Issue #14: Winter/Spring 2006

A Life in Pictures

UBC Mounts the Light and Dark of Eadweard Muybridge

On June 15, 1878, in Palo Alto, California, Eadweard Muybridge photographed the first fast motion serial images of a horse that captured a moment of suspension when no hooves touched the ground. The man who sponsored the experiment was the horse’s owner, railroad builder and former governor, Leland Stanford, who would later found Stanford University.

The 12 images – taken in about half a second – were captured through 12 cameras, each equipped with an electrically controlled mechanism that operated a special shutter. Each shutter was connected to a series of underground wires at short intervals. When the horse made contact with them, the shutter of each camera released, thus freezing motion for a fraction of a second. Muybridge gained international acclaim for his Stanford experiment and that brief moment heralded the age of motion pictures and cinema.

On January 17, 2006, award-winning playwright, Kevin Kerr, mfa’91 and award-winning designer, Dr. Robert Gardiner, head of UBC’s Theatre, Film and Creative Writing department, told the story of Muybridge’s life in the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival headliner, “Studies in Motion: The Hauntings of Eadweard Muybridge.” The play combines historical events with a fictional narrative on Muybridge’s professional and eccentric personal life, and employs innovative lighting technology that will change the landscape of theatre performance.

Eadweard Muybridge was a former landscape photographer who considered himself more an artist than a scientist. “Studies in Motion” tells the story of how, in 1874, upon discovering that his young wife, Flora, was pregnant with the child of Colonel Larkyns, Muybridge confronted Larkyns and shot him dead. Tried for murder, Muybridge was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide and abandoned both his wife and son. Despite his troubled personal life, Muybridge’s professional life flourished. He invented the Zoopraxiscope, a machine that projected images so the public could see realistic motion, a system that became the precursor of the motion picture. In the mid-1880s, Muybridge, awarded a significant grant from the University of Pennsylvania, used this technique to produce more than 100,000 sequence photographs at his compound on campus.

In just five months Muybridge shot close to 20,000 photographs. His subjects included athletes, tradesmen and teachers. He also photographed hospital patients to document their abnormal movements, as well as animals and birds. The human models often posed nude and performed activities that seemed unrelated to science: a woman throwing herself on a heap of hay; a man hitting a baseball or pounding a nail; a woman fanning herself. These images created not only a lasting artistic effect but marked the beginning of an obsession with imagery and the moment in which time is stopped and dissected, revealing a world invisible to the naked eye.

Playwright Kevin Kerr, winner of the 2002 Governor General award for the play “Unity” (1918), worked on “Studies in Motion” for nearly two years. His fascination with Muybridge began 10 years ago while doing research for “Brilliant,” about another Victorian-era genius, Nikolai Tesla.

“I saw this strange Muybridge film of little 1.5 second loops of people and animals moving in tiny parcels of action,” he says during a lunch break in rehearsals at the Frederic Wood Theatre. “The people were the most fascinating because they were the most elaborate. They were nude and in front of this strange backdrop of a black and white grid and doing basic gestures like walking, throwing a ball, or odd pratfalls like one woman dumping a bucket of water. Some of the movements were so pathological that I found them haunting, these little living moments pre-cinema. I felt privy to something special.”

Kerr’s fascination with the strange world that seemed to permeate Muybridge’s motion studies inspired him to develop a story based on the subjects themselves, as well as Muybridge. He discovered that Muybridge had a dramatic back story: marriage to a woman half his age, her affair, the murder of her lover and the abandonment of her child. “How does that relate to the world he creates after that time? Is there something that could be explored between the analytical and rational world of his photography and that very animal, passionate world of his past life?”

At around the time that Kerr and the Electric Company (the theatre company he co-founded) considered producing a play about Muybridge, Dr. Robert Gardiner, who Kerr once studied under at UBC, approached them to see if they would be interested in collaborating on a project. Gardiner had received a three-year, $205,000 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (sshrc) grant for the development of technology in theatre and he was interested in bringing on a professional theatre company to work with UBC staff and students.

“Up until this project, sshrc hadn’t done anything like this. Most of their projects focused on fish studies up north, that sort of thing,” says Gardiner over coffee in his cluttered office of books, video cameras and multiple computer screens. “But with “Studies in Motion,” they wanted to widen the sshrc umbrella. It’s an excellent thing to do because a great deal of creativity in the arts happens outside of the university with people who don’t teach or who aren’t students.”

