Symposium on Transformative Scenographic Discourses and Practices, Prague, Czech Republic, 9th and 11th June 2023.

Please note:
This is an in-person symposium.

There is no fee for joinning this event, but if you are accepted to present you will need to join or renew your IFTR membership. More information on membership pricing can be found here.

Planning your visit: 

 

Day 2

DAY 1 Abstracts and Biographies:
 

 

Session 1 (9.30-11.00) On Place and Scenography.

 

 

Věra Velemanová

 

Czech stage design and politics. Libor Fára and Scenography to Gorkyʼs The Lower Depths

 

The history of Czech stage design is full of cases where it has been forced to grapple with the political régime. This was done several times in the twentieth century: in the 1930s and 1940s in relation to the fascist regime, after that in the 1950s and intensely also after 1968 in relation to the communist regime. The most significant examples are to be found among Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as František Zelenka (1904-1944), an eminent architect and stage designer who was already involved in anti-Nazi productions of the Liberated Theatre between two World Wars and, as a prisoner in Terezin, created set designs and costumes for the theatre of the concentration camp. František Zelenka greatly influenced the stage designers of the next generations, especially the representatives of the action scenography.

 

One of them was Libor Fára (1925-1988), who knew very well work of Zelenka and other artists of previous generation and he used their work for inspiration. The paper, after a general introduction, will deal with the lesser-known phenomenon – connecting photographs and scenographies: specifically through the photos by Zdeněk Tmej of forced labour during World War II in the creation of scenography for Gorkyʼs The Lower Depths in Drama Club in Prague (1971). This performance emerged after the Soviet invasion 1968, in the atmosphere foreign invasion, soldiers and lawlessness, perpetrated by the collaborative Czechoslovakian regime.  The paper used rich literature and archive materials and is based on a long-term historical trajectory.

 

Bio:

Věra Velemanová (ver.velemanova@idu.cz) Researcher of the Departement of Czech Theatre Studies in Arts and Theatre Institute Prague.Her research focuses on the 19th - 21th century Czech set design and theatre history of Russian immigrants in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1938 and czech legionary theatre in Russia between 1914 and 1920. She also works as a curator of the exhibitions with theatrical themes.

She lectures at the Departement of Theatre Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles university, Prague.

 

Joslin McKinney

 

7:15am Frog Walk, Sheffield: scenographic attunements in urban environments

 

This 15 min presentation responds to the PQ theme, RARE, by considering human relationships with the unique qualities of urban environments as a form of scenography. It asks ‘How might concepts of scenography help us tune into the material, affective and embodied dimensions of our relationships with urban spaces?’ It focuses on the ‘ordinary affects’ (Kathleen Stewart) of urban spaces and those moments when something seems to be emerging from the ‘charged atmospheres of everyday life’.  It is an approach to analysing urban space that builds on the idea of  ‘scenographics’ (Rachel Hann) as materialisations of relationships between bodies and objects that ‘enact a distinct form of place-orientation’. And it develops the idea of bodily attunement to urban space through scenographic framing. Using my experience of an early-morning walk in Sheffield, it examines the multi-sensorial ‘embodied inhabitation’ (Monica Degen) of a particular place, Frog Walk, using concepts of expanded scenography; materiality, relationality and affectivity. The presentation concludes by speculating on the value of thinking through scenography to deepen our appreciation of the ‘genius loci’ of everyday spaces.

 

Bio:

 

Joslin McKinney is Professor of Scenography at the University of Leeds, UK. She is the programme leader for the Masters in Performance Design at Leeds. Her publications include the Cambridge Introduction to Scenography (CUP 2009) and Scenography Expanded: an introduction to contemporary performance design (Bloomsbury Methuen 2017). She has published articles on scenographic research methods, scenographic materiality and agency and the phenomenology of scenography. She was the chair of the international jury at the Prague Quadrennial in 2015.

 

 

Olga Nikolaeva

 

(In)visible resistance: scenographic reading of interventional protests in present-day Russia

 

For me, a theoretician who works with representation of trauma, the value of scenography lies in its qualities to act beyond and above verbal, as well as expand and explore spaces past what is traditionally considered a theatre environment. It also lies in its ability to approach unrepresentable, unthinkable, prohibited, and intentionally hidden. To trigger the affective of human experience and through it to target the meaning-making of it. Inspired by Rachel Hann’s outlook on how scenographics irritate the wordlings of power this paper investigates different spaces and places as a stage for resistance in present day Russia. This paper looks at the examples of organized protests and public and private acts of resistance across the country, focusing primarily on anti-war and new law enforcements protests. It explores how discourse of scenographic materiality and interventional and orientating qualities of scenographics can be applied to understanding of strategies of resistance in the space of autocratic regime and severe censorship. Exploring works of artists, activists, and anonymous citizens, this paper search for an approach in which extended scenography can help to understand the complex processes of resistance, its psychological influence, transformative qualities, and value for the struggling civil society in present-day Russia.

 

Bio:

 

Olga Nikolaeva is a postdoctoral researcher at Swedish Performing Arts Agency and senior lecturer in visual communication at Linnaeus University. Her research interests include scenographic materialism, scenographic ecology, representation of trauma and memory in theatre and performance. Her present-day research focuses on scenography of trauma in works of women theatre makers in contemporary Russian theatre.

