisors: Charles Jencks, Keith Critchlow, Paul Oliver, Harrison Dix and Warren Kenton.

THE DISINTEGRATION OF THEATRICAL SPACE

JAVIER NAVARRO DE ZUVILLAGA

Transcription of the original text published in English in Architectural Association Quarterly, London, vol: 8, n 4, 1976. Pages 24-31.

The tradition of the poor, the theatre in its purest and quintessential form, is alive and well. This tradition proceeds from the very origins of theatre and has always shown itself with greatest intensity in those periods of history when the theatre has been attempting to seek out its own space, either because no theatres existed, as in the beginning, or during the Middle Ages, or because the theatre was restricted by conventional spaces, as happens nowadays.

It could be said the one thing which most strongly characterises current theatrical practice is that instead of creating theatre in an appropriate place or space, on occasion it looks for the appropriate space to perform particular types of theatre. This phenomenon, which could be easily mistaken for indifference towards theatrical space, is, in fact, not so. It is quite the opposite; it implies greater concern for theatrical space by considering that theatrical space could be anywhere— in an ancient or modern theatre, open air or enclosed, a sports arena, a square, a park, a factory. It is clear that in order to revitalize itself theatre needed to get out of theatres, although occasionally it returns to them with a new spatial approach.

Appia introduced this need at the beginning of this century. He said, “Let us abandon our theatres to their death throes and let us construct basic buildings, designed simply to cover the space in which we are working”.1 Through this manner of understanding theatrical space, it can be classified, using G. Canella’s definition, as Mobile Theatre.2 But just as Temple Theatre and Theatre Machine portray themselves in characteristic buildings with very concrete examples, in Mobile Theatre we come up against a problem. Whereas the Temple Theatre and Theatre Machine were conceived in a search for a new integrated theatrical space, Mobile Theatre is a response to a tendency towards the disintegration on theatrical space.

But why should theatrical space be disintegrating? It should come as no surprise at all to us after the toil of Appia, Craig, Meyerhold, Piscator and Artaud, to name only the most significant. All their work during the first part of this century had to bear fruit and the way I see it, this fruit is Theatre Machine which was gestating for years and whose development was interrupted by two world wars, and Mobile Theatre, which in its manifold forms is the most direct response to the ephemeral character of the theatre.

I would put it this way. “What is a theatre? It is a place where theatre happens. But what is theatre considered as an activity? Theatre is a representation of activities, of all the activities imaginable, that is to say, the representation of anything. But each and every one of these activities requires a space for its performance and this space

INTRODUCTION_ EXPERIMENTS IN SITUATION

The architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (1942) earned his degree in architecture from the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid. During the academic year 1970-1971, he travelled from Madrid to London on a scholarship from the British Council to complete his education at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. There, from September to July, he developed a project called the Mobile Theater, consisting of a stage mechanism made up of a series of carefully designed 8 x 2.5 meter trucks, which could be joined to form a space for performances or other collective uses, covered by an inflatable structure, with a total assembly time of six and a half hours for four operators. His design, exhibited and published internationally from 1971 to 1975, was never realized. In June of 1976, the project was rounded out with a brilliant and ambitious 15-page text called “The Disintegration of Theatrical Space”, published in the journal Architectural Association Quarterly, and an architectural adaptation, developed in 1974, of the original theater design for use as emergency housing instead. This valuable material has remained partially unpublished and has not been subject to detailed study despite its originality, rigor and cultural value.

