Design (Theatre Studies)

For scenic designers, the building of a scenic model is not merely a component of one's practice-it is an act of creation. Handcrafted from pieces of this and that, the model's purpose is to imagine whole worlds in miniature that, in turn, inspire fantasies and daydreams. But when this purpose is ignored, and the model is regarded as simply a tool for communication, it is seen as having outlived its usefulness and often thrown away. On the stage our work exists only briefly and then it is gone (i.e., the bittersweet, ephemeral nature of theatre) but the model need not meet the same fate. The life of the scenic model, like any life spent in the service of art, is worthy of more consideration. We must imagine a better afterlife for it. In this article, I examine an exhibit of my own discarded scenic models titled Please Touch: Revitalizing Scenic Models through Play. Displayed in their ruined state, detached from their original duties as tools for production, I invited audiences to play with the models; to touch and examine them; and to move or rearrange them, as a way to revitalize them through engagement so that they might live again.

An association between Shakespeare and the Elizabethan ruff is an accepted fact in the modern Western cultural imagination. Depictions of the playwright wearing this garment are commonplace, and the ruff operates independently in popular culture as a symbol of “Shakespearean” qualities. This article dismantles the long-assumed Shakespeare/ruff pairing and examines the latent assumptions behind the garment’s past and present uses. First, I consider the ruff’s role as a core component of the Shakespeare “brand,” highlighting that in modern popular culture this garment has the effect of equating the “Shakespearean” with antiquation. I then show the extent to which the ruff’s internationally recognized Shakespeare associations conflict with the garment’s original, early modern uses. Elizabethan dramatists appear to have eschewed the ornamental garment in their own self-styling, and used the ruff in their plays to signal pride, excess, sexual violence, or foreignness. Finally, I scrutinize recent Shakespeare productions to ascertain how contemporary directors, designers, and dramaturgs have shaped and manipulated the ruff’s associations in performance. Several twenty-first-century stagings have featured Elizabethan costumes in an attempt to minimize problems that arise when the plays are presented out of their time, inadvertently repurposing the ruff as an indicator of historicization. However, multiple recent productions have used this iconic garment deliberately to challenge several of the ruff’s modern associations: the National Theatre’s 2017 Twelfth Night used ruffs to playfully reject ideas of “conventional” Shakespearean performance, while Shakespeare’s Globe’s contemporaneous Othello included the garment to accentuate the “schism” that emerges when a problematic historical text is reperformed today. Ultimately, this article illustrates the extent to which costume design has shaped—and continues to shape—our modern image of Shakespeare and his period.

ABSTRACT: Over the first half of the 20th century, avant-garde painters delved into theatre art and conceived innovative designs they put forward to break through the prevailing naturalism of the time. Spanish painter Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) also took an interest in stage design, first through her reciprocally influenced work with Rafael Alberti and then on her own. She produced designs that have been recorded in both her own and others' photographs and in comments attesting to her work in this field.
Both the silence of her former lovers (Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernimdez) in this regard and traditional
attitudes about women on the part of other intellectuals of the time together, coupled with the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and exile have left very few vestiges of her interesting stage design work, to which she had attached a great deal of importance before the war.
This article highlights Maruja Mallo's unique stage designs, her identity as compared to other influential artists, and her influence and legacy, in addition to explaining these designs' links to architecture.

Resumen: Las vanguardias pictóricas de la primera mitad del siglo XX acometieron la investigación en el teatro de arte y concibieron propuestas innovadoras para superar el naturalismo dominante. La pintora española Maruja Mallo (1902-1995) también se interesa por la escenografía, primero en un camino de colaboración recíproca con Rafael Alberti y después independientemente. Realizó propuestas que han quedado registradas en algunas fotografías y comentarios, propios y ajenos, que dan fe de su trabajo en este área.
El silencio sobre ella por parte de sus ex amantes (Rafael Alberti y Miguel Hernández), el tradicionalismo sobre la mujer de otros intelectuales coetáneos, la tragedia de la Guerra Civil Española y el exilio han dejado pocos vestigios de su interesante labor escenográfica previa al conflicto bélico, una actividad a la cual dio gran importancia.
Este estudio destaca la singularidad de las escenografías de Maruja Mallo, su identidad frente a las obras de otros artistas, las influencias y legado, así como también proporciona sus conexiones arquitectónicas.