 

Loukia Minetou

 

Narrative Design in Dementia Care: a scenographic approach to design for dementia

 

The built environment has been shown to have significant potential to improve the quality of life and contribute to the well-being of persons living with dementia. Persons with dementia in residential care suffer from isolation as it is difficult for staff and family members to find common routes of communication when the disease progresses. Within dementia care there is an urgent need to further facilitate communication especially with people living with late stage dementia. Storytelling has been effectively used in art therapy and art interventions for people affected by dementia to enhance communication, social connectivity and well-being.

 

Drawing on interdisciplinary research, the focus of the presentation is two case studies examining the employment of  scenographic principles in residential care settings. It describes research investigating innovative design for care homes employing the space as a actant thus enabling the residents to create, imagine, embody and communicate stories. The case studies report on the co-creation of space focused on offering lived experiences and multi-sensory engagement for residents with dementia in 3 care homes highlighting design elements that trigger storytelling and stimulate imagination. Such elements include sensory handrails, furniture, soft furnishings, configuration of space and inclusion of technology.  The presentation explores whether narrative design could provide routes of communication between residents, staff and family members thus improving the quality of life of people living with dementia.

 

This novel type of environmental design in care homes could enhance narrative agency in residents with dementia thus allowing residents, caregivers and staff members to communicate through storytelling.  Based on these case studies examples, the presentation discusses the value and impact of appropriate narrative design on the wellbeing of people with dementia and their carers, and future avenues for improving the physical environment in care homes based on storytelling possibilities.  There is a possibility for a significant impact of narrative design to communication, social connectivity and well-being of people living with dementia.

 

Bio:

 

Loukia Minetou, has a professional design background with over 20 years of industry experience in costume and set design. She is a Lecturer at the London College of Fashion, UAL and a doctoral researcher in design for dementia care hames, Centre for Environment and Ageing Research, The Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling. Her research is funded by the Alzheimer’s Society UK.

 

 

 

Session 2 (11.30-13.00) On Gender and scenography

 

Christin Essin

 

Costume as Transformative Methodology: Women’s Sport Uniforms

 

In 2022, women in the United States celebrated fifty years of Title IX, legislation that protected women’s equal access to federally funded educational programs and activities. Women’s sports grew significantly after its passage, especially with mandates providing female-identified athletes with the same quality of equipment, uniforms, and footwear as their male counterparts. Designed to fit and free women’s bodies to meet their athletic potential, sports uniforms make material the promises made by Title IX. They also mold individual players into a team, a visibly unified squad chasing the same goal despite differences (seen and unseen) in class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. The uniform characterizes their performing bodies as “uniformly” powerful within the choreographies and gender dynamics of their sport.

 

This paper analyzes uniforms worn by female-identified, collegiate basketball players using methodologies of recent costume scholarship; it casts materialist costume theory as a transformative analytical tool for investigating the cultural dynamic of sport. Costume is a “fertile ground for ideas and reflections,” argues Donatella Barbieri in Studies in Costume and Performance, claiming its “concepts, contexts, processes and practices” as a mode of knowledge gathering. By casting the basketball uniform as costume, this paper claims its agential power. By framing female-identified athletes as physically powerful, mentally confident, and passionately driven, the uniform actively resists patriarchal forces still intent on limiting women’s bodies. The recent overturn of Roe vs. Wade, a court case decided the same year Title IX passed, exemplifies the conservative backlash against U.S. women’s bodily autonomy. Ethnographic research with and observations of current collegiate players will document their perspectives and performances, providing the source material to theorize (and politicize) their uniformed bodies.

 

Bio:

 

Christin Essin is an Associate Professor of Theatre History at Vanderbilt University. Her second book, Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theatre Labor, was published in 2021 by the University of Michigan Press and recognized with a 2022 Frick Award by the American Theatre and Drama Society and a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award. She serves as editor for the Studies in Scenographic Practice, Theatrical Design, and Technical Craft series for Routledge Press. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, a state currently restricting the civil rights of women with one the strictest abortion laws in the United States. Her current research turns to costume theory to analyze the uniforms worn by woman-identified athletes as agents of power and signifiers of bodily autonomy.

 

 

Ewa Kara

 

The Feminist Spectacular in Florentina Holzinger’s Ophelia’s Got Talent

 

This paper analyzes contrasting approaches to traditional theatrical machinery and radical feminist performance in Florentina Holzinger’s production of Ophelia’s Got Talent (2022) at the Volksbühne, Berlin. Her iconic use of the performers’ naked bodies as a defining “costume” challenges gender roles and allows her to reclaim hegemonic theatrical space. Holzinger’s highly visceral and emotional performative concept re-conceptualizes Ophelia’s myth and other gender roles whereas Nikola Knezevic’s stage design is spectacularly theatrical and epic in style. On the stage of the Volksbühne, Knezevic recreates spaces of masculine phantasy using cars and helicopters, water and steam. Holzinger subverts this machismo with her stunts. But more particularly, she offers an exhilaratingly brazen choreography of pop culture, a kind of contemporary freak show, which simultaneously entices and repulses. Knezevic’s spectacular scenography, with its shock effects, intensifies the production’s more generally seductive aspects. The paper analyzes in detail at how this effect is achieved: how the particular space is dynamically constructed and contested, in effect negotiating socio-cultural issues of sexuality and gender, power and knowledge on stage. In conclusion, I suggest that spectacular scenography can be used as a tool to critique certain socio-political aspects of contemporary culture, while appearing to participate in them. In short, my paper shows how contemporary scenography can help to reshape our understanding of femininity and inter-subjective theatrical space.

