argues,” suggest that the paradigm of theatrical performance may be structurally alien to any quest for certainty and stability. The consequent breaking down of the binary and the neat hierarchical relationships between page and stage, between producer/artist and consumer/audience, should be located alongside the paralle! economic migration away from industrial manufacture with its focus on material product, to economies and industries that are predicated upon infor- mation, performance and knowledge with a focus upon service and the customer experience. The technologies of computation that have had such significant effects upon the theory and practice of theatre, perfor- mance and scenography, and that have simultaneously both enabled and reflected the ‘de-framing? and destabilisation of the theatrical experience, have also been the technologies that have enabled Internet access to knowledge and information and have generated an unprece- dented ability to interrelate with the world in ways that are similarly not ‘framed’ in colonial authority. The presentation and performance of self through the creation and ‘uploading’ into the virtual theatre of a social networking site or personal web space, or interaction with a performance website, have created significant alternatives to existing narrative modes, forms of representation, dramaturgies and physical places of performance. Within digital dramaturgies and within virtual theatres of performance, the virtual actor, the avatar, may be brought into existence and may walk upon an entirely new space and within a completely re-functioned scenography of performance. Scenography as Dramaturgy of Performance Given the volatile global situation, what should artists do? Richard Schechner, 2002" ‘The earlier chapters of this book have examined the development of scenography over the last hundred or so years and have been con cerned primarily with activity within the institution and architeceures of the theatre, The understanding of scenography that has been con- structed has been primarily about the creation of the mise en scene for the staging of plays. One way or another, scenography as a devel- oping form of artistic practice has been applied within the service of dramatic literature. But as Kershaw says, *...post-modernity sig- nals an acute destabilisation...an end to all the human certainties of the modernist past’.? Alongside artistic and cultural destabilisation, increasing ecological, environmental and global political concerns, and their volatility noted by Schechner above, are provoking the artist towards ever greater questioning of the function and purposes of per formance. In addition, and as we saw towards the conclusion of the previous chapter, the certainties of earlier twentieth-century modernist ambitions for theatre have been significantly challenged by, amongst other considerations, the increasing diversity of multi-ethnic perfor- ‘mance cultures. Of course, plays are still written and performed, but the earlier theatrical certainties of dramatic literature and narrative, and therefore scenery and its framing within theatre architecture are no longer primary. Institutionalised Western producing theatre compa- nies have become similarly decentred and replaced with performance forms and values that tend, as Christopher Balme suggests, towards: 223 5«the visual image over the written word, collage and montage instead of linear structure, a reliance on metonymic rather than metaphoric repre- sentation, and a redefinition of the performer's function in terms of being ‘and materiality, rather than appearance and mimetic imitation. Scenography in the service of dramatic literature continues to play a significant role in major theatre centres and draws upon the larest technologies of manufacture and control. But'whilst digital technolo- gies are increasingly used to serve many of the traditional values of spectacle in the theatre outlined in the introduction to this book, scenographers and scenography are simultaneously moving away from theatre architectures and formal spaces of performance. Floating freely, stimulated by increasing research interest in the subject in col- leges and universities, scenography has grown and in some ways been transformed into an applied art practice that is finding new ways to engage and interact with audiences. As_a rescarch-driven art prac- Se tis engaging with GvEnf/RrsCEMUTY HUES the environment global warming, ecology, vanishing resources, political inadequacy and corruption, and effects of globalised capitalism without first waiting upon the dramatist to write the play? In this chapter, I therefore want to examine some of the ways in which scenography has grown, developed and is being transformed within a post-dramatic culture of performance. In particular, how has scenography responded to globalisation, economic stringency, failing energy supplies, global warming and climate change, and shrinking resources? Do the energies and attitudes to theatre and performance, for example, the founding principles of Appia and Craig - the genetic, of scenographic theory ~ still have resonance and value within contemporary practice? Since scenography has conceptually grown so broad and may lack, for example, the focusing centrality of plays and ‘J theatre architectureanchop a discussion, my survey must be wider Staging, more selective and inevitably somewhat less comprehensive. ‘These are new and challenging buttons that have been added to the button box and which may determine ‘play’ during the twenty-first century. ‘Working within the culture of performance and with ever increasing presence within university research, scenography has become a vital constituent within applied theatre practice, Nevertheless, I believe that jin many ways new approaches extend and significantly develop the energies that I have identified as conditioning scenography through- out the twentieth century: rejection of the past; the idea of the scene J om Osada TEAMS. es thie — K TEATRO, APLICH DD ep orig To ANCHOR : AWcLAR THIN © DEN TRO be as machine; the materiality and performance-making qualities of light; the collision and collusion of scenography with architectures and a of technology. Therefore, although I want to consider approaches, applications and interventions of scenography, the values and attitudes that they represent may be determined within much of its founding theory and practice. Therefore, and consis- tently with the approach of the book, I would want to place these nme developments within chit historical context and theatica ECOOEIY) 9 Tn # veng premature iw . rechat seen, almost as soon as he had articulated end Geng S the atelier studio place of performance at Hellerau in 1910, Adolphe = (Bs jected the formality of its architecture along with any physical 3 "Forms of separation between the performing artist and the specta- Stor He struggled for a theory that would account for a completely interactive form of performance and he urged its importance to the << S community. Although ‘$carcely couches iscourse of contempo- > rary performance theory, his final essay,‘Art Is an Attitude’, } 'S 1927 as an introduction to Walter René Fuerst and Samuc Twentieth-Century Stage Decoration, is of striking relevance to the concluding examples and arguments of this book: RecHAzO 5 * We have loft our