Scenography

Simon Donger

• Publisher: Crowood
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781785004544
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Stagecraft & Scenography

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

1

DRAWING

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

Miss Fortune by Ana Maio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MOMENT DRAWING

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

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

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

Even though a moment drawing is somehow intuitive, it is also precisely conditioned by specific parameters. If we are looking to explore how an action might be staged, we can create additional rules to the improvisational approach to drawing. For instance, we might be interested in exploring an action from a variety of viewpoints or perspectives. Let’s take a generic example: let’s say that we want to improvise in drawing with the action of bare human feet walking in sand. Since this is an action we can easily see in everyday life, observation is a good starting point to drawing. We can observe both our own and someone else’s feet walking in sand. This will generate more perspectives on the same action: observing our own feet will necessarily be done from above, thus offering an aerial view of the action; observing someone else’s feet, on the other hand, can be done through a variety of viewpoints (any one of the possible positions all around the feet). Therefore, we would have at least two formal approaches to this moment drawing:

•Starting from a square that would be the surface of the sand floor seen from above, we would draw the impact of feet on sand, the reliefs or sand dunes emerging around and above the feet, resulting in a type of topographic image or map. As this map is effectively the result of traces of feet in the sand, it then becomes possible to imagine how other actions of the feet in sand could create different maps. What kind of map emerges from my feet running or jumping on sand?

•Starting from a horizontal line that would be the surface of the sand floor, we would alter that line as different parts of the foot push into the sand, resulting in a series of shifting horizon lines or landscapes. In this case the softness of the ground becomes emphasized and, again, the horizon lines will vary according to the type of movement done by the feet in the sand.

Character rendering by Khadija Raza depicting the protagonist of Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (1912). Although this drawing is suggestive of a costume, its purpose is rather to communicate a character. Note how the body’s gesture represents a dynamic and active presence to which certain feelings can be associated. The expressive quality of the character is further enhanced by additional and colourful lines, seemingly radiating from its gesture. Also note the inclusion of texts that are key lines spoken by, and encapsulating, the character.

Speculative drawings by Sofia Esquivel exploring possible variations on the inclusion of bodies inside model boxes. Note how this idea is tried in relation to various body parts, as well as to one or more bodies, and to varying sizes of boxes.

Improvisation here can be further refined by selecting one specific action: we could decide to only approach this task in relation to a body jumping on sand, still through the two perspectives mentioned above. This further defining of the framework does not stop improvisation, for we still have a range of phases of the jump to try out: Do we draw the feet lifting off the sand? Do we draw the first contact of the feet with the sand as they land? Do we draw the aftermath, once the jump has been completed? In the latter case, it is possible that the feet will be mostly covered by the sand that was pushed upwards by the landing and then fell back down over the feet. As such, this particular p...