This paper discusses how these materials create a sensual and emotional experience through what I will say, 'selective visuality'. The paper is an attempt to understand materials and light through, placement, interaction, social value, mood, emotion, and motivation. This paper also examines how these scenographic elements evoke a certain emotion, experience, and unexpectedness in theatre and performance practices. By placing light and material, the paper explores the politics and aesthetics of material and materiality in performances. Before going to make any broader claim, it would be a good idea to characterize the term 'material' and 'light' in the context of scenographic. My employment of the term material in this paper always suggests 'visual material' in the arena of performance. The material could be in any form and any shape like a set, costume, props (wood, leather, mud, plastics, and garbage), and so on. Similarly, with light, any source of light which are used in pay/performance has been considered as theatre light. For analysis, the paper includes Abhilash Pillai's Peer Gynt (2015), Helen (2007), Anuradha Kapur's Virasat (2013), 409 Ramkinkars and Deepan Sivarman's Dr. Caligori (2015), Ubu Roi (2013) to intended to explore the different material and diverse lighting composition. It is interesting to see how the director has used different types of material and lighting for expression, communication, and meaning-making process.

Dancers tend to be a visual and kinaesthetic group, hence this chapter adopts those characteristics too, making a graphic invitation to prompt thinking and curiosity about what constitutes dance. This is to equip a teacher with dance-orientated ideas, to structure their dance classes in a school setting. By way of overview and to lead the reader through this complex topic, the chapter first explores some conceptual and intellectual demands of dance as an area of human activity, progressing to more physical and performative requirements for teaching dance in practice.

Available in hard copy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/CARE-Curriculum-Physical-Education-Sport/dp/0995574464

The question of attention in theatre remains relatively unexplored. In redressing this, Theatre and Aural Attention investigates what it is to attend theatre by means of listening. Focussing on four core aural phenomena in theatre - noise, designed sound, silence, and immersion - George Home-Cook concludes that theatrical listening involves paying attention to atmospheres.

Such matters are examined as they have arisen in some of the most sophisticated works of theatre sound design of recent years, including Sound & Fury's Kursk, Romeo Castellucci's Purgatorio, Complicite's Shun-kin and Robert Lepage's Lipsynch. In suggesting how theatre works to direct the audience's aural attention, the book also carries out an important enquiry into radio drama (Beckett's All That Fall, Embers, and Pinter's A Slight Ache).

This ground-breaking study will be of interest to drama students, sound theorists, practitioner-researchers, performance philosophers, and to anyone curious to explore what it means to attend theatre.

Why do we feel engaged with
some places and not with
others? How can architecture
foster an engagement between
people and public places?
Spurred by questions like these, this book
focuses on contemporary Indian cultural
institutions, or artplaces, as a special kind of
public place. Offering a critique of contemporary
architectural and institutional approaches
to ‘place-making’, this volume proposes an
alternative approach to thinking about
architecture centered on our experience of
inhabiting spaces. Such a habitational
approach is crucial if architecture (and, by
extension, urban design) is to help nurture a
larger engagement between people and their
social environment.

Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method. Routledge, 2019.

Directions for Directing: Theatre and Method lays out contemporary concepts of directing practice and examines specific techniques of approaching scripts, actors, and the stage. Addressed to both young and experienced directors but also to the broader community of theatre practitioners, scholars, and dedicated theatre goers, the book sheds light on the director’s multiplicity of roles throughout the life of a play – from the moment of its conception to opening night – and explores the director’s processes of inspiration, interpretation, communication, and leadership. From organizing auditions and making casting choices to decoding complex dramaturgical texts and motivating actors, Directions for Directing offers practical advice and features detailed workbook sections on how to navigate such a fascinating discipline. A companion website explores the work of international practitioners of different backgrounds who operate within various institutions, companies, and budgets, providing readers with a wide range of perspectives and methodologies.