 

Bio:

 

Ewa Kara received her PhD in Theatre from Columbia University in New York. Her research investigates contemporary scenography, in particular the emergence of new visual paradigms and their challenge to earlier staging conventions. Previously she studied theatre and art history at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and taught at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her interests focus on scenography and the visual culture, modern and contemporary theatre, as well as the history of the theatrical avant-garde and Polish drama and theatre.

 

 

Kate Ladenheim

 

Stock Motion Performances: Digital Motion as Affective Scenography

 

This paper proposes that the construction and arrangement of stock motion (generic,

pre-recorded motion capture clips) is an affective, scenographic practice. Motion capture

systems, and programs for combining motion capture animation, suggest digital architectures and character archetypes. Further, because stock motion is easily transferable from avatar to avatar, it is possible to animate the body of a princess, zombie, office worker, or monster with effortless, uncanny precision.

 

Lauren Berlant’s 2010 book The Female Complaint discusses “intimate publics:” invisible,

affective spaces that unite individuals across generic identity markers. Intimate publics are

simultaneously affirming and alienating. Berlant’s primary example, “women’s culture,” unites women through a market-driven fantasy of romantic gratification while also upholding and promoting oppressive levels of normativity. Stock motion performs a similar trick: it offers a promise of uniting and empowering disparate bodies through expressive motion while also upholding and promoting stereotypes – often gendered, culturally appropriative ones.

 

In this paper, we argue that performances using stock motion as a central storytelling material build intimate publics in digital space. Regardless of what bodies perform stock motion, when the performance feels familiar, an intimacy is created; an affective, invisible architecture that unites the bodies performing and the bodies spectating. This emerging performance practice engages with normative ideas around what kinds of bodies should perform what kinds of motion. Yet, in their intentional mis-use of convention, stock motion performances also hold the potential for alternative intimacies and queer methods of resistance.

 

Abstract by:

- Kate Ladenheim, Principal Investigator

Associate Artist in Residence, Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Maryland

- MK Ford, Research Assistant

Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Maryland (MFA Dance 2024)

- Leo Grierson, Research Assistant

Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Maryland (MFA Media Design 2025)

- Tim Kelly, Research Assistant

Theater, Dance & Performance Studies, University of Maryland (MFA Media Design 2025)

 

Bio:

 

Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, media designer, and creative technologist. As the Artist-in-Residence at University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, she researches bodies in motion and how they impact and are impacted by systems of social and technological pressure. She has conducted research in motion interfaces for robotics design at U.C.L.A., and was the 2019-2020 Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance Lab. Her artistic projects have been presented internationally, and celebrated in Dance Magazine (USA) as one of their “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.”

 

 

Session 3 (13.45 to 15.00) On Scenography and Technology

 

Ed Grimoldby

 

Dance of the Necromancer - Affective Ontological Engagements with Pre-rendered

Intermedial Scenographic Spaces

 

This paper explores the phenomenon of projected pre-rendered animation sequences

accompanying LED dance. Provoked by the notion of ‘dead’ media presented by Coniglio

(2004) as antithetical to the ever changing nature of live artwork, this paper suggests that

through material engagements with the scenographic phenomenon, more nuanced theories

may be generated within this ever prevalent performance medium. The paper cites auto ethnographic case studies through the model of practice as research, and

demonstrates the layers of ‘interactivity’ present in pre-rendered intermedial performance.

 

This process situates pre-rendered performance as ‘synergetic’ rather than interactive & develops a taxonomy of visual tropes referenced through practical examples.

This taxonomy oscillates between the Uncanny doppelgangers of Dixon’s (2007) Digital Double and existing digital discourse (Dancing with Digital Sprites - Palmer & Poppat 2008) (Vicarious Interaction - Kattenbelt 2010) and suggest that a perception of interactivity may be more important than a genuine interactive methodology. However, the timeline restricted nature of pre-rendered synergetic performance systems excludes the performer from the efficacious feedback loop (Broadhurst 2010) of a genuine interactive system. What are the logistic repercussions of this exclusion (ontologically and practically) and how might material engagements with this medium still enable elasticity and flow when embracing Material Thinking.

 

The outcome of this process seeks to develop a novel understanding of liveness in a

pre-rendered intermedial workflow and suggest that despite its ontological ‘dead’ nature that entanglements within this branch of digital scenography are transformative.

 

Bio:

 

Ed is an award-winning video designer for theatre, specialising in interactive content design. Alongside this he is a professional fire performer & LED artist. His MA (University of Hull) explored the correlation between Alchemical philosophy and Artaud's scenographic theories alongside his own interactive digital performance work. His PhD (Current - University Of Hull) explores the tension between live & pre-rendered modes of interactive digital performance. He is a part time member of staff at the University of Hull & lectures in Artaud & wider Surrealist Theory. 

 

 

 

Katherine Graham

 

Rare Matter - Lighting in the R&D Studio; Meeting, Making, Meaning

 

This paper takes a critical lens to the ways in which lighting design unfolds in collaborative theatre making, arguing that the intersection of shared endeavour, dramaturgical experimentation, and design materials offers an affective entanglement of scenographic matter with the social and creative culture of a performance company.