Gardiner’s research involves replacing standard theatre stage lighting with a special video projector. A play generally requires between 100 and 400 lighting fixtures. Gardiner, with “Studies in Motion,” is using two (one in front, one from above) – digital video projectors operated by a laptop. “With a wide angle, stationary light source, we can light the whole stage and do anything that we could do with thousands of stage lights. It provides more creative flexibility at a lower cost because there’s no need to call in a new crew to change the lights.”

In all collaborations, whether between Muybridge and Stanford or Kerr and Gardiner, there exists a mutual respect, a synergy that happens in order for a concept to reach completion. “What we really liked was that Robert Gardiner was using non-traditional lighting to light space, blending medias, blending the worlds of film and computer animation with live performance,” says Kerr. Like Muybridge in the late 1880s, Gardiner’s work is revolutionary. His exploration of light, imaging and movement is pushing the boundaries of traditional lighting but as with all technological advances there are significant challenges.

“We’re still in the land of software that is a bit buggy. It doesn’t do everything we want it to do and takes a while to learn,” Gardiner says.

Currently, he is piggybacking on a software program called Isadora, developed by Troika Tronix in New York. He does, however, envision a day in the near future when he can hand off his version of the software to programmers and have them develop it for theatre designers worldwide. Meanwhile, he faces the additional challenge of integrating his lighting innovations with the play, as it evolves during rehearsal, as well as what the implications of his new technology means to dramaturgy.

“What does this mean to the way we put a play together?” Gardiner says. “Maybe nothing. Or maybe there’s a whole range of possibilities that are ultimately low tech enough that anyone can do them. One of the things true of theatre is that big effects always cost millions. Theatre is always in a dialogue between a Shakespearean nothing and a grand opera everything. So in a sense I’m trying to move the spectacular possibilities of grand opera towards the Shakespearean bare, empty room. The image is delivering a lot of story content and that takes technology. The best playwrights like Kevin Kerr are very good at this. When they’re writing a play they have a film running in their head.”

Kerr echoes Gardiner’s comments on the collaborative element of working from very different aspects of the creative process. “We’ve integrated everything so that Robert could work scenically and interface with the story. So his ideas could inspire the script and the script could inspire the design and the direction.”

But as with all creative processes, the greatest challenge is time, something Muybridge understood in his obsession to freeze it and capture motion. For Kerr, this challenge means the pressure of working with all layers of the production concurrently, from movement sequences and a large cast, to fresh script changes and the technological element of new lighting.

“The biggest challenge is in trying to keep perspective as we’re fusing all of these elements and leaving ourselves just enough room to make discoveries and changes when they are necessary,” he says.

For Gardiner, the challenge is synthesizing technology with the narrative. “I’m interested in combining the storylines, the image and the lights so audiences are not being distracted,” Gardiner says. “I’m not there yet. But I’m very close right now, one week into rehearsal, to putting the right lights on. That’s something you wouldn’t normally do in ordinary stage lighting until a few days before you open because you couldn’t. It’s exciting for the actors and directors who are not used to working in rehearsal light until the week before the show.”

In the end, the play’s the thing, and one of the main things “Studies in Motion” does, through Kerr’s script and Gardiner’s stage lighting, is pose a number of far-reaching, philosophical questions.

“The photograph and cinema have changed our lives,” Gardiner says. “We are who we are as a consequence of the guy who took a picture of a moving horse, who decided if he could take enough of it, he could reanimate that horse. We’re trying, in a very indirect and storytelling way, to wonder whether this has been de-humanizing. We don’t connect with speed or with each other in the same way that people did before video games and movies. We make movies called “Terminator 2” and video games that are possible because of Muybridge. How much of technical possibilities drive what we should do and what we actually do?”

Kevin Kerr, excited as he is by the integration of technology in “Studies in Motion,” returns to the basic principle of storytelling. “There’s an engaging human story here, specifically Muybridge and the models,” he says. “Seeing characters struggle with questions of what Muybridge left behind. Ultimately, I hope the play offers us a view of different moments from our past, including this very moment where we are getting this new way of looking. And in doing so, that the eyes are getting a treat that is stimulating and exciting and opens up potential for imagination so an audience can walk away full of ideas.” ¤

John Vigna is a Vancouver writer.