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László Moholy-Nagy’s Theatre of Totality: a precursor to digital performance

ABSTRACT László Moholy-Nagy’s Theatre of Totality was an inheritor of the philosophical legacy of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and was one of a number of early modernist proposals for spectacles which, I suggest, implicitly awaited the invention of the technological means to realise them fully. Developments in Digital Technology have since provided these. He proposed such a Totality which did not merely blend existing artistic genres and media, but embraced ‘life’ beyond art, synthesising vital impulses in a collective activity subsuming individual accomplishments. Unlike Wagner’s atavistic notions of reviving the social collectivity which produced Greek drama, this involved using the resources of industrial society, and though rejecting its profit-driven rationale, he believed that ‘the possibilities of the machine’ are endless. In his technical experimentation across media he aimed to encourage the development of a new receptivity to the ‘absolute elements’ of sensory stimuli. He sought a Total Theatre freed from ‘literary encumbrances’, to this end devising a variety of spectacular staging devices, culminating in his ‘mechanized eccentric’. Elements of this can be seen, I will argue, in the more contemporary multimedia works of Troika Ranch, Susan Kozel, Anne Imhof and Wayne McGregor.