Flowing Liquids behind Solid Façades: Water in Nineteenth-Century Stage Technology

Abstract

As theatre became a mass medium in nineteenth-century Germany, theatre buildings needed to fulfil the needs of the new civil spectatorship in terms of safety, comfort, and artistic demands. Water-based technologies like heating systems, hydraulics, and fire prevention became essential components of stage technology. As a result, more and more water pipes permeated the prestigious buildings of bourgeois theatre art and allowed new, centralised, and economically efficient working structures. The flexible and fluid transmission of power and energy through water stood in apparent contradiction to the increasing fixity and control of workers, machinists, and engineers in the theatres. In fact, fluid infrastructures, centralised work processes, and standardised control formed an efficient complement. Behind the representative façades of bourgeois theatres, a new, industrialised working reality was established that efficiently employed the alleged contradiction between fluid technology and controlled workflows and became a central principle of nineteenth- century stage technology.