chairs. We are erect, we want to be ‘of itt, we shrink from no violence to reach our goal, we seek for art and we wish to tind it in ourselves, We break the barriers asunder, surmount in a stride the ‘steps that separate us from the slage, [and] descend unflinching into the arena... The time will come when professionals in the theatre and the plays written for them will be a thing of the past, never to retumn, When mankind, free now, will sing in living symbols, more or fess dramatic, and adopted by all, thelr joys and their sorrows, their harvests, thelr labors, their struggles, their defeats and their triumphs; and they alone will be spectators whom age or infirmity will gather round us in common, living sympathy, The time when we shall be artists - living artists — because we willed it so* maviFesT. Every 4 years since 1967, the Czech Republic has held an inter national exhibition of stage design and theatre architecture. The Prague Quadrennial is the most comprehensive and important bring- ing together of architects and designers and their practices from all over the world. Significantly in the context of the developments out- lined in this chapter, for the 12th edition held in 2011, its name was changed from an International Exhibition of Scenography and Theatre architecture to the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and! ! Space — PQ2011. The change of name reflected the expansion and dramaturgical potential of scenography, and the mutability of the concept of the architecture of theatre and the space of performance. The following examples, many drawn from PQ2011, illustrate some of the ways in which scenography has become imbricated within performance-making; how it may operate as a dramaturgy; and how itis responding within the ‘volatile global situation’ to concerns of the contemporary world.’ Rejecting the theatre and its architecture and even the ‘non- architecture’ of the black-box studio, the finding and making of sites of performance has become a constant concern of scenographic practice. For example, the imposing and disturbing materiality of industrial, = used to create scenic spaces for performances that explore commu- nity_and collective memory. Mike Pearson identifies suck Spaces a representing *.--new Kinds oF informational site in changing techno- SF logical circumstances, and the role of human agency in place-making in a transitory moment of spon atari things and an intensification of affect ...”* Pearson Tinvolved in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AIRC) ‘Landscape and Environment’ network research-grant project during 2006-2008, which had used the Sennybridge Training Area (SENTA) Ministry of Defence training village at Mynydd Epynt in the Brecon Beacons, Wales, for one of its case studies. Under the direction of Pearson, working in collaboration with Mike Brookes and scenographer Simon Banham, the mock village, nor- mally used to simulate house-to-house combat, became the focus of scenography for The Persians by Aeschylus, which was staged in asso- ciation with National Theatre Wales in August 2010 (Figure 11.1), The production drew particular resonance, meanings and ‘an intensi- fication of affect’ from its site specificity, since, as a forcible requisition by the army in the 1950s, the village remains a contested place that resonates with concepts of the violent colonialism that has historically been inflicted upon the Welsh countryside. ‘The everyday use and connotations of the SENTA village clearly provided @ powerfully resonant scenography for The Persians, but the presence and history of an abandoned building may generate an especial ‘intensification of affect’ for performance events. Perhaps (pase eoernem Becomes a more appropriate phrase than mise en ‘Scone for the Tange of visual performance and scenographic exper- iments that work in conjunction with, and build upon their site ABsORE TION Puusta, om EVENTO - Arvonaw + Puta im ESUENE g & abandoned buildings and the disturbed landscape are frequently being {gyj| bh a and enlily i { x Figure 11.1. The Persians, Sennybridge Training Area (SENTA) Ministry e 7 Defence training village, Mynydd Epynt, Wales (Sinton Banham). 4 ig village, Mynydd Epynt, Wales ( Wok . specificity. For example, in the mid-1950s, an experimental nuclear reactor named R1 had been constructed into the rock beneath the Royal Institute of Technology just outside Stockholm in Sweden, It produced electricity from 1954 until it was decommissioned in 1970. The bare walls of the original reactor hall are almost com- pletely covered in diagrams, cable and pipework pathways, letters, numerals and other traces of the technology of its nuclear past. The remains of conduits and valves surround an exposed, bare, exca- vated and very ominous space in the centre of the building ~ again marked by numbers igsaglyahs nda divisions. The reclaimed space provides ad isa es aaa Y that reflects*eerily, before any event of ‘performance’ takes place, upon the immensity and yet transience of science within the natural world. The reactor space is now used as a cultural centre and performance laboratory for Operat “Mecatronica, a company that represents collaboration between light- ing scenography, dance and robotics. Anders Larsson and Magaus Lundin make performances using electro-acoustic and acousmatic music and explore interfaces between_dance, robotics and light. “Through light and sound, science and technology are embodied in the performance of dance, which confronts this resonant and disturbing space. EERILY » JvguieTAMENIE.Similarly unsettling and challenging to personal and social memory, the Hungarian artistic group Krétakér took over the former Prague headquarters of the Czechoslovak Communist Party newspaper Rudé Pravo for their project Crisis Trilogy Part 1: jp.co.de during the sum- mer of 2011, The building was temporally suspended, frozen at the conclusion of its function and awaiting the demolition that occurred a year later in 2012. The project focused on a group of 12 young people selected from all over the world whose task was to create a community over a period of several weeks living amongst the ruins of Soviet industrial grandeur. The audience was told that the project had been based upon the ideas of a Hungarian professor, Miklés Hida, who gave a short lecture on the sociological theories by which communities are built. To that end the young people had taken over the building, and the performance was organised and framed by the audience visit to their living spaces. Within the building the audience saw an installation of beautifully mounted and lit photographs and images that illustrated psychological abuse by parents of teenagers, and, following the introductory lecture, a film was shown of the inter- viewing and creation of the group of 12. The audience then moved down into the huge, ruined printing hall and met the group and ques- tioned them about their durational attempt to create community in and through this space. Footsteps grated upon the rough flooz, and the smell and taste of stale engine oil from the removed printing machinery dominated the senses. Industrial buildings provide complex sensory combinations. As Stephen Di Benedetto asks: ‘If artists harness words, line color, and movement, are not smell, taste, and touch just as viable and malleable stimuli?” What was true and what was a performed fic- tion? A social experiment, founded upon seemingly true sociological theory, had been constructed and performed in the ruins of a build- ing thar had, for almost half a century, been committed to communist truth (Figure 11.2), Abandoned buildings inevitably offer associations and relationships with the past, and an important feature of contemporary scenographic practice invites its audience to reflect upon the construction of mem- “ory. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur asked the question ‘Does there mot exist an intermediate level of reference between the living memory of individual persons and the public memory of the * Mexico’s Teatro OJO's ;NO? project in 2008 focused upon the performative dimensions of both individual and collective, politically generated memory. NO? created a series of interventions and what the company called ‘image-actions’ Figure 11.2 Krétakér Crisis Trilogy/Part 1: jp.co.de, performed in the formes Prague headquacters of the Czechoslovak Gommunist Pacty newspaper Rudé Privo, 2011 (photograph by Christopher Baugh). in Mexico City’s public spaces. These site-specific events and installa- tions were described by the company as ‘struggles against forgetting” and served to evoke accounts of what had or might have happened in those spaces. Their aim was to provoke a confrontation between official, state-generated history and possible, alternative personal his- tories. In this way, scenography acted asa mode of archaeology pondering over the traces and material remains of the past. The process of the act of performance — the event itself ~ became an archae- ological interpretation that in the case of ;NO? aimed to resist the ‘induced amnesia’ of politically constructed collective memory. Teatro OJO asked, ‘How to recognize those erased footprints embedded in the thoughts and behaviors of the subjects and the social urbanized life within Mexico City?” They consider their performance instal- lations as “... poetic interventions that seek to set off, interrogate or provoke the social, urban fabric, and by makii i _and by making spectators into “participants that reconfigure the actions according to the degree of their collaboration’."® But importantly the burden of (re)constructingmemory must be a shared responsibility between the performer and ‘What Ileana Diéguez called the ‘processuality’ of the event ‘was more important than an attempt to create or display (as in a ‘muscum, gallery or theatre) described objects or captioned artworks of memory. Through this process, ‘meanings’ were generated by the audience and acted in confrontation with their own memories, rather than being offered to them ‘ready-made’ by the actors. Both Appia and Craig would recognise this concern to reject imitation of a pre- interpreted reality in favour of a focus upon the lived reality and process of performance. Official history and memory were again brought into confronta~ tion when Teatro OJO’s performance Within a Failing State (2010) took over the abandoned, former building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City. Four audience members, ata time, were guided through the abandoned building by eight performers, who made, as Hector Bourges Valles described: --- [a] series of minimum actions, just the necessary amount to establish precise relations with space, an object or with the process itself. In other words they should make a space, an object or a document visible, auci- ble, perceptible... Rathor than lodging a roprosentation, it had to deal with the disposition of a direct link between the spectator, the actions and the real." Teatro OJO have renounced traditional forms of theatre, architecture and scenography so that their practice might serve as an interven- tion: as a way of relating a contemporary audience with its collective past ~ perhaps in order to conjure new memories and perhaps to effect some kind of reconciliation. The industrial or government buildings, as grim emblems of state power and authority, in their desolate and abandoned forms may serve as powerful stages where memory may be constructed and reconfigured. As Ann Stoler said: Itthe ruin stands as a tangible form that activates the past in the present, toopen the question of potential futures, maybe the ruin, as a remain [sic] of the past, can be a setting to locate the relationship between the colo- nial past and the imperial present in a way that itre-activates postcolonial thought in the blind spots that resist thought.* The sites of old, abandoned and ruined buildings may be expanded to include the pervasive urban ruined cityscape of globalised capitalism. Brazil’s Teatro da Vertigem project BR-3 was performed in 2007 along Figure 11.3 Teatro da Vertigem, BR-3 performance and image actions on the Tieté Rives, Si0 Paulo, 2007 (photograph by Nelson Kao). 3 miles of the industrially heavily polluted and ferociously dirty Tieté River, which runs through Sao Paulo (Figure 11.3). Audlience/spectators were invited to board a boat, which presented itself as a kind of floating evangelical church with a neon sign announcing anodyne religious promises accompanied by the recorded voice of an evangelical minister seemingly offering redemption and salvation. The ‘narrative’ of BR-3 concerned three historical states of Brazil: Brasilia, the monumental and powerful contemporary Brazilian capital; Brasiléia, a lost city of the River Amazon; and Brasilandia, an impoverished drug trafficking district of S40 Paulo. The river is a powerful and noxious result of rapid, unplanned development and urbanisation, Beyond the banks of the river could be seen the brightly lit, distant cityscape. The darkness of the slowly moving water, the bridges and warehouse buildings were used for lighting and as screens to receive projections. Actors served as guides who referred the spec- tator’s attention to performance actions and tableaux created by sophisticated projection, but also towards images of frequently very simple scenic resource. Examples of these were the disturbing stillness of a hanged man suspended from a mast, called into service to perform as a gallows on a small boat that slowly floated past the spectator; or ‘on the river bank the tableau of a distraught woman who was search- ing for her lost husband, whose cheap labour had been exploited tobuild vast ‘global’ cities such as Brasilia, Anténio Araijo, the direc- to/scenographer of BR-3, used the iconography and resonance of Brazil’s Catholic history, live action and performance, alongside tech- nologies of sound and projection to reflect on the globalised passion play of urbanisation and development, and the seemingly remorseless exploitation and transfiguration of the political underclass. There are strong similarities between the dramaturgical processes of Krécakor, Teatro OJO and Teatro da Vertigem and those of many contemporary site-specific performance artists. For example, UK scenographer Louise Ann Wilson makes performance where the journey either metaphorically as narrative or literally as 2 mode of spectating forms a focal part of her work and reflects her scenographic dramaturgy. She says: My concern is to create relationships between space, performer and audience, and to find ways of revealing, reshowing and re-enchanting a place by saying: 'Look anew at what is