Theatre and performance design a reader in scenography

THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE DESIGNTheatre and Performance Design: a reader in scenography is an essential resource for those interested in the visual composition of performance and related s

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THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE DESIGN

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 arebrought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatreand 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 forthe analysis of theatre and performance design By locating this study within the broader ﬁeld ofscenography – the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance – thisunique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation ofmeaning

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

Jane Collins is Reader in Theatre at Wimbledon College of Art, London, where she currently

co-ordinates the contextual studies programme She is a writer, director and theatre maker who worksacross the UK and internationally

Andrew Nisbet is a lecturer at Northbrook College, Sussex, teaching theatre practice and theory.

He has worked in conference, exhibition, event and temporary structure design and museuminstallations

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First published 2010

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

individual chapters © the contributors Typeset in Perpetua by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall All rights reserved No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,

or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theatre and performance design : a reader in scenography / edited by Jane Collins and

Andrew Nisbet.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1 Theaters – Stage-setting and scenery I Collins, Jane, 1951– II Nisbet, Andrew,

1960–

PN2085.T44 2010 792.02 ′5 – dc22 2009030782 ISBN10: 0–415–43209–X (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–43210–3 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–43209–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–43210–8 (pbk)

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7 The most concealed object 51

15 Dancing in the streets: the sensuous manifold as a

SCOTT PALMER AND SITA POPAT

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22 Stage designs of a single gesture: the early work of

ARTHUR B FEINSOD

LEE SIMONSON

24 Hope, hopelessness / presence, absence:

scenographic innovation and the poetic spaces

of Jo Mielziner, Tennessee Williams and

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EDWARD GORDON CRAIG

OSKAR SCHLEMMER

JERZY GROTOWSKI

38 Woman, man, dog, tree: two decades of intimate and

41 The work of art in the age of its technological

WALTER BENJAMIN

WOLFGANG ISER

C O N T E N T S

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49 The humanist theatre/The catastrophic theatre and

The cult of accessibility and the Theatre of Obscurity 371

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3.1 Perspective: Canaletto, Venice: The Libraria and Campanile from the Piazzetta,

mid-1730s The Royal Library, Windsor Castle Copyright reserved

Reproduced by gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen 243.2 Oblique projection: Lady Wen-chi’s Return to China: Fourth Leaf, c 1100,

Northern Sung Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,

3.3 Horizontal oblique projection: Master of the Blessed Clare, Adoration of the

Magi, mid-fourteenth century, Riminese School Courtesy of Lowe Art

Museum, University of Miami, Samuel H Kress Collection 253.4 Vertical oblique projection: David Hockney, Flight into Italy – Swiss

Landscape, 1962 (detail) Courtesy of the artist 263.5 Vertical oblique projection: Feilden Clegg Design, Architects, Bolbeck Park,

Milton Keynes, Commended Scheme, 1984 (detail) Courtesy of the architects 263.6 Orthographic projection: Bob Mitchell, Architect, Proprietor’s Cottage,

Hollens Hotel, Grasmere, 1984 (detail) Courtesy of the architect 273.7 Orthographic projection: Arfan Khan, aged 7.5, House with a Huge Snowdrift 273.8 Utagawa Toyoharu, 1735–1814, A Perspective Picture of the Foxes’ Wedding

Procession Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri 283.9 Min Qiji, A Moonlight Scene from Xi Xian Ji, Dream of the Western Chamber,

1640 Courtesy of the Far Eastern Museum, Cologne (no 702405) 29

3.10 David Hockney, The Second Marriage, 1963 Courtesy of the artist. 30

4.2 Comparison of eye and camera obscura Early eighteenth century 376.1 Photograph by Koen Wessing: Nicaragua, 1979 436.2 Photograph by Nadar: Savorgnan de Brazza, 1882 476.3 Photograph by R Mapplethorpe: Phil Glass and Bob Wilson 486.4 Photograph by G W Wilson: Queen Victoria, 1863 496.5 Photograph by R Mapplethorpe: Young man with arm extended 4911.1 Stage design by Adolphe Appia: Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Hellerau,

1912 Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, Geneva 8712.1 Taxonomy of spatial function in the theatre 90

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13.1 Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Theatre 9613.2 Longitudinal section of Kiesler’s Endless Theatre 9615.1 The square in which the installation was located (Photo: Scott Palmer) 10915.2 The two computers in the second-ﬂoor room (Photo: Scott Palmer) 11015.3 Ghostly footprints following participants (Photo: Paul Davies) 11115.4 The Cat’s Cradle image (Photo: Paul Davies) 11315.5 The football game being developed in rehearsal (Photo: Scott Palmer) 11516.1 The plans of the Bouﬀes du Nord and of the remains of the Rose

22.2 Promptbook sketch for Act I of The Devil’s Garden 16522.3 The Tower of London for Richard III, 1920 16622.4 Richard’s backlit throne before the Tower of London 16722.5 Back and sidelighting on Richard III’s throne 16822.6 Hamlet, 1922: Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech 16924.1 The Glass Menagerie: exterior of the Wingﬁeld apartment, rendering

25.1 Production photo from the 1928 The Threepenny Opera at the Theater am

Schiﬀbauerdamm © bpk/Willi Saeger 19025.2 Neher’s scenographic sketch for the scene from Brecht’s unﬁnished

play The Breadshop (1929–30) © Ulrike Stöll Image supplied courtesy of

the Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich 19225.3 Karl von Appen’s Arrangementskizzen for Turandot Courtesy of the author

25.4 Von Appen’s drawing for the peasant wedding in The Caucasian Chalk

Circle Courtesy of the author and the Brecht Archive 19934.1 Fashion as change: “Changing with the times” by Fougasse, 1926

Reproduced by kind permission of the proprietors of Punch 254

36.1–36.14 Oskar Schlemmer’s original illustrations and diagrams from Man

37.1 View of the scenic action for Kordia based on a text by Slowacki,

37.2 The Constant Prince based on the text by Calderon-Slowacki, drawing

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38.3 Pina Bausch’s Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört (Photo: Ursula

38.4 and 38.5 Exemplary moments from Two Cigarettes in the Dark and Nur Du.

39.1 Stelarc: Sitting / Swaying: event for rock suspension Tamura Gallery, Tokyo,

11 May 1980 (Photo: Keisuke Oki) 29839.2 Stelarc: Handswriting: writing one word simultaneously with three hands.

Maki Gallery, Tokyo (Photo: Keisuke Oki) 29940.1 Glow, performed by Kristy Ayre (Photo: Rom Anthoni) 30240.2 Glow, performed by Kristy Ayre (Photo: Artur Radeki) 30249.1 Plan for the fortiﬁcation of an imaginative work 372

50.1–50.7 Rae Smith’s original concept sketches for Warhorse 378–384

L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S

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Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) was a Swiss stage and lighting designer and theorist Appia’s

inﬂuential ideas for a unity between all the elements of staging and performance need to

be seen in relation to the Symbolist movement in the arts, although his vision is speciﬁc

to theatre It is set out in his theoretical writing: The Staging of Wagner’s Musical Dramas (1895), Music and Stage Setting (1899) and The Work of Living Art (1921) It was Appia, at

the end of the nineteenth century, who saw the potential for electric stage lighting tobecome an integral and expressive element of performance rather than working simply as

a means of illumination

Arnold Aronson is Professor of Theatre at Columbia University and President of the

History and Theory Commission of the Organisation Internationale des Scénographes,Techniciens et Architectes de Théâtre (OISTAT) He has written a number of books on

theatre design and scenography including American Set Design (1985) and The History and

Theory of Environmental Scenography (1981).

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was a French actor, director, writer and poet He was

one of the early associates of the surrealist movement headed by André Breton,but he broke away from the movement when Breton became a Communist and wanted

to involve the rest of the members in the party However, Artaud continued to seehimself as a surrealist and in 1927 wrote the script for the famous surrealist ﬁlm

La Coquille et le clergyman Artaud’s radical ideas on theatre were ﬁrst published in

France in 1938 and appeared in English in 1958 in a collection of essays entitled The

Theatre and its Double This collection had a major inﬂuence on a generation of theatremakers

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) was a French professor of philosophy and natural sciences

and a key figure in twentieth-century scientific thought and literary criticism Untilrecently he was relatively unknown outside France but he was a significant influence onthe early work of writers like Foucault and Althusser He combined his study of thehistory of science and philosophy with his study of literature to explore the creativity of

imagination In publications such as The Poetics of Space (1957) and The Poetics of Reverie

(1960), Bachelard theorised daydreaming as the highest state of the mind He taught

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philosophy at Dijon University in the 1930s and at the Sorbonne in Paris from 1940,where he held the chair in History and the Philosophy of Science.

Sally Banes is Marian Hannah Winter Professor of Theatre History and Dance Studies at

the University of Wisconsin-Madison Her many books include, Writing Dancing in the Age

of Postmodernism (1994), Dancing Women: female bodies on stage (Routledge, 1998) and Subversive Expectations: performance art and paratheater in New York 1976–85 (1998).

Howard Barker is a radical dramatist and poet He is the author of over 30 plays which

have been translated into a number of languages and performed all over the world Hewrites for radio in England and Europe and has also written three librettos for opera Aswell as his theoretical works he has published ﬁve volumes of poetry He is also a painterwith works held in national collections in England (V&A London) and Europe His best-

known plays include Scenes from an Execution, The Castle, The Bite of the Night and The

Europeans.

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) was a French philosopher, literary theorist and critic His

work extended over many ﬁelds, including writings on the theatre, particularly Brechtand Artaud He was an important inﬂuence on many schools of theory includingsemiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, existentialism and Marxism At the time ofhis death he was Professor at the Collège de France

Christopher Baugh is Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of

Leeds As a scenographer he worked in Bristol, California, Oregon, Manchester, London

and with the Abbey Theatre Dublin, winning a New York Drama Critics Tony award for

The Borstal Boy With Mecklenburgh Opera he won the Prudential Award for Opera He has

written Garrick and Loutherbourg (1990), “Stage design from Loutherbourg to Poel” in

J Donohue, ed., The Cambridge History of British Theatre (2004) and “Scenography and technology 1737–1843” in J Moody and D O’Quinn, eds, The Cambridge Companion to

British Theatre, 1737–1843 (2007) His book Theatre, Performance and Technology: the opment of scenography in the 20th century (2005) was nominated in 2007 by the United

devel-States Institute of Theatre Technology for a Golden Pen Award

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was a German Marxist philosopher, cultural and literary

critic, essayist and translator He was associated with the Frankfurt School and was afriend of Bertolt Brecht, writing an analysis of his work Benjamin committed suicidewhile escaping the Nazi occupation of France He is now regarded as one of the mostimportant twentieth-century thinkers on literature and modern aesthetics

Susan Bennett is Professor of English at the University of Calgary Her research is

con-cerned primarily with areas of contemporary performance and critical theory However,she is also engaged in researching the Early Modern period including Shakespeare She is

the author of Performing Nostalgia (1996).

Herbert Blau is an American director, cultural critic and proliﬁc writer on theatreand performance He was co-founder and co-director of The Actor’s Workshop in San

C O N T R I B U T O R S

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Francisco in 1952 and later became director of the repertory theatre at the Lincoln

Center in New York He introduced American audiences to European avant-garde drama,

including Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet He also directed the ﬁrst American production

of Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht.

Cristiane Bouger is a theatre director, dramaturge, performer and video artist Born in

Brazil, she lives and works in New York In 2003–4 she was a member of the Publishing

Council of the performance e-magazine Relâche (Brazil) She has published works in the

Movement Research Performance Journal, Critical Correspondence, on idanca.net and in vidade, o controle da cena e o público como agente compositor, organized by the scholar Margie

Interati-Rauen (EDUFBA, Brazil) In 2009, she was a collaborator and writer for PERFORMA

09 – The Third Visual Art Performance Biennial, in New York, curated by RoseLeeGoldberg

Ross Brown is Dean of Studies and Reader in Sound at the Central School of Speech and

Drama, London Between 1986 and 1994, Brown created sound and music for the RSC,BBC, Red Shift, Glasgow Citizens, Lancaster Dukes Playhouse, Avignon Festival anddirectors Elijah Moshinsky, Robert Sturua, and Peter Hall among many others He joinedCentral in 1994, where he developed the ﬁrst honours and master’s degree programmes

in theatre sound design He continues to research theatre sound and aurality, recently

completing the AHRC-funded project Noise Memory Gesture, investigating the aural theatre

of the memorial minute’s silence His latest book, Sound: a reader in theatre practice, was

published in 2009

Gabrielle Cody is Professor in the Department of Drama at Vassar College, where she has

taught since 1992 She concentrates her areas of teaching in dramatic literature, theory

and criticism, and performance studies Cody is the author of Impossible Performances: Duras

as dramatist (2000), the editor of Hardcore from the Heart: Annie Sprinkle solo (2001) and the

co-editor of Re:Direction: a theoretical and practical guide (Routledge, 2001) She is also the co-General Editor, along with Evert Sprinchorn, of The Columbia Encyclopedia of

Modern Drama (2007) and the editor of Performance Studies: the key concepts, forthcoming

from Routledge

Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) was an English actor, theatre director, designer,

producer and theorist whose ideas were a major inﬂuence on the development of thetheatre in the twentieth century He was the son of the famous actress Ellen Terry andbegan his own career as an actor but quickly switched to directing and designing Hechallenged the scenic conventions of naturalism, experimenting instead with moreabstract forms of expression which exploited the potential of light, music and movement

He was a proliﬁc writer and in 1898 he launched the theatre journal The Page; then in

1908 The Mask (until 1929) Among his many books, On the Art of the Theatre was

published in 1911

Jonathan Crary is Professor of Art History at Columbia University and has written widely

on contemporary art and the origins of modern visual culture His book Suspensions

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of Perception: attention, spectacle and modern culture (2000) won the 2001 Lionel Trilling

Book Award

Adrian Curtin is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Ph.D in Theatre and Drama

at Northwestern University, and a member of Northwestern’s Society of Fellows Hisdissertation, entitled “Soundscapes of the European theatrical avant-garde, 1890–1935,”examines the function and signiﬁcance of sonic experimentation in vanguard theatre fromsymbolism to surrealism He has written articles on works by W G Sebald, James Joyce,Ben Jonson and Peter Maxwell Davies, and an essay on teaching and trauma for the

journal Pedagogy.