This book aims to present a detailed portrait of the project and to situate it culturally in its time and place, London in 1971, where, after the events of May ’68, architectural counterculture took up arms on a series of very different fronts, from disciplinary retreat to guerilla positions, and under a broad range of ideologies. Navarro’s architectural design renders an account of those events, since its development over time extends beyond its conception as an artifact: its unsuccessful construction process resulted in an inner history that ran from 1969 until 1976. During that period, the Mobile Theater was presented by its author or exhibited in London (The Architectural Association School of Architecture 1971, 1974 and Slade School of Art 1972), York (International Youth Arts Festival 1971), Salzburg (Seminar on American Studies 1972), New York (International Theatre Institute 1972), New Haven, Connecticut (Long Wharf Theater 1972), Dallas (Dallas Theatre Center 1973), Madrid (Club Pueblo 1973), Tarragona (II Setmana de Teatre 1973), Barcelona (Museu del Teatre, Palau Güell 1973), Salamanca (Aula Juan de la Enzina, Universiad de Salamanca 1974), Málaga (Escuela de Arte Dramático 1974), Geneva (Salon International des Inventions, Second Gold Medal 1974), Vicenza (Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio 1975) and the 13th São Paolo Art Biennial in 1975. It was published in part in the following journals: Arquitectura, Madrid, May 1972; Architectural Design, London, January 1973; ABC de las Américas, New York, February 1973; Primer Acto, Madrid, February 1973; Jano, Barcelona, March 1973; Mobelart, Barcelona, June 1973; Arte y Cemento, Bilbao, July 1973;

Yorick, Barcelona, June-July 1973 and Architectural Association Quarterly, London, vol. 8, no. 4, 1976.

In 1969, Javier Navarro founded the Teatro Independiente de Situación (TIS), after leading a university theater group for a number of years. That experience culminated with the staging of a play called Experimento de situación during the cycle Teatro Nacional de Cámara y Ensayo at the Teatro Marquina in Madrid on May 31, 1970, just months before his departure for London. The piece, as recounted in the advertisement published in the newspaper ABC on that day, was based on the first act of the play Pictures from the Insects’ Life by the Čapek brothers, although no documentary evidence of it remains.

In a series of notes written during October of 1970 in London, Javier Navarro mulled over what he called Experiments in Situation, a hybrid piece that he was finally able to present to an audience at the Architectural Association on November 24 of that same year. In the format of a lecture performance, Javier Navarro, along with his collaborator for the piece, the artist Henry Gough-Cooper, presented his ideas to a group of professors and students from the Architectural Association, whose ranks included two of the most influential figures in English architectural culture at the time: Charles Jencks and Paul Oliver, who hosted Navarro at the AA.1 (Figure 1)

The title of that lecture performance was “Towards a Theatre of Situation”, and the event compiled many of the spatial ideas Navarro had brought with him to London from Madrid. It centered on the relationship that is generated during a staged performance between the audience, the spatial layout, and finally the immaterial, communication-related and emotional aspects which are always brought into play by that type of mechanism (Figure 2). Javier Navarro’s interest, latent for a long time during his studies of architecture and in the university theater, was focused on the possibilities that this type of architectural arrangement could offer in terms of rethinking the theater building and, by the bye, architecture as a whole. Drawing on the lecture, which is only partially documented, we can reconstruct what the Mobile Theater project would have been beyond its mere documentation as an architectural artifact, since the ambitious project was more than a series of drawings for the construction of a unique building. In his handwritten notes in preparation for the lecture, Javier Navarro defines his understanding of “situation” as follows:

The main character in the play is the very situation above the characters, and it’s the situation, which develops or holds itself as the time passes, what gives for to the behaviour of the people in the play. Of course, this situation has to be a general one, which affects the whole people who intervene. The space has an important role in this theatre. It is what I would call a common breathing space and, at the same time, a self-motivated one.2

A series of diagrammatic drawings accompany his ideas. They place emphasis on an act of communication through a chain of terms (situation-action-reaction-communi-

cation), which connect two human bodies in a multi-sensory network, or that curl into a spiral. The first sketch (Figure 3) warns of the possibility of confusing intersubjective communication with narcissism, which would logically result in the exhibitionism of a virtuoso, as we see in the drawing, accompanied by the warning “communication or showing-off?” On the other hand, the spiral suggests another kind of development (Figure 4), which begins in the center and unravels progressively in a logarithmic spiral, until it runs up against the edges of the paper that form its borders. The border is only provisional, however, practical or even arbitrary, because according to Navarro, only “fatal destruction” or “the infinite” can put an end to a situation that has begun to develop fully and satisfyingly – in other words, once it has surpassed the merely functional act of communication, which leads to narcissistic bravura, and entered into a genuine communicative act, expansive and spiraling. The enthusiasm of these handwritten notes for a theater of situation is absolute, as are the questions raised about the need for order, limits and legibility. These theoretical materials touch on the uncertainty between stable and open forms, effective and expanded communication, infinite and limited spaces, in an unresolved and highly defiant dialectic to which the architectural design for the Mobile Theater intended to provide a practical response.

