Scenographic Design Drawing: Performative Drawing in an Expanded Field 9781350168534, 9781350168565, 9781350168558

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Illustrations
Figures
Plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Drawn behind the Fourth Wall
Scenography
Worlding Theory
Scenographic Design Drawing
The Thinking Drawing
The Scenographic Thinking Drawing
The Peacham Drawing
The Exploratory Rehearsal Drawing
The Digital Presentational Drawing
The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing
Performative
Anti-theatricality
Theatricality
Chapter 2: Creating a Scene
The Second Scenographic Turn
Natalia Goncharova: Le Coq d’Or, 1914
Pablo Picasso: Parade, 1917
Dorothea Tanning: The Night Shadow, 1946
The Ballet Russes in Australia, 1936–40
Arthur Boyd: Elektra, 1963
The Playful Aesthetic of David Hockney
A Glimpse into the Past
Chapter 3: Staging Architecture
Norman Bel Geddes
Frederick John Kiesler
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio: The Slow House (1989)
Aldo Rossi
Frank Gehry
Chapter 4: Drawn to Perform
An Emergent Field: Expanded Drawing
Gosia Wlodarczak
The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing
William Kentridge
Gabriela Tylesova
Dan Potra
1927 Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt
Chapter 5: The Drawn Absence
The Field of Post-dramatic Theatre
Punchdrunk
Huis Clos
The “Look” as an Action of Grasping
The Voyeuristic Gaze of the Theatre-Going Spectator
No Exit (2017)
Definition of Presence
An Absent Presence in No Exit (2017)
The Video No Exit
The Scale Scenographic Model
Theatricality in No Exit
The “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory”
The Set Model of the Hypothetical mise-en-scène within the Black Model Box
The Model as an Epistemic Tool
The Hybrid Genre: The Drawn Absence
Chapter 6: Drawn into the Future
The Simultaneity of the Image
Digital Scenography and Worlding Theory
Digital Scenography
The Digital Drawing
The Freehand Thinking Drawing
Authorship, Authenticity, and Autograph
Drawn to the End
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
References
Index

Citation preview

SCENOGRAPHIC DESIGN DRAWING

Drawing In

Series editors: Russell Marshall, Marsha Meskimmon, and Phil Sawdon Loughborough University, UK “Thinking through drawing” has become a ubiquitous trope across the arts, sciences, and humanities. The rich vein of thinking, making, and visualizing through drawing that is being developed across these diverse fields affords an opportunity for sustained intellectual dialogues to emerge within, between, or without traditional disciplinary boundaries. The Drawing In series provides a space for new perspectives and critical approaches in the field of drawing to be brought together and explored.

Published titles: Drawing Difference, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon Drawing Investigations, Sarah Casey and Gerry Davies Performance Drawing, Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, and Carali McCall Scenographic Design Drawing, Sue Field Forthcoming: Serial Drawing, Joe Graham Drawing as Phenomenology, Deborah Harty Looking at Life Drawing, Margaret Mayhew

SCENOGRAPHIC DESIGN DRAWING Performative Drawing in an Expanded Field

SUE FIELD

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 © Sue Field, 2021 Sue Field has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Series design by Tjaša Krivec Cover image: One of twelve panels for the panoramic drawing The Chairs: black and red pen; collage on watercolour paper; 594 x 941 mm (Sue Field, 2015) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Field, Sue (Susan Janet), author. Title: Scenographic design drawing : performative drawing in an expanded field / Sue Field. Description: London; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020. | Series: Drawing in | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020024160 (print) | LCCN 2020024161 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350168534 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350168541 (epub) | ISBN 9781350168558 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Artists’ preparatory studies. | Theaters–Stage-setting and scenery. | Drawing–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N7433.5 .F54 2020 (print) | LCC N7433.5 (ebook) | DDC 702.8–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024160 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024161

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6853-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6855-8 ePub: 978-1-3501-6854-1 Series: Drawing In Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  viii Acknowledgments  xii

Introduction 1 1 Drawn behind the Fourth Wall 21 Scenography  22 Worlding Theory  24 Scenographic Design Drawing  28 The Thinking Drawing  32 The Scenographic Thinking Drawing  38 The Peacham Drawing  43 The Exploratory Rehearsal Drawing  44 The Digital Presentational Drawing  48 The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing  51 Performative  52 Anti-theatricality  55 Theatricality  57

2 Creating a Scene 63 The Second Scenographic Turn  65 Natalia Goncharova: Le Coq d’Or, 1914  68 Pablo Picasso: Parade, 1917  72 Dorothea Tanning: The Night Shadow, 1946  78 The Ballet Russes in Australia, 1936–40  84 Arthur Boyd: Elektra, 1963  85 The Playful Aesthetic of David Hockney  90 A Glimpse into the Past  96

vi Contents

3 Staging Architecture 99 Norman Bel Geddes  100 Frederick John Kiesler  103 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio: The Slow House (1989)  110 Aldo Rossi  118 Frank Gehry  125

4 Drawn to Perform 131 An Emergent Field: Expanded Drawing  134 Gosia Wlodarczak  136 The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing  137 William Kentridge  140 Gabriela Tylesova  147 Dan Potra  151 1927  Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt  153

5 The Drawn Absence 161 The Field of Post-dramatic Theatre  162 Punchdrunk  165 Huis Clos   167 The “Look” as an Action of Grasping  169 The Voyeuristic Gaze of the Theatre-Going Spectator  172 No Exit (2017)  172 Definition of Presence  174 An Absent Presence in No Exit (2017)  175 The Video No Exit  179 The Scale Scenographic Model  181 Theatricality in No Exit  185 The “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory”  186 The Set Model of the Hypothetical mise-en-scène within the Black Model Box  187 The Model as an Epistemic Tool  188 The Hybrid Genre: The Drawn Absence  189

Contents

6 Drawn into the Future 195 The Simultaneity of the Image  196 Digital Scenography and Worlding Theory  199 Digital Scenography  202 The Digital Drawing  208 The Freehand Thinking Drawing  213 Authorship, Authenticity, and Autograph  218 Drawn to the End  224 Notes 227 References 236 Index 251

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1 Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998 30 1.2 Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998 31 1.3 Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998 32 1.4 Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017 41 1.5 Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017 42 1.6 Filipa Malva. Scenographic thinking drawing for Eu Uso Termotebe e o Meu Pai Também (I Use Termotebe as My Dad Before Me): black pen on paper, 2018 45 1.7 Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawings for All of Me: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1993 46 1.8 Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for All of Me: black ink and watercolor on paper, 420 × 594 mm, 1993 47 1.9 Michael Scott-Mitchell. Scenographic thinking drawings for Madama Butterfly: black pen on paper 49 1.10 Michael Scott-Mitchell. Digital drawing for Madama Butterfly: D3​.j​s, 2019 50 1.11 Robert Wilson. Storyboard drawing: charcoal on paper for Einstein on the Beach, 1976 60

Illustrations

ix

2.1 Arthur Boyd. Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns (Elektra backdrop), 1962–3, etching and aquatint, printed in black ink with plate-tone, from one plate, 39.6 × 46.7 cm 86 2.2 Production photograph for Elektra, 1966. Australian News and Information Bureau 88 2.3 Production photograph for Elektra, 1966 88 2.4 David Hockney. “Cobweb Drape, Tom’s House” from The Rake’s Progress 1975. Ink on paper, 19 ¾ × 24. 96 3.1 Norman Bel Geddes: Scenographic design drawing for The Divine Comedy, 1921–30 102 3.2 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Architectural model of Slow House with drawings on acetate/glass inserted into the model, 1991 112 3.3 Frank Gehry. Scenographic design drawing for Don Giovanni: black pen on paper 127 4.1 William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 6): Charcoal and red pencil on Velin Arches Cover White (440 gsm). 121 × 160 cm, 2016 143 4.2 William Kentridge. Scenographic design drawing for Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 63): charcoal on paper, 164 × 196 cm, 2017 144 4.3 William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 17): Charcoal and red pencil on Hahnemuhle paper 56.5 × 78 cm, 2016 146 4.4 Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic thinking drawing for Swan Lake, black wings: charcoal on bond paper, 2019 148 4.5 Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic thinking drawing for Swan Lake, masque ball: charcoal on bond paper, 2019 149 4.6 Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic sketch model drawings for Swan Lake: lead pencil on mix media, 2019 150 4.7 Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Perfect American: black pen and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2013 153

x Illustrations

4.8 Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012 156 4.9 Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012 157 4.10 Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012 157 4.11 Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012 158 5.1 Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 12,240 × 660 mm, 2017 173 5.2 Sue Field. Thinking drawing for No Exit: black pen on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2016 176 5.3 Sue Field. Detail of panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 1020 × 660 mm, 2017 177 5.4 Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, The Chairs: black pen and ink on printed script and sheet music, approximately 9000 × 600 mm, 2015 180 5.5 Sue Field. Thinking drawings, No Exit: black pen, colored marker pens, and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017 184 5.6 Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018 188 5.7 Sue Field. Scenographic scale model, within a scale model, 2017 189 5.8 Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018 191

Plates 1

Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998

Illustrations

2

xi

Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998

3

Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017

4

Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawings for All of Me: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1993

5

Arthur Boyd. Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns (Elektra backdrop), 1962–3, etching and aquatint, printed in black ink with plate-tone, from one plate, 39.6 × 46.7 cm

6

Production photograph for Elektra, 1966

7

David Hockney. “Cobweb Drape, Tom’s House” from The Rake’s Progress 1975. Ink on paper, 19 ¾ × 24

8

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Architectural model of Slow House with drawings on acetate/glass inserted into the model, 1991

9

William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 17): Charcoal and red pencil on Hahnemuhle paper 56.5 × 78 cm, 2016

10

Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Perfect American: black pen and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2013

11

Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012

12

Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012

13

Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 12,240 × 660 mm, 2017

14

Sue Field. Detail of panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 2017

15

Sue Field. Thinking drawings: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017

16

Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my appreciation and thanks to my mentor Dr Vaughan Dai Rees, Associate Dean International/Engagement in the Faculty of Art & Design UNSW, Australia, and to all the extraordinary artists/scenographers who contributed their drawings and time for this monograph. Thank you Dr Antony Milch for your patience and encouragement and to his son, Sam Milch for providing me with his philosophical ruminations. A very, very special thanks to my father Dr Geoffrey Field, my mother Janice Field and my daughter Lucy because without their unrelenting support this amazing journey would never have happened. In the spirit of a theatre-going spectator, this was a long and challenging quest in pursuit of adventure and discovery, of wonder and astonishment.

Introduction

The primary motivation for this book was to prompt a scholarly debate on the set design drawings for theatre and live performance and to highlight their unique qualities within the greater arena of drawing practice and theory.1 This monograph constitutes a seminal undertaking intended to address a critical research gap and to encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue. Therefore, two central questions have been adopted which I argue are of increasing significance, not only in the field of scenography but also to all disciplines that draw upon theatre and performance studies, fine art and architectural discourse. First, what is the under-theorized but highly complex interaction between performative and theatrical space, embodied in the scenographic design drawing? Secondly, how can the scenographic design drawing, in which the palimpsest2 is the unique interface of “time, motion, action and space” (Aronson 2005, 5), contribute to a different expanded drawn space? This enquiry is divided into two parts that stem from theory and practice which will in turn respond to the above questions. The first part surveys the diverse range of set design drawings executed by the contemporary scenographer, and also provides a historical context, including a crosssection of twentieth-century visual artists (painters) and architects who also practiced scène décor, set design, or “scenery”3 in different and unusual ways as a fundamental part of their creative oeuvre. This unique group of “scenographers” is crucial to this exploration because, prior to the 1960s, design for theatre, opera, and ballet was underpinned by innovators from the disciplines of painting and architecture.

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The second and critical part of this enquiry identifies how in recent decades the scenographic design drawing, as a theatrical catalyst and epistemic tool, has transcended its traditional pragmatic function and entered into a new expanded drawn space where the drawing itself has transformed into an autonomous, performative object. In the twenty-first century, the scenographic design drawing not only embraces performative encounters and imaginative exchange but is also distinguished from other forms of drawing by its inherent theatricality. Theatricality “is a reliance on spectatorial participation and a recognition and exaggeration of artifice” (Caroline van Eck 2011, 26). No longer a derogatory term, “the study of theatricality—imaginary, visionary, and invisible—as a socio-political creative force” (Burnett 2014, 123) has discovered its potential to enrich and enliven other creative disciplines. The central premise of this investigation is underpinned by the critical framework of worlding theory. The creation/making of worlds is as the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart in Tactile Composition posits: Some assemblage of affects, effects, conditions, sensibilities and practices throws itself together into something recognizable as a thing. Disparate and incommensurate elements (human and non-human, given and composed) cohere and take on force as some kind of real, a world. (Stewart 2014, 119) This philosophical stance, supported by the recent paradigm shift in scenography theory by Hann (2019), Aronson (2018), Wallen (2018), Joslin McKinney (2017), and Brejzek (2015), is pivotal to my argument which speculates how scenographic design drawings have the quality, as first coined by Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen, of cosmopoiesis, of world creating (Wallen 2018). These drawings encapsulate a potential to visualize multiple alternate and heterogeneous realities. They transform the immaterial—the manifold of images in the scenographers’ “mind’s eye”4—into a material “force as some kind of real, a world” (Stewart 2014, 119). In Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, Arnold Aronson questions why there is a lack of scholarly research into scenography and

INTRODUCTION  3

scenographic practices. He argues: “Could we not take a stage design—a theatrical environment—and wade into the depths of its forest of symbols, its spatial dynamic, and its existence as a site for revelation?” (Aronson 2005, 97). This enquiry extends Aronson’s argument by proposing that the scenographic design drawing, more so than the finished, built stage design, exists as the primary “site of revelation.” The principle underpinning this claim is that the scenographic design drawing is a theatrical “illustration,” not in relation to its popular, parochial meaning but in terms of its original etymological source: to “enlighten.” Hence the scenographic design drawing is a means to enlighten— to illuminate a performative space in constant flux, a site of infinite mutable theatrical signs which excite cognitive surprise, wonder, and astonishment. There remains a dearth of academic publications and scholarly dialogue pertinent to the drawings for theatre and live performance. These drawings, which reveal cognitive ideational thinking, shape multiple performative encounters and are the site of imaginative agency across the breadth of live performance. In 2017, in the introduction to Drawing and Design, the editors Jane Collins and Arnold Aronson queried this void in scholarly works: whereas there is a substantial canon of critical writing about drawing in fine art, there is still relatively little written about the role of drawing in theatre and performance design. (Jane Collins 2017, Intro 1–3) In 2012, the British scenographer Kate Burnett also questioned this lack of research in Addressing the Absent: Drawing and Scenography: Drawing has been widely researched and theorised especially in relation to the disciplines of Architecture and the Fine Arts, but far less in relation to the Applied Arts, particularly Scenography and Design for Film and Television. (Burnett 2014, 123) There are many formulaic “how to do” staging books. Every few years a new text on the practical components of the theatre design process is published or a new edition of an old text is released—for instance, those of Curtis (2014),

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McKinney (2009), Rowe (2007), Kramer (2004), and Pecktal (1995). These texts address the process and realization of a scenographic design rather than the conceptual theoretical exploration; they focus on the pragmatics of materials, the construction of scenic and costume elements, and are comprehensive at the expense of detail. They are peppered with illustrations but, despite the often-sumptuous display, the imaging of text, the visualization and expression of theoretical ideas, and concepts from the “mind’s eye”5 through drawing are given only a cursory commentary. There are also publications focusing retrospectively on the scenographic productions of an individual, for instance, the scenographer Robert Wilson (Wilson 1984), the artist Pablo Picasso (Cooper 1987), artist/scenographer Xenia Hausner (Hausner 1990), the artist/scenographer William Kentridge (Kentridge 2007), Salvador Dali (Robert Descharnes 2013), and the architect Aldo Rossi (Rossi 2015). These texts explore an individual’s scenographic design practice or, in the case of the painter/architect, scenographic design as an adjunct to their primary practice. Scenographic design drawing is not necessarily their central theme. This investigation introduces scenographers (past and present) whose scenographic drawing practices are largely under-theorized, such as the Russian/Soviet scenographer and artist Natalia Goncharova, the American artist Dorothea Tanning, and Australian painter Arthur Boyd. I also introduce a new and novel perspective on the well-known and extensively researched individuals examined in this analysis such as Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, and William Kentridge, in particular by reviewing these artists/practitioners through a unique scenographic lens. This book is distinctive because it specializes in scenographic design drawing and, most significantly, extends these drawings beyond their traditional iterations of ideational and representational experiments into a different, expanded view that situates them in an autonomous, self-referential space. In 2002, What Is Scenography? was published, written by the British scenographer Pamela Howard. This text ignited a scholarly dialogue that has produced a change in how academia views scenography, performativity, and

INTRODUCTION  5

theatricality. The text stressed for the first time the creative production of the contemporary scenographer. It is ground-breaking because it is an exploration of Howard’s personal experiences, particularly her analysis of her own drawing aesthetic as part of her scenographic design practice. Interspersed throughout the book are her “thinking” sketches, drawings, and paintings which throw light on her cognitive processes. Freehand drawing is critical to her overall methodology, starting with tiny thumbnails upon her first reading the text through to “finished” drawings and paintings for both the final set and the costume designs. When I first read this book, certain suggestions made by Howard struck a chord within me. She discusses her practice informally and anecdotally. The following comment resonated with my own drawing process: I draw with a brush and paint, use collage, or inks. This whole process, which is free of the constraints of the production yet to come, should be utterly pleasurable and enjoyable, created in a spirit of enquiry. This is a time of total freedom where the imagination can roam, transcending logic and reason, making the most wonderful connections. (Howard 2002, 39) Another publication that sparked worldwide acclaim was Arnold Aronson’s Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. As he questions, “Where are the Foucaults, Arthur Dantos, Clement Greenbergs of scenography?” (Aronson 2005, 97). Every year since Aronson’s publication, there have been an increasing number of academic books published about scenography and scenographic research and practice: for instance Hann (2019), Aronson (2018), Thea Brejzek (2017), Joslin McKinney (2017), Sofia Borges (2015), Iball (2011), Joslin McKinney (2009), and Howard (2009). However, articles and book chapters written in English and specific to scenographic design drawing in the context of the set design remain scarce. Those I have discovered for this book, including my own publications, are Malva (2019), Jane Collins (2017), Collins (2017), Field (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016), and Burnett (2014). Questions are now being raised about the scenographic design drawing in light of the recent acceleration in academic research in scenography. This

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enquiry is timely because there is emerging a global curiosity and a thirst for new knowledge and understanding in relation to the drawings executed by the historical and contemporary scenographer. I put these under-theorized drawings center stage to make prominent their intrinsic difference as a performative, theatrical, and epistemic tool and also, most importantly, to show how these drawings can expand to encompass new experimental platforms for the contemporary scenographer and performance and spatial artist in an increasingly digitalized space. This recognition will dispel the popular belief that the scenographic design drawing remains stalled at the preparatory stage of the design process—a representative “illustration” anticipating its realization as a three-dimensional stage set, prop, or costume. The new millennium has embraced the potential of the scenographic design drawing to transcend beyond the fourth wall6 into a new and different expanded space where the drawing becomes an autonomous performative object within the mise-en-scène. This collaborative and interdisciplinary junctive highlights the academic need for this book. The scenographic design drawing is uncharted scholarly terrain—this and the recent rise in academic curiosity have inspired this publication. This book is divided into six chapters which are loosely chronological. Chapter 1, “Drawn behind the Fourth Wall,” identifies the scholarly terrain surrounding the scenographic design drawing and defines key terms within the field of scenography. I explain the different types of design drawings produced by the contemporary scenographer, both analogue and digital, executed within the production processes of theatre and encompassing many different functions and purposes. Scenographic design drawings, whether motivated by text or not, can employ all traditional methods of pen, pencil, and paint, or contemporary digital systems such as a stylus and computer tablet.7 These include the freehand, generative “thinking” sketches, journal renderings, the exploratory rehearsal drawings, digital presentational illustrations, and the performative scenographic design drawings pertinent to the set design. In this context, I shall discuss exemplary international scenographers who employ

INTRODUCTION  7

drawing as a primary iterative and communication methodology within their creative practice. These will include Filipa Malva, Dan Potra, Michael ScottMitchell, and Robert Wilson. Throughout this book there is a recurrent emphasis on the freehand scenographic generative sketch executed early in the design process because of the special cognitive relationship that exists between the eye, the mind, and the hand. I refer to these drawings as the scenographer’s visual expression of thought,  or thinking drawings, because they spawn ideational thinking and have nothing to do with the practicalities of realism; or, as Burnett argues: The phrase “thinking through drawing” suggests the moments at which thoughts, ideas, and impulses may be articulated onto a surface (paper or screen), not as an end or climax but as “staging posts” on a journey in a continual state of departure and arrival. (Burnett 2014, 4) The Portuguese scenographer and architect Filipa Malva encapsulates the conceptual role of the scenographic design drawing in Drawing the Scene: In the creation of a scenographic concept, drawings are often open-ended. They register a train of thought, which may include the scenographer’s ideas, observations and memories. These can be recorded with more or less intensity on paper and they can even wander away from the main subject. These aspects make them especially interesting in collaboration. Frequently, it is the thin lines hidden behind the finished drawing that provide the most interesting clues. They can activate the imagination leading to unexplored aesthetic choices. (Malva 2019, abstract) This chapter also establishes the key scenographic tropes—worlding, performativity, theatricality, and the theatrical sign. An insight into these terms is critical to the contextualization of the scenographic design drawing and its representation of the contemporary scenographic space or worlding. Chapter 2, “Creating a Scene,” traces the scenographic design drawing through the twentieth century, which in turn illuminates its changing role from

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the nineteenth-century “splodgers” or scene painters—“who used chamber pots for palettes and brooms for brushes” (Margaret Trudgeon 2007, 6)—through to the current, more complex holistic position of the scenographer as the visual and spatial director of the “scenographic” (Brejzek 2015, 17). This chapter sets the scene, beginning with Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) and Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) who together helped instigate the paradigm shift from nineteenth-century scenic decoration to an abstract spatial art form—evident in the many speculative scenographic design drawings and lighting designs they produced. I have also interrogated the scenographic design drawings for the Ballet Russes, the Parisienne-based dance company established in 1909 by the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev. A large number of European visual artists was deliberately chosen by Diaghilev, such as Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Max Ernst, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, and Henri Matisse to name a few, to provoke change and bring something new, something avant-garde and startling, to the conservative European ballet art form. The designs by these revolutionary artists had an astonishing influence on scenography and on the development of the scenographic design drawing; for the first time, this theatrical ephemera was considered of aesthetic value and therefore worth curating as a record of an extraordinarily innovative period in theatre’s history. In this context, I first examine the Russian avant-garde artist and scenographer Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962). Her scenographic design drawings for the Ballets Russes production Le Coq d’Or witnessed her painting practice “enlivened” onto the Parisienne stage of the Théâtre National de l’Opéra (1914). This spectacular theatrical production combined Russian folk mythology and mysticism with the dynamic colorful tropes of Cubo-Futurism (Bowlt 1990, 46). Goncharova produced experimental, vibrant, and colorful drawings which became synonymous with the heightened theatricality of the early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde. However, despite her significant contribution to twentieth-century theatre, her set design drawings remain largely unrecognized in any serious theoretical discourse.8

INTRODUCTION  9

I also explore Pablo Picasso’s scenographic design drawings for Parade, a one-act ballet directed by Jean Cocteau and performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, in 1917. Parade was also produced by the Ballet Russes, and the music was composed by Eric Satie. Picasso’s theatrical genius was manifest in a plethora of thinking drawings and illustrations for the overture curtain (stage firewall), set, and costumes. This examination places Picasso’s drawings under a new and different scenographic lens which will bring contemporary knowledge and understanding to this early twentieth-century theatrical innovation. With the death of Diaghilev in 1929, the company metamorphosed into Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo (1931). A multitude of new and original productions followed, scenographically designed by artists such as the American surrealist painter and poet Dorothea Tanning. In 1946, the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo produced at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the one-act ballet the Night Shadow. Scholarly research regarding Tanning’s scenographic design drawings is scant. I shine a new and different light on Tanning’s hauntingly strange and beautiful drawings and paintings for the ballet, her first foray into scenographic design. Tanning was initially drawn to the heightened theatricality of the stage because it provided her with a different site for creative experimentation and “enlivened” her surrealist iconography on an epic, spectacular scale. The Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo toured extensively throughout the world, including as far as Australia (1936–40). Their arrival had a profound cultural effect upon modern Australian dance, design and visual arts, inspiring such artists as the painter and sculptor, Arthur Boyd. I focus on Boyd’s innovative but little-known drawings for the set, costumes, and overture curtain for the ballet Elektra, choreographed by Robert Helpmann for the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, London (1963). Boyd’s highly eroticized designs, which were his black-and-white drawings enlarged on a massive scale and enveloping the entire dramatic space, outraged the general public. But, despite this

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controversial reception and subsequent acclaim, research is scarce regarding his scenographic design drawings, both in Britain and in Australia. To conclude this chapter, I review the playful and colorful scenographic design drawings of the English artist David Hockney. I center on Hockney’s imaginative scenographic design drawings for the 1975 production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, directed by John Cox and produced by the Glyndebourne Opera, UK. This was Hockney’s first opera. Again, I critique Hockney’s drawings from a contemporary standpoint in contrast to what has been previously written. Instead of analyzing his work from the perspective of the painter, I reverse this process and look at it from the different and under-researched gaze of the scenographer. My investigation into the above artists distinguishes this book from previous explorations into these familiar personalities because their drawings for the stage are viewed through a different scenographic lens, rather than a performance theory or visual art paradigm. Chapter 3, “Staging Architecture,” explores the scenographic design drawings of six architects: Norman Bel Geddes, Frederick Kiesler, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Aldo Rossi, and Frank Gehry. What characterizes their drawings is the drawn space situated somewhere between theatre and architecture: a liminal site “betwixt and between”9 reality and illusion—for instance, Norman Bel Geddes’s early scenographic experimentations for the unrealized production of Dante Alighieri’s  The Divine Comedy (1921), in which he blurred the borders defining the performance and spectatorial spaces. This blending of the traditional division between the stage and the audience was to later develop into a phantasmagorical synergy in his scenographic/ architectural design for the spectacular Futurama (1939–40). In 1924 Frederick Kiesler rejected the proscenium outright and devised the Endless Theatre, which was the precursor to the theatre in the round. His scenographic design drawings from this period are scant. However, his speculative drawings for his iconic but unrealized project for the Endless House (1947–60) encapsulates his scenographic theories interrogating the infinite, boundless, and endless. In a similar vein, the controversial American

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scenographer/architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio construct together a heightened theatricality in their unrealized design for the American vacation home Slow House (1989). The model of Slow House (1991) now resides in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, as an autonomous performative object. However, it is the drawings for Slow House that blur the line between theatre and architecture. Ten sectional drawings, in the form of X-rays on acetate/glass, function as cinematic screens and are inserted into the model as voyeuristic vignettes, a probe into the domesticated eye on vacation (Wood 2005, 3). These drawings are a scenographic storyboard which resembles that of a contemporary American reality television show. I also examine the enigmatic and sensual scenographic design drawings of the Italian architect and artist Aldo Rossi. I focus on Rossi’s drawings for the set designs for the production of Elektra by Richard Strauss, performed in the ancient Greco-Roman theatre in Taormina, Greece (1992). Rossi was heavily influenced by the theatre as a space inhabited by memory; he constructed self-referential worlds that traversed across architecture and theatre. His whimsical drawings for this production are characterized by his eclectic, phantasmagorical design aesthetic. I conclude this chapter with an appraisal of the drawings by the American architect Frank Gehry, where there exists a synergy between his architectural sketches and those he generated for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, directed by Christopher Alden and produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2012). Gehry’s “scribbles,” despite the brevity and ambiguity of their lines, render explicit his ideation thinking. Gehry’s “draped” architecture and scenographic design for Don Giovanni are both explosive and expressive compositions in a state of flux—exaggerated and enigmatic “folded” geometries exemplifying the core of his aesthetic oeuvre. Positioned in the second part of this enquiry is Chapter 4, “Drawn to Perform,” which identifies how the scenographic design drawing has expanded beyond drawing as a secondary support for the final theatrical production into a different space that intersects and interrelates scenographic design

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drawing, sophisticated digital technologies, contemporary performance, and expanded drawing as an art practice. I identify these drawings as the performative scenographic design drawing because they exhibit characteristics such as performativity, theatricality, and spectatorial engagement. In this context, I examine the performative scenographic design drawings of the Polish performance artist Gosia Wlodarczak; the South African scenographer and artist William Kentridge; the Czech Republic scenographer Gabriella Tylesova; the Romanian scenographer Dan Potra; and the British performance troupe, 1927, the co-artistic directors of which are the writer, performer, and choreographer Suzanne Andrade and the animator and illustrator Paul Barritt. Despite these individual artists being scenographically quite distinct, they all deconstruct the traditional definition of drawing by employing heightened scenographic tropes to create, exhibit, and perform their drawn works. All skillfully combine freehand and digital processes as integral elements in their creative production to realize extraordinarily complex performances in which technology is employed both as a seductive and as a destabilizing mechanism. They all generate expanded drawings which are inherently theatrical and cross over into an interdisciplinary drawn space—a worlding—that is an immersive, interactive, and richly sensory environment. Here the drawing becomes the “other actor” whose pervasive presence creates an illusion of moving, threedimensional forms interacting intimately with the live performer or, in the case of Wlodarczak, the live drawing artist. As Samuel Weber argues in Theatricality as Medium, “Theatricality demonstrates its subversive power when it forsakes the confines of the theatron and begins to wander” (Weber 2004, 37). I identify how theatricality has separated itself from the confines of the traditional black-box theatre and “wandered” beyond the fourth wall into an expanded drawn space. This is an exploration of how scenographic design drawings can take on an independent life of their own, becoming performative objects themselves. Chapter 5, “The Drawn Absence,” also investigates how the scenographic design drawing has expanded far beyond the two-dimensional piece of

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paper into a different space that merges the scenographic drawing, postdramatic theatre, and expanded drawing as an art practice. I discuss here my own ongoing research which explores this juncture. The primary question supporting my research is: How can a drawing, underpinned by post-dramatic scenographic strategies, produce a spectatorial encounter with an absent presence? This question spawned all kinds of peripheral questions throughout my research. What if scenographic design drawings, which are so specific to the field of contemporary theatre design, were “expanded” to become a primary outcome before a different type of audience from that of conventional dramatic theatre? Hypothetically, could these re-contextualized drawings become a new type of performative drawing different to that which is currently known and theorized10—a type which demands the viewer engage and participate in the spectre of performance embodied in the drawing? Could the spectator “gaze with admiration or bewilderment, or . . . contemplate” (Caroline van Eck 2011, 12) these drawings as he or she would observe the unfolding of a “play”?11 Are there subliminal theatrical signs which compel the spectators to look at the drawn representations as if they, the spectators, were part of an audience immersed in a post-dramatic theatrical performance? The intention from the beginning of this practice-based research was to create a drawn post-dramatic mise-en-scène emptied of a human presence. An intensified theatricality would further exaggerate an absent “ghostly” trace—a “drawn” performative space fraught with discursive meanings, enigmatic illusions, trompe-l’œil effects, allegorical tropes of flight and fall, and deliberate, self-conscious, meta-theatrical conceits. The final outcome was a speculative proposal for a new and different performative drawn work, a culmination of all the primary components of my research practice: a panoramic drawing (approximately 10 m long), a digital video of the drawing with a soundscape, a “performative” set model and scenographic life-size props which were mounted together in a multitude of “black box spaces.” Collectively, they

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produced a worlding—an assemblage of disparate elements, which generated both a drawing and, in conjunction with the image of the empty stage, a theatre without actors. In this different expanded drawn space, the actors are absent— the spectator is now the performer in the post-dramatic drama. My research is underpinned by the philosophy of the spectatorial gaze and presence. This enquiry could not progress without acknowledging the digital interface that has pervaded the fabric of post-millennial society and culture; and how this virtual fourth wall has impacted on the future of scenographic design drawing. Chapter 6, “Drawn into the Future,” focuses on the current potent scholarly debate examining the profound influence the digital interface and synthetic computer imaging has had on the scenographic design drawing and processes. In the 1990s, the screen of the computer, cinema, and television had, for most individuals, a recognized and clearly defined interface that separated the real from the simulation of the real. In appearance, this was similar to the threshold of the stage, or the fourth wall, which separates the reality of the spectatorial space from the illusionary representation on stage. However, as Aronson comments, “on stage, a door is a sign of the liminal, the unknown, the potential, the terrifying, the endless. On the screen, a door is a sign of a door” (Aronson 2004, 340). Or as Alice Rayner explains: “the screen is a curtain that hides nothing, for there is nothing to hide behind it. Light projected onto a two-dimensional screen transforms candlelight and curtains into a technological apparatus that realises an uncanny familiarity in visible images that are no more than disembodied hallucinations” (Rayner 2006, 156). In 1983, Jean Baudrillard predicted that “the medium is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message .  .  . there is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it” (Baudrillard 1983, 54). The 1990s and early years of the twentyfirst century have seen profound technological change and subsequently an explosion of scholarly discourse in relation to the hypersurface or the infinite Euclidean spaces of the digital screen. As Stephen Perella posits in Hypersurface

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Architecture, “As a verb, hypersurface considers ways in which the realm of representation (read images) and the realm of instrumentality (read forms) are respectively becoming deconstructed and deterritorialized into new imageforms of intensity” (Perrella 1998, 7). The internet and Smart phone spawning YouTube and social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have created an all-pervasive space which is intangible, constantly mutating, and infinite. As Sam Spurr observes: what the digital domain has proposed is a multivalent perspectival space. Instead of a single, static viewing point and subject, multiple, simultaneous possibilities allow for inclusion and immersion for many different kinds of bodies. . . . Virtual spaces are no longer separate from our daily lives; instead the everyday is negotiated through interwoven networks of information. (Spurr 2007, 31) The theatre theorist Gabriella Giannachi in Virtual Theatres identifies the hypersurface as a “skin,” as a virtual fourth wall which is the “site of exchange between the inside and outside” (Giannachi 2004, 103). Giannachi’s virtual theatre deconstructs and fragments the boundaries between the real and the simulation in which the spectator is simultaneously present on both sides, inside and outside, of this curved liminal plane. As she further argues: When “performing” the hypersurface, the viewer always confronts materiality and representation, inside and outside, information and fiction, to find that they also are always part of both worlds. As a hypersurface, viewers can be both materiality and representation, both inside and outside of the work of art, transformed into artistic information that changes in real time. Within the world of hypersurface, the viewer is both remediated and in the real; they are both alive and live. (Giannachi 2004, 103) Now, at the beginning of the third decade, there is a total immersion, an embeddedness. Within the all-encompassing, ambient, Euclidean space of the hypersurface, the contemporary spectator has neither the ability nor the

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desire to differentiate between the material and the immaterial, the real and the fictional, because it is irrelevant. The virtual and augmented reality of the screen has brought about extraordinary change in the performing arts; all aspects of creative production have been radically affected by the technical sophistication of computer technology. Cinematic special effects and digital imagery have altered the way the spectator “sees” theatre. Traditional dramatic narrative, ponderous sets and the notion of the “suspension of belief ” and of “transcending reality” required of classical dramatic theatre can be difficult for a “post-truth” audience to engage with, accustomed as they are to the instantaneous magic of the touch screen, remote control and voice-recognition technology. As Aronson argues: “The linear narrative and unified frame has been supplanted by a nonhierarchical, ever-expanding network capable of sprouting infinite replication” (Aronson 2000, 202). As such, many of the traditional roles once performed by the scenographic design drawing and painting have become outmoded. For instance, the hand drawn and painted scenic illustration (a scaled version of the traditional painted backdrop and proscenium firewall) and mechanical working drawing (manual drafting) have both been superseded by the sophisticated, three-dimensional digital graphic and modeling programs and software: Photoshop, Vector Works, Rhinoceros (Rhino), and computer-aided design (CAD), to name a few. However, these technological innovations and virtual visualization practices have positively, rather than adversely, impacted on scenographic design and its drawing practices, unleashing a myriad of wondrous possibilities. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine this potential, in which multidisciplinary platforms, both traditional and digital, create multiple hyper-theatrical environments as assemblages or worldings. In this context, I again reference Stewart who claims: An atmospheric world or thing is mobile and generative; it produces multiple potentialities for coherence and shift. An emergent world, always almost there, is itself always leaning into a mobilization. (Stewart 2014, 120)

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Contemporary scenographic design combines drawing, technology, and multisensory effects to achieve an amplification of the senses, creating an immersive experience for the spectator in the real, illusory, and filmic aspects of the performance. These can produce astonishing spectacles of heightened theatricality, embodied spectatorial engagement, and situations where scenographic design drawings are merged as filmed or projected material within spectacular theatrical spaces of motion and light. The British academic Nick Hunt in Alternative Materialities: Scenography in Digital Performance posits: The widespread adoption of digital media across the field of performance arts has proposed alternative materialities that have sometimes radically disrupted existing scenographic practices, and sometimes perpetuated established practices through new means. New possibilities have brought new ways of thinking and doing, and new goals. (Hunt 2010, 3) The scenographer Nebojša Tabački in his article Make Me Feel: Sensing Technology in Contemporary Scenography celebrates this evolutionary change in scenographic design practices but also cautions: This is a call to focus on the imagination, instead of on efficiency. .  .  . Without this transition, we are only scratching the postmodern surface, and the risk will remain that, one day, as theatre critic Kenneth Tynan predicted, technology will rise like an army and expel the audience from the theatre. And how would this technology-led exodus make us feel? Superfluous, frustrated, defeated, or, perhaps, liberated? My gut tells me that freedom would feel different. (Tabački 2017, 139) The imaginative, invisible, performative and temporal spatiality inherent in the scenographic design drawings are the inimitable qualities which sets them apart within the greater context of drawing. It is also the distinctive scenographic thinking drawing that will traverse and overcome the power of rapid technological change because of the cognitive and haptic relationship these drawings embody early in the scenographic design process. These genesis

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drawings will continue to serve a purpose and remain exempt from other forms of visualization, such as 3D modeling and virtual and augmented reality. The following comment by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), the pioneering German architect and founder of the Bauhaus, resonates with my central argument regarding the enduring nature of live theatre and the scenographic design drawing as the site of revelation: the stage derives from an ardent . . . desire of the human soul (theatre = show for the gods). It serves, then, to manifest a transcendental idea. The power of its effect on the soul of the spectator and auditor is therefore dependent on the success of the transformation of the idea into (visually and acoustically) perceivable space. (Wringler 1969, 58) The Scenographic Design Drawing: Performative Drawing in an Expanded Field is a rigorous but accessible examination of the scenographic design drawing. It will appeal not only to theatre and performance practitioners and academics but also to visual artists and architects who wish to draw on the theatrical spaces of live performance. University students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, engaging in a cross-disciplinary research practice that intersects the study of performativity, theatricality, and spatial theory, will also appreciate and benefit from the significant influence the study of the scenographic design drawing can contribute to their work. Since this book explores uncharted territory, highlighting the potential of the scenographic design drawing as an emergent scholarly field of an expanded practice, it is of interest also to theatre and performance devotees who are fascinated by the blurring of the lines between multiple artistic and design disciplines in creating performative environments for the general public. This enquiry is enriched by my background as an Australian set and costume designer across the performance disciplines of opera, theatre, event, film, and television. My professional experience merges with scholarly research and studio-based university teaching at UNSW Art & Design, University of Technology, and at the prestigious drama school, the National Institute of

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Dramatic Art (NIDA) Sydney, Australia. The scenographic design drawing is integral to my design, art, and teaching practice as cosmopoietic or as a world-creating trope and as a tangible and conceptual instrument to stimulate cognitive surprise, imagination, and performativity. This undertaking illuminates, within the newly emergent field of digital scenography, the unrecognized potential which the drawings for theatre and performance afford across an interdisciplinary dialogue. What is proposed here is a new approach to the scenographic design drawing and its recent history. By repositioning the traditional method of drawing within an expanded notion of the scenographer’s design process, and thereby displacing the finite construction of the stage set and costumes as the conventional endpoint of theatre design, the scenographers’s drawings can no longer be regarded as theatrical ephemera but as a repository of temporal, spatial, and performative knowledge which continues a scholarly dialogue far beyond the closing night and the destruction and disposal of the stage set. My aim for this new and novel argument is to launch an interdisciplinary dialogue by first recognizing that these drawings are unique in their difference and therefore worthy of conservation, collection, and scholarly endeavor.

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1 Drawn behind the Fourth Wall

The Australian scenographer Tony Tripp encapsulated the spirit of the scenographic design drawing in the following statement: The drawing is the act of articulating an idea. The drawing is intended to persuade the director to go with it. It is the best time of all, doing the drawing. At that early stage it is a pure and untroubled thing—nothing to do with the practicalities of realism. It is a piece of art to seduce. (Kristen Anderson 2001, 155) The scenographic design drawings are the drawings produced by the visual and spatial director of theatre and live performance. As part of a complex collaborative art form, these drawings are an authentic and seminal expression of the scenographer’s creative oeuvre. It is the scenographic design drawings that create in the mind’s eye the images which emerge from the scenographer’s creative engagement both with text and non-text performance. These drawings are idiosyncratic in their visualization of the performative, theatrical, and imaginative spaces of a play, opera, dance, or of non-text-based performance such as physical theatre and post-dramatic theatre. The scenographic design drawing, in all of its multiple iterations, continues into the future as the principle site of not only theatrical wonder and astonishment (Hunter 2005; Buchanan

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2007, 44), but also originality and authorship; as the means of problem finding as opposed to problem solving (Buchanan 2007, 45); and most significantly as an epistemic tool which facilitates the discovery of new spaces, both surprising and potent, for the live contemporary spectator in the twenty-first century and beyond. In this chapter, I identify the freehand, generative, thinking sketch pertinent to the set design, exploratory rehearsal drawing (storyboard), digital presentational illustrations, and the performative scenographic design drawing. Also defined are the terms worlding, performative, theatricality and the theatrical sign and their specificity to the scenographic design drawing. It is, in particular, this body of drawings that are unique as both a performative and a theatrical representation of cosmopoiesis, of world creating. Therefore, as this chapter will reveal, these drawings are worthy of a greater scholarly endeavor than is currently acknowledged.

Scenography Scenography,1 an emergent field of research (Iball 2011, 38), originated as the European term for theatre production. As Rebecca Hickie tells us: “the term, scenography, is an increasingly popular one within the worldwide theatremaking community, and is now the term of choice when referring to the visual, spatial and aural aspects of theatre production” (Hickie 2009, Abstract). As Kate Burnett comments: scenographer and scenography . . . have been used in Europe for far longer, but were adopted internationally as the standard academic terms, as the study of this artform/discipline has developed as an academic research subject since the early 1990s. (Burnett 2014, 3) Scenography expresses a holistic visual, aural, and sensory approach to creating live theatre and performance. The scenographer and director are the joint visionaries of the mise-en-scène, supported by a team of creative and



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technical collaborators. Pamela Howard argues: “To be called a scenographer means more than decorating a background for actors to perform in front of. It demands parity between creators who have individual roles, responsibilities and talents” (Howard 2001, 14). She also suggests that scenography “is the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators that contributes to an original creation” (Howard 2001, 16). Arnold Aronson favors the term scenography over theatre design because it implies something more than creating scenery or costumes or lights. It carries a connotation of an all-encompassing visual-spatial construct as well as the process of change and transformation that is an inherent part of the physical vocabulary of the stage. (Aronson 2005, 7) More recently Rachel Hann, the British “cultural geographer” (Hann 2020), states: I am arguing for the recognition of scenography as a holistic strategy of theatre-making . . . From masks to costume, light to sound, architecture to bodies, these discrete stimuli are connected through the act of scenography. (Hann 2019, 3) In a similar light, the art historian Astrid von Rosen suggests, “Scenography as a concept of and for the theatre, addresses how theatre methods orientate place to craft atmospheres, feelings and worlds” (Rosen 2020, 4). In the following statement Christopher Baugh encapsulates the definition of scenography by employing the analogy of the drawing artist: One might argue that scenography has become the principal dramaturgy of performance-making—perhaps close to a direct translation of scaena and graphos “drawing with the scene”—where all aspect of “the scene” (scenic space, embodied action, material, clothes, light and sound) may become the materials laid out on the performance-maker’s “palette.” (Baugh 2013, 240)

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For the contemporary scenographer, the process of producing an “original creation” as an “all-encompassing visual-spatial construct” “on the performance-maker’s palette” begins with the scenographic design drawing.2 These drawings are unique in the greater context of drawing because they are cosmopoietic, or world creating, and a visualization of an emergent scenographic assemblage of forces, of worlding.

Worlding Theory All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages . . . Act II, Scene VII. As You Like It. (1599) In this monologue, written by the playwright William Shakespeare and spoken by the melancholic character Jaques, the stage is an analogy for the world and humans are actors performing the drama of life. Shakespeare’s theatre was devoid of extraneous decoration, stripped back to wooden floorboards and perhaps a single arras.3 The actors wore contemporary clothing, similar to the motley gathering of spectators who ate, drank, laughed, and booed at will throughout the performance. The sixteenth-century stage was an assemblage of incongruent parts that together generated a scenographic encounter or worlding in which the “seven ages” of humankind was played out. The term “assemblage” is applied here in the context of Gilles Deleuze who aligned assemblage with the poststructuralist/postmodern concepts of collage, emergence, ephemerality, temporality and heterogeneity (Wise 2013), all of which can pertain to scenography.



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The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart suggests a worlding has occurred, such as in Shakespeare’s theatre, when there are “sensorial attunements to the emergent, to what is unfolding but yet to come . . . [a] process of mattering, to the moods, intensities” (Stewart 2019, NPF). A scenographic ecology, a worlding, has been assembled together. As Stewart also maintains: Here, compositional theory takes the form of a sharply impassive attunement to the ways in which an assemblage of elements comes to hang together as a thing that has qualities, sensory aesthetics and lines of force and how such things come into sense already composed and generative and pulling matter and mind into a making: a worlding. (Stewart 2014, 119) Rachel Hann in Beyond Scenography (2019) applies Stewart’s compositional theory to scenography and scenographic practices. Multiple perceptual worldings are encountered as momentary “scenes” (Hann 2019, 2); reinforcing Stewart’s theoretical stance, “Scenes becoming worlds are singularities of rhythm and attachment. They require and initiate the kind of attention that both thinks through matter and accords it a life of its own” (Stewart 2014, 119). As Hann further maintains: Moreover, a stage-scene operates as an enacted land border that demarcates the thresholds between perceptual worlds .  .  . acts of human-centric worlding. Each sustains a particular situation of viewing, of watching, or participation. (Hann 2019, 9) Hann extends the philosophical concept of worlding to the moment or “scene” when the stage, the actors, and the spectators experience a sensory symbiosis—over and above the everyday to produce an extra-daily experience (Hann 2019, 11). The extra-daily technique, first coined by Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese in A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, harnesses theatrical energy, which differentiates this act from the normalcy of everyday life and ordinary performative actions (Eugenio Barba

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1991, 18). As Hann claims, there is an inherent difference between performance and theatre; “Performance is daily. Theatre is extra-daily” (Hann 2019, 11). In a similar vein, the Polish scenographer, writer, and artist Tadeusz Kantor wrote of theatre as an “impossible” space. He proposed that the stage is an impossible . . . whose sense and meaning are revealed to us only in the process of folding and exploring the tensions between different realities, is to bring us to the edge where the liberation of our historical environment from conventions is possible. (Kobialka 2002, 77) In Kantor’s theatre practice, he explored multiple alternate momentary “scenes” or worlds; these are spatial and temporal dimensions as sites of memory and history. These explorations took the form of drawings, haunting monologues, and personal “commentaries intended to transgress all physical and mental boundaries and to express the most intimate thought processes that occur in the artist’s private space and .  .  . imagination” (Kobialka 1992, 333). Kantor also called these private spaces the “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). These worlds, or rooms within the interiority of the scenographer’s imagination, first materialize in the scenographic design drawing. As Clive Ashwin identifies it, drawing is the process of making material an otherwise immaterial form or idea that existed only as an idea or concept in the designer’s mind until its commitment to paper. The iconic (image-like) nature of such drawing is interestingly reflected in the etymological link between image and imagine. (Ashwin 1984, 201) The scenographic design drawing, beginning with the early thinking drawing, visualizes these scenographic ecologies—worlds. The sheet of paper of a sketch book, a journal or yellow Post-it note stages a micro-world—worlds within the scenographer’s room of imagination and memory, revealing the slippage between an illusion and a reality, an absence and presence, the imagined and the corporeal.



