‘We are not Exiles, we are Messengers’: George Riabov and his Collection of Russian Theatre Design (USA)

This article is devoted to the history of George Riabov’s collection of Russian art. Among art collections outside of Russia, the George Riabov Collection of Russian Art is unique due to its scope. It includes icons from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, graphic arts and sculpture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, as well as ‘lubki’, posters and illustrated books from the early 1900s to the 1930s, nonconformist art of the former Soviet Union from the 1960s–1970s, and the works of Russian émigré artists. Consisting of important works of Russian art across the centuries, the Riabov Collection also features some major examples of stage and costume designs for theater, ballet, and opera created by the early twentieth-century artists. In 1990, Riabov donated his vast collection to The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (USA). The article traces the history of the Riabov collection and also places a number of important costume and stage designs in the collection in the context of the development of Russian theatrical design in pre- and post-revolutionary era. Keywords: Riabov collection, Russian art, theater design, émigré artists, World of Art, Ballets Russes, art collecting

Immersion Domes

Large-scale immersion domes are specialized embodiments of spatial augmented reality allowing large groups to be immersed in real-time animated or cinematic virtual worlds with strong sense-of-presence. Also called fulldome theaters, these spaces currently serve as giant screen cinemas, planetariums, themed entertainment attractions, and immersive classrooms. This chapter presents case studies for emerging applications of digital domes, reviews dome theater design basics, and suggests that these venues are on track to become mainstream arts and entertainment centers delivering global impact at scale. Standard venue designs will be necessary to realize the full potential of an immersive media arts and entertainment distribution network. This chapter provides rationale for standardization of immersion domes for multi-use events spaces, immersive cinemas, and live performing arts theaters.

Introduction

This introduction lays out the direction of the book on the whole by discussing the movie palace, Ben Schlanger, modernism, and new cinema histories. Schlanger’s life and career are briefly introduced, and the importance of using archival materials and the Better Theatres section of Motion Picture Herald for documenting Schlanger’s theory of theater design is explained. From such writings, one can gather that Schlanger’s ideal theaters would be places of both bodily passivity and contemplation, yet also of immersion in the sense that the local environment and fellow viewers would fall away in service of the screen. Furthermore, the term “neutral” is examined via Bertrand Russell and neutral monism; in addition, the introduction explores the neutral and neutralization’s connections to the apparatus. All of these strands are connected via a modern approach to spectatorship explicated by Schlanger in his theaters.

The Optical Vacuum

Between the 1920s and the 1960s, American mainstream cinematic architecture underwent a seismic shift. From the massive urban movie palace to the intimate streamlined theater, movie theaters became “neutralized” spaces for calibrated, immersive watching. Leading this charge was New York architect Benjamin Schlanger, a fiery polemicist whose designs and essays reshaped how movies were watched. This book examines the impact of Schlanger’s work in the context of changing patterns of spectatorship; his theaters and writing propose that the essence of film viewing lies not only in the text, but in the spaces where movies are shown. As such, this study insists that changing models of cinephilia are determined by physical structure: from the decorations of the palace to the black box of the contemporary auditorium, variations in movie theater design are icons for how twentieth-century viewing has similarly transformed. And by looking backward into cinema’s architectural history, 1970s screen theory becomes clearer as a historical in addition to a theoretical model; the emergence of the apparatus can be found in the immersive powers of the neutralized movie theater. In this book, exhibition practice takes its place as a force that propels spectatorship through time. Ultimately, space and viewing are revealed to be intertwined and mutually constitutive phenomena through which spectatorship’s discourses are all the more clearly seen.

Architects: From Tool Users to Tool Makers, Exemplified by “Auto-Theater”

In this paper, a theater design tool, “Auto-theater”, tentatively made by the author is proposed to improve the theater design based on the parameter design. In the past, almost all the architects used the tools made by the software manufactures to draw graphics. Now, a few architects start to make the tools by themselves to generate designs. The primary objective is to help the architects focus themselves from using drawing tools onto making their own design tools, so that they will better understand the architectural rules. The paper describes in detail the development of “Auto-theater”, discusses its application and outlooks its future.