In particular, the paper will example the role of design in the artistic processes of collaborative research and development, reflecting on the author’s long-term collaboration with the visual theatre company, Theatre Re. Using accounts of successive periods of R&D, this paper will consider the role and value of this kind of shared encounter, in which creative proximity may be both physical and virtual. The practices of co-creation, and co-operation that emerge in the practices described      open up new questions about the ontology of performance and the ways in which performances are assembled from their materials and from the practices of human connection which drive them. In this vein, light’s role is one of negotiation; light is a fundamentally contingent material operating alongside and overlapping the work of performers, composers, and directors, both responding to and prompting developments in other areas of creative practice.

 

Bio:

 

Katherine Graham is a lecturer in Theatre at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York, where her research focuses on the agency of light in performance. She has also worked extensively as a lighting designer for theatre and dance. She is a co-editor of Contemporary Performance Lighting: Experience, Creativity, Meaning (Bloomsbury, 2023).

 

 

Scott Palmer

 

Hanging about in the dark”: Materiality, transformation and the joy of light

 

This paper will consider aspects associated with the experience of light and darkness drawing on examples of contemporary relational performance practice and audience experiences and emerges from recent writing in Contemporary Performance Lighting:Experience, Creativity, and Meaning (Graham, Palmer & Zezulka, 2023).

 

Light’s profound psychological and physiological effect on human bodies conditions our entire experience of the world and the way in which we think and feel (de Kort and Vetch, 2014). Light and its material qualities are therefore an essential, although frequently overlooked, component of all experiences of performance.

 

We see through light, we witness the effects of light, and we feel light – it conditions our moods and directly affects our behaviour – and yet light is, paradoxically, an immaterial material; its materiality only obtained by proxy, through coming into contact with another material object.

 

Light’s materiality is inherently bound to the spatial and temporal conditions in which it is employed and this presentation will focus on specific examples and qualities of designed light that deliberately contribute to, disrupt and transform contemporary audience experiences.

 

Bio:

 

Dr Scott Palmer is Associate Professor in Performance Design at the University of Leeds, UK. His teaching and research focus on designing environments for audience experience including those mediated through the mobile phone, interactive video and 360 fulldome environments. Publications include Light: Readings in Theatre Practice (2013), Scenography Expanded (co-edited with McKinney) (2017) and Contemporary Performance Lighting (with Graham and Zezulka) (2023) and is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Performance + Design book series.

https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/performance/staff/391/dr-scott-palmer

 

 

Session 4 (15:15-16:40) On scenographic eco-dramaturgies and social engagement

 

Kamina Mamadnazarbekova

 

Island and Insularity in British XXI Century Drama

 

Remote island is a very common locus and trope for Anthropocene theatre. Fascinating, just discovered and full of mystery, innocent, virgin, empty and full at the same time, exploited, deserted, abandoned, hosting a catastrophe or turning into a miserable place, prison or resource colony, it often represents a model of globalized extractivist economy, human to non-human relations, or just a mini-model of the world. According to Fréderique Ait-Touati, theatre is a suitable apparatus to facilitate the apparition of Gaia - latourian concept of living interconnectedness creating favourable condition for human existence. Island on theatre stage turns out to be a perfect figure of this Anthropocene scenography. Like in Crash Park (2019) by French director and scenographer Philippe Quesnes where rotating island accelerates its speed while exotic paradise turns into luxury hotel. Or in a documentary piece Pleasure island (2019) by young Belgian artists Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere narrating the sad story of Nauru, poisoned and corrupted by mining industries of phosphate extraction and then hosting refugees banned from the shores of Australia.

 

In British eco-dramaturgy an island is always a way to talk about one's own insularity and colonialism. I this article I would like to explore the imaginary geography of British Isles from Tirstan da Cunha to Lesbos or Lemnos (which are in fact Greek, but totally appropriated by aristotelian civilisation) in the texts by Zinnie Harris (Further then the Furthest Thing, 2000),  David Greig (Outlying Islands, 2002), Nick Gill (Fiji land, 2013) and Kae Tempest (Paradise, 2022).

 

Bio:

 

Kamila Mamadnazarbekova is doctoral student at Sorbonne University preparing her thesis on landscape theatre and the concept of nature on British stages of the XXIst century with Elisabeth Angel-Perez. Kamila earned a Masters degree from Le Mans University with a thesis on Philippe Quesne under the direction of Anna Street.

 

David Vivian

 

Title: The AnthropoScene: Articulating sophisticated paths for active change-making

 

This paper will outline the concepts and strategies deployed to engage young theatre makers in active, politically and historically-aware gestures of change in the ongoing dialogues about climate change, conflict, colonialism, neo-colonialism, power imbalances, social exclusions, and cultural marginalisation.  With specific reference to a production of the play AnthropoScene by David Fancy in autumn 2022, part of a 24-hour play cycle entitled AnthrApology written during the first year of the pandemic, the production explored how the alienation that results from humans’ supremacist behaviour towards one another contributes to the climate crisis, as well as engaged the ethics of theatricalizing the present climate emergency.  It is based on the premise that humans are in dire need of a truth and reconciliation commission with the planet. Part of a multi-year performative investigation to position our young scholars as active critical thinkers of new relations of understanding, this essential project participates in the ongoing negotiation of new relationships between humans, and between humans and everything else in this world.  