Liam Doona is Head of the Department of Art and Design at Dun Laoghaire Institute of

Art, Design and Technology He is also a freelance theatre designer Doona was a foundermember of the Association of Courses in Theatre Design and alongside his educationalwork has maintained a practice as set and costume designer which enables him to workfor a number of leading touring theatre companies and theatres Doona teaches Ireland’sﬁrst B.A Honours Degree in Design for Stage and Screen at Dun Laoghaire

Tim Etchells is a writer, director and artist He is best known for his work as artistic

director and writer of the UK-based performance ensemble Forced Entertainment Healso develops his own projects in a variety of media including SMS, video and installation

He has written widely about performance and contemporary culture, and in addition to

Certain Fragments – a collection of theoretical writing and performance texts (Routledge,

1999) – he has published: The Dream Dictionary (2001) and Endland Stories (1999) Etchells

is currently a Creative Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre Studies at LancasterUniversity

Arthur B Feinsod is currently the Chair of the Department of Theatre at Indiana State

University and Artistic Director of the Crossroads Repertory Theatre At ISU he teaches

an introduction to theatre for majors as well as courses in playwriting, directing, theatrehistory, the history of theatrical style, and mask acting

Richard Foreman is an American writer, director, designer and avant-garde theatre maker.

He founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968 His proliﬁc output of workincludes writing, directing and designing over 50 plays, international touring, workshops,symposiums and multimedia events Several volumes of his plays have been publishedthroughout the world In 2004, Foreman established the Bridge Project to promotedialogue in the arts and international exchange between countries throughout the world

In 1990 he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement award from the National Endowment forthe Arts

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) was a French academic, philosopher, historian, sociologist

and cultural theorist Foucault’s work is hugely inﬂuential and informs critical discussion

in a wide range of disciplines, including the arts His writing on madness and insanity,prisons, discipline and punishment, and sexuality reﬂects his interest in the relationshipbetween knowledge and power In 1970 Foucault was elected to the prestigious Collège

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de France Madness and Unreason: history of madness in the classical age (1961), The Order of

Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976) stand out

among a large number of other publications

Gabriella Giannachi is Associate Professor in Performance and New Media and a director

of the Centre for Intermedia at Exeter University Her research engages with the ics and politics of mixed-reality performance, and the impact of virtuality on the perform-ing arts She is currently investigating the construction and performance of presence inmediated and simulated environments, working with artists and computer scientists fromEurope and the United States

aesthet-Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) was a professor and inﬂuential art historian He was the

author of many works of art criticism and art history, including The Story of Art (1950),

which is regarded by many as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts

He was born in Vienna but he worked in London from 1936 until his retirement in 1976

He was knighted in 1972

Jane Goodall is Associate Professor, Writing and Society, at the University of Western

Sydney She has written extensively on arts in the modern era, with a special interest in

the relationship between the arts and sciences Her academic publications include Artaud

and the Gnostic Drama: performance and evolution in the age of Darwin (1994; winner of

the Australasian Drama Studies Association’s Robert Jordan Prize) and, with Christa

Knellwolf, the collection Frankenstein’s Science (2008), which contextualises Mary

Shelley’s work in contemporary scientiﬁc and literary debates Her book on Stage Presencewas published by Routledge in 2008

Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) was a Polish theatre director, performer, actor trainer and

theorist who founded the Laboratory Theatre in Wrocław, Poland The Laboratory wasdevoted to researching the art of theatre, with particular focus on the actor and the spatial

relationship between actor and audience His book Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) has had a

major inﬂuence on actor training and experimentation in theatre around the world

Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007) was a German literary scholar who, together with Hans

Robert Jauss, is credited with founding the “Constance School” of Reception Aesthetics.Iser shifted the focus from the author to the reader by analysing what occurred during theact of reading His theory, which became known as “Reader Response,” had a majorimpact on literary criticism in the late 1960s

Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990) was a Polish artist, writer, designer and theatre director He

was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków where he studied under the stagedesigner Karol Frycz, who was a great admirer of Edward Gordon Craig In 1955 hefounded the Cricot 2 group with a number of theatre and ﬁne artists dedicated toexploring non-realist modes of expression in theatre His work was at the forefront of the

European avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century and his inﬂuence spread

to America He left a body of theoretical writings in which he outlines the rationaleunderpinning his radical theatrical ideas

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Nick Kaye is an academic and researcher in post-war experimental performance He is a

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and currently Professor of Performance Studies

at Exeter University, where he is also co-director of the Centre for Intermedia Kaye’s

many publications include Postmodernism and Performance (1994), and as well as contributing

articles regularly to a number of journals he has also devised and directed research-basedmultimedia performance projects shown in London, Dresden and Beijing

Thomas Laqueur is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley His

publications include: Religion and Respectability: Sunday schools and working class culture (1976); and with Catherine Gallagher he edited The Making of the Modern Body (1987) and

Solitary Sex: a cultural history of masturbation (2003) Making Sex: body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) has been translated into over 12 languages.

Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) was a French academic, philosopher and sociologist Lefebvre

wrote widely on politics, philosophy and sociology and is best known for two key

publications, The Critique of Everyday Life (1947) and The Production of Space (1974).

Lefebvre’s writing has had a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on a wide range of disciplines, larly human geography and urban planning More recently it has informed the discussionand critique of space in theatre and performance

particu-Gay McAuley is Honorary Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the

University of Sydney She has made a signiﬁcant contribution to the development ofresearch into space and place in the context of performance In 1989, after almost twodecades of development work exploring modes of collaboration between academics andpractitioners, McAuley established the Department of Performance Studies as an inter-

disciplinary centre at the University of Sydney Space in Performance (1999) was awarded

the Rob Jordan Prize by the Australasian Drama Studies Association

Doreen Massey is a social scientist and geographer Her research (re)-examines the

geo-graphical organisation of society, and our conceptions of space and place, and looks at theeﬀects of globalisation on social and political interaction Massey considers these spatialissues in terms of gender, race, identity and the power politics of multinationalism In

1982, Massey joined the Open University where she is currently Professor of Geography

She is co-founder and co-editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture In 1998, she

received the Prix Vautrin Lud, the prestigious International Geography Prize Massey wasmade a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2000

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a French philosopher and phenomenologist.

Phenomenology challenges Cartesian dualism and the separation of mind and body andseeks to develop a radical redescription of embodied experience which gives primacy toperception and ways of “being-in-the-world” These ideas are associated with existential-ism: a philosophical movement which became famous in the 1940s and 1950s throughthe writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Merleau-Ponty wrote on art,literature and politics but he also engaged with the sciences, particularly psychology andcognitive science

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Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) was an inﬂuential Russian actor, director, producer

and writer His avant-garde productions challenged the conventions of naturalism He

worked with the Bolsheviks after the revolution and was a key ﬁgure in the transformation

of post-revolution theatrical aesthetics emphasising the visual aspects of performanceand employing constructivist scenic elements He developed a system of acting known as

“biomechanics,” which displayed the kinetic potential of the human body through highlystylised movements He was arrested in 1939 as part of the Stalinist purges and shot

in 1940

Scott Palmer is a lecturer in Scenography at the University of Leeds His research interests

focus on lighting design and the interaction between technology and performance Palmer

is the author of the Essential Guide to Stage Management, Lighting and Sound (2000), and has

published articles on technical training and lighting design practice in the British theatre

He is currently joint editor of the Association of Lighting Designers’ Focus journal.

