Word: magika
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Actually, they are the same Czech, appearing in Czechoslovakia's unique Laterna Magika at a Munich theater. Using ten screens of assorted sizes, five projectors, 21 technicians, 17 performers and two conveyor belts, Laterna Magika achieves a series of kinetic marvels that leaves the Germans jawohling in the aisles. Actors on the boards engage in dance and dialogue with actors on the screens, mingling reality and illusion, adding to the stage the weightless ease of movies and to the movies the presence of theater...
...great Sergei Eisenstein produced a show in Russia that combined stage and cinema, and in the '30s a theater project of the WPA did a similar experiment on Broadway. Then the hybrid form remained dormant until two brothers named Emil and Alfred Radok developed it into Laterna Magika, starting in 1948. They mainly saw it, says Emil, "as a means to add new interpretations and new dimensions to already existing works, and as a real possibility for creating entirely new works...
Their version of Tales of Hoffmann, with principals live and all secondary characters on film, has long been the major tourist attraction of Prague. Laterna's Munich engagement is one of its few appearances outside the Iron Curtain since the Brussels World's Fair, and Laterna Magika techniques, curiously enough, have been used in quite minor ways in both the Du Pont and Texas shows at the present New York World's Fair. This summer the Laterna Magika company itself will cross the Atlantic for the first time. A four-month tour of the U.S. will begin...