Joan Littlewood blamed anti-socialist prejudice for Theatre Workshop’s hostile treatment by the Arts Council. Yet her failure to secure the Council’s backing for the Fun Palace – an open-ended project for an arts, entertainment, and education centre she developed with architect Cedric Price – may be better expressed as a collision between anarchy and bureaucracy. Following Nadine Holdsworth’s 1997 article for New Theatre Quarterly, ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My Grave”: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, in this article Juliet Rufford argues that the project fell victim to a form of programme censorship because it broke the rules of culture and professionalism as defined by the major funding body for the arts. The concept of ‘fun’ is seen as vital to understanding the cynicism of the policy makers towards Price and Littlewood’s proposals, but also as driving explorations of intermediality, interactive performance, and performative architecture that have since been taken up successfully by artists working within and beyond the subsidized sector.

Scenography is going through a period of renewed artistic exploration and unprecedented academic interest, which, in recent years, has seen numerous scholars argue that its newly expanded practices are capable not only of challenging theatre orthodoxy but also taking on a critical – perhaps, political – function. However, if scenography is currently being celebrated within Theatre and Performance Studies for the pivotal role it is playing in determining a postdramatic ‘politics of perception,’ it has also been considered alongside a number of related design practices that abet neoliberal capitalism’s accelerated processes of commodification.
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.

Critical Costume 2015: New Costume Practices and Performances

Critical Costume 2015 presents contemporary costume practices and performances by thirty two artists-researchers from three continents and various artistic backgrounds. The works examine the performative qualities of material and form - whether physical, digital or virtual - and stimulate the audience’s thinking to reconsider the role of costume in contemporary performance by proposing new modes of representation as well as new artistic processes. Moreover, the selected works explore how the scenographic body is constructed on a spatial, temporal and conceptual level through body manipulation, material exploration, embodied design and its interpretation.

The use of smart materials and wearable electronics has rapidly expanded in the field of fashion, introducing new interactive qualities of surfaces, materials and garments. In fashion garments, the performative environment functions as an abstract site for experimentation, expression and communication of the wearer through the intelligent garment. However, there is still limited use of embodied technologies in the field of performance costume for text-based and music-based performance, with the exception of integrated lighting technologies, currently broadly used in musical performance.
This article provides a critical review of specific examples of technology-led garments in live performance, and uses a specific fragment from the Athens 2004 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony as a case study to highlight how technologies embedded in costume can create interactive interfaces between the body of the performer and the environment – the space, the other performers, the audience – becoming a transmitter and receiver of emotions, experiences and meanings in innovative ways. By analysing this case, as well as by posing questions, this article aims at generating a discourse on the expressive and narrative potential of the use of intelligent materials and embodied technologies within the creative practice of costume design.

This multi-authored essay collects a range of position statements made by leading scholars/practitioners in the fields of theatre aurality, music theatre/opera, and sound design. Contributors independently prepared short statements in response to a central provocation—namely, the mooted ‘scenographic turn’ and its implication for theatre sound studies. The essay provides snapshots of current opinions about theatre sound design and scenography. It does not advance a single, unified argument but rather outlines some key ways in which sound/music and scenography are operating, and have operated, in theatre, and have been discussed in aesthetic theory. The essay ultimately reinforces the importance of attending to sound and scenography as co-constitutive elements, and suggests there is no single or best way of doing this.

This paper looks into the concept of ‘Design as Theatre’ and how design is used within music theatre, opera and musical theatre to drive and re-enforce the political or story points being portrayed to an audience. Using examples from history and the contemporary, this paper explores how theatre design has changed and why. The paper also asks how technology influences our theatre making and design. Throughout this paper I focus on apprising theatre design and how elements can be used to create new work whilst informing the development of music theatre art.

