The history and the evolution of stage technology is an interesting topic to look into and find out more about it. There is a long way that we have come in the technology field. Tharon Musser once said, “The problem with hand-drawn documents is that they look like the Dead Sea Scrolls to people nowadays.” The Topic about stage technology and its evolution into what we have seen and use into today's productions. The question is where did it all start and how we got to where we are at now? This is not every invention that there has been but this the main inventions.
The stage self-tends to lend itself to a rectangular pattern, not a circular one when it comes to theatrical dancing. (Classical Greek Theatre, Pg. 25) While also the wood used to build things out of also tends to lend itself to straight-line, not curved construction (Classical Greek Theatre, Pg.26). The Teatro Olimpico which is a theatre in Vicenza, northern Italy, which was constructed in 1580-1585 had a fixed scenic element in the theatre that is a detailed roman architectural façade or a scaenae frons built out of wood and stucco (The History of Rigging Pg. 115). This static scenery, however, presented a challenge to the actors who were not able to play into the background because they would become out of scale with it as they moved upstage. While the Teatro All’antico had foreshortening created in the painted scenery and a raked floor which allowed the actors to work within the scenic pieces houses and trees, there was no treatment above the stage at this time – borders, sky cloths, on either stage and the proscenium arch had not yet been created also (The History of Rigging Pg. 116).
One of the main and maybe the most noticeable parts of the theatre would be the scenery. When theatre first began in the Greek period, it was played in an arena type setting. The audience was seated on the side of the hill called a theatron which was built to hold about 14,000 people at once and below them would be the acting area which was called the orchestra which has an average diameter of about 78 feet. There is very little archaeological evidence of a complete orchestra and what there is accurse too late to fit into any developmental sequence (Classical Greek Theatre, Pg. 26). The acting area was made the skene which in about 465 B.C. was a backdrop or a wall began to be used, which it stood hung or stood behind the orchestra. In 425 B.C. the skene became a permanent stone wall and could also go by the name of Paraskenia. The Paraskenia was a very long wall, and many of them had doorways or just doors cut out of them so that the actors could enter and exit from them. There were many different scenic elements used during the Greek time. There was machina and it was a crane that gave the impression of a person flying and it was mainly used at the end of the show when we had a Deus ex Machina and that means an actor playing God would be lowered on to the stage by a “mechane” which the name of the crane device was used (Classical Greek Theatre, Pg.87). Whenever there was a death scene in a Greek show, the death was not seen on stage so there was a wheeled wagon used to bring the characters that had died into the view for the audience to see and it was called the Ekkyklema (Classical Greek Theatre, Pg.90.). Backdrops where introduced during the Greek and Roman period. The Greeks used flats or wooden backdrops painted to help tell where they were at in the play, but it was not the help when they had to do a scene change. When the Greeks wanted to do scene changed, they came up with the Periaktoi which means revolving and was a triangular prism made of wood object used for displaying and rapidly changing theatre scenes. Those were used in western theatre until the angled wings came along (painted side panels) and perspective scenery in the 16th century Italy. At the beginning of Italian Renaissance, there was the use of sets that had flat wings, placed parallel to the front of the stage. A series of flats would-be set-in grooves on the stage floor, which was set as each wing position. At the scene change, those visible in the last scene where simultaneously pulled out of sight by what would be a chariot and pole, or a carriage and frame method of scene changing. This mechanization of the grooves allowed one person to change all the flats at once.