Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 137
Live fire is one of the theatre’s main—but also most dangerous—effects; it was what burned down Shakespeare’s
Globe theatre (via an off-stage cannon shot) in 1613. Here it is used safely in Dara, a 22-actor Pakistani production, set
in 1659 and brought to London’s National Theatre in 2015, which portrays two brothers fighting each other to rule the
Muslim empire. © Geraint Lewis
or make an audience laugh. But what digital technology
can do is aid and accelerate the process of artists who
do these things. The capacity for digitally combining
and configuring (and then reconfiguring) ideas, angles,
shapes, colors, spaces, perspectives, and measurements,
which designers uncover through research or create
through imagination, makes possible the consolidation
of a giant spectrum of experimental and aesthetic possibilities
with the speed of light and the assurance of a
mathematician. Perhaps no other era of theatre history
has seen a technological innovation so successfully balance
reality’s hard facts with the artist’s free-floating
imagination.
Digital design has become invaluable to contemporary
designers on a variety of levels. First, computer-aideddesign
(CAD) programs can assist with or even replace
much of the drudgery of sheer drawing mechanics.
With a click of the mouse, straight lines, angles, circles,
shapes, colors, and typefaces can be selected from a menu
of choices and placed where desired. Moreover, all of
these can be shifted in an instant: colors can be changed,
lines lengthened, walls thickened, floors raised, furniture
moved, sight lines adjusted, and dimensions measured.
Individual design elements can be instantly replicated:
an elaborately drawn banister post can become a dozen
posts in a flash. Whole drawings can be rescaled, zoomed
in or out; individual elements can be rotated or relocated
freely about the page. And the resulting drawings can be
shared instantly with design team members working anywhere
around the world (as designers often do). Global
collaboration has become not merely possible in the digital
age, it has become routine.
Digital storage allows designers to draw upon vast
visual databases. A designer can, for example, dip into
virtual art catalogues of eighteenth-century chandeliers,
Victorian drapery, Roman togas—all digitized for