Toward the end of Dominick Argento`s ”The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe,”
which recently played at Lyric Opera, huge projections of the tortured face of the title character burst onto half a dozen large screens on stage left and right. The images, which transmitted an almost kinetic quality, became larger and larger and, then-with the focal point on the dark, deep-set eyes-blurred into haunting portraits of seeming madness. The effect was that of Kafka out of Baudelaire.
That striking display, and other graphic manifestations of hallucination and horror, was the work of 37-year-old John Boesche, who is known to some backstage folks at the Lyric as ”the slides guy,” but is more formally listed as the projections designer.
Boesche-who previously made his mark on such productions as the Lyric`s controversial ”Tannhauser” (directed by the flamboyant Peter Sellars) and the Goodman Theatre`s ”Galileo,” ”The Tempest” and ”Sunday in the Park with George”-also has been a set designer, but projection is now his focus
(pun decidedly intended). ”Almost all lighting designers get involved in projection, but I think I`m the only person in Chicago who`s doing projections like this for opera as their primary work,” he says. ”And there are really just a few designers in the country who work exclusively with projection for opera, theater and dance.”
To achieve the effect of the Poe face, Boesche and a computer graphic artist scanned the photographic image (of a mid-19th Century daguerreotype)
into a Macintosh computer and used graphics software that allowed them to stretch the image in only the vertical dimension. Then they had the slides photographed with an in-register optional animation camera that concentrated on the eyes. Of course, it is a great deal more complicated than that, which is one reason that, say, an English major would be an unlikely candidate for Boesche`s line of work.
”I can understand why more people don`t do this,” he concedes, while explaining the basic elements of his craft backstage at the Lyric. ”My job is to find technical solutions to the problems, so I need to know about materials and processes and techniques, and how to persuade a computer to discipline slide projectors to behave in a musical way.”
Following its premiere in Minneapolis in 1976, ”Voyage”-based on an incident that presumably happened near the end of Poe`s life in 1849-was produced in Baltimore and Sweden, but the Lyric version was by far the most extravagant. ”The others may have had slides, but not on this scale,”
Boesche says. ”This is wildly different. In the original concept, the setting actually was on board a ship, but we set it all in Poe`s imagination, using the voyage as a metaphor.”
During the two hours, some 1,400 slides-ranging from scrawled snippets of the writer`s poems and stories to the shadowy sails of vintage ships-were shown on 31 projectors, most of them set in stacks of three. Thirty of the projectors were Kodak 35 mm Ektagraphics, outfitted with auto-focus and other ”bells and whistles,” and way up at the top of the opera house was a Pani projector, commonly used in opera for projecting a single, large image.
Six of the backstage 35 mm projector stacks were rigged up so that they and their corresponding half-dozen wall-screens could move in sync. This gave the impression of a very large seamless image on the eight screens on stage.
”If power were lost during a show, it would be a tragedy,” Boesche says.
The projectors were run by an IBM-based system (this particular program is called ”Showtime”), with special software and a device called a projector controller allowing the images to be timed down to a thousandth of a second to coincide with the music. ”The problem is that the performance may speed up or slow down ever so slightly. We`re obviously dealing with human beings. But it`s surprising how accurate a good conductor can be.”
”A lot of what I try to do is work with the images so that the audience isn`t aware that they are slides. It sounds simple, but I try to prevent people from seeing a standard slide frame, that 2-by-3 inch proportion. Instead, I incorporate it into the scenery or whatever, because you don`t want to call attention to the mechanics of the projection but to the performers and the rest of the set.”
He collaborated on the production with stage director/Tony winner Frank Galalti (”The Grapes of Wrath”), set designer John Conklin and lighting designer Duane Schuler, who began the process by discussing what images to use. Boesche then took most of the photographs himself.
”We were always exploring different options. For `The Masque of the Red Death` scene, I obtained three dozen red roses and photographed them daily for about 10 days as they died.” (Laughter.) ”It was a very beautiful image, but our concern was that it just wasn`t necessary. It was more elaborate than it needed to be. The same week, I also shot things we did use: a large, all-white wedding bouquet that was deteriorating, and an image of Poe`s face changing into a human skull, with textures of decay projected onto that skull. At one point I thought, `Let`s see, what other nasty thing can we do?`
”Probably the most challenging of all were the images of Poe`s dying young wife, Virginia, when her offstage voice comes to haunt him. We worked out a very long sequence of images that involved several stages of her face getting closer and closer, and animation that indicated her sleeping fitfully and then singing in an extremely tortured way until the image of her singing resembles her gasping for air as she dies from consumption.
”We used maybe a sixth of the images that had been created for that sequence-which was exactly right. We didn`t need the whole elaborate starting and stopping every time she started singing.
”That`s one of the temptations that you should avoid once you recognize the potential of this medium. You shouldn`t illustrate everything that happens in the score or in the text. It`s important to allow room for the audience to come to their own interpretations.”
A native of Indianapolis, Boesche studied architecture at IIT for two years, but became disenchanted with the school`s approach and transferred to the School of the Art Institute`s interior architecture program, ending up teaching courses in holography. He then produced a laser light show at Triton College, where he explored the relationships between visual imagery and classical and contemporary electronic music, and from there began doing projects for local dance and theater companies.
”This job is something like Edison`s proportion for invention-1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” he says. ”Really, only a small amount of time involves the creative side. The huge amount is record-keeping- long lists of what slide is where, especially when you have eight images that look almost exactly alike. There`s also mounting and collating. My wife is a dancer, but she`s opened a cafe and pastry shop, and I`ve been thinking that what I do is a little like cooking. Everyone knows that the best part of cooking is eating. Similiarly, everyone likes to sit out in the theater and look at shows. But there are lots of parts to it that have to do with peeling and slicing carrots.”