 

The presentation will include a brief overview of key scenographic propositions to support this wildly eclectic dive into a deeply, mutually ingrained narrative, including elements of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, real-life figures including Toussaint L’Ouverture, various youth climate justice activists, and fictional characters across multiple locations and time periods, all engaged in acts of self-harm, racism and environmental harm.

 

Participating artists and scholars will be invited to view a web portfolio of still and video-recorded moments made available before we gather in Prague and to come prepared with critical provocations and shared desperations that fuel our ongoing exploration for a better way forward when it is clear there is no going back. Embedding an ecoscenographic framework into tertiary performance pedagogy

 

Bio:

 

David Vivian is the Scenographer for the Department of Dramatic Arts of Brock University in Niagara, Canada. He is the Director of the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, where he was previously the Director. A former convener of the Scenography Working Group, his current projects include AnthrApology, a 12-hour installation performance based on the idea that the world needs a truth and reconciliation commission for all humans and their relationship with one another, as well as their individual and collective relationships with the planet.

 

 

Tessa Rixon

 

Embedding an ecoscenographic framework into tertiary performance pedagogy

 

This presentation considers the scenographic shift towards an ecologically ethical approach to performance design within tertiary education. Situated within the growing field of ecoscenography, this short talk shares the teaching practice and subsequent impact of embedding ecoscenographic thinking into the education of design students.

An internationally collaborative project, this project sought to understand how undergraduate students – as makers and designers – can move together through climate change towards a sustainable future. Co-run with Tanja Beer and Ian Garret as part of a Global Networked Learning initiative between York University (Canada), Griffith University (Australia) and Queensland University of Technology (Australia), twenty-five university students were trained in sustainable, ecologically conscious approaches to designing for live performance across 2021/22. Students were guided by professional designers and educators in scenography, sustainability and technology, working in partnership with the 2021 Climate Change Theatre Action (CCTA) project to produce seed design concepts for new climate plays for exhibition at the World Stage Design Festival in Calgary in August 2022.

 

This work will continue at the 2023 Prague Quadrennial Results Driven Workshop program, where the same team will trial condensing the program into a three-day intensive format.

This practice offered an alternative approach to traditional models of design pedagogy by employing the three cornerstones of ecoscenography—co-creation, celebration and circulation (Beer 2021)—in a higher education context. As a result, the coordinators noted a marked impact on students’ engagement with place and space, materiality, and a deeper engagement with community. This presentation will detail the pedagogical approach while sharing the outcomes of adopting an ecological ethic within the training of the next generation of theatre designers.

 

Bio:

 

Tessa Rixon is a practitioner-researcher in digital scenography, intermedial performance & Australian performance design. Tessa's work promotes new modes of integrating established and emergent technologies into performance; exploring eco-conscious approaches to scenography; and showcasing Australian performance design practice and histories. As Lecturer in Scenography at Queensland University of Technology (Australia), Tessa’s research has been published in top-ranked publications and she is currently the National Committee Representative for Australia for the International Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference (ITEAC) 2023, and the National Secretary for the Australasian Performance and Drama Studies Association (ADSA).

 

DAY 2 Abstracts and Biographies:

A brainstorming workshop will follow the 5 pairings of presentations set out below. This is aimed to provoke wider questions that emerge in response to ideas expressed across papers.  There will also be time to ask for clarifications on the content of each presentation immediately these have taken place. The first of the pairings is a joint paper.

1.     

Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen  Joint paper - Virtual Spaces between theatre, art and architecture II: Transformation through Scenography

 

We propose to present and invite discussion on our current research-in-progress on the virtual model and the architectural fragment.  Transformation lies at the centre of digital production and its infinite reproducibility unsettles conventionalized understandings of authorship, narrativity and representation. We focus our presentation on recent practices of performative configurations where material presence and immaterial construction coalesce in mirroring or doubling toward the dissolution of gender, class, history, and territory. Such constructions of digital and material architectures and bodies, whether abstract, figurative, austere or opulent, expand scenographic production aesthetics toward deliberate acts of potentialities, and these constructions define transformation as something that correlates to how materials are performed. The virtual model comes to the fore through our inquiry into its unique capacity for world-making or cosmopoiesis. The architectural fragment comes into play through two distinct lines of inquiry, the first as the allure of the incomplete to both creator and spectator, and the second as the challenge of the dissolution of the line and the surface into the pixel. Together, the virtual model and the architectural fragment confirm a new notion of materialism in its capacity for construction and destruction in the making of worlds.

 

Bio:

 

Dr Thea Brejzek is Professor of Spatial Theory at, the School of Architecture, the University of Technology Sydney. Her research engages with the construction of performative spaces across theatre, architecture, media, and exhibition. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bauhaus foundation Dessau and Co-Editor of Theatre & Performance Design.

 

Dr Lawrence Wallen is a Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.

Previously he has held positions as a Professor of Scenography at the Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland and as Guest Artist and producer at the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM). 

 

2.     