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As I mentioned earlier, these particular drawings have the quality of cosmopoiesis, of world creating. Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen introduced the term in relation to scenography and specifically to set models in their book The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture (2017). As they identify, the origin of the term cosmopoetic derives from Plato’s hypothesis in which the construction of the “world” from “chaos” was created by a demiurge or divine “craftsman” as a model (Plato 2008, 17). The craftsman fashioned the world from “an image of something” (Plato 2008, 17). As Brejzek and Wallen further argue, this “image of something” is not “a copy but rather the materialization of an immaterial idea . . . unique and always original” (Thea Brejzek 2017, 16). I extend their argument and propose that Plato’s divine craftsman would have first sketched his idea of the world as a thinking drawing. The imagined world as “an image of something” is first a drawing. Reinterpreting Brejzek and Wallen I claim, “The sum of these immaterial qualities in coalescence with the material reality of the [drawing generates] its cosmopoietic capacity” (Thea Brejzek 2017, 15). The scenographic design drawing is the translation of images in the scenographer’s mind’s eye into material form through the medium of drawing—as an imagined felt place that encompasses the intangible qualities of an emergent mood, atmosphere and intensity (Stewart 2019, NPF). Brezjek in Cosmopoiesis, or: Making Worlds through the Model comments in relation to set models but again could easily be referring to the scenographic design drawing: As visualizations of utopic, dystopic, futurist or hyperrealist scenarios and ideas .  .  . are the physical manifestations of artistic concepts that do not strive to be dramatized through realization yet are cosmopoietic in that they form their own, entire world. (Brejzek 2016, 12) Despite its vital position in the creative production of the scenographer, the scenographic design drawing, as a concept and an object of scholarly debate and research, remains marginalized.

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Scenographic Design Drawing Steve Garner suggests in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research that there is a “ring” made up of the fine artist, sculptor, graphic designer, and architect whose drawings and drawing processes have been the subject of widespread research (Garner 2008, 17). But he also points to practitioners outside this inner circle, for instance, the anthropologist, whose drawings are also worthy of critical discourse (Garner 2008, 18). I expand Garner’s argument to encompass the drawings of scenographers which are definitely among those beyond the “ring”; their drawings are readily overlooked in an otherwise well-trodden field. There are several reasons for this attitude— the ephemeral and temporal quality of these drawings, the conventional view that they are merely pragmatic, preparatory sketches, or worse, mimetic copies of the “directorial vision” and therefore unworthy of scholarly analysis and theoretical discourse. In the following statement, Neill Overton identifies the fluid, grey area between art and design where the scenographic design drawing or, as he describes it, the “performed drawing in situ” sits: The nature of sketching as study, as enquiry, is a precondition to the performed drawing in situ. Importantly, “drawing” as an art practice is territorially without its own empire—there are drawings made for set design, costume design, theatre, painting, animation storyboarding, character development, graphic and interior design, sculpture, and manifold skirmishes backwards and forward between otherwise contested borderlands of fine art and design. (Overton 2015, NPF) In my opinion, the scenographic design drawings should be positioned in the forefront of academic discourse, as a performative and theatrical representation which harnesses the imaginative and elusive spaces of theatre and live performance. In Western text-based theatre, the preexisting literary text is almost invariably the starting point of the scenographic process (Hickie 2009, 40).



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The scenographer begins by reading the play, script, or libretto (in conjunction with the musical score), and then starts to draw. There is a multitude of different varieties of drawings, both analogue and digital, embracing many roles within the production processes of scenographic design. For instance, the Austrian scenographer and artist, Xenia Hausner has generated an extensive body of scenographic design drawings for theatre and opera productions held at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Covent Garden in London and Theâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, to name a few. Her remarkable body of work is examined in Xenia Hausner: Ratselraum Fremde Frau (Hausner 1990). Her ideational sketches in black ink and colored felt-tipped pens for multiple productions reveal her unabating visual imaging of differing spatial scenarios that emerge from her engagement with the dramatic text or libretto and score for an opera. Page after page of frenetic iterations for both the set and costumes reveal her consummate draftsmanship and transformative and imaginative thought processes. The distillation of abstract thought is exemplified in these rapidly performed drawings. I first came across this non-English publication when I was a design student in the early 1990s at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Australia. I was utterly mesmerized by the complexity and innovation of Hausner’s spatial set evocations—a form of European theatre that I had yet to experience in Australia. But most significantly it was her experimental, explorative, and expressive thinking drawings that had the most impact on my own university learning and experience. In 1999 Hausner ceased to design for live performance to pursue her painting practice. Today she is recognized as one of Austria’s leading visual artists. The scenographic design drawings characterizing my own past design practice are the result of an embodied experience between the eye, mind, and hand. I first read the text in tandem with spontaneous doodling in the margins of the photocopied script (Figure 1.1). I become immersed in the unfolding story and the characters and spaces described. Words transform into a multitude of doodles, scribbles, trailing lines on scraps of paper, Post-it notes— anything at hand to record those elusive thoughts and fleeting ideas that have

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FIGURE 1.1 Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. sprung from the initial reading of the text. The drawings which emerge from this encounter are the repeated reworking of the palimpsest, layers upon layers of mark making, erasure and trace, backtracking, and reflection. My chosen freehand drawing method is the monochromatic line or mark on paper. A black pen, a brush, or a stick dipped in black ink is the preferred implement, allowing my thoughts to be put down quickly before they disappear. Ink is a rapid, fluid medium—indelible, irreversible, and leaving permanent marks. The first mark begins the “illumination.” The instant line meets paper—the instantaneous movement of eye and hand—is the revelation of shadows in the mind’s eye. Figure 1.1 is an example of thinking drawings which I drew in this embryonic phase of designing the set for Helmut Bakaitis’s production of The Curse of the House of Atreus (1998). The script was developed in rehearsal as an adaptation of Aeschylus’s ancient Greek play, The Oresteia. Many drawings repeated again and again, with each revealing a slight change or difference.



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These repetitive scribbles are personalized pictograms: a “short-handwriting” that is only decipherable by its creator, the drawing artist. It is pertinent to note here that the etymological source of scenographic is the Greek word skēnographia, the painting of scenery, from skēnē (scene) + graphia (to write or draw). Therefore, the scenographic design drawing can be understood as the drawing or writing of the performative mise-en-scène. Howard describes scenography as a type of performative writing. She aptly describes the ephemeral and transient process as the “écruiture scénique or the writing of the stage space” which transforms the dramatic text into the performative “scenographic script” (Howard 2009, 39). Figures 1.2 and 1.3 are the more developed drawings in my journal, using ink and gouache on layers of paper; these were later shown to and discussed with the director, igniting an animated but constantly shifting dialogue. It is

FIGURE 1.2  Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

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FIGURE 1.3  Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. these drawings which can potentially draw the spectator, the director, and other collaborators beyond the pictorial plane or fourth wall into the performative and theatrical space of the drawn representation. This meta-speculative world is a simulation (the two-dimensional drawing) of a simulation (the future reality of the live three-dimensional performance)—that is, from the subject of the representation to representation as a subject. This conundrum is what particularly distinguishes the scenographic design drawing.

The Thinking Drawing In the fine arts, freehand drawing has two major roles: first, to provide preparatory sketches for a final work, for example sculpture, and, second, to present a finished work as an end in itself. In The Primacy of Drawing: An Artist’s



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View, Deanna Petheridge suggests that preparatory drawings are the “Primi pensieri . . . first thoughts of artists, contain[ing] . . . attributes of immediacy, intimacy, revelation and fragmentation” (Petherbridge 1991, 12). The freehand drawing is the haptic cognitive tool which expedites the discovery of new and novel objects and spaces. As Petherbridge also states, drawing is Primarily .  .  . the movement of the hand and its extension of pen, quill, brush, chalk or lead which reveals the process of describing lines and its ideation. The difficulties of erasure implicit in most of its methods mean that the lines are left in place as a record of the processes of the moving hand. (Petherbridge 1991, 7) In his essay What Calls for Thinking (1951), Martin Heidegger defines humanness through the hand because the hand differentiates humans from all other organisms. It can grasp, point, sign, and draw the artist or designer’s thoughts. The hand thinks in collaboration with our complex neural system. He posits: The hand is something altogether peculiar. In the common view, the hand is part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ that can grasp. . . . The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs . . . different by an abyss of essence. Only beings who can speak, that is think, can have hands and can handily achieve works of handicraft. . . . Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking. (Heidegger 1999, 380–1) The somewhat conventional and prosaic term “preparatory” has extended its meaning to encompass the more dynamic concept of ideational or thinking drawing, which I further argue is the creative embryo—the conceptual birth— of the original thought. In a similar light, Paolo Belardi in Why Architects Still Draw suggests: Disegno (drawing) means being open to all the possibilities that a pencil has concentrated in its tip, thousands of brainstorms calmed and distilled into a fraction of an ounce of graphite. (Belardi 2014, xii)

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The thinking drawing embraces the complex cognitive and perceptual processing of the vague half-formed ideas of the “paper sketch,” so facilitating surprise, discovery, and invention. It is now well recognized that the drawing generated early in the artist/designer’s creative production is an embodied form of visual cognition, and therefore the principal site of innovation and ideation. The American artist Terry Rosenberg writes: The ideational drawing, in producing traces of the cognitive hand, produces the otherly arrangements of thinking that .  .  . constructs and educes otherness the way poetry does and uses otherness of thinking (poetic thought) as a process of poiesis or invention. (Rosenberg 2008, 111) Further, he suggests that within the drawing there is the impulsion . . . to form and transform. In this notion of blankness, drawing is thinking and acting between the not-yet-formed and the formed, in the space between form and form at the threshold between form and anti-form. (Rosenberg 2008, 114) The thinking drawing is a crucible filled with ambiguous, indeterminate marks, signs, and symbols where new ideas are generated but also, critically, where past ideas resurface, having gestated for a while. Memories become interwoven with the present. A new vocabulary of marks, signs, and symbols, which resonate with potential new meanings, emerges, and memories are reinvented into something fresh and invigorated. The drawing, as the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues, “is always a result of yet another kind of double perspective; a drawing looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, to the observed or imagined world, and into the draughtsman’s own persona and mental world” (Pallasmaa 2009, 91). Drawings by the hand, with all their uncertainties, imperfections, irregularities, fractured scribbles, rubbings, and erasures result in unexpected connections, illuminating accidents and surprises. As Clive Ashwin comments, the freehand drawing “remain[s] strangely elusive and inexpressible in terms other than those of drawing itself



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.  .  . it is precisely this inexpressible element that makes drawing valuable and irreplaceable” (Ashwin 1984, 42). Emma Dexter suggests that drawing’s tautologous nature “forever describes its own making in its becoming. In a sense, drawing is nothing more than that, and in its eternal incompletion always re-enacts imperfections and incompletion” (Dexter 2005, 6). Dexter further comments that drawing is a map of time recording the actions of the maker . . . a line always suggests a continuation and ad infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity. A drawing enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. (Dexter 2005, 6) There has been extensive research exploring the relationship between design sketching and visual cognition. Jonathan C. Fish ignited an academic debate in his doctorate thesis How Sketches Work: A Cognitive Theory for Improved System Design in 1996; he claimed the sketch attributes preserve the results of cognitive processing which can be used interactively to amplify visual thought. The traditional attributes of sketches include many types of indeterminacy which may reflect the artist’s need to be “vague.” (Fish 1996, Abstract) There is also the pioneering research of Stephen Scrivener in the field of computer supported design collaboration, underpinned by freehand drawing, that emphasizes the importance of the “invisible mental processes that result in the visible activity of sketching” (Stephen Scrivener 1990, 117). In conjunction with Manolya Kavakli-Thorne and Linden Ball in 1998, Scrivener investigated the structure of the “idea sketches . . . the initial free-hand drawn externalisations produced by a designer of envisioned or partially envisioned entities” (Stephen Scrivener 1998, NPF). He concluded that the sketch is characterized by “its vagueness, its incompleteness, its ambiguity, the way it captures the essence of form and space, the fluency of its production, etc” (Stephen Scrivener 1998, NPF). Another study completed by Scrivener in 2000,

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along with Ball and Winger Tseng, investigated the “uncertainty” of sketching behaviour where, with respect to the freehand sketch, “uncertainty drives invention and perhaps uncertainty also drives invention in design” (Stephen Scrivener 2000, 481). The sometimes rough and rudimentary scribbles and marks, comprehensible only to the drawing artist, can stimulate a renewed energy which then invigorates the creative work. They are the primary source of what Scrivener later identified in 2010 as cognitive surprise (Scrivener 2010, NPF). Sketching on paper as a thinking process has been in use since the late Middle Ages when artists/artisans began to draw in an experimental and investigative way, rather than simply copying or recording finished paintings and sculptures (Bambach 2002, NPF). As Carmen Bambach argues: “This exploratory type of drawing offers a vivid and intimate glimpse of the artist creatively thinking on paper” (Bambach 2002, NPF). In the design field of architecture, the preparatory sketch remains a central methodology within the architectural pedagogy. Pallasmaa in The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture suggests the sketch is a search in the obscurity and darkness of uncertainty, in which a subjective certainty is gradually achieved through the laborious process of the search itself. This search is as much an embodied and tactile journey, guided by the hand and feelings of the body as it is a visual and intellectual enterprise. (Pallasmaa 2009, 109) Pallasmaa has extensively examined the complex and multisensory relationship between the architect’s eye, mind and hand; in other words, between the multifarious dimensions of human embodiment, intuition, and intelligence, which include the integral role of thinking and the grasping, probing hand (Pallasmaa 2017, 98). An exemplar supporting Pallasmaa’s argument is the American architect Frank Gehry, who continues to draw traditionally by hand multiple free-form “scribbles” in black Biro pen, which are later transformed



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into the complex digitalized geometries of his highly theatricalized architecture. As Gehry comments: I think of them as scribble . . . I don’t think they mean anything to anybody except to me. At the end of the project we wheel out these little drawings and they’re uncannily like the finished building. (Keskeys 2016, 1) The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles acquired in 2017 a collection of 1,000 sketches, more than 120,000 working drawings and over 100,000 slides produced by Gehry between 1954, when he graduated from USC School of Architecture in Los Angeles, and his award of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1988 (Howarth 2017). Gehry’s thinking drawings are an extraordinary record revealing the genesis of his distinctive style—an evolution of artistic thought, embodied existence, and knowledge. Gehry’s scribbles reinforce the position Pallasmaa argues: “A sketch is in fact a temporal image, a piece of cinematic action recorded as a graphic image” (Pallasmaa 2009, 90). In a similar vein, Gabriella Goldschmidt, an Israeli architect who has also written extensively on the dialectics of sketching, considers that the designer’s sketch is a vehicle for contemplation, where the designer’s eye and hand meander over the sketching surface seeking the new but also sifting through the traces of the past. “The sketch provides feedback .  .  . using emerging configurations as cues” (Goldschmidt 2002, Editorial). She writes a pertinent description of the design-thinking sketch: We are trained to look for treasures in the tangle of lines we put down on paper, and we know how to take advantage of this invaluable skill . . . there is no substitute to sketching as a design-thinking tool, one that economically and effectively supports the generation, development, and revision of design proposals. (Goldschmidt 2003, NPF) In 1925, the Swiss artist Paul Klee aptly described the wandering contemplative line of the sketch as “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without a goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point shifting its position

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forward” (Klee 1925, 16). The thinking drawing and the premise that these original elicitations are “the fundamental, unconscious, situational and tacit understanding of the body” (Pallasmaa 2017, 103) underpin scenographic practice but, as this enquiry posits, the scenographer’s design drawings manifest their own distinct and unique features.

The Scenographic Thinking Drawing This enquiry examines primarily the freehand scenographic design drawing, which encompasses the contemporary expanded definition of drawing as mark making, employing diverse media and by “creating a sense of visual intrigue they [can] rework images and objects that are found, made or imagined” (Stout 2012). Clive Ashwin identified drawing in 1984 as the “Footprint on the beach, idle tracings of a finger in wet sand and to doodling on a telephone pad” (Ashwin 1984, 202). As you will see throughout this book, the scenographic design drawing can include collage, paint, and the “drawn mark” made by the pencil, pastel, and pen, or, of course, executed digitally using a stylus and digital screen. However, I am particularly interested in the drawings performed early in the scenographic design process because they generate a special cognitive relationship that exists between the imagining mind, the hand, and the image that emerges on the blank sheet of paper or screen. Lubomír Doležel in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds claims that the “universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of human minds and hands” (Doležel 1998, ix). These drawings or sketches produced by the thinking hand are exploratory, experimental, and present as “unfinished.” I refer to these drawings as the scenographer’s thinking drawings because they represent embodied thought and have nothing to do with the practicalities of realism. As the contemporary Romanian scenographer Dan Potra argues: “The first drawings on reading the text are at their rawest—they are not just ideas but



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gut feelings, instincts” (Potra 2011). Howard considers this early period in the scenographer’s drawing process as being free of the constraints of the production yet to come . . . should be utterly pleasurable and enjoyable, created in the spirit of enquiry. This is a time of total freedom where the imagination can roam, transcending logic and reason, making the most wonderful connections. . . . This is the stage when the scenographer’s creativity and vision are at their strongest. (Howard 2002, 23) These embryonic thinking drawings are idiosyncratic to theatre and live performance because they are a visualization tool that images performative encounters and imagined, theatrical worlds. Joslin McKinney and Helen Iball comment in Research Methods in Scenography: The processes of drawing and of working through different kinds of visualisation (rough sketches, technical drawings, 3D or computer models, renderings and samples) allow mental projections to be made. (Iball 2011, 23) The sketch journal is a method of documenting, annotating, and collating the scenographer’s “mental projections.” Burnett identifies the journal as a scenographic instrument of collaboration: The sketch and sketch books are essential to most scenographers, for whom drawing is an essential part of our collaborative art form. Even the Greek origin of sketch, schedios, meaning “done extempore” is illuminating. It indicates the importance of the moment in observing, recording, graphically developing or demonstrating ideas in meetings with directors and fellow artists, in rehearsals, and while working in transit and other random situations. Importantly, the lines (meaning a full range of mark making) and the ideas are constantly shifting, the sketch understood and interpreted from the individual viewpoints of those drawing and looking. (Burnett 2014, 5)

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The journal is a portable hard-drive of the artist/designer’s eye-of the-mind: “a window into a creative practice, suggesting a moment of truth, realisation or an unbridled thought” (TRACEY 2015, NPF). The thinking drawing, as an intimate tactile understanding of media, is critical as an embodied sensory encounter between the images in the mind’s eye and the hand. “The mind’s eye” is one’s visual memory or imagination. William Shakespeare coined the phrase “in the mind’s eye” in his most famous play Hamlet (1603). Hamlet recalls the ghost of his father in his mind’s eye: HAMLET: Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio! My father! - methinks I see my father. HORATIO: Where, my lord? HAMLET: In my mind’s eye, Horatio. (Shakespeare 2015, 18) It is the scenographic thinking drawing which, in particular, captures wonder and astonishment early in the scenographer’s design process. The scribbled drawing, notational scrawl and ubiquitous trace recorded in a sketch journal are drawn directly from the text, uninhibited by pragmatics, logistics, and budget deadlines. The Australian scenographer Eamon D’Arcy views the thinking drawing as the representation of diagrammatic space—an ephemeral space of discovery, invention, and “play” between the real and the fictional. As D’Arcy comments: All staging begins with a diagram of some kind. Because of its composite qualities the diagram is a space “in play,” where explorations and artistic inventions are allowed to take place. At the same time the diagram can facilitate and begin to resolve the tension between the real and the fictional. (D’Arcy 2012, 84) Here the diagram as a means of experimental play can also prompt a way of seeing something never seen before—a serendipitous moment of wonder and



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astonishment. The thinking drawings are not finished works; rather, they are conceptual explorations revealing the intimate workings of cognitive thinking which can potentially lead to what Scrivener identified as cognitive surprise (Scrivener 2010, NPF). It is the scenographic thinking drawings that visualize the images which surface from the scenographer’s creative and imaginative encounter with the text. Dan Potra produced many thinking drawings in his journal for the opera Dracula (2017), composed by Victoria Borisova-Ollas and directed by Linus Fellbom for Kungliga Operan, Stockholm. Potra’s scenographic process begins with first reading the text, in this case the libretto written by Kristian Benkö and Claes Peter Hellwig, followed by the spontaneous sketching in black felt pen in his journal. At this early stage, these drawings capture the germ of an idea. Figure 1.4 has been selected from multiple drawings which form an embryonic storyboard that maps the different scenes throughout the breadth of the opera.

FIGURE 1.4  Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Dan Potra.

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FIGURE 1.5  Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Dan Potra. These quick, diagrammatic sketches and annotations are executed in colored pencils and black pen in Potra’s journal as a means of ordering and sequencing his thoughts. Many of these ideas were later discarded and replaced. In these early drawings, what is consistent and remains as a key meta-theatrical trope is the use of heavy black drapery and layers of black gauze to not only frame the scenes but more importantly to conjure a haunting and eerie mise-en-scène reminiscent of nineteenth-century Gothic horror (Figure 1.5). The curtain, as a theatrical sign, instantly arouses in the spectators a sense of anticipation that they are about to enter into and gaze upon the exaggerated forbidden eroticism of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The voluminous baroque folds of the curtains are a theatrical device for revelation and concealment—of potentially hidden and unfulfilled desire. The lifting or drawing back of the stage curtains signals the moment of the “suspension of disbelief ” to the spectator. The spectator becomes the voyeur gazing through the fourth wall. As Alice Rayner argues, “the proscenium curtain . . . reproduces



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a structure of desire . . . it materialises a desire to see more, to see truth, to see real” (Rayner 2006, 141). The image or sign of the theatre curtain is also a metatheatrical conceit which constantly reminds the spectator that they are in a “theatre.” As Sam Trubridge suggests: “the curtain is indeed a sign, a character, even before it performs its time-honoured role of opening the scene and revealing . . . the ‘elusive realities’ within” (Trubridge 2012, 14). Potra advanced to more established drawings, which are freehand digital drawings recorded on a Wacom tablet. It is these drawings that are revealed to the director to stimulate a visual dialogue combining both analogue and digital technologies which reveal Potra’s mastery of draftsmanship.

The Peacham Drawing An example of a scenographic thinking drawing which has survived the ephemeral and fleeting spirit of theatre is The Peacham Drawing, executed in 1595 during a rehearsal of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. This drawing, a doodle in the margin of the script of a Longleaf document belonging to the Marquess of Bath (Great Britain), has aroused curiosity and speculation since its discovery in 1925. As the only extant drawing of a contemporary Shakespeare performance (Schlueter 1999, 171), this small, finely detailed black line sketch, placed above the stage direction Enter Tamora pleadinge for her sonnes going to execution, remains the subject of intense scholarly debate because of the discrepancy between the drawing and the script (Schlueter 1999, 171). It also remains a mystery whether the artist and the writer are one and the same individual, heightening the academic conjecture and uncertainty. However, I am intrigued by this drawing because it is an early record of the scenographer’s exploratory observations during the repeated changes that occur within the performance space, particularly during rehearsal. Not all scenographers draw in this volatile environment; many will simply take detailed notes.

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The Exploratory Rehearsal Drawing Contemporary examples of the exploratory rehearsal drawing are those generated by the Portuguese scenographer and architect Filipa Malva for the 2018 production Eu Uso Termotebe e o Meu Pai Também (I Wear Termotebe as My Dad Before Me), written and directed by Ricardo Correia and co-produced by Dona Maria II Theater (Lisbon), Gil Vicente Academic Theater (Coimbra), Aveirense Theater (Aveiro), and Vila Flor Cultural Center (Guimarães). The play is based on a collection of stories sourced from interviews and testimonies of the former workers and employers of the once-thriving Portuguese manufacturing textile industry. The play’s title refers to a television advertisement from the 1980s of a Portuguese company Termotebe, which made thermal shirts. Such factories are now silent ruins; there only remains the still acute memories of loss, anguish, and pain that emerged from the mass closures, redundancies, and bankruptcies. Malva produced multiple scenographic design drawings in the capricious and unpredictable rehearsal room process in which the actors played several roles and manipulated and transformed a seemingly miscellaneous collection of props and costume accessories. Figure 1.6 is one of many improvised experimentations in fine black pen, which reveal Malva’s cognitive processes. This page of sketches identifies spatial perspectives, technical diagrammatic details, and discarded lines of thought. From here, Malva progresses to more complex digital drawings with explicit notations and instructions that are then communicated to others as part of the collaborative team. As Malva posits: Initial storyboard sketches were one of the starting points of the rehearsal process. Conceptual design drawings need only to communicate with their creators. Incidents and absences are frequent. Absence allows the freedom of non-decision at that particular point in the process. In storyboarding it is the in-between drawings that suggest the relationship between scenography



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and action. It is in the absences of the drawings that the dramaturgy is found. (Malva 2013, NPF) An early scenographic design of mine, upon graduating at NIDA, was the production All of Me (1993), produced by the internationally acclaimed Australian physical theatre group Legs on the Wall and directed by Nigel Jamieson.4 This was a self-devised performance created entirely in the rehearsal space. The set, which was a skeletal scaffold of metal spring bed frames, was built and installed at the commencement of rehearsals to enable the performers, right from the beginning of the rehearsal process, to embody their physicality on and within the set. I sat in rehearsal, watching and documenting (in my journal in the form of drawings) the ever-changing nuances evident in this non-text-based improvised performance. Figure 1.7 is a page of scattered thinking drawings and notations recorded in my sketch

FIGURE 1.6  Filipa Malva. Scenographic thinking drawing for Eu Uso Termotebe e o Meu Pai Também (I Use Termotebe as My Dad Before Me): black pen on paper, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of Filipa Malva.

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FIGURE 1.7  Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawings for All of Me: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1993.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. journal during a rehearsal of All of Me. Rapid, staccato graphite pencil and pen lines are scrawled indiscriminately across the pages and, in some instances, layered over the surfaces of previous sketches. Scraps of paper with more drawings are pasted over others, revealing the continuous transformative process of drawing an envisaged performance with only a rudimentary metal structure and a short poem (written by Mary Morris)5 as a prompt within the rehearsal room. The multiple layering of sketches and erasure reveals an ambiguity and uncertainty darting between different sensory modes: memory, direct observation in the rehearsal room and the unconscious rambling of unfixed thoughts. These yet unformed/formed concepts later matured into the more detailed and comprehensive drawing, Figure 1.8, which was executed later in the design process when the performance had metamorphosed into its final realization. Despite the experimental fluidity and unpredictability of the scenographic process, it is evident here how similar the final design is to the original generative sketches.



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FIGURE 1.8  Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for All of Me: black ink and watercolor on paper, 420 × 594 mm, 1993.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. In examining retrospectively All of Me for my current research, I came to recognize that this theatrical production was, in fact, a post-dramatic performance.6 However, in 1993, this term had not yet gained recognition or currency. I now view the scenographic drawings I produced in the process of designing and realizing All of Me through a different contemporary postdramatic lens. For the scenographer collaborating in post-dramatic theatre, an initial text may still exist; however, this does not necessarily drive the overall interpretation or end performance which often has its roots in devised and improvised methodologies. The scenographic design drawings for postdramatic theatre look similar to those produced for text-based theatre, except that they are more likely to have been executed in the rehearsal room rather than in the design studio. Here, the scenographer draws the constant transformative change manifest in non-text improvised performance. What became apparent as I pursued this research was that, as a scenographer

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designing for post-dramatic theatre, I was constantly aware of the primary importance of the spectator, not as a passive viewer but as an active witness in the creation of the post-dramatic performance.

The Digital Presentational Drawing Darwin Payne in his comprehensive text on twentieth-century theatre design The Scenographic Imagination (1981) divides freehand drawing for theatre into three basic categories: diagrammatic drawings, scenic or illustrative drawings, and mechanical working drawings. It is, however, only the diagrammatic or thinking drawings which are of any real relevance now in the twenty-first century. The hand drawn and painted scenic illustration (a scaled version of the traditional painted backdrop and proscenium firewall) and mechanical working drawing (manual drafting) have both been superseded by the rapid digital and technological changes that have occurred in the performance arts in the past thirty years. The scenic illustration has been replaced by the digital presentational drawing, a style of visual communication that is almost exclusively created digitally to produce a final presentation image using commercial computer software programs such as Photoshop, Vector Works, Rhinoceros (Rhino), and computer-aided design (CAD), to name a few. These drawings are intended to sell an idea or vision to the director, performers, producer, and art director. But more often than not they are also used in commercial applications such as marketing a production and corporate fundraising or as exhibition material for a production’s retrospective. The computer has reinstated the scenic illustration but has pushed this presentation mode into the realm of glossy, highly finished three-dimensional computer design perspectives, even going so far as to create animated videos of the proposed production for commercial corporate purposes. The Australian scenographer Michael Scott-Mitchell combines both analogue and digital processes to create, for instance, his complex scenographic



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designs for Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, directed by Graeme Murphy for Opera Australia (2019). This interpretation was located in the seedy backstreets of contemporary urban Japan, where the character Cio-Ciosan (Madama Butterfly) was portrayed as a bondage prostitute—put up for sale as a dangling piece of meat on a conveyor belt, similar to a fast-food sushitrain outlet. Scott-Mitchell, in conjunction with reading the libretto (written by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) and listening repeatedly to the music, generated multiple thinking drawings. For instance, (Figure 1.9) is a page of his precise, diagrammatic line drawings in black pen of the horrific scene in which Lieutenant Pinkerton meets Cio-Cio-san for the first time, bound up in red ropes as a tantalizing treat on a revolving smorgasbord. Pinkerton purchases Cio-Cio-san from her pimp and embarks on a night of “passion” which repeatedly returns as erotic, sadomasochistic imagery throughout the opera on the cyclorama of digital LED screens that dominate the overall

FIGURE 1.9  Michael Scott-Mitchell. Scenographic thinking drawings for Madama Butterfly: black pen on paper.

Source: Courtesy of Michael Scott-Mitchell.

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production design. Scott-Mitchell rapidly progresses from the analogue thinking drawing to digital technologies where he begins to manipulate architectural orthographies in AutoCAD to develop further his conceptual thinking. He comments: “When I am kick-started by imagery, I immediately go to CAD, and start drawing” (Reinhardt 2012, 46). He then works in D3​.​ js which is a powerful dynamic and interactive visualization programme that enables the manipulation and automation of graphics from the preliminary design stage through to the operation of the final data in the opera theatre. It is at this stage that Scott-Mitchell works in collaboration with the director to navigate the technological complexities of multiple scenes involving the live performers and sophisticated lighting, set hydraulics and video projections. Figures 1.10 is a digital presentational drawing of the opening scene in which Cio-Cio-san is strung up before Pinkerton as the chosen object of his desiring male gaze. Scott-Mitchell’s hi-tech scenographic production is a heightened world, a Japanese futuristic phantasmagoria that lurches the audience onto a virtual roller coaster. However, what is pertinent to this enquiry is again how similar Scott-Mitchell’s original freehand scenographic design drawings

FIGURE 1.10  Michael Scott-Mitchell. Digital drawing for Madama Butterfly: D3​.j​s, 2019.

Source: Courtesy of Michael Scott-Mitchell.



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are to the complex digitalized images produced for the final presentational photographs and video. His Madama Butterfly is an exemplar of how digital technology can visually enhance a concept, but even more significantly, of the ability of the digital drawing to communicate rapidly and decisively across invisible boundaries to the “collective team.” This quality has transformed the scenographic design process for Scott-Mitchell, who works extensively internationally, because virtual collaboration has enabled him to practice effectively and successfully globally. In the past decade there has been a paradigm shift, or scenographic turn from traditional staging and building practices to digital scenography, such as Scott-Mitchell’s Madama Butterfly. Established scenographic tropes which orientate, locate, and shape imaginative encounters have been reinvented through the use of digital media, in particular the manipulation of theatrical and performative space within an expanded, immersive cinematic narrative of computer-generated images. How has this radical technological change impacted on the scenographic design drawing? This question is interrogated in Chapter 6.

The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing The performative scenographic design drawing is a term I have coined to identify the freehand drawings that have been transfigured digitally on a cinematic scale. However, they are not simply projections as a backdrop to the action but have expanded into a different space in which they have become the “other” performer, “acting” seamlessly with the live human counterparts. Embedded in these drawings are theatrical signs that manifest performativity and theatricality. These particular drawings, as expanded drawn works, are examined in detail in Chapters 4 and 5. The following identifies the terms performative, theatricality, and the theatrical sign, and their specificity to the scenographic design drawing.

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Performative The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word performative as: Of or pertaining to performance: designating or pertaining to an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or written or by means of which the speaker performs a particular act. (OED 2019) This definition only came into popular usage in the second half of the twentieth century, with the philosopher of language John. L. Austin first writing of performative speech or utterance as referring to “itself ” in the process of its own making (Austin 1961). In 1988, Judith Butler wrote of gender as being performative. She argued: I will draw from theatrical, anthropological, and philosophical discourses, but mainly phenomenology, to show that what is called gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo. In its very character as performative resides the possibility of contesting its reified status. (Butler 1988, 1) In the 1990s, the theatre theorist Peggy Phelan argued that certain styles of writing are performative by “enact[ing] the death of the ‘we’ that we think we are before we begin to write” (Phelan 1997, 17). These styles of writing are linked to performance by their ephemeral, transient essence and exemplify what Peggy Phelan later referred to as “movement-based thinking” (Phelan 2011, 22). In the past twenty years there has been a burgeoning of academic literature and discourse pertinent to “all things performative.” The buzz words, performative and performativity, have proliferated beyond the traditional confines of what used to be referred to as theatre studies and acting theory into a myriad of manifestations. The German art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann questions this excess use of the term performative:



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Today it is widely believed that “performative” can be understood as “performance-like.” Understood in this false sense it has become a ubiquitous catch-word for a broad range of contemporary art phenomena that, in the widest sense, show an affinity to forms of staging, theatricality and mise-en-scene. (Hantelmann 2010, 17) The term “performative” is an apt definition when identifying the key differences exhibited by the drawings generated by scenographers in their creative production, as against other forms of drawings and drawing methodologies. Catherine de Zegher coined the term “performative drawing” in 2001 with this comment: “More than a trace of a creative genius, as a performative act drawing is the gesture in itself . . . the artist’s decision between thinking and doing” (Zegher 2001, 2). Performative drawing as a visual art term gained currency in 2007 with the publication of the book, Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art. The introduction states: The selection aims to present drawing by traditional means with a conceptual edge, with an emphasis on how the process of making the drawing contributes to its content, a concept we describe as “performative.” (Tracey 2007, ix) There are now many definitions circulating in the academic arena which identify the performative drawing. Nonetheless, there is a commonality of meaning within this discourse: that is, they are drawings delineated by the verb or the action/doing of drawing, the process of making marks, where the drawing “demonstrates process and idea simultaneously in the course of its own production” (Tracey 2007, xviii). For example, Maryclaire Foá who works with sound as a drawn trace; Tony Orrico who employs the movement of his body as a repetitive tool to generate large drawings in graphite; John Court, a durational performance artist whose primary focus is time; and Tim Knowles who shapes invisible phenomena to create mark-making systems. There is also the post-doctoral research of Kendal Heyes (Heyes

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2010), Jane Grisewood (Grisewood 2010), and Maryclare Foá (Foá 2011), which continue to categorize performative drawing according to John. L. Austin’s model of performative speech or utterance as referring to “itself ” in the process of its own making (Austin 1961). While their conclusions have some relevance to this project, particularly their investigation into the drawing’s relationship to the live spectator, I argue that the scenographic design drawing, as an artefact or object embodying performative qualities is a different, unacknowledged performative drawing. This is a semiotic process that produces an accumulation of theatrical signs, which invites the spectator to inhabit spatial narratives that enact a human-centric worlding, drawn from the scenographer’s “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). The concept that a drawing can be performative, but not governed by the verb to draw, is the position held by Sam Spurr who identifies certain architectural design drawings as performative because they do not describe the action but allow the viewer to participate in the action (Spurr 2007, 144). As she argues: “in contrast to passive representations of environments, they demand from their viewers total immersion” (Spurr 2007, 149). Spurr is not concerned with the act of “doing” the drawing, as defined by de Zegher, Heyes, Grisewood and Foá, but with drawing which “provide[s] alternative structures in which the . . . drawing can incorporate dynamic and embodied elements” (Spurr 2007, 152). What is pertinent here is the implicit involvement of the spectator. “Thus the spatial, two-dimensional, pictorial representation of an event is transformed into a narrative unfolding in the spectator’s act of looking” (Caroline van Eck 2011, 10). The scenographic design drawing manifests an active performative space which provokes in the spectator anticipation, tension, and an expectation that something is about to happen or has occurred. This emerges because embedded in these drawings are theatrical signs that are an accumulation of meaning or perform a narrative—that is, a story is being unfolded. The objects become, as on stage, emblematic, the carriers of myth (Howard 2009, 129). These signs “stage the act of viewing” (Caroline van Eck



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2011, 14) and describe where “theatricality seems to stem from the spectator’s awareness of a theatrical intention addressed to him” (Josette Féral 2002, 96). As Samuel Weber also posits: for what constitutes the theatricality of a scene is not simply its visibility, not simply the fact that it is seen, but rather that it is seen by another: someone who remains, qua observer, external to the scene—a stranger, irreducibly alien. (Weber 1999, 357)

Anti-theatricality The examination of theatricality and theatrical space within the scenographic design drawing is the key to interpreting and understanding these particular drawings. However, since Plato denounced mimesis as “a corruption of the mind of all listeners who do not possess as antidote a knowledge of its real nature” (Sternberg 1990, 62), theatricality and theatrical performance have been frequently denigrated as “illusory, deceptive, exaggerated, artificial or affected” (Thomas Postlewait 2003, 4). As Marvin Carlson states: From Plato onward one of the most predictable attacks on theater has been precisely that it provided empty representations that if unchallenged threatened the authenticity of the real self. (Carlson 2002, 240–1) In 1711, the Earl of Shaftesbury in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, suggested: Such study’d Action, and artificial Gesture, may be allow’d to the Actors and Actrices of the Stage. But the good Painter must come a little nearer to Truth, and take care that his Action be not theatrical. (Shaftesbury 1738, 368) In 1758, the French philosopher and critic Denis Diderot, in his critique De la Poèsie Dramatique, searched for a theatre without theatricality, where the actors are advised “to moderate their declamatory style, to speak as if in real

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life, and to rely more on intimate and natural gesture . . . [and] . . . the beholder . . . should be invited to forget that he is attending a performance” (Oostveldt 2011, 170). According to Diderot, performers on stage, or the characters in a painting, must exclude everything else and forget they are being gazed upon in secret by a spectator (Lessing 1986, 340). In 1988, the art historian and critic Michael Fried returned to and supported Diderot’s anti-theatrical antagonism in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Fried’s prejudice directly parallels a demand, first made by Diderot in 1758, “that the artist . . . find a way to neutralize or negate the beholder’s presence, to establish the fiction that no one is standing before the canvas” (Fried 1988, 108). Fried also criticized art work which deliberately sought out a subjective and embodied spectatorial experience; rather, he stressed the radical exclusion of the beholder in relation to the viewing of an artwork, (Fried 1988, 108) where the more absorptive the quality of a painting (or performance), or the more its “lack of awareness of being beheld” (Fried 1988, 121), the greater its ability to deny the spectator’s presence and gaze. In 1955, John L Austin strengthened anti-theatrical prejudice by claiming that a performative utterance “said by an actor on the stage” is a constative utterance and should be “exclud[ed] from consideration” because it is “hollow and void” and therefore “parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language” (Austin 1955, 22). To etiolate means to render weak, pale, and sickly. As Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick remarked on Austin’s use of this verb: What’s so surprising, in a thinker otherwise strongly resistant to moralism, is to discover the pervasiveness with which the excluded theatrical is hereby liked with the perverted, the artificial, the unnatural, the abnormal, the decadent, the effete, the diseased. (Andrew Parker 2000, 175) Austin’s belief that a theatrical model is diseased persisted well into the first decade of the new millennium. In 2005, Jane Tormey also viewed with suspicion theatricality and theatrical performance, claiming it is simply “acting out, a



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representation or mimesis, following some directive and suggests a passive operation where the participant actualizes something already determined” (Tormey 2005, Editorial). To support her argument, she also draws on the work of Austin, stating that the drawing that follows a theatrical model “might be termed a ‘constative’ drawing which would represent or describe mimetically” (Tormey 2005, Editorial) and that it is either true or false and is, therefore, defined before it is drawn. However, I disagree with Tormey’s interpretation of Austin. The scenographic design drawing, which is inherently theatrical, is not simply a mimesis but contains theatrical signs that prompt an embodied spectatorial participation and celebrates the imaginative, illusion, and the invisible. As Carlson claims: Theatricality can be and has been regarded in a far more positive manner if we regard theater not as its detractors from Plato onward have done—as a pale, inadequate, or artificially abstract copy of the life process—but if we view it as a heightened celebration of that process and its possibilities. (Carlson 2002, 244)

Theatricality An undercurrent of thought has emerged in the second decade of this millennium questioning the negative understanding of theatricality. For instance, Amanda Brandes disputes Fried’s anti-theatrical position: Michael Fried sets up the idea of the theatrical as an enemy of art. . . . His idea is that theatrical art is grounded in the temporal and the spatial, while the new, modern ideal art exists outside of time and space. . . . This ideal art, he argues, does not need its audience to validate it, but it exists instead in a pure space on its own merits. The theatrical, on the other hand, is nothing without its audience. Its audience is inherent in its very definition. (Brandes 2007, NPF)

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As Laura Weigert also argues: Historians . . . have recovered the term “theatricality” . . . [and] in so doing, they have embraced those features of the term that have been traditionally denigrated: namely, a reliance on spectatorial participation and a recognition and exaggeration of artifice. (Weigert 2011, 26) In November 2013, a Scenography Symposium, Layering Reality: The Right to Mask, was held in Prague as a lead up to the Prague Quadrennial of 2015. This symposium discussed why theatricality, such as masking,7 continues to be regarded as inauthentic, as ways to seduce us with a false appearance or as ways to hide who we actually are . . . perceived as “mere theatre” as opposed to “the real,” and rejected or even forbidden for being deceptive . . . it is about time that we move beyond such easy condemnation. (Lotker 2013, NPF) The symposium argued for the “use of performance design in theatre and beyond in order to question and reclaim the place of the invisible, the imaginary and the theatrical in our lives” (Lotker 2013, NPF). Theatricality and the theatrical sign are a primary trope defining the scenographic design drawing because it is the site of the invisible and the imaginary, where the spectator is inherent in its very definition (Brandes 2007, NPF). Erika Fischer-Lichte explains how theatrical signs work: Here, a human body can, indeed, be recalled by another body or even an object, and an object can be replaced by another random object or a human body because, in their capacity as theatrical signs, they can signify one another. (Fischer-Lichte 1995, 87) As Davis and Postllwait identify, the binary tension between real and artifice, authentic and false, is theatricality’s “virtue, recognizing the gap between signifier and signified, truth and effect” (Thomas Postlewait 2003, 142). Objects as theatrical signifiers or in other words, narrative devices, inhabit the performative space of the scenographic design drawing. The objects



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embedded within the palimpsest are reflexive strategies or meta-theatrical tropes, such as the traditional stage curtain, the isolated door jamb and empty chair. All are signs constantly reminding the spectators that they are watching a “live” theatre performance. Meta-theatre is “theatre that is aware of itself.” Meta-theatre makes use of the conventions that haunt the theatre space, such as wings, entrances, exits, fire extinguishers, and stage directions. Instead of masking the mechanics of theatre, they are made visible. As Rayner suggests, “the Brechtian aim [was] for the theatricality of theatre to be obvious, without the mystique of illusionistic secrets” (Rayner 2006, 145). The ambiguity of the objects inspires the spectator as witness, voyeur, and scientific investigator (Rancière 2009, 4) to manifest meaning—or, perhaps, none at all? As Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests: The spectators are free to associate everything with anything and to extract their own semiosis without restriction and at will, or even to refuse to attribute any meaning at all and simply experience the objects presented to them in their concrete being. (Fischer-Lichte 1997, 57–8) The contemporary American scenographer Robert Wilson creates performative storyboards in charcoal, which explicitly employ the stage curtain as a “staged” theatrical sign in his designs. He is not interested in the sensuality of the curtain but employs it as a postmodern conceit, instilling his designs with an intellectual coolness, a deliberate hiatus in the performance. For instance, the storyboard drawing in charcoal on paper, for Wilson’s production of Einstein on the Beach (1976) divides the dramatic space with large areas of curtain which very precisely, almost clinically, delineate the scenes in this production (Figure 1.11). Andy Lavender writes of Wilson’s use of the storyboard to sequence the performed interruptions of the curtain: This familiar item, which usually merely opens and closes to signal the beginning and end of things, is positioned within the set and accordingly staged. It offers a constant reminder of the performative nature of the production. (Lavender 2001, 161)

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FIGURE 1.11  Robert Wilson. Storyboard drawing: charcoal on paper for Einstein on the Beach, 1976. Permission Noah Khoshbin Curator / Watermill Center / NY.

Source: Courtesy of Robert Wilson. http:​/​/www​​.robe​​rtwil​​son​.c​​om​/wo​​rks​-​o​​n​ -pap​​er Accessed June 12, 2019. Wilson’s curtain as a sign becomes a self-conscious, constructed theatricality—a calculated disruption revealing contradictory impossible spaces of the real and its double. Aronson suggests of Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach: Wilson’s scenography, more than most, is a true theater of images. The pictures, though sometimes bizarre or surreal . . . are strikingly beautiful. They are, furthermore, self-contained and generally self-referential. Moreover, rather than alienating, the work is mesmerizing, often inducing a trance-like state in the audience. The image within the frame of a Wilson production is highly structured and complete and rarely refers overtly to any other work of theatre. (Aronson 1991, 6) Spectators, in viewing Wilson’s theatre, are abruptly made aware that they are “seeing” theatre. Wilson repeatedly claims the importance of the visual over the verbal:



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Usually in the theatre the visual repeats the verbal. The visual takes second place to language. I don’t think that way. For me the visual is not an afterthought, not an illustration of the text. It has equal importance. If it tells the same story as the words, why look? . . . Most directors begin by analyzing a text, and the visual follows from that interpretation. This naïve use of the visual code bores me. I always start with a visual form. In most theatre the eye is irrelevant. Not in mine. I think with my eyes. (Holmberg 1996, 53) As Wilson states, he always starts with a visual form. This includes the scenographic design drawing as a thinking drawing—as the means by which to image in a material form the theatrical spaces contained within the mind’s eye. This enquiry identifies theatricality as an alternative model by which a “different” performative drawing, that is the scenographic design drawing, can be investigated. The space, both visible and hidden within the palimpsest of the scenographic design drawing, embodies an unrecognized spectral presence—“the temporal dimension of theatre which includes immediacy, intimacy, duration and disappearance” (Rayner 2006, 108). The performative, theatrical, and temporal spatiality intrinsic to these drawings is potentially an unrecognized difference, which within the field of scenography sets them apart from other forms of drawings. The scenographic design drawing becomes the synthesis of text, vision, and the temporal moment, where the imaging of text within the “thin” space of the palimpsest becomes a transformative process very early in the scenographer’s practice. These drawings are an unacknowledged performative drawing that represents an embodied space, a worlding, where the spectator has the freedom to make and transform meanings.

