Scenographic Imagination Third Edition

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Scenographic ImaginationThird Edition

• Darwin Reid Payne

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Introduction

• Buckminster Fuller, less is more.

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Introduction

• Basic Core of Knowledge
• 1.Theatre History and Development of Drama
• 2. Art History and period and styles of art,
  architecture, painting, sculpture, furnishing,
  and costume
• 3. Familiarity with principles, techniques, and
  materials of 3-D design
• 4. Basic knowledge of stagecraft and theatrical
  production techniques , materials, and staging
  protocol and technique
• 5. Fundamental draft

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Introduction

• Denis Babet, The designers task is no longer to
  ornament or to embellish, to create a shrine for
  the production the setting is today an
  interpreter of the play, an actor. In many cases,
  of course, it must still specify or evoke the
  scens of the action, but above all it acts out
  and reveals the action, stresses or explains its
  meanings (scenographers) conceive in
  agreementwith the director, an organization of
  the scenic space that is functional in relation
  to the play, to the staging, to the actor and to
  the public they establish a scenic architecture
  of which each element becomes indispensible,
  brings out the relationship that unites the
  characters, accentuates the signification of the
  actors slightest gesture. They are creators of
  space.

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Introduction

• Not only is reading essential to the scenographer
  seeking to build a store of practical
  information, it is also necessary and positive
  step toward the creation of a philosophical
  framework without which craft will lack direction
  and art loses purpose.
• Awareness and comprehension of the literature of
  a scenographers own discipline as well as the
  related arts are important since the scope of
  scenography is nothing less than the whole world
  outside the theatre

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Introduction

• Formal education goals
• The ability of the scenographer to develop a kind
  of time vision an ability to see historical
  pasts and other cultures as a living place with
  living inhabitants.
• The understanding that seeing is not 20/20 or
  corrected vision that surfaces of objects,
  places, and events can only be penetrated and
  understood by an active vision and a prepared
  vision
• To comprehend how space on a stage differs
  conceptually from that outside the theatre
• To realize that the art of scenography presumes
  the ability to create on the stage the dramatic
  imagery that supports the purposes of the total
  production
• To develop the technical skills that serve
  scenic concepts of the production rather than to
  demonstrate the visual virtuosity of an
  individual scenographer

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• The first designers, scenic artist, provided
  background in front of which actors and singers
  performed
• Bibineas
• Serlio

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• Changeable Scenery by Richard Southern proposes
  that ...the changing of the scenes was intended
  to be visible it was part of the how it came
  into existence to be watched.
• 1)that engineering ability was a coequal
  necessity for the stage designer of the past
• 2)the ability to create appropriate scenic
  environments was at best a secondary consideration

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• Restoration of Charles II in 1660 scenery
  becomes an integral part of the dramatic stage
• Pre- Restoration scenography happened on a flat
  dusty promontory between the heavens above and
  hell below, location was signaled by three
  dimensional functional props. This definition of
  space is cosmic and human, where we are is
  determined by theological architecture and
  portable accessories.
• The post-Restoration scenography definition of
  space is Cartesian and Newtonian, there was no
  theological frame, only a succession of spatial
  categories - unindividuated stock scenes, generic
  woods, gardens, city squares or interiors.....

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• From the middle of the sixteenth century until
  late in the nineteenth, scenic artists were
  almost without exception painters and quite often
  architects as well as engineers(especially during
  the late R4enassiance and baroque periods)
• During Shakespeares time Inigo Jones was
  arguably a more powerful figure than Ben Jonson
  who complained bitterly that Jones was paid more
  for his scenery that he, Jonson, was forhis plays.

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• Major reformers in Theatrical Design-Richard
  Wagner, Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia are directly
  responsible for freeing the stage of the
  increasingly stultifying realism- basic tenet
  that scenography is not a peripheral theatrical
  activity ( either physically or conceptually) but
  one that is essential to the dramatic production.

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• American Father of Scene Design Robert Edmond
  Jones-author of The Dramatic Imagination, 1941
  and proponent of the new stagecraft. A stage
  setting has no life of its own. Its emphasis is
  directed toward performance . In the absence of
  the actor it does not exist. Strange as it may
  seem, this simple and fundamental principle of
  stage design still seems to be widely
  misunderstood.

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The Scenographic Artist

• The Purpose of the Scenographic Artist
• Norman Bel Geddes, ...We live in an industrial
  age. We should have theatres that belong in our
  time, drama that voices our time. Instead our
  theatre is a secondary expression...The end we
  seem to be going toward has a more plastic three
  dimensional structure... designed for the playing
  of a sequence of scenes of diverse mood, locale,
  and character, not imitative in character, but
  creative in dramatic terms with emphasis on the
  intensity of the dramatic action and its
  projection to the audience

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The Scenographic Artist

• Directions of Scenography over the past ninety
  years
• radical staging/ stage-audience relationships,
  Grotowski
• emphasis on the sculptural rather than employing
  painted flats
• redefinition of box set and violating the
  proscenium arch
• actual 3-D textures
• greater use of consciously selected metaphorical
  and symbolic imagery, and fragmented imagery
• simplification of scenic elements that directly
  relate and reflect abstract qualities in the text
• multiple focus
• rediscovery of stage space

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The Scenographic Artist

• Stage Space- scenographers most significant
  function then, is that of manipulator of stage
  space in its relationship to the actor
• Interior decorator versus scenographer
• What is stage space?
• Peter Brook ...the set is the geometry of the
  eventual play, so that the wrong set makes many
  scenes impossible to play, and even destroys many
  possibilities for the actors.

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The Scenographic Artist

• Private Space versus Public Space
• Establishment of the Personal Quality of a Room
• 1. A planned look designed by another
• 2. Individual responsibility
• 3. Unconscious ordering
• The very nature of stage space is fluid and
  amorphous it freely blends, sometimes breaks,
  those natural laws that operate outside the
  theatre. No set of laws, no firm principles can
  be formulated will once and forever set the
  limits of how stage space may be used.

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The Educational Background of the Scenographer

• The basic assumption made in this book, and
  class, Is that all students training for to be
  scenographers feel, as an important part of their
  educational agenda, a strong need to become
  directly involved in a form of communication that
  can reveal to others meaningful truths concerning
  their collective pasts, their current worlds, and
  their possible futures.
• Students of every art must realize their
  education never ends.

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The Educational Background of the Scenographer

• Students who undertake the study of any art soon
  come to realize that all arts have two major
  components in their makeup the physical
  aspect(the craft part) and the metaphysical
  aspect(the philosophical part). The first part
  deals with the How of the craft and the second
  addresses the Why of the craft.

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The Fallacy of Self-Expression

• Anton Ehrensweig Instead of straining too hard
  to discover his inner self, the student should
  objectively study the outside world...Today the
  artist is involved with objective reality in
  order to reach his own self.
• Joshua Reynolds The greatest natural genius
  cannot subsist on its own stock he who resolves
  never to ransack any mind but his own will soon
  be reduced from mere barrenness to the poorest of
  all imitations. It is vain to invent without
  materials on which the mind may work and from
  which invention must originate.Nothing can come
  of nothing.

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The Fallacy of Self-Expression

• Hebert Read, If every artist merely expresses
  the uniqueness and separateness of self, then art
  might be disruptive and anti-social...but the
  great artist..life expression, is precisely the
  life of the community the organic group.
• Bruno Bettleheim, The most fascinating dream,
  expressing the deepest layers of the unconscious
  is at best raw material...
• David Pyle It is fruitless to consider the
  action of a thing without considering the system
  of which it is a component.

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The Outwardly Directed Creative Impulse

• What is art, imagination, creativity
• If you are persistent in your search for the
  roots of creativity and imagination if you
  foster an inquiring mind as assiduously as you
  pursue your technical craft, you will in time
  realize that the asking of a question is often
  the best answer to it.
• The approach to style is by way of plainness,
  orderliness, sincerity.
• Do you want to pursue an art in which my work
  will always be incomplete without the work of
  others?
• The scenographer has two basic encounters the
  stage, the text
• language of form
• love of play
• unfocused attention/ undirected introspection

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The Outwardly Directed Creative Impulse

• Actual Process of realizing a design
• 1. Formation of visual images
• 2. documentation of images, diagrammatically
• 3. Ordering of diagrams and visualizations into
  presentation
• 4. Rendering into actual stage forms and devices
• Considerations
• 1. budget
• 2. time
• 3. skill of technical staff
• 4. limitations of theatre
• Document Package
• 1. rough and diagrammatic drawings
• 2. finished scenic sketches
• 3. 3-D models
• 4. mechanical drawings
• 5. visual aids to the construction process

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