Chapter One focuses on historical contexts and the concept of design as performance, as well as introducing artists who will be the focus of this paper. Chapter Two concentrates on design, space and the audience and how the three interact. Chapter Three looks at how design can help develop music theatre work as well as the establishment of an art form, which utilises design elements in a non-conventional way.

This paper concludes by considering whether we should be contemplating re-establishing the philosophy of new music theatre or merely work to further establish it and how design can help us achieve both the former and the latter.

Tradition and innovation in Greek interwar scenography:
the work of Pikionis and Steris

The paper explores the way in which tradition and innovation, realism and modernism co-exist in Greek interwar scenography, by focusing on the work for the theatre of architect D. Pikionis (1887-1968) and painter G. Steris (1898-1987).

Pikionis and Steris’s architectural and scenographic work for Marica Cotopouli’s theatre company (1932) is a radical attempt for modernistic design in an era when stage realism was still very much in the agenda. Marica’s Open-air Theatre (1932) is an original version of the ‘architectural stage’ (a stage with fixed architectural elements and without settings), while Pikionis and Steris’s set designs are informed by the modernistic principles of simplification and suggestion.

However, the ‘architectural stage’ of Marica’s Open-air Theatre was soon turned into a stage suitable for conventional box sets in order to meet the needs of the repertory, while the over-simplified settings Pikionis and Steris designed for Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1932) were met with unusual hostility by contemporary critics. Tradition was still powerful and scenographic innovation was taking only timid steps.

The article explores the innovative scenographic approach of HoROS Theatre Company of Thessaloniki, Greece, when revisiting an emblematic text of Greek culture, Golfo, the Shepherdess by Spiridon Peresiadis (1893). It focuses on the ideological implications of such a revival by comparing and contrasting the scenography of the main versions of this touring work in progress (2004-2009). Golfo, a late 19th century melodrama of folklore character, has reached over the years a wide and diverse audience of both theatre and cinema serving, at the same time, as a vehicle for addressing national issues. At the dawn of the 21st century, in an age of excessive mechanization and rapid globalization, HoROS Theatre Company, a group of young theatre practitioners, revisits Golfo by mobilizing theatre history and childhood memory and also by alluding to school theatre performances, the Japanese manga, computer games and the wider audiovisual culture, an approach that offers a different perspective to the national identity discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of performed scenography as understood by puppetry and in particular by the Teatro de Marionetas do Porto (TMP). This Portuguese theatre company has founded their practice on the Robertos, a traditional way of puppetry with roots in Comedia dell’Arte. TMP has taken this tradition further by introducing bunraku techniques such as a visible interaction between the performer and the puppet and the use of live music as structure for the performance. They develop specific puppets for each performance, basing their design on their possibilities of action. I will argue that their use of multiple puppets as well as the multiple ways of manipulation by its puppeteers has developed a specific interaction with the scenography, which is used to expand character and action. In doing this, the definition of scenography is in turn expanded.

The vast changes occasioned by the cross-cultural exchanges Africans have been exposed to since Colonialism has left the majority of the population culturally disoriented. The distortion to the process of cultural production, socialization and education is perhaps one of the most visible vestiges of colonialism in most African societies today. Long before Colonialism, most African societies had developed indigenous education systems in which the young were carefully inducted into their various roles in the societies. Among the Mada, for instance, the Performing Arts played a central role in the process of initiating its new crop of leaders. The performative nature of the learning process contrasts sharp with the abstraction in western pedagogy bequeathed the people by the British Colonialists. This paper seeks to understand the nature and pattern of indigenous leadership development among the Mada of Central Nigeria. It explores the role of the performing arts as vital instruments of socialization, orientation, entertainment and education in Mada society and examines how this vital

How can an exhibition designer engage the visitor to a world's fair who has already spent hours walking around the grounds, visiting other attractions and countless national pavilions? This question drove many theoretical and practical considerations of exhibition design during the interwar period and preoccupied many designers and artists. As a very active participant in world's fairs at this time, Czechoslovakia established an intricate system of presenting its material production and cultural prowess which included careful design of the exterior of its pavilion as well as its interior. Using the Czechoslovak pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, 1937, as a case study, this article examines how Czech designers developed their own original ideas about exhibition design informed by other disciplines. It offers a reading of exhibition design in parallel with stage design and claims that the two shared many techniques, aimed at attracting audiences. It stresses, on the one hand, the affiliation between the two design areas and on the other, the original contribution of designers from Czechoslovakia to the development of exhibition design as a self-sufficient field in the interwar period.

RESUMEN: El proyecto para el concurso del Palacio de los Soviets en Moscú (1931) de Le Corbusier plantea otra posible y más fragmentaria clave de interpretación que, aunque en principio sea más marginal, merece ser mencionada: la relación con el teatro, con la renovación de la escena europea y con la experimentación soviética, porque Le Corbusier es consciente de que la arquitectura no consiste sólo en la cualidad del edificio, es también una puesta en escena, una dramaturgia. Escenógrafos como Appia, con la luz, o directores de escena como Max Reinhardt, con el espectáculo de masas, y Vsevelod Meyerhold, con el teatro japonés del Kabuki, van penetrando en el sentir de un Le Corbusier que deja la impronta teatral en la puesta en escena de la megaestructura moscovita.

ABSTRACT: Le Corbusier's design submitted to the public competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931) may have an additional interpretation which, although less researched and in principal more marginal, is noteworthy. And that is the relation­ship between theatre and the resetting of the stage in Euro pe and Soviet experimentation. Le Corbusier was aware that architecture goes beyond the building itself and is also a sort of staging or dramaturgy. Set designers such as Appia, through the use of light, and stage directors like Max Reinhardt, through the use of performance for the masses, and Vsevelod Meyerhold, through Japanese Kabuki theatre, gradually permeated the sensibility of Le Corbusier who left staging as a mark in his design for the Moscow me­gastructure.

In recent years there has been a distinct performative turn in the development of landscape-based architecture; it is now more than possible to consider scenographic models of spatial conceptualization – the “creation of spaces within which performing bodies can interact” (McKinney and Butterworth 2009:3) - as primary tools to analyse architectural interventions into landscape. Drawing on research for a forthcoming book, Performing Mountains (Palgrave 2018), this paper will seek to explain and critique the recent growth of ‘skywalks’, focusing primarily on mountain landscapes and on the scenographic management of risk, fear and exhilaration. In urban contexts skywalks are pragmatic links between buildings, designed to eliminate the need to descend and re-ascend. But in rural contexts the opportunity to enhance the experience of dangerous landscapes is being exploited by architects in high places all over the world – from the Rockies to the Alps, from the Grand Canyon to Zhangjiajie in Hunan province, China.

What does this growing phenomenon of skywalks tell us about the ways in which construction technologies are being utilised to heighten the experience of landscape? What behaviours are produced by such environments? What are the surrounding technologies used to facilitate this heightening of experience – social media and wearable technology for instance? How might a scenographic lens draw out aspects of landscape performativity that might otherwise remain dormant?

With specific reference to one recent example of mountain skywalks, the ‘Walk of faith’ on Tianmen Mountain, China, this paper seeks to answer these questions, building a case for a scenography-based reading of mountain architecture.

Theatre design is not a linear process and each production is different from another. Harnessing visualisation as a process and a tool enables designers to engage with each other and collaborate to produce strong, story driven designs which are more affordable, faster to make and of a higher quality.

RESUMEN

TEATRO DE MARIUS VON MAYENBURG
Obra: Vista Despejada 

Introducción
"Vista despejada", el estreno en castellano de una de las obras recientes del más elogiado y premiado dramaturgo alemán de la última década, Marius von Mayenburg1, que la escribió en 2008 a los 35 años (el mismo autor de "El feo", obra anterior a esta, actualmente en cartelera).

La obra ofrece un singular acto escénico en que un grupo de vecinos evoca el momento terrible en que la comunidad temió el estallido en el lugar de una bomba, colocada quizás por una niña pequeña, hija de uno de ellos. Se trata de un 'hipertexto', una propuesta textual sin historia ni personajes2, que puede atribuirse a una docena de hablantes. Juegos laberínticos se vuelven fluido y apasionante, un posible montaje,  proyección de imágenes, artilugios electrónicos, megáfonos y elementos extraídos de la música concreta, elementos que estimulan un imaginario  que pone en acción un cúmulo de asociaciones con acciones terroristas de repercusión mundial.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

ABSTRACT
This thesis chronicles the development of a contemporary scenographic design for the stage of Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Clockwork Orange, based on his original novel and including the 21st chapter, which has been omitted from editions published in the United States prior to 1986 and Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 movie. Expressionistic style and scale support the original resolve of the author to question societal interference with individual free will.
Burgess’s novel, stage script, notations, additional writings and interviews were employed to determine author intent. Substantially different from the impact of Kubrick’s film, Burgess envisioned Alex’s transformation into an adult, stemming from personal experience and the freedom to choose.
20th Century Expressionistic art inspired large, industrial scale surroundings as a mechanical background for the very human, emotionally charged subject matter of the story. They hint at a far-reaching, self-assured state, ominously watching over all. Splashes of color represent the life that humans (the Oranges) bring to this environment (the Clockwork) and were also borrowed from Graphic Expressionism. Alex and hisgangs’ violent actions are exposed stylistically and potently without the voyeuristic distraction of bloody, realistic detail which are not the focus of Burgess’ story.
Separating from the well-known classic film and the oft-banned edition of the novel with only 20 chapters, this production presents Anthony Burgess’ originally intended tale of “the danger of stifling free will and the creative urge for the sake of obedience to the State.” (http://www.anthonyburgess.org/)

Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance examines collective and devised theatre practices internationally--with emphasis on Russia, Europe, and North America--from the late 20th century, into the present. Building upon the authors’ previous work, A History of Collective Creation, this volume situates contemporary collective creation in a tradition which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and traces the aesthetic, social and political shifts that have marked this mode of theatre making, from mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, to present-day devising practices.

हम जानते हैं कक भारतीय रगमंचीय इततहास में नार्टयशास्र के बाि रगमंचीय ववन्यास के सामाजजक, राजनैततक एवं
संस्क
ृ
ततक पक्ष की समझ और उसकी प्रकिया को ही इततहास के पन्नों से बाहर रखा जाता रहा है। समान्यतः कई
अध्ययनों में अभभनेता, नाटककार, तनिेशक, प्रेक्षक आटि के ववभभन्न पक्षों को रेखांककत ककया गया है, लेककन
ववन्यास से संबथधत जो भी प
स्तकेंु
याशोध पर हैंवह भसफ् ववन्यास के तनमा्ण प्रकिया को ही िमबद्ध तरीकों से
रेखांककत करतीहैं, या िस ू रे शब्िों में कहें तो ववन्यास के तकनीकी पक्ष तक ही के जन्ित हैं। इस शोधपर का मुख्य
उद्िेश्य इन तकनीकी पक्षों को नजरअंिाज करते हुए इसके महत्वपूण् एवं प्रभावी पक्षों (सामाजजक, संस्कृ ततक एवं
राजनीततक) को रेखांककत करना है। सार्थ ही, तनिेशकों, ववन्यासकारों तर्था प्रेक्षकों को ववन्यास के अनभभज्ञ पक्ष से
रूबरू कराते ह
ु
ए, एक व्यापक पररदृश्य पर ववन्यास के सरोकार को समझने और समझाने का एक रास्ता खोलना है।
‘रंगमंचीय ववन्यास’ को जानने से पहले हमें रंगमंच क्या है? उसे जान लेना चाटहए। रगमंच एक व्यापक शब्ि है।
इससे न के वल नार्टयमंडप का बोध होता है बजल्क इसमें पांडुभलवप (script), रंगभलवप, अभभनेता, िश्क, रंगभशल्प के
तत्व अर्था्त दृश्यबंध, रूप-सज्जा, वस्र-सज्जा, रंगिीपन, ध्वतन प्रभाव, पाश्व् संगीत आटि सब समाटहत रहते हैं।
नार्टयशास्र में भी नार्टयमंडप को रंगमंच की मार एक इकाई मानी गई है।
“इहाटिनटर्टययोगस्य नार्टयमंडप एव टह”।1
पजश्चम में ‘थर्थयेटर’ शब्ि का भी यही अर्थ् होता है। एडवड् गाड्न िै ग कहते हैं कक ‘रंगमचीय कला न तो भसफ्
अभभनय है और न ही नाटक (text) है, न ही दृश्य है और न नत् ृ य है, यह कई इकाइयों का भमला-जुला समग्र रूप
है’2 इन संिभों से यह तो तय हो गया है कक ‘रंगमंच’ एक व्यापक शब्ि है तर्था इसे उसी पररप्रेक्ष्य में िेखा जाना चाटहए।

Modernism on Stage restores Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to its central role in the Parisian art world of the 1910s and 1920s. During those years, the Ballets Russes’ stage served as a dynamic forum for the interaction of artistic genres - dance, music and painting - in a mixed-media form inspired by Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). This interdisciplinary study combines a broad history of Diaghilev’s troupe with close readings of four ballets designed by canonical modernist artists: Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, and Giorgio de Chirico. Experimental both in concept and form, these productions redefine our understanding of the interconnected worlds of the visual and performing arts, elite culture and mass entertainment in Paris between the two world wars.

This volume traces the ways in which artists working with the Ballets Russes adapted painterly styles to the temporal, three-dimensional and corporeal medium of ballet. Analyzing interactions among sets, costumes, choreography, and musical accompaniment, the book establishes what the Ballets Russes' productions looked like and how audiences reacted to them. It brings dance to bear upon modernist art history as more than a source of imagery or ornament, spotlighting a complex dialogue among art forms that did not preclude but rather enhanced artists’ interrogation of the limits of medium.

Le Corbusier’s design submitted to the public competition for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (1931) may have an additional interpretation which, although less researched and in principal more marginal, is noteworthy. And that is the relationship between theatre and the resetting of the stage in Europe and Soviet experimentation. Le Corbusier was aware that architecture goes beyond the building itself and is also a sort of staging or dramaturgy. Set designers such as Appia, through the use of light, and stage directors like Max Reinhardt, through the use of performance for the masses, and Vsevelod Meyerhold, through Japanese Kabuki theatre, gradually permeated the sensibility of Le Corbusier who left staging as a mark in his design for the Moscow megastructure.

Le Corbusier, Competition, Palace of the Soviets, Theatre, Reinhardt, Meyerhold.

An everyday object can be used in performance as a mediator between the reality of the stage
and that of the narrative. It can go back and forward between these universes, allowing performers
to play with the boundaries between presentational and fictional spaces, as defined by Gay
McAuley in Space in Performance — re-positioning the narrative, either mentally or spatially.

In this paper I argue the way performers can achieve this change is by manipulating the
perception of an object’s function, scale, sound and aesthetics. The performer uses the object’s
original characteristics, such as colour, texture, form and design purpose, as potential clues,
reframing them to establish new links with the main narrative. This process of transformation
makes for a fluid scenography/dramaturgy relationship where performers, scenographer and of
course, spectators share the experience of theatrical emergence.