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In our “warehouse” of the memory there exist “catalogues” of photographic plates, registered by our senses. These are for the most part seamlessly meaningless details, pitiful ones, scrapes, clippings of a kind . . . and they are IMMOBILE! And, what is more important: TRANSPARENT, like photographic negatives. They can be placed on top of each other. And that’s why one should not be surprised if, for instance, distant events link up with those of today, personages get mixed up, and we have serious problems with history, morality, and all sorts of conventions. The waves of memory, now bright and peaceful, are suddenly stirred up, the elements are unleashed, HELL. (Gluhovic 2010, NPF) In the above prose, written by Tadeusz Kantor, there is identified his preoccupations with history as discarded objects of memory, loss, and death. Here he describes history as a refuse of abandoned photographic glass plates in which the broken fragments overlap and juxtapose events of the past

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with the present; history is not a linear continuum but a shattered collage of happenings.1 In the context of Kantor’s argument of “distant events link[ing] up with those of today” I have constructed the following two chapters as a brief historical overview of twentieth-century scenographic design drawing to highlight its interconnected relationship with contemporary scenographic practices. Prior to the 1960s, when theatre production and design studies became increasingly institutionalized, visual artists (primarily painters) and architects dominated the practice of designing for live performance; theatre, ballet, and opera were integral parts of their oeuvre. In examining these individuals, I am also cognizant of perpetuating an elitist master narrative propagated by the twentieth-century avant-garde. However, this selection has directly influenced the development and trajectory of my current art, design, and research practice. Beginning as a young design student in the early 1990s at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, Australia, I studied these artists and architects through the postmodern fractured lens of a hybridized and historicized space/spaces. In particular, it is the heightened theatrical worlding or the infinite possible worlds present in their drawings, which resonates with my own spatial design thinking, including a preoccupation with theatrical signs such as the spatial performativity of the “theatre curtain.” In hindsight, I can recognize the pronounced interconnections from the vaudevillian allusions embedded in Picasso’s Parade, 1917, the haunting surrealism of Dorothea Tanning, through to David Hockney’s parody of eighteenth-century staging (including the two-dimensional drawn trompe-l'œil curtains) in The Rake’s Progress, 1975. As a student I was particularly affected by the pageantry and spectacle of the Ballets Russes, (1909–29); my current drawing practice continues to echo this early influence. Thea Brejzek in The Scenographic (Re-)turn: Figures of Surface, Space and Spectator in Theatre and Architecture Theory 1680–1980 maintains there has occurred culturally three “shifts” or Three cultural “crises,” namely the seventeenth-century debate regarding the ontology of time and space, the passage into modernity in the early



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twentieth century and the rise of postmodernism in the late twentieth century, are portrayed here as “shifts” in the spatial theories and practices of theatre and architecture. (Brejzek 2015, 17) My core artistic output is a direct product of the third shift or scenographic turn, that is, from a modernist to a postmodern paradigm that occurred primarily in the 1980s and 1990s. In light of this, I have deliberately presented these early scenographic design drawings of painters and architects in chronological order to highlight the rapidly changing role of the twentieth-century “theatre designer”—from the nineteenth-century artisanal scene painters through to the current, more complex, holistic position of the twenty-first-century scenographer as the visual and spatial director of the multisensory, durational, and relational interplay of the body in performance, crafting assemblages and felt atmospheres (Rosen 2021, NPF).

The Second Scenographic Turn According to Brezjek, the second “scenographic turn,” or cultural “crises,” was the passage into modernity in the early twentieth century (Brejzek 2015, 17). As also Erica Fischer-Lichte explains: At the turn of the last century, the staging of plays became elevated to an artistic activity as the literary text of the play ceased to be the basis of performance. The historical avant-garde declared theatre a self-sufficient art form independent of literature. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 185) However, Arnold Aronson claims in Postmodern Design: There has been a strong tradition from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century of fine and plastic artists designing for the stage . . . these artists have, for the most part, shown a surprising inability to transpose their radical ideas onto the three-dimensional space of the stage in a manner as equally innovative as their art. (Aronson 1991, 3)

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In this chapter, I argue, counter to Aronson’s assertion, that the creative production of the early twentieth-century avant-garde artists was “for the most part” tempered or diminished in the translation from artwork to stage. These artists exemplify the scenographic encounter in the “in-between” space of painting, architecture, and the performing arts. As Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth maintain: Few of them have referred to their thinking in terms of scenography. It is the accumulative contributions of their work that enable such a concept as scenography to be recognised as relevant to the production of theatre today. (Joslin McKinney 2009, 9) It is imperative that scenographic methodologies, in particular these historical scenographic design drawings, are re-examined through a different, contemporary lens. Scott Palmer’s claim supports this position: We need to revisit perceived histories of theatre practice that have been established and subsequently re-enforced on the basis of linguistic translations that may lack a scenographic sensibility. (Palmer 2015, 1) These drawings are no longer theatrical ephemera to be neglected and marginalized but are an extraordinary record of scenographic thinking, ideation, and an epistemic tool that prompts knowledge and understanding within the practice of scenography. This chapter stages the scene, beginning with the Swiss architect and theorist Adolphe Appia (1862–1928) and the English actor, director, and scenographer Edward Gordon Craig (1872– 1966), who together effected change in the scenographic practices of the twentieth century.2 They both instigated the paradigm shift (Brejzek 2015, 17) from nineteenth-century scenic decoration to a modernist abstract spatial art form defined by light. This is evident in the wealth of scenographic design drawings they produced, identifying their revolutionary set and lighting concepts. Despite many of their designs being hypothetical, particularly in the case of Appia, their thinking had a far-reaching impact



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on not only twentieth-century scenography but across an interdisciplinary modernist paradigm. Western theatre in the late nineteenth century, as Richard Beacham argues, “was in crisis . . . artistically speaking, retrograde and irrelevant” (Beacham 1987, 1). Or, as Hilda Meldrum Brown also states: “stage production had been in the doldrums in the 19th-century theatre, hidebound as it was by conventions and an obsession with exact representation” (Brown 2016, 3). Across the visual and performance arts, the realist hegemony, dictated a century earlier by the French philosopher Denis Diderot, had given way to Richard Wagner’s symbolism, steeped in “myth, dream and archetype” (Beacham 2013, 2). The long-held conventions of rational thought and realistic imagery, description, and characterization were replaced by a language of symbols and signs that prompted an emotional imaginative response and a subconscious reawakening (Beacham 2013, 2). Diderot in his critique De la Poèsie Dramatique, 1758, had constructed the fourth wall to shut out the spectator from the stage or the beholder before a painting (Lessing 1986, 340). However, this new wave of symbolist thought allowed painters to create works that invited the spectator to “fill it in” with their own imagination, fantasies, and subjectivity (Beacham 2013, 2). This radical change in philosophy and aesthetics was slow-reaching scene décor, which remained under the vulgar pall of a “low” art form. Appia’s and Craig’s vision of a new theatre underpins the emergence of a modernist paradigm: a theatre divested of extraneous embellishment, illusionism, and artifice. The Calvinistic austerity of Appia’s modernism in particular appears to be at odds with the amplified eclecticism and spectacle of the Ballets Russes, which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, as Juliet Bellow argues in Modernism on Stage: The Ballet Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Under the aegis of Diaghilev’s company, avant-garde artists helped to create visually and conceptually rich works—a combination of installation and performance art—avant la lettre—that adapted modernist styles to the

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temporal, three-dimensional and corporeal medium of ballet . . . [which] produced new forms of figural art and responded to modernity’s new forms of embodiment. (Bellow 2013, 2)

Natalia Goncharova: Le Coq d’Or, 1914 The Ballets Russes, acclaimed as the most influential and ground-breaking ballet troupe of the twentieth century, brought together in Paris a revolutionary collaboration of visual artists, composers, choreographers, and dancers from across Europe (Bellow 2013, 1). Part of their legacy is the artistic endeavor that stemmed from the Russian visionary and impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929). His innovative artistic philosophy, “a total work of art,” was the integration or, as Kathleen Stewart would suggest, an assemblage of all the disparate elements involved in the creative production of a worlding. In its embryonic years, Diaghilev employed, almost exclusively, Russian émigrés to develop scenographic designs for the company’s repertoire—for instance, the artist/designers Alexandre Benois, Konstantin Korovin, Léon Bakst, Nicholas Roerich, Mikhail Larionov, and Natalia Goncharova. The Ballets Russes became a conduit for “Russia’s artistic traditions and brought the country culturally into the European mainstream . . . the vulgar energy of neo-primitivism, the coloured abstractions of rayism, and the geometry of constructivism” (Bowlt 1987, 28). The sumptuous, vibrant set and costumes steeped in Russian folklore and fairy tales entranced the Parisian audiences. It was the charismatic artist Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) who in particular combined Russian mythology and mysticism with the dynamic colorful tropes of Cubo-Futurism (Bowlt 1990, 46). Goncharova’s scenographic design drawings for the Ballets Russes production Le Coq d’Or witnessed her painting practice “enlivened” onto the Parisienne stage of the Théâtre National de l’Opéra (1914). Le Coq d’Or is an opera/ballet, composed by Nikolai RimskyKorsakov, choreographed by Michel Fokine with the libretto by Vladimir



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Belsky. The opera/ballet was based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s 1835 poem Zolotoi Petdok (The Tale of the Golden Cockerel) which was itself adapted from a Russian fairy-tale, a political satire depicting the bumbling, gluttonous Tzar Dodon and his fantastical kingdom as perceived through the eyes of a eunuch called the Astrologer. The scandal and outrage that arose from this short-lived production was due to the controversial placement of the opera singers. Dressed in identical dull red robes and fur-trimmed hats (Caddy 2012, 160), they were raised on tiered benches either side of the stage, isolating them from the immediate action of the dancers on center stage who were mimicking and miming the actions of the characters (Chamot 1979, 15). The dancers were also dressed in vivid, colorful costumes in sympathy with Goncharova’s set design. The singers were relegated to a role subordinate to the dancers.3 As Caddy posits: As a consequence, there were two of each character: one centre stage, mute but mobile; the other “un double momifié” (a mummified double). (Caddy 2012, 160) The sacrilegious conjunction of the music and choreography led to a law suit issued through the French court and supported by the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (Caddy 2012, 161). However, Goncharova’s designs received overwhelming acclaim. The Russian critic Serge Volkonsky wrote of Goncharova’s designs: If the walls of the French Grand Opera had vocal organs, they would have gasped with surprise at the sight of what was being shown there on 21 May 1914. A Russian fairy-tale with boyars, boyar’s wives, peasant women, wetnurses, with motley kerchiefs, traditional head-dresses and children’s toys presented itself before the spectators; it did not have the usual operatic form, but assumed the dimensions of a huge children’s book in which fabulous events are shown with all the hyperbole that is given to them by a child’s imagination. And what imagination was displayed here! Madame

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Goncharova, our famous “futuristic” painter, had surpassed all that could possibly be built by a child’s fantasy. (Militsa Pozharskaya 1990, 123) Goncharova is recognized as being seminal in the controversial and provocative new wave of Russian avant-garde artists who emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Her unorthodox behavior and public notoriety was characterized by “her acting and posturing, her masquerading and promenading—her own ‘theatralization of life’  ” (Bowlt 1990, 45). Goncharova and the Russian painter Mikhail Larionov, who became her “lifelong companion and partner in many epoch-making undertakings” (Chamot 1979, 7), together established the radical art collectives, Jack of Diamonds (1909–11), Donkey’s Tail, Osliny Khvast (1912–13), and also invented the art technique, Rayonism (1912–14). Goncharova’s scenographic design drawings for Le Coq d’Or are a manifestation of her experimental, vibrant, and colorful painting practice, which was synonymous with the heightened theatricality of the Russian avant-garde. Typifying her sheer creative energy, the drawings are executed with exuberance and unrelenting energy, all the while underscoring the iconic elements celebrated and distinctive in her paintings of this period. Her scenographic design drawings for Le Coq d'Or range from the thinking sketches in graphite pencil through to the more complex set illustrations in gouache and watercolor illuminating neo-Byzantine fantastical landscapes. Goncharova compiled repeated studies for the design. Her thinking sketches are diagrammatic, avoiding a representation of a three-dimensional perspectival view and instead flattening the designs in a manner similar to a sixth-century Byzantine mosaic. She completed multiple sketches in graphite and charcoal. Striking and bold graphic floral motifs and geometric shapes dominate these neo-primitivistic renditions. The scenographic space is reduced to a two-dimensional pattern. However, in Goncharova’s more developed scenographic design drawings for Le Coq d’Or, executed in gouache and watercolor, her complex and intricate art practice comes to the fore. For her design proposal for an unrealized



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backdrop curtain for Le Coq d’Or (Chamot 1979, Plate 38, 56), she employed the harsh angular lines of Rayonism exploding out of the frame, the geometric layering and abstraction of space typical of cubism and, most significantly, the pictorial “splicing of time”—the quintessence of Futurism and Futurist theatre; the fractionated spatiotemporal aesthetic where the spectator is challenged by the multiple and simultaneous realities (Caddy 2012, 171). This drawing in gouache is an interlocked milieu of Russian folk motifs, carved intricate wooden fretwork doorways and windows, a zigzagging staircase and cockerels. The fantastical freneticism would have enveloped the spectator in a cascade of spectacular color. By contrast, Goncharova’s watercolor drawing of the backdrop curtain for Act One4 resonates with a different expression of her artistic oeuvre: much less frenzied, illustrating a more nostalgic and romantic view of pre-revolutionary Russia. Here, she depicts a dazzling, rich tapestry of traditional floral motifs and lubok prints, Byzantine onion domes, and a Fauvist explosion of color which generate the exotic landscape of the ancient city of Azerbaijan in which the ballet Le Coq d’Or was set. This drawing is framed in heavy theatre curtains of a red floral pattern on a white background, a trompe l'œil “drawn open” to reveal the gorgeous fairy-tale mise-en-scène—a scene within a scene or world within a world. Goncharova’s designs originate in Russian tradition but emerge as the multi-planar aesthetic of Futurism. Her costume designs are also bold, simple silhouettes in lurid floral appliques and traditional lubok prints. The dancers are a box of Russian wooden toys come to life. Goncharova drew inspiration from tradition to fuel the modern. As John E Bowlt in Stage Design and the Ballets Russes suggests: Drawing on [her] knowledge and appreciation of indigenous art forms such as the lubok (cheap, hand colored print), the peasant toy, and the icon, Goncharova .  .  . suddenly transformed the Russian stage into a primitive buffoonery. With [her] bright colors, distorted perspectives, and love of play, they imbued the theater with an effervescence and vitality

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that reminded spectators of the balagany,5 the fairground, and the circus. (Bowlt 1987, 37) Michel Fokine, who choreographed Le Coq d’Or, was at first reticent about Diaghilev’s choice of scenographer but later exclaimed: Gontcharova not only provided beautiful decors and costume designs she also manifested an extraordinary, fantastic love for her work. .  .  . It was touching to see how, with their own hands, she and Larionov painted all the props. Each piece was a work of art. (Bowlt 1987, 38) Goncharova revisited her work for Le Coq d’Or in 1937 for the revival by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a successor company led by Colonel Wassily de Basil. This production premiered on September 23, 1937, at Covent Garden, London, to great acclaim. An examination of Goncharova’s scenographic design drawings through a scenographic rather than fine art lens is critical in regard to her artistic output viewed in its entirety. It is evident that a parallel can be drawn between the evolution of her art and her scenographic practice. As John E. Bowlt argues in Natalia Goncharova and Futuristic Theater: Goncharova manifested an original, forceful, even abrasive personality that sets her clearly apart. . . . The principal area in which Goncharova excelled was the theatre. (Bowlt 1990, 44)

Pablo Picasso: Parade, 1917 After the Russian revolution in 1917, Diaghilev remained in Western Europe until his death in 1929. He was highly selective about the European artists he chose for his collaborations; only those he deemed exceptional were invited to participate, such as Pablo Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Coco Chanel, Max Ernst, Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, and Henri Matisse to name a few. They provoked change and brought something new, something avant-garde



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and startling, to the conservative European ballet art form (Bellow 2013, 2). The designs by these revolutionary artists had an astonishing influence on scenography and on the development of the scenographic design drawing; for the first time, this theatrical ephemera was considered of aesthetic value and therefore worth curating as a record of an extraordinarily innovative period in theatre’s history. In this context, I shall examine Picasso’s scenographic design drawings for Parade, a one-act ballet directed by Jean Cocteau and performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, in 1917. The ballet was produced by the Ballets Russes and the music was composed by Eric Satie. Picasso’s theatrical genius was manifest in a multitude of thinking drawings and illustrations for the overture curtain (stage firewall), set, and costumes. This was Picasso’s first commission for theatre. He was specifically chosen by Serge Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau to prompt a new direction from the now-tired formula of the Ballets Russes (Cooper 1987, 17). The ballet Parade was the turning point, signall[ing] a shift away from Russian folklore, oriental or “Primitive” ballets and towards urbane, experimental productions which focused on contemporary life and relied heavily on avant-garde artists. (Rothschild 1991, 32) There were many factors that influenced Picasso’s decision to accept the Parade commission in 1916. First, the offer by Cocteau to go to Rome and meet the Parade team gave Picasso, who was then absorbed in serious artistic problems of his own, a chance to escape war-torn Paris. There was a strong expectation that the theatre would revitalize his flagging creative urge which at that point was being stifled by a particularly austere period of cubism (Cooper 1987, 19–20). Also, Picasso had always indicated a compelling interest in the circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and music-hall in his paintings and drawings prior to Parade. In 1915–16, he produced many pencil drawings of circus performers, particularly Harlequins, which he later recast after Parade into the Salvado Harlequin paintings (1923). The opportunity to work on Parade meant he

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could submerge himself completely in the theatre world: in rehearsals, backstage, and in the dressing rooms, drawing the performers in action. As Douglas Cooper suggests: “Picasso’s artistic outlook was transformed and the course of his life changed” (Cooper 1987, 28). Picasso’s designs for the set of Parade were partially inspired by the décor of Teatro dei Piccoli, a marionette theatre troupe in Rome created by Vittorio Podrecca in 1914. Picasso saw the tiny theatre within the larger theatre of the Sala Verdi in the Palazzo Odescalchi, Rome (Sammartano 2009, NPF). Parade’s set is a theatre within a theatre—a Parisienne boulevard spectacle of a vaudeville troupe “parading” their “act” in front of a fairground booth in an attempt to lure the passing spectators inside to see the main spectacle. The troupe includes two acrobats, a Chinese conjuror and a little American girl, all of which are introduced by two gigantic, ten-foot high cubist clad “stage managers” and a comical cheval-jupon (a horse played by two actors). The finale is a frenzied ragtime dance by all the performers in their last desperate bid to draw in the indifferent spectators. As Deborah Rothschild says: [The] theme of the ballet is artistic frustration as the performers fail to entice the audience to enter the real show inside. At the conclusion of the first performances the managers and actors collapsed in despair on the stage, and a placard was lowered reading: “The drama which did not take place for those people who stayed outside was by Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.” Thus, the outcast Parade performers stood for the creative artists themselves, while the misapprehending audience of the scenario represented an uncomprehending public. In a neat dovetailing of art and reality, the outraged opening night audience was true to its cast role. (Rothschild 1991, 189) Picasso reveled in this “witty, satirical and brash” narrative (Cooper 1987, 21); the point is that visually Picasso does not stop short at what appears to be. Picasso looks and feels more deeply: he wants to capture what escapes the



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eye, the wiles, the artifice, the cunning, the “real life” element over which is cast the veil of illusion. (Cooper 1987, 12) It is this populist subject matter, alien to the elite ballet art form, that identifies Parade as innovative and original, as does the ingenuity of the tripartite collaboration of Picasso, Cocteau, and Satie. The overture curtain is a highly romantic evocation of the circus painted by Picasso and Diaghilev’s scene painters at the studios on the Buttres–Chaumont. The painterly style is deliberately naturalistic and somewhat naïve, depicting a circus troupe backstage having a supper prior to their performance. The motley, colorful group of clowns, a harlequin, musicians, and acrobats appear to be sitting on wooden crates and trestles among the stored backstage scenery: a painted backdrop of a ruined landscape, a scenic flat of a classical Doric column, a ladder with a monkey atop, and billowing theatrical red curtains. To the left of the work is a ballerina in a tutu and feathery wings, pirouetting on the back of a winged white horse as if preparing to enter on stage. Picasso again produced multiple thinking drawings in graphite on paper.6 These early generative works are a more realist rendering of backstage, depicting the performers cramped in by the painted flats, theatrical properties and stored curtains. These developed into the final work in tempera which is a dreamy mise-en-scène of an idealized theatrical tableau reminiscent of Degas.7 The overture curtain stood in contrast to what was to follow—a disjunctive mingling of disparate elements; a starkly monochromatic cubist-inspired set, a cacophony of discordant music, unsettling choreography, and an eclectic collection of disturbed characters. Picasso’s set design for Parade8 is a cubist cityscape inspired by the view from his own Parisienne window which he had frequently drawn in the years prior to his commission (Cooper 1987, 30).9 For the set design he drew multiple iterations in graphite and ink on paper of the Parisienne skyline, transfigured into a compressed, multiperspective, bizarrely angled and geometrized composition behind a central decorative proscenium arch,

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floorboards, and Italianate balustrade—an abstracted synthesis representing the small fairground booth stage/entrance dwarfed by the menacing facades of the encircling skyscrapers.10 Center of the proscenium arch is a stylized motif of an ancient Greek lyre—a symbol of theatricality and theatron. This ancient art form is juxtaposed within the nightmarish and strident glare of modernity, a contrast between the alienation of the urban modern sprawl and the romanticism of traditional theatre. However, it is the character of the Horse or cheval jupon that encapsulates Picasso’s anarchic and provocative artistic oeuvre. Due to the extensive body of drawings, we can see the evolution of Picasso’s Horse from the embryonic beginnings in the form of rudimentary graphite scribbles on scraps of paper to the production photographs of the final costume worn by the performers.11 Originally, the “third manager” sat astride the Horse as a dummy but was deleted in rehearsals because the prototype kept falling off.12 Picasso’s drawings trace this creative journey, giving an insight into his obsessive attention to detail where every aspect and change to the costume during rehearsal is documented. From these sketches, Picasso constructed rough prototypes using cardboard, canvas, metal, and anything he could lay hands on lying around the theatre (Rothschild 1991, 165). The Horse’s head took its inspiration from the exotic and the primitive with the deliberate referencing to tribal African masks and motifs, such as the Senufo and Bambara animal masks. The Horse also continued Picasso’s artistic preoccupation with the complex ambiguity of the dual perspective of the face: cubism’s themes of displacement and contradiction. In the Horse, Picasso continued his obsession with representations of violence and aggression, so brilliantly exemplified in his earlier, most famous, and controversial painting Les Demoiselles d Avignon (1907). As Richard Axsom posits: What was significant about the Horse’s head is the two aspects conveyed abrupt changes in expressiveness. . . . In the head alone, Cubist ambiguity is



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displayed: a back and forth between a passive and aggressive mood. (Axsom 1979, 73–4) Also, as Rothschild states: At the time of Parade Picasso was consciously experimenting with double faces which created disturbing psychological tensions .  .  . mak[ing] sketches emphasising the horse’s dual aspect. . . . The evocation of a feeling of disquiet under a frivolous and witty façade—[is] seen concretely in the horse. (Rothschild 1991, 18) The Horse viewed from the front had a cross-eyed, engaging and comical, buffoonish appeal but from the side its face revealed bared teeth, transforming it into a menacing and demonic beast. The audience found this disturbing to the point of outrage, as well as an affront to their notions of what was considered decent and artistically appropriate for “Ballet” (Rothschild 1991, 186). Picasso gravitated toward popular entertainment for his own personal amusement. It was therefore only natural that his art practice plundered ideas, themes, and images from what was considered “low art” forms, such as vaudeville, boxing, cinema, pantomime, advertising, and the circus. Picasso’s hilarious two-man horse was straight from the slapstick gag performed by the clown buffoons in the circus arena. At the opening night of Parade, the audience had anticipated the strange cubist elements in Picasso’s design. The genteel patronage of the Ballets Russes expected something modern, perhaps subversive, simply because Picasso’s fame and notoriety preceded him, but by the conclusion of the evening they were shocked, uncomprehending and scandalized to the point of storming out of the theatre, by what they considered the vulgar intrusion of “low” popular entertainment (Rothschild 1991, 32). As the composer Francis Poulenc describes in his autobiography: For the first time . . . music hall invaded art with a capital A. A one–step is danced in Parade! When that began the audience let loose with boos and applause. . . . It was real bedlam. (Poulenc 1963, 88–9)

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Parade also opened in 1917. For many of the hostile audience, the content was both offensive and trifling in comparison to what was occurring on the battlefields where the French were struggling against imminent defeat. Cocteau got more than he bargained for. In the words of Cocteau, it was when Picasso’s Horse made its entrance: I feared that the hall would collapse. I have heard the cries of a bayonet charge in Flanders, but it was nothing compared to what happened that night at the Chatelet Theatre. (Rothschild 1991, 33) The year 1917 marked a turning point in Picasso’s art. His dilemma between cubism and naturalism came to a head. Both these idioms collided in Parade resulting in something fresh and invigorated. He executed multiple drawings, mainly in graphite, ink, and gouaches, during his time in Italy. These were exploratory in nature, not finished works, so they reveal the intimate and experimental workings of Picasso’s artistic oeuvre. He went on subsequently to design a number of Diaghilev ballets and “the decors he created were among the most imaginative and the most memorable of our century—the theatre in return has greatly nourished his art” (Cooper 1987, 84).

Dorothea Tanning: The Night Shadow, 1946 With the death of Diaghilev in 1929, the Ballet Russes metamorphosed into Colonel de Basil’s Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo (1931). A multitude of new and original productions followed, scenographically designed by artists such as Picasso, Joan Miró, Georges Rouault, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, and the American surrealist painter and poet Dorothea Tanning. In 1946, the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo produced at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, the one-act ballet the Night Shadow: music adapted by Vittorio Rieti from themes composed by Vincenzo Bellini, choreographed by George Balanchine (Diaghilev’s most influential Russian protégé and later the co-founder of the New York Ballet), and designed by Dorothea Tanning. The Night Shadow, a



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hauntingly beautiful work, embodies both Tanning’s scenographic and artistic legacy. Unlike Salvador Dali, Tanning’s surrealism is steeped in the fantastical nightmarish worlds of nineteenth-century Gothic and fantasy literature. Her contribution to twentieth-century scenographic design was recognized in recent times with two significant exhibitions, Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage, at the Drawing Center New York (2010), and Dorothea Tanning, at the Tate Modern, London (2019). The latter was a large-scale retrospective of her work, including her scenographic design drawings. Tanning was born into a strict Lutheran family in Galesburg, Illinois (1910), and died in New York (2012) aged 101 years. Her art and literary practice were defined by her early childhood in the small community of Galesburg where she said, “nothing happened but the wallpaper” (Tanning 1979, 2). She escaped the boredom and banal into the psycho-melodramas of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Wimpole, and the poems of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. She also experienced reoccurring dreams that later became the quintessence of her surrealist oeuvre. In 1936, Tanning attended the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the MoMA, New York. This was a seminal moment for Tanning who wrote in her biography Between Lives: An Artist and Her World: Here is the infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for. Here is the limitless expanse of POSSIBILITY, a perspective having only incidentally to do with painting on the surfaces. (Tanning 2001, 49) Tanning realized there were others like her who painted from their imagination and not from “reality.” Her work combines the familiar with the strange, the conventional with the inexplicable, and is underpinned by an exploration of unbridled female desire and sexuality. The Night Shadow was Tanning’s first foray into scenographic design. In 1942, she met Balanchine at a gathering of like-minded surrealist artists and writers at the New York gallery owned by the art-dealer Julien Levy. Here she also met her future husband of thirty years, the German Dada and surrealist artist, Max Ernst (1891–1976). In 1946, they were married in Hollywood at a double ceremony with the surrealist artist Man Ray and dancer Juliet Browner.

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The Night Shadow, a nineteenth-century-inspired Gothic tragedy reminiscent of the phantasmagorical imaginations of Edgar Allen Poe, is set at an opulent and macabre masquerade ball; the guests were attired in Tanning’s dazzling array of elaborate costumes and bizarre head-dresses.13 The ballet opens with the protagonist, the Poet, flirting with the Coquette. At a certain point he finds himself alone, when a beautiful apparition in ethereal, gossamer white materializes before him. The Poet, mesmerized, desperately tries to wake the Somnambulist14 only to be seen by the jealous Coquette. Piqued, she has the Poet killed. The apparition re-emerges to bear the Poet’s lifeless body away. Despite the simple plot, the Night Shadow was, for Tanning’s fertile imagination, an unchartered terrain. Tanning’s scenographic design drawing of the set,15 executed in watercolor, captures an atmosphere of menace. The proscenium is a Gothic ruin in grey stone; upstage is a painted backdrop of a vast desolate landscape of more ruined archways and colonnades sprouting anamorphic vegetation; on the prompt side or stage right is a lit Gothic doorway leading into a mysterious stone tunnel. Long shadows, heightened chiaroscuro, and the pall of a sickly pale green light pervade this sketch, completed in 1945.16 The open doorway creates an air of expectation and suspense, of things hidden. Who or what is going to appear through the door? In the Night Shadow, Tanning creates a scenographic mise-en-scène resonant of the body of surrealist work she produced between the paintings Birthday (1942) and The Guest Room (1950–2).17 Her preoccupation with both Gothic ruins18 and doors is evident in this prolific creative phase before and after the Night Shadow. Victoria Carruthers identifies in Dorothea Tanning and Her Gothic Imagination how the image of the door offers the artist a device with which to explore her preoccupation with thresholds and liminal spaces that connect reality and fantasy. Imagery depicting veils, fabric, walls, wallpaper and doorways are utilized throughout the artist’s career to signify the surfaces that reveal or conceal



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alternate states of reality. Ordinary domestic furniture is often used as a site for transformation and other-worldly inhabitation. (Carruthers 2011, 136) Doors became an obsession with Tanning—a persistent leitmotif in her art and literary practice. As Tanning herself commented in an interview titled Dorothea Tanning Paints Again, and Speaks for Herself: I do recall I had a dream about doors a long time ago, and those doors appeared in many canvases afterward. It was a horrible dream. I opened it and it was another door right behind it. (McQuaid 1999, 6) The images which fill Tanning’s drawings and paintings are from deep within her subconscious interiority—dreamscapes fragmented by walls, corridors, and doors and framed in white ruffled sheets or starched tablecloths reminiscent of a seventeenth-century Dutch painting staged with a baroque curtain. The cloths appear to be symbolic of ominous dark clouds enveloping the mise-enscène.19 These theatrical devices are a threshold which separates and divides two spaces, allowing the spectator to hover in the realm of possibility—one of both anticipation and trepidation. Tanning’s surrealist works reveal, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues, “an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity” (Bachelard 1964, 83). Alyce Mahon, the curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning: Beyond the Door, Another Invisible Door also argues: The door stands not simply as a threshold in Tanning’s art but as an invitation to venture beyond the real and to enter a world of dreams and fears. We witness a never-ending perspective which is not meant to alienate but seduce the spectator. (Mahon 2018, NPF) The Gothic door in Tanning’s sketch for the Night Shadow20 anticipates an imagined interior—a very palpable, endless winding corridor perhaps leading beyond to more doors. The Gothic-ruined archways painted on the backdrop are

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located in limitless space, again evocative of her surrealist paintings, for instance Maternity (1946–7), in which an isolated mother cradling a child stands before an opened bedroom door in a yellow desert which is also a simulation of a theatrical door jamb representing a bedroom door. The door jamb on stage represents both an entrance and an exit. Here in Tanning’s painting the staged door jamb in an endless, barren landscape generates a deep sense of foreboding and emptiness. Arnold Aronson posits: “On the stage, a door is a sign of the liminal, the unknown, the potential, the terrifying, the endless” (Aronson 2004, 340). Theatre is, in large part, about presence and absence (Aronson 2004, 332), and the single lone door on stage establishes this boundary by delineating “two separate spaces: the world seen and the world unseen; the world known and the unknown; the tangible and implied” (Aronson 2004, 332). For Aronson, the open door becomes an analogy of death and loss. He proposes: on some level .  .  . the doors [entrances] on stage .  .  . echo this opening onto the inner world of the soul. Every time a door opens on the stage, a cosmos of infinite possibility is momentarily made manifest; every time a door closes certain possibilities are extinguished and we experience a form of death. (Aronson 2004, 332) Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space suggests: The door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. (Bachelard 1964, 222) In a similar vein, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio suggests that the moment of opening the door and stepping into the light and onto the stage is a metaphor for the human consciousness: I have always been intrigued by the moment when, as we sit waiting in the audience, the door to the stage opens and a performer steps into the light or



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to take the other perspective, the moment when a performer who waits in semi darkness sees the same door open, revealing the lights, the stage, and the audience. (Damasio 1999, 3) The American scenographer Robert Edmond Jones (1887–1954) believed the unopened door on stage was somehow lifeless—dead. Until the performer came through the door onto the stage, the design remained inert and incomplete, containing only “the promise of a completion, a promise which the actor later fulfills. . . . It waits for the actor and, not until the actor has made his entrance, does it become an organic whole” (Oenslager 1975, 12). Similarly, Tanning, in an interview titled Among the Sacred Monsters, commented: My work is about leaving a door open to the imagination so that the viewer sees something else every time. (Gruen 1988, 182) Doors also appear in the dreams of the contemporary American architect and scenographer George Tsypin (1954–). They are closed doors; however, instead of shutting off creativity, their hidden mystery stimulates ideas and the mind’s eye: the mystery doesn’t get cracked open. You touch it—you encounter it. Or at least you discover a little door. You never enter that door, but at least you identify the door. My role is to identify the door . . . there is a world inside your head. And I see if I can bring that world to a live installation, but essentially you only have your own world in your mind. There is only that, and you just have to have the courage to make it happen. (Ebrahimian 2006, 147) Theatre gave Tanning the opportunity to enliven her surrealist tableau of torment, fear, and an oppressive darkness—feelings of isolation and vulnerability. Her enduring preoccupation with the door represented her own inner psychodrama. As she commented, endless stairs, the unscalable walls, even the doors I had painted, half open like Venus’s flytraps, irresistible snares inviting me in . . . From there it was

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an easy leap to leap to a dream of countless doors. Oh, there was perspective, trapped in my own room. (Tanning 2001, 62–3) As Tanning said of her 1942 introduction to George Balanchine, “A momentous meeting, for it began a collaboration that literally swept me off my feet” (Tanning 2001, 86). Tanning and Balanchine collaborated together on four ballets between 1946 and 1953.

The Ballet Russes in Australia, 1936–40 Adolphe Appia’s revolutionary modernism, flourishing primarily in Europe, was slow reaching Australia, but when it arrived in the form of the Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes companies in Melbourne between 1936 and 1940, the impact was profound.21 “Here for the first time was a practical application of modernism on a large scale. For most Australians, exposure to European modernism had been limited to seeing works reproduced in art books and journals” (Laffan 2004, 2). The extraordinary public response to the first tour extended a ten-week tour to nine months—from mid-October 1936 to mid-July 1937. The avant-garde designs transformed Australian theatre thinking, and subsequently there emerged the modernist painter/ scenographers of Australian theatre: Sydney Nolan, John Brack, Leonard French, Donald Friend, Loudon Sainthill, and Arthur Boyd, to name a few. These artists left behind an incredible body of work revealing their visual design methodology through hundreds of drawings and sketches for theatre, ballet, and opera. Their conceptual thinking sketches are a legacy underpinned by historical perspectives and considered in terms of social and cultural significance. Earlier in the millennium, the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne, Australia, held three exhibitions on Australian scenography with a particular focus on the scenographic design drawings of the twentieth-century visual



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artists who included theatre as part of their artistic oeuvre. This rich and untapped Australian history is exemplified in these three exhibitions: Creative Australia and the Ballet Russes (2009), Drawn to the Stage; Australian Stage Design from the Arts Centre’s Performing Arts Collection (2007), and Creating a Scene: Australian Artists as Stage Designers 1940-1965 (2004). The catalogues do not so much discuss the drawings in detail as give a fascinating insight into this period of accelerated creative output in Australia’s theatrical history, when theatre design was largely dominated by painters. As Margaret Trudgeon expressed in the introduction in the catalogue for the exhibition Creative Australia and the Ballets Russes: [the] influence and originality—the cycle of art; and more specifically the profound cultural effect that the Ballets Russes tours had upon modern Australian dance, design and visual arts from the 1930s to the present day. (Trudgeon 2009, Introduction)

Arthur Boyd: Elektra, 1963 In this context, I examine the scenographic design drawings of the prominent Australian painter Arthur Boyd (1920–99) who, living as a young man in Melbourne in the late 1930s, would have been indirectly influenced by the Ballet Russes’ far-reaching legacy and impact on Australian visual culture. Boyd, recognized as the Antipodean Chagall (Bennetts 1994),22 created profoundly humanistic paintings of trauma, bestial desire, loss, and transcendence—an expressionistic juxtaposition of classical mythology and biblical themes set in the vast, hostile Australian landscape. These recurrent visual tropes are also evident in Boyd’s innovative but little-known scenographic design drawings of the set and costumes for the ballet Elektra, the score by Malcom Arnold and choreographed by Robert Helpmann for the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, London, 1963. Based on this ancient Greek tragedy, Boyd’s charcoal sketches

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and etchings, completed as part of his scenographic process, were subsequently enlarged on a massive scale as black-and-white painted backdrops which enveloped the entire dramatic space, for instance, the sketch Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns (1962–3) was expanded to become one of the backdrops for Elektra (Figure 2.1). The fury and violence that radiated from this sketch echoed Boyd’s iconic Nude and Beast series of paintings, also completed during this time (1960–5). The contrast between the agitated slashes and the sensuous curving lines in Boyd’s scenographic design drawings resonates, for example, in his painting Nude with Beast III (1962)23—a deeply disturbing pictorial narrative of sacrifice, rape, and terror which takes on a frenzied corporeal performativity in Helpmann’s ballet. This parallel is even more obvious when comparing Boyd’s etching for the backdrop of Elektra, White

FIGURE 2.1  Arthur Boyd. Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns (Elektra backdrop), 1962–3, etching and aquatint, printed in black ink with plate-tone, from one plate, 39.6 × 46.7 cm.

Source: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The Arthur Boyd gift 1975.



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Joined Figures (1962–3),24 with his sketch in black ink and wash, Weeping Head with Nude and Beast (1960–5).25 The similarity of the curvilinear composition, expressionistic line, and enlarged eye in profile evidences the synchronicity of Boyd’s scenographic and art practice. There is also a strong parallel between the devouring open jaws center of Boyd’s interlocking nude and beast and his scenographic sketch in black ink of a serpent’s gaping carnivorous mouth located in the crotch of Clytemnestra’s costume.26 Boyd’s drawings reveal his artistic preoccupation with motifs of violence and carnal lust: the jagged teeth, horns, claws, and shark heads wrestling with anamorphic demonized creatures. Boyd, having previously relocated to London in 1959, embraced the opportunity when unexpectedly approached by Helpmann to transform his current painting practice into a creation of gargantuan proportions. The innovation and originality inherent in these drawings, blown-up to such an exaggerated scale, were their performative agency. It was the heightened drama emanating from the ferociously strident execution of the drawings in black on a white ground that enveloped the spectator in an enigmatic other worldliness. This was further amplified by Boyd’s costume designs, for instance, the Furies wore purple skin-tight full-length bodysuits with weirdly placed yellow eyes. Elektra had long vermillion tresses that streamed behind her as she was catapulted into the air (Figure 2.2). Orestes, also a red head, was naked except for a pair of gold metallic studded trunks. The combination of the strangely surreal costuming and the blood vermillion stage floor further intensified the sexually charged composition (Figure 2.3), the glowing red color heightening the sensual and ecstatic choreography of the dancers and submerging the spectatorial field of vision in a sanguineous glow. Elektra was critically panned at its London premier and condemned as vulgar, offensive and sexually gratuitous. The audiences were scandalized by the overt eroticism, the unrelenting discordant musical score, the blatantly suggestive costuming and the heightened hedonism that emanated from the theatricalized panoramic drawn setting. Clive Barnes scathingly wrote, “Helpmann’s Elektra may possibly be the first ballet ever to make me

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FIGURE 2.2 Production photograph for Elektra, 1966. Australian News and Information Bureau.

Source: Courtesy of National Archives of Australia.

FIGURE 2.3  Production photograph for Elektra, 1966.

Source: Courtesy of National Archives of Australia.



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physically ill” (Barnes 1963, 12). Fernau Hall attacked the choreography as “an inexpressive hodge-podge of clichés” (Hall 1963, 6–7). Peter Williams also mocked Helpmann’s composition but seemingly praised Boyd’s set designs describing them as a calligraphic nightmare as a surround to this turbulent dance work .  .  . four vast canvases . . . on which furies and sex symbols are interlocked in a Hieronymous Bosch version of hell. (Williams 1963, 16) Richard Buckle, for the Sunday Times, March 31, 1963, also spoke favorably of Boyd’s scenographic designs. He wrote: It opens with drums and brass in a burst of boiling rage. Scarlet floorcloth and a flight of scarlet steps set off Arthur Boyd’s huge images of love and death drawn in black and white. [Nadia] Nerina, made up witchlike with streaming vermillion hair, gloating over avenging axe, is Elektra. [David] Blair, naked and redheaded, is Orestes. There are eight male purple Erinyes or Spirits of Vengeance who fling Elektra through the air in a variety of breathtaking dives. . . . The sets of Arthur Boyd, Australia’s Chagall . . . must be seen—they are a shot in the arm. (Walker 1998b, 280) Boyd’s highly eroticized scenographic designs were a visual shock to the outraged British public. But, despite this controversial reception and following acclaim, research remains scarce outside Australia regarding Boyd’s scenographic design drawings. The Australian premiere of Elektra opened as part of the Adelaide Festival in 1966. Clytemnestra’s costume was modified for the conservative Australian audience. The snake’s jaws were placed above the thigh, rather than between the legs of the dancer. The Furies’ costumes were altered to black and white with a swirling linear pattern, blending them into Boyd’s stage cloths. Despite these changes the South Australian press still responded with the following: The ballet was an unremitting attack on the senses. Malcom Arnold’s loud, pulsating music was matched by the visual assault of the red floor, Arthur

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Boyd’s black and white décor of chaotic sexuality and the frenzy of the movement on stage. (Alan Brissenden 2010, 75) Beth Dean in the Sydney Morning Herald, March 18, 1966, wrote: Lust in its own devouring . . . is expressed in a setting by Arthur Boyd of erotic black and white curlings above a vermillion flooring. It is displayed against the distraught tensions of Malcom Arnold’s music. Some viewers will be shocked by the erotic emphasis of the work but there is no denying its theatrical impact. (Walker 1998a, 419) In all, Boyd worked on only a smattering of theatrical productions; he was reluctant to devote too much time to this different medium because he felt it was a distraction to his painting practice. In an interview with Hal Missingham in London 1965, Boyd mused that he would “like to do a great opera” but this could be “a waste of time . . . in the sense you would not be getting on with . . . paintings . . . more or less excuses to relieve oneself from having to think too hard” (Boyd 1965). However, Boyd’s scenographic design drawings for Elektra remain one of the most astounding insights into his artistic core—their modernity would even today amaze and astonish.

The Playful Aesthetic of David Hockney To conclude this chapter, I review the playful and colorful scenographic design drawings of the English artist David Hockney (1937–). The focus is on Hockney’s imaginative and indefatigable explorations of the possibilities of image making for the 1975 production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, absurdist libretto by W. H Auden and Chester Kallman, directed by John Cox and produced by the Glyndebourne Opera, UK. This was Hockney’s first opera. I review Hockney’s scenographic design drawings from a contemporary standpoint in contrast to what has been previously written. Instead of analyzing



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his work from the perspective of the painter, I shall reverse this process and look at it from the different and under-researched gaze of the scenographer. Embodied in David Hockney’s scenographic design drawings is his unique design aesthetic which developed in conjunction with his studio art practice. As Martin Friedman in Hockney Paints the Stage argues, “An energetic dialogue existed between his studio and theatre projects; one nourished the other” (Friedman 1983, 45). Hockney’s immense body of work includes hundreds of drawings and sketches for theatre and opera. His complete immersion in drawing would leave him, at the conclusion of a theatre production, creatively reinvigorated. This renewed energy was reflected in his studio artworks. The discipline of drawing is fundamental to Hockney’s creative spirit. As he disclosed in Drawings Are the Top: They Are Just Magical: Drawing is the most immediate thing you can do as an artist. It is direct. Drawing gives you a confidence and it opens your eyes. It isn’t the world that has grown tired, it is us at looking at it. We need to revitalise our way of looking at the world. (David Hockney 2009, 15) As Ulrich Luckhardt and Paul Melia argue in David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective: [Hockney] produces drawings at every opportunity, even if they have only been important as sketches or as contributions to his repertoire of ideas, rather than finished works in their own right. In the stage designs .  .  . drawings were used to first visualize the sets and then again for the preparation of designs on which the scale model was based. The direction and effect of light, a crucial factor in set placement, was then precisely prepared with the model. (Ulrich Luckhardt 1995, 11) Hockney, recognized as an expert draftsman, embraced the challenge and the visual feast of the operatic medium. His scenographic design drawings express a spontaneity and immediacy; they reveal changes and indicate new directions in his scenographic process which are synonymous with the unpredictability

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and fleeting ephemerality of theatre. Unlike Boyd, Hockney did not shy away from the collaborative and immersive core of this art form but adopted the performing arts as another vehicle to experiment with and test new ideas and to express his latest artistic endeavor. Hockney’s active participation in the spectacle of opera led to formative shifts in his painting practice. He said of his experience: The Rake’s Progress came at a good time for me because it was a period when I was trying to figure out what to do in painting. So when this came along in 1974 it ended something for me and took me into something else . . . I’d always loved the theater. In fact, I was interested in it before I was first asked to design productions, because I’d used theatrical ideas in painting. And I’d talked about it; I said long ago that I thought of all my painting as drama.27 Some of my early pictures have titles such as Theatrical Landscape. I was always interested in the theater because it is about illusion in space. (Hockney 2008, NPF) When Hockney accepted an invitation in 1974 from the director John Cox to design a new version of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress for the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, he grasped the opportunity to plunder this rich and very different source of heightened illusionism.28 It was also an escape from the artistic rut he was grappling his way through at this time—a period of intense academicism and virtuosity in technique (Friedman 1983, 186).29 Hockney did many studies for the opera. The primary trope was the large-scale crosshatching and parallel lines, a drawing technique echoing William Hogarth’s original series of engravings (1734) and associated with eighteenth-century engravers. Hockney’s “drawn” set design was primarily in monotone grey, black, and white, interspersed with splashes of intense saturated color. As he wrote: We made lots of samples of the cross-hatching in different sizes and hung them up on the stage. I sat at the back of the theatre with binoculars, deciding what scale should be. If it was done too small, it would look like a



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checkerboard—and that would be ridiculous. So I made some calculations and came up with the exact size. (Hockney 2008, NPF) Hockney drew every scene for the opera as a graphic cinematic storyboard; the characters seem to move from one frame to another.30 These were then translated into the scenographic model which he assembled in cardboard and rendered in ink. Here he constructed the traditional two-dimensional stage flats that so appalled Adolphe Appia. However, Hockney employed this eighteenth-century stagecraft with a satirical and humorous twist. In setting up an animated cartoon-strip as a contrast to the tragic narrative and Stravinsky’s discordant score, Hockney further enhanced the melancholic trajectory of the opera. For instance, the Bedlam Scene31 in which the hilarious costumed characters, trapped in their asylum cells/jury box, served only to heighten the pathos of this scene. Every peculiarity, erasure, and nuance of his scenographic design drawings and “drawn” models was metamorphosed onto a colossal scale. Hockney’s prodigious number of scenographic design drawings for A Rake’s Progress reveals his unrelenting search for new subject matter and his constant recycling and reprocessing of the past into something fresh, contemporary, and new. Recurrent artistic tropes interweave throughout his scenographic design drawings for the opera. His embryonic thinking sketches are of particular significance because they identify his fascination with heightened theatrical devices that are also present in his paintings before and after his first foray into opera design. These are the deliberate manipulation of one-point linear perspective; the one-dimensional spatiality, symbolism, and stylization present in ancient Egyptian frescos and the staging of pictorial space employing the theatrical curtain and eighteenth-century baroque illusionist visual effects such as the “trick-of-the-eye” or trompe l’oiel. His multilayered and playful explorations, where sleight-of-hand, illusion, and reality are merged, are all evident in his art works from the 1960s; they are prophetic in their preoccupation with theatrical stratagems.

