Scenography E-Book

Simon Donger

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Scenography is a comprehensive guide to the practical study and process of designing for performance. Rooted in theatre, scenography concerns artists who work through creative elements such as spaces, artefacts, garments, lighting and sound to mobilize new sensory experiences. As a result, scenography has gained broader interest and relevance across a wide range of fields, particularly where there is a desire to innovate with the perception of the live body. To this end, the book offers practical strategies to support the creative process from conception to completion; detailed advice on key actions such as drawing and modelling; tactical insights offered by professional practitioners from various disciplines and a case study on scenographic research. The book will be of great interest to artists looking to engage in or refresh their approach to performance design, and those wanting to integrate and adapt scenography within their existing practice. Fully illustrated with 78 colour photographs and 36 line artworks. Simon Donger is and award-winning stage designer and is the Course Leader of the MA/MFA Scenography at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Another book in the new series Crowood Theatre Companions.

Leseprobe

Scenography

Simon Donger

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2018 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2018

© Simon Donger 2018

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 454 4

Frontispiece

On Lies by Francesc Serra Vila. PATRICK BALDWIN

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever grateful to those who have been instrumental in my scenographic education, namely: Trish Lyons, Ana Cappelluto, Chris White, and Romeo and Claudia Castellucci.

I am filled with gratitude towards the artists who have so generously and patiently contributed to this book.

Finally, I must thank the various individuals who, over the years, have inspired and supported my endeavours to promote and celebrate scenography: Joanna Parker, Madaleine Trigg, Simon Shepherd, Andrea Cusumano and Eve Katsouraki.

PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Most of the photographs in the book depict the works produced by students on the scenography courses at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. All photography is taken by the artists named in the captions or writing the texts in which the photograph is included, unless otherwise stated in the caption.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Professional Insight: Dramaturging by Henny Dörr

1 DRAWING

Professional Insight: Listening by Dan Scott

2 MODELLING

Professional Insight: Model-Making by Yoon Bae

3 PROTOTYPING

Professional Insight: Siting by Sophie Jump

4 COMPOSING

Professional Insight: Spectating by Michael Pavelka

5 DOCUMENTING

Professional Insight: Photographing by Jemima Yong

6 RESEARCHING

Professional Insight: Measuring by Oren Sagiv

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Based on principles and processes originating in performance design, scenography is a creative framework for the conception of the material and perceptual qualities of temporary events. The term is not limited to performance design because these principles and processes have become of interest and relevance to a variety of creative practitioners. In performance, scenography is no longer solely linked to designers, as a range of directors, choreographers, dramaturgs, writers and performance artists have integrated aspects of performance design in their practice. In parallel, a variety of other creative fields (such as the visual arts, architecture, fashion, media arts, curation and exhibition design) are increasingly including performance and performative events within their domains. This has resulted in their more or less explicit engagement with scenography. As such, scenography is a framework that is expanding in its application.

Greek Precarious Body by Olga Ntenta.

Whether applied in or out of the context of performance, the principles of a scenographic framework of practice remain the same; only its processes are likely to vary as they are adapted to the particulars of a given project. This book aims at clarifying these principles and sketching out these practical procedures loosely enough so as to be applicable in a range of contexts where temporary and performative events are concerned. As such, the practical insights and processes presented throughout the book do not constitute a particular methodology nor do they elaborate a complete description of the scenographic framework. Rather, the material contained in this book offers a series of actions found in performance design. These are articulated so as to be uniquely tailored to both your own interests and the particulars of a given creative process.

Accordingly, the book contains chapters describing the general purposes and uses of particular actions, interspersed by shorter texts written by contemporary practitioners who provide detailed tips and tasks based on their own practice. All of these practical strategies are stepping-stones to elaborate your own creative practice. Indeed, the book is aimed at creative practitioners who have an interest in, yet little or no practical experience of, scenography.

THE THREE PILLARS OF SCENOGRAPHY

Before we move on to discussing the practical tools and processes at play in a scenographic framework, some clarification of the principles that inform this framework is required.

