Czechoslovak Theater Technology under Communism: Ambassador to the West

Every four years during the cold war millions of people in western Europe and the United States cheered (or at least expressed profound respect for) Olympic athletes from the Soviet Union and its east European satellite states. Throughout the Soviet period, smaller crowds enjoyed outstanding dancers and musicians from the region. Everyone knew that the governments invested millions in training in the arts and sports, “unfairly” more than organizations in the West could afford, but few denied the pleasure of watching or listening to these outstanding individuals, ensembles, and teams. Most Westerners did not, however, associate technological achievement with the Soviet Bloc, with the dramatic exception of Sputnik (1957) and the space race. They typically assumed that a system that could not provide decent consumer goods to its peoples must be a technological backwater.¹ Even specialists rarely knew of “reverse technology transfer” from East to West.²

Yet technology was a core part of communist ideology and played a central role in building socialism in both the Soviet Union and its satellite states. As such, innovative technology, usually displayed only at trade fairs, world’s fairs, and other special venues, served as an ambassador to the West for these countries, a way of proclaiming that despite evidence to the contrary, these countries could achieve world-class contributions to a number of technological fields. Current scholarship on the Soviet Bloc countries indeed reveals that despite their relative isolation from the West, scientists and engineers from the USSR and eastern Europe led the world in certain fields.³ Some of their achievements had no competition in the West, at least at first; if their value was compelling, western companies invested in them through either the outright purchase of product or patent, licensing, or the exchange of expertise. Such activity generated reverse technology transfers from East to West, a flow of exports that provided hard currency to the East and new technology to the West; it also enabled technicians, engineers, and scientists to travel both ways through the Iron Curtain, resulting in a circulation of ideas and artifacts throughout Europe and beyond.

I first discovered this to be the case as early as 1983, in my research on technological innovation in the Czechoslovak textile-machine industry during the 1960s.⁴ Much later, when working with the Tensions of Europe network, I found researchers from these countries and young scholars in the United States who were exploring the hidden achievements of these countries and in the process rewriting what we thought we knew about technology transfer.⁵ As I turned my research focus toward the interface of technology and the arts, I discovered anew Laterna Magika, the multimedia magic-lantern show from the late 1950s that was still playing in Prague. What was it all about? In the course of answering this question I discovered several breakthrough technologies in the service of theater production that had emerged from Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century.

As I homed in on the post–World War II period I found that many of these technologies were associated with Josef Svoboda (1920–2002), a Czech scenographer known worldwide for his lighting and projection innovations.⁶ As I looked to western sources for responses to these innovations I found that as in many other scientific and cultural fields, theater technology seemed to fly below their radar. Just as the state invested in certain scientists, performers, and athletes, allowing them to represent the country abroad, it also invested in theater technology, which in the hands of certain Czech scenographers and directors captured the imagination of their western colleagues (and captured some of their production purses as well). As in the case of textile machines, theater technology did not seem to miss a beat, despite the traumatic events of August 1968 (which ended the Prague Spring) and the prolonged “normalization” that followed. Svoboda and other so-called ambassadors freely traveled abroad, demonstrating their creative technical abilities to Europeans and Americans in the best theaters in the world.

My objective is not to introduce and describe in detail these many inventions and innovations and...