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Hockney’s inventive and playful approach is most pronounced in his manipulation of one-point perspective as a key theatrical signifier. He orchestrated the orthogonal lines to force the spectator to focus on a particular point in the drawing. One-point perspective in the traditional proscenium theatre prioritized the supposed best seat in the house, the œil du prince or “prince’s eye,” which is the center of the seventh row of the picture frame stage.32 Many of his artworks were deliberately staged as if the spectator was sitting center of the picture frame.33 In his drawing in ink on paper for the Bedlam Scene34 and final model in ink on card,35 he represents the asylum cells by employing a forced perspective—a precisely constructed convergence of a linear perspectival spatiality, compressing the spectatorial view as it moves upstage. In doing so he condenses the scene, amplifying the absurdity and lunacy contained within. This pictorial manipulation of objects and figures in a spatial framework was deliberately staged to create maximum visual effect. Also, early on in Hockney’s artistic career, there appeared in his drawings and paintings an obsession with curtains and drapes, again an eighteenthcentury baroque leitmotif. The curtain, both theatrical and domestic (the Bathroom Shower Curtain series36), became a tantamount presence within his oeuvre. This preoccupation with the curtain as a theatrical device to reveal or to conceal began when he was a student at the Royal College of Art, London. The building was attached to the Victoria and Albert Museum which meant he often walked past many seventeenth-/eighteenth-century baroque paintings where the trompe l’oeil curtain framed a scene or was pulled back to “reveal” a micro-domestic drama. He played with and parodied the illusionistic, virtuosic visual conventions of seventeenth-century painting,37 particularly that of the Dutch painters such as Gerrit Dou in his Painter with Pipe and Book (1645).38 Here the painted scene is by implication fictional (the painting is only a representation of reality), but the curtain, which may be drawn across the painting to protect it from dust, is “real” because it exists in the space of



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the spectator. This deliberate deceiving of the “eye” fascinated Hockney, as he expressed: If you take the painting off its stretcher, it is like a curtain. When you paint a curtain on canvas, the illusion is that it’s an inch deep at most. If you paint a curtain pulled back, it reveals a picture, as a stage curtain does in the theatre. A curtain in a painting always does that, even if it’s on a window. (Friedman 1983, 25–9) Hockney’s obsession with the curtain was obvious in The Rake’s Progress. He employed the trompe l’oiel theatricality of the “painted curtain” in his scenographic design drawings for The Rake’s Progress. Instead of fabric curtains on stage, there were stage flats painted with his cross-hatched drawings, which are an illusion of three-dimensional “real” curtains. He frames most of the scenes in “drawn” theatrical drapes, including the overture curtain or fire wall—Drop Curtain for The Rake’s Progress.39 This whimsical drawing in black, red, and green ink is a representation of a traditional proscenium arched theatre, framed in heavy red cross-hatched drawn drapes. Swirling in a downward spiral is the eighteenth-century costumed figure of Tom, the protagonist, representing his downfall. Cartoon bubbles and the flattening of the perspective to a one-dimensional plane are typical of Hockney’s painting practice. Another pertinent example is Cobweb Drape, Tom’s House from The Rake’s Progress (Figure 2.4)—a particularly beautiful but deeply melancholic drawing in black ink of a voluminous heavy drape, torn and frayed with great swags of cobwebs intertwined. This is the scene in which the protagonist, Tom, has lost everything. Hockney’s lyrical rhythmic cross-hatching creates a haunting interplay. To the top right of the drawing he has scribbled marks and small doodles of faces—are they Tom’s forlorn face? These “scribbles” reveal Hockney’s contemplative thinking processes. The Rake’s Progress was the beginning of Hockney’s long artistic journey with opera and theatre. During the 1980s and 1990s, he collaborated with

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FIGURE 2.4  David Hockney. “Cobweb Drape, Tom’s House” from The Rake’s Progress 1975. Ink on paper, 19 ¾ × 24. © David Hockney. Photo credit: Richard Schmidt.

Source: Collection of the David Hockney Foundation. Cox on scenographic designs for Glyndebourne Festival Opera, UK; the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and the Royal Opera House, London; he also designed productions in Chicago and Los Angeles. During his work on The Rake’s Progress, the relationship between Hockney’s painting and scenographic design is inextricable. The opera was a liberating encounter. The multiple scenographic design thinking drawings in black pen, gouache, and graphite he produced strongly affected his later paintings. The Rake’s Progress began a dynamic and spirited discourse between Hockney’s studio and scenographic practice; one replenished the other. His monumental output of scenographic design drawings delivers an insight into this extraordinary artist.

A Glimpse into the Past The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held



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fast . . . For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. (BENJAMIN 1955, 254) In the above extract, Walter Benjamin posits the argument of how we understand history. We understand history, he suggests, by forming pictures of it in our imagination. But how do we know which is the real picture? The true picture of history we get to see only for a moment; it whizzes by. We get to see the truth when we get just the right perspective on it, but in the same instant as we glimpse the truth, it becomes corrupted by our biases, shaped and conditioned by the current society around us where the past and the present events are manifestations of material conditions. Further Benjamin argues that history is “the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin 1969, 262). Therefore, I propose, in recognition of Benjamin’s hypothesis, how we can in the hereand-now “blast open the continuum of history” (Benjamin 1969, 262) and catch a glimpse of the past in the form of the scenographic design drawings, endeavors, and achievements without historical bias? Is that possible? How can we interpret these drawings—as the artifacts of a moment in history through a fresh novel perspective? I have hopefully succeeded in offering a glimpse into the history of the twentieth-century painter/scenographers through a new and different lens: that of the contemporary scenographer. Their highly theatrical aesthetic and innovative experimentations are epitomized in their contribution to theatre, ballet, and opera in the form of scenographic design drawings. Their explorations were not just a superficial and peripheral adjunct to their studio art practice but a period of enlightenment which invigorated their artistic oeuvre. The extensive worldwide influence the Parisian Ballet Russes had in the dissemination of twentieth-century avant-garde modernism is exemplified by the extraordinary scenographic endeavours of Goncharova, Picasso, Tanning, Boyd, and Hockney, to name a few. The Ballet Russes presented a blueprint on

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how disparate creative fields of practice could adapt and integrate to produce spectacles of wonder and astonishment. As Juliet Bellow states: Arguably, though, the most pressing problem for any scholar hoping to write the Ballets Russes back into the history of art stems from the interdisciplinary nature of the troupe’s productions. These multimedia works demand a cross disciplinary approach—the invention of a critical vocabulary adequate to describing the complex ways in which these spectacles mixed artistic forms. (Bellow 2013, 5) To understand the enduring significance of the scenographic design drawing as a theatrical catalyst and epistemic tool, one must revisit the “fine and plastic artists designing for the stage” (Aronson 1991, 3) “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin 1969, 255). These artists dominated early- to mid-twentieth-century theatre, opera, and ballet scenographic design. This unique group of “scenographers” is crucial to this exploration because, prior to the 1960s, scenography was underpinned by innovators from the disciplines of painting and architecture.

3 Staging Architecture

The stage exerts a magical attraction; it is a place that frees the imagination, a place where time and space seem unbounded despite the physical confines of the stage and the temporal confines of a performance. (HERZOG 2006, NPF)

The above comment, made by the contemporary architects/scenographers Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, makes explicit what has been for centuries the primary incentive for architects to design for the stage: the freedom to experiment and explore unfettered by constraints of permanence, stability, and perpetuity. This chapter investigates the scenographic design drawings of the architects/scenographers Norman Bel Geddes, Frederick Kiesler, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Aldo Rossi, and Frank Gehry. In their scenographic design drawings, an astonishing synergy between the architectural and scenographic practice is revealed. What particularly distinguishes these drawings is the drawn space, situated somewhere between theatre and architecture—a liminal site “betwixt and between”1 reality and illusion, permanence and ephemerality, predictability and volatility. The German scenographer Anna Viebrock, in an interview with Hubertus Adam, identifies the principle difference between the scenographer and the architect: “On stage, maybe it’s possible to construct more intense atmospheres, i.e., uncanny or terrifying spaces. As an architect, one is not allowed to do that” (Anna Viebrock 2011, 73). This is the primary reason architects have been

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drawn to the stage—into this uncanny and terrifying space, because they are allowed to play.

Norman Bel Geddes This enquiry begins with the scenographic practice and thinking of Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), the American scenographer who transformed himself into a visionary industrial designer (Marchand 1992, 25; Kuksa 2008, 49). Bel Geddes is chiefly remembered for his spectacular design Futurama, for the General Motors’ Highways and Horizons Pavilion at New York World’s Fair (1939–40). The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, has an extensive collection of his architectural drawings, models, technical drawings, photographs, and paraphernalia in relation to this twentieth-century architectural and scenographic extravaganza. However, I shall examine his earlier, less-known, scenographic design drawings for his unrealized stage setting for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy; a comprehensive collection is also held at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, as well as the New York Public Library. This enormous undertaking was to be performed at Madison Square Garden in 1921 to commemorate the sexcentenary of Dante’s death (Hunter 1966, 238). Despite the failed enterprise, Bel Geddes published A Project for the Theatrical Presentation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri in 1924. This philosophical and technically explicit exploration encapsulates Bel Geddes’s core design aesthetic, which was directly influenced by the new revolutionary scenographic principles of performative space instigated by Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig (Kuksa 2008, 49). Both Appia and Craig, in similar ways, proclaimed the demise of European bourgeois realism in favor of an expressionistic abstraction that stimulated a psychological and subjective spectatorial engagement, primarily through light. Bel Geddes also designed the Divine Comedy Theatre to accommodate his scenographic design as a portable, traveling show. It took him over two years



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to complete the architectural model of the building and within this, the fully working scenographic model with stage machinery and lighting. The model has been lost in the ephemeral abyss of history but extant are hundreds of sketches, technical drawings, photographs, and a complex annotated script (Kuksa 2008, 52). In 1923, Bel Geddes described a hallucination which prompted him to draw the images in his mind’s eye, which later were to develop into an astonishing visualization of The Divine Comedy. He wrote, my table faced a bare wall, and for weeks I looked at nothing else . . . As I looked into it, day or night, a vague palpitation as of some sort of life was there . . . I was perfectly aware that it was in my imagination, but in my imagination it was real. It was clear to me as any object in front of me now. The wall pulsated just as surely as my own body did. I touched it with my hand and could feel nothing, but I could see it . . . The spot would glow as a coal that is breathed upon .  .  . One night, the whole form was turning slowly round and round converging inward. I was being drawn toward that burning hole in the wall, all the time, turning round and round, like a corkscrew . . . I rose to my feet, to throw the illusion off, and reeled dizzily into the next room and across it into a bookcase . . . I grabbed a book . . . it was the first volume of Norton’s Translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy . . . From that day to this, I have devoted to a dramatic visualization of the poem all the time I could. (Geddes 1924, 8–9) Bel Geddes’s bizarre vision of a flaming orifice embedded within his study wall, transfigured into his scenographic design drawing (Figure 3.1) as a cavernous crater, lit in an orange red glow (Geddes 1921–30, Image). Executed in sanguine chalk, this delicately rendered sketch draws the viewer into a vortex of explosive lines. Shafts of light radiate from the center of the image, generating exaggerated shadows from the miniscule human figures congregating around the illuminated core. Monolithic structures loom upwards, further diminishing the human presence. The proposed stage was 124 feet wide and

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FIGURE 3.1  Norman Bel Geddes: Scenographic design drawing for The Divine Comedy, 1921–30.

Source: Courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 148 feet deep. The elevation was 59 feet. This is a helicopter or “birds-eye view” of the scene which is typical of an architectural drawing but uncommon for a stage perspective because it implies the spectator is sitting in the lighting grid or fly-tower. The performers wore masks inserted with megaphones to amplify and intensify their expressions within the epic theatricalized spaces (Hunter 1966, 241). As Bel Geddes maintains: “I define costume as scenery worn by people” (Geddes 1924, 245). Bel Geddes produced fifty-two sketches of the scenes for Purgatorio and Paradiso (only forty-five remain) and a complete scene-by-scene storyboard of Inferno—visualizing in intricate detail each transition employing these dynamic cinematic perspectives (Hunter 1966, 239). Similar to many of Bel Geddes designs, the human figure is subjugated by the majestic, colossal, and sculptural environ of Bel Geddes imagination. As Frederick J. Hunter posits in Norman Bel Geddes’ Conception of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”:



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In the visual arts .  .  . it is practically a compulsion to render the vision of the imaginative idea in a concrete way as in a sketch, or drawing, or model to show its potentiality in terms of its form, that is, with a sense of the essence of the whole . . . the first sketch, the artefact of vision, which demonstrates the pre-potency of the artist, which shows his conception in terms of its essential nature, and which may reveal the form of the thing envisioned whether the final work of art or invention is ever constructed or not. (Hunter 1966, 239) If the spectators are not in a helicopter, where are they in relation to the scenographic space? Are they part of the performance, blended into the crowd? This is very likely because Bel Geddes’s theoretical explorations eradicated what he considered the inhibiting conventions of the theatre, such as the traditional peep-show relationship between the spectator and the proscenium stage (Marchand 1992, 26). It was this determination to eliminate all boundaries between the spectators and performers in favor of “a sense of unity, intimacy, and audience-participation” (Marchand 1992, 26) that characterized Bel Geddes as a prophetic and pioneering designer. His scenographic experimentations in the form of cinemaesque-constructed perspectives emerged fully fledged in his later scenographic/architectural design for Futurama. This remarkable architectural and engineering achievement echoed pronounced scenographic tropes evident in his earlier scenographic design drawings for The Divine Comedy, particularly the relationship between the diminutive scale of the human figure (the performer/spectator) and Bel Geddes cosmiopoetic imagination.

Frederick John Kiesler In 1926, Frederick John Kiesler (1890–1965), the Austro-Hungarian2/American architect, poet, sculptor, philosopher, and scenographer claimed in his manifesto,

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“THE THEATRE IS DEAD. WE WANT TO GIVE IT A SPLENDID BURIAL” (Kiesler 1926, 1). This proclamation was made in a full one-page preface to a special theatre issue in The Little Review on the International Theatre Exposition in New York for which Kiesler was the artistic director. “[T]he ultimate aim of Kiesler’s stage designs was not to renew theater in the stricter sense. Instead, as spatial art they were a station where one changes (Umsteigestation) from representational art to architecture” (Blume 2019, 99). Kiesler was a twentiethcentury polymath and visionary in both scenography and architecture—the two disciplines were indivisible. His philosophies were prophetic spatial theories in the context of the infinite, boundless, and endless. His legacy however comprises mainly speculative visualizations; only a smattering of his biomorphic, spheroidal, and sculptural designs were realized as buildings, surrealist exhibition designs (Galaxies), and scenographic productions.3 His contribution to theatre in the form of his pioneering concept Stage Space (Raumbühne)—a mechanized, kinetic synergy that blurred the traditional demarcation between the performer and the spectator—was demonstrated in the production Railway Theatre at the Vienna International Exhibition of Theatre Technology (1924). The intertwining, spiralling geometries of both the performers and the staging were in constant motion: an embodiment of the new accelerated dynamism of modernity. Unfortunately, this is evidenced only in a few photographs; his scenographic design drawings lost or discarded to history. There are also only a small number of iterative drawings identifying his exploratory thinking for his Endless Theatre (1924–6),4 a collection is held at the MoMA, New York. An example being a diazotype print of a single elliptical line that is unbroken and eternal, encapsulating Kiesler’s legacy: his lifelong exploration of the endless space (Kiesler 1924, Image). As Torsten Blume argues in Frederick Kiesler, the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus Space: Records are few and far between so that we can only trace Kiesler’s beginnings indirectly based on his later activities and his connections with numerous figures. (Blume 2019, 54)



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It is therefore in this context that I examine, through a contemporary scenographic lens, Kiesler’s architectural drawings for his revolutionary endeavor, the Endless House (1947–60). Kiesler’s theories, which emerged from his early stage experimentations, resonate in his hypothetical designs for this iconic twentieth-century project. These drawings and models could easily be recognized today as either architectural scenography or scenographic architecture. In 1923, Kiesler designed to great acclaim (Welzbacher 2019, 53), an electromechanical set for Karel Čapek’s robot dystopia R.U.R, produced at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin (Zillner 2019, 18).5 I have only discovered one scenographic design drawing from this very early production of Kiesler’s: a Russian Constructivist–like collage illustrating the backdrop (Welzbacher 2019, 61). This was a scene from Čapek’s imagined human factory, which included upstage an iris diaphragm measuring approximately 1100 mm in width that could be opened to display film projections (Welzbacher 2019, 58). This embryonic experimentation with mirrors and film projections further developed upon his return to Vienna in 1924, where he designed his first major “endless space” or as he described it: his Space Stage (Raumbühne) for the Middle Hall of the Vienna Konzerthaus (Hugill 2017, NPF). This “anti-naturalistic, abstract theatre experiment” (Welzbacher 2019, 63) was the continual dynamic motion of theatrical and performative space, further heightened by the incorporation of “moving” film imagery. Kiesler, who rejected the proscenium stage outright (Blume 2019, 107), devised a complex revolving sculptural entity of “dynamic action” . . . [that] . . . “later took static physical form in the first spiral ‘theatre in the round’ ” (Henriquez 1989, 20). He seized the “core theme of the avant-garde as the leitmotif . . . abolishing the boundaries of space, form and content. Always revolving around the concept of “endlessness,” he would explore this idea from every possible angle to the end of his days” (Welzbacher 2019, 59). In 1926 Kiesler moved to New York. It is here that his early avant-garde endless Space Stage developed into his lifelong project The Endless House6—“a

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turning point in the history of those affected” (Zillner 2019, 17). His spatial experimentations were not static but fluid and dynamic spaces, composed of circles, ovoids, and infinity loops, whirling, spiralling and looping galaxies in a state of constant flux. This is particularly evident in his architectural drawings which are curvilinear compositions of elliptical shapes and volumes (Henriquez 1989, Images: 19 and 21). His radical experimentations on endless space manifested as poly-dimensional sketches that closely resembled the surrealist automatic drawings (Hugill 2017, NPF).7 Drawing and the model were the epistemic tools with which he translated his theoretical explorations into a highly theatricalized performativity and materiality. Kiesler was an integral part of the post–First World War avant-garde movements that emerged during the time of the Red Vienna, Austria, and Weimar Republic, Germany (Prager 2019, 72). He became a member of the De Stijl group in 1923 (Sveiven 2011, NPF) and intermingled and socialized with artists such as Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg, Marcel Duchamp, Sigfried Giedion, Arshile Gorky, and Piet Mondrian to name a few. As Christian Welzbacher posits: Looking back upon his life’s work, we can trace Kiesler’s artistic, intellectual development by taking Neo-Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Surrealism as points of reference, a development that Kiesler shared with many fellow artists in his network. (Welzbacher 2019, 64) As Megan Sveiven also suggests: “These relationships may have influenced his approach to artistic theories and practices, which were often found heretical and bizarre” (Sveiven 2011, NPF). Kiesler’s spatial theories for both theatre and architecture emerged in tandem with those propagated by the German Bauhaus, such as Walter Gropius’s Total Theater (Welzbacher 2019, 57) as well as the theatre experiments conducted by Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Moholy-Nagy (Blume 2019, 99). As Blume argued: The Bauhaus, Kiesler and many avant-gardists saw analyzing the threedimensional possibilities of the stage, harnessing all elements of the stage



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set and stage machinery, and doing away with the proscenium stage in order to create innovative spatial relations between the audience and the actors as a suitable way of testing concepts of space in theater that could be applied to exhibitions, house building and urban development. (Blume 2019, 100) However, Kiesler’s organic curvilinear designs conflicted with the austere functionalism and rationalism of his modernist contemporaries, such as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, which largely manifested as the white, flat-roofed square box: a practical space with a ceiling, walls, floor, and sharply defined corners. Instead, Kiesler’s underlying aesthetic was a “desire to unify the universal space of modernity and the primordial/ erotic reality of bodily space” (Henriquez 1989, 19). In direct contrast to Mies van der Rohe, he controversially stated in Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture, “Form does not follow function. Function follows vision. Vision follows reality” (Kiesler 1949, 738). In his seminal text Inside the Endless House (1966), Kiesler wrote a poem which employs the analogy of the turtle carrying its “house” as a metaphysical construct of the human desire to be enveloped by their own individualized, contained habitat: a spiritual and haptic space that is a living organism. The Endless House, like a turtle’s shell, is manipulated and “moulded by the content of life” (Henriquez 1989, 21) Happy turtle whose cave grows on its back and protects it from imaginary blessings of the heavens it crawls the earth bound to it forever food is on her path no matter where she turns the mate appears uncalled for, and is welcome

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there will be egg rolling on the green lawns of millions of white houses not built by architects lucky turtle the touchdown is continuous belly to belly shell against shell, constant friction and no harm you have the total independence without that pseudo security of science, agriculture, industry, art Oh lucky turtle you are the very dream image and reality of independence resting securely in the palm of your shells. just being a summary of split seconds lived continuously, crawling crawling crawling (Kiesler 1966, 14–15) As Kiesler also wrote: The “Endless House” is called “Endless” because all ends meet and meet continuously. It is endless like the human body—there is no beginning and no end to it. (Kiesler 1966, 569) Similar to the turtle, the Endless House is a cocoon devoid of structural seams, corners, and hard-edged linear geometries. This endless seamlessness developed into Kiesler’s theory of Correalism (1939) in which he argued



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for an alternative visionary architecture related to spirals, infinity, and eternity. Forms he perceived as points where apparent known forces met invisible, secret, spiritual ones, and that reality was really the interaction of these forces. (James Stevens Curl 2015) Kiesler produced multiple drawings for his Endless House, an early example is again part of the collection at MoMA, rendered in ink and wash on paper in 1947 (Kiesler 1947, Image). This delicately expressed drawing in the shape of an egg with a hole cut through and placed perfectly balanced on two pylos instantly recalls the ancient Celtic monoliths and stone circles. This is an image of a “dwelling” abstracted to its simplest and most basic shape and form. When I first came across this sketch, I thought it was one of Kiesler’s set design drawings. It encapsulates his Endless Theatre or “theatre in the round.” The spectator would have an equivalent aspect from all vantage points. Another example of Kiesler’s sketches was drawn later in 1951, also in ink and wash on paper (Kiesler 1951, Image). This whimsical “scene” reveals three human figures lounging on what appears to be beach towels beneath the protective womb-like canopy of the Endless House. The serenity and bliss that emanates from this sketch exemplifies Kiesler’s pursuit for an embodied and performative connection between human bodies and architectural space. Again, this drawing could be easily mistaken for a scenographic design drawing. In 2015 at MoMA, there was an exhibition, Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, based on the concept of the twentieth-century single-family home as being as fundamental to the development of modern architecture as the ubiquitous skyscraper (Farago 2015, NPF). Kiesler’s Endless House in the form of models and drawings set the precedent for the rest of the exhibition which explored various iterations of the ideal single-family home. It was, however, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s model and drawings for the unbuilt Slow House (1991) that exemplified the futuristic potential of screen technology in the Smart Home. As Jason Farago speculates in Dwellings That Defy the Idea of Home:

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One wonders how Kiesler would react to the recent development of smart appliances, from Google’s thermostat to Apple’s HomeKit framework, and the terrifying dawn of an “internet of things”—in which digitally embellished objects for homeowners spew metadata to corporations, states and who knows who else. (Farago 2015)

Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio: The Slow House (1989) There is no front facade, only a door. The weekend house is conceived as a passage from physical entry to optical departure or, simply, a door to a window. (RENFRO 2019)8 The following is an examination of the unusual performative architectural drawings of the two American avant-garde architect/scenographers Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. As Thea Brejzek argues in Between Symbolic Representation and New Critical Realism: Architecture as Scenography and Scenography as Architecture: The emerging genre of Performance Architecture sees architects embracing the performative as an inherent spatial condition that is well-suited to uproot architecture’s assumed durability, and instead to propose material, aesthetic and political counter-positions. (Brejzek 2017, 76) Diller and Scofidio’s design for the Slow House, an unrealized vacation home, is an example of late twentieth-century performance architecture; “although causing quite a stir in architectural debate at the time, their Slow House project of 1989 still remains a somewhat enigmatic gesture of architectural thought and invention” (Bremner 2000, Abstract). The multiple drawn iterations produced are not scenographic design drawings per se; instead they sit in an



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expanded field of drawing somewhere between scenography, architecture, performance, and installation art. Sam Spurr in Performative Architecture: Design Strategies for Living Bodies investigates “the overlap between theatre and architecture . . . in terms of performativity and phenomenology” (Spurr 2007, 6). She suggests that to bring animated bodies into architecture is to begin at the origin of the design process which is the drawing (Spurr 2007, 24). Her aim is for the architectural drawing to shed its “Cartesian coordinates situated in a Euclidean definition of space . . . (and) perpetuated by its triumvirate of plan, section and elevation” (Spurr 2007, 141). Instead, she seeks out architectural “drawings that embrace body movement, traditionally in the forms of maps, scripts and scores” (Spurr 2007, 142). The speculative drawings and models for Slow House manifest what Spurr defines as the “performative drawings that explore how to bring that body into the design process” (Spurr 2007, Abstract, iv). The drawings for Slow House employ the semiotics of architectural drawing but subvert their rationalism, producing instead representations that are incomprehensible in fragments but in their entirety are extraordinary scenographic visualizations. The drawings embrace the corporeal body, performativity, and theatricality and in doing so interrogate and question the long-established conventions of architectural representation, systems, and prescriptive formulas. An example is the ten sectional drawings, in the form of X-rays on acetate/glass, which are inserted into the model as cinematic screens. They collectively generate a peep-show, a probe into the domesticated eye on vacation (Wood 2005, 3). These drawings go far beyond the conventional architectural orthographic diagram. They are a scenographic storyboard of an American reality drama, blurring the boundaries between performance and architecture; the virtual and the real; and the ephemeral and permanent. As RoseLee Goldberg comments in Dancing About Architecture: Diller and Scofidio’s diverse and innovative theater projects served not only as full-scale working models for their ideas about architecture, they also provided a laboratory for the concepts that would give their first buildings their most distinctive qualities. (Goldberg 2003, 45)

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FIGURE 3.2  Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Architectural model of Slow House with drawings on acetate/glass inserted into the model, 1991.

Source: Slow House Model. Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The model of Slow House with the inserted drawings now resides at the MoMA, New York, as an autonomous performative object (Figure 3.2). Diller and Scofidio, acknowledged as highly theatrical architects or “illusionists” (Davidson 2007, 128–137), first collaborated in the scenographic design of installations and theatre sets. Between 1983 and 1998 they created nine productions “each of which allowed them to explore a number of their obsessions; how to increase the felt experience of architecture, for example, or how to build structures that mediate how the viewer sees them” (Goldberg 2003, 45). Diller describes this early phase in their practice: We were interested in making problems in space, not solving them— especially challenging inherited spatial conventions. Each project had its logic and appropriate medium, whether it was physical materials, or video, or performance, or print. It was simply about finding the right tool for the job. (Incerti Guido 2007, 51)



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As Ellen Gamerman remarks of this early conceptual phase: Architect Elizabeth Diller is always sketching. The work is often in colored pencil in aquamarine, yellow and other hues. She often uses a black Sharpie, scribbling on a 200-foot roll of tracing paper set up in the office for her and her colleagues. The idea can be fleeting even if the ink is permanent: “I just waste a lot of paper,” she said, adding that it’s important to get everything down quickly even if she abandons the idea later. (Gamerman 2010, NPF) The Slow House was an experimental investigation into viewing through multiple frames or representations of the screen: the car windscreen, television screen, picture-window, and drawings on X-ray film. All these screens were a conceptualization of the mobile embodied “desiring gaze” on vacation. Together, the drawings, the architectural model, and the exhibition—The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House (Gallery Ma Tokyo, 1992)—expand the traditional canon of drawing into a different performative space, redolent of a heightened theatrical mise-en-scène. The design for Slow House was originally commissioned by Koji Itakura, a Japanese real estate investor, and was to be built in North Haven on Long Island. Similar to Kiesler’s analogy of a turtle for his Endless House, Slow House is also based on the curvilinear, spiraling shape of a snail. The blueprint of the design was dictated by an arc or, as the architects described it, the “decelerating curve”: the organic form of a snail (hence the name Slow House) (Dimendberg 2013, 66). The façade comprised the red front door alone, four-feet wide and eighteen-feet high. This opened into a meandering curved space which ended in a huge picture-window, capturing a coveted ocean view. However, this view was quite deliberately obstructed by a large television screen which was connected to a video cassette recorder (VCR) and camera directed at the water view outside. Diller and Scofidio “conceptualised a waterfront view as portable, storable, and capable of being transported back to the city, a commodity as well as a sight and an experience” (Dimendberg 2013, 67).

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The spectatorial embodied experience began in the car driving toward the vacation home. Upon arrival, the spectator stepped through an entrance of highly theatricalized, baroque proportions, then moved along a 100-footlong curved wall to be confronted by a simulacrum of an extraordinary view. The “desiring gaze” compelled the spectator to move, to seek out the “million dollar” view so craved by the status-driven, hyper-capitalist liberal American. As Diller and Scofidio argued: Taking issue with the construction of visual pleasure for the leisure-eye both its production and its denial—the house regulates three optical devices of “escape” from and to culture: The car windshield, a reversible escape into vehicular space between city and vacation home; the television screen, a solitary escape into mediatic space, a social space that connects viewers by an electronic weld; the picture window, the escape into a propriety scenic space, a space measured by market value. (Elizabeth Diller 1994, 224) The Slow House design was a deliberate contrast to the historical traditions of the summer home or villa. Diller and Scofidio “rejected these traditional precedents by replacing the codes of Renaissance perspective with a flattened space that transformed the interior of the house into a single curving surface without a direct visual axis . . . Vision is eroticised, the hostage of the ‘desiring eyes’ ” (Dimendberg 2013, 67). The Albertian one-point perspective which relaxed the static eye center is deflected, provoking a curiosity that compels the spectator to move, to seek out meaning: The house is a mechanism of arousal, eliciting an optical desire and feeding it, slowly. The only direct view is at the end of the one-hundred-foot-long wall, through the picture window, toward the horizon. (Elizabeth Diller 1994, 225) Of course, this view is not real; it is only a representation of the real. The television screen stretches the notion of reality, truth, and meaning, becoming, as Jean Baudrillard suggested, a simulacrum where the original truth has been



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rendered meaningless and irrelevant—a specter of the real, which he referred to as a hyperreality (Baudrillard 1983, 104). The spectator gazes longingly upon an electronic screen which, ironically, can be programmed to display the perfect view twenty-four hours a day (Elizabeth Diller 1991b, Image). As Diller and Scofidio comment: “Thus the vacant leisure gaze is arrested at the window’s surface and forced to contemplate the instrument of its contemplation” (Elizabeth Diller 1994, 248). On October 24, 1990, at Columbia University, Diller and Scofidio presented a seminal lecture using video, projected images, and multiple competing voiceovers of their unrealized seaside vacation house, Slow House. The presentation was, in fact, a theatrical performance: “the performance overshadowed (the) project to wide acclaim” (Wood 2005, 3). As Peter Wood argues: “For them performance offered a way to re-introduce the body to architectural discourse after the emptiness of late Eighties Minimalism” (Wood 2005, 1). Just prior to the lecture, Diller and Scofidio had been presented with a prestigious award at the Progressive Architecture Thirty-Eighth Annual Awards Competition. Rem Koolhaas, a member of the jury, said: “what I like here is that the house itself is a kind of mise-en-scène. It manipulates the view” (Elizabeth Diller 1991a, 88). It was, however, at the exhibition—The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House—at the Gallery Ma in Tokyo in the following year (1992) that the Slow House became immortalized as a performative art installation, comprising the drawings, model, Polaroid photographs, soundscape, and text.9 The reworking of “the house as an installation, splicing and editing it as if it were a film, introduced another layer of reflexivity into a project already concerned with vision” (Dimendberg 2013, 73). What had been a failed commission due to a change in the client’s financial circumstances had now elevated the Slow House design from an inanimate building to a mobile, embodied spectatorial experience. This was particularly evident in the multiple drawings10 spawned from the failed enterprise. These were displayed in such a way that the spectator was forced to weave through the exhibition as if on a quest for meaning in a labyrinth of glazed panels of glass. The Desiring Eye used twenty-four freestanding steel poles

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and frames in a grid-like pattern on a raised floor within the gallery space.11 A single halogen light bulb was suspended above each display: “At first glance they resembled music stands, and the gallery conveyed the impression of a concert, minus the instruments and performers” (Dimendberg 2013, 74). The innate theatricality of Diller and Scofidio is apparent in the Slow House drawings. The ten sectional X-ray drawings on acetate/glass (Elizabeth Diller 1991b, Image) inserted into the original model were however, in the exhibition, displayed separately from the model to allow the spectator to fully observe each drawing and read the text.12 An example of the text or script is as follows: “Long, slick and slender, tickles where it’s tender? A whip. What is the difference between walking up the stairs and looking up the stairs: In one you step up the stairs, in the other you stare up the stairs” (Wood 2005, 5). The forbidden is on display. As Wood argues: The X-ray provides a particularised view of the body not seen without technological intervention. The X-ray is another screen, and it is, in the tradition of comic book superheros, a privileged view not afforded to ordinary human sight. The X-ray drawing is a form of super-vision that sees that which should really be hidden. (Wood 2005, 5) The spectator becomes the voyeur, embodying the penetrative desiring gaze. In another of the ten drawings, there is a copulating couple in bed, observed from above by a group of three individuals eating (Wood 2005, 7). The attached text reads: “A Woman asks her psychiatrist, “My husband only seems to want to use the dining room table for sex. What should I do?” The psychiatrist responds, “I would stop eating in bed” (Wood 2005, 5). The acute, sardonic humor amplifies the perversion of looking at these pornographic X-ray drawings, illustrating what are conventionally the hidden fantasies and/or realities of domesticity. As Wood further suggests: We have in this drawing a version of debased performance—a sex-show, but it could be said that architectural drawing has always been a kind of



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peep-shop insomuch as it has always been concerned with the voyeuristic display of the parts hidden beneath and behind and inside buildings. (Wood 2005, 5) These drawings “stage” the mobile embodied act of gazing. What is so unusual is that these drawings, accompanied by a script, cease to function as architectural drawings and become a scenographic design storyboard that enacts a reality drama: a narrative that parodies the American seaside vacation house and lifestyle. The drawings and objects in the exhibition transformed the spectatorial gaze from a static, all-encompassing image to a process of accumulating images and meaning in motion. This demanded that the spectator engage and participate in the drama of the “staged” architectural installation. The X-rayed domestic spaces of Slow House, in the form of highly theatricalized scenographic design drawings, pre-empt the shift away in the early 1990s from Adolphe Appia’s modernist grand narrative to the multiple, nonlinear, and accumulative spaces of contemporary scenography, for instance, in the post-dramatic designs of the late German scenographer, Bert Neumann (1960–2015). Brejzek identifies this trend as the development of a new critical realism that provocatively reinstates the fourth wall both metaphorically and architecturally in the form of functional, practisable living spaces as the peephole into the politicized domestic life of the neoliberal citizen. (Brejzek 2017, 70) Diller and Scofidio’s speculative drawings and models for Slow House provided multiple-perspectival screens that created a discombobulation of domestic space. As Brejzek further comments in relation to contemporary performance but resonating with the earlier innovation of Slow House: The scenographic representation of the private dwelling in this way, formerly a symbol of identity, security and ownership, has clearly become the spatialized representation of a hypercapitalist society, so that across the

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re-established fourth wall we watch the hysterical writhings of the postFordist, postmodern subject. (Brejzek 2017, 76)

Aldo Rossi Each drawing is a new occasion, and the pressures of its moment send his hand along a path different, subtle or obvious, from any that it has travelled before. This freshness revivifies the patterns of his analogies, of the meanings he ascribes to forms. (RATCLIFF 1993, 15) Aldo Rossi (1931–97), the Italian architect, artist, and scenographer, recognized as a major protagonist in late twentieth-century Italian postmodern architecture, has left a legacy of drawings of confounding poetic beauty and complexity. For Rossi, the medium of drawing is elevated above the preparatory, ideation sketch—to an end in itself—an autonomous performative drawing that communicates a labyrinthine intricacy of meaning. As Peter Wood argues: Rossi adopts strategies of representation normally excluded by a conventional architectural drawing program. The presence of self-referential material, the allegorical, narrative, biographical, and scalar juxtaposition, all seek to reposition the dialogue of architectural drawing away from a projected and objective external world, and onto a subjectified one internally organized. (Wood 2002, 90) Rossi’s drawings manifest heightened theatrical spaces inhabited by a dreamscape of memory, the imaginative, and the metaphoric—speculative sites teeming with historical quotations, interlacing thematic layers and recurrent, motifs, and signs. He challenged modernism’s typological indifference and rejection of history (Bandini 1981–2, 109). He constructed multiple selfreferential worlds that traversed across the boundaries of architecture and



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theatre. Traditional architecture projects the utopian site of a “building,” whereas Michel Foucault identified theatre as a heterotopia: The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus, it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another. (Foucault 1984, 6)13 Foucault’s argument can be extended to that of a rectangle of paper as the “staged” heterotopia executed by Rossi, a place encompassing within a single reality (the paper), multiple contradictory, and disparate drawn spaces and temporalities (Foucault 1984, 6).  Projected fragments of architectural iconography explode across the palimpsest of the paper, representing not a single moment of time but a phantasmagoria of the past and the future. Micha Bandini, in examining Rossi’s architectural theory and practice, identifies his preoccupation with duality: Rossi’s buildings play at the threshold between image and reality, the same game enjoyed by his drawings. (Bandini 1981–2, 110) The core of theatre and live performance is a “contest” between reality/ image, truth/illusion, visibility/invisibility, and presence/absence. Within Rossi’s drawings is a different, unacknowledged drawn performative space, a manifestation of Victor Turner’s limen or threshold: “a noman’s-land betwixtand-between the structural past and the structural future” (Turner 1990, 11). Or, as Gilles Deleuze argues, where The line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency of its own. (Gilles Deleuze 1987, 505)

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I suggest that the One is the hegemonic authority of Euclidean geometry— plan, section, and elevation. Rossi’s drawings illuminate this Other drawn “smooth space.” The multidimensional spatiality of his biographical drawn worlds liberates the architectural drawing from its traditional position as a representation of absolute truth; no longer is the “building” the finite endpoint in the design process. Instead the drawing embraces performative encounters and imaginative exchange, tropes I assign to the scenographic design drawing. Rossi’s drawings are distinct from the orthodox architectural representation because of their inherent theatricality and departure from rationalist thought. As Paolo Portoghesi suggests: He used drawing not just as a means of producing plans for a building, but as a tool for teasing out the fruits of his imagination. He seemed to be coaxing out these ideas as if they were little objects endowed with a tangible solidity and vitality. (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 7) Investigation of Rossi’s breadth of drawn works reveals in his experimentations and explorations a harmonious and seamless correspondence between his architectural, art, and scenographic practice. Rossi’s scenographic design output was small but despite this what is so particularly exciting, when reviewing his architectural drawings, is that they are unmistakable in their staged urban typographic mise-en-scène. It is through this facetted lens that I examine Rossi’s scenographic design drawings for the set and costumes for the opera, Elektra by Richard Strauss, libretto by Hugo von Hofmannstahl, and located in the ancient Greco-Roman amphitheatre of Taomina, Sicily (Germano Celant 2015, 212 Plate 265). Elektra is based on Sophocles’s ancient Greek tragedy written around 410 BCE. The plot charts Elektra’s raw and brutal desire to revenge the murder of her father, King Agamemnon, by her mother, Clytaemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Rossi’s production design of colossal metal-studded walls, gargantuan stone statues, and columns echoed



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and complemented the ancient semi-circular theatre. Dislocated historical artifacts referencing ancient Mycenaean architecture and mythology are embedded in the three walls of oppressive reinforced armory. Rossi had a peculiar predilection for the fragment, the relic, and the insignificant object. As he expressed: I love museums of palaeontology and those patient reconstructions of fragments without significance into the significance of form. This love for the fragment and for the thing binds us to apparently insignificant objects, and we attribute to them the same importance that we customarily give to art. (Rossi 1981, 2) Rossi also drew direct inspiration from the Treasury of Atreus  or  Tomb  of Agamemnon, which is a beehive tomb, tholos, on Panagitsa Hill at Mycenae, Greece, constructed during the Bronze Age around 1250 BCE. As Rossi described: Mycenaean architecture was all about depth, obscure entrances, overhead light, wells, shadows . . . And I saw it in our world as we see the cities where we live; immense destructions, smashed up buildings, poverty, confusion of languages . . . Everything I have written is architecture, both the fixed scene of any home or the courtyard of the palace of Atreus. The father, the daughter, the iron of the knives and the swords, the famous doors of fabulous treasures, the windows of servants and heroes, the glossy decorations with enamels of beautiful women and agile ephebes. And all this through a crack, the collapse of the construction or the appearance on the surface of the blood of the palace/ madhouse or clinic. (Germano Celant 2015, 212) Rossi’s under-acknowledged scenographic design drawings for Elektra can be sourced from two English written publications: Aldo Rossi: Opera Grafica: Etchings, Lithographs, Silkscreen Prints (2015) and Aldo Rossi: The Sketchbooks 1990-1997 (2000). I examine several drawings from each of these publications which originated in Rossi’s personal sketchbook. The sketchbook affords

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an exemplary insight into Rossi’s diverse creative production. As Carter Ratcliff comments: A sign of Rossi’s independence is his habit of keeping note books that convert architectural matters into thoroughly personal preoccupations. Rossi is an obsessive diarist. As his ruminations grew more labyrinthine, he started to clarify them with small sketches . . . His career as an artist had resumed. His hand was faster now, led onward by his fascination with the grain of history and the persistence of its textures. (Ratcliff 1993, 13) First, I examine the drawing printed on a page of a newspaper displaying the results of the New York Stock Exchange Transactions (Germano Celant 2015, 213). This small thinking drawing, originally sketched in Rossi’s sketchbook (Germano Celant 2015, 212 Plate 266), encapsulates the essence of Rossi’s design; the heavy studded metal ramparts of the palace are lacerated diagonally by a deep gash seeping with blood. The fissure is present from the beginning of the show as a premonition of the horror yet to befall; the red blood appears later. In the central doorway are two human figures in shadow. Dark, shadowed apertures are inserted deep into the armored walls, reminiscent of the walled tombs such as those found on the Isle of the Dead, Isola di San Michele, Northern Italy. The pronounced shadows in black ink capture the dying sun of late afternoon. The heightened mood of solemnity and gloom emanates from this schematic but detailed drawing. The question remains why did Rossi print the drawing on the New York Stock Exchange Transactions? I suggest this unusual juxtaposition parallels the merciless dysfunctionalism of the House of Atreus, cursed with eternal damnation by the Gods, with that of the immense destruction of Western capitalism. Both are a scourge on humanity. The more developed drawing, executed in watercolor, ink, and collage (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 70–1), is a rigorous visualization of detail that is realized in the final production photo (Germano Celant 2015, 212 Plate 265). Ancient Mycenaean photographic images of King Agamemnon’s death mask, the Lion Gate, frescos, and ceramics are collaged onto the drawing. “Displayed



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like posters, they provide a palimpsest which tells its own story simultaneously with that of the play” (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 70). The drawing emphasizes the shadows cast by the sun. Rossi was well aware of the natural elements and their impact on his set design in an outdoor amphitheatre. The production photo (Germano Celant 2015, 212 Plate 265) supports this by exhibiting huge shadows that cascade down the walls and across the stage in the late afternoon sun. Rossi is recognized for his peculiar inclusion in his architectural drawings of the deep cast of shadows and their sculptural effect on the building. As Micha Bandini comments: In all his drawings, shading holds special significance. They demarcate the contours of a building against its environment .  .  . His relationship with reality, the relationship of his drawings with his buildings, seems often to shadow the mirror image of real life. (Bandini 1981–1982, 110) Large primordial shadows that carved out Rossi’s monolithic geometries were a primary motif defining his artistic oeuvre, revealing his constant, almost obsessive, perception of the passage and effects of time. It is the dense black shadows that often slant obliquely across his architectural drawings that distinguish his works from architectural orthodoxy by resonating an emotive, subjective, and nostalgic aura (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 103, 173). Similar to the long shadows of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, Rossi’s drawings emanate a haunting ghostliness: Exerting a pressure of hypothesis on his drawings, the speed of his hand— or his imagination—gives a quietly fantastic tone even to his most sober and seemingly realistic drawings. So, it is never a surprise to see la mano santo drift into his pictures of the city. This hand of the saint is a fragment of a vision remembered from his earliest years, so the blessing implied by the saint’s raised hand is entangled with memories of childhood happiness—or at least with the idea that childhood ought to be happy. (Adjmi 1993, 16)

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This absent presence is further accentuated by the specter of the “lone hand” that appears repeatedly in Rossi’s drawings. In, for instance, his scenographic design drawing for Electra (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 68) there is a hand sketched in the upper right quadrant. It is similar to the hand painted in Rossi’s Dicatum Carolo (1989), Architettura Razionale e Immagini Celesti (1974), and in his drawings for Teatro del Mondo (1979). This recurrent motif stems from an early childhood memory when he visited San Carlone of Arona, a massive copper statue of St. Charles Borromeo, erected between 1614 and 1698. The sheets of hammered copper are joined with bolts, similar to Rossi’s riveted metal sheets on the walls of Elektra. The interior of San Carlone can be accessed by narrow stairs and ladders. Rossi describes his first experience of entering into the statue: As with the Homeric horse, the pilgrim enters the body of the saint as he would a tower or a wagon steered by a knowing technician. After he mounts the exterior stair of the pedestal, the steep ascent through the interior of the body reveals the structure of the work and the welded seams of the huge pieces of sheet metal. Finally, he arrives at the interior/exterior of the head; from the eyes of the saint, the view of the lake acquires infinite contours, as if one were gazing from a celestial observatory. (Rossi 1981, 3) The hand of the saint brings a further humanizing presence and metaphysical expression to Rossi’s designs: another poetic referent that would otherwise be suppressed in the conventional architectural drawing. As Alberto PérezGómez argues: For many architects, myth and poetry are generally considered synonymous with dreams and lunacy, while reality is deemed equivalent to prosaic scientific theories. In other words, mathematical logic has been substituted for metaphor as a model of thought. (Pérez-Gómez 1983, 6) The trace of the hand in Rossi’s scenographic design drawing for Electra (Paolo Portoghesi 2000, 68) is also the presence of the auteur: his signature,



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authenticity, and absent presence. The biographical and personal motifs are what make Rossi’s drawn works distinctive: The quickness of Rossi’s hand signals a willingness to trust the viewer’s vision. His line seems to say: you see what I mean, so I won’t bore you with an unnecessary degree of precision . . . Unburdened by this pretension, Rossi’s line has the quickness of speculative thought, or of speculation crowding into conservation. Instead of the eternal certainties sought by the metaphysical painters, Rossi seeks—and, with his relentless gestures, finds or, better, produces—new possibilities. (Adjmi 1993, 21) Aldo Rossi’s drawings allow one the possibility of entering into and becoming immersed in the staged mise-en-scène of a museum of strange things. His preoccupation with memorial objects; and the fragment, the souvenir, and the traces of human frailty such as the hand embodied his architectural, artistic, and scenographic practice with a pronounced sensitivity and humanism otherwise suppressed in the architectural works of his contemporaries.

