Scenographic Design Drawing

Performative Drawing in an Expanded Field

Sue Field

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350168541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Stagecraft & Scenography

This enlightening study explores the set design drawings for theatre and live performance, highlighting their unique qualities within the greater arena of drawing practice and theory. The latest volume in the Drawing In series, Scenographic Design Drawing encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue in the field of drawing with the inclusion of illustrations throughout. Scenographic design drawings visualize the images in the designer's 'mind's eye' early in the design process. They are the initial design tool in the creative engagement with theatre, opera, dance, and non-text-based performance. It is, in particular, this body of drawings that is unique as both a performative and a theatrical representation of multiple worlds within the 'stage space'. Sue Field illuminates this illustration process and identifies how these drawings have functioned and developed over time. Scenographic Design Drawing serves to satisfy an emerging global curiosity and a thirst for new knowledge and understanding in relation to the drawings executed by the historical and contemporary scenographer. This work addresses a critical research gap and shows how the scenographic design drawing continues to be a principal site of innovation, subjectivity, originality and authorship in theatre and live performance.

1

Drawn behind the Fourth Wall

The Australian scenographer Tony Tripp encapsulated the spirit of the scenographic design drawing in the following statement:

The drawing is the act of articulating an idea. The drawing is intended to persuade the director to go with it. It is the best time of all, doing the drawing. At that early stage it is a pure and untroubled thing—nothing to do with the practicalities of realism. It is a piece of art to seduce. (Kristen Anderson 2001, 155)

The scenographic design drawings are the drawings produced by the visual and spatial director of theatre and live performance. As part of a complex collaborative art form, these drawings are an authentic and seminal expression of the scenographer’s creative oeuvre. It is the scenographic design drawings that create in the mind’s eye the images which emerge from the scenographer’s creative engagement both with text and non-text performance. These drawings are idiosyncratic in their visualization of the performative, theatrical, and imaginative spaces of a play, opera, dance, or of non-text-based performance such as physical theatre and post-dramatic theatre. The scenographic design drawing, in all of its multiple iterations, continues into the future as the principle site of not only theatrical wonder and astonishment (Hunter 2005; Buchanan 2007, 44), but also originality and authorship; as the means of problem finding as opposed to problem solving (Buchanan 2007, 45); and most significantly as an epistemic tool which facilitates the discovery of new spaces, both surprising and potent, for the live contemporary spectator in the twenty-first century and beyond. In this chapter, I identify the freehand, generative, thinking sketch pertinent to the set design, exploratory rehearsal drawing (storyboard), digital presentational illustrations, and the performative scenographic design drawing. Also defined are the terms worlding, performative, theatricality and the theatrical sign and their specificity to the scenographic design drawing. It is, in particular, this body of drawings that are unique as both a performative and a theatrical representation of cosmopoiesis, of world creating. Therefore, as this chapter will reveal, these drawings are worthy of a greater scholarly endeavor than is currently acknowledged.

Scenography

Scenography,¹ an emergent field of research (Iball 2011, 38), originated as the European term for theatre production. As Rebecca Hickie tells us: “the term, scenography, is an increasingly popular one within the worldwide theatre-making community, and is now the term of choice when referring to the visual, spatial and aural aspects of theatre production” (Hickie 2009, Abstract). As Kate Burnett comments:

scenographer and scenography . . . have been used in Europe for far longer, but were adopted internationally as the standard academic terms, as the study of this artform/discipline has developed as an academic research subject since the early 1990s. (Burnett 2014, 3)

Scenography expresses a holistic visual, aural, and sensory approach to creating live theatre and performance. The scenographer and director are the joint visionaries of the mise-en-scène, supported by a team of creative and technical collaborators. Pamela Howard argues: “To be called a scenographer means more than decorating a background for actors to perform in front of. It demands parity between creators who have individual roles, responsibilities and talents” (Howard 2001, 14). She also suggests that scenography “is the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators that contributes to an original creation” (Howard 2001, 16). Arnold Aronson favors the term scenography over theatre design because

it implies something more than creating scenery or costumes or lights. It carries a connotation of an all-encompassing visual-spatial construct as well as the process of change and transformation that is an inherent part of the physical vocabulary of the stage. (Aronson 2005, 7)

More recently Rachel Hann, the British “cultural geographer” (Hann 2020), states:

I am arguing for the recognition of scenography as a holistic strategy of theatre-making . . . From masks to costume, light to sound, architecture to bodies, these discrete stimuli are connected through the act of scenography. (Hann 2019, 3)

In a similar light, the art historian Astrid von Rosen suggests, “Scenography as a concept of and for the theatre, addresses how theatre methods orientate place to craft atmospheres, feelings and worlds” (Rosen 2020, 4). In the following statement Christopher Baugh encapsulates the definition of scenography by employing the analogy of the drawing artist:

One might argue that scenography has become the principal dramaturgy of performance-making—perhaps close to a direct translation of scaena and graphos “drawing with the scene”—where all aspect of “the scene” (scenic space, embodied action, material, clothes, light and sound) may become the materials laid out on the performance-maker’s “palette.” (Baugh 2013, 240)

For the contemporary scenographer, the process of producing an “original creation” as an “all-encompassing visual-spatial construct” “on the performance-maker’s palette” begins with the scenographic design drawing.² These drawings are unique in the greater context of drawing because they are cosmopoietic, or world creating, and a visualization of an emergent scenographic assemblage of forces, of worlding.

Worlding Theory

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages . . .

Act II, Scene VII.

As You Like It. (1599)

In this monologue, written by the playwright William Shakespeare and spoken by the melancholic character Jaques, the stage is an analogy for the world and humans are actors performing the drama of life. Shakespeare’s theatre was devoid of extraneous decoration, stripped back to wooden floorboards and perhaps a single arras.³ The actors wore contemporary clothing, similar to the motley gathering of spectators who ate, drank, laughed, and booed at will throughout the performance. The sixteenth-century stage was an assemblage of incongruent parts that together generated a scenographic encounter or worlding in which the “seven ages” of humankind was played out. The term “assemblage” is applied here in the context of Gilles Deleuze who aligned assemblage with the poststructuralist/postmodern concepts of collage, emergence, ephemerality, temporality and heterogeneity (Wise 2013), all of which can pertain to scenography.

The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart suggests a worlding has occurred, such as in Shakespeare’s theatre, when there are “sensorial attunements to the emergent, to what is unfolding but yet to come . . . [a] process of mattering, to the moods, intensities” (Stewart 2019, NPF). A scenographic ecology, a worlding, has been assembled together. As Stewart also maintains:

Here, compositional theory takes the form of a sharply impassive attunement to the ways in which an assemblage of elements comes to hang together as a thing that has qualities, sensory aesthetics and lines of force and how such things come into sense already composed and generative and pulling matter and mind into a making: a worlding. (Stewart 2014, 119)

Rachel Hann in Beyond Scenography (2019) applies Stewart’s compositional theory to scenography and scenographic practices. Multiple perceptual worldings are encountered as momentary “scenes” (Hann 2019, 2); reinforcing Stewart’s theoretical stance, “Scenes becoming worlds are singularities of rhythm and attachment. They require and initiate the kind of attention that both thinks through matter and accords it a life of its own” (Stewart 2014, 119). As Hann further maintains:

Moreover, a stage-scene operates as an enacted land border that demarcates the thresholds between perceptual worlds . . . acts of human-centric worlding. Each sustains a particular situation of viewing, of watching, or participation. (Hann 2019, 9)

Hann extends the philosophical concept of worlding to the moment or “scene” when the stage, the actors, and the spectators experience a sensory symbiosis—over and above the everyday to produce an extra-daily experience (Hann 2019, 11). The extra-daily technique, first coined by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, harnesses theatrical energy, which differentiates this act from the normalcy of everyday life and ordinary performative actions (Eugenio Barba 1991, 18). As Hann claims, there is an inherent difference between performance and theatre; “Performance is daily. Theatre is extra-daily” (Hann 2019, 11).

In a similar vein, the Polish scenographer, writer, and artist Tadeusz Kantor wrote of theatre as an “impossible” space. He proposed that the stage is

an impossible . . . whose sense and meaning are revealed to us only in the process of folding and exploring the tensions between different realities, is to bring us to the edge where the liberation of our historical environment from conventions is possible. (Kobialka 2002, 77)

In Kantor’s theatre practice, he explored multiple alternate momentary “scenes” or worlds; these are spatial and temporal dimensions as sites of memory and history. These explorations took the form of drawings, haunting monologues, and personal “commentaries intended to transgress all physical and mental boundaries and to express the most intimate thought processes that occur in the artist’s private space and . . . imagination” (Kobialka 1992, 333). Kantor also called these private spaces the “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). These worlds, or rooms within the interiority of the scenographer’s imagination, first materialize in the scenographic design drawing. As Clive Ashwin identifies it, drawing is

the process of making material an otherwise immaterial form or idea that existed only as an idea or concept in the designer’s mind until its commitment to paper. The iconic (image-like) nature of such drawing is interestingly reflected in the etymological link between image and imagine. (Ashwin 1984, 201)

The scenographic design drawing, beginning with the early thinking drawing, visualizes these scenographic ecologies—worlds. The sheet of paper of a sketch book, a journal or yellow Post-it note stages a micro-world—worlds within the scenographer’s room of imagination and memory, revealing the slippage between an illusion and a reality, an absence and presence, the imagined and the corporeal.

As I mentioned earlier, these particular drawings have the quality of cosmopoiesis, of world creating. Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen introduced the term in relation to scenography and specifically to set models in their book The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (2017). As they identify, the origi n of the term cosmopoetic derives from Plato’s hypothesis in which the construction of the “world” from “chaos” was created by a demiurge or divine “craftsman” as a m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Drawn behind the Fourth Wall
• 2 Creating a Scene
• 3 Staging Architecture
• 4 Drawn to Perform
• 5 The Drawn Absence
• 6 Drawn into the Future
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright