Theatre and Performance Design

A Reader in Scenography

Jane Collins, Andrew Nisbet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136344527
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography is an essential resource for those interested in the visual composition of performance and related scenographic practices.

Theatre and performance studies, cultural theory, fine art, philosophy and the social sciences are brought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatre and performance design.

The volume is organised thematically in five sections:

• 
  
  

• looking, the experience of seeing
• space and place
• the designer: the scenographic
• bodies in space
• making meaning

• 
  
  

This major collection of key writings provides a much needed critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. By locating this study within the broader field of scenography – the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance – this unique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation of meaning.

Contributors include Josef Svoboda, Richard Foreman, Roland Barthes, Oscar Schlemmer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Schechner, Jonathan Crary, Elizabeth Wilson, Henri Lefebvre, Adolph Appia and Herbert Blau.

ChapterLooking

DOI: 10.4324/9780203124291-2

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,

That they behold, and see not what they see?

William Shakespeare (sonnet 137)

The etymological root of the word “theatre” comes from the Greek “place for viewing” and we still talk about going to “see” a play not about going to “hear” one. “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak” (Berger 1990: 7). However, seeing is an embodied experience and phenomenology teaches us that visual perception is always suffused by the other senses. At every stage of their praxis, designers are engaged in the act of looking and seeing. Looking suggests action and engagement, seeing is what is perceived as a result of looking. These acts are separate but simultaneous, each is implied in the other, but how we see and what we see is never a matter of simply “just looking,” as Maaike Bleeker argues:

What seems to be just “there to be seen” is, in fact, rerouted through memory and fantasy, caught up in threads of the unconscious and entangled with the passions. Vision, far from being the “noblest of the senses” (Descartes, 1977), appears to be irrational, inconsistent and undependable. More than that, seeing appears to alter the thing seen and to transform the one seeing, showing them to be profoundly intertwined in the event that is visuality.

(Bleeker 2008: 2)

“Just looking” is in fact a complex web of sensory interactions and these interactions are themselves subject to different historic and cultural conditions. As the “place for viewing,” the theatre frames and organises the relationship between the viewer and what is there to be seen. Therefore a study of the visual in performance should provide a useful paradigm for any analysis of ways of seeing across a range of different historic and cultural contexts. However, as Bleeker points out, there are very few references to the theatre in the field of visual studies and only a limited number of texts in theatre and performance studies concerned specifically with visual analysis.

This is reflected in the essays we have chosen for inclusion in this section, of which only two, Blau and Bennett, deal directly with the experience of looking and seeing in the theatre. The others draw on discourses from philosophy, fine art and cultural theory, but they all have a bearing on the way in which “visuality” operates in the theatre and in performance. These essays consider the problem of distinguishing between appearance and reality; the shifting relationship between the viewing subject and the object of observation; European perspective; the “reading” of photographic images; and the relationship between form and function in fine art. They are in no way definitive but they do introduce the breadth of thinking and attest to the complexity of the experience of looking and seeing both within and beyond the scenographic frame.

Seeing is Believing

If “seeing is believing” then how do we know that what we are seeing is “true”? The possibility of the independent existence of matter outside the mind of man has exercised philosophers for thousands of years. In the nineteenth century Nietzsche¹ famously argued “there are no facts only interpretations,” thus raising the problem of the veracity of what we see. According to Berger: “The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled” (Berger 1990: 7). He cites as an example the way “we see the sun set” although “[w]e know that the earth is turning away from it” (ibid.). Contemporary psychology suggests that there are innate cognitive and perceptual structures “hard-wired” into the brain which account for these instances so that “No matter what we know, we continue to see things as we do see them, as if our perceptual system were here invincibly resistant to knowledge” (Danto 1991: 208).

The constitution of the viewing subject, the different ways in which vision has been understood and ways of seeing “naturalised” in different historical time frames, is a common thread which is dealt with explicitly in all the essays in this section. Less explicit is the relationship between the experience of seeing and the way we use words to describe what we see. “Seeing,” Berger tells us, comes before words, but a number of philosophers have expressed the view that “perception and description” cannot “as easily” be separated. Danto summarises Wittgenstein’s² position thus:

[we] do not have, as it were, the world on one side and language on the other, but rather that language in some way shapes reality or at least our experience of the world … Experience is indelibly linguistic.

(Danto 1991: 204)

Seeing the Real; Seeing the Virtual

According to Foucault, no subject “runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history;” the viewing subject is always constituted within a specific “historical framework” (in Crary 1994: 6). The revolution in image production in the latter part of the twentieth century heralded by rapid developments in digital technologies has radically altered the way we see:

Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.

(Crary 1994: 2)

Crary accepts that older “modes of ‘seeing’” will continue to operate alongside these new forms of vision but he is wary of the implications of these techniques for the human subject. This caution needs to be balanced against the potential for “digitally fabricated spaces” to expand the visual field, taking audiences into uncharted territory resulting in a new aesthetics of looking and seeing. Giannachi makes the point that technology has always modified the relationship between what we see and what we know:

Clearly, definitions of the real are no longer simply constituted by what is seen by the eyes, but also by what is seen through a microscope, a telescope and even the interface of one’s computer screen. And while on the one hand the virtual appropriates and cannibalises the real, the real is still our main point of reference in any definition and understanding of the virtual.

(Giannachi 2004: 132)

It is still to the “real” that we look for reference points for the virtual, albeit as points of departure. However, whereas the virtual might be described as “electronic mathematical data” (Crary 1994: 2), what we understand as the “the real” and its relationship to what we regard as “appearance,” has perennially proved to be much more difficult to define.

Appearance and Reality

Russell (1912) addresses the problem of distinguishing between the appearance of things and the way they really are from a philosophical perspective. In the process he highlights an important difference between the kind of “seeing” necessary for the painter who needs to understand appearances and that which is required of the practical man who must have knowledge of the physical reality of objects. The designer dealing as he/she does with three-dimensional objects in space needs of course to have knowledge of both.

The nature of the relationship between appearance and reality also occupied Greek philosophers. In the fourth century BC Plato (1955) challenged the reliability of the senses and destabilised the associative connections between what we see and what we believe. Platonic philosophy rested in the belief of the existence of two worlds: the changeable physical world which is manifested through appearances, and beyond that the world of ideal forms which are unchanging and eternal. The moral and intellectual condition of most men was, according to Plato, one of ignorance. Unaware of their limited perspective they lived as if chained in a dark cave believing the shadows and sounds they perceived in front of them to be the real world as opposed to mere representations of it.

Representations of Reality

Willats (1990) discusses the “viewer-centred” nature of linear perspective and develops Russell’s point about the difference between the way things appear to the human eye and the “truth about the shapes of objects as they really are.” He distinguishes between the approaches of the “practical man,” in this instance an architect whose drawings will have a practical outcome, and the painter who is concerned with surfaces and appearances. He introduces a variety of drawing systems reflecting different world-views. He points out the fluidity between these systems, the way they borrow from each other and the way they demonstrate the potential for exchange and play between cultures.

Crary (1994) argues that the camera obscura played a key role in the construction of the subject/observer in the latter part of the fifteenth century and this contributed to a major epistemological shift in terms of “what constituted vision” that lasted for over two hundred years. It was thought that the intercession of an impartial mechanical apparatus between the external world and the observer resolved the problem of the unreliability of the senses by rendering an image of the world that was objective and thus verifiable as “true.” By removing the corporeal subject from the field of vision there could be no doubt that the image produced was an “objective” representation of reality. Furthermore, the dark interior chamber of the camera obscura also came to represent the “inner space” of the human mind which both the empiricist John Locke³ and the rationalist Descartes⁴ incorporated into their respective philosophical positions on the nature of perception and reason.

Ways of Seeing

Gombrich’s (1963) “meditations” on art give us an insight into the complicit nature of looking at performance. He suggests that initially all “representations” were not produced with the intention of communication but for their functionality and as such they were “substitutes” standing in for the “real thing.” He cites as an example the hobby horse, which although just a “stick,” we recognise as a substitute for a horse because it is ridable. The formal characteristics of the stick are just enough to fulfil the minimum requirements of function. However, in order to make sense of this “stick as horse” we need to fill in the gaps of its formal incompleteness. This resonates with Iser’s theory of “blanks” in relation to literature (see Part V) and in performance correlates in visual terms to the way in which a cloth might serve as a river, and a table act as a “substitute” for a bridge. What matters are not the formal characteristics of these things but that the “cloth as river” forms a barrier and the “table as bridge” is crossable.

Barthes (1993) uses the terms the studium and the punctum to describe two coexistent elements within the photographic frame. The studium is the subject of the photograph, a “wide field” that includes the photographers’ intentions and the potential interest for the viewer that that subject contains. The punctum on the other hand is that in the photograph which breaks or punctuates the studium and provokes a personal response in the viewer. It is the accidental or the unintentional in the image that triggers this response and it is the punctum that differentiates our engagement or attraction between certain images and others.

Barthes is concerned with the experience of looking at photographs and we must be cautious about transferring his analysis uncritically to the media of theatre and performance. However, his “irritation” at what he sees as the obviously constructed juxtapositions, the “artifice” of some photographs, does have implications for the theatre designer where the visual field is inevitably composed. In many ways the studium corresponds to the scenographic in theatre, a densely packed series of images unfolding ...