Frank Gehry The stage sets created by architects or even by artists are perfectly dreadful— we thought, in view of so many failed attempts. The pitfalls of simply transferring one’s own style, one’s typical trademarks from construction site to proscenium stage seem almost inescapable. (HERZOG 2006, NPF) The above comment, made by the architectural team Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, recognizes the age-old problem of so many architects and painters who impose their own signature idiosyncrasies onto a theatre production without regard to the narrative, the collaborative team, and the

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original intentions of the dramatic text. Thea Brejzek reinforces this position in Between Symbolic Representation and New Critical Realism: Rather, it is the architects’ notion of the theatre and the stage as a controlled and controllable machine, operating at the will of its creator, that underlies many fascinating yet ultimately reductive scenographic inventions, typically comprising a large singular object or environment of objects with a sculptural quality and volume that showcase the architects’ known formal and material language. (Brejzek 2017, 66) Brejzek employs the set design by the contemporary Canadian-born American architect Frank Gehry (1929–) as an “ultimately reductive scenographic invention” for Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, directed by Christopher Alden and produced by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2012. She critiques the design as “a typical Gehry look, very aesthetic but rather generic and in no way related to Mozart’s narrative .  .  . a single all-white set of large mounds of crumpled paper, strongly reminiscent of his trademark deconstructivist techniques” (Brejzek 2017, 70). While I agree with Brejzek that Gehry’s design is a direct extension of his architectural oeuvre, I do dispute the claim that it does not support Mozart’s original artistic and philosophical intentions. To conclude this chapter, I defend Gehry’s design for Don Giovanni as an exemplar of conceptual genius that has its embryonic beginnings in the scenographic design drawing, an example of which is an ambiguous scribble in black pen on paper (Figure 3.3), also characteristic of Gehry’s architectural drawing style.14 This thinking sketch of criss-crossing, interweaving lines subsequently metamorphosed into an abstracted sculptured landscape of towering anamorphic forms made primarily of crumpled and scrunched white paper. Gehry’s set design has been repeatedly critiqued as resembling icebergs, waves, or marble (Pastier 2012)15 and has also been quoted in Brejzek’s article (Brejzek 2017, 70). I disagree with these descriptions; instead, I propose that Gehry’s minimalist design, reminiscent of the twisted, billowing folds of his



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FIGURE 3.3 Frank Gehry. Scenographic design drawing for Don Giovanni: black pen on paper.

Source: Sketch courtesy of Frank O. Gehry 2019. “draped architecture” (Allmer 2007, 266), embodies, in a single sweeping theatrical gesture of white paper, the analogy of disheveled white “bed sheets” reinforcing the sexual depravity and hedonism of the protagonist. It is also pertinent to identify here that Mozart composed Don Giovanni in 1787 and therefore Gehry’s design conceptually echoes the eighteenth-century paintings depicting “draped” fabric as voluminous rumpled bed clothes framed by heavy swagged and looped curtains, for instance, François Boucher’s Odalisque (1749). In this scene of sated lust, the white bed sheet and blue drapery appear to have taken on a life of their own, transforming into autonomous theatrical objects. This heightened performativity of baroque excess intensifies the illusion of grandeur, decadence, and eroticizm, all synonymous with the thematic underpinnings of Don Giovanni. “Draped fabric not only emerges as a formal metaphor in Gehry’s oeuvre, but also acts as an inspiration source, appearing in study models as a form-giving tool” (Allmer 2007, 266).

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Gehry’s doodle makes explicit his ideation thinking despite the brevity of its lines. On close examination, I propose that the drawing depicts Act 2, Scene 3 which is set in a graveyard. The figure of Don Giovanni stands downstage; in the center is a tangle of lines representing perhaps the crushed paper as gravestones; rising above is the stone statue of the Commendatore. Upstage and to the right of the drawing is a squiggle that could possibly be the conductor, as the orchestra was unconventionally placed upstage behind the set and raised on a rostrum. This created a greater intimacy, immersing the spectator within the “bed clothes” and the horrific story of the degenerate downward spiral of the arrogant libertine, Don Giovani. The “bed clothes,” represented by white paper, are a billowing, wrapping, and twisting montage of fragmented masses and volumes. Açalya Allmer further emphasizes Gehry’s preoccupation with draped forms: It is the unsettling drapery that is the pure attraction, the surface without anything behind it, and thus pure expression. And yet, in Gehry’s hands, the emphasis on theatricality serves to transform the building and makes it a site of conspicuous display, turned into the architecture of a gigantic drapery. (Allmer 2007, 274) Gehry’s theatricalized architecture as spectacle is immortalized in the Walt Disney Concert Hall which Gehry also designed and in which Don Giovanni was performed. As Gevork Hartoonian suggests in Frank Gehry: Roofing, Wrapping, and Wrapping the Roof: Gehry’s design for the Disney Concert Hall skews the post-modern fascination with historical images and the architecture of spectacle . . . The fragmented and torn surfaces of the amphitheatre could also be associated with fabrics used to cover scaffolds in carnivals, and of course, tent architecture. (Hartoonian 2002, 18–21) Gehry’s “draped” architecture and scenographic design for Don Giovanni recall Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical relationship between the idea of the “fold”



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and seventeenth-century baroque architecture. In his seminal text, The Fold, Deleuze employs the analogy of the theatrical curtain as a baroque fold of labyrinthine space that “endlessly produces folds . . . twists and turns . . . the Baroque fold, unfurls all the way to infinity” (Deleuze 1993, 3). Deleuze also proposed that the theatre is a monad: a black room without doors and windows (Deleuze 1993, 27); and a maze of corridors and adjacent “in-between” spaces which together form a complex, convoluted space of folds.16 I extend Deleuze’s argument to that of Gehry’s scenographic design and architectural drawings. The monad begins and ends at the same metaphysical point: “folding and unfolding, wrapping and unwrapping” (Deleuze 1993, 123). The lines of a Gehry drawing, a frantic scribble, has no visible beginning or end and therefore as a monad is “a fixed point that infinite partition never attains, and that closes infinitely divided space” (Deleuze 1993, 28). The line embarks on a metaphysical journey, entering into a labyrinth dividing endlessly, [where] the parts of matter form little vortices in a maelstrom, and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another. (Deleuze 1993, 57) Gehry’s set design of twisting, undulating folded paper like Deleuze’s monad is a self-referential, self-similar fractal of the original scenographic design drawing. These generative freehand drawings illuminate very early in his design process his explosive and expressive compositions in a state of flux—exaggerated and enigmatic geometries “draped” in stainless steel, plywood, and paper. Anna Viebrock identifies a key difference between scenography and architecture—temporality. But actually, people make the stories. This is something you can tell in a stage design; you can be wickedly evil. In architecture that is not possible. But the true horror exists only in the real world [of architecture]. In the theatre it is only for approximately two hours. (Anna Viebrock 2011, 74)

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Architecture is traditionally defined by permanence, scenography by ephemerality. This is the appeal of theatre to the architect. The architect/ scenographers explored in this chapter perceived their work for the stage not so much as a showcase to present their signature trademark but as a space to play, to explore, and to experiment. All these architects were magically attracted to the stage as “a place that frees the imagination, a place where time and space seem unbounded” (Herzog 2006, NPF).

4 Drawn to Perform

This chapter examines how the scenographic design drawing has extended beyond drawing as a secondary support in the speculative imaging of the final theatrical production into a different space that intersects and interrelates drawing, sophisticated digital technologies, contemporary performance, and expanded drawing as an art practice. I identify these drawings as the performative scenographic design drawing because they exhibit enhanced characteristics such as performativity, theatricality, and an intense spectatorial engagement. I propose that the performative scenographic design drawing does not describe or illustrate the action but generates a spectatorial encounter, in which the spectator is immersed in a worlding (Heidegger 1971, 177). Martin Heidegger in Poetry, Language, Thought claims: “The world presences by worlding. That means: the world’s worlding cannot be explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed through anything else” (Heidegger 1971, 177). Heidegger is here carving the boundaries of what we as humans can explain and what we can speak about. We can, in some sense, talk about what is in the world (facts of nature, etc.) but to give an explanation of the world’s  appearance  as a whole to us is beyond our capabilities. This is because, as he says in the penultimate sentence, our human cognition “fails to transcend the world’s nature” (Heidegger 1971, 179–80). Our powers of cognition lie firmly within nature (the world), and so we cannot get outside

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it (transcend it), in order to explain it. To apply a scenographic context to Heidegger’s enigmatic statement of an unattainable desire to comprehend or even imagine the existentialist condition of “worlding,” I turn to Jill Dolan’s concept of “utopia, that boundless ‘no place’” (Dolan 2001, 456). She argues in Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative: “why do people continue to seek the liveness, the present-tenseness that performance and theatre offer? Is the desire to be there, in the moment, an expression of a utopian impulse?” (Dolan 2001, 455). The utopian performative is a rare experience of theatrical reception that “evoke(s) the sense that it’s even possible to imagine a utopia, that boundless ‘no place’” (Dolan 2001, 456). As Dolan further suggests: Audiences are compelled to gather with others, to see people perform live, hoping, perhaps, for moments of transformation that might let them reconsider and change the world outside the theatre, from its macro to its micro arrangements. (Dolan 2001, 455) Audiences keep returning to theatre yearning to experience a form of utopia, even though this transcendental phenomenon, similar to Heidegger’s worlding, may in fact be unfathomable. Dolan encapsulates utopian performative in the following comment: a theatre person knows when something works—it’s when the magic of theatre appears, when the pace, the expression, the gesture, the emotion, the light, the sound, the relationship between actor and actor, and actors and spectators all meld into something alchemical, something nearly perfect in how it communicates in that instance. (Dolan 2001, 458) This “magic of theatre” occurs when there is a synergy of scenographic practices, of worlding. The term worlding identifies an active, ongoing process with no end; there are only infinite possibilities and potentialities. The performative scenographic design drawing, as a coalescence of seemingly



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disparate technologies, both analogue and digital, has the potential to create a scenographic atmospheric encounter or, as Kathleen Stewart argues, atmospheric attunements .  .  . a process of what Heidegger (1962) called worlding—an intimate, compositional process of dwelling in spaces that bears, gestures, gestates, worlds. (Stewart 2011, 445) Here, the performative scenographic design drawing is not constrained to the page or gallery but has navigated into a different expanded and embodied space, with always the potential of creating a cosmopoietic worlding. In light of this, I first examine the emergent field of expanded drawing in which a pronounced shift in the perception and understanding of contemporary drawing is aligned with the major digital and technological developments in the exhibition, installation, and performance of drawn works. What follows is an exploration of the scenographic design drawing, no longer limited to tradition but encompassing new and novel technologies and digital media. This transforms into a powerful means of visual imaging which constructs virtual environments and augmented reality sets which manifest extraordinary and fantastical worlds. Drawing can exist not only as an independent art form but also as an autonomous performative object and epistemic tool that occupies its own unique performative space. I stake out exciting new directions in the production of performative scenographic drawing as an interrelated, immersive spectatorial encounter. Through this lens, I identify contemporary scenographers in ballet and opera who engage both the freehand and the digital practice of drawing to produce complex digital scenographies employing real-time interfaces, animations, CGI, and immersive digital projections. Interconnected “drawn” borders and spaces between what was once regarded as oppositional genres, drawing conventions, and media have now established themselves within the elusive, ephemeral realm of scenography and live performance.

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An Emergent Field: Expanded Drawing The emergent field of expanded drawing challenges preconceived notions of the “drawing,” particularly drawings for design which traditionally are a purely practical means to experiment, record, and communicate. In recent years, scholarship in this area has moved from a marginal to a more central position, stimulating critical debate on a diverse range of topics, including the complex interrelationships between drawing, “moving image” technology, spectatorial participation, and performance. As Robert Luzar argues: Since the 1970s, predominantly in North America and Europe, drawing has re-emerged with a greater focus on conceptual invention, expansion of mediums and immediacy of form. (Luzar 2017, 55) Contemporary drawing can now include multimedia such as film, video, assemblage, on-site interventions/installations, sculpture, and digital computer technology (Harty 2010, Editorial). In Drawing as Performance: The Art Gallery Meets Experimental Theatre, Neill Overton proposes that since the 1970s the drawing crossed over from the gallery exhibition into the realm of experimental theatre; time-based, engaged in situ, performed and completed by the viewer/audience: permanently shifting the art gallery exhibition paradigm. (Overton 2015, NPF) The term “expanded” was first linked to aesthetic practice by the art historian Rosalind Krauss in her seminal essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field. She identified that sculpture and painting “had been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity . . . extended to include just about anything” (Krauss 1979, 30). Furthermore, Krauss argued that sculpture, in particular, had entered into a black hole where “positive content was increasingly difficult to define, something that was possible to locate only



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in terms of what it was not” (Krauss 1979, 34). She suggested this space “could be called its negative condition—a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place” (Krauss 1979, 34). She also proposed that the postmodernist space of painting involved a similar expansion, distinguished by the conflicting binary terms of uniqueness/reproducibility (Krauss 1979, 43). A contemporary advocate of expanded drawing and its future capabilities is the peer-reviewed, online journal TRACEY: Drawing and Visualisation Research, launched in 1998. TRACEY is dedicated to the exploration and examination—physically, cognitively, and critically—of contemporary drawing and visualization research processes (Deborah Harty 1998, NPF). In particular, TRACEY has actively encouraged and “expanded” the definition of drawing to include drawn works such as found drawings, “which may be by-products of other processes, organic forms or discarded materials—images arising by accident rather than from any conscious process” (TRACEY 1998, NPF). TRACEY and its allied website Drawing Research Network (DRN) have facilitated a global drawing and visualization community beyond the academy (Deborah Harty, 1998, NPF). In Chapter 1, I briefly discussed the performative drawing, identifying the commonly held definition that these are drawings delineated by the verb or the action/doing of drawing governed by John L. Austin’s model of performative speech or utterance, referring to “itself ” in the process of its own making (Austin 1961). These “thought events” (Luzar 2017, 52) performed in real time intersect “drawing and performance to display an event of making, being and thinking” (Luzar 2017, 51). “These artists focus on the intellectual properties of indexing physicality and material engagement” (Luzar 2017, 55). There have been many exhibitions celebrating the late twentieth-century renaissance in drawing and expanded drawing as an art practice, arising from Bernice Rose’s 1976 exhibition Drawing Now, MoMA, New York. Others that have followed are American Drawing: 1963–74, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976); Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three AvantGarde Generations, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1976);

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Afterimage: Drawing through Process, Los Angeles (1999); Performance Drawings at the Drawing Center, New York (2001); and more recently Move: Choreographing You, Hayward Gallery, London (2010–11) (Luzar 2017, 56). In the catalogue for this last exhibition, Peggy Phelan describes performative drawing as “movement-based thinking” (Rosenthal 2011, 22). The Polish experimental installation and performance artist Gosia Wlodarczak creates works which generate “movement-based thinking.” As she expresses it: “my practice is made manifest through heightened awareness of ‘existence’ in the everyday areas of human thought, behaviour and experience” (Wlodarczak 2007, NPF). She does not practice scenography per se, but she does, however, perform “live” drawings before a spectator, employing scenographic tropes to create intense spectatorial encounters within an expanded drawn space. Her performative drawings are a distinctly ephemeral spatial expression which resonate a heightened theatricality.

Gosia Wlodarczak Gosia Wlodarczak’s installation/performance art is performed drawings which occur as an action in front of, and conditioned by, the presence of spectators as witnesses and their awareness that they are active participants in the unfolding narrative. A drawing produced by the “live” drawing artist in front of another as witness is a performance; the drawing exists in the moment of its making as “movement-based thinking” (Rosenthal 2011, 22). The traces left of the “live” actions become autonomous performative marks, autonomous objects as a record, or the evidence of the performed installation artwork. The British historian Claire Bishop identifies installation art as “a type of art that the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical,’ ‘immersive,’ or ‘experiential’” (Bishop 2005, 1). Wlodarczak’s work A Room Without a View, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne (2013) manifests, in particular, a heightened spectatorial presence with an intensely theatrical specificity.



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The spectator, as the voyeur, views the performance on a screen via a live webcam stream. Wlodarczak herself was “imprisoned” in a nine-paneled, windowless black box. Here she spent seventeen days, deprived of sight and sound, drawing continuously on the black walls with a white pigment marker pen between the hours of 10:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. (Wlodarczak 2013, NPF). Wlodarczak, trapped in a closed, walled-off room with a concealed camera, is gazed upon by the hidden spectator, separated behind the fourth wall and within the safety of the darkened exhibition space. The “stage” of A Room Without a View is transformed into a “peep-show cinema,” the camera into a surveillance device, and the spectators into voyeurs. Wlodarczak described her experience in A Room Without a View as living inside the drawing; she is the performative drawn work (Wlodarczak 2013, NPF). What is significant here is that Wlodarczak has created a powerful and emotive spectatorial engagement within a distinctive scenographic mise-en-scène between herself and the absent presence of the spectator as the Other. She also successfully combined traditional drawing processes with digital technologies to generate a performative scenographic encounter within an expanded drawn space. As she states: My work interrogates space, time and language, using them as “tools” to grasp the phenomenon of “acute actuality.” Over time I have adopted various visual processes and methods to address and communicate these issues. Drawing is the basis of all my work, extending towards performance, interactive situations, sound and video installation. (Wlodarczak 2007, NPF)

The Performative Scenographic Design Drawing Scenography has extended into a multidisciplinary field which includes “found theatre, site-specific theatre, devised theatre, applied theatre, media theatre, interventions, installations and so on” (Lotker 2015, 8). It is theatre’s

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preoccupation with duality, such as truth/falsity, reality/illusion, visibility/ invisibility, presence/absence, which places a different iteration of the scenographic design drawing within an expanded drawn space, where now the drawing artist is removed from the work and it is the drawing itself that potentially transforms into a palpable presence as the “other performer.” I argue that it is these drawings which have evolved into the performative scenographic design drawing. They are digitally animated onto “screens,” which are not simply projected “backdrops” framing the live performance but are the performative agency generated by the nonhuman, algorithmic Other whose presence creates an illusion of moving, three-dimensional forms interacting intimately and flawlessly with the live performer. These multifaceted productions involving complex choreography combined with digitally mediated environments mark theatre’s epistemic shift toward real-time digital interaction, feedback, modulation, and simulations between the performers and the animated “drawn” environments. In 1988, Robert Russett and Cecile Starr in their book Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art prophesized: Perhaps one day these films will be marketed through art galleries and “hung” in museums; perhaps they will be collected and played on home projectors and video machines, as long-play records are now heard on hi-fi sets; perhaps programmes of these films will be presented in theaters and television, as recitals and concerts now are viewed with pleasure by mass audiences. (Robert Russett 1988, 11) Experimental animation, or as Russett and Starr identified it as “this brilliant but little-known kinetic art form” (Robert Russett 1988, 9), has become front and center in the transformation of scenographic space. Within these animated drawn environments, there have emerged newly altered worlds, both familiar and novel. As the American director Peter Sellars argues: the high tech interface has been appealing to artists because it does have the potential to fragment and diversify the master narrative, offering



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simultaneous multiple perspectives, freshly negotiated independent vocabularies and the direct experience of ambiguity, the ineffable and a sensory and mental landscape that lies above, below and beyond ideology. (Salter 2010, x) The following is an exploration of the experimental animations or, as I like to refer to them, the digital, performative scenographic design drawings of the South African director, scenographer, and artist William Kentridge; the Czech Republic scenographer/artist Gabriela Tylesova; the Romanian scenographer Dan Potra; and the British performance troupe—1927. This examination identifies how the scenographic design drawing can take on an independent life of its own. These drawings have transcended their traditional pragmatic function to a new expanded space—a “threedimensional,” performative, and virtual space. Long-established perceptions of the stage, spectatorial interaction and participation, and visual representation have transformed into a dramaturgical-scenographic arena, a site of scenographic experimentation and innovation. All these artist/ scenographers combine and manipulate “obsolete” animation practices with contemporary sophisticated technologies to produce imaginative and wondrous possibilities. As Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn recognize in Experimental and Expanded Animation: Techniques or camera-based effects such as dust, film scratches, the blur, flash frames, lens and exposure flares, reticulation, processing mistakes and light leaks—all qualities signifying the limits and nature of celluloid-based filmmaking—are transported into menus and buttons as simulations in film editing software such as I-Movie, Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. (Vicky Smith 2018, 46) However, what is decisive in this examination is that all these creative practitioners are distinguished by their consummate draftsmanship and that their scenographic practice originates with the freehand thinking drawing. In

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our contemporary world of media proliferation, the drawing by the hand of the scenographer remains a critical tool which facilitates the discovery of new spaces, both surprising and potent, for the live contemporary spectator in the twenty-first century.

William Kentridge William Kentridge (1955–) is a seminal practitioner in the creative production of performative scenographic design drawing. In both Kentridge’s art practice and his scenographic productions, he deconstructs the traditional definition of drawing by employing distinct scenographic tropes combined with experimental film technologies to create, exhibit, and perform the drawn works. He generates expanded drawings which are inherently theatrical and arousing curiosity, wonder, and astonishment in the spectator. Early in his career, he pioneered the integration of “archaic” cinematic imagemaking techniques into his artistic experiments and performed installations. Arising from his training in the early 1980s in mime and theatre at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, he produced outstanding expressionistic “live” performative drawn narratives that intersected a multidisciplinary discourse. The multifarious and complex elements which collectively identify Kentridge’s drawn works assert that it is not about the real but about, as Hans-Thies Lehmann argues, “the unsettling that occurs through the indecidability whether one is dealing with reality or fiction. The theatrical effect and the effect on consciousness both emanate from this ambiguity” (Lehmann 2004, 105). Kentridge’s startlingly original and innovative works are primarily in charcoal and ink on paper and then animated, employing the early cinematic technologies of stop-motion. His obsessive technique of repeatedly drawing, erasing, and re-drawing marks while continually filming the blurred and torn



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traces is integral to his art and filmmaking aesthetic. As Erica Ando comments in her review of Kentridge’s exhibition, William Kentridge: Five Themes: Kentridge’s utopia is a vision of transformation, relying on the ambiguity of the future, drawn and erased over and over in an effort to transcend the absurdities of everyday life. (Ando 2010, 335) An example of Kentridge’s drawn installations is More Sweetly Play the Dance, exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery (London) in 2015.1 Like many of Kentridge’s works, this is also autobiographical, steeped in his personal memories, ideology, and experiences growing up in Johannesburg as a thirdgeneration South African of Lithuanian-Jewish heritage during the apartheid period. As he explained: I have never been able to escape Johannesburg, and in the end, all my work is rooted in this rather desperate provincial city. I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and the films are certainly spawned by, and feed off, the brutalised society left in its wake. (Kentridge 2012b, NPF) South Africa’s horrific legacy of colonialism and apartheid is a prominent theme of trauma, embedded throughout Kentridge’s oeuvre. More Sweetly Play the Dance is a forty-five meter, multimedia, multiscreen caravan procession of larger-than-life figures, puppets, and animated charcoal drawings. They encircle the entire space as primarily silhouettes and shadows, accompanied by a harrowing soundscape led by a brass band. The film is projected as a moving narrative on a background of a charcoal-rendered desolate mining landscape, stripped bare of trees. The figures are collectively performing the medieval Danse Macabre—the dance of death. It is a shuffling, whirling, dancing troupe of characters from all levels of society, uniting in death. The last figure in this haunting procession is the South African classical dancer Dada Masilo, dressed in a military style uniform while gracefully pirouetting around a rifle. More

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Sweetly Play the Dance explicitly interrogates South Africa’s colonial past as a means to critique and engage with the political present. The motley procession of dispossessed characters is reminiscent of the current global movement of refugees seeking out an uncertain future. As Kentridge maintains: The procession is a form . . . [that records] the fact that here in the twenty-first century human foot power is still the primary means of locomotion and we are still locked in the manual labour of individual bodies as a way of making the world. . . . The image of a procession of people carrying their baggage is both a contemporary and immediate image and one deeply rooted in our psyches. (Marente Bloemheuvel and Jaap Guldemond 2015, 25) Kentridge digitally animates his drawings on a sweeping, all-encompassing scale within the scenographic space. “Caught in the fibrillation between figure and ground, the viewer contemplates his or her own unsteady place in death’s passing procession” (Bhabha 2016, NPF). Here, the spectator is fully immersed in a drawn narrative that is ambiguous in its complexity, but palpable in what Maaike Bleeker describes as its “here and now-ness” (Bleeker 2008, 65). The spectators are conscious that a theatrical event is taking place here and now; they have become acutely aware of their own presence within the expanded drawn space. Kentridge has successfully merged his artistic practice into his recent explorations into the traditional art form of opera, for instance, Mozart’s The Magic Flute (2005), Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose (2010), Alban Berg’s Lulu (2015), and Wozzeck (2018). Wozzeck toured Australia in 2019 as a collaboration between Opera Australia, the Metropolitan Opera New York, Salzburg Festival Austria, and the Canadian Opera Company. This critically acclaimed production was equally both compelling and highly confronting. Wozzeck, completed by Berg in 1922 and based on a nineteenth-century play Woyzeck by Georg Büchner (1837), shadows the soldier and anti-hero Wozzeck and his tragic descent into madness, murder, and suicide. Kentridge brought to the Berg’s score and libretto his own apocalyptic vision. There is



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an unrelenting bombardment of the stridently drawn images of gas-masked figures, barbed wire, decapitated heads, lifeless bodies submerged in mud and swamp water, and ominous night skies that loom over the increasingly paranoiac Wozzeck who stumbles across the cinematic palimpsest.2 Like most of Kentridge’s works, there is also black humor made manifest through the surreal collocation of disparate fragments between the real and absurd. For the design of Wozzeck, he drew inspiration from black-andwhite photographs of the French battlefields during the First World War, and then juxtaposed them with ciphers plundered from vaudeville and music hall. Recognizable objects, such as Kentridge’s ubiquitous megaphone, suddenly appear in a strange, unknown setting or vice versa. For instance, in (Figure 4.1), why are there abandoned megaphones in the harsh, war-torn landscape of mud and barbed wire? This pronounced divergence in meaning

FIGURE 4.1  William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 6): Charcoal and red pencil on Velin Arches Cover White (440 gsm). 121 × 160 cm, 2016.

Source: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

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generates, as Jacques Rancière posits, a “dialectical montage . . . by assimilating heterogeneous elements and combining incompatible things, it creates clashes” (Rancière 2007, 56). As Rancière also argues: It involves organizing a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict . . . the distance and the collision . . . [reveal] the secret of a world—that is, the other world whose writ runs behind its anodyne or glorious appearances. (Rancière 2007, 57) This visual “collision” of imagery is further amplified by Berg’s discordant and atonal music. Kentridge’s frenetic charcoal drawings of the ravages and iconography of war (Figure 4.2) are cinematically projected onto the “real” and tangible elements of the set: a desolate and bleak terrain of zigzagging wooden

FIGURE 4.2 William Kentridge. Scenographic design drawing for Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 63): charcoal on paper, 164 × 196 cm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town.



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duckboards, crates, dilapidated furniture, door jambs, and a cyclorama layered in enlarged printed book pages3. Kentridge comments that the opera had to meet a material for it to take fire—with Wozzeck, it’s the roughness of charcoal drawing. So all of the projections are made out of charcoal drawings and there’s something in the graininess of the drawing itself that echoes both with the music, obviously, but also with the world that it’s depicting—of things transforming, of sounds under the earth. (Kentridge 2016, NPF) The projected charcoal and ink drawings appear to continually redraw themselves, appearing and then instantly erased or metamorphosed into another haunting image that in turn disappears in a blink-of-the-eye. Redrawing, re-seeing, and not seeing—disappearing into a black void—are the tropes that define Kentridge’s transformative drawing practice. These fleeting moments are, as Kentridge describes, “gaps”: It is in the gap between the object and its representation that this energy emerges, the gap we fill in, in the shift from the monochromatic shadow to the colour of the object, from its flatness to its depth and heft. (Kentridge 2012a, 31) The neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio argues that there is a gap between our knowledge of neural events, at molecular, cellular, and system levels, on the other hand, and the mental image whose mechanisms of appearance we wish to understand. There is a gap to be filled by not yet identified but presumably identifiable physical phenomena. (Damasio 1999, 323) These gaps are seized by the desperate grasping gaze, only to disappear in a blink-of-an-eye. The act of drawing is itself an attempt at capturing visually those fleeting, fragmented moments which are, as Damasio posits, a “state of feeling made conscious” (Damasio 1999, 125). Similarly, the French

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philosopher Jacques Derrida identifies this gap as a drawn trait or trace that persists in the time of the (clin d’oeil) that buries the gaze in the batting of an eyelid, the instant called the Augenblink, the wink or blink, and what drops out of sight in the twinkling of an eye. (Derrida 1993, 48) Just as Kentridge’s drawings appeared from and disappeared within the murky darkness which enveloped the mise-en-scène, so did the singers emerge in and out and through the aggressively drawn black-and-white landscape: a Francisco Goyaesque representation of Hell on earth (Figure 4.3). The challenge for the spectator is to distinguish what is perceived and what exists as real; this is the quintessence of theatre: a sign of a gap-being-filled in a blink-of-an-eye. Kentridge’s unique contribution to the practice of performative scenographic design drawing is exemplified in his opera productions in which the drawing

FIGURE 4.3  William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 17): Charcoal and red pencil on Hahnemuhle paper 56.5 × 78 cm, 2016.

Source: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town.



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as a filmic iteration transforms into the Other character—elusive, ephemeral, and fleeting, which is also the essence of live performance.

Gabriela Tylesova The Czech Republic scenographer and artist Gabriela Tylesova created performative scenographic design drawings for her design for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake (1875–6), choreographed by Karen Kain and produced by the National Ballet of Canada (2020). This tragic love story, the duality of the White and Black Swan, follows the doomed liaison between the handsome Prince Siegfried and the beautiful Princess Odette, who, cursed by the evil sorcerer Baron von Rothbart, is transformed by day into a swan swimming in a lake created from her own tears. One evening, as Siegfried is walking along the lakeshore, he encounters Odette changing into a maiden. Both instantly fall in love and Siegfried swears a vow of undying fidelity. A ball is held to celebrate the Prince’s birthday. However, one of the guests is von Rothbart, accompanied by his daughter Odile who is the “wicked twin” or doppleganger of Odette. Bewitched, Siegfried falls under the seductive, evil spell of Odile and breaks his vow, condemning Odette to a life as a swan. The concept underpinning this production is, as Tylesova states, “a heightened controlled environment by a dark force.”4 Her scenographic design recalls the Hollywood subgenre of “women’s films,” the 1940s melodrama. Embedded in these films are dark psychological undercurrents, a black menacing space, chiaroscuro lighting, and ominous looming shadows. Ben Singer in Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts identifies the tropes of melodrama as a “cluster concept” .  .  . strong pathos; heightened emotionality; moral polarization; non-classical narrative components; and spectacular effects. (Singer 2001, 7)

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These stylistic characteristics are all present in Tylesova’s Swan Lake, generating a spectatorial emotive engagement with the female protagonist, Odette. Similar to the heroine of melodrama, there is a polarization or bifurcation of the female psyche—the passive victim (Odette) in opposition to the sexually aggressive predator (Odile).5 As Simone de Beauvoir, in her classic work The Second Sex (1949), argues: There is no figurative image of woman which does not call up at once its opposite: she is Life and Death, Nature and Artifice, Daylight and Night. Under whatever aspect we consider her, we always find the same shifting back and forth. (Beauvoir 1974, 210) Tylesova’s creative production is strengthened by both analogue and digital drawing methodologies generating a heightened spectatorial engagement within the cinematic mise-en-scène of animated digital screens. She begins her design process by first working in tandem with thinking drawings in charcoal (Figures 4.4–4.5) and sketch models constructed

FIGURE 4.4  Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic thinking drawing for Swan Lake, black wings: charcoal on bond paper, 2019.

Source: Courtesy of Gabriela Tylesova.



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FIGURE 4.5  Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic thinking drawing for Swan Lake, masque ball: charcoal on bond paper, 2019.

Source: Courtesy of Gabriela Tylesova. using hand-drawn, multilayered, two-dimensional cut-outs, at the scale of 1:25. The teasers and tormentors6 frame the proscenium as cardboard representations of the feathery wings of a black swan (Figure 4.6). They shroud the scenographic space in a heightened theatrical gloom. Arnold Aronson comments: postmodernism is inherently theatrical, and the proscenium (or proscenium-like arrangement) remains the prime semiotic embodiment of theatricality in our visual vocabulary. (Aronson 2005, 26) The cyclorama enveloping the upstage space was hand painted in acrylic medium in the 1:25 model by Tylesova, and later digitally animated on a colossal, immersive scale within the scenographic space. The expanded drawings create the set environment in which the ballet is performed but they also are the Other, whose pervasive malevolent “presence” within the amplified oppressiveness of the mise-en-scène creates an illusion of a sinister, moving, three-dimensional Other intermingling both seductively and insidiously

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FIGURE 4.6  Gabriela Tylesova. Scenographic sketch model drawings for Swan Lake: lead pencil on mix media, 2019.

Source: Courtesy of Gabriela Tylesova. with the live ballerinas. The diverse elements, both analogue and digital, which collectively produce Tylesova’s drawn installations, generate a surreal world that shifts continually between a subconscious nightmare and a dark psychological drama of “male” possession and control. The ghostly effect of moving images on the cyclorama and poignant chiaroscuro lighting builds an emotive theatrical state. Tylesova’s body of scenographic design drawings that transgress across traditional and contemporary technologies has expanded beyond the fourth wall into a performative and theatrical space. Her drawings, which represent a future reality that is theatrical, imagined, illusory, and akin to live performance are also ephemeral and transitory. I claim that it is these different performative scenographic design drawings which manifest an intrinsic theatricality unlike the current definition of performative drawing posited in scholarly circles.



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Dan Potra The performative scenographic design drawings produced by the Romanian scenographer Dan Potra also straddle both analogue and digital presentations. Employing freehand drawing at the genesis stage, he creates expanded drawings which are later transformed digitally into an immersive animated mise-en-scène. He designed the set and costumes and had animated his freehand pencil drawings for The Perfect American, composed by Phillip Glass, directed by Phelim McDermott for Teatro Real in Madrid in a co-production with the  English National Opera  in London (2013). The libretto written by Rudy Wurlitzer is based on the controversial  biographical novel  Der König von Amerika by Peter Stephan Jungk. Set in 1966, the opera opens with the protagonist Walt Disney on his deathbed—haunted by dreams and nightmarish hallucinations. Disney, acclaimed as a visionary artist and entrepreneur, is portrayed in the opera as also a megalomaniac, a narcissist, racist, antiSemite, and misogynist, who over-worked and under-paid his creative team of animators without any acknowledgment. A disgruntled, fired worker, the fictional Austrian cartoonist Wilhelm Dantine returns to the dying Disney to confront and demand compensation. Potra comments: The commercial side of Disney is something to rail against. On the other hand, when you are growing up behind the iron curtain, there’s something magical about his western way of making movies. You’re drawn in by the level of ambition and innovation. By the mechanics and the magic. By Donald Duck! (Potra 2014, NPF) Central to Potra’s scenographic design are his drawings, beginning once again with thinking drawings in pen and colored pencils in a sketch journal. These later developed into a highly complex and extensive storyboard sketched out free hand with a stylus on a Wacom tablet. The extraordinary detail which explicitly mapped out each performative and technical intricacy can be likened

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to a cinematic storyboard for a full-length feature film. Multiple ideas are sketched, reworked, discarded, and re-drawn again and again, evidencing the scenographer’s constantly shifting imaginative thought. In an interview with Nancy Groves for The Guardian (2014), Potra says the composer Phillip Glass kept asking, “Give me your storyboard and I’ll write the music to underscore it” (Potra 2014, NPF).  This astounding collaboration generated a seamless synergy between two prominent artists. To prevent copyright infringements, Potra also had to reinterpret and adapt by hand with pencil on paper the Disneyesque cartoon characters, which were then later digitally animated onto large moving gauze screens by the UK production company Leo Warner and 59 Productions, mimicking archaic and deliberately naïve, stop-motion techniques. These scrims are attached and seemingly propelled by a central gigantic mechanical-electrical moving assemblage, designed by Potra to resemble 1950s heavy iron industrial machinery. Connected are also cameras on a boom that revolve with the action of the performers. Potra’s set is a constantly moving, shifting, and rotating entity. Live feedback and close-ups of the singers are merged with cartoon characters such as “Mickey Mouse,” which are also continually mutating and dividing into demon-like monsters, cancer cells, complicated diagrams, and maps (Figure 4.7). The animations are also often generated by the movements and physical actions of the singers and the ensemble of dancers costumed as Disney’s beleaguered animators; here again the drawings become the Other performer. Potra’s animations mimic the very early Disney hand-painted cells and frame-by-frame cartoons. Drawn on tracing paper with blue pencils these delicate spectral-like drawings, projected on the diaphanous gauzes, resonate with Phillip Glass’s haunting and poignant musical score. As Potra comments about Disney the artist: He created this whole parallel universe with just some paper and pen. A world that comes to life on screen but can only last so long before you have to roll back to reality. (Potra 2014, NPF)



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FIGURE 4.7 Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Perfect American: black pen and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2013.

Source: Courtesy of Dan Potra.

1927  Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt The British performance troupe, 1927, was founded in 2005 by the coartistic directors: the writer, performer, and choreographer Suzanne Andrade and the animator and illustrator Paul Barritt. Together they constructed extraordinarily mesmerizing and original performative works, combining drawing, analogue, and digital film technologies with “live” installations. These staged environments enabled technologically driven forms of electronic or computer-augmented interaction between the performers and the performative scenographic design drawing itself. From their early experiments in small cabaret venues in London, they evolved into complex and spectacular theatre and opera productions. Their expanded experimental practice began with Barritt’s digital manipulation of his exquisite freehand drawings produced on a traditional lightbox. He mimicked a deliberately “naïve” 1920s silent-film aesthetic (hence the company’s name—1927). Barritt ingeniously

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recreated the repetitive cycles of jumpy, jittery, and scratchy “moving” drawn images of the analogue handcrafted frame-by-frame articulations and stopmotion animations, reminiscent of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and experimental films produced by the Russian Constructivists and later by Weimar Germany.7 Barritt’s playful but darkly absurd animations exploit the inherent idiosyncrasies within these embryonic cinematic explorations to create parables that critique contemporary culture. As Andrade said: Many others have used film in theater, but 1927 integrates film in a very new way. We don’t do a theater piece with added movies. Nor do we make a movie and then combine it with acting elements. Everything goes hand in hand. Our shows evoke the world of dreams and nightmares, with aesthetics that hearken back to the world of silent film. (Lenz 2018, NPF) Andrade and Barritt were commissioned by Barrie Kosky, the celebrated Australian theatre director and, since 2012, the Intendant and Chefregisseur (artistic director) of the Komische Oper Berlin, to produce, design, and choreograph The Magic Flute, Die Zauberflöte (1791), composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. This wonderfully magical, witty interpretation of Mozart’s most recognized opera premiered in 2012 to critical acclaim and continues to tour the world, opening for the first time in Perth, Australia, in 2019. The Magic Flute is a wildly bizarre, fairy-tale story between the young Prince Tamino and the damsel in distress, Pamina. This was Andrade and Barrit’s first opera design, and a project that had a preexisting narrative and fixed musical score. Barritt describes his scenographic design drawing process for The Magic Flute: She [Andrade] has been listening to the music of Herr Mozart upon an old phonograph over and over again and writing out lists of the events that need to happen for the individual scenes whilst at the same time working out the choreography needed. We discuss in detail said events, often shifting and changing the ideas to fit with the logistics of the stage . . . Once, at the lab



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I undertake the time-consuming and painstaking task of drawing out the necessary animated scenes. For this I use my trusty pencils and pens and a glass box lit from beneath (I use a local family of glow-worms for this but others might use different means). (Barritt 2015, NPF) The “real” tangible staging for The Magic Flute is relatively simple in construction: a large white screen, swiveling doors, and platforms. However, to make it possible for the singers to interact seamlessly and safely with the projected cartoon characters and animated environments, they had to be harnessed. There were also other unique challenges for the performers who had to be acutely cognizant of the conductor and orchestra, sing Mozart’s whimsical but complex score including singspiel,8 while simultaneously paralleling their live actions with an animated character within the alternate virtual and immaterial mise-en-scène. Staging and choreography had to be precise; innumerable hours were spent rehearsing hundreds of technical cues to synchronize the performers, orchestra, and digital matrix. To succeed in the final simulation of live interaction, the singers performed with the predetermined, pre-recorded projected images. The performer and screen are as Dorita Hannah argues: No longer the planar surface upon which light, still and moving images are “thrown,” the screen has become an extension of the body and lived space. (Hannah 2017, 40) Barritt’s flickering, multiperspectival, rapidly reconfiguring and constantly shifting animations evoke the neon lit and strobed environs of cabaret venues, amusement arcades, and fairgrounds of a by-gone era (Figure 4.8). The spectator is left to literally make sense of what they see, informed only by the English subtitles ingeniously disguised as ornamental silent-film intertitles accompanied by an eighteenth-century Hammerklavier or fortepiano. A vaudevillian anarchy is generated by Barritt’s roller coaster of animation, Mozart’s profound music and Kosky’s own personal oeuvre drawn from

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FIGURE 4.8  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt. music hall, pantomime, and Yiddish theatre (Figure 4.9). Kosky, described as Australia’s enfant terrible (Farrell 2018, 106), wrote in 2008 in his highly controversial book On Ecstasy: The theatre seems to me the perfect place for the ecstatic to manifest itself. Theatre is by very nature an alchemical mix of manipulation, ritual and simulation. Body, voice, light, sound. Who really knows what will be unleashed or unearthed when these forces combine. Or in what theatrical moments these forces will choose to emerge. (Kosky 2008, 51) The fantastical elements of this opera complement Barritt’s juxtaposition of early Disneyesque cartoons overlayed with a montage of German Expressionistic images (Figures 4.10–4.11). Barritt’s scenographic design drawings recall the kaleidoscopic of simultaneity of images in the drawings of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. The collision of disparate images in these artists



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FIGURE 4.9  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt.

FIGURE 4.10  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt.

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FIGURE 4.11  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt. drawings manifests in Barritt’s whimsical and lyrically wrought evocations for The Magic Flute. When I contacted Barritt to ask him if he had any of his early thinking drawings for The Magic Flute, he replied: They are some prep/story board images I drew during making the Magic flute. Quite interesting to look back at them. I sort of drew out a load of stuff to help me get the feel and develop ideas. (Barritt 2019) Barritt’s flowingly, expressed thinking drawings resonate with Mozart’s lilting, rhythmic score. As Kosky argued: This is also helped by 1927’s very special feeling for rhythm. The rhythm of the music and the text has an enormous influence on the animation. This not only gives the whole piece a consistent style, but also a consistent rhythm. It’s a silent film by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, so to speak! (Lenz 2018, NPF)



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Rosalind Krauss examines in The Im/Pulse to See. In Vision and Visuality (1988) rhythm and the flip-book, frame-by-frame animation, such as designed by Barritt. She identifies how there is present within early animations or, as she describes, the “mechanical segmentation of the continuity of motion” (Krauss 1988, 59), a primal pulse, erotic, and subversive that situates the spectator “captured not so much by the visual itself as by what one could call the visuality-effect” (Krauss 1988, 58). As she argues: a rhythm, or beat, or pulse—a kind of throb of on/off on/off on/off—which, in itself, acts against the stability of visual space in a way that is destructive and devolutionary . . . has the power to decompose and dissolve the very coherence of form on which visuality may be thought to depend. (Krauss 1988, 51) Barritt’s unrelenting, pulsating, and transformative montage of imagery generates an intense spectatorial encounter, in which meaning manifests quite differently and poignantly for each individual. As Kosky comments: This emphasis on the images makes it possible for every viewer to experience the show in his or her own way: as a magical, living storybook; as a curious, contemporary meditation on silent film as a singing silent film; or as paintings come to life. (Lenz 2018, NPF) This is accentuated by the palpable presence of the human hand in the creative production of the animations: as an embodied and tactile process of drawing between the eye, mind, and hand. The human effort remains visible and real. As Kosky again stressed: During the performance, the technology doesn’t play in the foreground. Although Paul spent hours and hours sitting in front of computer to create it, his animation never loses its deeply human component. You will always notice that a human hand has drawn everything. Video projections as part of theatrical productions aren’t new. But they often become boring after a few

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minutes, because there isn’t any interaction between the two-dimensional space of the screen and the three dimensions of the actors. Suzanne and Paul have solved this problem by combining all of these dimensions into a common theatrical language. (Lenz 2018, NPF) The digital complexity and brilliance of 1927’s creative designs for The Magic Flute remain consistently authentic to the opera’s spirit and intent; Mozart’s humanity and genius is central to the design. The handcrafted animation is fundamental in the creation of magical filmic theatre, where Kosky declared, “It’s a silent film by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, so to speak!” (Lenz 2018, NPF). The future of the scenographic design drawing is challenged primarily by digital systems that augment an invisible, simulated, and predictive reality. As Chris Salter argues: the digital image is the new scenography, replacing the three-dimensionality of real space with its polygon-driven doppelganger. (Salter 2017, 177) However, as I have highlighted throughout this chapter, digital interventions can complement and enhance analogue and handcrafted scenographic drawing processes. As Dorita Hannah states, the screen is now recognized as “Neither a passive plane upon which to throw the image nor an inert surface emitting pixelated light, the screen is acknowledged as a performative player in its own right” (Hannah 2017, 54). This enquiry has distinguished creative scenographic productions, which intersect and interrelate the freehand scenographic design drawing with the expanding potential of drawing practices that are no longer confined either to the page or to the gallery. It has staked out exciting new directions in the production of performative scenographic design drawings, positioned in a different expanded and embodied space. Interconnected practices that seek to interrogate the crossovers and spaces between what was once regarded as oppositional genres and media have now established themselves within the elusive realm of scenography and live performance.