here; witness the surface of things, and then look again and you will see something more profound about this piace and perhaps about the world, and how we experience it, and our Place within it’... Rather like an archaeological dig, making work like this involves an approach to performance-making in which | ‘excavate’ the performance ‘out of a specitic landscape or place.” As the company Wilson +Wilson, Louise Ann Wilson and Wils Wilson made House (1998), which took two abandoned, and soon-to-be- demolished, Yorkshire workers’ cottages in Huddersfield, UK, and ‘excavated’ them to make a performance event where found objects, images and sounds were used to create imagined histories. Louise ‘Ann Wilson says: “This source material was a jumping off point for the artistic team, feeding our preoccupation with time, change, the evolution of buildings and private space, and raised questions relating to how we read the past.” As in the earlicr examples, small audiences, frequently limited to the intimacy of single figures, were guided or led through the performance. In House, the audi- cence progressed through rooms of the houses whilst events and ‘image actions’, ‘fragments of human stories’, unfolded before and around them. Later work by Louise Ann Wilson has focused pri- marily upon the relationship between rural landscape and human events, but the scenographic inspiration, dramaturgy and performance methodologies are similar. In these examples, the guided journey has formed the basis of the dramaturgical_ infrastructure of new scenographic site-specific practice. But the intervention of the actor/performer may not always: provide the means of guiding the audience. Increasingly, hand-held computers and smartphone technology have been used to provide guidance and instruction, which enables the individual participant to control their exposure and perhaps their response to perfor- mance. Dutch scenographers Lena Miller, Roos van Geffen, Theun Mosk and Marloeke van der Viugt used this technology to provide impulses, sounds and guidance in Looking For...(2011), in which visitors/spectators/audience were invited to make a guided journey through the streets of Prague. The narrative framework was provided by the (supposed) discovery in 2003 of some rolls of undeveloped film. “These were images of Prague during the 1960s and showed individuals and groups posed within recognisable city locations. The participant (or ‘attendant’, as Di Benedetto has usefully called such engagement") used a smartphone to guide them on a tour through the locations of the photographs where they were invited to use the camera on the phone to imitate the 1960s” images. The photographs were later compiled alongside both the originals and those of other participants to form a complex artistically mediated and multi-layered gallery of remembrance of a journey through the city. As with the Krétakor per- formance, uncertainty about the truth of the narrative framing, in this instance, the ‘discovered’ film from the 1960s, generated a heightened sensitivity to city spaces within the participant. The client community has become inseparably participant, attendant and audience. Bat it is the process of the journey that enables meanings and reso- nance, which, in some instances, may require significant commitment by the audience. For example, the UK company Blast Theory, who have consistently experimented with hand-held computers and smart- phones, described their 2007 site-specific work Rider Spoke as a piece which .-linvites the audience fo cycle through the streets of the city, equipped with a handheld computer. They search for a hiding place and record a short message there. And then they search for the hiding places of others... It invites the public to be co-authors of the piece and a visible ‘manifestation of it as they cycle through the city. Itis precisely dependent ‘on its local context and invites the audience to explore that context for its ‘emotional and intellectual resonances... Rider Spoke has @ high thresh- old for the audience: you must be willing to cycle, alone at night, through the city. And this sets the stage for a very personal and intimate form Of participation. Instead of ‘User Generated Content’, the artists have approached the project as inviting 'Publicly Created Contributions’.The generation and interrogation of memory has become a frequent theme within contemporary performance scenography. Canadian scenographer and scholar Kathleen Irwin explored scenography as a technology of remembrance in both her own work (largely in abandoned sites) and her writing about web-based performance. In ‘The Wilderness Downtown’ (the Montreal rock group Arcade Fire’s project launched online in 2011), which focused upon selation- ships between the individual and the location(s) of their childhood, she had an especial concern for the opportunities, and a distinct sensitivity to the challenges, offered by the ‘found spaces’ of dig- ital technologies and the consequences of intermedial intervention in the making of memory. “The Wilderness Downtown’ used digital technology to explore memory and identity in both local and global neighbourhoods. She said that performance may be ‘... extrapolated from the specificities of the site itself and, importantly, the communi- ties that claim ownership of it’. In this instance, the site was real, although digitally mediated, but the context of memory was virtual, “The Wilderness Downtown’ used Google Maps-based software to lead the individual ‘audience’ on a virtual journey through the land- scape of their youth where *,.. material traces evoke worlds that are intangible and unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect and insigh¢’.® But Irwin also acknowledges the dif- culties where third-party mediatisation frames the memories that are ‘generated; in this instance, the hoodie-wearing young person (suppos- edly oneself} who guides us on a journey through the neighbourhood ‘where we once lived has both positive and negative connotations. In applying the skills and practices of scenography to social engage- ‘ment, artists may use a combination of sophisticated, or at least complex, technology alongside a celebration of alternatives. For exam- ple, glass is made from primal elements of silicon fused into formation at very great heat. It is also one of the most frequently recycled com- modities and seems to typify the opportunity for a regeneration of scarce resources. Performance scenographer Richard Downing, work- ing in Aberystwyth in Wales, is currently (2012) making a work called “Butterfly Man’, where a ‘village’ of some 300 pairs of hands is cast in recycled glass. The hands are cast with thumbs together and fingers spread wide in imitation of ‘butterflies’. These are suspended in ‘flight as it were, as a site-specific landscape intervention. Equally important to the scenography, however, is the process of smelting and moulding the glass. Downing is using a new kind of glass-melting furnace pow- ered by low-carbon biomass fuel -at once sophisticated and advanced, and yet inexpensive, ecologically sensible and completely accessible to the artist. He described his ambition: this is important to me for the transformative ‘chain’ underpinning the work a chain ultimately embodied in the ‘butterfly’ metaphor and anamorphic assembly, Roughly, it goes