Patrice Pavis is a renowned international scholar who has written extensively on Theatre

and Performance Professor of Theatre at Paris VIII University, he is the editor of The

Intercultural Performance Reader published by Routledge in 1996 Currently he is Professor

of Theatre in the Drama and Theatre Studies Department at the University of Kent

Plato (c 427–347 ) was a Greek philosopher and a student of Socrates, who founded theAcademy, the ﬁrst acknowledged institution of higher education He is recognised as one

of the greatest inﬂuences on the development of western thought

Sita Popat is a lecturer in dance at the University of Leeds Her research interests centre on

the relationship between dance choreography and new technologies Her book on online

choreography is published by Routledge, titled Invisible Connections: dance, choreography and

internet communities (2006) She is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician, logician,

histor-ian and social reformer He was one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentiethcentury and in 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

Richard Schechner is an American director, writer and academic He has been immensely

inﬂuential in terms of broadening the deﬁnitions of theatre and performance and in theestablishment of performance studies Schechner was a founder member of the experi-mental theatre company The Performance Group (1967–80), which later became TheWooster Group In the 1970s and 1980s Schechner travelled extensively in Asia, where

he worked with the anthropologist Victor Turner and developed an interest in ritual andreligious performance His proliﬁc output of work continues as artistic director of East

Coast Artists (1991–), through his own writings and as editor of Routledge’s World’s

of Performance series He is currently Professor of Performance Studies at New York

University

Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943) was a German painter, sculptor and theatre designer

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associated with the Bauhaus school where he ran the sculpture department and the stage

workshops His Triadic Ballet (Triadisches Ballett) which premiered in Stuttgart in 1922

became internationally renowned Strongly inﬂuenced by cubism, he explored the lematic of the human ﬁgure in space He left a large body of work and published histheories on art as well as his letters and diary entries from 1910 to 1943

prob-Lee Simonson (1888–1967) was an American stage designer and a leading ﬁgure inwhat became known as the New American Stagecraft movement He worked with theWashington Square Players and in the twenties for the Theatre Guild He was a leadingexponent of the move away from naturalistic stage settings towards abstraction, and his

seminal work The Stage is Set, written in 1932, inﬂuenced a generation of designers Other works include, Part of a Lifetime: drawings and designs, 1919–1940 (1943) and The Art of

Scenic Design: a pictorial analysis of stage setting and its relation to theatrical productions (1950).

Rae Smith is a British theatre designer whose work has been seen all over the world Based

in the United Kingdom, she has worked at the Royal Court, the Lyric Hammersmith, theRoyal Shakespeare Company and with Theatre de Complicité as well as on Broadway Herdesigns for opera include productions in Brussels and Strasbourg, and with the WelshNational Opera, Opera North, Scottish Opera and the English National Opera Studio

Her design for Warhorse at London’s National Theatre won the Evening Standard Best

Design Award 2007

Josef Svoboda (1920–2002) was a Czech artist and visionary scenic designer, often called

the father of modern theatre design, although he preferred to use the term scenography

He trained initially as an architect and later studied scenography in Prague From 1948,for over 30 years, he was the leading designer at the Czech National Theatre and duringthat period he designed productions all over the world Co-founder of the Laterna MagikaTheatre, he became its Artistic Director in 1993 He was internationally renowned for hisinnovative use of light and his multimedia installations involving live actors and the use ofﬁlm projections Svoboda achieved many awards in his lifetime, including honorary doc-torates from universities in the United States and France and from the Royal College ofArt in London

Nicholas Till is professor and director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music

Theatre at the University of Sussex Prior to this he taught visual art and theatre atWimbledon College of Art, where he was also course leader of the M.A in Scenography.His professional activities have included extensive work as a theatre and opera director,and he is co-artistic director of the experimental music theatre company Post-OperativeProductions He has published articles on music, visual arts, theatre and performance in a

number of journals, and his book Mozart and the Enlightenment: truth, virtue and beauty in

Mozart’s operas was published in 1992.

Andrew Todd is an architect who works from Paris where his practice is engaged with

research, consultancy and design for arts and performance spaces Todd compiled and

co-authored The Open Circle (2003) with the scenographer Jean-Guy Lecat Lecat was

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Peter Brook’s technical director between 1976 and 2000 with responsibility for touringBrook’s productions throughout the world.

Lois Tyson is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, Michigan Her other

books include Learning for a Diverse World: using critical theory to read and write about literature (2001) and Psychological Politics of the American Dream: the commodi ﬁcation of subjectivity in twentieth century American literature (1994).

John Willats (?–2006) was a sculptor and writer Born in London, he studied at Queens’

College, Cambridge and the Royal College of Art He lectured extensively on children’sdrawing and ﬁne art He is the author of Art and Representation: new principles in the analysis

of pictures (1997).

Elizabeth Wilson is Emeritus Professor in Cultural Studies at London Metropolitan

University She taught full time at London Metropolitan University for many years andhas also taught at Stanford University, California, Goldsmiths, the Architectural Associ-ation, King’s College London and the London College of Fashion, where she is currentlyVisiting Professor

Robert Wilson is a leading American avant-garde theatre director and visual artist whose

work crosses the boundaries between ﬁne art, theatre, performance opera and dance.His interdisciplinary productions foreground the visual in performance and his extensiveoutput of works include collaborations with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Heiner Müllerand Tom Waits

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Pamela Howard OBE

A decade ago, the word and the practice of scenography were relatively unknown except inparts of Eastern Europe Some thought it was a spelling mistake, others a grandiose word forset design and many thought it was just a symptom of designers getting above themselves,with the inevitable consequences of established boundaries and territories being invaded.However, what has happened is perhaps less dramatic, but much more important and longlasting Scenography – the totality of visual creation in the stage space – has become a subject

in its own right The word is no longer provocative, and has become part of our language, ifnot always understood It features in dictionaries, on Google, and even in job advertisements.Simply, Scenography has arrived, and plenty of people are enthused and want to study,research and practice, taking part in the never-ending evolution of theatre forms