One of the key principles in scenography is the live body. We design artefacts, environments and situations to be used, inhabited and observed by bodies. As such, the process of designing has to incorporate this bodily dimension, and for this to happen, a range of bodies (including ours) are mobilized. We might call this an embodied process, as we seek to hinge every step of the process on imagined and actual bodies. Importantly, here the body is not conceived according to a mundane, abstract or ideal standard. Quite the contrary, we approach bodies as diverse, dynamic, unique, creative and surprising organisms. Whether they are performers or audiences or both at the same time, the bodies we work with are on a journey of discovery and transformation. We must, therefore, make as little assumption as possible about the body, including our own.

In effect, the preponderance of the body’s experience in scenography is also part of a collaborative or dialogic principle that is also core to the scenographic framework. We engage in imaginary and actual collaborations, or dialogues, with bodies as well as spaces, texts, artefacts, materials and phenomena. More specifically, when we draw a body or model a space, these artefacts (drawing and model) are not finite but platforms that orchestrate a discussion between imagination (speculation) and realization (operation). Such artefacts project something imagined over something actual and, in doing so, generate all sorts of questions regarding both the imagined and the actual elements at play. The creative process then is driven by dialogues between speculative and operative modes of development. These dialogues tend to be more speculative at the start of the process and a lot more operative as we move towards completion. But in all cases they are conducted through actual materials that facilitate imaginative leaps.

There lies a third key principle in scenography, which is transformation. During the creative process, we transform or translate texts into situations, scale models into built environments, bodies into characters, sounds into images, materials into artefacts and so on. There is an overarching transformative principle inherent to a creative process developed under a scenographic framework. It includes, in particular, the layering or scaffolding of something new and temporary over something that already exists. But we can also see the transformative principle at work in the very outcomes of this process. Indeed, transformation is intrinsic to the time-based nature of scenographic work. The time factor implies that something must appear, evolve and disappear in the eyes of our audiences. Thus transformation is structural to the creative processes and outcomes of the scenographic viewpoint, which seeks to articulate ‘a world where nothing is fixed and anything can happen’ (Bogart and Landau 2005: 202).

PROFESSIONAL INSIGHT

DRAMATURGING

Henny Dörr

Henny Dörr is Course Leader of the Master in Fine Art and Design: Scenography at HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Since 1989, she has taught dramaturgy to scenographers. She is a founder and member of the interdisciplinary collective of artists Skilled/Unskilled, exploring artistic practice through performative research since 2013.

‘What am I writing in space?’ This is a vital question for a spatial practice that has to relate itself to narrative, meaning, semiotics and concepts. The risk: an over-emphasis on analysis, rationality, meaning and readability, leading to symbolism and intellectualism, and questions such as: Why is it this? Why did he/she do that? In which case, scenography becomes something to be motivated on a conceptual level: an art of the head.

But then, aside from the ‘why’, one can deal with ‘what’ and ‘how’: What do you want to make? What makes you stand out? What is your art about? What inspires you? What do you want to tell? What do you want to express? These are questions of the heart. What makes your (he)art tick? The answers might be seen as important for audiences, critiques, etc., but may be even more so as they are important to collaborate with other artists. The way these artists work influences the work itself and hence also your specific artistic contribution, and vice versa: what and how you contribute as an artist influences the way you work together. So, of equal importance are questions concerning this process of (co-)creation: How do I work best? How do I want to work? How does this group work? How do I influence this process? These ‘how’ questions necessarily translate into practical questions such as: When will I attend working sessions? How often? In what kind of environment do I want to work? What does my studio look like? Where is my studio? But also: What kind of materials do I want to work with? What kind of techniques? What do I need around me? Gradually, scenography comes back into the realm of the hand.

This leads to new thoughts and new ways of approaching the design process. As we tend to do things the way we are used to do things, there is much challenge and gain in engaging in a process of deconditioning. What if we assume the position of not knowing. Not knowing what to do, how to do it, what we want the result to be and so on. Can we then, through practice, find out what the true nature of our creative process is, and can we re-design it? Can we re-configure ourselves, in order to prevent us from working from assumptions, from answers we already have and from a design process that only produces variations on the same theme? Can we find a way to acknowledge that there are more ways of looking at something?

The act of observing is most important. This is not about one way of looking at things. Maybe the eye, for the designer, is what the body is for the dancer. And it might be that the eye and the mind become lazy, or economic. So it should be kept alert, to prevent it from starting to see what you are used to seeing.

Train the savage eye Look for the unfamiliar. This is a very important view, at the same time almost impossible, since we seem to understand the world on the basis of duality. We can understand the unfamiliar as that which is not familiar. Hence it is always set against the familiar through associations, interpretations, stories, aesthetics that you know. Something unusual reminds you of something familiar, yet in looking for that familiarity, you become aware of that which is unfamiliar. You might try to stop giving meaning to it, and just note and observe.

Try the objective eye This is a helpful way to obtain another reality than the one you make in your head: look at reality as a series of facts. Now, of course, the interesting part is that it opens up questions about what facts are, how many sorts of facts exist and where they stop to be facts. You will get a series of different lives of the world as objects: historical, biographical, material and social, and can even describe the senses or emotions as facts.

‘Look for the unfamiliar.'

Feed the tactile eye Try and focus on one layer of reality, e.g. look in everything for sensations: tactility, temperature, mass, form, weight, anything that evokes a physical reaction. Do not forget that visuality is often key to what we are dealing with, so the question is not about what something feels like as such, but what something looks like that evokes a certain sensation.

You can elaborate other ways of looking by yourself. They give you the opportunity to look at things as if you see them for the first time, and open possibilities for designing a world. These tips may seem extremely obvious. But as soon as something enters the realm of the obvious, we risk not paying attention to it and we close our eyes to many discoveries and hidden worlds.

1

DRAWING

Drawing has a range of applications in scenography. We draw in response to a text, an image, a score or a concept. We draw observations of bodies, spaces and things around us. We draw imaginative ideas and events that might unfold. We draw the plans for the construction of something. So whenever we draw, the drawing is never an end in itself. Rather, the drawing in scenography is always in relation to something else that is actual or may be actualized/realized. In this sense, drawings mediate imagination and reality. They are meant to be peered through to assist the viewer in imagining an environment or artefact in concrete terms. They function as windows rather than as images. Yet drawings have limitations, as they can only ever loosely emulate the spatial and temporal parameters of scenographic work. Time and space can be hinted at in drawing but their design can only be finalized away from drawing, in actual terms.

Miss Fortune by Ana Maio.

Yet the need for our drawings to effectively become something real and tangible can create a sort of pressure on how we approach drawing: it can easily become an activity where we only draw that which can be realized. As such, drawing can be a rather mechanical practice. However, before drawing becomes instrumental in the passage to realization, its use as a creative practice, responding to a stimulus of a sort, is potentially crucial to creative developments. Indeed, it is within the imaginatively speculative dimension of a drawing that our ideas can be evolved to discover new forms. A rough sketch, rapidly made on the page of a sketchbook or a napkin, may be rather incomprehensible to most, but to us it will have a significance of which we may be more or less aware. This is the beginning of a transformative dialogue with both a stimulus of sorts and our own imagination, which will lead us to unexpected outcomes.

Since drawings are bridges to projecting our imagination in potential or speculative environments, any drawing made without a concern for how it will translate in a realized form will trigger critical uncertainty regarding what it might be in reality. In other words, this kind of drawing will be either impossible to understand as a real structure or will suggest a variety of possible realized outcomes. This uncertainty is critical because it opens up the doors to creative exploration and development. And although technical drawing is far more instrumental, even so certain issues of realization might emerge and, yet again, these are problems to be solved creatively and thus provide opportunities to develop the work further.

Advocating the productive difficulty of translating an image into a three-dimensional and experiential environment is not only a matter of allowing creative developments. The challenge of shifting an impossible image into a possible event can be considered a key aspect of scenographic practice since, in theatre, this problem can be found within a wide spectrum of textual sources, ranging from divine apparitions in Ancient Greek plays to the ghostly ones of Shakespeare’s. Unsurprisingly then, more recent playwrights have raised the stakes even further. Consider, for instance, the following stage direction written by the late Sarah Kane in Cleansed (1998): ‘the rats carry Carl’s feet away’. Though we can easily draw up a couple of rats running away with human feet in their mouth, if we also consider the realization of that image many problems emerge: How will Carl’s feet be actually separated from his body? What will be the rats? How will they pick up Carl’s feet? And so on.

These problems are not solely practical because whatever solution is found to translate this image will affect its impact and meaning. For example, we may want to consider designing puppets to represent the rats, but this could turn out to have a humorous effect that may not be appropriate. Thus, to approach this problem in the first instance, it would be best to not focus on a solution but rather engage in a dialogue with the uncertainty of the image. This also allows us to avoid the recycled clichés that often come with quickly conceived designs. It would not be surprising if the puppet solution to Kane’s rats is one that hundreds of designers have considered. Indeed, images that easily come to our mind tend to be images we have been exposed to in our life. Because these are already lingering in our imagination with a great level of pre-existing details, they are easy to retrieve. As we are exposed and thus inhabited by so much imagery, it is difficult to resist recycling. A conscious effort in the way we engage in the creative process is required to minimize the influence of these ready-made images. And this effort must be concerned with not being too precise too quickly, and by allowing improvisation and experimentation at the core of the process.

One way of ensuring improvisation lies in considering our drawings in dynamic and kinetic terms, albeit in motion. From a scenographic standpoint, imagery is not static, not fixed, but always in movement. Historically, the tight relation between painting, architecture and theatre meant that static imagery was an expected component of the stage (e.g. flat, painted scenery). Yet, alongside that same history, multiple technical structures were invented to move this fixed imagery (e.g. flying systems). At the end of the nineteenth century, theatre practitioners like Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia decided to rid the stage from static painted scenery, instead focusing on the movement on stage. To do so, they both first used drawing to explore potentially new dynamics of space and light. However, prior to Craig and Appia, drawing was used to depict accurately the design to be. Craig and Appia, on the other hand, used drawing to grasp the action of a moment, to apprehend the potential of new dynamic phenomena on stage. Instead of perfectly defined shapes and surfaces, their drawings are concerned with volumes and movements of the intersection of the body, light and space. Rather than attempting to fix vision in a perspectival space, their drawings present us with how the human body may perceive this volumetric motion: movement being a shape in flux over time and space, the perception of depth and movement is more random and incomplete than the perception of stationary objects. In many ways, Craig and Appia’s use of drawing is quite paradoxical, as they sought to inscribe three-dimensional and moving phenomena on flat and static paper. Yet this paradox is very productive, as it raises the creative potential of speculation over definition.

Throughout a creative project, from conception to completion, drawing can be utilized in this way to advance the design. It is likely, however, that drawing has a more important speculative role to play at the start of a project, with less and less allowance for the unknown being granted as the project evolves. In this chapter, we shall look at the practicalities of moving from the unknown to the known through various types of drawings needed during a project.

MOMENT DRAWING

A moment drawing is a drawing that seeks to grasp a scene or a particular instance in an event. Such drawing captures a movement of sorts. This may be based on an imagined moment, or one that is textually described, or one that is actually observed. In any event, sketching an action is paradoxical: how does that which is in motion become visualized in a still image? We can choose to render the beginning of the action, its climax or its ending. But once a fragment of the action has been isolated, it is possible to see it as suggestive of another kind of action. Moment drawing is thus a slippery and speculative, rather definitive form. Nurturing this slipperiness can help us initiate design ideas. This has nothing to do with drawing skills but with the rules we employ in the way we draw the moment. For instance, in the case of a play text, we may select a handful of key moments/actions described in the text, and choose to draw only the outlines of the bodies and their environment, or only the bodies engaged in these moments without drawing their environment.

In moment drawings, we are not yet dealing with a complete aesthetic but with giving forms to particular actions. In doing so, some aesthetic features will emerge. Before developing these features further, it is worth improvising further with the already established features. In this case, we are looking for variations: how many other ways can there be to use these same features to present this particular action? Like for performers, improvisation for designers requires establishing certain rules – a framework. A drawing offers a framework in this respect: improvising with a drawing is done through new iterations and ways of re-assembling the same elements from the initial drawing.

Moment drawing by Samuel Beal sketching the outlines of a scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953). Note how the use of line drawing allows focusing on the action of bodies in space whilst suggesting the beginning of a spatial form occupying the floor and the background.