5 The Drawn Absence

To that end we must study to remake these images—no longer content with a puppet, we must create an über-marionette. The über-marionette will not compete with Life—but will rather go beyond it. It’s ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the body in Trance—it will aim to clothe itself with a death-like Beauty while exhaling a living spirit. (CRAIG 1908, 12)

The radical English and modernist scenographer, director, and theatre theorist Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) sought to replace the “living actor” with an über-marionette. Craig wrote an article for London’s Morning Post which questioned: “Why should the actors and actresses spoil the view by standing between the scene and the audience” (Craig October 13, 1903). Much speculation has been written as to what exactly Craig envisioned this über-marionette to be: a puppet, masked dancer, shadow, or spectral presence “loaded with Nietzschean flavour” (Bœuf 2010, 102). As Patrick Le Bœuf further posits: “The figure imagined by Craig a century ago has not lost any of its power to fascinate and make us dream” (Bœuf 2010, 113). This chapter examines my ongoing practice-based research in which the “living actor” has become an absent presence within the expanded drawn space of the performative scenographic design drawing. I extend Craig’s concept to the actor’s complete corporeal removal from the stage. Instead, the spectatorial presence

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and gaze is prioritized—more so than narrative meaning, plot structure, and the long-established role of the actor. The spectator becomes the performer within the drawn scenographic mise-en-scène. A ghostly presence or, as Craig ambiguously describes it, “the body in Trance” is inherent within the expanded drawn space and therefore provokes in the spectator a “heightened awareness for one’s own presence” (Lehmann 2006, 122). My drawing practice seeks to discover a hybrid genre that is both a drawing and a “theatre without actors,” constructed through the image of the “empty stage.” The spectator’s encounter with this absent presence within the expanded drawn space becomes a form of post-dramatic theatre. My scenographic design and art practice are inextricably linked: one informs the other. Both are supported by drawing as a process and as an artifact. My current research was undertaken to investigate unexplored intersections between the scenographic design drawing, post-dramatic theatre, and expanded drawing as an art practice. This is presented as the Drawn Absence (2018), constructed primarily from the freehand scenographic design drawing, the scenographic scale model, and digital video interventions, underpinned by scenographic tropes and associated with the immersive, spectator-centric space of post-dramatic theatre.

The Field of Post-dramatic Theatre Post-dramatic theatre emerged from the horrors of the Second World War—the Holocaust and Hiroshima—as a recognized field of academic discourse (Lehmann 2006, 13). The concept of post-dramatic theatre is analogous to that of postmodern theatre; both terms are interchangeable. It was Elinor Fuchs, in The Death of Character (1996), who recognized the deconstruction of traditional dramatic conventions in contemporary American theatre. She related this rupture directly to postmodern theories of subjectivity (Lehmann 2006, 1). By the 1990s, the term “postmodern



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theatre” was firmly established and defined by some of the following keywords and phrases: ambiguity; celebrating art as fiction; celebrating theatre as process; discontinuity; heterogeneity; non-textuality; pluralism; multiple codes; subversion; all site; perversions; performer as theme and protagonist; deformation; text as basic material only; deconstruction; considering text to be authoritarian and archaic; performance as a third term between drama and theatre; anti-mimetic; resisting interpretation. (Lehmann 2006, 25) Arnold Aronson, in his text on postmodern theatre Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, asserts that theatre has now reached a point where there is a fragmentation of languages. Structures have dissolved; discrete images have evaporated. The past is no longer prelude, it is merely material to be drawn upon the present use. All images, all ideas, all thoughts, are equal. Linearity is archaic, anachronistic. (Aronson 2005, 77) He examines in detail the emergence of postmodern theatre and its virulent reaction to the avant-garde modernism which prevailed for much of the twentieth century. He encapsulates the fundamental aesthetic of postmodern theatre design as “virtually reek[ing] with the presence of the past, and it often pastes together a collage of stylistic imitations that function not as a style but as a semiotic code” (Aronson 2005, 17). With the onset of postmodernism came the “death” of art, narrative, subject, and the character; self-referential authorship was deemed elitist and irrelevant (Robinson 2011, NPF). Adolphe Appia’s meta-narrative, the single metaphoric image, and the monolithic sculptural object within the sparse dramatic space imploded with the onset of the “hypertextural world of electronic media” (Aronson 2005, 79). However, the German theatre theorist Hans-Thies Lehmann disputes the application of the term “postmodern” to theatre, arguing that it reduces theatre to generalized catchphrases (Lehmann 2006, 25) and “miss[es] . . . the diversity of its theatrical means . . . in the light of post-dramatic aesthetics” (Lehmann 2006, 26).

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The term “post-dramatic theatre” was coined by Lehmann in Postdramatisches Theater in 1999. (The English translation was published in 2006.) According to Lehmann, this “new theatre” (Lehmann 2006, 68) is a simultaneous and multiperspectival form of perceiving (Lehmann 2006, 6). He proposed a “palette of stylistic traits” comprising “parataxis, simultaneity, play with the density of signs, musicalisation, visual dramaturgy, physicality, irruption of the real, situation/event” (Lehmann 2004, 105). He further suggested that in this new theatre the spectators become co-writers of the text and active witnesses “who reflect on their own meaning-making and who are also willing to tolerate gaps and suspend the assignment of meaning” (Lehmann 2006, 6). In a similar vein, Rachel Fensham argues that post-dramatic theatre “leads to the creation and installation of a new kind of spectator, one who participates in the process and meaning of the event, or situation” (Fensham 2012, NPF). As also Thea Brezjek and Lawrence Wallen maintain, this is a theatre that no longer accepts the traditional dominance of the dramatic text, but instead claims the equal autonomy of all aspects of performance. Postdramatic scenography is distinct by its often-irreverent collaging technique and its visual emphasis as well as its eclectic formal language and historical citations. (Wallen 2018, 7) Post-dramatic theatre is nonlinear in that narrative meaning and plot structure are subordinate. It is a reaction against twentieth-century dramatic naturalism and realism pirating “low” theatrical art forms of vaudeville, pantomime, and music hall. Post-dramatic theatre embraces a return to “theatricality” or, in other words, a reliance on spectatorial participation and the recognition and exaggeration of artifice (Caroline van Eck 2011, 26). It is pertinent to identify here the etymology of the word theatre. As Martin Harrison posits: It is significant that the Greek theatron means literally “a seeing-place” or “a place for viewing,” from theomai, “to behold,” as it stresses not the



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performer, nor the drama performed but the audience, the spectators. (Harrison 1998, 275) The theatricality inherent in post-dramatic theatre positions the spectator as the center of the action. The post-dramatic performance expresses a heightened theatricality which embraces the presence and gaze of the spectator.

Punchdrunk A key player within the field of post-dramatic theatre is the contemporary British theatre company Punchdrunk. They have created a new kind of spectator who is a participant in the “shared space” (Lehmann 2004, 105) of post-dramatic theatre. Their critically acclaimed production Sleep No More, first created in 2011 and still running in New York, is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This production is set in over a hundred cinematically detailed rooms ranging across the six floors of a vast block of three disused warehouses called the McKittrick Hotel (Punchdrunk 2011). The promenade performance1 is three hours long, with all the scenes running consecutively. The spectators, wearing white masks to give them anonymity, wander throughout the sprawling building, up and down flights of stairs, along the dimly lit corridors, and in and out of the cluttered rooms. They are immersed in a film-noir horror story that compels them to keep moving through the spaces to seek out meaning. Multiple narratives, nonlinear performance, and a heightened theatricality define this post-dramatic production by Punchdrunk. Another production created by Punchdrunk in conjunction with the Royal National Theatre is The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013). This show is also set across four floors of an abandoned building which was previously the Royal Mail sorting office in Paddington, London. Adapted from Georg Büchner’s famous unfinished play, Woyzeck, it is a promenade spectacle of murder, insanity, and adultery. The white-masked spectators are once again

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able to move throughout the atmospheric gloom of the performance space, enveloping themselves in the seediness and depravity of the recreated 1960s Hollywood film studio. The freedom to move in and out and through the performance space, to intermingle with the actors, and/or simply to come and go at will conflicts with traditional theatre where the spectators “are condemned to silent observation” (Lehmann 2006, 3) in the darkened auditorium and in front of an imaginary fourth wall. By contrast, Maaike Bleeker describes the presence of the post-dramatic spectator as a here and now-ness. She proposes, The spectators lose their safe places in the auditorium. They lose those places—marked by absence—from whence they might merely observe a dramatic world unfolding “over there.” Instead, spectators are addressed more directly and made aware of the fact that the theatrical event is taking place here and now. This “here and now-ness” is further stressed by strategies of deconstruction that aim at breaking open the coherent world represented on stage in order to show what really is there: actors, objects and a theatrical machinery. (Bleeker 2008, 65) In a similar vein I aim to create a spectatorial “here and now-ness” through an embodied sensory encounter with the drawing where the spectator becomes acutely aware of their own presence within the expanded drawn space. This repositions the contemporary spectators so that they are no longer gazing passively at the spectacle or drawing in front of them but are actively witnessing an event. It is the investigations into the precedents to my research and into the key players in post-dramatic theatre, such as the creative productions of Punchdrunk, which enabled me to construct a taxonomy of attributes with which to explore my own art practice. These are a spectatorial promenade performance, theatricalization (meta-theatricality, exaggeration, audience participation), nonlinear departure from fiction in favor of the “real,” monologues instead of dramatic dialogue, subordination of the word/text, theatre of scenography/images, music/soundscape, multiplication of frames, and the absence of the invisible fourth wall.



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Huis Clos VALET: Outside? GARCIN: Damn it, you know what I mean. Beyond that wall. VALET: There’s a passage. GARCIN: And at the end of the passage? VALET: There’s more rooms, more passages, and stairs. GARCIN: And what lies beyond them? VALET: That’s all. Extract from Huis Clos (Sartre 1989, 6) In late 2015, I embarked on a three-month, studio art residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.2 This exceptional experience marked an epiphany in my research practice. My first-hand encounter with Paris, with all the wonders and horrors3 it offered, generated a fresh set of strategies which provided me with a new framework in which to experiment, develop, and design a hybrid genre of drawing. This new genre is both an expanded drawing and a different form of post-dramatic theatre in which an absent presence is manifest. It was during this time I produced many scenographic design drawings, including thinking drawings, in response to the French existentialist play Huis Clos (No Exit), written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1944. My artistic/scenographic process always begins with an individual exploration inspired by a piece of text. The text, sometimes just a single word, is the starting point of the process. In conventional Western theatre productions, the scenographer begins with the dramatic text such as a play, script, and libretto (in conjunction with the music). The dramatic text is a prose or verse composition forming a narrative. The live performer is a representation of the characters in the narrative or story, performing the dialogue and action before a live audience. The scenographic process is similar in the context of post-dramatic theatre,

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except that the text is subordinate to other aspects of the production. As Lehman argues: Post-dramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging—and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that .  .  . becomes more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information. (Lehmann 2006, 85) It is through this post-dramatic lens that I approached Sartre’s play Huis Clos with the intention of using the text as a philosophical stimulus rather than a literal interpretation of the narrative. Huis Clos was written by Sartre as a theatrical manifestation of his seminal text Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943). Both texts were written during the Second World War when Paris was under the tyrannous reign of the Nazi-controlled Vichy government (1940–4). Sartre was a prisoner of war between 1940 and 1941. It was during this period that he read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which prompted him to respond with Being and Nothingness as a study of the consciousness of being. It is particularly pertinent to this research because the chapter “The Existence of Others” defines Sartre’s reaction to the experience of being fixed in the gaze of the Other—a phenomenological portrayal of the encounter with the Other via “the look” or le regard. The gaze—or, as Sartre referred to it, the “look”—is that which permits the subject to realize that the Other is also a subject. We only become aware of ourselves when confronted by the gaze of the Other. It is this awareness of being watched that enables us to be aware of our own presence. Sartre suggests a provocative example of how the unexpected gaze of the Other can lead to the objectification of ourselves. You are alone in a room and peering through a keyhole of a door. At this point, you are in a state which is “a pure consciousness of things, and things, caught up in the circuit of [your] selfness” (Sartre 1956, 259). However, suddenly you hear footsteps in the space beyond the door. It is the Other, who



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then turns and stares back at you through the keyhole. You now see yourself because somebody sees you. As Sartre argues: This means that all of a sudden, I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. (Sartre 1956, 260) It is through this becoming aware that we are being watched and hence objectified that we begin to objectify ourselves. Huis Clos exemplifies the arguments proposed in Sartre’s major philosophical text. Three damned souls find themselves trapped together in the same room for eternity. This is hell according to Sartre. He argued “hell is other people,” or l’enfer, c’est les autres (Sartre 1989, 45). Each cannot escape the unblinking gaze of the other two. They cannot hide from the Other. They are alone except for the mysteriously elusive Valet whose ambiguity could be the Devil in disguise. As Joseph McMahon comments in Humans Being: The World of Jean-Paul Sartre: this hell is created by the individual as his response to the Other who terrifies him . . . each is in hell where the interaction of their consciousnesses can change nothing. They are fixed and presumably inalterable because their past, now that it is over, has the quality of an object. Nothing that they say or do now can redefine, reform, or compensate for what they were then. They are locked up together to play a rueful endless game whose rules have been traced out from the patterns of their lives and whose outcome brings them fruitlessly back to the beginning. (McMahon 1971, 72)

The “Look” as an Action of Grasping INEZ: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamours in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out—but you can’t prevent your being there. Can

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you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I’m certain you hear mine. It’s all very well skulking on your sofa, but you are everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled, because you have intercepted it on its way. Extract from Huis Clos (Sartre 1989, 22) Sartre defines the “look” as an action of grasping, of a desperate seizing of the look of the Other and vice versa. The “look” is intercepted by the Other (Sartre 1989, 22). This conjures up a terrifying image of a disembodied form clutching through the tiny orifice of a keyhole. Sartre argues: I grasp the Other’s look at the very centre of my act as the solidification and alienation of my possibilities . . . Hitherto I grasped these possibilities thetically on the world and in the world in the form of the potentialities of instruments: the dark corner in the hallway referred to me the possibility of hiding—as a simple potential quality of its shadow, as the invitation of its darkness. (Sartre 1956, 256) The notion of the gaze as the act of grasping in an acquisitive manner harks back to the ancient and medieval “gaze of devotion.” Ivan Illich comments in The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: No matter the school to which the antique opticians belong, they all agree that the gaze reaches out, projects itself in an organic erection of the eye; that it is the projection of flesh into the world. For all of them, the visual ray—the ejaculation of the visual sense—itself organic, an organ that is awakened when the lids are opened. (Illich 2010, 5) The antique opticians identified the gaze as a physical, embodied protrusion that gropes out from the eye. Illich further argues that the medieval Franciscan scholars in England, particularly Roger Bacon and William of Ockham, try to understand cognition as the result of a so-called multiplicatio specierum, a kind of metaphysical simulacrum swarming out from the object of cognition to be grasped, embodied and named as the knowing subject. (Illich 2010, 9)



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The contemporary Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa in The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses also identifies the gaze as a fleshy organ that reaches out, not to grasp but to stroke. He suggests: vision reveals what the touch already knows. We could think of the sense of touch as the unconscious of vision. Our eyes stroke distant surfaces, contours and edges, and the unconscious tactile sensation determines the agreeableness or unpleasantness of experience. The distant and the near are experienced with the same intensity, and they merge into one coherent experience. (Pallasmaa 2005, 42) Again, in a similar vein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies the gaze as a veil of flesh: things we could not dream of seeing “all naked” because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh .  .  . How does it happen that my look, enveloping them, does not hide them, and finally, that veiling them, it unveils them? (Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2004, 249) Sartre generates a heightened sexual tension between the grasping groping fleshy gaze of the three characters in Huis Clos. They are all aware of being watched, of being “unveiled,” of being objectified. “Their lived experience, their past, has now become an object” (McMahon 1971, 79). GARCIN: . . . Sorry I fear I’m not good company among the dead. ESTELLE: Please, please don’t use that word. It’s so—so crude. In terribly bad taste, really. It doesn’t mean much, anyhow. Somehow, I feel we’ve never been so much alive as now. If we’ve absolutely got to mention this— this state of things, I suggest we call ourselves—wait!—absentees. Have you been—been absent long? Extract from Huis Clos (Sartre 1989, 12) The three characters in Huis Clos—or as they are described—“absentees” (Sartre 1989, 12) are trapped together for eternity; they cannot escape the unblinking gaze of the Other.

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The Voyeuristic Gaze of the Theatre-Going Spectator Huis Clos is an idiomatic French legal term meaning “in chamber . . . exclude the public” (Bridge 1994, 152); the “secret” proceedings of a court hidden behind locked doors where no one can either enter or exit the room. Huis Clos can also be translated as denoting in camera, where “camera” is a vaulted, darkened chamber.4 This definition is evocative of the black box camera with its sealed internal chamber and the concept of “being watched.” My research proposes that the spectator, silently gazing into the hellish “chamber” of Huis Clos, does so voyeuristically from the shadows of the auditorium and from behind the fourth wall. There is a sense that the “absentees” on stage cannot escape the oppressive, groping gaze of the audience—or of each other—within the claustrophobic confines of the black box theatre space. In Huis Clos, not only are the “absentees” (Sartre 1989, 12) trapped within the gaze of each other but also within that of the theatre spectator peeping through a keyhole in the fourth wall: protected, as George Rodosthenous also argues, in “a legalized and safe environment for that interaction” (Rodosthenous 2015, 3). As Marvin Carlson also observes: The skene house, in addition to its practical service, provided a tangible sign for the hidden “other” world of the actor, the place of appearance and disappearance, the realm of events not seen but whose effects condition the visible world of the stage. (Carlson 1989, 131)

No Exit (2017) I deliberately chose Huis Clos to trigger my panoramic drawn work No Exit (2017) which is approximately 12,240 x 660 mm (Figure 5.1). This work does not illustrate the text but rather is conceptually driven by Sartre’s philosophical underpinnings of the Other as an absent presence. No Exit is a representation



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FIGURE 5.1  Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 12,240 × 660 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. of the windowless space of backstage; with the exception of the running man exit sign, there are no drawn human figurative elements: the actors have left the space. However, there remains a presence, the sense of being watched, of being grasped in the fleshy gaze of the Other hidden behind the billowing curtains, the doorjamb, or, perhaps, the painted backcloths. The aim here is to prompt a spectatorial tension; the spectator encounters the voyeuristic hidden gaze of the Other as a ghostly absentee. As Alice Rayner suggests, the “ghosts” which inhabit the theatre animate our connections to the dead, producing a visible, material, and effective relationship to the abstract terms of time and repetition, sameness and difference, absence and presence. If we doubt the presence of those absent, it may be only because the abstractions are safer and more comfortable. A ghost, particularly in the theatre, ought to startle an audience into attention with a shiver. Doubt rationalises the shiver, but it also signals an encounter. (Rayner 2006, xiii) It is within this strange metaphysical gap—a space of an absent presence, a “shiver” (Rayner 2006, xiii)—in which the post-dramatic spectator encounter their own presence confronted by the gaze of the Other.

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Definition of Presence The Oxford English Dictionary defines presence as “the fact or condition of being present; the state of being with or in the same place as a person or thing” (OED 1989). However, the emergence of postmodernist discourse in the latter half of the twentieth century, in particular by the French New Wave philosophers,5 has disrupted this traditional definition of presence, specifically in relation to theatre. This radical new debate questioned the presence of the dramatic text as the driving force of the theatrical production, the performer as the center-piece (Denise Varney 2000, 93), the director as auteur, and the spectator as passive voyeur. Elinor Fuchs’s ground-breaking publication The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism (1996), still resonates as an astute and perceptive critical text, predicting as it does the shift in theatre from the language of performance to a non-narrative paradigm. Fuchs examines the rapid cultural and aesthetic change which occurred in American theatre in the 1980s and early 1990s and, in particular, the evolution of the theatrical consciousness and presence of the postmodern spectator. As she suggests, theatre has a deep genius for representing the cultural condition [which] always reemerges. Thus, we may be seeing a new kind of theatre that mimics in its underlying structures of presentation and reception the fundamental culture of contemporary capitalism. In this theatre, one could say, we are seeing the commodification of the theatrical unconsciousness. (Fuchs 1996, 129) Fuchs illustrates her argument with this metaphor: Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, the stroller, the loiterer, the window shopper endlessly fascinated with commodities . . . finally to have arrived in the theatre. Too restless and driven to be contained in a theatre seat, he prowls the total entertainment, simultaneously consuming and consumed. (Fuchs 1996, 141)



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According to Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham, “the processes of deconstruction have shown representation, on which the theatre relies, is based on absence rather than presence” (Denise Varney 2000, 93). As Cormac Power also states, postmodernism has begun the following debate: If the concept of presence implies a correspondence between consciousness and object, or viewer and stage, then theatre at once affirms presence by taking place before an audience, while simultaneously putting this correspondence into question: a fictional “now” often coexists in tension with the stage “now.” We see the stage and imagine the fiction, and so the whole question as to what is present is opened up. (Power 2008, 4) Jean-François Lyotard viewed the postmodernist paradigm as an attempt to represent the unrepresentable (Lehmann 2006, 37). My research supports the notion that absence can be thought of as an unrepresentable “ghostly” form of presence and of absence. Therefore, I have applied this definition to my drawing practice to generate post-dramatic spaces of a new hybrid genre of drawing.

An Absent Presence in No Exit (2017) No Exit is a panoramic drawn work, largely executed in black pen and colored ink on printed script and sheet music. A thinking drawing (Figure 5.2), executed in my journal, developed into this drawing (Figure 5.1) of twelve panels or drawing sections which can be reordered or interchanged at whim. Here, as in post-dramatic theatre, chronological narrative and linear meaning are irrelevant. There is no beginning or end, an eternally looping, revolving entity, which is a manifestation of the artist/researcher’s autobiographical interior monologue or “stream of consciousness.” No Exit is multiperspectival, a “mind’s eye view” into the imagination and personal memories. The drawing, as Juhani Pallasmaa argues, “is always a result of yet another kind of double perspective; a drawing looks simultaneously outwards and inwards, to the

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FIGURE 5.2  Sue Field. Thinking drawing for No Exit: black pen on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2016.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. observed or imagined world, and into the draughtsman’s own persona and mental world” (Pallasmaa 2009, 91). There are no “actors” in No Exit, but their absence becomes an absent presence. Here absence is not a vague, diffuse entity, but a palpable tension: the performers have only just left the postdramatic space or perhaps are about to enter from behind the curtain or door. The panoramic format compels the spectator to promenade the drawing to seek out meaning and to experience the empty stage as an embodied sensory happening. The drawing ceases to be a backdrop for action, becoming the impetus for action itself. It is neither the actor nor the drawing artist who is the performer, but the curious performing spectator, compelled to move to view the drawing in its entirety. The panoramic performativity of this drawing harks back to the medieval theatre pageant wagons, where the street spectator walked from tableau to tableau seeking out the revelations of God. It is also the objects and their strange arrangement in No Exit that arouse curiosity in the spectator. The etymology of the word “Hell” is a



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“concealed space” (Hoad 1986). Within the drawn windowless spaces of the panoramic drawing, No Exit, are certain objects that are alluding to the dark “concealed space” of a “fiery” Hell. These objects are the banal conventions, dictated by Work, Health and Safety (WHS), that populate the theatre backstage spaces. For example, the French running man exit sign on fire6 with no visible illuminated exit door; the red fire extinguisher, empty and abandoned; the red fire hose, left turned on to flood the space; the spilt bottle of fire-retardant; and the emergency red telephone left forgotten off the hook, all again exemplify an absent presence (Figures 5.3). Objects take

FIGURE 5.3  Sue Field. Detail of panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 1020 × 660 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

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priority in No Exit. The panoramic format pans across a performative space teeming with deliberate, self-conscious, meta-theatrical conceits. There are embedded within it reflexive, post-dramatic strategies or meta-theatrical motifs such as the red theatre curtain, floorboards, and door jamb. All are signs constantly reminding the spectators that they are watching a “live” theatre performance. Meta-theatre is “theatre that is aware of itself.” Metatheatre makes use of the conventions that haunt the theatre space, such as wings, entrances, exits, fire extinguishers, and stage directions. Instead of masking the mechanics of theatre, they are made visible. As Alice Rayner suggests: “the Brechtian aim [was] for the theatricality of theatre to be obvious, without the mystique of illusionistic secrets” (Rayner 2006, 145). There is the feeling that a specter/presence remains, even though there are no visible humans present in the drawn space. The objects embody presence and absence; there is an ambivalent sense that someone, the actor, has just left the “room.” The ambiguity of the objects, as Jacques Rancière argues, compels the spectator “to exchange the position of passive spectator for that of scientific investigator or experimenter who observes phenomena and searches for their causes” (Rancière 2009, 4). The objects in No Exit, as in post-dramatic theatre, are signs that can provoke meaning—or, perhaps, none at all? As Bleeker argues: freed from his or her fixed position and no longer forced to see in one way rather than the other, the spectator is granted the freedom to see and give meaning at will—or not to attribute any meaning at all—to the experience there to be apprehended. (Bleeker 2008, 65) Also, as Erika Fischer-Lichte suggests: The spectators are free to associate everything with anything and to extract their own semiosis without restriction and at will, or even to refuse to attribute any meaning at all and simply experience the objects presented to them in their concrete being. (Fischer-Lichte 1997, 57–8)



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The objects, in particular, emphasize what Bleeker earlier referred to as “here and now-ness” (Bleeker 2008, 65), where the spectators become acutely aware of their own presence within the post-dramatic performance space. The objects within the drawn mise-en-scène become, as on stage, emblematic, the carriers of myth. These signs “stage the act of viewing” (Caroline van Eck 2011, 14) or, more implicitly, the act of mobile, embodied gazing. In the drawing of No Exit, it is the ordinary, mundane objects which imagine a ghostly presence or a double—of the absent presence of the actor, the drawing artist, or some other unseen occupant. It is the presence of the gazing spectator as the performer interacting with the Other which in some way “completes” the drawn work.

The Video No Exit In 2014, I was invited to present a paper titled Drawn to the Light: The Drawing from the Dramatic Text Stages the Act of Viewing, at the DRN, Postgraduate Event, Coventry University (UK).7 The drawing I was to discuss in my presentation was my incomplete earlier panoramic work The Chairs (2015). However, prior to the conference I was presented with a dilemma: the drawing, now nine meters long, was too difficult to represent as still photographs, which is how I would have exhibited them at a conference in a PowerPoint presentation. I attempted many experiments in photographing the work in a black space at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, Australia, but was unable to capture the drawing in its entirety without having to stand back and zoom out from the image. This rendered the drawing illegible. Thus, the photographic image (Figure 5.4) reveals only half of the drawing. It was then that I decided to video the drawing to make it possible to view the work as a whole. In 2017, when I had completed the panoramic drawn work No Exit, I again videoed the drawing but now I was exploring ways to incorporate this media into my final proposition. The video was shot at NIDA in a black box

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FIGURE 5.4  Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, The Chairs: black pen and ink on printed script and sheet music, approximately 9000 × 600 mm, 2015.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. performance space, intentionally mirroring the context of the drawn work which is ambiguously set in the windowless backstage spaces of an abandoned proscenium theatre. The oculus of the camera lens mimicked the eye of the moving spectator—in this case, my spectatorial eye. The panoramic scale of the work demanded the camera be attached to a dolly to pan across the drawn performative space, to constantly back-track, stand back, and/or move in closely to absorb the detail of the work. Felix Kulakowski (NIDA) and I edited the video of No Exit8 with a soundscape that is a combination of two very different acoustic compositions. First, there is the hypnotic sound of lapping waves, underscored by the dulcet and mellow tones of the French cabaret singer Maurice Chevalier crooning Tout Seul (On Top of the World, All Alone). The pages of the musical score Tout Seul and of Sartre’s philosophical text Being and Nothingness blow through the drawn space of No Exit. However, this ambience is continuously interrupted by the persistent, intrusive noise of an abrasive telephone ring and the high-pitched drone of the Parisienne air-raid siren.9 The challenge here is to prevent the spectator from becoming lulled into a state of nostalgia by both the objects and the soundscape. The



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soundscape is a post-dramatic device by which the spectator is abruptly distanced from subconscious emotional involvement by what Bertolt Brecht defined as the “effect of alienation.”10 The spectator’s attention is constantly drawn to meta-theatrical conventions which, in turn, transport them into the “here and now-ness” where they are aware of their own presence gazing at the drawing (Bleeker 2008, 65). It was at this point in my explorations that I realized my research practice was moving toward a performative installation that involved scenographic design drawings, video projections, and a soundscape. It was this serendipitous moment, or what the English academic Stephen Scrivener identifies as cognitive surprise (Scrivener 2010, NPF), which led to a transformative change in the culmination of my research: the scenographic-scaled set model11 or maquette.12 The model was pivotal in creating a point of intersection between scenographic design drawing, post-dramatic theatre, and expanded drawing as an art practice. This breakthrough offered a new and different alternative: both a three-dimensional representation of the original panoramic drawn work and a hypothetical post-dramatic mise-en-scène within the expanded drawing. What follows documents the final process in the use of the model to further experiment with, test, and develop the impetus for this research: a new hybrid genre.

The Scale Scenographic Model The scenographic model is a tangible, three-dimensional prototype and ideation device which enables the scenographer to play with, and understand, theatrical space in miniature. The geometric ratio most commonly used in Australian theatres is 1:25. Spatial relationships between the scenographic objects within the theatrical space can be clearly visualized, prompting different scenarios and possibilities. As the Australian indigenous scenographer Jacob Nash comments: “The scale model is a great communication device. It allows

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you to see your ideas exactly, and see if it works” (Curtis 2014, 191). However, the model can also extend beyond practical and functional constraints. Like the freehand scenographic thinking drawings, the model creates a hypothetical mise-en-scène which can potentially generate unforeseen and unpredictable outcomes. As Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen suggest in The 1:1 Architectural Model as Performance and Double, As an expression of material exploration and experimentation, utopian ideals and speculative construction, the architectural model continues to occupy a critical role in the development of spatial ideas across a range of disciplines including stage design, exhibition design, interior design, installation art and architecture. (Thea Brejzek 2014, 96) As Marx Wartotsky also proposed: The argument here is that models are more than abstract ideas. They are technological means for conceptual exploration leading to experimentation. But an experiment is something that has to be performed and not merely conceived to be useful. In this sense, models are experimental probes, essential parts of the human technique for confronting the future—but not as a passive encounter with something already formed. Rather, in a unique way in which human action is creative, such an encounter shapes the future. Thus, we may suggest, that models constitute the distinctive technology of purpose. (Wartofsky 1979, 148) Most significantly, these miniature worlds can manifest the wonder and astonishment inherent in Scrivener’s “cognitive surprise” (Scrivener 2010, NPF). For instance, Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva identified the model as an agency to astonish the hundreds of models and drawings produced in design form an artistically created primal matter that stimulates the haptic imagination, astonishes its creators instead of subserviently obeying them, and helps



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architects fix unfamiliar ideas, gain new knowledge about the buildingto-come, and formulate new alternatives and “options,” new unforeseen scenarios of realization. (Bruno Latour 2009, 84) In the 1976 exhibition Idea as Model, the American architect Peter Eisenman suggested that the model has the “capacity to render the unimagined visible and to provide space for the unexpected” (Macken 2016, 40). The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard proposed that the miniature, the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness. Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness. (Bachelard 1964, 155) Bachelard viewed the miniature as an intimate space of immensity. It is here that the spectator, as voyeur, peers—as if through a keyhole—into a world that is hidden, a world imagined. Working in miniature enables a myriad of possibilities and, similar to drawing at this early stage in the scenographic process, the model is also “a pure and untroubled thing—nothing to do with the practicalities of realism” (Kristen Anderson 2001, 155). For my research, the model stimulated the further discovery of new and novel spaces. Pamela Howard provides an apt description of the empty model box: The empty maquette . . . exposes the bare bones of the space . . . the use and manipulation of scale on the stage is a scenographic art that stretches space from the maximum to the minimum to give it meaning . . . Through this process the dynamic that the space provides can be moulded and sculpted until it starts to speak of the envisaged production. (Howard 2009, 2) Confronted by an empty black model box, I began an exploratory phase producing multiple scenographic design drawings in conjunction with sketch models which together created different iterations by experimenting within the black model box. I eventually settled on the scenario shown in Figure 5.5.

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FIGURE 5.5  Sue Field. Thinking drawings, No Exit: black pen, colored marker pens, and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. In this drawing, the original panoramic drawing is exhibited in a corridor (bottom left) created within the black box theatre but separated from the main performance space. The spectator enters through entrance opposite prompt (OP) or stage right, and then views the original panoramic drawing in a corridor before entering the main area in which the digital video projection, soundscape, and life-size objects are displayed. The spectator then leaves through the exit P (prompt or stage left). This scenario (Figure 5.5) depicts the maximum potential of all the versions I had examined. This is because the scenographic setting in the model encapsulates all the primary components of my research practice—the original panoramic drawing, the digital video projection, the soundscape, and the scenographic life-size props. Mounted together in this scenario, they can provoke a spectatorial encounter with an absent presence through the action of “walking” throughout and around the post-dramatic mise-en-scène. The spectators are not just viewing the drawing;



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they inhabit the drawing with the Other. In this different theatrical space, the spectators actively engage and participate as witnesses in the drama. Josette Féral and Ronald P. Bermingham claim in Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language: Theatricality seems to be a process that has to do with a “gaze” that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge . . . This space is the space of the “other”; it is the space that defines both alterity and theatricality. (Josette Féral 2002, 97)

Theatricality in No Exit Theatricality, which was examined in detail in Chapter 1, is a key trope defining post-dramatic theatre. Féral and Bermingham posit the question: You enter a theatre. The play has not yet begun. In front of you is a stage; the curtain is open; the actors are absent. The set, in plain view, seems to await the beginning of the play. Is theatricality at work here? (Josette Féral 2002, 95) Of course, there is; because, despite the absence of the actors, a deliberate theatrical mise-en-scène has been established. In Figure 5.5, certain theatrical signs are in place. The ghostly effect of moving projected images on the brick walls of the black box theatre, the poignant “emptiness and darkness,” the soundscape, and the exposed theatre paraphernalia (floorboards, exit signs, fire hose, and fire extinguisher) all create an emotive theatrical state: “A semiotisation of space has already occurred, the spectator perceives the theatricality of the stage, and of the space surrounding him” (Josette Féral 2002, 96). This condition, where “theatricality seems to stem from the spectator’s awareness of a theatrical intention addressed to him” (Josette Féral 2002, 96), is also expressed in the “real” objects scattered throughout the space and

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represented in the original panoramic drawing. These objects create a set in the black box theatre. A soundscape would also resonate throughout the theatrical space. There are no “auditorium chairs” for the spectators to sit on. However, they could choose to sit on the objects because the post-dramatic space “affords” them the opportunity13 and allows the spectator to actively participate in the drama. Both the spectator and the specter can sit, stand, or “walk” throughout the theatrical space to view the objects. The haunting ambiguity of this setting again evokes a palpable absent presence because theatricality resonates throughout the space.

The “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” Attempts and explorations aimed at finding an ALTERNATIVE SPACE NOT ARCHITECTONIC, NOT CONCRETE, An INNER MODEL of drama Which could embrace: Ideas, emotional tensions, thoughts, spiritual conflicts. I call this space “A MENTAL SPACE” “AN ALTERNATIVE SPACE.” (KANTOR 2010, 212) Tadeusz Kantor suggested that the theatre is a metaphysical alternate space in which “the self-reflexivity of the space fold[ed] back upon itself ” (Kobialka 1992, 339). He also described the fourth wall as an “in-between space; .  .  . as a found reality—an autonomous spatial fold that exists in a space of variable dimensionality” (Kobialka 1992, 332). In his theatre practice, Kantor repeatedly explored the spatial and temporal dimensions of this transition or



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“in-between” space as a site of memory and history. In Figure 5.5, the spectator inhabits the drawn space, becoming immersed in the artist’s private spaces: the “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). This is an extension of Kantor’s concept of a performative “folded space”: a collapsed space that is potentially a site where performance and spectatorial perception and presence become conflated. It is this scenario, which my research now creates as a three-dimensional representation in the model. The model becomes an alternative and complementary space of communication but, more significantly, transforms into an autonomous, performative representation of the panoramic drawing, No Exit (2017).

The Set Model of the Hypothetical mise-en-scène within the Black Model Box After completing all the set model pieces, I photographed multiple postdramatic scenes in the black model box to illustrate the final scenario represented in (Figure 5.5). I employed an Isonic 800HD Portable Pico Projector to project the digital video of the original panoramic drawings onto the black walls of the model box. Figure 5.6 is a photograph of the scenographic model in which the original panoramic drawn work, No Exit, has expanded beyond the traditional definition of drawing. This is the scenario in which all the primary components of my research practice—the original panoramic drawing, the digital video, the soundscape, and the scenographic life-size props—are mounted together in the black box theatre. Collectively, they produce a new hybrid genre that is both a drawing and, in conjunction with the image of the empty stage, a theatre without actors. In this different expanded drawn space, the actors are absent. I (the artist, scenographer, director, and playwright), along with the original drawing, become an absent presence, that is, a spectral presence or Other. Within these different spaces, the spectator, set, and its representations become the performers and the “play.”

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FIGURE 5.6  Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

The Model as an Epistemic Tool It was at this point in my research that I found myself designing multiple spaces or “rooms,” employing the model as an epistemic tool. It was an exhilarating feeling to experiment and explore conceptually in the miniature spaces of the model. The post-dramatic immersive experience of the expanded drawn space had now extended into a potentially epic metatheatrical encounter, where the spectator could roam endlessly throughout multiple rooms of “Imagination” and of “Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). As a final addition to the expanded drawn space, I inserted the completed set model of the hypothetical mise-en-scène into the black model box. This was a model within a model. The scale model itself has become a performative object (Figure 5.8); it embodies a miniature world within a world. As Thea Brejzek suggests:



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FIGURE 5.7  Sue Field. Scenographic scale model, within a scale model, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field. there is also another dimension to the model, linked to invention and imagination more than the pragmatic needs of the scenographer and architect in that models are physical and conceptual instruments of the cosmopoietic (world-making) act—they are able to comprise entire worlds. (Thea Brejzek 2017, 11) The model within the model, as the conceptual manifestation of the original scenographic design drawing No Exit, had become its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard 1983, 11).

The Hybrid Genre: The Drawn Absence The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard proposed a phenomenon called the Precession of Simulacra, which included the Three Orders of Appearance (Baudrillard 1983, 83). He assigned classical dramatic theatre, the double, the

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mirror, and games of mask and appearance to the first order of simulacra, where a basic reality or presence is masked or perverted as a counterfeit of the original (Baudrillard 1983, 98). However, in the third order of simulacra, it was no longer possible to differentiate between the real and its simulation (Baudrillard 1983, 98). As Baudrillard suggests: The whole world newsreel of “the present” gives the sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the same time . . . The reality of simulation is unendurable—more cruel than Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which was still an attempt at a dramaturgy of life, the last flickering of an ideal of the body . . . For us the trick has been played. All dramaturgy . . . has disappeared. Simulation is master. (Baudrillard 1994, 72) I argue that the hybrid genre, which I now identify as the Drawn Absence, can be classified in the third order of simulacra, where there is no relation to any reality whatever; simulation is master (Baudrillard 1994, 72)—it is its own pure simulacrum (Baudrillard 1983, 11). The Drawn Absence is an autonomous scenographic drawing which has expanded beyond scenography into an untracked, unknown space. The original panoramic drawing, No Exit, which from the beginning existed outside the traditional theatre production process, has metamorphosed into multiple representations as a ghosting (Rayner 2006, intro xiii) of the original dramatic text and scenographic thinking drawings. Signs are replaced with multiple signs, stretching the notion of reality, truth, and meaning. The drawing becomes, as Baudrillard maintains, a simulacrum where the original truth (the text) has been rendered meaningless and irrelevant—a specter of the real, which he refers to as a hyperreality. These particular drawings cannot be interrogated with conventional techniques of scenographic design drawing and therefore: At this level the question of signs, of their rational destination, their real or imaginary, their repression, their deviation, the illusion they create or that which they conceal, or their parallel meanings—all of that is erased. (Baudrillard 1983, 104)



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In Baudrillard’s later text The Vital Illusion, he describes the murder or extermination of the real (Baudrillard 2000, 61) where there is no corpse; there only remain simulations or a “spectral” presence, an absence of the real (Baudrillard 2000, 61). In a similar light, my research further argues that if the early scenographic thinking drawing is the mental embryo—the birthing of the original concept from the original truth (the text)—it follows that the drawn performative space of the Drawn Absence is the death of the original concept and the death of the original truth. This leaves only a “specter of the real”—a hyperreality. The single masked reality (Baudrillard 1983, 98) of the one-point perspective common to the scenographic thinking drawing (the spectator’s view) is replaced by a perspectival labyrinth (mind’s eye view) of a totally discombobulating but immersive hyperreality (Figure 5.8). Within the different post-dramatic spaces of the Drawn Absence, the notion of “real” space is distorted to encompass a vast space, teeming with the specters from the artist/researcher’s past: a space drawn from the intimate realms of the mind’s eye. Within this Other space, it is no longer necessary for

FIGURE 5.8  Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

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the “real” and original to be present, such as the original panoramic drawn work; only a representation or multiple simulations of the drawing inhabit the space. The hypothetical spaces of the model reveal the complexity of thinking, through the cinematic layering of imagery. Here, the “Prince’s eye”14 is irrelevant. Instead, there is an accumulation of episodes and multiple views, all staged simultaneously, combining to generate the Drawn Absence. Multiple perspectives embrace a performative space in constant flux: the site of infinite mutable meta-theatrical signs. The model becomes a simulation of a hyperreal and of a third-order simulacrum (Baudrillard 1983, 98), which, as Baudrillard further argues, “is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 1983, 3). The model of the Drawn Absence proposes a spatial simulation where the spectators, as the performers, now find themselves entering beyond the fourth wall into an unknown space; a drawn post-dramatic space that is now the “play.” The model enables the visualization and testing of the new ideas that emerged from the completion of the panoramic drawing No Exit. While drawing remained the principal methodology, it became apparent that it had expanded beyond the parameters of the page and the digital video. The model had become an autonomous, drawn, performative object in itself. The anthropologist Michael Taussig proposed that the model can transform into an autonomous object with its own character and power. He argued: I call it the mimetic faculty, the nature that culture uses to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other. The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing of the character and power of the original to the point whereby the representation may assume that character and that power. (Taussig 1993, xiii) What Taussig is suggesting is “sympathetic magic,” meaning that the model is imitative, comprising the power of the copy which embodies the spiritual power



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and character of the original. The term “sympathetic magic” was popularized by James Frazer, an anthropologist who published his seminal text on magic and religion The Golden Bough in 1890. Frazer argues that sympathetic magic is where things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive of as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears empty. (Frazer 2002, 27) This recognition that the model can take on a life of its own, transforming into an autonomous performative object beyond pragmatic concerns, was critical in directing my research into under-explored scholarly terrain. As Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen argue in The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture: “The autonomous model .  .  . is neither processdriven nor representational but conceptualized and built to be autonomous” (Thea Brejzek 2017, 2). The model, as an autonomous, performative object, both as a scenographic mise-en-scène and as an expanded drawn space, was pivotal in the final artistic resolution, becoming itself a performative object. The performative model presented an opportunity for an expanded drawing on a far larger scale, the model becoming an agency to provoke future speculative thinking. The model as an expanded drawing established a speculative scenographic mise-en-scène: a theatre of scenographic images, where the spectators produced their own meaning from the encounter with an absent presence. However, the presence of the “absent” drawer is revealed to the spectator because the original panoramic drawings are intrinsically autobiographical. They are a form of stream-of-consciousness whereby every object has a deep personal connection with the drawing artist. The spectators, as in post-dramatic theatre, are free to generate their own meaning or none at all from the performative works exhibited.

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The Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda (1920–2002) wrote: When I sit alone in a theatre and gaze into the dark space of its empty stage, I’m frequently seized by fear that this time I won’t manage to penetrate it, and I always hope that this fear will never desert me. Without an unending search for the key to the secret of creativity, there is no creation. It’s necessary always to begin again. And that is beautiful. (Carver 2009, 69) Svoboda’s “unending search for the key to the secret of creativity” is embodied in the core of my ongoing scholarly research which set out on a journey to discover a hybrid genre that is both a drawing and a theatre without actors. The outcome of this research is the development and exploration of the new hybrid genre which I now identify as the Drawn Absence, constructed in conjunction with digital video projection, an accompanying soundscape, set model, and the image of the empty stage. The model as a performative object is a proposal for how this new hybrid genre could be staged in the future— multiple spaces which the spectator experiences as an immersive promenade. Within this new space, the set design and its representations become the “play,” and the spectator becomes the performer. By contrast, I, the artist, become an absent presence—not only as the scenographer but also as the director and playwright. The original drawing is no longer essential within the expanded drawn space of the Drawn Absence. It too becomes an absent presence—an absence, however, that remains palpably present. The spectator’s encounter with this absent presence within the meta-theatrical space becomes a form of post-dramatic theatre. This research has recognized a different spectatorial encounter as a new form of spectatorial engagement and experience within a drawn post-dramatic space.

6 Drawn into the Future

This chapter examines the proliferation of the digital screen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century and its impact on the traditional analogue practice of the freehand scenographic design drawing. Computer imaging technologies have both enriched and destabilized the long-established role and specificity of these idiosyncratic drawings for theatre and live performance. The screen as a digital interface, a virtual fourth wall, has pervaded the fabric of post-millennial society and culture with the emergence of multiple social media networks, virtual reality platforms, and other digital communication. Likewise, complex digital scenographies employing the light-emitting diode (LED) screen, animations, computer-generated imagery (CGI), real-time interfaces, and immersive digital projections have prompted the rejection of cluttered, cumbersome, and expensive staging and have instead transported spectators on virtual journeys venturing into unexplored, phantasmagorical terrain. Established scenographic tropes which orientate, locate, and shape imaginative encounters have been reinvented through the use of digital media, in particular the manipulation of theatrical and performative space within an expanded, immersive cinematic narrative of images. As Arnold Aronson questions: Is it possible that we are also in a post-dimensional, post-spatial world in which scenographic concepts must be radically rethought? Can virtual space or non-dimensional space have power? (Aronson 2008, 29)

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Later in 2013, Aronson argues that “live theatre, faced with the unprecedented change of digital technologies that have radically altered all notions of time and space, is still attempting to understand how to function in this new environment” (Aronson 2013, 94). In light of this rapid and extraordinary change, I frame my argument by first interrogating the potent philosophical debate generated by the radical permeation of the digital screen within the interconnected contemporary practices of scenography, spatial design, and performance installation art. Next, I investigate the profound influence the digital interface and synthetic imaging and rendering have had on the scenographic design drawing. In this context, I posit this question: In a speculative future will the freehand scenographic design drawing become yet another tradition to be consigned, as an artisan craft, to a nostalgic past? Drawing has expanded far beyond the page and the gallery, but I still believe the freehand thinking drawing remains for the time being the site of revelation, of imagining the inexistent, of originality, authenticity, and authorship. This is very much in accordance with the Finnish architect Juhanni Pallasmaa who argues, “The intelligence, thinking and skills of the hand also need to be rediscovered before we become ‘handless’” (Pallasmaa 2017, 108).