Amy Chan Scenographic Participation and Co-creation: Light and Space as the Key Co-Performers, in an Interdisciplinary Classical Music Performance

 

Goldberg Illuminations was a music and light performance co-created and performed by a classical concert pianist and a light artist, based on Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. The concert hall was a contemporary and special architecture in the middle of a heritage cultural compound, which was once a police station and a prison dated back to Victorian era of the colonial Hong Kong. Instead of being supportive to the masterpiece and the virtuoso pianist performance, I, as a light artist, and light and space were the co-creators working closely with the pianist during the creative process and the performance. By actively engaging light and the special architecture of the performance venue in relation to the outer and larger environment of the heritage site through a scenographic perspective in the creative artist dialogue for the conception of the performance, the complex interrelationship among music, artists, audience, light and space was opened up and interrogated. The resultant light installation was not limited to the stage but also extended into the audience space, entrance hall and former prison yard. Light and space formed the integral parts of the music performance, transformed into active co-performers, and transcended the interdisciplinary performance into an ongoing dialogue of light, space, music, artists and audience, each with an independent voice as in the polyphonic composition of Bach. The scenographic participation of the media also reproposed the agential potentiality of light and space, and the roles of classical musician and light artist in an interdisciplinary performance.

 

Bio:

 

Amy Chan (Hong Kong) is a light artist at the intersection of performance, installation, music and science. She is also the co-founder of Drama Collaboratory, an interdisciplinary research-practice performance laboratory based in Hong Kong. Light is the protagonist, antagonist and co-performer of her works.

 

 

Maria Konomi Reflections on transformative performance design practices: from installation to performance design to text.

 

This paper will engage with alternative forms of performance design practices that involve a circular, nonlinear, -and to a large extent also nonhierarchical- approach to collaborative performance making, as well as a creative recycling of conceptual and material frameworks to produce transformative notions of performance design practices. CRASH COURSE ON HOME ECONOMICS is a devised theatre performance project presented in Athens in January 2023/2024 that took its main inspiration from an installation piece (September 2021) created by artist/scenographer Maria Konomi. The original installation was titled A Handful of Soil and was part of ‘Revolutionary Palimpsests’, a visual arts exhibition focusing on reimagining alternative commemorating events for the 200 years of the Greek War of Independence (1821- 1829). The installation aimed to explore feminist sensibilities creating multiple connotations to the female struggle at the domestic, societal and national independence front. Almost two years later CRASH COURSE ON HOME ECONOMICS was inspired by the installation in various visual/spatial, conceptual and material perspectives. The 19th century protofeminist sensibilities evolved and expanded into more contemporary feminist issues like domestic violence and the contemporary femicide crisis. Meanwhile, one thread of the narrative brought onstage the manifesto declaration of Olympe de Gouges fighting for the rights of the woman and citizeness as early as 1791 in the context of the French Revolution. Materials and feminist spatialities from the installation informed the performance design, which in turn shaped the conceptual and thematic core of a new original performance text, devised by director Michaela Antoniou. Exchanging and recycling materialities and material concepts, experimenting and improvising with layering feminist spatialities and spatial themes were part of our approach of transformative performance making from installation to performance design to text and performance.

 

Bio:

 

Maria Konomi Scenographer/costume designer, visual artist and Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Athens (undergraduate & postgraduate course). She specialized in scenography/costume design at the University Arts London (Wimbledon School of Art: BA Theatre Design & Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design: MA Scenography). She holds a PhD in Theatre Studies and Greek Scenography from NKUA. She has over ninety set and costume design credits in all kinds of performing arts and film, presenting her work globally at major theatre organisations, arts and film festivals and independent companies. She is currently co-curator for the national participation of Greece in Prague Quadrennial 2023 for both professional and student sections.

 

3.     

Susanna Suurla. Devising costume: exploring the transformative potential of embodied

and material-led devising methods in the costume design process.

 

This ‘7-minute practice presentation’ stems from my ongoing doctoral research (2021-)

examining the transformative potential of embodied and material-led devising methods as a

costume-specific design method. The study seeks to produce knowledge on how devising

methods, typically used in process-led approaches to contemporary dance and theatre to

develop the performance, can be incorporated into the costume design process to facilitate

ideation through a materially informed and embodied design approach, which is based on

reciprocal action and responsiveness between the material and the designer. The practice-led investigation is based on a two-phase workshop method which explores and assesses the

influence of embodied and material-led devising methods in the creative processes of costume designers, when these methods are used as the impetus for creative work.

With this presentation, I invite feedback on my preliminary findings based on three workshops held in the spring of 2023 by sharing my ideas on how the shared agency of physicality, materiality and the senses present in the devised design process may enable a more reflexive, conscious and responsive approach to costume design, which makes visible the designer's own experiences, prejudices and assumptions, thus also facilitating the designer to critically think in divergent ways about the story they are telling through costume.

 

Bio:

 

Susanna Suurla is a Costume Designer, Doctoral Candidate and a University Teacher in Costume Design at Aalto University, Finland, with over 20 years of experience in costume for performing arts. Her doctoral research explores awareness-based, embodied and material-led devising methods as a costume-specific design approach that enables a reflective, holistic approach to costume design.

 

 

Athena Stourna Transformation, reparation and change! Scenography in the heart of activist practice.

 

How can scenography and the creation of performance space within sites of social isolation provide a current of social change and inclusion, of agency and artistic responsibility in periods of severe crises? In this paper, I propose a presentation of my work as educator in scenography, as part of socially-engaged theatrical creation in marginal, secluded places, in Greece. In a country that has undergone a series of political, social, financial and sanitary crises over the past fifteen years, the urgency to hasten towards sites of uncertainty, tension and trauma and creatively inhabit them, has led to the formation of participatory artistic projects with third-year undergraduate students, in which the visual and spatial elements become the focal point.