The event in London, which did not advance beyond a latent and very speculative stage, took place in one of the rooms at the Archi-

Figure 1: Javier Navarro (left) during the lecture “Towards a Theatre of Situation”, facing Charles Jencks (standing on the right) and Paul Oliver (seated). London, November 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga.

Figure 2: Leaflet from “Towards a Theater of Situation” London, November 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga.

Figure 3: Preparatory drawing for “Towards a Theatre of Situation”. London, October 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga. Figure 4: Preparatory drawing for “Towards a Theater of Situation”. London, October 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga.

tectural Association, which was accessed via a hallway running between haphazardly painted translucent plastic walls (Figure 5). The floor along the entryway was covered with rice and sugar cubes to encourage people to move more carefully than usual: a necessarily slow entrance, sonorous, cautious, clearly ritualized. The chalkboard in the room was covered with drawings, play programs, texts, diagrams and sketches. On one table, written material and plates of food were laid out for the guests; on another, there were two tape recorders operated by Henry Gough-Cooper, and a microphone hung from the ceiling of the room. The attendees were given pamphlets printed with typewritten texts including: “Love is communication/Make love/Communication can be love/Make Communication/If you like somebody or something/ Caress it”. (Figure 6)

The key to the “situation” on which the event was focused lay in providing the audience with the scheme of a situation that would be easy to understand, and the materials to construct it collectively, in order to achieve the goal laid out in the preparatory notes: “Give people a scheme of a situation, which they can make its own and, therefore, play it […] (a situation) able to be manipulated by them.” The notes and drawings show a range of experiments in situation, which refer to archetypal relationships between actor/spectator, one-on-one or in groups. We see transparent boxes with small groups of people facing grandstands, or labyrinths of mirrors and concentric hexagons for a single person, which would be triggered using equipment like tape recorders or TV monitors. (Figure 7) The experiments fall somewhere between installations and architecture, “happenings” with the main goal of inciting communication and awareness of the surrounding space. The notes alongside one of the preparatory sketches read: “Ideas about different experiments in situation. 1 Give people schemes of their own physical situations (mirrors). A 11 A man in a labyrinth of mirrors, conscious of all the people around him are in his same situation, even physically, because all of them are his own image (conscience). Study reaction of persons (even children) in the hexagon of seven mirrors. Probably it needs some voice telling what they have been aware of. A 12 John Cage’s experiment. A sound-proof room in which you can perceive two noises: your heart beating and your brain working. It’s a kind of experiment of situation, in making people conscious of their noise. A 17 Stepping on sugar. Shaking upon something. Coughing cause of smoke. Feeling oppression cause of the pressure of the air”.

These are the dramaturgical materials that can be designed, on an architectural scale, into the Mobile Theater – the aim of which does not lie in the particular built situation, but rather in its possibilities as an architectural artifact that can intervene in the space of the city, altering and desecrating, momentarily, its physical materiality and its social theatricality.

In a classical theater building, the stage design is the only element subject to spatial variation within a fixed architectural structure, which is often also monumental. This fact led Javier Navarro to consider the possibility of joining together a mobile ar-

Figure 5: Spectators during the lecture “Towards a Theatre of Situation”. London, November 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga. Figure 6: Excerpts from working materials used in “Towards a Theatre of Situation”, London, November 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga.

Figure 7: Excerpts from working materials used in “Towards a Theatre of Situation”, London, November 1970. Courtesy of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga.