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Introduction to Scenography
DR2014
Ways of Thinking about
Scenograpahy
https://dr2014theatretheory.wordpress.com/
• Define Scenograpahy…..
A Scenographer is a theatrical
designer who specializes in designing
all the visual elements of a
performance, using a holistic
universe approach to
conceptualization.
http://www.stephstuff.com/scenography/sceno.html
Scenography - the creation of a stage space does not exist as a self-contained art work...
Scenography is always incomplete until the
performer steps into the playing space and
engages the audience. Moreover, scenography is
the joint statement of the director and the visual
artist of their view of the play, opera or dance
that is being presented to the audience as a
united piece of work.
Pamela Howard. What is Scenogrpahy?
The scenographer has to be an artist who can
understand how to work with and incorporate the
ideas of the director, understand text as a writer, be
sensitive to the needs of a performer exposed to an
audience, and create imaginative and appropriate
spaces for productions.........also understand music
and sound as a musician and composer, movement
as a dancer and choreogapher, and the effects of
light and shadow as a fine arts painter and a
photographer.
Pamela Howard, What is Scenography?
The scenographer visually
liberates the text and the story
behind it, by creating a world in
which the eyes see what the ears
do not hear.
Pamela Howard, What is Scenography?
• Theatre, from the Greek theatron, literally
"place for viewing,” from theasthai "to
behold" (related to thea "a view, a seeing)+ tron, suffix denoting place.
• http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=theater
Bertrand Russell.
Appearance and Reality
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no
reasonable man could doubt it?”
Colour Circle Made by DTS second
years in October 2016
signs our brains attempt to read in order to
decipher/infer meaning. (“sense-data”)
• Colour
• Texture
• Shape
• Touch
• Sound
• Smell
our experience of those are “sensations”,
(whenever we see the colour we have a
sensation of it)
Dickie Beau's OLDEN LOBES Speech In Full on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/200009275
A pioneer of playback performance, emerging from the drag tradition of lip-synching,
Dickie Beau is influencing the practice of a whole new generation of performancemakers.His work began to take shape on the alternative drag scene in London’s East End,
and is informed by a history that includes classical acting, a crucial period living and
working with physical theatre company Teatro Della Contraddizzione in Milan, as well as a
significant stint working in Film and TV drama development in the UK. The results defy
conventional ideas of what drag performance is and can be, whilst bringing
about innovative new theatre experiences, and his process of writing “digital scripts” opens
up fresh approaches to writing for performance.
“Superb work, demonstrating astonishing technical competence as well as conceptual
ambition.” – The Guardian
Dickie’s work is increasingly studied on contemporary theatre and performance courses in
the UK and he’s in demand as a workshop leader, teacher and visiting speaker. Dickie is an
Associate Research Fellow at both Queen Mary University of London School of English and
Drama and at the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London. He has
worked as an artistic mentor for SPILL Festival’s National Platform as well as for MA
students at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Chichester.
http://dickiebeau.com/biography/
… “what we see is never just matter of simply
“just looking”.”
Looking: The Experience of Seeing. Theatre and Performance Design, A Reader. Ed
Jane Collins & Andrew Nisbet.
Semiotics – the theory and study of signs (Ferdinand de Sauusure)
From linguistics where language is made up of units of meaning or signs, each
consisting of a “signifier” and a “signified”.
The signifier is the sound-image… and the the signified is the concept for
which the sound-image stands.
When applied to visual culture…
“The signifier may be thought of as any physical object which has been
given a meaning. The signifier may be thought of as the material or
physical vehicle of meaning. Thought of in this way, it is the sign’s image as
we are able to perceive it visually; it could be gestures, drawn, painted,
photographed, computer generated and so on. The signified may be
thought of as the meaning that is associated with, or given to , the
signifier. It may be thought of as the mental concepts or thoughts that
come into one’s head on seeing (or hearing, etc.), the signifier.”
From The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography.
• The notion that theatre production as a signifying entity, allowed
scenography, a part of that entity, to create meaning separately
from the text.
•
• It became necessary to ‘view the performance not as a single sign
but as a network of semiotic units belonging to different
cooperative systems.’
• Semiotics gave an avenue into stage spectacle which had previously
been considered “too ephemeral a phenomenon for systematic
study”
• Jiri Veltrusky…‘all that is on stage is a sign”…anything on stage…has
the potential to carry dramatic meaning.’
From The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography.
• Signifier and Signified:
Analysis of how communication can occour.
“…A table employed in dramatic representation will not usually differ in any
material or structural fashion from the item of furniture that the members
of the audience eat at, and yet it is in some sense transformed: it acquires,
as it were a set of quotation marks. It is tempting to see the table as
bearing a direct relationship to its dramatic equivilant – the fictional
object it represents – but this is not stricly the case: the material stage
object becomes, rather, a semiotic unit standing not directly for another
(imaginary) table but for the intermediary signified ‘table’, i.e. for the class
of objects of which it is a member. The metaphorical quotation marks
placed around the stage object mark its primary condition as
representative of its class, so that the audience is able to infer from it the
presence of another member of the same class of objects in the
represented dramatic world (a table which may or may not be structurally
identical with the stage object.)”
- Elam
• Charles Sander Peirce identifies:
- Icons: resemblance to things to which they refer,
photograph, painting, graphic… or costume or prop that
represents a real thing
- Indices: the work through connection with, or cause and
effect of, the thing to which reference is made. Lighting
drawing focus, sound emphasising character’s state of
mind, costume suggesting status
- Symbols: signs which work through agreed conventions.
Codes that may require explanation to outsiders.
The idea that red shoes might signify a hidden sexual side to a
character that appears chaste.
• Iconic Signs (Icons) subdivided into:
- Image: which has the appearance of the things to which they refer
(Golden, heavy metal crown.)
- Diagram: indicate structural characteristics have a schematic
likeness between themselves and the things to which they refer
(paper shaped like crown.)
- Metaphor: create or suggest likeness between themselves and the
things to which they refer (a circle of twigs placed on the head that
the audience understand to be a golden crown.)
Image Icons try to make the spectator forget what they are viewing is
not real.
Diagramatic and Metaphorical Icons allow and demand a more
conceptual understanding of the performance.
• None of these signs can work in isolation or
are they fixed.
• The study of semiotics is also not able to affix
meaning, or is it interested in affixing
meaning, rather the analysing of the
communication that occours between the
object and the viewer/listener
• Aston and Savona offer four levels of operation of the stage picture:
-
funtionalistic: responding to needs of text
-
sociometric: how scenography can provide an index of rank and
gender
- atmospheric: experiential qualities of the fictional place being
depicted
- symbolic: the stage picture being a metaphorical condensation of
the text’s idealogical preoccupations
• Like all symbols the comprehension relies on shared understanding
between the creators and the receivers
• Aston and Savona consider four stages in
making a performance:
• 1. The dramatist encodes the text
• 2. The director decodes the text
• 3. The designer re-encodes the text
• 4. The spectator decodes the production
seeing is an embodied experience and
phenomenology teaches us that visual
perception is always suffused but the other
senses.”
…“
Looking: The Experience of Seeing. Theatre and Performance Design, A Reader.
Ed Jane Collins & Andrew Nisbet.
• Phenomenolgy. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger
• Concerned to account for conciousness in human beings not from a
scientific, abstract point of view but from a first-person perspective.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty says phenomonenology is concerned with
attempts to capture experience, in direct and ‘primitive’ essence
and at a stage before intellectual ananlysis begins to sort, edit and
render it as an artificial ‘reconstruction’.
• He emphasises that interactions with the world are made up of
multiple perspectives…what is seen, heard, felt, sensed, imagined,
anticipated and remembered. (These can have a psychophisical
response in viewers.)
“semiotics and phenomenology are best seen as complementary
perspectives on the world and on art”…
(semiotics: objectified, intellectual understanding of signs.)
(phenomenology: total effect of all that the individual spectator
apprehends or experiences)
“Senses intermingle so that ‘the ear sees scenery and the eye hears
it.’”
“ the speeches become a metaphysical light cast on the setting, while
the illuminated setting encompasses the speech and gives is a kind
of environmental meaning”
the interpenetration of sight and hearing may effect the way audience
members perceive scenography.
• Di Benedetto…
“before interpreting, one needs to have a
vocabulary to understand the ways in which
an object or experience exists in space.”
An brief overview of the history of
theatre design.
Wilde, Larry. http://www3.northern.edu/wild/scdes/sdhist.htm
Pre – Renaissance
During the Greek, Roman, Medieval and Elizabethan periods, the
rear wall of the theatre was the scenery.
Occasionally, especially during the medieval morality plays, scenic
elements, such as the Hells Mouth, were introduced. Generally
the scenes location was either obvious, unimportant, or stated
in a character's lines. The latter was the standard practice
during the Elizabethan Era.
Greek Theatre, the beginning…
The Theatre of Dionysus, Athens
Herodian Atticus, Tech rehearsal for Carmen May 2007
Roman Theatre at Orange, France
Medieval Theatre
Le Matryre de Sainte
Apolline
from Jehan Fouques
miniature
Valenciennes Passion Play
Norah Lambourne’s Drawing of the Valenciennes Passion Play
Elizabethan Playhouses
The Fortune
The Globe Theatre
The Italian Renaissance
Scenery, as we know it today, is a product of the Italian Renaissance.
To a large extent, it is based on the discovery of the rules of perspective and their application to the world of
architecture. The early evolution of the theatrical scenery is the work of a number of artists over a period of
approximately two hundred and twenty five years: 1508 to 1638.
Around 1415- Filippo Brunelleschi. (1377- 1446) goldsmith, sculpture and architect discovers the secret of linear
perspective: a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface.
1435- Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1474) publishes Brunelleschi's secret in Della Pitture, the first treatise on the
geometric principles of linear perspective.
1508- Pellegrino da San Daniele (1467-1547) places individual houses (probably as angled wings) in front of a painted
backdrop for a staging of Ariosto's The Casket at Ferrara.
1545- Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554) publishes Architetura the first work detailing the design and construction of a
court theatre. Serlio's playhouse was erected in a large existing room (a Hall of State) in the court palace, the
standard practice of the day. The stage, located at one end of the room, was raised to the ruler's eye level and the
perspective scenery was designed to provide the Royal Chair with a perfect view. The front half of the stage floor
was level, the rear half sloped up towards the back wall increasing the illusion of depth. The scenery was placed
on the raked (or sloped) portion of the stage. Serlio's sets (Comic, Tragic and Pastoral) consisted of four sets of
wings (the first three were angled -- one face parallel to the front edge of the stage and the other angled up stage
-- and the fourth wing was flat and parallel to the audience) and a backdrop or back shutter. His sets were
conceived in architectural terms. They were not meant to be shifted.
1606- Giovan Battista Aleotti (1546-1636) introduces the flat (not angled) wing in Ferrara.1638- Nicola Sabbattini
(1574-1654) publishes Practica di fabricar scene e machine ne' teatri (Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes
and Machines), the first practical stage craft manual.
• The English Renaissance
Ingo Jones (1573-1652), England's first major scene designer, introduced the
Italian concept of perspective scenery to the English court theatre of James I in
the beginning of the 17th century. He visited Italy in 1600 returning to his
native England four years later. In 1605 he designed a perspective setting using
angled wings and a back shutter for a production of Ben Jonson's The Masque
of Blackness. By 1608 he was framing his scenery with a proscenium arch and
in the 1630s he abandoned the angled wings of Serlio for the more practical
flat wings of Aleotti.
Court Masques and Baroque Theatre
Masque Design by Inigo Jones
Costume Drawings by Inigo Jones
Restoration Theatre
1660-1710
Philip James de Loutherbourg and David Garrick
1771-1785
• In 1771 de Loutherboug settled in London, where
David Garrick paid him £500 a year to design scenery
and costumes and oversee the stage machinery at the
Drury Street Theatre. His stage effects attracted the
admiration not just of the general public, but also of
artists. He devised scenic effects in which, for instance,
green trees gradually became russet and the moon
rose and lit the edges of passing clouds: illusions
achieved through the use of coloured lantern-slides
and the ingenious lighting of transparencies.He
continued to work at the theatre until 1785.
3 De Loutherbourg sketches for RichardIII from the V&A online collection
An example of his painting style
19th Century
Historically accurate scenery
The trend towards historically accurate scenery began in Germany around 1810 and is
attributed to Josef Schreyvogel, the director of Vienna's Brugtheater. Below are three
managers-directors whose emphasis on historical accuracy has impacted the world of design.
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Actor-manager Charles Kean's (1811-1868) spectacular antiquarian (historically accurate)
productions, especially of Shakespeare's major dramas, dominated the London stage of the
1850s. He believed that "historical accuracy might be blended with pictorial effect that
instruction and amusement would go hand in hand." He brought centrality of mise en scene
to the production of legitimate drama.
Georg II (1826-1914), the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen operated a small, professional court
theatre. Like Kean, his sets and costumes were historically accurate. Although he used a
realistic style of production, the plays he presented were primarily romantic. His two most
frequently revised works were William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Frederich Schiller's
William Tell. His acting company toured the major cities of Europe for 16 years (1874 to 1890)
influencing production techniques in both Paris and Moscow.
American producer, director and playwright David Belasco (1853-1931) is primarily
remembered today for his emphasis on naturalistic detail. In 1909, for a production of The
Easiest Way, his scenic artist placed the contents of a boarding house room, including the
wallpaper, on the stage of the Stuyvesant Theatre and three years later (1912) he built on
stage a fully functioning restaurant (Child's Restaurant) for the Governor's Lady. As a
playwright he provided the dramatic source material for two of Puccini's most popular
operas: Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Girl of the Golden West (1905) .
• Development of the box set
• As early as 1804, the manager of the Court Theatre at
Mannheim (Germany) joined several pairs of wings with
door and window flats creating a more realistic scenic
environment.
• Actor-manager Mme. Vestris (1797-1856) is credited with
introducing the box set to the English stage. In 1832, a critic
wrote of one of her productions "the stage's more perfect
enclosure fits the appearance of a private chamber
infinitely better than the old contrivance of wings." When
Mme. Vestris produced Dion Boucicault's London
Assurance at Covent Garden in 1841, the critics noted the
realism of the rooms with their heavy molding, real doors
with doorknobs, and ample and correct furniture.
The Olympic Theatre, Managed by Madame Vestris
The Whip, Bruce Smith’s “Sensation Scenes”
“The Corsican Brothers” by Dion Boucicault, utilising gauzes etc to facillitate
magic like effects
• The New StageCraft
At the end of the 19th century, two designers, Adolph Appia (1862-1928) and
Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), revolted against the scenic practices of the
traditional European acting company. They objected to a three-dimensional
actor standing on a flat floor surrounded by acres of "realistically" painted
canvas. Their controversial ideas, published in numerous books and periodicals,
would become the basis of the New Stagecraft. A stagecraft of simplification
and suggestion.
Adolphe Appia
•
Adolphe Appia, (1862-1928) was a Swiss architect, stage designer and theorist
of stage lighting and décor. His theories and realized works transformed the
practice of stage design and he had a great influence on the development of
performing arts
•
.His sets and his drawings didn’t look for pictorial realism, their intent was rather
to create and underline a believable mood for each scene. Symbols and metaphors
prevailed over literal descriptions, as in the representation of trees. The actors and
the script were of equal importance than scenery: for Appia, the four basic scenic
elements were: Painted Scenery (Vertical); Spatial Arrangement (Floor); the Actor;
the Light. “Inclusion of the Actor as a scenic element creates a completely new
focus with resonance in modenism”.
Lucarelli, Fosco. http://socks-studio.com/2013/12/13/a-revolution-in-stage-designdrawings-and-productions-of-adolphe-appia/
Rhythmic Spaces
Appia's distinctive contribution to this first scenographic turn was in
recognising the power and potential of light as both a unifying and
expressive force that could be modulated like music. In establishing
the fundamental principles of stage lighting, Appia drew attention to
the materiality of light, its effect upon stage space and the actor's
body within it. Appia therefore evolved a new dramaturgy, with light
at its centre, that can also be seen to have influenced such
widespread practices as the light plays of the Bauhaus, the work of
Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda and the contemporary work of
Robert Wilson, for example.
Palmer, Scot. A ‘choréographie’ of light and space: Adolphe Appia and the first scenographic turn
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23322551.2015.1024975
Drawing for
Orpheus, Hellerau, 1913
Photograph of Orpheus, Hellerau, 1913
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig OBE (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966)
Similar to Adolphe Appia in his struggle against the reproduction of reality, Craig envisaged scenic environments
designed to appel to the emotion through visual suggestion, evocation and symbolist aesthetics. Without actually
meeting until 1914, the two shared and promoted similar ideas on the use of light and stage space: Craig used to
lit the stage from above, rather than adopting the traditional foot lighting. Colour and shadow played a strong role
in his sets: “Under the play of this light, the background becomes a deep shimmering blue, apparently almost
translucent, upon which the green and purple make a harmony of great richness.” (Craig in Bablet, 1981)
His most important scenographic concept was the idea of using neutral, mobile, non-representational screens as a
staging device: a system of hinged and fixed flats quickly arrangeable for internal and external scenes. His stage
sets were more about a strong sense of mood and atmosphere than naturalism. Movement, action, words, colour
and rhytm was used a strong means of conceptualization, combining in a dynamic form.
All of his life Craig promoted a visual theatre (he always argued audiences go to see, rather than hear, plays). Design
elements have to function as symbols and communicate deeper meanings, rather than simply reflecting the real
world.
Lucarelli, Fosco
http://socks-studio.com/2014/02/15/to-transcend-reality-and-function-as-symbol-stage-design-of-edward-gordoncraig/
Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus Theatre
Oskar Schlemmer, (born September 4, 1888 died April 13, 1943, German painter,
sculptor, choreographer, and designer known for his abstract yet precise paintings
of the human form as well as for his avant-garde ballet productions.
“Although Schlemmer was one of the important stage artists of the 1920s, he was not a true man of
the theatre. The staged works he produced on the Bauhaus stage together with his students,
of which there were a large number, were not conceived as works of theatre in the strict sense but as spatializations of
compositional strategies.” – Franz Anton Cramer
http://www.printmag.com/imprint/schlemmer-bauhaus-multimedia-design/
Schlemmer’s Pole dance
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/24/oskar-schlemmers-ballet-ofgeometry-in-pictures
Caspar Neher and Brecht
CASPAR NEHER (1897-1962)
Caspar Neher, who became one of the leading stage designers in Europe from the 1920's until his death in 1962
and was in his youth a schoolmate and friend of Bertolt Brecht, began his career by collaborating with the
young author, and later collaborated repeatedly with Brecht and Weill--with both together and each separately.
Aufstieg und Fakk der Stadt Mahagonny Scene
sketches by Neher
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Epic Theatre proposed that a play should not cause the spectator to identify
emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead
provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage.
Neher designed many of the sets for Brecht's dramas and helped to forge the
distinctive visual iconography of their Epic Theatre.
For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the
spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself. By
highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to
communicate that the audience's reality was equally constructed and, as such, was
changeable.
The distancing effect or Verfremdungseffekt. Brecht first used the term in an essay
on "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" published in 1936, in which he described
it as "playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying
itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and
utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in
the audience's subconscious”.
The distancing effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were
a fourth wallbesides the three surrounding him [...] The audience can no longer
have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking
place”.
Josef Svoboda
May 10, 1920 – April 8, 2002
•
A czech artist and visionary scenic designer,often called the father of modern
theatre design, although he preferred to use the term scenography. He trained
initially as an architect and later studied scenography in Prague. From 1948, for
over 30 years, he was te leading designer at the Czech National Theatre and during
that period he designed all over the world. Co-founder of the Laterna Magika
Theatre he became its artistic director in 1993. He was internationally renowned
for his innovative use of light and his multimedia installations involving live actors
and the use of film projections. (Theatre Performance Design: A reader in
Scenography)
•
Signature elements of his ever-changing environments were projections and later
closed-circuit television monitors, which allowed a scene to be to multiplied in
space and time. Another key feature were mirrors, sometimes enormous and used
to reflect and distort the stage floor. The influence of set designer Adolphe Appia is
visible in the strong presence of architectural elements such as majestic stairs and
platforms.(http://www.graphicine.com/josef-svoboda-light-and-shadows/)
Photographs of Svoboda’s work from
http://www.graphicine.com/josef-svoboda-light-and-shadows/