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Juliet Rufford
JULIET RUFFORD is a designer, educator and researcher whose work spans theatre and performance studies, architecture, scenography and the politics of space. She has held teaching/research posts in Drama, Theatre and Performance at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and Queen Mary University of London, and has also taught drama, theatre and performance at a number of other higher education institutions within and outside the University of London (including Birkbeck and Goldsmiths Colleges, and Sussex University). She has also taught Architecture, Interior and Spatial design at London's Architectural Association and at Pratt Institute, New York City. An artist contributor to the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space’s Architecture Section and to the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale (as part of Haworth Tompkins’ creative team), she has acted as an education consultant to the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (MArch Design for Performance and Interaction) and has worked in industry on high-end retail and residential design projects. Together with Andrew Filmer, she co-convened the International Federation for Theatre Research’s Theatre Architecture Working Group for a period of eight years (2010-18). Her articles have appeared in journals including Contemporary Theatre Review, the Journal of Architectural Education, New Theatre Quarterly and Persona. Her short book Theatre & Architecture was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Her latest co-authored and co-edited book Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies (Bloomsbury) was published in May 2018.
Supervisors: Professor John Stokes, Professor Alan Read, Professor Jane Rendell, and Professor Joe Kelleher
Supervisors: Professor John Stokes, Professor Alan Read, Professor Jane Rendell, and Professor Joe Kelleher
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Bloomsbury / Methuen Engage series eds. Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Performing Architectures examines the relationships that exist between theatre, performance and architecture within an expanded field of spatial and artistic practice. The essays that make up the collection ask what new terms, what modes of thinking, and what techniques and practices have emerged (or might emerge) through encounters between architecture and performance. This enquiry is located in three key areas. First, the book focuses on theatre projects – that is: built, speculative or utopian architectural projects for theatre and performance. Second, it focuses on interdisciplinary practices that critically re-examine and transform our experiences of architecture, performance and the built environment. Third, it focuses on interdisciplinary pedagogies that are driven by the question of what is gained for students of one discipline in the encounter between that discipline and the other. The volume provides an essential introduction to the ways in which performance and architecture – as socio-spatial processes and as things made or constructed – operate as generating, shaping and steering forces in understanding and performing the other.
CONTENTS
Essays by a distinguished list of international authors including: Himanshu Burte, Dorita Hannah, Klaus Van Den Berg, Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima, TAAT collective, Andrew Filmer, Mike Pearson and Cathy Turner, David Roberts, Natalie Rewa, Alex Schweder, Juliet Rufford, Beth Weinstein and Robert Wilson.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
This wide-ranging and stimulating collection offers major new insights into our performative relationship with the world around us.
Marvin Carlson, City University of New York, USA
A provocative volume that reaches across the world and through time to offer new theoretical and practical perspectives on architecture, dramaturgy and scenography.
Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland, Australia
This well conceived and implemented volume brings together thinking on the complex relationship between performance and architecture. Timely and fascinating, Performing Architectures works towards an architectural dramaturgy appropriate for our post-dramatic concerns and practice.
Maurya Wickstrom, City University of New York, USA
In this short book, I argue that theatre and architecture are caught up in an interrogative aesthetics, one that uses the ruptures between them as much as their points of convergence to explore their signature dilemmas, the affordances and limitations of each. The book is divided into two main parts. In Part One: On Architecture, I discuss two terms (‘mimesis’ and ‘performativity’) that are closely related to theatre but are contentious when applied to architecture. I show how the former provides exciting opportunities for an architecture that seeks to enact different meanings for its users, and I argue that the latter, considered as an architectural process, might make use of the tools of performance to create alternative architectural performativities. In Part Two: On Theatre, I trace architecture’s historical role in producing theatrical meaning; I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one order – that of the illusionist proscenium-arch stage – to establish other, more radical uses of architecture and how contemporary experiments use architecture to debunk myths that play out within, and extend beyond, the theatre. The book ends with an argument for the tectonic – the poetics of architectural construction - as a potentially valuable means of analysing and making theatre. Throughout, I question some of the assumptions we make about discrete disciplinary processes, and I reassess relationships between theatre, architecture and world.
Keywords: Critical Spatial Practice, Interdisciplinarity, Performance Architecture, Politics of Space, Theatre Architecture.
Exploring a wide range of research on scenography, design, urban studies and political theory, I argue that scenography can act as a valuable tool for disclosing the role of design in reinforcing the strategies of neoliberal capitalism. In the first part of this (author draft) chapter, I trace the mutation of late nineteenth-century commodity culture through mid twentieth-century ‘spectacle’ (Debord) and ‘sign value’ (Baudrillard) to contemporary forms of experience design, brand imaging and urban brandscaping. I rehearse this passage from product to sign to design in order to map the place of scenography within what Foster dubs ‘the political economy of design’ (2002, p. 22). In the second part of the chapter, I use the (predominantly) Marxist theoretical framework established in part one to inform my analysis of an intentionally varied landscape of contemporary performance and scenography practice, including postdramatic theatre, immersive performance and urban activist theatre. Retaining the historical term ‘scenography’ as one which cuts across theatrical and non-theatrical performance contexts and is currently being used in business strategy (as I discuss below), I examine how some scenography for found-space performance is spatially innovative but politically acquiescent to some of neoliberalism’s key ambitions. However, I explore how other approaches to the visuospatial aspects of performance – whether they are designed for ‘edgy,’ ‘alternative’ locations or for traditional proscenium-arch stages – reveal scenography’s latent critical potential.
This is the author version of chapter 12 from the book co-edited by myself and Andrew Filmer. Please refer to the published text when you quote from this chapter.
Endorsements for Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies
* Timely and fascinating, Performing Architectures works towards an architectural dramaturgy appropriate for our post-dramatic concerns and practice *
Maurya Wickstrom, City University of New York, USA
* A provocative volume that reaches across the world and through time to offer new theoretical and practical perspectives on architecture, dramaturgy and scenography *
Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland, Australia
* This wide-ranging and stimulating collection offers major new insights into our performative relationship with the world around us *
Marvin Carlson, City University of New York, USA
The PDF is a pre-publication version of the essay that appears in Mary F. Brewer, ed., Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 89-109. Please refer to that book (most of which you can view on googlebooks) for page numbers.
As a researcher, educator and curator with a longstanding interest in the intersections between performance and architecture, I have often been perplexed by the relationship between these two fields. Sometimes (as when the ritual construction of playhouses in ancient India fused acts of architectural dramaturgy and social performance), they have seemed so closely intertwined that it makes little sense to separate them. At other times (as when European modernists rejected narrative and time in architecture and a generation of theatre-makers abandoned their theatre buildings), each has polarised aggressively away from the other.
In certain respects, theatre and architecture are radically dissimilar, and differences of ideology, methodology and material circumstance should caution us against assuming too easy a set of connections between them. Yet, they share interests in the production, articulation and programming of space, in the structuring of action and event, and in the meeting between human bodies and the built forms they occupy. More problematically (for those of us committed to socially-engaged theatre and the continuing relevance of critical architecture), they also share strong ties within a matrix of capitalism, cultural desire and cultural production.
My paper anticipates the central argument of my forthcoming book Theatre & Architecture (2014): that it is possible not only to think about a politics of architecture in performance, and of performance in architecture, but also to think through each inter-section between these disciplines about larger issues that lie beyond them both. Prompted by the conference call, I reflect on current encounters between theatre and architecture, including Haworth Tompkins’s performance-led approach to the re-development of Battersea Arts Centre (2006 on-going). In doing so, I adopt the rigorous inter-disciplinarity advocated by architectural historian Jane Rendell (in her Art and Architecture: A Place Between, 2006). My aim is to show how theatre and architecture might transgress their discrete disciplinary borders, finding in that ‘place between’ a space of enhanced creativity and an enclave of resistance to capitalist and institutional imperatives.
Keywords: Theatre, Architecture, Performance Space, Politics, Interdisciplinarity.
In this paper, I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one order – that of the illusionist proscenium-arch stage – to establish other, more radical uses of architecture on the stage, and how contemporary theatrical experiments use architecture to debunk myths that play out within, and extend beyond, the theatre. With examples ranging from the architectonic scenographies and dramaturgies of the historical avant-gardes to late twentieth and early twenty-first productions by Tanztheater Wuppertal and The Builders Association, I consider how theatre and dance-performance have used the architectural 'real,' and acts of construction and critical un-building to explore their own ‘producedness.'
This is the author's draft version of a book review commissioned by the University of Toronto Press journal MODERN DRAMA. A final version of this book review is due to appear in the Winter 2016 issue of the journal (Modern Drama 59.4 (2016) pp. 519-22). Please cite the published version in MODERN DRAMA if you wish to draw on material contained in the review posted here. Thank you. JR
Bloomsbury / Methuen Engage series eds. Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Performing Architectures examines the relationships that exist between theatre, performance and architecture within an expanded field of spatial and artistic practice. The essays that make up the collection ask what new terms, what modes of thinking, and what techniques and practices have emerged (or might emerge) through encounters between architecture and performance. This enquiry is located in three key areas. First, the book focuses on theatre projects – that is: built, speculative or utopian architectural projects for theatre and performance. Second, it focuses on interdisciplinary practices that critically re-examine and transform our experiences of architecture, performance and the built environment. Third, it focuses on interdisciplinary pedagogies that are driven by the question of what is gained for students of one discipline in the encounter between that discipline and the other. The volume provides an essential introduction to the ways in which performance and architecture – as socio-spatial processes and as things made or constructed – operate as generating, shaping and steering forces in understanding and performing the other.
CONTENTS
Essays by a distinguished list of international authors including: Himanshu Burte, Dorita Hannah, Klaus Van Den Berg, Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima, TAAT collective, Andrew Filmer, Mike Pearson and Cathy Turner, David Roberts, Natalie Rewa, Alex Schweder, Juliet Rufford, Beth Weinstein and Robert Wilson.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
This wide-ranging and stimulating collection offers major new insights into our performative relationship with the world around us.
Marvin Carlson, City University of New York, USA
A provocative volume that reaches across the world and through time to offer new theoretical and practical perspectives on architecture, dramaturgy and scenography.
Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland, Australia
This well conceived and implemented volume brings together thinking on the complex relationship between performance and architecture. Timely and fascinating, Performing Architectures works towards an architectural dramaturgy appropriate for our post-dramatic concerns and practice.
Maurya Wickstrom, City University of New York, USA
In this short book, I argue that theatre and architecture are caught up in an interrogative aesthetics, one that uses the ruptures between them as much as their points of convergence to explore their signature dilemmas, the affordances and limitations of each. The book is divided into two main parts. In Part One: On Architecture, I discuss two terms (‘mimesis’ and ‘performativity’) that are closely related to theatre but are contentious when applied to architecture. I show how the former provides exciting opportunities for an architecture that seeks to enact different meanings for its users, and I argue that the latter, considered as an architectural process, might make use of the tools of performance to create alternative architectural performativities. In Part Two: On Theatre, I trace architecture’s historical role in producing theatrical meaning; I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one order – that of the illusionist proscenium-arch stage – to establish other, more radical uses of architecture and how contemporary experiments use architecture to debunk myths that play out within, and extend beyond, the theatre. The book ends with an argument for the tectonic – the poetics of architectural construction - as a potentially valuable means of analysing and making theatre. Throughout, I question some of the assumptions we make about discrete disciplinary processes, and I reassess relationships between theatre, architecture and world.
Keywords: Critical Spatial Practice, Interdisciplinarity, Performance Architecture, Politics of Space, Theatre Architecture.
Exploring a wide range of research on scenography, design, urban studies and political theory, I argue that scenography can act as a valuable tool for disclosing the role of design in reinforcing the strategies of neoliberal capitalism. In the first part of this (author draft) chapter, I trace the mutation of late nineteenth-century commodity culture through mid twentieth-century ‘spectacle’ (Debord) and ‘sign value’ (Baudrillard) to contemporary forms of experience design, brand imaging and urban brandscaping. I rehearse this passage from product to sign to design in order to map the place of scenography within what Foster dubs ‘the political economy of design’ (2002, p. 22). In the second part of the chapter, I use the (predominantly) Marxist theoretical framework established in part one to inform my analysis of an intentionally varied landscape of contemporary performance and scenography practice, including postdramatic theatre, immersive performance and urban activist theatre. Retaining the historical term ‘scenography’ as one which cuts across theatrical and non-theatrical performance contexts and is currently being used in business strategy (as I discuss below), I examine how some scenography for found-space performance is spatially innovative but politically acquiescent to some of neoliberalism’s key ambitions. However, I explore how other approaches to the visuospatial aspects of performance – whether they are designed for ‘edgy,’ ‘alternative’ locations or for traditional proscenium-arch stages – reveal scenography’s latent critical potential.
This is the author version of chapter 12 from the book co-edited by myself and Andrew Filmer. Please refer to the published text when you quote from this chapter.
Endorsements for Performing Architectures: Projects, Practices, Pedagogies
* Timely and fascinating, Performing Architectures works towards an architectural dramaturgy appropriate for our post-dramatic concerns and practice *
Maurya Wickstrom, City University of New York, USA
* A provocative volume that reaches across the world and through time to offer new theoretical and practical perspectives on architecture, dramaturgy and scenography *
Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland, Australia
* This wide-ranging and stimulating collection offers major new insights into our performative relationship with the world around us *
Marvin Carlson, City University of New York, USA
The PDF is a pre-publication version of the essay that appears in Mary F. Brewer, ed., Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 89-109. Please refer to that book (most of which you can view on googlebooks) for page numbers.
As a researcher, educator and curator with a longstanding interest in the intersections between performance and architecture, I have often been perplexed by the relationship between these two fields. Sometimes (as when the ritual construction of playhouses in ancient India fused acts of architectural dramaturgy and social performance), they have seemed so closely intertwined that it makes little sense to separate them. At other times (as when European modernists rejected narrative and time in architecture and a generation of theatre-makers abandoned their theatre buildings), each has polarised aggressively away from the other.
In certain respects, theatre and architecture are radically dissimilar, and differences of ideology, methodology and material circumstance should caution us against assuming too easy a set of connections between them. Yet, they share interests in the production, articulation and programming of space, in the structuring of action and event, and in the meeting between human bodies and the built forms they occupy. More problematically (for those of us committed to socially-engaged theatre and the continuing relevance of critical architecture), they also share strong ties within a matrix of capitalism, cultural desire and cultural production.
My paper anticipates the central argument of my forthcoming book Theatre & Architecture (2014): that it is possible not only to think about a politics of architecture in performance, and of performance in architecture, but also to think through each inter-section between these disciplines about larger issues that lie beyond them both. Prompted by the conference call, I reflect on current encounters between theatre and architecture, including Haworth Tompkins’s performance-led approach to the re-development of Battersea Arts Centre (2006 on-going). In doing so, I adopt the rigorous inter-disciplinarity advocated by architectural historian Jane Rendell (in her Art and Architecture: A Place Between, 2006). My aim is to show how theatre and architecture might transgress their discrete disciplinary borders, finding in that ‘place between’ a space of enhanced creativity and an enclave of resistance to capitalist and institutional imperatives.
Keywords: Theatre, Architecture, Performance Space, Politics, Interdisciplinarity.
In this paper, I show how early twentieth-century theatre-makers disrupted one order – that of the illusionist proscenium-arch stage – to establish other, more radical uses of architecture on the stage, and how contemporary theatrical experiments use architecture to debunk myths that play out within, and extend beyond, the theatre. With examples ranging from the architectonic scenographies and dramaturgies of the historical avant-gardes to late twentieth and early twenty-first productions by Tanztheater Wuppertal and The Builders Association, I consider how theatre and dance-performance have used the architectural 'real,' and acts of construction and critical un-building to explore their own ‘producedness.'
This is the author's draft version of a book review commissioned by the University of Toronto Press journal MODERN DRAMA. A final version of this book review is due to appear in the Winter 2016 issue of the journal (Modern Drama 59.4 (2016) pp. 519-22). Please cite the published version in MODERN DRAMA if you wish to draw on material contained in the review posted here. Thank you. JR
Bearing in mind that developments in architecture, scenography and theatre/performance - and in the attendant professional practices of these disciplines - are significantly conditioned by the ways in which they are taught, these 4 workshops ask:
How are architecture, performance, dramaturgy and scenography being taught now? And, how might we teach them in future?
The discipline of architecture is already recognising the value of performance in the education of architects, enabling students to test and develop concepts and designs through prototyping and embodied inhabitation and to form more nuanced understandings of architecture/user relationships. Performance as pedagogical method helps break down architecture’s presumed autonomy, and critiques its dominant working methods. We aim to take these explorations further still.
We also aim to discover how architecture theory, tools and techniques might offer critical constructional tools for performance pedagogy and for training in theatre design. How might an awareness of architectonics (including, for example, studio exercises in form-making or a renewed stress on materials and textures) enrich theatre and performance pedagogy, generating new insights into play structure, choreographic and scenographic practices, devising processes or site-specificity – and what might be gained by working in this way?