As soon as a ﬁeld of study becomes recognised it brings with it new and rigorous

challenges The student quickly realises that entering the scenographic world means creating

work that is far greater than just putting something on the stage It demands tion, a clear personal aesthetic and an ability to see objectively the implications of the

contextualisa-scenographic iconography The practitioner realises at ﬁrst hand that spectators can and do

read visually and how this helps to create the critical debate that makes theatre the thrilling

and immediate discipline it can be Researchers become a living part of theatre practice,

feeding a collection of ideas and reﬂections into the arena to stimulate and provoke further

critical engagement Teachers and academics have to be informed, be aware of current practice

and future developments, and be able to bring all these new shoots into a coherent work for the many eager and demanding students who want to explore the scenographicworld Thus a sourcebook aimed at all branches of scenography becomes an essential need,especially if it links theory and practice, and brings together in one book clues and pointersfor further personal investigation and research

frame-In a creative discipline there is rarely a shortage of ideas However, few ideas in selves are truly interesting What is really interesting is how ideas can be reinterpreted andreinvented to be relevant to our times To imagine what can be done, we have to know whathas been done, and to do that a coherently organised sourcebook is an essential resource Inscenography this has been much needed for a long time Of course everyone has their ownindividual path and area of interest, but theatre is always about opening minds to unfamiliarideas and giving diﬀerent perspectives to seemingly familiar worlds This is the starting

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them-point for the kind of critical debate and discussion that underpin creative and provocativework and that move the subject forward In this book the student can meet historical andcontemporary ﬁgures, evaluate their contributions, and be informed enough to continue on

a pathway of personal research that may well end up in a surprisingly diﬀerent place, as real

adventures often do Of course, scenography is a collaborative art and this Reader should

also serve as an inspiration and valuable sourcebook for drama students and theatre studiesstudents and give pause for thought to all those who still think there is a division betweenthe literary and the visual in theatre and performance

The summary of all this thinking is embodied in the new manifesto for the former PragueQuadrennial of Stage Design, now renamed the Prague Quadrennial for PerformanceDesign and Space 2011 In this new guise, the Quadrennial will be “working with perform-ance to research scenography as a wider cultural phenomenon, appearing in many aspects ofart and life” This focal point of world scenography is responding to the increasingly com-plex realities of contemporary theatre making Over 52 nations will be exhibiting works thatreﬂect what has been happening in their countries during the past four years The expansion

of the ﬁeld, reﬂected in the name change and the manifesto of the Prague Quadrennial,shows beyond doubt the timely necessity for this erudite and logical sourcebook

F O R E W O R D

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to thank Talia Rodgers for her unﬂagging enthusiasm for the project and her faith in us asﬂedgling editors, and Ben Piggott for his helpful editorial guidance.

The University of the Arts London has supported this project through the Research ment of CCW (Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon) We would particularly like to thankAnita Taylor and Eileen Hogan for helping to facilitate this Northbrook College have alsobeen generous in their support and special thanks go to Simon Ives and Jacqueline Catteneo

Depart-In addition we are most grateful to Alastair Torley and the library staﬀ at NorthbrookCollege as well as Helen Davis and the library staﬀ at Wimbledon College of Art, all ofwhom responded with patience and good humour to our many requests for information,sometimes at very short notice

Our principal advisors on this Reader were Greer Crawley, designer and a director of theSociety of British Theatre Designers, Liam Doona, designer and Head of the Department ofArt and Design at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, County Dublin,Ireland and Joanne Tompkins, Professor of Drama, School of English, Media Studies and ArtHistory, The University of Queensland, Australia We thank them all for generously givingtheir time to read early drafts, for their honest criticism, and for their invaluable advice Therange and quality of the Reader has been much enhanced by their input

Discussions with our colleagues across the ﬁelds of theatre, performance and scenographyhave of course been a major inﬂuence on the form and content of this book Too numerous

to mention individually this includes members of The International Federation of TheatreResearch (IFTR) Scenography Working Group and The Association of Courses in TheatreDesign (ACTD) However, special thanks are due to David Burrows, Dr Bridget Escolme,

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Peter Farley, Professor Vivian Gardner, Pamela Howard, Michael Pavelka, doctoral studentEsther Armstrong and Antje Sachwitz in Berlin who helped us to get permission to repro-duce the Karl Von Appen images We must also mention the museum staﬀ and archivistsfrom all over the world who helped us source many of the images that appear in this volume.And last but not least a big thank you to the students of theatre and performance atWimbledon and Northbrook whose stimulating discussions and challenging minds inspired

us, made us think harder and conﬁrmed the need for a collection of this nature

***

As editors we wish to thank the authors and publishers for their time and assistance inbringing this collection together and we gratefully acknowledge permission to publish thearticles and extracts that follow

Permissions

B Russell (1912) The Problems of Philosophy Oxford University Press, pp 1–6 Reprinted by

permission of Oxford University Press

Plato (1955) “Book 7: the simile of the cave” trans H D P Lee, in The Republic London:

Penguin, pp 278–83 Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd

J Willats (1990) “The draughtsman’s contract: how an artist creates an image” in H Barlow,

C Blakemore and M Weston-Smith, eds, Images and Understanding Cambridge University

Press, pp 235–43, 249–54 Reproduced with permission

Jonathan Crary Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century,

E H Gombrich (1963) “Meditations on a hobby horse or The roots of artistic form” in

Meditations on a Hobby Horse London: Phaidon, pp 1, 4, 5, 7–8.

From Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, published by Jonathan Cape Reproduced by

permission of The Random House Group Ltd for the UK, and Farrar, Strauss and Girouxfor the US and rest of world

Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press

Routledge) pp 168–76 Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books UK

M Foucault and J Miskowiec (1986) “Of other spaces,” Diacritics 16(1) Spring, pp 22–7.

H Lefebvre (1991) The Production of Space, trans D Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell,

pp 37–42, 46

D Bablet and M.-L Bablet (1982) Adolphe Appia 1862–1928: actor – space – light London:

John Calder, pp 57–9 Reproduced by permission of Oneworld Classics

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

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University of Michigan Press

R Schechner, 6 Axioms from TDR/The Drama Review 12(3), T39, Spring 1968, pp 41–64 Reprinted by kind permission of TDR and Richard Schechner.

N Kaye, ed (2000) Site-Speci ﬁc Art: performance, place and documentation London: Routledge,

pp 1–7 Reproduced by kind permission of Taylor and Francis

S Palmer and S Popat, Dancing in the Streets Originally published in the International Journal

of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 2(3), 2007, pp 297–314 Reproduced by permission of

the authors and editor of IJPADM.

A Todd and J.-G Lecat (2003) The Open Circle: Peter Brook’s theatre environments London:

G Giannachi (2004) Virtual Theatres: an introduction London: Routledge, pp 134–9,

reproduced by kind permission of Taylor and Francis

“The house from cellar to garret”, from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, translated

D Massey (2005) For Space Sage Publications, London, pp 177–80 Reprinted by

permis-sion of Sage Publications Ltd

Arnold Aronson, (1991) “Postmodern design,” 43:1, pp 1–11 © 1991 The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.Arthur B Feinsod (1984) “Stage designs of a single gesture: the early work of Robert

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

L Simonson (1932) The Stage is Set, New York: Dover Rights now held by Taylor and

Francis Books, UK

Liam Doona, “Hope, hopelessness / presence, absence: scenographic innovation and thepoetic spaces of Jo Mielziner, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller,” in Malcolm Griﬃths,

ed., Theatre Design: exploring scenography (The Society of British Theatre Designers, 2002.)