like this: sunlight captured and stored by plants; this energy released - the whole work should read as a release of energy ~ by new technology to transform (melt) waste glass (itself once sand) to be re-shaped as individual butterfies*hands, cap- {ured In one moment of their change; these gathered as both unique individuals... and a sum of parts transforming/ revealing further poten- tials (depending upon viewer and viewpoint) all revealed, in a loop, by Tight? “The process of transformation and change that has been a consistent feature of scenography throughout all ages, to which has been added concern for the exploration of alternative technologies, is an impor- tant and significant development within socially engaged performance and scenography. Downing sees this work as a process of making scenography, but equally important as a process of research. Such research increasingly serves as the starting point for scenographic practice and performance: in practice, this research becomes the initiating energy of creation and has replaced the dramatic text — the play. Proactive scenographic performance is increasingly being used as an active intervention to register and empower the collective and individual memories of local communities. Through space, objects, memorabilia, playful procession, dance and clothes — all essentially scenographic qualities, intangible, ephemeral and transient ~ memo- ries may be generated and archived. In abandoning theatre buildings, scenography is taking to the community its skills of modelling, graphic representation, costume and public celebration, alongside sophisti cated new technologies and digital archiving skills. These are provid- ing a forum for research, interrogation, publication and performance (and of course the Internet plays an important role in this work). Scenography is offering a paradigm of performance whereby com- munities may collaborate with artists and work to develop skills to record and celebrate thoughts, memories and emotions collectively experienced. UK scenographer Fiona Watt used a form of scenographic dramaturgy to make a community celebration within the context of the changing North Kent urban landscape located within the larger‘Thames Gateway regeneration zone. Her work formed part of the Créativité sans Frontiéres, a transnational collaboration of artists and musicians that was formed through the Interreg IV Cross Bor- der Programme of the European Union. ‘This worked to make links between local communities in Medway and Dunkerque. Watt and fellow artists based much of their work on the traditions of hawk- ers, marker traders and travelling showmen and musicians. Reflecting upon Marcel Duchamp’s Béite-en-Valise,® performance narratives were made from the simplest, most portable means. Using small models, memorabilia and ephemera, ‘suitcase museums’ were made, which served to memorialise individual past lives and communities, In procession through the streets and dockyards on both sides of the English Channel, they served to reflect upon the transformation and (regeneration of the urban environment. The suitcases of arte- facts and models helped articulate, develop or interrogate the memory and identity of individual people and a community who have been subjected to a globalising process — in this instance the dockyard clo- sures and the subsequent regeneration (and inevitable gentrification) and their effects on communities in Chatham (UK) and Dunkerque (France). The actions of Créativité sans Frontigres involved walk- ing aud wavelling, which brought about mapping and discovery; scenography and performance served to reveal and to guide both participant and spectator on the shared journeys. In such instances, ‘we might well think of scenography as an archiving technology of memory. ‘We have seen that the guided journey and the concerns of identi- fying, shaping, showing and labelling - map-making ~ have become recurring tropes of scenographic dramaturgy and_performance- making. Such techniques and socially engaged practices have been used elsewhere by artists working with communities coming to terms with, for example, dislocation and diaspora, enforced urbanisation or the destruction of rainforests or community farmland. For example, in Brazil, interventions have taken the memories of current and former inhabitants and questioned inherited assumptions such as progress, the unquestioning generation of wealth and happiness. ‘They have used a dramaturgy of processions, street dance, celebration and par- ties in order to confront social restlessness. It is significant that in exhibition catalogues and websites announcing and describing this work, scenographers frequently list their range of skills as those of set designer, costume designer, painter, sculptor, fashion designer, teacher, graffiti artist, historian, researcher and fine artist. ‘The process typically involves an encounter between official artists and indigenous artists and their communities. The ambition is to make a provocation and a playful intervention that disturbs every- day life, and where eventual efficacy lies in the ability to empower both participant and audience. The communities frequently have tra- ditions of community performance and diurnal practices that may be extended and celebrated by the artists and which, through their tradi- tional forms, serve to enrich and empower the community. As Dwight Conquergood says Porformance studies is a border discipline, an interdisoiptine, that cult vates the capacity to move between structures, 10 forge connections, to see together, o speak with instead of speaking about or for others. Per- formance privileges threshold-crossing, shape shitting, and boundary- violating figures, such as shamans, tricksters and jokers, who value the carnivalesque over the canonical, the transformative over the normative, the mobile over the monumental. Parades, street dance, ‘shape shifting’ and the carnival may become essential parts of the scenography and utilise existing, traditional technologies of costume and musical instrument. Local customs are important. For example, where street children sell strips of sweets hanging in ribbons from their shoulders and have them converted into bright and exuberant carnival costumes. Hélio Leites, as a solo street performer and craftsman, tells epic stories including a personal adap- tation of Romeo and Juliet, which he performed using tiny models and finger puppets at a street market at Largo da Ordem in Curitiba. But crucially, the challenge for scenography and its artists is to work with the poetry of the images, the actions and the collective movements and, not to impose a ‘theatrical’ dramaturgy or aesthetic, to bring a vision of performance that, patronisingly, simply exploits local artistic tradi- tions, The artist can too easily become the “big game hunter’ seeking ‘out ever moze unique and rare indigenous songs and dances. Helen Nicholson properly cautions: [W)hatever the cifferent values of the practitioners and participants, the efficacy and effectiveness of the work depends on the formulation of praxis ~ the embedded synthesis of theory and practice — rather than a particular battery of drama strategies, forms or tachniques.