The Simultaneity of the Image In Arcades Project/Das Passagen-Werk (1927–40),1 Walter Benjamin writes of the ambulatory gaze of the flâneur, or the “dreaming idler,” strolling “aimlessly” (Benjamin 1999, 417) along the covered arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin identifies the flâneur’s experience within the crowded and claustrophobic arcades as the “colportage phenomenon of space” (Benjamin 1999, 418), where the flâneur perceives everything simultaneously. Here, chronological sequence and linearity are replaced by simultaneity. Multiple compressed layers of the past unfold before the gaze of the flâneur as a



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“phantasmagoria, in which the city appears now as landscape, now as a room” (Benjamin 1999, 21). Benjamin’s flickering, phantasmagorical scenes are similar to the multiple-perspectival strobing frames of contemporary digital scenography.2 As he further suggests: Thanks to this phenomenon, everything potentially taking place in this one single room is perceived simultaneously. The space winks at the flâneur: What do you think may have gone on here? (Benjamin 1999, 418) Multiple images are reflected in the dazzlingly lit glass facades, taunting the vainglorious flaneur. The flâneur experiences the “sensation of seeing for the first time what [he] has seen many times before . . . that moment of unforgetting, when the familiar world suddenly seems strange and new or impossible” (Rayner 2006, xix). As Alice Rayner in Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre further argues: “Seeing what we saw before” implies recognition in the root sense of the word, a reknowing, and thus is related to the idea of unforgetting. A phenomenological ground for such recognition suggests the moment when one perceives that one is perceiving what has been there all along. That is to say the “world” as perceived has been there before, but the moment of perception is one in which the world appears in what Heidegger called its “unconcealedness.” (Rayner 2006, xix) The arcades metamorphose into a labyrinthine dream of perpetually metamorphosing multiperspectival images (Benjamin 1999, 429), where the past returns as a “sensation of seeing for the first time what one has seen many times before” (Rayner 2006, xix). The “winking space” of Benjamin’s nineteenth-century Parisienne arcade has been replaced in the twenty-first century by the flashing multivalent glare of the digital screen. Elinor Fuchs’s ground-breaking publication The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism still resonates as an astute and perceptive critical text, predicting as it does the shift in theatre from the

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language of dramatic performance to a non-narrative paradigm. Fuchs illustrates her central argument with the image of Benjamin’s flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, the stroller, the loiterer, the window shopper endlessly fascinated with commodities .  .  . finally to have arrived in the theatre. Too restless and driven to be contained in a theatre seat, he prowls the total entertainment, simultaneously consuming and consumed. (Fuchs 1996, 141) Fuchs examines the rapid cultural and aesthetic change which occurred in American theatre in the 1980s and early 1990s and, in particular, the evolution of the theatrical consciousness and presence and gaze of the postmodern spectator subsumed by the solicitation of the image. As she proposes, theatre has a deep genius for representing the cultural condition (which) always reemerges. Thus, we may be seeing a new kind of theatre that mimics in its underlying structures of presentation and reception the fundamental culture of contemporary capitalism. In this theatre, one could say, we are seeing the commodification of the theatrical unconsciousness. (Fuchs 1996, 129) In 1967, Guy Debord also states the spectacle “is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory” (Debord 1983, 1, 13). In a similar context, Vilém Fusser also foreshadows in Towards a Philosophy of Photography, the post-millennial “reality” devoured by simulacra, so much so that the individual can no longer remember or care about the original. Flusser identifies this as the amnesic technical image: The technical images currently all around us are in the process of magically restructuring our “reality” and turning it into a “global image scenario.” Essentially this is a question of “amnesia.” Human beings forget that they



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created the images in order to orientate themselves in the world. Since they are no longer able to decode them, their lives become a function of their own images; imagination has turned to hallucination. (Flusser 2000, 10) However, in 1997, Stephen Perrella concludes in Hypersurface Architecture and the Question of Interface on a more positive stance suggesting: We explore the unknown through a superpositioning of the known. But as technology becomes more pervasive and envelopes our existence, emerging problematics will fold onto and through one another. Instead of commuting into cyberspace, we might instead establish real connections throughout a hyperreal environment, interweaving realities into a continuous, multiplicitious fabric. (Perrella 1997, NPF) The theatre has a “deep genius for representing the cultural condition” (Fuchs 1996, 129), and this is patently evident in recent times with the accelerated technological change that has occurred in the prolific use of the screen in contemporary live performance, prompting the newly emergent field of digital scenography. The digitalized screen, as a powerful mechanism of visual imaging, has transformed performance by constructing virtual environments and augmented reality sets which manifest extraordinary and fantastical worlds.

Digital Scenography and Worlding Theory New and novel imaging technologies have created unique narratives and virtual journeys, constructing phantasmagorical illusions and unpredictable worlds distant from any realistic representation of life (Emmanouela Vogiatzaki—Krukowski 2011, NPF). Digital scenography in the context of Kathleen Stewart’s compositional theories of worlding has the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense. We watch or avert our eyes as folded,

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indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field, rendering its materiality and our thought multidimensional, contingent, and overdetermined. (Stewart 2019, NPF) The symbiosis between the live performance, virtual avatars, video projection, and real-time interfaces has manifest worlding phenomena through the montage of real and recorded images in the same cosmopoietic world—that is, both the stage and spectatorial space. More so than any time before, the simultaneity of the image has blurred the thresholds between the real and illusion, presence and absence, visible and immaterial. As Rachel Hann posits in Beyond Scenography: Operating at the threshold of the politically real and the contrived, stages have come to conceptualize human-centric enactments of worldly phenomena that denote how experience is partitioned in terms of world. Consequently, the concepts of stage and scene (stage-scenes) isolate how worlding occurs as an ongoing negotiation of thresholds, whether framed as fictional or real, that scores and orientates situational experience. (Hann 2019, 80) Digital technologies have enabled the spectator to inhabit, physically and/or virtually, the scenographic environ. As Emmanouela Vogiatzaki– Krukowski  and Manthos Santorineos suggest in Illusionistic Environments and Digital Spaces, the spectator can participate, interrupt, and perform as the co-creator of the world. The spectator “can draw his own lines in a visual text, which might be simultaneously a part of the artist’s mind and a part of his imagination. It appears that digital scenography turned to be a meeting point for the creator and his creation, for the spectator and his spectacle” (Emmanouela Vogiatzaki—Krukowski 2011, NPF). As Chris Salter posits in Participation, Interaction, Atmosphere, Projection, atmospheres are spawned and then proliferate as amplified, accelerated environs, which in turn are continually mutating into different altered states. The threedimensionality of the real stage space has been replaced by its polygon-driven



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doppelganger. The digital world or worlding is invisible, simulated, and multiplicitous (Salter 2017). As Salter further argues the spectator is no longer mere observer from the outside, but a creator from within environments under transmutation from technologies of the digital, the biological and the chemical that a future historian tracking the evolution of scenographic agency and behavior will ultimately have to search. (Salter 2017, 179) Returning to Stewart, but again in the context of digital scenography, the spectator can now, even more so than in previous history, experience a heightened theatrical encounter: an atmospheric attunement where the everyday transfigures into something, palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract. They have rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, and lifespans. They can pull the senses into alert or incite distraction or denial. (Stewart 2011, Abstract) Digital scenography has the extraordinary potential to transport the contemporary spectator, living the everyday in an increasingly digitalized environ, on transformative journeys where An atmosphere is not an inert context but a force field in which people find them-selves. It is not an effect of other forces but a lived affect—a capacity to affect and to be affected that pushes a present into a composition, an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event. (Stewart 2011, 452) In a similar light, Johannes Birringer in Moveable Worlds/Digital Scenographies proposes an apt definition of digital scenography as an assemblage of instantaneous and concurrent narratives: the live performance architecture incorporates analogue, digital and networked dimensions; performers and audiences are inside and outside

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the digital worlds simultaneously; and the screen canvases co-animate the localized movement narratives, as much as the movement characters of the performers and the costume designs animate the images from the past and present, and even forecast the meanings that might be read into the dancing language of the avatars, their bodies, sexualities, identities. (Birringer 2010, 98–9)

Digital Scenography In 1958, the Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda (1920–2002) and director Alfréd Radok (1914–76) produced Laterna Magika for Expo58 in Brussels, which was a multiscreen, theatricalized fusion of projected images, film, kinetic staging, and the synchronized performance of the live actors, singers, dancers, and musicians (Josef Svoboda 1966, 142). It was revolutionary in its conception of the seamless interaction of the live performers with the ephemeral images. Svoboda introduced “an early version of his poly-écran— the wall of screens on which each screen can feature an independent image, or be part of an assemblage of a large projection” (Rewa 2012, 134). He won both the Grand Prize for Laterna Magika and the Golden Medal for the exhibit Histoire du verre (Rewa 2012, 133). Svoboda is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s revolutionary scenographers and prominent exponents in the integration of the screen and theatrical performance, rejecting naturalistic, illusionistic staging. In an interview for Le Theatre en Tchecoslovaquie, Prague (1962), he argued: It is interesting that “faithful reproduction” seems “natural” to us only when we work with man-made details. Attempts to imitate works of nature on the stage have never succeeded. Nature has its own rhythm. The tree quivers— it is a dynamic organism. That’s why a “naturalist” set is out of the question; you can’t copy nature so easily. Here is the frontier which the modern theatre is struggling to cross. (Josef Svoboda 1966, 142)



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In Laterna Magika, Svoboda experimented with eight mobile screens, and three film and two slide projectors which were linked to the performer; the same actors appear both on the stage and on the screen. The screens could flip, slide, rise and fall, rotate, appear and disappear, employing a myriad of ingenious staging devices: scissor lifts, trapdoors, and conveyor belts. The “balletic” choreography of the scenographic objects “magically” synchronized with the live performance and multi-speaker stereophonic sound. However, this spectacular but complex matrix came at a cost. As Svoboda himself stated: It means that Laterna Magika is to a certain extent deprived of that which is beautiful about theatre: that each performance can have a completely different rhythm, that the quality of a performance can be better or worse, that a production can expand its limits. (Svoboda 2002, 103) The pre-recorded film and still-photographs and the strict precision of the technical staging limited the ephemeral unpredictability of a live theatrical performance which is the magical essence of theatre—its imperfect humanism and fallibility. As Svoboda further argued: The film can only copy, but theatre always produces an impression of space which can be enlarged in many ways. .  .  . The set must be mechanically refined for the utmost flexibility in scenic space if it is to use filmic possibilities without being overwhelmed. The stage must be able to respond instantly to the progression of images. (Josef Svoboda 1966, 142) It is through this lens that I examine the explosion of the digital screen onto contemporary live performance, prompting a critical dialogue across the disciplines of scenography, spatial design, and performance installation art. The emergent field of digital scenography or “performance design with realtime interfaces and immersive digital projections (video, sound, animation, 3D graphics, virtual realities, networked transmissions and so on)” (Birringer 2010, 90) has radically challenged traditional scenographic practices by removing expensive, heavy, and unwieldy staging and by questioning the elite,

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hierarchical preoccupations of dramatic theatre. The contemporary spectator is confronted by a very different fourth wall, that of the digital interface or virtual plane of the screen. As Donald Marinelli comments, the postmodern spectators, in relation to virtual worlds and realities, “enter into an imaginary world so ‘real’ that the viewer perceives and believes co-existence in time and space with the world being portrayed on stage or screen (glass or canvas)” (Marinelli 2003, 14). In a similar vein Catherine Elwes’s in her book Installation and the Moving Image maintains: [the] moving image installation embodies the perceptual doubleness of the spectator, the human ability to suspend disbelief and entertain two realities simultaneously. Our quotidian experience increasingly demands of us nimble perceptual shifts between any number of remediated realities presented to us in myriad electronic forms. (Elwes 2015, 2) In previous chapters I have examined the highly successful integration of digital imaging technologies in which novel dramaturgical exemplars are generated in the digital scenographic designs of Dan Potra, William Kentridge, Gabriella Tylosova and Barrie Kosky, and the British performance troupe, 1927. In the past decade in particular, digital scenography has overtaken traditional staging construction practices because it has become increasingly cheaper, faster, and more practical to invest and install screen technologies that can be repeatedly and sustainably reused; a “set” of LED screens can be adapted to multiple theatrical iterations. There is also the millennial penchant for slick, glossy, and overtly sumptuous and glamorous outcomes combined with the prevailing assumption that projected imagery is innovative and original. As Greg Giesekam argues in Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre, there is a “commonly-held historical amnesia” that somehow projections and moving pictures are “a recent phenomenon” (Giesekam 2007, 1). Illuminated projections on the stage have been in existence since the invention of the magic lantern in the 1650s.3 Josef Svoboda’s production Laterna Magika (1958) is an extraordinary



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historical example where projection was synchronized “effortlessly” with the live performance. The theatre historian Arnold Aronson in Technology and Dramaturgical Development: Five Observations foreshadowed this current fixation with digital mediations; he claimed, “It is not theatre created as a consequence of the new technology .  .  . it is theatre about the new technology. It discusses rather than embodies” (Aronson 1999, 193–4). He comments later in Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography, “there is still a sense of media as fetish object . . . there is an almost reverential air to its presence” (Aronson 2005, 95). Similarly, Birringer asserts: “New media in performance are fashionable” (Birringer 2010, 91). There is increasingly a regressive mystification emanating from the dazzlingly illuminated screens of twenty-first-century spectacular entertainment where the presence of the spectator has progressively receded. Nick Moran in Resisting the Lure of the Screen contends that projections are the “twenty-first-century painted cloths” (Moran 2010, 87). The digital screen can be seen as analogous to the trompe l’oeil scenic back cloths of a much older tradition—they are an evocation of three–dimensional space on a two–dimensional surface. (Moran 2010, 86) Moran identifies several overarching concerns, such as the playing of live action and dialogue against moving projected images, further exacerbated when the projected image consists mainly of a human face and a clearly defined digital frame (Moran 2010, 86). There is also the spatiotemporal dislocation of live performers with the use of three-dimensional scenographic props before a projected two-dimensional virtual environ. I argue that it is also the perceptual saturation overload and discombobulating, strobing effects of the rapidly metamorphosing imagery which exhausts the performance of theatricality and liveness, and results in, as Catherine Elwes’s argues, a “spectatorial attention deficit” due to the constant barrage of digital moving images (Elwes 2015, 156). Elwes’s further maintains that “the reduced attention span of the ‘mediabombed’ contemporary viewer . . . raised in a screensaver culture of constantly

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refreshing images” has produced a “cognitive dissonance”—a desensitization (Elwes 2015, 156). As she also argues: Moving images are moulded to the shape of absent or imaginary beings signalling from elsewhere in time and space, from a dream world with no obvious causal link to the setting in which they are presently manifest. In common with representational painting, but with enhanced effect, film and video can transport viewers to that fictional domain, simultaneously dulling their awareness of the here-and-now. (Elwes 2015, 1) There is a conflict between the screen and the live performer producing an often incongruous scenographic spatial and temporal discord. As Aronson states: the placement of such technology and imagery on the stage is tantamount to carrying on a conversation in two languages. Communication is still possible, but content is overwhelmed by form. (Aronson 2005, 86–7) Later in 2013, Aronson again argues in Time and Space on the Stage: “Their ephemerality and two-dimensionality place them in a different spatio-temporal sphere from the live actors and three-dimensional stage space” (Aronson 2013, 93). The repercussions of the installation of the electric light bulb on stage at the turn of the twentieth century is markedly similar to the introduction of the LED lamp and illuminated LED screen in the new millennium. As Christopher Baugh claims in “Devices of Wonder”: Globalizing Technologies in the Process of Scenography: in the 19th century, the new technology of electric light played a major part in the destruction of the scenographic language of 1589. . . . The relative brilliance of early electric light exposed the artifice of the twodimensional deconstruction of reality upon which the system was based: the three-dimensionality of the human actor, let alone threedimensional furniture and sculpted properties began to look absurd. (Baugh 2017, 29)



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An example is Opera Australia’s digital opera Aida composed by Giuseppe Verdi to an Italian libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni (1871). This Italian production, directed by Davide Livermore, the video content by the Italian design company D-Wok, and the digital set of flexible LED screens created by Giò Forma, premiered in Sydney, Australia, 2018, to a superfluity of extolling, gushing press reviews. This operatic spectacular was devoid of scenographic staging except for an immense backdrop of ten soaring high-resolution LED screens floating above a black mirror-finished floor. Hailed by Opera Australia’s artistic director Lyndon Terracini, as the “future of opera” (Neutze 2018, NPF), I was nevertheless bereft of emotion except in the scenes of salacious exoticism where I was trying not to giggle too loudly at the complete absurdity of this over-wrought melodrama. The imagery was monumental in relation to the scale of the singers and cast. The huge CGI enhanced “human” faces on the screens bore no resemblance to their live counterparts on the stage. These weirdly perfect avatars—as idealistic renditions of mythical Egyptian gods and creatures—were blazoned across the screens, diminishing the humanism and “real” presence of the live singers and performers. This conflicting disjunctive was further compounded by the costumes designed by Gianluca Falaschi, which resembled 1970s idealized colonial relics unearthed out of Opera Australia’s attic: gold and black cornrow wigs on white performers! As Ben Neutze comments in his review of Aida: You could call it a triumph of questionable taste, but it’s a triumph nonetheless and the glitziest piece of theatre to premiere in Australia this year. Visually, it’s got more in common with a Katy Perry or Kylie Minogue concert than traditional opera. In one moment, giant digital snakes slither around the edge of the stage; it’s more than a little  Taylor Swift. (Neutze 2018, NPF) In the 1890s, Adolphe Appia condemned Richard Wagner’s ostentatious and over-embellished staging of two-dimensional painted scenic flats. Opera Australia’s Aida is nineteenth-century illusionistic scene painting on a bizarrely

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grandiose scale. The technology is different, but the pretentious and overtly decorative outcome is precisely the same. The live performers and digital matrix remain unintegrated and disembodied, simply layered together within an over-saturated digital visualization. Here again, the persistent solicitation of the image subsumes the attention of the potentially already fatigued gaze of the spectator. In 1911 French philosopher Henri Bergson identified the human consciousness with the duration of time: Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances .  .  . it goes on increasing—rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. (Bergson 1911, 4) If we apply Bergson’s definition to the temporality of theatre in the twentyfirst century, then the unrelenting accumulation and “swelling” of time have replaced chronological sequence and linearity with simultaneity. Bergson’s snowball, transfigured into an avalanche of phantasmagorical strobing on the digital screen, has, in the words of Elinor Fuch, finally “arrived in the theatre” (Fuchs 1996, 141); but how has this altered or affected the scenographic design process, particularly the practice of scenographic design drawing? As Anna Ursyn questions in Digital Drawing, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Journalism: “Has the meaning of drawing been totally changed in electronic media, where images are interactive, linked and open ended?” (Ursyn 2008, 170).

The Digital Drawing In 2002 Peter Wood, the New Zealand “architectologist,” anticipated the change within the discipline of design drawing: It is inevitable that the digital drawing will for the most part replace the manual one, and, just as linear perspective heralded the Renaissance, we



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can expect that architectural practice in the technological age will change dramatically. (Wood 2002, 300) This enquiry cannot ignore the computer screen or fourth wall of the digital drawing which has in the twenty-first century subjugated many of the roles once performed on the palimpsest4 of the freehand drawing in the design fields of scenography and architecture. As John Blood, the American scenographer, architect, and concept artist, identifies in Opinion: Is Drawing Dead?: We are at a pressing juncture, transitioning from a manual tradition to one of predominantly digital execution. The computer is systematically and quite naturally supplanting manual operations. (Blood 2012, 10) Blood views this “shift from mechanisms of representation to techniques and tools for simulation enabled by the advent of digital technology” as a positive rather than oppositional change (Blood 2012, 10). The graphics tablet, also referred to as a digitizing tablet, and drawing and graphics pad, represents a form of digital “freehand” drawing. Here the palimpsest of the paper in the traditional design journal is replaced by the smooth glossy surface of the digital screen on the computer monitor or electronic device; the stylus replaces the pencil, pen, and paintbrush. Increased speed, accuracy, and usability expedite the process of design drawing. Digital exactitude reigns supreme; erasure is clean and precise, avoiding torn and scuffed paper, smudges, coffee stains, and fragments of a rubber eraser. The irony here is that it’s these accidental, “unwanted” effects that now can be replicated digitally to give an authenticity, a humanness to digital drawing as a simulation of a sketch drawn by hand. The British artist James Faure Walker, who combines computer graphics with oil paint and watercolor, examines in Pride, Prejudice and the Pencil the divisive issue between the pencil and the graphics software. He questions why “Today pencil lovers agonize over the loss of territory to ‘new’ media or to installation art” (Walker 2008, 88). He concludes that “Drawing ideologies have been built up around something as simple as pencil and paper. If you take a really long

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view, this is just one technology, one that worked well for a few centuries” (Walker 2008, 90). Digital image-makers scan, copy, and adapt from internet sources and transform images, employing filters, into line drawings which are in turn manipulated to mimic an oil painting, a watercolor, pastel, or graphite drawing. A mistake or “change of mind” is rapidly deleted with the upturned flip of the stylus. The versatility of digital drawing and the ease with which multiple simulations can be magically restructured (Flusser 2000, 10) have established it as an important digital tool in design. As Blood also argues, the digital drawing can now create “endless hyperbolic worlds entirely condensed within a flat surface” (Blood 2012, 10). The American architect and historian Reinhold Martin in Points of Departure: Notes Toward a Reversible History of Architectural Visualization comments in relation to architecture but could easily be referring to the set design: Perspective has moved from being primarily a means of representing something already known, to a technique for designing what is not yet known. More than that, however, in a digital environment perspective is reversible. Changes in a perspective view can automatically generate changes in the underlying model, as well as the other way around. (Martin 2017, 7) It is now possible to generate effortlessly in three-dimensional modeling computer software mathematically precise, manipulable perspective, and axonometric models—ephemeral models which effectively draw together a world (Martin 2017, 12). It is also the “collective creation” through collaboration that has positioned the digital design drawing as the principle tool of communication—as the means to disseminate information in a visual form across multiple virtual borders, turning it into a “global image scenario” (Flusser 2000, 10). Interaction, networking, and design sharing have become established modes for the visual exchange of ideas through the internet and social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Zoom, and file hosting and storage



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facilities such as Dropbox. Digital drawing tools have succeeded in spawning design fabrication readily accessible to the “invisible” collective group and in generating a seamless delivery in real time to a greater global audience. The British costume designer Adele Keeley comments: I have found that there is great potential when engaging with digital techniques and processes. Timesaving methods can release designers from the long process of hand painting designs. The computer offers designers more efficient working practices and flexibility in how they edit and present their work. (Keeley 2010, 41–2) The twenty-first century has seen the rapid development in the digital visualizations in scenographic processes. The digital drawing employing softwares like Maxwell, VRay, and Photoshop has facilitated extraordinary photo-realistic cinematic representations. The production team, the director, performer, producers, and design and technical teams can be taken on a cinematic journey through hyper-realistic environs led by avatars resembling the performers in speculative costume. This digitally drawn hyper-realism is synonymous with the current focus on creating “real” highly detailed digital scenographies, employing photo-realistic projections, and moving live or recorded video and other real-time interfaces. Spectators are immersed in a “live reality show.” As Baugh argues: Digital interventions of light, projection, sound and computer-controlled automation serve to bind together world audiences within theatres, and through projected imagery on urban buildings and monuments within a theatrical metanarrative of stage technology and spectacular effects. (Baugh 2017, 31) Presentational, photo-realist digital drawings as hypothetical representations illuminate the “domestic architectures presented on the stage . . . manipulated, compacted, densified, cut and pasted to convey the frenetic and overall disoriented biographies of the postmodern subject” (Brejzek 2017, 70).

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However, there is also a current underswell of scholarly resistance to this hyper-realistic illusionism: a push-back against the slick, glossy luxe of hyper-realistic digital graphics. This pertinent and timely debate is evident in architectural circles but, unfortunately, still largely absent from scenographic discourse on drawing. The British architect, academic, and founder of Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) Sam Jacob recognizes this recent swing from what he describes as “the polished sheen and lens flare” of the “postcards from the near future” (Jacob 2017, 83) to instead “new ways of hybridizing drawing projections and paper space” (Jacob 2017, 87). In Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing, he identifies: The return of the architectural drawing in the digital age is a reinvigoration of the tradition of drawing, but its techniques, tools, and media make it fundamentally new . . . the screen is intimately, vibrantly connected to the world. . . . Even as we make digital drawings, we assume the position of the spectator. Even as we draw, we are watching the drawing emerge. We become consumers of the drawing just as we are its creator. The site of drawing is never really empty but connected to network flows, a surface that can leak or erupt, become fugitive and restless, recombinant and promiscuous, where meanings and associations between images are constantly in flux. (Jacob 2017, 86) Jacob strongly advocates this move away from the rampant virtuoso illusionism, over-embellished and ultimately vacuous digital drawing that has proliferated in design offices, corporate boardrooms, and in university design studios since before the millennium. He reasons: Instead of striving for pseudo-photo-realism, this new cult of the drawing explores and exploits its artificiality, making us as viewers aware that we are looking at space as a fictional form of representation. This is in strict opposition to the digital rendering’s desire to make the fiction seem “real.” (Jacob 2017, 87)



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The “post-digital drawing” is an amalgam of the freehand and computer drawing. As I mentioned earlier, digital technologies can replicate any traditional freehand drawing technique and medium, including the extraneous mishaps of the graphite smudge, spilt ink, and coffee ring stain. What Jacob has observed in his recent professional and teaching practice at the Architectural Association in London, the Yale School of Architecture, and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Jacob 2017, 87) is a return to the iconic modernist tradition of architectural drawing but as a hybridized rendition of analogue and digital processes. An evocative example proposed by Jacob is the architectural drawing for a music center in Muharraq, Bahrain (2017) by Kersten Geers and David Van Severen, the Brussels-based office KGDVS (Jacob 2017, 86).5 As Jacob claims, this alternative method of architectural representation is contrary to the glossy renderings prevalent in the past ten years (Jacob 2017, 86). This drawing expresses an abstract, metaphorical space and revels in the graphic qualities and marks associated with drawings by hand, typically obfuscated by the pseudo-photo-realist digital drawing. However, Jacob also claims the computer, in transforming the design drawing, has in doing so diminished “the drawing’s role as an exploratory, inquiring design tool” (Jacob 2017, 84). This raises the question—should the thinking drawing, as an instrument of ideation early in the scenographic design process, wither away with the unrelenting rise of technology? (Jacob 2017, 84). Has the digit (from the Latin digitus) or finger been rendered obsolete by the “digital”?

The Freehand Thinking Drawing The computer is transforming every aspect of the scenographic design process from its extraordinary ability to organize and present data to creating complex scenographic worlds. Many iterations of manual drawing in the scenographic design practice have been superseded by sophisticated digital imaging technologies. My principle concern is, as Martin Heidegger speculated

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over half a century ago, “whether thinking will come to an end in a bustle of information” (Heidegger 1967). Should the predilection for expediency, efficiency and the slick, shimmering and over-embellished finishes of the digital drawing put at risk the freehand drawing, particularly in the genesis phase of the scenographer’s process? I argue for the enduring critical importance of the thinking drawing as the synergy between the eye, mind, and hand. Drawing is the agency for problem finding as opposed to problem-solving; drawing as the primary index of innovation, authenticity, and originality, and most significantly, drawing as a haptic tool which facilitates the discovery of new and novel spaces, both surprising and potent. The American artist Terry Rosenberg aptly identifies the elusive and ambiguous essence of the thinking drawing: Drawing is a space of multiple geneses. . . . Ideational drawing is physicocognitive-thinking happens through physical as well as mental action. One thinks with the stochastic reflexes of the hand; and these reflexes cannot be understood fully in reflection. The thinking hand eludes the mind’s grasp. (Rosenberg 2008, 124) Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish architect, also alludes to the hand as the direct haptic link to thought or the imagining mind: In the arduous processes of designing, the hand often takes the lead in probing for a vision, or a vague inkling, which it eventually turns into a sketch, materializing thus the idea. The pencil in the architect’s hand is a bridge between the imagining mind and the image that appears on the sheet of paper. In the ecstasy of work, the draughtsman forgets both his hand and the pencil, and the image emerges as if it were an automatic projection of the imagining mind. (Pallasmaa 2017, 104) Pallasmaa has written extensively on the cognitive and perceptual processes of the freehand drawing. He does not deride the computer per se, acknowledging that the computer “expedites most aspects of architectural production decisively” (Pallasmaa 2009, 095). However, he does point out that problems



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emerge in the fully computerized drawing, particularly in the most sensitive and vulnerable early phases of the design process—the initial ideation. He argues that “computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, synchronic capacity for imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object” (Pallasmaa 2009, 097). Computer operations and imagery take place in a mathematized and abstracted immaterial world, in a space that is weightless and scaleless. The hand, however, has a direct haptic connection between the object, its representation, and the designer’s mind. Pallasmaa celebrates the uncertainty, natural vagueness, and innate hesitancy of hand drawing compared with the false precision and apparent finiteness of the computer image (Pallasmaa 2009, 096) and he considers that, with fully computer-generated designs, the designer himself remains an outsider in relation to his/her own design and body. Computer drawings are devices for a bodiless observer (Pallasmaa 2009, 099). In a similar light, the American architect and academic Paul Emmons in Size Matters: Virtual Scale and Bodily Imagination in Architectural Drawing argues: CAD applies this Cartesian approach to scale in architectural drawings by forgoing the senses to assume scale is solely in the mind. Data is recorded at 1:1 or full scale, but the size of the screen image indefinitely varies as the operator zooms in or out to consider various aspects, creating the inability to put them into a perceivable relation to the operator’s body. . . . CAD only requires scale when printing in paper space. (Emmons 2005, 232) Emmons’s ongoing research examines architectural drawing practices and the means by which drawing enhances the architect’s imagination. In particular, he advocates the embodied connection of manual drafting as opposed to CAD: The synoptic scalar view invites imaginative inhabitation of the drawing. When no clear relation exists between body and drawing, this inhabitation is at best partial and shifting. (Emmons 2005, 233)

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The Israeli architect and academic, Gabriela Goldschmidt, in Manual Sketching: Why Is It Still Relevant? also makes distinct the cognitive link in the freehand drawing as opposed to the digital drawing. She maintains: I propose that manual sketching has cognitive benefits that cannot easily be replaced by computational tools, and therefore sketching continues to be viable alongside computational tools, especially in the “front end” of designing and in the design studio at school. (Goldschmidt 2017, 77) Drawings are not just end products; they express the complex cognitive interaction of our minds, eyes, and hands. The thinking drawing images imaginative thought in all of its waviness, unevenness, and idiosyncrasies. It is the potential tactile messiness, incompleteness, and unpredictability which separate these particular drawings from the digital representations. Goldschmidt also claims that the “reading” of freehand drawings becomes a cognitive visual skill and an intimate, tacit knowledge of media, which is lacking in digitalized processes. She emphasizes that “the intimacy with one’s own sketch allows sidetracking, random scribbling, and manipulation of the paper” (Goldschmidt 2002, NPF). The architects and academics Iainz Fraser and Rod Henmi describe the papery sensation of hand to paper in their celebrated publication, Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis of Drawing: The experience of drawings is a surprisingly multi-sensual one, involving not only the sign of the mark made but also the tactility of a soft pencil drawn across textured paper, the sound of a pen scratching in a sketchbook, even the smell of ink or paper. Each drawing tool and surface has its own proclivities, engaging in a dialogue of action with the user. (Iain Fraser 1994, 162) The South African scenographer and artist William Kentridge argues that when he draws on a computer its inner logic is very much at odds (Kentridge 2010, NPF). The digital effect that looks like a smudge of charcoal is really just a decoration added on. Whereas on the freehand charcoal drawing, the



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accidental smudge cannot be avoided; “it’s there whether you like it or not” (Kentridge 2010, NPF). He suggests further that “some people think very well on a keyboard. I need a kind of fidgeting of charcoal, scissors, or tearing, or something in my hands, as if there’s a different brain that is controlling how that works” (Kentridge 2010, NPF). Digital drawing, its sharp, clearly defined and polished “completeness,” can also result in the obscuration of an unresolved idea and discourage further exploration, interpretation, and reflection. The fixation on photorealism and pseudo-cinematic immersion can be at the expense of thinking, of experimentation, of throwing out an idea and beginning again. This is particularly detrimental in the collaborative scenographic process which in the conceptual early phase is not linear but ebbs and flows with the constant changes in the rehearsal room. The thinking drawing enables the scenographer to produce multiple ideas that can be proposed, rejected, modified, or accepted quickly. . . . This immediacy allows the mind to race, to build, to draw excitement from the process of creation with an exhilaration that increases with each moment, as one tests sketch after sketch in rapid succession. (Treib 2008, 16) Marc Treib, the American environmental designer, historian, and academic, identifies the thinking drawing as playful and dramatic, an apt description when referring to scenography: Even before grasping the full consequences of any idea, drawing—as a tool neither strict or demanding—stimulates the inherent playfulness of the creative process. . . . As drawing is “pressure sensitive” it dramatises ideas by making lines more or less intense and emphatic in a manner that reflects the workings of the thought process. The thinking drawing in a digitalize world, remains the principle site of theatrical wonder and astonishment, of Stephen Scrivener’s cognitive surprise (Scrivener 2010, NPF), and of originality and authenticity.

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Authorship, Authenticity, and Autograph HAMLET: Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own (SHAKESPEARE 2015, Act 3 Sc. 2) Dating back to the Italian Renaissance, the embodied connection of the drawing by hand has been the established instrument identifying autograph. The unprecedented change that has occurred in the past thirty years has instigated a paradigm shift from tools of representation to simulation by image digitalization. The digital drawing challenges notions of authenticity and authorship (long attributed to freehand drawing) through the proliferation of multiple simulacra. Once the digital drawing is transmitted and deleted it becomes a copy without an original. The pre-eminence of computer design skills over freehand drawing in universities and design colleges worldwide has, for this recent generation of scenographers, seen the decline of the single, authorial voice; the modernist “heroic individual” is fractured into a “multiplication of sub-selves inside a networked individual” (Hayes 2012, 9). Drawing digitally has constructed virtual communities in which there is a shared united experience with the blurring of roles within the creative production teams. Archaic hierarchical structures have disappeared (and for most part for good reason) but unfortunately this has also reinforced problems of authenticity and loss of authorship in an increasingly corporatized environment. The drawing by hand embodies the personal mark of its creator, whether artist or designer. The self-referential aesthetic of drawing should remain to offset this age of rampant digital appropriation. The thinking drawing enables free play of the scenographic imagination to explore, experiment, and discover a personal and subjective oeuvre within the “bustle of information” (Heidegger 1967) of an increasingly digitalized performance arts industry. For the contemporary scenographer, freehand drawing is the haptic tool which, sparked by a text a dramatic script or serendipitous moment in the rehearsal room, generates cognitively surprising encounters within performative and theatrical spaces.



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This is seen in the deeply personal and private spaces identified by the Polish scenographer and artist Tadeusz Kantor in the “Room of Imagination” and the “Room of Memory” (Kobialka 1992, 62). In a similar vein, the Polish architect and academic Beata Malinowska-Petelenz in Drawing—The Art of Portraying Space suggests that drawn spaces are “spaces of memory . . . deeply filtered, processed and sometimes distorted by “instruments” that deform it, the eye, brushes, pens, pencils or even sticks” (Malinowska-Petelenz 2015, 198). She further posits: This is particularly subjective, emotional information about the impressions gained by the author of the image by watching the slice of life. (MalinowskaPetelenz 2015, 198) The American artist Terry Rosenberg also views the drawing as a thinking space: In the first place, ideational drawing is not a form of communication. The drawing is rather, a denkraum—a space where an individual thinks. The drawing does not need to make sense to anyone else apart from the person drawing—and to themselves only when they are ideating. (Rosenberg 2008, 123) The British scenographer Kate Burnett images in the mind’s eye empty spaces waiting to be filled; “I realised that my own involvement with the sketch . . . was about the information of the un-filled in—the absences, the spaces and gaps that allow for possibility, invention, for more imagining” (Burnett 2014). An animated scholarly debate has flourished since the 1970s regarding the significance of the autonomous creative voice of the artist and designer. Bernice Rose writes in Drawing Now of “drawing as an autographic (indeed biographical) revelation, presenting the artist’s first and most intimate and confessional marks” (Rose 1976). Dianna Petherbridge in her seminal text The Primacy of Drawing: An Artists View argues “the primal nature of drawing, its universality and economy of means, its expressive intensity, its ability to reveal

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process and autograph has always been central to discussions and evaluation of drawing” (Petherbridge 1991, 7). In 1992, Rose further speculates: At the critical centre of art there is now a scepticism about the validity of the authorial role and the relevance of the signatory gesture. This struggle over self-expression as a still valid concept strikes at the heart of drawing itself, long the primary medium of the authorial gesture. Technology has invaded the garden. (Rose 1992, 10) Emma Dexter in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing writes that drawing in “the areas of human experience . . . has become associated with: intimacy, informality, authenticity (or at least with authentic inauthenticity), immediacy, subjectivity, history, memory, narrative” (Dexter 2005, 6). The art historian David Cottington in Reading Between the Lines: Pettibon, Picasso and the Future of Drawing questions whether authenticity matters in this technological age, highlighting the paradigm shift that occurred in Western art at the end of the twentieth-centur. He first discusses the advent of modernism as a break from nineteenth-century “realism” where “drawing’s narrative and communicative functions were replaced by a focus on its expressive, notational and selfreferential functions” (Cottington 2007, 3). However, by the 1960s modernism itself was in crisis, challenged by the emergence of what he identifies as “the now overused term postmodernism” (Cottington 2007, 2). As he maintains: the key importance to art’s authenticity—in a time of the rapid and unending proliferation of new technologies of image-making, the perceived unmediated relation that it displays between hand, eye, and mind has been an invaluable guarantor of subjectivity, of authorship, of the identity of the artist. (Cottington 2007, 2) Cottington also claims: We live in a culture in which the new is almost inseparable from the marketable and we have a corresponding dislike or a fear of what appears



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to be the elitism of difficult and private codes of drawing. (Cottington 2007, 24) He concludes with an appraisal of postmodernism’s new freedoms but leaves us in no doubt that “these freedoms speak to our shared experiences of this mass-culturally mediated world” and therefore we have lost authenticity and selfhood which modernism had previously given voice too (Cottington 2007, 24). It is in educational institutions and universities worldwide that a prominent decline is evident in the drawing processes as an indicator of authenticity and autograph. The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of novel, sophisticated technologies and digital media relating to image-making which in many ways has revolutionized scenographic design education but has also presented new and difficult challenges for both educator and student. Design curricula are now constantly rewritten to accommodate the acceleration of trends in scenographic visualization, such as CGI, visual effects design, VFX, Photoshop, Vector Works, Rhinoceros (Rhino), and CAD, to name a few. This has impacted on the long-established freehand drawing subjects that were once the creative underbelly of scenographic education. Notions of explorative and experimental ideation are readily sidelined as time-wasting and outdated. Contemporary design “thinking” is increasingly becoming purely pragmatic, economic, and technical, rather than philosophical, intellectual, or contemplative—producing reactors rather than revolutionaries. Personal autograph is deemed elitist and irrelevant in a neoliberal, “rampant objectophilia”-driven society (Jacob 2015, NPF). As Malinowska-Petelenz maintains: Drawing and sketching skills .  .  . are, little by little, being replaced with computer graphics programs. Drawing has simply become unnecessary. Students, especially the younger ones, feed on this illusory thesis, fascinated by the machine-generated smooth, hyper realistic images. Young people escape from a pencil, pen and paper, from a systematic exploration of

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form. .  .  . Yet sketch .  .  . is the fastest, easiest and cheapest language of communication. (Malinowska-Petelenz 2015, 196) Richard Buchanan in Anxiety, Wonder and Astonishment: The Communion of Art and Design criticizes the lack of “talk of wonder or astonishment in contemporary art and design” and believes they “deserve greater attention than they currently receive, because these emotions are both the sign and the source of creativity and originality” (Buchanan 2007, 44). As he further points out: Problem-solving takes priority over problem finding. Interpretations abound, and little time is given to the free play of invention and discovery. Thus, invention and discovery appear to be a matter of chance rather than disciplined artistic and intellectual exploration. (Buchanan 2007, 45) Similarly, Stephen Scrivener in Artistic and Designerly Research: Articulated Transformational Practice examined research methods for art and design students and found that problem-finding research, “being projective reflections, are transformational in that they change our understanding of . . . design and in so doing open up new possibilities and artistic and design potential” (Scrivener 2010, NPF). Distinct from problem-solving,6 projective reflections are also “cognitively surprising artistic and design interventions that expand knowledge and understanding of the nature and scope of . . . design” (Scrivener 2010, NPF). Scrivener’s model of cognitive surprise is a constantly evolving paradigm where strategies are endlessly developed by the process of embodied making and thinking. Unfortunately, in the current climate, problem-solving is the prevailing catch phrase in design education and the preferred research model in educational institutions because of its economic, pragmatic, and guaranteed material outcomes (Scrivener 2010, NPF). In 1981, the American scenographer, writer, and educator Darwin Payne argued in his internationally acclaimed textbook The Scenographic Imagination that the thinking drawing, or as he identifies it, the “preparatory” drawing, is “the most essential (as well as the most fundamental) form of



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graphic communication the scenographer must master in order to practice scenography” (Payne 1981, 89). This claim is still effective today. For instance, the importance of the scenographic design-thinking drawing is particularly emphasized in the 2019–20 application prospectus for the Master of Fine Art (Set Design) at the Yale School of Drama, New York:7 Theatre is an act of transformation, and for designers it is the transformation of words into visual and musical imagery; designers must have the capacity for visual expression, with its foundation set firmly in the ability to draw and sketch clearly and expressively. Drawing is not merely a technique for presentation; it is the language that reveals one’s thoughts and thus creates a dialogue among the director, the designers, and their colleagues. Through drawing, one observes and records one’s world. Drawing informs and clarifies one’s vision and is an integral part of the formulation of a design. Drawing should be as natural to the visual designer as speaking. (Stephen Strawbridge 2019, NPF) Further on, in the application prospectus, it is specifically stated on several occasions that digital material will not be considered because the freehand thinking process is what is being sought, not a polished, refined end product whose authorship and authenticity is difficult to trace: No video or other digital imagery  will be  accepted as part of a design applicant’s portfolio. All such materials will not be reviewed. .  .  . The portfolio is not an advertisement and should not be “dressed up” to “sell” oneself. Please avoid mats, acetate covers, superfluous graphics, and other forms of “eyewash.” . . . It should also include, if possible, rough preliminary sketches (not computer generated) and sketchbooks, as they show an applicant’s thought process and design journey. Production photos must be accompanied by sketches (originals preferred). (Drama 2019) As a scenographer, artist, academic, and educator, I have witnessed a technological revolution in art and design education. As Howard Riley argues:

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“Underlying the history of change in the organization of art [and design] education there is a history of change in the pedagogical methods adopted by teachers of drawing” (Garner 2008, 154). As a drawing researcher and educator in this digitally complex learning environment, I have had to face new challenges in making explicit the complex process of deciphering the visual world. I fully agree with Malinowska-Petelenz that Hyper-realistic visuals and simple freehand sketches should not be competitors but ought to complement each other, although only the latter show the personality, sensitivity and temperament of their creator. (Malinowska-Petelenz 2015, 200) Freehand drawing techniques, in particular the thinking drawing early in the student’s design practice, are critical in negotiating the many obstacles which impact on innovative and original ideation. Drawing is the core design skill in the visualization of concepts, which enables the students to begin a transformative journey of self-discovery and autonomy. I encourage students to employ both digital and freehand drawing methodologies in their design process; the sketch is about the generation of ideas while digital imaging particularly excels in the realization, refinement, and finish of designs. The unrelenting pursuit of cognitive surprise, wonder, and astonishment is what I strive for in all facets of my own professional practice and research but, most importantly as an educator, I try to imbue in my students, through the practice of drawing, a fearless spirit of adventure uninhibited by the practicalities of realism.

Drawn to the End In 2012, the Yale School of Architecture convened a symposium Is Drawing Dead?, organized by the faculty members Victor Agran and George Knight who were concerned that the practice of drawing is vanishing with the advent



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of digital technologies (Hayes 2012, 8). The conference presented over twenty responses from academics and practitioners, including Deanna Petherbridge and Juhani Pallasmaa. As Blood states: The tone of the conference seemed to be one of general agreement. . . . The methods used in both academia and practice, whether digital or analogue (and most likely both), are essentially and fundamentally tools at the disposal of the designer. Thus, it is the designer’s quest to identify and master the tools appropriate to a given approach. At this time we have a unique opportunity to discover, and even invent, new possibilities inherent in the unfolding overlap of the hand, eye, and continually evolving realm of technology. (Blood 2012, 10) Can the scenographic design drawing survive into the future? Can these drawings, peculiar to theatre and live performance, adapt to change? The answer is yes of course! Digital drawing is just a new technology, a different skill, similar to the “miraculous” invention and discovery of orthographical projection in the fifteenth century. As Jacob posits in relation to architectural drawing, but again pertinent to the set design drawing: Yet at the moment that the architectural drawing seemed consigned to the dustbin of history, a different generation found in its very anachronism the possibility of an alternative. (Jacob 2017, 84) In the twenty-first century the scenographic design drawings are the means by which to illuminate a performative and theatrical space in constant flux. The thinking drawing, as the genesis of thought, is the “door” into the scenographer’s uncensored, private contemplations, imaging the scenographer’s mind’s eye in an innately collaborative art form. This monograph has brought to light the means by which the scenographic design drawing reveals cognitive ideational thinking, shapes multiple performative encounters, and is the site of imaginative agency across the breadth of live performance. These drawings are where an idea is staged and performed. Most importantly, this

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examination has demonstrated how the scenographic design drawing has navigated beyond the page and gallery into a different expanded and embodied space, generating something new, unforeseen, and entirely, unforeseeable, a worlding. Interconnected “drawn” borders and spaces between what was once regarded as oppositional genres, drawing conventions and media have now established themselves within the elusive, ephemeral realm of scenography and live performance. In the age of digital technology these drawings have found a niche as the performative scenographic design drawing. The aim of this monograph is to instigate an interdisciplinary conversation, along with the recognition that these drawings are unique in their difference within the greater staging of drawing and therefore worthy of conservation, collection, and scholarly endeavor. In other words, in its undead, post-physical, digital form, the [scenographic design] drawing has returned richer, stronger, and more provocative than ever. (Jacob 2017, 87)

NOTES

Introduction 1 This monograph primarily examines the set design drawings for live theatre and performance. In past publications there has been an extensive analysis of costume design drawings. 2 Material in which the original writing has been erased to be replaced by other writing. A contemporary meaning is a surface, interface, or mask inscribed with layers of history and memory. 3 Arnold Aronson in Introduction: Scenography or Design identifies the different words and phrases that address the visual aspects of theatre, P1. 4 “The mind’s eye” is one’s visual memory or imagination. 5 Hamlet Act 1, scene 2—in the mind’s eye was first coined by Hamlet as the visualization of his mind. 6 The fourth wall in theatre is the invisible plane that separates the spectator in the auditorium from the performer/actor on stage. 7 For this enquiry, I have excluded the scenographic technical drawing—plan, section, and elevation—which are mainly executed in computer-aided design (CAD), Rhino, and Vector Works. 8 In terms of a serious theoretical discourse in English, Natalia Goncharova scenographic output is largely documented in relation to her costume designs. 9 Victor Turner, the British cultural anthropologist, described this thin space in relation to ritual and rites of passage as “betwixt and between.” The experience of a passage or threshold becomes the process of transition (Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, 1969). 10 The most common definition of “performative drawing” is the drawing as the act, action, or the physical process of drawing in real time before a live spectator, which employs John. L. Austin’s model of performative speech or utterance, that is, referring to “itself ” in the process of its own making. 11 Prior to the second century AD, the Greek thea (derived from the verb theaomai, to gaze with admiration or bewilderment, or to contemplate) and its cognate theatron were used to identify the distinctive visual characteristics of the theatre.