With thanks to Professor Malcolm Griﬃths

C Baugh (1994) “Brecht and stage design: the Bühnenbildner and the Bühnenbauer” in

P Thompson and G Sacks, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht Cambridge University

Press, pp 235–53 Copyright: © Cambridge University Press, 1994 Reproduced withpermission

R Barthes (1979) “The diseases of costume” from Critical Essays, trans R Howard

Evan-ston: Northwestern University Press, pp 41–50 Reprinted with permission of Editions

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Seuil for UK and Commonwealth, and Northwestern University Press for all otherterritories.

T Kantor (1961) “My idea of the theatre,” in the programme of The Rhinoceros by E Ionesco,

the Stary Theatre, Kraków, pp 17–22 and T Kantor (2000) “Development of my ideas

concerning staging techniques: terminology,” in Krzysztof Ples´niarowicz, ed and sel.,

Meta-morfozy Teksty o latach 1938–1974 [Metamorphoses: texts for the years 1938–1974].

Kraków: Cricoteka, Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor /Ksie˛garnia Akademicka Available from http://www.cricoteka.com.pl/en/ Reproduced bythe kind permission of the translator, Monika Markiewicz

Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc

1999 Routledge Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books, UK

Sheridan (New York: Pantheon) Originally published in French as Surveiller et punir

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and mind,” from The Primacy of Perception Trans C Dallary

Extract from Making Sex: body and gender From the Greeks to Freud, by Thomas Laqueur, pp 3–6,

E Wilson (1985) Adorned in Dreams: fashion and modernity London: Virago Press, pp 2–9.

Reproduced by permission of I B Tauris Publishers

E G Craig (1911) “The actor and the Über-marionette” in On the Art of the Theatre.

Heinemann, pp 80–94 Publication is with the consent of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate

“Man and art ﬁgure” from The Theatre of the Bauhaus, ed Walter Gropius and Arthur

of Wesleyan University Press

J Grotowski, (1969), Towards a Poor Theatre London: Methuen, pp 15–21 (with additional

illustrations by Jerzy Gurawski from The Grotowski Institute, Wrocław, Poland) trans T K.Wiewiorowski Reprinted by permission of Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C BlackPublishers

Gabrielle Cody, “Woman, man, dog, tree: two decades of intimate and monumental bodies

in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater,” TDR/The Drama Review 42(2), T158, Summer, 1998, pp 115–

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of the MIT Press

C Bouger (2007) Glow: interview with Gideon Obarzanek (edited extracts and additional

illustrations) This interview was originally published on idanca.net (Brazil)

Extract from “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, second version”

reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, by Walter Benjamin, ed Michael W Jennings,

Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y Levin, pp 20–5, 42–4, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press

W Iser (1978) The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, pp 20–1, 164–9, 196–8, 203

L Tyson (1999) “Semiotics” in Critical Theory Today: a user friendly guide New York: Garland,

pp 205–8 Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Books, UK

P Pavis (2003) Analyzing Performance: theater, dance, and ﬁlm, trans D Williams, Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, pp 37–40, 311–19

Sally Banes, “Olfactory performances,” TDR/The Drama Review 45(1), Spring, T169, 2001,

V Meyerhold (1977) Meyerhold on Theatre, ed and trans E Braun London: Methuen,

pp 23–30, 70–2 Reprinted by permission of Methuen Drama, an imprint of A&C BlackPublishers

A Artaud (1970) The Theatre and its Double, trans V Corti London: Calder, pp 64–7.

H Barker (1993) Arguments for a Theatre University Press, Manchester pp 71, 85–90.

Smith R (2007) Rehearsal Sketches for Nick Staﬀord’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s

“War Horse” directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris for the National Theatre Fromthe author’s own collection

S Brecht (ed.) (1978) The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson London: Methuen, pp 419–22.

Reproduced by permission of Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt-am-Main globally, and Methuen(A&C Black) in the UK and Commonwealth

J Svoboda (1993) The Secret of Theatrical Space, trans J M Burian New York: Applause,

pp 20–5, 72–4

Every eﬀort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders The publishers would bepleased to hear from any copyright holders not acknowledged here so that this page can beamended at the earliest possible opportunity

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Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet

Scenography encompasses a broad and divergent sphere of activity Performances are beingmade in theatre spaces, found space, site-speciﬁc space and virtual space Opportunities forthe designer have never been so varied or the territory so uncharted We seem to be at aparticularly acute stage of transition or collision in an indeterminate and shifting ﬁeld

A discursive space has opened up that asks us to engage both within and beyond its

bound-aries wherever these may be set Discursive (from the Latin discursus) means to run to and fro,

hither and thither, between disciplines, between the past and the present, between what isknown and what is indeﬁnable This Reader is an invitation to enter into this discourse, toparticipate in this journey of inquiry

This is an anthology of collected articles which foregrounds the role of the visual artistand the visual composition of performance within the broad ﬁeld of the performing arts:theatre, opera, dance and performance It takes the “scenographic” as its central frame ofreference and then works outwards, making imaginative theoretical and temporal linksacross a range of cultural discourses This is a “magpie” of a book, stealing, unashamedly,from visual theory, ﬁne art, philosophy, linguistics, cultural studies, art history, studies ingeography, social science as well as theatre and performance studies, all of which arebrought to bear on the process and practice of scenography

Scenography is a broad term that incorporates an intricate matrix of overlapping

prac-tices any one of which it is impossible to study in isolation So, although this Reader looks at

performance primarily from a visual perspective, this is always within the wider context oftheories of production and reception This collection of essays will therefore be of interestand value not only to designers but to students, practitioners and scholars across the range

of theatre arts and performance disciplines

We have deliberately included the words theatre, performance, design and scenography

in our title These practices are sometimes considered discretely but more often pairedwhen they are written or spoken about Theatre is sometimes subsumed by the broaderterm performance, while design or theatre design is embraced by the increasingly popu-lar term scenography The blurring of boundaries between these fields is one of the dis-tinguishing features of current practice However, many of the essays we have included referspecifically to theatrical conventions associated with the dramatic tradition and indeed werewritten before the expansion of the field in the 1960s to what has now become known as

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performance studies Having both terms in the title indicates the breadth and historicalscope of the book.

We use the term “designer” to describe the role of the person who conceives and realisesthe material processes of production through, but not exclusively, set, costume, lightingand sound We also consider olfactory design Scenography encapsulates the whole event,including the performers and the audience; it is the discursive ﬁeld in which these distinctand yet overlapping practices converge Within the scenographic frame there are diﬀerent

approaches to design and we incorporate these in this Reader This scale of engagement

ranges from adopting a speciﬁc assigned role – set designer, costume designer, lightingdesigner etc who provides practical solutions, for instance, creating the visual context inwhich the performance takes place – to a more dialectical engagement with the materialpresented At the far end of the scale is the individual who takes responsibility for the wholeperformed event These approaches are not exclusive

This book is organised around ﬁve thematic headings:

• Looking: the experience of seeing

• Space and place

• The designer: the scenographic

the-to each other and the-to scenography Some of these relationships will be quite tangential;others are more direct The introductions give an overview of each section, but ultimately

it is up to you as the reader to make your own conceptual links and draw your ownconclusions in relation to the arguments presented These discourses themselves resonateoutwards, interlink and cross-reference to further suggested reading and areas of study

We have not designed the book to be read in a linear fashion and we encourage you to adopt

a discursive approach, travelling to and fro between sections to ﬁnd your own route throughthis variable and shifting terrain The introductions, for instance, can be read ﬁrst as separateentities which frame the section as a whole, or serve as reference points for the contextual-isation of particular essays after they have been read Suggested further reading is included

at the end of each extract

The range and scope of the material in this volume is extensive Although our approachcomes from a western/Eurocentric perspective, we have where possible included workswhich acknowledge and encompass the global dimensions and heterogeneous nature ofcontemporary design practice Some of the contributions will be familiar as they formpart of the canon of writings on western theatre and performance in the twentieth century.The works of people like Craig, Appia, Schlemmer, R E Jones, Artaud and Grotowski, for

J A N E C O L L I N S A N D A N D R E W N I S B E T

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instance There are also newly commissioned essays by contemporary designers writingabout their own work, and essays by designers and scholars theorising the work of others.The texts which pertain directly to performance are interspersed with extracts from theworks of cultural theorists like Barthes, Foucault and Lefevbre and by ﬁne art historians likeWillats and Crary.