* Low or indigenous technologies may become extremely sophisticated means of achieving community objectives, of asserting a powerful self- sufficiency and of engaging practically with the concern for waning,resources. In Slovakia, the process and technologies of making a place of performance adjacent to an abandoned railway station became a public spectacle and an act of community performance. The outcome was a permanent theatre space, but the process and act of build- ing became a statement about ecology, resource and recycling, and offered a spectacle of community independence and solidarity. The performance space called $2 Stanica Cultural Centre in Zilina-Zarietie (2009) was built from ‘recycled’ plastic beer crates donated by the Cerna Hora brewery. These form a remarkably modern-looking exter- nal shell placed beneath the ‘tof’ of the overhead roadway, whilst an old stee! shipping container created the foyer and entrance. But the walls of the performance space inside the piled-up crates were made from bales of straw ‘puddled! in several lorry loads of local clay. ‘The theatre has been built entirely by the local community respond- ing to desires for a place of performance, but also with a concern for the recycled and the regenerated conservation of resources, and an urgent need for community self-sufficiency within a climate of severe financial stringency. $2 give the recipe for their building on the Open Architecture website: \What you would need if you make [it] yoursot: roof ofthe concrete bridge in the neighborhood, 3.000 beer crates, 800 straw bales, 10 m3 of wood and 60 OSB boards, 120 railway sleepers, 1 old shipping container, 2 lorries of mud, 12.000 nails, 1 km of screw-bars, 3.000 wood and metal ‘screws and other joining components, 120 volunteers’ hands, 5,000 vol Untoers' hours within three months, 7.000 €....and...no need of official permission” ‘The project was inspired by Tom Rijven, an expert in alternative archi- tectures and building with straw bales, who worked alongside the builders and advised on its practical construction. The unusual nature of the building process that involved an entirely voluntary workforce and the spectacle of the wall of beer crates and especially the daily “puddling’ of clay into the straw became an act of extended community performance and a playful celebration of independence, sustainable architecture and self-sufficiency (Figure 11.4). Iti a significant exam- ple of the way in which low-expense technologies may enable artists to confront and respond to both local and to global issues. In this instance, the aim was to offer a ‘fresh solution to public authorities investing money in huge national and municipal cultural venues that have soon after [sic] problems with money for program, because they spend all for heating and maintaining’. “Tdésign’. I has become transformed into a very full, Figure 11.4. $2 Stanica Cultural Centre in Zilina-Zriedie, Slovakia (2009). A performance space built beneath a road bridge from plastic beer crates and straw bales puddled in mud (photograph by Jitka Sedlékoud). _Itis evident from these examples that contemporary ‘scenography” if no longer mere re sophisticated synonym for ‘theatye socially engaged Tand active ‘participant ii am extraordinary expansion of activities as Kershaw sayss But the extraordinary expansion of creative activites that the theatre- and performance-orientated writings analyse, from scripted drama staged in traditional theatres to improvised performative interventions at sites as varied as genetically modified vegetable fields and an oil rig in the North Sea, is especially challenging as it reflects the interna- tional and centripetal dynamics of ecologically engaged live perfor mance practices...So by the early twenty-first century an Interna- tional movement of environmental and ecological creative performance groups was emerging to span a plethora of forms, genres, aesthet- ics, venues, locations, sites, purposes, policies and, last but not least, pleasures.”* Of course, the job of designing scenery, costumes, lighting and sound for theatrical productions of plays, opera and musicals continues throughout the world. But scenography is no longer primarily the servant of dramatic performance; it has floated free and may create from within its own practices and research, To this extent, it hasclearly begun to fulfil what I have called Craig’s ‘agenda’ for the last hundred years: ‘Today they impersonate and interpret; tomor- row they must represent and interpret; and the third day they must create. One might argue that scenography has become the principal dramaturgy of performance-making - perhaps close to a direct transla~ tion of scaena and graphos ‘drawing with the scene’ ~ where all aspects of ‘the scene’ (scenic space, embodied action, material, clothes, light and sound) may become the materials laid out on the performance- maker's ‘palette’. Perhaps because scenography yields no useful verb, many contemporary artists prefer the linguistic familiarity of litera~ ture and refer to this inclusive manipulation of forms and materials in performance-making as ‘writing’ performance, The point is that scenography throughout its short critical life has been a remarkably unstable concept and has proved obstinately elusive in both theory and practice. Attempts at linguistic definition are generally reduced to an all-embracing, and not very useful, blandness as they aspire to express the breadth and inclusivity of the concept. We can only define scenography through a description of what it does and how it works within broader understandings of performance. ‘We may properly speak of scenography in the context of small-scale site-specific performance in a landscape that uses a bare minimum of technology and that develops a close, interactive relationship with its audience. We can also speak of the scenography that trans- forms a site into the location of a drama, for example, Joanna Scotcher’s setting of The Railway Children (2010) within the aban- doned Eurostar terminal at Waterloo railway station in London. And, of course, as we have seen, the dystopian visions of authoritarian government and globalised capitalism have become a distinctive qual- ity of contemporary scenographic activism. But we can also speak of scenographic performance in the very different context of the multi-million-pound expenditure on high technology for large pub- lic events of popular spectacle. This would be illustrated in Es Devlin’s scenography for Lady Gaga’s Monster Rall world tour (2009-2011), scribed by Gaga as ‘the first-ever pop electro opera’,” but also where the work of a vast team of scenographers and technicians, led by Mark Tildesley (set) and Suttirat Larlarb (costumes), deter- mined the dramaturgy and narrative process that formed a spectacle of national ‘community’ celebration created in Danny Boyle's open- ing ceremony performance at the London Olympic Games 2012 (Figure 11.5). Figure 11.5 Opening ceremony, London Olympics 2012: technology creates the scenography for a vast spectacle of community and national celebration (Workers’ Photos/Rex Features). ‘The online call for contributions made by editors Sodja Lotker and Richard Gough for the journal Performance Research 18.2 “On Scenography’ (2013) reflected the very wide range and potential inclusivity of contemporary scenographic practices in the making of performance: Performance consists of two actively interacting layers - ‘movement’ and ‘environment’, action and space, dramaturgy and scenography. The interaction between the two creates the potential and possibilty for exp>- riencing time and space within the performative act. But the boundaries between the two are often blurry and porous. Dramaturgy becomes scenography, and scenography is dramaturgy...Scenography 1s the many-layered environment of a performance that oreates spatial contexts and activates positioning, The movement of positioning (spatial and men- tal) is a crucial aspect of contemporary performance perceived as an ‘experience and an event rather than a place for meaning or illustration. ‘Soenography is acting out the historical, architectural, cultural, dramate, situational, lyrical, archaeological, fragmentary, political, authentic, the- atrical, social, physical, catastrophic, psychological...and many other dramaturgical contexts for and of the performance.A Reflection and a Conclusion Interlude: An interval in the performance of a play; the pause between the acts;...an interval in the course of some action or event; an intervening time or space of a different character. To come between, as an interlude; to interrupt. From the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1973 ‘Towards the beginning of this book, I suggested that Gordon Craig's opinion was that the theatre must be restored, but that since it was cur- rently ‘lost’, it could not be reformed — it was too late for that. Whilst significantly expanding the definitions of theatre and performance, the evidence of this final chapter has illustrated tremendous energy and creativity, and particularly a passionate sense of engagement with social and community purposes. Furthermore, these examples sive Craig’s ‘agenda’ of impersonation moving towards representation and leading to creation, which has been quoted on several occasions throughout the book, an especially new resonance in the light of the creation of new articulations of theatre and performance as well as creativity within scenographic performance practice. Tt may well be the case that theaue artists have taken the best part of a century, since the revolutions of Craig and Appia, to extract them- selves from an attitude towards theatre that perhaps ought, in reality, to be thought of as little more than a short interlude, ‘an intervening time or space of a different character’ within the much longer his- tory of the anthropology of theatre and performance. Such a history suggests that aboriginal and early forms of theatre and performance throughout Western and non-Western cultures served as important, and indeed vital interventions within communal life. Performance vwas occasional ~ that is, it served the needs and purposes of an ‘occasion of some significance and importance to the community. Per- formance served useful cultural functions within the social, religious and political life, and places and spaces of performance (architecture and scenography) were determined by the nature of both the occa- sion and the relationships that existed between performers and their audiences. Scenography included masks, marionettes, dumbshow and pantomime, and ic involved procession, dancing, pageants, journeying and celebration, But for @ short period ~ a mere interlude — within this much longer history, theatre and the act of performance became an institution, and buildings were designed and created where theatre and plays would be commodified and ‘sold’ commercially. Although precise dates are not important, we might suggest that this interlude began at about the time when James Burbage built a building called “The Theatre’ in London in 1576 and managed a company of actors and artists who established a profession and who made theatre to earn their living and for profit. From that time, theatre could be made what- ever the occasion and to anyone who could pay the price of seeing its product; and the audience began its 300-year journey towards the passive anonymity of the darkened auditorium. The architecture that was developed for this theatre became a commercial marketplace — indeed, during the early period, theatres were frequently referred to as “marketplaces of wit. ‘The introduction and the first two chapters of this book outline some of the changing qualities of these attitudes and the resulting scenographic practices of this theatre of the interlude, of this brief caesura within the history of theatre and performance. These chapters conclude with an account of the state of artistic, scenographic and social crisis ~ the crisis of mimesis — that confronted theatre towards the close of the nineteenth century, during the final phase of the inter- lude when the short-lived proscenium arch defined the attitude and practices of architecture, acting and scenography. Perhaps, therefore, we should not think of the growth and devel- ‘opment of scenography during the twentieth century as solely repre- senting attempts to reform theatre, Nor should we think of it as a kind of rearguard action; a staving off of the rapid closure of theatre buildings; a reframing and restructuring of practices necessitated by reduced patronage and funding; a battling against perceived threats from mediatised forms such as film, television and digital enter ment; oF as attempts to maintain the traditional sense of a community audience within an increasingly diverse, multicultural and globalised world. Rather, we might, perhaps, think of the process of experiment and change of the last century as a slow (and frequently painful) strug- gle to rid theatre of the effects of this short interlude, or interruption in its history, and to restore to theatre and performance something closer to the attitudes and functions which it had maintained throughout the greater part of its history. The theatre of the ‘interlude’ may well be represented by Schechne-’s ‘string quartet’: a product of the humanism and capitalism of the Renaissance that temporally displaced, disguised and hid, we might argue, the true qualities and importance of the mainstream human values and need for theatre and performance. The similarities between contemporary understandings of performance, and the way they are‘manifesting themselves in the examples of new scenographic practices that have been considered in this final chapter, and our understand- ing of theatre history in non-Western cultures, in antiquity and in the medieval period throughout Europe, would seem to support Craig in his understanding of theatre history and his proposition that only restoration is conceivable, It may well be the case, therefore, that only with the rejection of the centrality of the ‘string quarter’, and an acknowledgement of its place within an interlude in the history of theatre, might there be a renaissance of belief in the communal values and efficacy of performance and scenography: an attitude which might ensure important and socially vital futures for theatre, performance and technology. Notes Preface 1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 10. All quotations and references are from this edition. 2. Ibid. p. 55. 3. John Donne, ‘A Valediction: of the booke” from Songs and Sonnets {c.1593-1601), lines $3-4. Herbert Grierson (ed.), The Poems of Joh Donne (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). 4, Derrida, Archive Fever (1998), p. 36. 5. I have adopted and modified this term from Bar Kershaw’s Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Introduction 1. Lam thinking particularly of Steve Dixon's work with his company Chameleons, and the telematic performance titled Unheimlich (2008) that he made with Paul Serman, Andrea Zapp and Mathias Fuchs, which linked audiences virtually with actors in both Salford, England, and Rhode Island, USA. Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Arch- tecture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 38. 3. Madame (Lucia) Vestris ran the Olympic Theatre in London from 1831 until 1839. Her refinement and good taste created a considerable fashion for the extravaganzas, farces and burlesques that she produced. 4. For illustrations and discussion of these surviving theatres, see Simon ‘Tidworth, Theatres: An Architectural and Cultural History (New York: Praeger, 1973), and Richard and Helen Leacroft, Theatre and Playbouse (London: Methuen, 1984). w 2458. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, cans, by Karen Jirs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 17. 9. Tid. p. 86. 10, Michael Kirby, “The new theatre’, in Brooks McNamara and Jill Dolan (eds.), The Drama Review: Thirty Years of the Avant-Garde (Ann Arbos, ‘ME University of Michigan Research Press, 1986), pp. 63-4 11, Christopher Balme, ‘Editorial’, in Theatre Research International, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2004), p. 1. 12, Ibid., p. 1. 13. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, p. 85. 14, Mark Reaney in collaboration with the Kent Interactive Digital Design Studio (KiDDS), at the University of Kent, July 2000. 15. Maaike Bleeker, ‘Look who's looking! Perspective and the paradox of postdramatic subjectivity’, in Theatre Research International, vol. 29, ro. 1 (March 2004), p. 40. 16. See Barry Smith, ‘Digital dancing and software developments’, in Steve Dixon (ed.), Digital Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 183-208. 17, See Scott Palmer and Sita Popat, ‘Dancing in the streets: The sen- suous manifold as a concept for designing experience’, in. Interna- tional Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media, vol. 2-3 (2007), pp. 297-314. 18. Kershaw, The Radical in Performance, p. 6. 19. Richard Schechnes, ‘A new paradigm for theatre in the academy’, in Drama Review, vol. 36, no. 4 (1992), p. 8. 20. Edward Gordon Craig, ‘The actor and the iiber-marionette’, p. 61. 21, Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, p. 288, cited in Bleeker, Look who's looking!’ p. 31. 22. Nick Kaye, Postmodernism and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 23. 11 Soenography as Dramaturgy of Performance 1, Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 269. Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance, p. 6. Christopher Balme, ‘Editorial’, p. 1. Walter René Fuerst and Samuel J. Hume, Tiventieth-Century Stage Dec- oration, 2 vols (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929; Dover reprint, 1967), pp. xii, xv. 5. Thave reported on some of these examples in ‘Scenography with purpose: Activism and intervention’, in Arnold Aronson (ed.), The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011, Prague Quadrennial (Prague: Arts & Theatre Institure/PQ2011, 2012), pp. 36-49. 10. 1. 12. 13. 4. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 13. Stephen Di Benedetto, ‘Guiding somatic responses within performative structures: Contemporary live art and sensorial perception’, in Sally Banes and André Lepecki (eds.), The Senses in Performance (New York & London: Routledge, 2007), p. 125. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History Forgetting, trans. by Kathleen Blarnet and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 131. Patricio Villareal Avila, ‘Remembering ;NO®, Teatro Ojo (Prague Quadrennial) PQ2011 exhibition leaflet. Tleana Digguez, ‘Stages and dramas of memory’, Teatro Ojo (Prague ‘Quadrennial) PQ2011 exhibition leaflet, Héctor Bourges Valles, ‘What I have thought about S.R-E VISITAS GUIADAS,, Teatro OJO (Prague Quadrennial) PQ2011 exhibition leaflet. Ann Stoler, presentation at Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism for 2011; see http:jhbwtc.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/ann-stoler- ruin-to-ruin-ruination.htm! (accessed 26 July 2012) Quoted in Jonathan Pitches and Sita Popat (eds.), Performance Perspectives: A Critical Introduction, (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 65. In this, Scott Palmer conducts an important interview with Louise Ann Wilson (pp. 63-74) that con- ‘tributes significantly to an appreciation of contemporary scenographic dramacurgy. Ibid., p. 66. Di Benedetto, ‘Guiding somatic responses within performative struc- tures’, p. 125. hitpe/iwweblasttheory.co.uk/buiwork_sider_spoke.htinl (accessed 6 July 2012). Kathleen Irwin, ‘The ambit of performativity: How site makes meaning in site-specific performance’, PhD Dissertation, University of Art & Design, Helsinki, 2007, pp. 10-1. Ibid, p. 37. Email correspondence with the author, 17 August 2011, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) made a series of suitcase museums from .1935 until shortly before his death. They contained and dis- played miniature replicas, photographs and reproductions of works by Duchamp, and usually one ‘original’ artwork. Dwight Conquergood, ‘Of caravans and carnivals: Performance stud- ies in motion’, The Drama Review vol. 39, no. 4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 137-8. Helen Nicholson, Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 56. huepr//openarchitecturenetwork.org/projects/s2 (accessed 6 July 2012).24, Ibid. 25. Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 28. 26. Edward Gordon Craig, The Actor and the Uber Marionette, (London: Heinemann, 1911; Mercury Books 1962}, p. 61. 27. hetp:fen.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_Ball_Tour (accessed 3 August 2012). Further Reading The role of scenography and the impact of technology within theatri- cal production are referred to in many general histories of the theatre ~ although they are usually considered with a view, primarily, to gaining a better understanding of the theatre’s contemporary dramatic litera- ture. In addition, there are a few general histories of scenography and a number of detailed studies of theatre architecture, There are a few books of technical description and instruction that provide important historical information, but there are very few books that consider the application of specific technologies within theatre and performance. ‘The Selective Bibliography provides details of these, and specifically includes works that have been useful to me in writing this book, and it offers some guidance for those who wish to pursue further study of individual artists and theatze practitioners, Since the first edition of this book, there have appeared a number of books dealing with spe- cific aspects of scenographic practice, for example, the intervention of digital vechnologies in performance and site-specific performance. In the Selective Bibliography I have indicated with an asterisk those books to which readers may refer should they wish to pursue the basic theme of this book ~ the fundamental synergy that lies between theatre, scenography, technology and performance. 265