 

The first project was carried out in the Refugee Camp of Elaionas, in Athens, right in the heart of the refugee crisis of 2015. Students were asked to create short, visual performances to be viewed by refugee children that did not speak any language other than their own. The second project is an ongoing one that is taking place in an Agricultural prison, outside of the city of Nafplion, in the Peloponnese. Students and prisoners participate in a series of theatre workshops and co-create a site-responsive performance by the end of the term.

Scenography thus becomes a means of transformation of spaces and people, activated by the urgency to resist against inhumanity and exclusion. It also provides an artistic tool for students that enables them to remain active and creative as both citizens and artists.

 

Bio:

Athena Stourna, PhD. is scenographer, theatre and performance maker and researcher. She is Assistant Professor of Space, Scenography and Performance at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. Her research and artistic practice focus on performance space and design, as well as in the relationship between food, drink, and cooking with theatre and performance.  Affiliation: University of the Peloponnese

 

4.     

Eleanor Field Scenographic mess, de-systematising, and staging nuclear non-proliferation.

 

Scenographic mess, which is clutter, debris and an aesthetic and formal approach to

performance making (Etchells, Pahl, Tripney and Cook), is disruptive. Mess asks: “Why do

things happen this way?” The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW)

demands the same of the existing non-proliferation agreement.

 

Reflecting on the process of designing A Family Business ( Staatstheater, Mainz 2022), a

performance that delves into global diplomacy and nuclear disarmament, this paper

explores scenographic mess that nurtures activism. Narrating the nuclear destruction of civilisation, the scenography reflects unpredictability and resists clear meaning, while remaining robust, malleable and supporting interventions expressed through mess. Occasionally hazardous, it provokes the unexpected from scenography.

 

This paper is written from conversations with key collaborators in Germany and the UK who

embraced a design-led rehearsal process and the complications of working with

scenography that can fall in infinite ways. This paper explores how mess is the perfect space

to hold delicate global diplomacy towards decolonisation, the fragility of nuclear peace and

the nurturing of activism.

 

In the show, when a character from the Global South, whose country has no nuclear

weapons, is accused of having ‘nothing to lose’, they reply: ‘We’ve got everything to lose. We’ve just never had a real say in whether we want to risk it or not.’ (Thorpe, 2022)

Scenographic mess “de-systematises”; it promotes new perspectives and ways of working,

necessary in a world where the majority of the population is largely ignored.

 

Bio:

 

Eleanor Field is a theatre designer, with over a decade of professional experience, and is currently completing a part-time PhD at Northumbria University exploring mess and scenographic processes. Her research is currently investigating what a study of mess can offer as a challenge to current industry expectations of scenographic processes and possibilities. 

 

 

Ele Slade Co-creation and conversation between humans and nonhumans during the crafting of live performance piece Memories of Fiction (2018).

 

 

This paper examines social connectivity through co-creation and conversation between humans and nonhumans during the crafting of live performance piece Memories of Fiction (2018). I claim that conversations form the work of scenographic practices, with scenography operating as a mode of crafting beyond design. I emphasise the important (and particular) moments when bodies in space assemble to craft something – in ‘proto performances’ (Schechner), or perhaps proto scenographies. I situate scenographic practices as social through inherent conversational qualities, where model boxes and sketches are actants, and human disciplinary boundaries are porous. In these moments social scenographic practices hold bodies (of all types) and processes together in conversation for a time. This live moment of interaction is crucial in the crafting as well as the operation of scenography onstage: the act of crafting scenography is itself a social act of scenography.

 

I seek to recognise a key aspect of the work we already do as scenographers, calling on practices and processes already undertaken. ‘Conversation’ here highlights a conceptual and critical move from product to process, from commodity to community. A social angle of our work cannot be recognised to its full extent if we remain within a framework based on an equation of scenography = product. With the ‘social’ being inherently performative rather than ostensible (Latour 2005), the social of scenography needs a new framework, one specifically not focussed on product, through which to understand what we already do.

 

Bio:

 

Ele (Eleanor) is a performance designer, ensemble practitioner, and Lecturer in Drama Practice at Staffordshire University. Ele teaches scenographic and ensemble practice to designers and non-designers, and researches scenography beyond design. Ele’s current research uses an Actor-Network-Theory lens to investigate the social aspects of scenography and scenographics.

 

 

 

5.     

Nikolas Kanavaris Scenography as a living transformator of the theatrical space: the “on stage” spatialities of G. Patsas and D. Fotopoulos

 

This paper investigates scenography within the theatrical phenomenon as a liminal

spatiality, created between the place-space dipole (De Certeau). Between the myth and the

action of people, scenography is constituted as a production of space (Lefebvre). The

material world of scenography is established within the presentational space, and it is

consisted of all material objects οn stage (set, props, costumes).

 

As a distinct system of multiple signs (McAuley), scenographic design is shaped by the

elementary relationships established primarily with the theatrical text and secondly with the

physical action of the actors.