The length of the extracts varies considerably from journal articles reprinted in theirentirety to very short excerpts from much longer works We have, where possible, repro-duced the images that were included in the texts in their original published form There arehowever some exceptions to this: the drawings by Grotowski’s “designer architect” JerzyGurawski for example are less familiar versions of those printed in the source publication.Where a text has been edited we have only included those images that relate to that sec-tion In each case we consider these images integral to the full understanding of the text.Another exception is the inclusion of a “visual essay” by Rae Smith which eloquentlyexpresses the value of drawing in rehearsal

There are many diﬀerent and competing theoretical approaches, opinions and tives in this volume It is not a handbook with instructions on how to design nor does it seek

perspec-to deﬁne scenography What this Reader does is open up a discussion By placing the practice

of theatre and performance design in a historical and cultural context it oﬀers a cal framework from within which this practice can be interrogated and comprehended.Locating scenography within the wider discourse of arts practice opens up its potential,politicises its aesthetics and reasserts its centrality in the production of meaning In thefast-moving, multimedia, interdisciplinary and global domain of contemporary theatreand performance, designers need navigation skills There are no maps, but this volumewill hopefully oﬀer some reference points from which to negotiate the challenges of thisunsettled and vertiginous terrain

criti-I N T R O D U C T criti-I O N

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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 beforewords 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 isalways suﬀused by the other senses At every stage of their praxis, designers are engaged inthe act of looking and seeing Looking suggests action and engagement, seeing is what isperceived as a result of looking These acts are separate but simultaneous, each is implied inthe other, but how we see and what we see is never a matter of simply “just looking,” asMaaike Bleeker argues:

What seems to be just “there to be seen” is, in fact, rerouted through memory andfantasy, 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 beirrational, inconsistent and undependable More than that, seeing appears to alterthe thing seen and to transform the one seeing, showing them to be profoundlyintertwined in the event that is visuality

(Bleeker 2008: 2)

“Just looking” is in fact a complex web of sensory interactions and these interactions arethemselves 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 forany 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 studiesconcerned speciﬁcally with visual analysis

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This is reflected in the essays we have chosen for inclusion in this section, of which onlytwo, 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 allhave 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; theshifting relationship between the viewing subject and the object of observation; Europeanperspective; the “reading” of photographic images; and the relationship between form andfunction in fine art They are in no way definitive but they do introduce the breadth ofthinking and attest to the complexity of the experience of looking and seeing both within andbeyond the scenographic frame.

Seeing is believing

If “seeing is believing” then how do we know that what we are seeing is “true”? Thepossibility of the independent existence of matter outside the mind of man has exercisedphilosophers 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 wesee 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 whichaccount 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 beenunderstood and ways of seeing “naturalised” in diﬀerent historical time frames, is acommon thread which is dealt with explicitly in all the essays in this section Less explicit isthe relationship between the experience of seeing and the way we use words to describewhat we see “Seeing,” Berger tells us, comes before words, but a number of philosophershave 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, butrather that language in some way shapes reality or at least our experience of theworld 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 ofhistory;” the viewing subject is always constituted within a speciﬁc “historical framework” (inCrary 1994: 6) The revolution in image production in the latter part of the twentieth centuryheralded by rapid developments in digital technologies has radically altered the way we see:

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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 newforms 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” toexpand the visual ﬁeld, taking audiences into uncharted territory resulting in a new aesthet-ics of looking and seeing Giannachi makes the point that technology has always modiﬁed therelationship between what we see and what we know:

Clearly, deﬁnitions of the real are no longer simply constituted by what is seen bythe eyes, but also by what is seen through a microscope, a telescope and eventhe interface of one’s computer screen And while on the one hand the virtualappropriates and cannibalises the real, the real is still our main point of reference inany 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 ical data” (Crary 1994: 2), what we understand as the “the real” and its relationship

mathemat-to what we regard as “appearance,” has perennially proved mathemat-to be much more diﬃcult

to deﬁne

Appearance and reality

Russell (1912) addresses the problem of distinguishing between the appearance of thingsand 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 whoneeds to understand appearances and that which is required of the practical man who musthave knowledge of the physical reality of objects The designer dealing as he/she does withthree-dimensional objects in space needs of course to have knowledge of both

The nature of the relationship between appearance and reality also occupied Greekphilosophers In the fourth century  Plato (1955) challenged the reliability of thesenses and destabilised the associative connections between what we see and what webelieve Platonic philosophy rested in the belief of the existence of two worlds: thechangeable physical world which is manifested through appearances, and beyond that theworld of ideal forms which are unchanging and eternal The moral and intellectualcondition of most men was, according to Plato, one of ignorance Unaware of theirlimited perspective they lived as if chained in a dark cave believing the shadows andsounds they perceived in front of them to be the real world as opposed to mererepresentations of it

L O O K I N G : T H E E X P E R I E N C E O F S E E I N G

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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 andthe “truth about the shapes of objects as they really are.” He distinguishes between theapproaches 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 outthe fluidity between these systems, the way they borrow from each other and the way theydemonstrate the potential for exchange and play between cultures

Crary (1994) argues that the camera obscura played a key role in the construction ofthe 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 overtwo hundred years It was thought that the intercession of an impartial mechanical apparatusbetween 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 nodoubt that the image produced was an “objective” representation of reality Furthermore, thedark 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 Descartes4incorporated into their respective philosophical positions on the nature of perceptionand reason

Ways of seeing

Gombrich’s (1963) “meditations” on art give us an insight into the complicit nature oflooking at performance He suggests that initially all “representations” were not producedwith 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 offunction 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 toliterature (see Part V) and in performance correlates in visual terms to the way in which acloth might serve as a river, and a table act as a “substitute” for a bridge What matters arenot the formal characteristics of these things but that the “cloth as river” forms a barrier andthe “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

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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 becautious 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 thevisual ﬁeld is inevitably composed In many ways the studium corresponds to the scenographic

in theatre, a densely packed series of images unfolding moment by moment The designermay wish for the “accidental” to “prick” the viewer in performance but cannot guarantee it

In any event to guarantee it would be to negate its eﬀect as an “aesthetic moment.” To whatextent should the designer leave space for unexpected juxtapositions and coincidences ofaction that might provoke in the observer that personal and particular response? Or does thenotion of “staged” negate the potential for the singular experience of looking that Barthes

associates with the punctum?

Theatre according to Blau (1990) “posits itself in distance,” and the separation of theperformer and the audience is fundamental to the act of viewing Thus it is essential thatthe delineation of the stage edge, the demarcation line between the performer and theviewer, is clearly drawn The line can be breached, as in the performance experiments ofthe 1960s, but stepping onto the stage changes the status of the viewer from audience toparticipant This kind of bodily crossing over brings the performance event closer to that ofthe Dionysian experience of ritual and sacriﬁce For all this participatory jouissance, however,Blau maintains that the fear of “the touch of the unknown” remains Thus, the maintenance

of distance is a psychic as well as a physical necessity rooted in what Blau calls the “scopicdrive,” the erotic pleasure which is generated by gazing at that which we cannot touch butthat might touch us

The essays in this section (with the exception of Willat’s discussion of hybrid pictures)deal with the experience of looking and seeing from a western perspective Bennett (1997)introduces a range of critical debates that examine the implications of looking at perform-ance from both a western and a non-western viewpoint She looks speciﬁcally at some ofthe issues raised by intercultural performance, including its potential to reinforce westerncultural hegemony Bennet employs the term “horizon of expectations” to explain the range

of assumptions that different audiences bring to bear on the act of looking and seeing in thetheatre These assumptions, based on notions of tradition, identity, cultural background,class, age and gender, inflect what we see and the way we see it (see Part V for fur-ther development of these ideas) Bennett reminds us that there is no definitive position

in terms of the way we look at performance, but rather multiple, diverse and shiftingpoints of view

NOTES

1 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900

2 Austrian/British Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951

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3 English philosopher John Locke 1632–1704.

4 French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes 1596–1650

REFERENCES

Barthes, R (1993) Camera Lucida London: Vintage.

Bennett, S (1997) Theatre Audiences: a theory of production and reception London: Routledge.

Berger, J (1990) Ways of Seeing London: Penguin.

Blau, H (1990) The Audience Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Bleeker, M (2008) Visuality in the Theatre Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Crary, J (1994) Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press

Danto, A C (1991) “Description and the phenomenology of perception” in N Bryson, M A Holly

and K Moxey, eds, Visual Theory Oxford: Polity, pp 201–15.

Giannachi, G (2004) Virtual Theatres: an introduction London: Routledge.

Gombrich, E H (1963) “Meditations on a hobby horse or the roots of artistic form” in Meditations on

a Hobby Horse London: Phaidon, pp 1–11.

Plato (1955) The Republic, trans H D P Lee London: Penguin.

Russell, B (1912) The Problems of Philosophy Oxford University Press.

Willats, J (1990) “The draughtsman’s contract: how an artist creates an image” in H Barlow,

C Blakemore and M Weston-Smith, eds, Images and Understanding Cambridge University Press,

pp 235–54

PA R T I

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1 APPEARANCE AND REALITY

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubtit? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the mostdifficult that can be asked When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straight-forward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy – forphilosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly anddogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after explor-ing all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusionthat underlie our ordinary ideas

In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to

be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to knowwhat it is that we really may believe In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin withour present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived fromthem But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know isvery likely to be wrong It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certainshape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print By turning my head I see out ofthe window buildings and clouds and the sun I believe that the sun is about ninety-threemillion miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that,owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for

an indeﬁnite time in the future I believe that, if any other normal person comes into

my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and thatthe table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm All thisseems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who

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doubts whether I know anything Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of itrequires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that

is wholly true

To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate attention on the table To the eye it isoblong, brown, and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it givesout a wooden sound Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with thisdescription, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to bemore precise our troubles begin Although I believe that the table is “really” of the samecolour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, andsome parts look white because of reflected light I know that, if I move, the parts that reflectthe light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table willchange It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two

of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it fromexactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change inthe way the light is reﬂected

For most practical purposes these diﬀerences are unimportant, but to the painter they areall-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have thecolour which common sense says they “really” have, and to learn the habit of seeing things asthey appear Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause mosttrouble in philosophy – the distinction between “appearance” and “reality,” between whatthings seem to be and what they are The painter wants to know what things seem to be, thepractical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher’s wish

to know this is stronger than the practical man’s, and is more troubled by knowledge as tothe diﬃculties of answering the question

To return to the table It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour

which pre-eminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part

of the table – it appears to be of diﬀerent colours from diﬀerent points of view, and there is

no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others And we knowthat even from a given point of view the colour will seem diﬀerent by artiﬁcial light, or to acolour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be nocolour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged This colour is notsomething which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the

spectator and the way the light falls on the table When, in ordinary life, we speak of the

colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normalspectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light But the othercolours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real;and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table hasany one particular colour

The same thing applies to the texture With the naked eye one can see the grain, butotherwise the table looks smooth and even If we looked at it through a microscope, weshould see roughnesses and hills and valleys, and all sorts of diﬀerences that are impercept-ible to the naked eye Which of these is the “real” table? We are naturally tempted to say thatwhat we see through the microscope is more real, but that in turn would be changed by a

B E R T R A N D R U S S E L L

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still more powerful microscope If, then, we cannot trust what we see with the naked eye,why should we trust what we see through a microscope? Thus, again, the conﬁdence in oursenses with which we began deserts us.

The shape of the table is no better We are all in the habit of judging as to the “real” shapes

of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see thereal shapes But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looksdifferent in shape from every different point of view If our table is “really” rectangular,

it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuseangles If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point awayfrom the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side werelonger All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experiencehas taught us to construct the “real” shape from the apparent shape, and the “real” shape

is what interests us as practical men But the “real” shape is not what we see; it is thing inferred from what we see And what we see in constantly changing in shape as wemove about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about thetable itself, but only about the appearance of the table

some-Similar diﬃculties arise when we consider the sense of touch It is true that the tablealways gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure But the sensation

we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body

we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the

body cannot be supposed to reveal directly any deﬁnite property of the table, but at most to

be signs of some property which perhaps causes all the sensations, but is not actually apparent

in any of them And the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can beelicited by rapping the table

Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what weimmediately experience by sight or touch or hearing The real table, if there is one, is not

immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known.

Hence, two very diﬃcult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all?(2) If so, what sort of object can it be?

It will help us in considering these questions to have a few simple terms of which themeaning is deﬁnite and clear Let us give the name of “sense-data” to the things that areimmediately known in sensation: such things as colours, sounds, smells, hardnesses, rough-nesses, and so on We shall give the name “sensation” to the experience of being immedi-

ately aware of these things Thus, whenever we see a colour, we have a sensation of the colour, but the colour itself is a sense-datum, not a sensation The colour is that of which we

are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation It is plain that if we are toknow anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense-data – brown colour,oblong shape, smoothness, etc – which we associate with the table; but, for the reasons

which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the data, or even that the

sense-data are directly properties of the table Thus a problem arises as to the relation of thesense-data to the real table, supposing there is such a thing

The real table, if it exists, we will call a “physical object.” Thus we have to consider therelation of sense-data to physical objects The collection of all physical objects is called

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