 

Through this interpretive scheme selected work of G. Patsas and D. Fotopoulos (awarded

Greek scenographers in PQ) is outlined. The statements of the two creators regarding their

designing principles as well as the critical commentary by contemporary set designers-critics

outline the spatiality introduced by the set. The spatiality of the abstraction-conception of

the priestly body of Patsas, and the spatiality of the heterogeneity-autonomy of the objectactor of Fotopoulos constitute two different scenographic worlds, with divergences and intersections. Scenography as a liminal spatiality constitutes inhabitable worlds, images with active bodies, that constantly transform the perception of the dramatic text.

 

Bio:

Nikolas Kanavaris has studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), holds a postgraduate diploma from the MSc program "Design-Space-Culture," and has specialized in set and costume design at the National Theatre of Greece. He lives in Athens and works as an architect and as a set designer-costume designer (Theatrical Group B.P.M.). He approaches the discourse about space, city, performance, and design both theoretically (exploring the concept of "commons") and through applied methods in art (urban games), teaching (residential design), and activism.

 

 

 

Paula Ven Beek Making in Place: ways in which landscape in Australia, Indonesia and Aotearoa/NZ have informed scenographic projects.

 

Performance design creates environments for performers and audiences to inhabit. Identity,

history and narrative are embedded in the spaces we encounter. Collective embodied

experience of landscape can strengthen collaborations and the crafting of scenographic

projects. In this short practice presentation I will use two case studies from my practice as a

performance maker to discuss how ‘making in place’ informed design during the creative

development stages of two works.

 

‘Opal Vapour’ (2012) is a solo dance performance created as an intersection between body,

voice and light. The work was developed over a series of residencies in Port Macquarie and

Hobart in Australia and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Each unique landscape in each location

informed the layers of movement, sound and image in a work that explored intercultural ritual and our own dis/connection to nature and birthplace. ‘Ka emiemi’ (2023) is the Aotearoa New Zealand Countries/Regions exhibition offering for PQ23. Ka emiemi expresses the act of being together and consists of eight artists from across the country, from diverse and intersecting performance design disciplines, co-creating this new work. Although many development stages were done virtually, key points of coming together galvanised the

process. The design concepts were tested in a creative development exhibition on the

Wellington waterfront (Feb 2023). Exploring themes that arise from our geographic location

and dynamic geology ‘making in place’ has informed materiality and audience experience.

Stepping away from a studio-based practice, this iterative process of ‘making in place’ and

being together in landscape, has brought new depths to creative collaborations and artistic

outcomes in both pre and post pandemic conditions.

 

Bio:

 

Paula van Beek is a performance maker passionate about exploring new forms for creative work. She uses theatre and live art strategies to make interactive experiences, installations and events. She has worked widely in the performing arts sector in Australia and Aotearoa making works in car parks, theatres, hallways, galleries, riverbanks and online. For PQ23 she is part of the collective Ka emiemi team presenting in the Aotearoa New Zealand Nations and Regions exhibition. She currently teaches performance at Te Auaha: NZ Institute of Creativity, te Pūkenga  in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.  

 

 

 

Workshopping of questions emerging from the presentations and articulated by the audience participants, followed by summing up of potentialities for transformative research and practice.

The call for Papers:

The IFTR Scenography Working Group co-conveners are inviting you to submit abstracts (200 to 250-word) for 15-minute papers or 7-minute practice presentations that align with the RARE Prague Quadrennial 2023 objectives as well as engaging with the evolution of discourses in scenographic research for this interim IFTR event hosted by Charles University and Arts and Theatre Institute Prague. 

 

Agential, affective entanglements of scenographic matter not only contribute to the making of performing bodies, spaces, and places, they can also actively participate in the shaping cultures and social practices that can be meaningful beyond national and cultural boundaries.   The Prague Quadrennial offers us the opportunity to engage with situated practices and discourses as well as with the possibilities of transnational and trans-cultural encounters.

 

We are therefore interested in transformative scenographic discourses, practices, and activist performances that bring to the fore urgent matters such as climate change, conflict, colonialism, neo-colonialism, power imbalances, social exclusions, and cultural marginalisation. These may present materialisations of resistance, oriented towards resilient social and environmental well-being as drives towards change.  They may foreground spatial design practices for performance, costume, lighting, sound, digital and mediated performance, addressing environmental, political, gendered concerns in ways that highlight agency and responsibility. We are also interested in interdisciplinary approaches, including those that demonstrate scenography’s ability to draw from and contribute to discourses in other fields.   

-       Transformative transnationalism / trans culturalism and scenography

-       Situated scenographic cultures

-       Affect and scenography

-       Activist practices

 

-       Politics and scenography

 

-       Scenographic participation, co-creation and co-operation

 

-   Scenography as practicing and experiencing creativity and human connectivity

 

-   Physicality, materiality and the senses in scenographic practices and discourses

 

-   Scenography’s impact in interdisciplinary projects and discourses 

 

-      Any of the above from historical perspectives

 

Please send your abstracts to both the Working Group Co-conveners no later than the 27^th Feb 2023:

 

Dr Donatella Barbieri d.barbieri@arts.ac.uk

 

Dr Christina (Xristina) Penna x.penna@derby.ac.uk

 

With many thanks to colleague Věra Velemanová from Charles University and Arts and Theatre Institute, Prague who will be leading the organisation of this symposium.
Many thanks to Andrew Filmer for inviting our group to hold Day 2 of the symposium at Veletrzni Palace as part of the PQ Performance Space Exhibition.