228 NOTES

Chapter 1 1 Scenography is the English translation for the European term scénographie (French, Czech), scenografia (Italian), or scenografie (Romanian), and means “scene design” or “theatre design” in Australia. 2 There are scenographers/theatre designers who only use three-dimensional sketch models (both analogue and digital) early in the ideation design process. It is also common that both drawing and sketch modeling are employed early in the design process. 3 A curtain suspended loosely across a stage and used as a backdrop or part of a stage setting. 4 All of Me was awarded the 1995 Australian Victorian Green Room Award for Best Innovative New Form Production and 1996 Edinburgh Herald Angel Award for the most outstanding theatre show across art forms, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. 5 The text which prompted All of Me was a short poem written by Mary Morris (1993). 6 All of Me, first performed in 1993, was before the term “post-dramatic theatre” was established. 7 Mask: to disguise under an assumed outward show; to conceal (intentionally or otherwise). Oxford University Press. http://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/114612. Accessed August 19, 2017.

Chapter 2 1 Kantor’s early work included “happenings” or performative events. This involved live meta-theatrical performances which “repeatedly expressionistically condensed scenes, combined with a quasi-ritualistic form of conjuring up the past” (Lehmann 2006, 71). 2 Appia’s and Craig’s writings influenced subsequent experimenters—Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre, Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, Steven Berkoff, Tadeusz Kantor, and Peter Brook to name a few. 3 Author anonymous. Photograph of Le Coq d’Or, 1914. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Caddy, Davinia. 2012. The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle Époque Paris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 161. 4 Goncharova, Natalia. Set design drawing for the Act I of Le Coq d’Or, 1914. Watercolor, 281/2 × 411/2 in., 72.5 × 105.5 cm. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Nikita D. Lobanov-Rostovsky, London (Bowlt 1987, 37).

NOTES  229

5 Balagany: existed in Russia from the middle of the eighteenth century, consisting of booths put up for displaying wares at markets and fares (Robert Auty 1977, 250). 6 Picasso, Pablo. Scenographic design drawing for the set of Parade. Graphite on paper, 25 × 30.5 cm, 1916–17 (Cooper 1987, Plate 114). 7 Picasso, Pablo. Scenographic design drawing for the set of Parade. Tempera, 10.6 m × 17 m, 1916–17 (Cooper 1987, Plate 119). 8 Picasso, Pablo. Scenographic design drawing for the set of Parade. Graphite on paper, 1916–17 (Cooper 1987, Plate 99). 9 Picasso, Pablo. View of Paris, 1915–16. Graphite on paper. View from the window of the artist’s studio in Rue Schoelcher (Cooper 1987, Plate 97). 10 Picasso, Pablo. Scenographic design drawing for the set of Parade. Graphite on paper, 16.5 × 18.5 cm, 1916–17 (Cooper 1987, Plate 100). 11 Oumansky, MM. and Novak. Production photograph for the Horse, 1917 (Cooper 1987, Plates 89, 95). 12 Picasso, Pablo. Scenographic costume design drawing for the Horse. Ink and graphite on paper, Rome, 1917 (Cooper 1987, Plates 90–2). 13 Tanning, Dorothea. Scenographic design drawing for the costume for the Guest in the Night Shadow, 1945. Kleinberg, Joanna, Liebowitz, Rachel. 2010. Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage. Drawing Center, New York. Plates 8, 10, 27, 31. 14 Tanning, Dorothea. Scenographic design drawing for the costume for the Sleepwalker in the Night Shadow, 1945. Kleinberg, Joanna, Liebowitz, Rachel, 2010. Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage. Drawing Center, New York. Plate 16. 15 Tanning, Dorothea. Scenographic design drawing for the set in the Night Shadow, 1945. Kleinberg, Joanna, Liebowitz, Rachel, 2010. Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage, Drawing Center, New York, Plate 12. 16 Tanning, Dorothea. Scenographic design drawing for the set in the Night Shadow, 1945. Kleinberg, Joanna, Liebowitz, Rachel. 2010. Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage. Drawing Center, New York. Plate 12. 17 The following paintings reveal Tanning’s preoccupation with doors: Tanning, Dorothea. Birthday, 1942, oil on canvas, 102 × 64 cm. Courtesy: Philadelphia Museum of Art © DACS, 2019. Tanning, Dorothea. Portefeuille (Pocketbook), 1946, oil on canvas, 8 1/2 × 6 in. The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tuscon. Gift of the Estate of Kay Sage Tanguy, 64.7.2. Tanning, Dorothea. The Guest Room, 1950–2, oil on canvas, 60 5/16 × 42 1/4 in. Tanning, Dorothea. Intérieur (Interior), 1953, oil on canvas, 18 1/10 × 15 in. 18 Tanning, Dorothea. 1944. A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 × 15 1/2 in. The title refers to the author Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823).

230 NOTES

19 Tanning, Dorothea. The Guest Room, 1950–2, oil on canvas, 60 5/16 × 42 1/4 in. This painting is framed in a voluminous white sheet/cloth curtain similar to the seventeenth-century Dutch masters; for instance, Nicolaes Maes, The Eavesdropper Listening in on Her Scolding Mistress, 1655. Oil on wood panel. London: Mansion House (Guildhall Art Gallery). Harold Samuel Collection. 46.7 × 72.1 cm. 20 Tanning, Dorothea. Scenographic design drawing for the set in the Night Shadow, 1945. Kleinberg, Joanna, Liebowitz, Rachel, 2010. Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage. Drawing Center, New York. Plate 12. 21 A number of Ballets Russes companies were formed following Serge Diaghilev’s death in 1929. Between 1936 and 1940 three of these companies visited Australia in tours orchestrated by the entrepreneur Colonel Wassily de Basil and were called a variety of names: Colonel W. de Basil’s Monte Carlo Russian Ballet, Covent Garden Russian Ballet, The Original Ballet Russes, Colonel W. de Basil’s Covent Garden Ballet, and Colonel W. de Basil’s Ballet Company. https://trove​.nla​.gov​.au​/list​?id​=1194. Accessed February 4, 2018. 22 Arthur Boyd: Testament of a Painter—Antipodean Chagall is a documentary on Arthur Boyd as part of the NFSA. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nfs​​a​.gov​​.au​/c​​ollec​​tion/​​curat​​ed​/ar​​thur-​​ boyd-​​testa​​ment-​​paint​​er​-an​​​tipod​​ean​-c​​hagal​l. Accessed April 12, 2019. 23 Boyd, Arthur. Nude with Beast III (1962). Oil on composition board, 160.4 × 182.6 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1966. © National Gallery of Victoria. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ngv​​.vic.​​gov​.a​​u​/exp​​lore/​​colle​​ction​​/copy​​right​​r​epro​​ ducti​​ons/. Accessed June 4, 2019. 24 Boyd, Arthur. White Joined Figures (Elektra backdrop). 1962–3. Printed in black ink, from one copper plate. National Gallery Australia. 25 Boyd, Arthur. Weeping Head with Nude and Beast (1960 and 1965). Drawing in brush and black ink and black ink wash, 50.8 h × 63.6 w cm. The Arthur Boyd gift, 1975. National Gallery Victoria. 26 Boyd, Arthur. Scenographic design drawing for the costume of Clytemnestra for Royal Ballet production of Elektra (1962 and 1963). Drawing in brush and black ink on paper, 50.1 h × 38.0 w cm. The Arthur Boyd gift, 1975. National Gallery Australia. 27 Hockney reflecting on his designs for his first theatre production, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1966), for London’s Royal Court Theatre. Hockney said of his transition across to theatre: I had played with those ideas before and thought of all my pictures as drama. Even the way I was painting at that time was a kind of theatrical exaggeration. (Friedman 1983, 11) 28 Hockney had fifteen years earlier, on returning from his first trip to New York in 1961, completed sixteen etchings of Rake’s Progress 1961–3, based on William Hogarth’s series of the same name produced in 1735. These unusual, graphically explicit illustrated drawings are based on Hockney’s own personal experiences as a young gay man struggling to navigate his way through the hedonistic and

NOTES  231

consumeristic social fabric of 1960s New York. Hockney associated the depravity of eighteenth-century London and the horrors of a Hogathian Bedlam to his encounter with impoverishment and feelings of discombobulation and loss. 29 An example indicative of this period of overt naturalism is Hockney’s life-size painting of the celebrity dress designer Ossie Clark and fabric designer Celia Birtwell, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, 1970–1. Hockney reworked many times the painting, taking a year to complete. 30 Hockney, David. Multiple scenographic design drawings, costume designs and models for The Rakes Progress, 1975. https​:/​/th​​edavi​​dhock​​neyfo​​undat​​ion​.o​​rg​/se​​ries/​​ the​-r​​a​kes-​​progr​​ess. Accessed April 3, 2019. 31 Hockney, David. Study for Bedlam for The Rakes Progress, 1975. Ink on paper (Friedman 1983, 71). 32 The best seat in the house: L’œil du prince, or “the prince’s eye,” to use the term made famous by Nicola Sabbatini (1475–1554). 33 Hockney explored the one-point perspective of the stage set in his paintings—for example, in the monumental double portrait, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, 1969. The twenty-five radiating lines of the wooden parquetry end two inches above the center of Geldzahler’s head, drawing the spectator’s eye toward Hockney’s poignant representation of his long-time friend, pop art evangelist and former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hockney also reflected the scene in Geldzahler’s spectacles—a pictorial illusory technique reminiscent of the painted mirrors of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, such as Jan Karel van Eyck. 34 Hockney, David. Study for Bedlam for The Rakes Progress, 1975. Ink on paper (Friedman 1983, 71). 35 Hockney, David. Scenographic design model of the Bedlam Scene, The Rake’s Progress, 1975. Ink and card. https​:/​/th​​edavi​​dhock​​neyfo​​undat​​ion​.o​​rg​/ar​​​twork​​/615.​ Accessed March 3, 2019. 36 Hockney, David. Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, 1963. Oil on canvas. https​:/​/th​​edavi​​ dhock​​neyfo​​undat​​ion​.o​​rg​/ch​​rono​l​​ogy​/1​​963. Accessed April 2, 2019. 37 Hockney, David, Play within a Play, 1963. Oil on plexiglass. https​:/​/th​​edavi​​dhock​​ neyfo​​undat​​ion​.o​​rg​/ch​​ronol​​​ogy​/1​​963. Accessed March 4, 2019. Play within a Play is a typical example of where Hockney paintings employ the curtain as a theatrical sign or symbol of the artifice of theatre. The curtain is a hanging fringed tapestry or is it simply a painted scenic backdrop—a representation of a hanging fringed tapestry? What pushes this illusionistic concept even further is how Hockney has painted the male figure, his art-dealer, John Kasmin pressing his face and hands on to an invisible pane of glass—which is a representation of the “real glass” of the framed painting, again in the space of the spectator (the Egyptian sarcophagus left of the “tapestry” is wearing an Egyptianesque braid). Here the character in drama of the painting is trapped within a decorative one-dimensional world. The painting defies any realistic interpretation or reading.

232 NOTES

38 Dou, Gerrit. Painter with Pipe and Book, 1645. Painter with Pipe and Book. Oil on panel, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 39 Hockney, David. Scenographic design drawing for the Drop Curtain for The Rake’s Progress, 1975. Ink on paper and cardboard, 13 7/8 × 20 1/8, for the opera production of The Rake’s Progress, set and costume design by David Hockney.

Chapter 3 1 Victor Turner, the British cultural anthropologist, described this thin space in relation to ritual and rites of passage, as “betwixt and between.” The experience of a passage or threshold becomes the process of transition (Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage, 1969). 2 Frederick Kiesler was born in Chernivtsi, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian crown land of Bukovina (in modern-day Ukraine), on September 22, 1890. (Zillner 2019, 17). 3 1923: Set designs for Karel Čapek’s utopian play R.U.R. and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in Berlin. 1924: The Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques) and the Raumbühne (Space Stage) in Vienna. 1925: The Austrian theatre section at the Exposition Inter-Nationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) in Paris. 1929: The Film Guild Cinema, New York. 1965: The Shrine of the Book, Jerusalem is a sanctuary that contains the Dead Sea Scrolls. 4 The article The Animation of Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House written by Phoebe Springstubb contains an early drawing of Kiesler’s as a diazotype print of his Endless Theatre. These were exhibited in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, MoMA New York (Springstubb 2015). 5 Kiesler, Frederick. Scenographic design drawing for R.U.R, Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin 1923. (Blume 2019, 54). https​:/​/ww​​w​-deg​​ruyte​​r​-com​​.ezpr​​ oxy1.​​libra​​ry​.us​​yd​.ed​​u​.au/​​downl​​oadpd​​f​/boo​​ks​/97​​83035​​61541​​8​/978​​30356​​15418​​-0​04/​​ 97830​​35615​​418​-0​​04​.pd​f. Accessed November 4, 2019. 6 The article The Animation of Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House written by Phoebe Springstubb contains the architectural drawings that were exhibited in Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture, MoMA, New York (Springstubb 2015). 7 The article AD Classics: Endless House / Friedrick Kiesler, written by Megan Sveiven, contains an array of Kiesler’s drawings, plans and models for his hypothetical design for Endless House. (Sveiven 2011).

NOTES  233

8 Slow House (Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller) (1991a). https​:/​/ds​​rny​.c​​om​/pr​​ oject​​/slow​​-hous​​e​?ind​​ex​=fa​​lse​&s​​e​ctio​​n​=pro​​jects​. Accessed May 9, 2019. 9 The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, at the Gallery Ma in Tokyo (1992), and the following year at Le Magasin in Grenoble and Arc-en-rêve in Bordeaux. 10 Drawings and model now reside at MoMA, New York. 11 The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, at the Gallery Ma in Tokyo (1992). https​ :/​/ds​​rny​.c​​om​/pr​​oject​​/desi​​ring-​​eye​?i​​ndex=​​false​​§​​​ion​=p​​rojec​​ts. Accessed May 30, 2019. 12 Slow House (Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller) (1991a). www​.e​​verys​​tockp​​hoto.​​ com​/p​​hoto.​​php​?i​​mageI​​d​=602​​8437. Accessed January 2, 2013. 13 Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité, October 1984 from the original in French, Des Espace Autres, March 1967, translated by Jay Miskowiec. 14 Gehry, Frank. Architectural sketch for The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, California. Black pen on paper. https​:/​/hy​​peral​​lergi​​c​.com​​/2657​​34​/th​​e​-fre​​eform​​-scri​​ bbles​​-that​​-give​​-rise​​-to​-f​​rank-​​​gehry​​s​-bui​​lding​​s/. Accessed May 30, 2019. 15 Pastier, John. (2012), “Build Maestro, Frank Gehry Designs Sets for LA Philharmonic’s Don Giovanni,” The Architects Newspaper, June 21, Available onlin​e: ht​​tp://​​archp​​aper.​​com​/n​​ews​/a​​rticl​​es​.as​​p​?id=​​6126#​​​.VfEn​​DmSqp​​Bc. Ac​cesse​d July 5, 2016. 16 The Fold (1993), by Gilles Deleuze, examines the contribution made by the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to metaphysics: his theory of monads.

Chapter 4 1 Kentridge, William. 2016. Installation views of More Sweetly Play the Dance. New York. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​iango​​odman​​.com/​​exhib​​ition​​s​/mor​​e​-swe​​etly-​​p​lay-​​the​-d​​ance. Accessed June 15, 2019. 2 Photographic images of the Wozzeck production at the Salzburg Festival 2017 can be accessed from the following link: https​:/​/ww​​w​.sce​​nogra​​phyto​​day​.c​​om​/wi​​lliam​​-kent​​ ridge​​-sabi​​ne​-th​​eun​is​​sen​-w​​ozzec​​k/. Accessed June 15, 2019. 3 The set designer for Wozzeck is Sabine Theunissen who has collaborated with William Kentridge since 2003. 4 Private conversation between author and Gabriela Tylesova (November 2018). 5 Like the Odette/Odile character in the ballet Swan Lake, the cinematic heroine is often portrayed with a twin sister or a doppelgänger, for instance, in Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman (1944) and Dark Mirror (1946) and Curtis Bernhardt’s A Stolen Life (1946).

234 NOTES

6 A teaser, or top masking, is a horizontal curtain attached to a batten and hung upstage of the proscenium and reduces its height. Tormentors, or side masking, are vertical stage drapes—usually hung on battens attached to travellers running on stage track— that reduce the visual width of the stage for certain scenes. http:​/​/www​​.spec​​ialty​​theat​​re​ .co​​m​/tea​​ser​-t​​ormen​​tor​-s​​​tage-​​curta​​ins. Accessed May 22, 2016. 7 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene and Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang. 8 Songs (arias) interspersed with spoken dialogue.

Chapter 5 1 Promenade performance: performance in which the spectator moves between locations, following the action from scene to scene. The spectator inhabits the theatrical space by walking through the performance, as against sitting and watching. Kershaw, Baz. “Promenade performance.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance: Oxford University Press, 2003. 2 The three-month studio art residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, was awarded by University New South Wales (UNSW), 2015. 3 The Paris terrorist attacks occurred midway through the residency on Friday, November 13, 2015. 4 In camera: http:​/​/www​​.etym​​onlin​​e​.com​​/inde​​x​.php​​?allo​​wed​_i​​n​_fra​​me​=0&​​se​arc​​h​=in+​​ camer​a. Accessed August 10, 2016. 5 French New Wave philosophers, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), André Breton (1896–1966), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). 6 I discovered this EXIT sign in the Pompidou Center (Paris). In this sign, the running man has no illuminated door to run toward; rather, he is being chased by flames to nowhere. He is trapped in a place without doors or windows. This new detail has appeared in the panoramic drawing No Exit as a symbol of Hell. 7 DRN Postgraduate Event, Coventry University (UK), 2014. 8 Felix Kulakowski: AV Supervisor, NIDA. 9 Air-raid sirens sound off at midday on every first Wednesday of the month in Central Paris. The alert system is part of the Système d’Alerte et d’Information des Populations (SAIP), a national warning system designed to alert the public if it is in danger. 10 Bertolt Brecht proposed the “effect of alienation” or “estrangement-effect.” 11 From this point on in the research, the scale scenographic model will be referred to as “the model.”

NOTES  235

12 Maquette is the European term for “set model.” 13 (Gibson 1979), 127. James J. Gibson proposed in his seminal text The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, the concept of affordance: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” 14 The best seat in the house—the center, seventh row from stage—the oeil du prince, or prince’s eye, to use the term made famous by Nicola Sabbatini (1475–1554), 92.

Chapter 6 1 Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) was written between 1927 and 1940, remained unpublished until 1982, and finally appeared in English in 1999. 2 For example, the opera The Magic Flute (2012), directed by Barrie Kosky and the UK company, 1927. 3 The invention of the magic lantern in the 1650s in all probability was by a prominent Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. 4 Palimpsest: the surface of a text or drawing that has been erased and rewritten/ redrawn upon. Layers of past inscribing on the surface of paper, marble, canvas, and so on. 5 https​:/​/ww​​w​.met​​ropol​​ismag​​.com/​​archi​​tectu​​re​/ar​​chite​​cture​​-ente​​rs​-ag​​e​-pos​​t​​-dig​​ital-​​ drawi​​ng/. Accessed September 28, 2019. 6 Problem-solving or hypothesis-driven research is “characterised as a process of understanding a problematic situation, developing and testing a solution to it” (Scrivener 2010, NPF). 7 Yale School of Drama in New York is a leading international university in scenographic design.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. absent presence, an  13, 124, 125, 137, 161, 162, 167, 184, 186, 187, 194 in The Drawn Absence  193, 194 in No Exit  172, 173, 175–9 Adam, Hubertus  99 affordance  235 n.13 Afterimage: Drawing through Process (Los Angeles, 1999)  136 Agran, Victor  224–5 Alden, Christopher Don Giovanni  11, 126–8 Alighieri, Dante Divine Comedy, The  10, 100 Allmer, Açalya  128 American Drawing: 1963–74 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1976)  135 Ando, Erica  141 Andrade, Suzanne  12, 153–60 anti-theatricality  55–7 Appia, Adolphe  8, 66, 84, 67, 93, 100, 117, 163, 207, 228 n.2 Arc-en-rêve (Bordeaux, 1993)  233 n.9 architecture  36, 37, 210, 211 distinguished from scenography  129–30 hypersurface  14–15 staging  10–11, 99–130 Arnold, Malcom  85, 89 Aronson, Arnold  14, 16, 23, 60, 66, 82, 149, 195–6, 206 Drawing and Design  3 Introduction: Scenography or Design  227 n.3 Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography  2–3, 5, 163, 205 Postmodern Design  65

Technology and Dramaturgical Development: Five Observations  205 Time and Space on the Stage  206 Arp, Hans  106 Ashwin, Clive  26, 34–5, 38 assemblage  24 Auden, W. H.  90 augmented reality  16, 18, 133, 199 Austin, John Langshaw  52, 56, 57, 135, 227 n.10 on anti-theatrical prejudice  56 model of performative speech or utterance  54 authenticity  125, 196, 209, 214, 218–24 authorship  196, 218–24 AutoCAD  50 autograph  218–24 avant-garde  8, 64–8, 70, 72, 84, 97, 105, 106, 154, 163 Aveirense Theater, Aveiro  44 Axsom, Richard H.  76–7 Les Demoiselles d Avignon  76–7 Bachelard, Gaston  81, 183 Poetics of Space, The  82 Bacon, Roger  170 Bakaitis, Helmut Curse of the House of Atreus, The  30 Bakst, Léon  68 Balanchine, George  78, 84 Ball, Linden  35, 36 Ballet Russes  8, 64, 67, 68, 72, 73, 78, 84, 97–8, 230 n.21 Le Coq d’Or  8, 68 Parade  9, 72 Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo  9, 78, 230

252 INDEX

Le Coq d’Or  72 Night Shadow  9, 78 1936–40, 84–5 Bambach, Carmen C.  36 Bandini, Micha  119, 123 Barba, Eugenio Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, A  25–6 Barnes, Clive  87–8 Barritt, Paul  12, 153–60 Magic Flute, The  154–8, 160 Baudelaire, Charles  79 Baudrillard, Jean  14, 114–15, 189–2 Precession of Simulacra  189 Vital Illusion, The  191 Baugh, Christopher  23, 211 “Devices of Wonder”: Globalizing Technologies in the Process of Scenography  206 Bauhaus  18, 106 Beacham, Richard C.  67 Beauvoir, Simone de  234 n.5 Second Sex, The  148 Beckmann, Max  156 Belardi, Paolo Why Architects Still Draw  33 Bel Geddes, Norman  100–3 Divine Comedy, The  101–2, 103 Divine Comedy Theatre  100–1 Futurama  10, 100, 103 Project for the Theatrical Presentation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, A  100 Bellini, Vincenzo  78 Bellow, Juliet Modernism on Stage: The Ballet Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde  67–8 Belsky, Vladimir  68–9 Benjamin, Walter  97 flâneur  174, 196–8 Benkö, Kristian  41 Benois, Alexandre  68 Berg, Alban  144 Lulu  142

Wozzeck  142–3, 233 n.3 Bergson, Henri  208 Bermingham, Ronald P. Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language  185 Bernhardt, Curtis Stolen Life, A  233 n.5 Birringer, Johannes  205 Moveable Worlds/Digital Scenographies  201–2 Birtwell, Celia  231 n.29 Bishop, Claire  136 Bleeker, Maaike  142, 166, 178, 179 Blood, John  210 Opinion: Is Drawing Dead?  209 Blume, Torsten  106–7 Frederick Kiesler, the Bauhaus and the Bauhaus Space  104 Boeuf, Patrick Le  161 Borges, Sofia  5 Boucher, François Odalisque  126 Bowlt, John E. Natalia Goncharova and Futuristic Theater  72 Stage Design and the Ballets Russes  71–2 Boyd, Arthur  4, 84, 92 Antipodean Chagall  85 Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns  86 Elektra  9, 85–90 Furies  87 Nude and Beast  86 Nude with Beast III  86 Orestes  87 Weeping Head with Nude and Beast  87 White Joined Figures  86–7 Brack, John  84 Brandes, Amanda  57 Brecht, Bertolt  234 n.10 Brejzek, Thea  2, 5, 117–18, 164, 188–9 Between Symbolic Representation and New Critical Realism: Architecture

INDEX

as Scenography and Scenography as Architecture  110, 126 Cosmopoiesis, or: Making Worlds through the Model  27 Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture, The  27, 193 1:1 Architectural Model as Performance and Double, The  182 Scenographic (Re-)turn: Figures of Surface, Space and Spectator in Theatre and Architecture Theory 1680–1980, The  64–5 Breton, André  234 n.5 Browner, Juliet  79 Brown, Hilda Meldrum  67 Buchanan, Richard Anxiety, Wonder and Astonishment: The Communion of Art and Design  222 Buchner, Georg Woyzeck  165 Büchner, Georg  142 Buckle, Richard  89 Burgtheater, Vienna  29 Burnett, Kate  5, 7, 39–40, 219 Addressing the Absent: Drawing and Scenography  3 Butler, Judith  52 Butterworth, Philip  66 Caddy, Davinia  69 CAD. See computer-aided design Canadian Opera Company  142 Čapek, Karel  105 Carlson, Marvin  57 Carruthers, Victoria Dorothea Tanning and Her Gothic Imagination  80–1 Chanel, Coco  72 Chatelet Theatre  78 Chevalier, Maurice Tout Seul  180 Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris  167 Clark, Ossie  231 n.29

253

Cocteau, Jean  73, 75, 78 Parade  9 cognitive dissonance  206 cognitive surprise  3, 19, 36, 41, 181, 182, 217, 222, 224 Collins, Jane  5 Drawing and Design  3 computer-aided design (CAD)  16, 48, 50, 227 n.7 constative drawing  57 Cooper, Douglas  74 Correia, Ricardo Eu Uso Termotebe e o Meu Pai Também (I Wear Termotebe as My Dad Before Me)  44 cosmopoiesis  2, 19, 22, 27, 103, 133 Cottington, David  220–1 Reading Between the Lines: Pettibon, Picasso and the Future of Drawing  220 Covent Garden, London  29, 72 Cox, John  10, 90, 96 Craig, Edward Gordon  8, 66, 67, 100, 161–2, 228 n.2 Creating a Scene: Australian Artists as Stage Designers 1940–1965 (2004)  85 Creative Australia and the Ballet Russes (2009)  85 cubism  71, 73, 76, 78 Cubo-Futurism  8, 68 Curtis, Stephen  3–4 Dali, Salvador  4, 78 Damasio, Antonio  82, 145 Dantine, Wilhelm  151 D’Arcy, Eamon  40 Davis, Tracy C.  58 Dean, Beth  90 de Basil, Colonel Wassily  72, 78, 85, 230 n.21 Debord, Guy  198 de Chirico, Giorgio  8, 72, 78, 123 Deleuze, Gilles  24, 119, 128–9 Fold, The  129, 233 n.16 Derrida, Jacques  146

254 INDEX

Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, The (Gallery Ma, Tokyo, 1992)  113, 115–16, 233 n.9 Dexter, Emma  35 Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing  220 de Zegher, Catherine  53, 54 Diaghilev, Serge  8, 9, 68, 72, 73, 75, 78, 230 n.21 diagrammatic drawings  48 Diderot, Denis De la Poèsie Dramatique  55–6, 67 digital drawing  208–13 digital interface  14–16 digital presentational drawing  48–51 digital scenography  19, 51, 133, 195, 197, 199–208, 211 Diller, Elizabeth  4, 10, 99, 109 Slow House  11, 109–18 Divine Comedy Theatre  100–1 divine craftsman  27 Dix, Otto  156 Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose  142 Doesburg, Theo van  106 Dolan, Jill Performance, Utopia, and the Utopian Performative  132 Doležel, Lubomír Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds  38 Dona Maria II Theater, Lisbon  44 Dorothea Tanning (Tate Modern, London, 2019)  79 Dorothea Tanning: Early Designs for the Stage (Drawing Center, New York, 2010)  79 Dou, Gerrit Painter with Pipe and Book  94 Drawing Now (MoMA, New York, 1976)  135 Drawing Research Network (DRN)  135 Drawn to the Stage; Australian Stage Design from the Arts Centre’s Performing Arts Collection (2007)  85

DRN. See Drawing Research Network Duchamp, Marcel  106 D-Wok  207 École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq  140 Elwes, Catherine  205–6 Installation and the Moving Image  204 Emmons, Paul Size Matters: Virtual Scale and Bodily Imagination in Architectural Drawing  215 Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture (MoMA, 2015)  109 English National Opera, London  151 Ernst, Max  8, 72, 79 estrangement-effect  234 n.10 expanded drawing  12, 13, 131, 133–6, 140, 149, 151, 162, 167, 181, 193 exploratory rehearsal drawing  44–8 extra-daily technique  25, 26 Falaschi, Gianluca  207 Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism (MoMA, New York, 1936)  79 Farago, Jason Dwellings That Defy the Idea of Home  109–10 Fensham, Rachel  164, 175 Féral, Josette Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language  185 Field, Sue  5 All of Me  46, 47, 228 nn.4–6 Chairs, The  179, 180 Curse of the House of Atreus, The  30–2 Drawn Absence  12–13, 161–94 Drawn to the Light: The Drawing from the Dramatic Text Stages the Act of Viewing  179 No Exit  173, 176, 177, 184 scenographic scale model  188, 189 Fischer-Lichte, Erika  58, 59, 65, 178 Fish, Jonathan C.  35

INDEX

255

flâneur  174, 196–8 Foá, Maryclaire  53, 54 Fokine, Michel  68, 72 Foucault, Michel  119, 234 n.5 found drawings  135 fourth wall, the  6–7, 12, 14, 15, 21, 32, 42, 67, 117, 118, 137, 150, 166, 172, 186, 192, 195, 204, 209, 227 n.6 Fraser, Iainz Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis of Drawing  216 Frazer, James Golden Bough, The  193 freehand thinking drawing  5, 30, 32–5, 48, 51, 129, 139, 151, 153, 209, 213–18, 221, 224 French, Leonard  84 Friedman, Martin Hockney Paints the Stage  91 Fried, Michael Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot  56 on anti-theatricality  57 Friend, Donald  84 Fuchs, Elinor Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre after Modernism, The  162, 174, 197–8 functionalism  107 Fusser, Vilém Towards a Philosophy of Photography  198–9

Giannachi, Gabriella Virtual Theatres  15 Gibson, James J. Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, The  235 n.13 Giedion, Sigfried  106 Giesekam, Greg Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre  204 Gil Vicente Academic Theater, Coimbra  44 Giò Forma  207 Glass, Phillip  151, 152 Glyndebourne Festival Opera, UK  10, 90, 92, 96 Goldberg, RoseLee Dancing About Architecture  111 Goldschmidt, Gabriela  37 Manual Sketching: Why Is It Still Relevant?  216 Goncharova, Natalia  4, 227 n.8 Donkey’s Tail  70 Jack of Diamonds  70 Le Coq d’Or  8, 68–72 Osliny Khvast  70 Rayonism  70 Gorky, Arshile  106 Grisewood, Jane  53–4 Gris, Juan  8, 72 Gropius, Walter  18, 107 Total Theater  106 Grosz, George  156 Groves, Nancy  152

Gamerman, Ellen  113 Garner, Steve Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research  28 Geers, Kersten  213 Gehry, Frank  10, 11, 36–7, 99, 125–30 Don Giovanni  126–8 gender identity  52 Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles  37 Ghislanzoni, Antonio  207 Giacosa, Giuseppe  49

Hall, Fernau  89 Hamlyn, Nicky Experimental and Expanded Animation  139 Hannah, Dorita  160 Hann, Rachel  2, 5, 23, 25, 26 Beyond Scenography  25, 200 Hantelmann, Dorothea von  52–3 Harrison, Martin  164–5 Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin  100 Hartoonian, Gevork

256 INDEX

Frank Gehry: Roofing, Wrapping, and Wrapping the Roof  128 Hausner, Xenia  4, 29 Xenia Hausner: Ratselraum Fremde Frau  29 Heidegger, Martin  213–14 Being and Time  168 Poetry, Language, Thought  131–2 What Calls for Thinking  33 Hellwig, Claes Peter  41 Helpmann, Robert  9, 85, 87, 89 Henmi, Rod Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis of Drawing  216 Herzog, Jacques  99, 125 Heyes, Kendal  53, 54 Hickie, Rebecca  22 Hockney, David  4, 10, 230 n.27, 230–1 n.28 Bedlam Scene  93, 94 Drawings Are the Top: They Are Just Magical  91 Drop Curtain for The Rake’s Progress  95 Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott  231 n.33 Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy  231 n.29 playful aesthetic of  90–6 Play within a Play  231 n.37 Rake’s Progress, The  64, 90, 92, 93, 95–6, 230 n.28 Theatrical Landscape  92 Hofmannstahl, Hugo von  120 Hogarth, William  230 n.28 Howard, Pamela  183 What Is Scenography?  4–5 “How Sketches Work: A Cognitive Theory for Improved System Design” (Fish)  35 Hunter, Frederick J. Norman Bel Geddes’ Conception of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”  102–3 Hunt, Nick Alternative Materialities: Scenography in Digital Performance  17 Huygens, Christiaan  235 n.3

hyperreality  115, 190, 191, 211 hypersurface architecture  14–15 Iball, Helen  5 Research Methods in Scenography  39 Idea as Model (1976)  183 Illica, Luigi  49 Illich, Ivan Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze, The  170 illumination  30 imagination  5, 7, 17, 19, 26, 39, 40, 67, 69, 79, 80, 83, 97, 102, 103, 123, 182, 215, 218 International Theatre Exposition, New York  104 Is Drawing Dead? (Yale School of Architecture, 2012)  224–5 Jack of Diamonds  70 Jacob, Sam  213 Architecture Enters the Age of PostDigital Drawing  212 Jamieson, Nigel All of Me  45–7, 228 nn.4–6 Jarry, Alfred Ubu Roi  230 n.27 Jones, Robert Edmond  83 Jungk, Peter Stephan Der König von Amerika  151 Kain, Karen  147 Kallman, Chester  90 Kandinsky, Wassily  106 Kantor, Tadeusz  26, 63–4, 186–7, 219, 228 n.1 “Room of Imagination”  26, 54, 186–7, 189, 219 “Room of Memory”  26, 54, 186–7, 189, 219 Kasmin, John  231 n.37 Kavakli-Thorne, Manolya  35 Keeley, Adele  211 Kentridge, William  4, 12, 139–47, 204, 216–17, 233 n.3 More Sweetly Play the Dance  141

INDEX

Kiesler, Frederick  103–10 Endless House  10, 105–9, 113, 232 n.7 Endless Theatre  10, 104, 105, 109 Inside the Endless House  107 as member of De Stijl  106 Stage Space (Raumbühne)  104, 105 theory of Correalism  108–9 Klee, Paul  37–8 Knight, George  224–5 Knowles, Tim  53 Komische Oper Berlin  154 Koolhaas, Rem  115 Korovin, Konstantin  68 Kosky, Barrie  154, 155, 204 Chefregisseur  154 On Ecstasy  156 Intendant  154 Magic Flute, The  235 n.2 Kramer, Wayne  4 Krauss, Rosalind Im/Pulse to See. In Vision and Visuality, The  159 Sculpture in the Expanded Field  134–5 Kulakowski, Felix  180 Lang, Fritz Metropolis  234 n.7 Larionov, Mikhail  68 Donkey’s Tail  70 Jack of Diamonds  70 Osliny Khvast  70 Rayonism  70 Latour, Bruno  182–3 Laurencin, Marie  8, 72 Lavender, Andy  59 Layering Reality: The Right to Mask (Scenography Symposium, 2013)  58 Le Corbusier  107 Legs on the Wall  45 Lehmann, Hans-Thies  140, 163–4 Post-dramatisches Theater  164 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  233 n.16 Le Magasin (Grenoble, 1993)  233 n.9 Leo Warner  152

257

Levy, Julien  79 Little Review, The  104 Livermore, Davide  207 “look,” as an action of grasping  170–1 Los Angeles Philharmonic  11 Luckhardt, Ulrich David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective  91 Luzar, Robert  134 Lyotard, Jean-François  175 McDermott, Phelim  151 McKinney, Joslin  2, 4, 5, 66 Research Methods in Scenography  39 McKittrick Hotel  165 McMahon, Joseph Humans Being: The World of Jean-Paul Sartre  169 McQuaid, Cate Dorothea Tanning Paints Again, and Speaks for Herself  81 Madison Square Garden  100 Mahon, Alyce  81 Malinowska-Petelenz, Beata  221–2, 224 Drawing–The Art of Portraying Space  219 Malva, Filipa  5, 44–5 Drawing the Scene  7 Eu Uso Termotebe e o Meu Pai Também (I Wear Termotebe as My Dad Before Me)  45 Marian Goodman Gallery, London  141 Marinelli, Donald  204 Martin, Reinhold Points of Departure: Notes Toward a Reversible History of Architectural Visualization  210 Masilo, Dada  141 masking  58 materiality  15, 17, 106, 200 Matisse, Henri  8, 72 Maxwell  211 mechanical working drawings  48 Melia, Paul David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective  91

258 INDEX

melodrama  147 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  171, 234 n.5 meta-theatre  59, 178 Metropolitan Opera, New York  9, 78, 96, 142 Meuron, Pierre de  99, 125 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Pseudo-Functionalism in Modern Architecture  107 mimesis  55, 57, 192 mind’s eye  2, 4, 21, 27, 30, 40, 61, 83, 101, 175, 191, 219, 225, 227 n.4 miniature  181–3, 188 Miró, Joan  8, 72, 78 mise-en-scène  6, 13, 22, 31, 42, 53, 71, 75, 80, 81, 113, 115, 120, 125, 137, 146, 148, 149, 151, 155, 162, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 188, 193 with black model box, set model of  187 Missingham, Hal  90 Moholy-Nagy  106 MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art, New York Mondrian, Piet  106 Moran, Nick Resisting the Lure of the Screen  205 Morris, Mary  46 Move: Choreographing You (Hayward Gallery, London, 2010–11)  136 movement-based thinking  52, 136 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  155 Die Zauberflöte  154 Don Giovanni  11, 126, 127 Magic Flute, The  142, 154–8, 160 Murphy, Graeme Madama Butterfly  49 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York  11, 104, 109 Nash, Jacob  181–2 National Ballet of Canada  147 National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), Sydney, Australia  18–19, 29, 45, 64, 179 Neumann, Bert  117

Neutze, Ben  207 New York Public Library  100 New York Stock Exchange Transactions  122 NIDA. See National Institute of Dramatic Art, Sydney, Australia Nolan, Sydney  84 objects, as theatrical signifiers  58–9 Opera Australia  49, 142 Aida  207–8 Oresteia, The  30 Orrico, Tony  53 Overton, Neill  28 Drawing as Performance: The Art Gallery Meets Experimental Theatre  134 painting  5, 8, 9, 56, 70, 73, 76, 81, 82, 85, 86, 92, 94, 123, 135, 231 n.37 palimpsest  1, 30, 59, 61, 119, 123, 143, 209, 235 n.4 Pallasmaa, Juhani  34, 175–6, 214–15, 225 Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, The  171 Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture  36 Palmer, Scott  66 panoramic drawing  13, 173, 177, 180, 184, 186, 187, 190, 192, 193, 234 n.6 paper sketch  34 Parker, Andrew  56 Passagen-Werk, Das Arcades Project  235 n.1 Payne, Darwin Scenographic Imagination, The  48, 222–3 Peacham Drawing, The  43 Pecktal, Lynn  4   Pérez-Gómez, Alberto  124 Performance Drawings (Drawing Center, New York, 2001)  136 performative  52–5 definition of  52 drawing  53, 61, 135, 227 n.10

INDEX

space  3, 13, 51, 54, 58, 100, 105, 113, 119, 133, 178, 180, 191, 192, 195 utopian  132 performative scenographic design drawing, the  6, 12, 22, 51–5, 131–3, 137–40, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 160, 161, 226 performativity  51, 52, 64, 86, 106, 111, 127, 176 Perrella, Stephen Hypersurface Architecture  14–15 Hypersurface Architecture and the Question of Interface  199 Petherbridge, Deanna Primacy of Drawing: An Artists View, The  32–3, 219–20, 225 Phelan, Peggy  52 Photoshop  16, 48, 211 Picasso, Pablo  4, 8, 9 Parade  64, 72–8 Plato  27, 57 Podrecca, Vittorio  74 Poe, Edgar Allen  80 Portoghesi, Paolo  120 post-digital drawing  213 post-dramatic theatre  13, 21, 47, 48, 162–8, 175, 178, 181, 185, 193, 194, 228 n.6 Postlewait, Thomas  58 postmodernism  65, 149, 163, 175, 220, 221 Potra, Dan  7, 12, 38–9, 43, 139, 151–3, 204 Dracula  41, 42 Perfect American, The  151, 153 Poulenc, Francis  77 Power, Cormac  175 presence absent  13, 124, 125, 137, 161, 162, 167, 184, 186, 187 definition of  174–5 Pritzker Prize for Architecture  37 problem-solving or hypothesis-driven research  235 n.6 promenade performance  165, 166, 176, 194, 234 n.1

259

Puccini, Giacomo Madama Butterfly  49 Punchdrunk Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, The  165–6 Sleep No More  165 Pushkin, Aleksandr Zolotoi Petdok (The Tale of the Golden Cockerel)  69 Radcliffe, Ann  79 Radok, Alfréd Laterna Magika  202–5 Railway Theatre, Vienna International Exhibition of Theatre Technology  104 Rancière, Jacques  144, 178 Ratcliff, Carter  122 rationalism  107 Ray, Man  79 Rayner, Alice  14, 42–3, 59, 173, 178 Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre  197 Rayonism  70 Rhinoceros (Rhino)  16, 48, 227 n.7 Riley, Howard  223–4 Rimbaud, Arthur  79 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai  68 Roerich, Nicholas  68 Rose, Bernice  135, 220 Drawing Now  219 Rosen, Astrid von  23 Rosenberg, Terry  34, 214, 219 Rossi, Aldo  4, 10, 11, 118–25 Aldo Rossi: Opera Grafica: Etchings, Lithographs, Silkscreen Prints  121 Aldo Rossi: The Sketchbooks 1990–1997, 121 Architettura Razionale e Immagini Celesti  124 Dicatum Carolo  124 Elektra  120, 121, 124–5 Teatro del Mondo  124 Treasury of Atreus or Tomb of Agamemnon  121 Rothschild, Deborah  74

260 INDEX

Rouault, Georges  78 Rowe, Clare  4 Royal Ballet, Covent Garden, London  9, 85 Royal College of Art, London  94 Royal National Theatre Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, The  165–6 Royal Opera House, London  96 R.U.R (Čapek)  105 Russett, Robert Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art  138 Sabbatini, Nicola  235 n.14 Sainthill, Loudon  84 SAIP. See Système d’Alerte et d’Information des Populations Salter, Chris Participation, Interaction, Atmosphere, Projection  200–1 Salvado Harlequin paintings  73 Salzburg Festival Austria  142 Santorineos, Manthos Illusionistic Environments and Digital Spaces  200 Sartre, Jean-Paul  234 n.5 Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology  168, 180 Huis Clos  167–9, 171, 172 “look,” as an action of grasping  170–1 No Exit  172–3, 190 absent presence in  172, 173, 175–9 theatricality in  185–6 video  179–81 voyeuristic gaze, of the theatre-going spectator  172 Satie, Eric  9, 73, 75 Savarese, Nicola Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, A  25–6

scale scenographic model (the model)  181–5 as an epistemic tool  188–9 scene creation  7–10, 63–98 Ballets Russes  84–5 Elektra  85–90 Le Coq d’Or  68–72 Night Shadow  78–84 Parade  72–8 playful aesthetic  90–6 second scenographic turn  65–8 scene décor  1, 67 scenic/illustrative drawings  48 scenographers  1, 2, 4, 6–8, 18, 22, 24, 26–9, 38–41, 43, 47, 53, 54, 61, 65, 91, 97, 98, 133, 138–40, 152, 167, 181, 189, 194, 217, 218, 223, 225, 228 n.2 scenographic design drawing  28–32 definition of  21 performative  6, 12, 22, 51–5, 131–3, 137–40, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 160, 161, 226 scenographic thinking drawing  38–43 scenographic turn  65 scenography  22–4, 27, 31, 61, 66, 67, 73, 84, 98, 104, 137, 160, 190, 196, 217, 223, 226 architectural  105, 110, 111 distinguished from architecture  129–30 definition of  4–5 digital  19, 51, 133, 195, 197, 199–208, 211 postdramatic  164 Schlemmer, Oskar  106 Scofidio, Ricardo  4, 10, 99, 109 Slow House  11, 109–18 Scott-Mitchell, Michael  7, 48–50 Madama Butterfly  49–51 scribbled drawing  40 Scrivener, Stephen  35–6, 41, 181, 217 Artistic and Designerly Research: Articulated Transformational Practice  222

INDEX

second scenographic turn  65–8 Sedgwick, Eve  56 Sellars, Peter  138–9 sensory symbiosis  25 Severen, David Van  213 Shaftesbury, Earl of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times  55 Shakespeare, William  24 Hamlet  40, 227 n.5 Macbeth  165 Titus Andronicus  43 simultaneity of the image  196–9 Singer, Ben Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts  147 Siodmak, Robert Cobra Woman  233 n.5 Dark Mirror  233 n.5 sketching  36, 37 sketch journal  39–40 Smith, Vicky Experimental and Expanded Animation  139 Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques  69 spatial theory  18, 65, 104, 106 spectatorial engagement  17, 100, 131, 137, 148, 194 splodgers  8 Springstubb, Phoebe Animation of Frederick Kiesler’s Endless House, The  232 nn.4, 6 Spurr, Sam  15, 54 Performative Architecture: Design Strategies for Living Bodies  111 staging architecture  10–11, 99–130 Bel Geddes, Norman  100–3 Diller, Elizabeth  110–18 Gehry, Frank  125–30 Kiesler, Frederick  103–10 Rossi, Aldo  118–25 Scofidio, Ricardo  110–18

261

Starr, Cecile Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art  138 Stewart, Kathleen  16, 25, 68, 133, 201 compositional theories of worlding  199–200 Tactile Composition  2 Stoker, Bram Dracula  42 storyboard  11, 22, 41, 44–5, 59, 60, 93, 102, 111, 117, 151, 152 Strauss, Richard Elektra  9, 11, 120, 121, 124–5 Stravinsky, Igor  93 Rake’s Progress, The  10, 90, 92, 93, 95–6 surrealism  64, 79, 106 suspension of belief  16, 42 Sveiven, Megan  106 AD Classics: Endless House / Friedrick Kiesler  232 n.7 Svoboda, Josef  194 Laterna Magika  202–5 sympathetic magic  193 Système d’Alerte et d’Information des Populations (SAIP)  234 n.9 Tabački, Nebojša Make Me Feel: Sensing Technology in Contemporary Scenography  17 Tanning, Dorothea  4, 9, 64 and Among the Sacred Monsters  83 Birthday  80 Guest Room, The  80 Between Lives: An Artist and Her World  79 Maternity  82 Night Shadow  78–84 Taussig, Michael  192 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich  147 Teatro dei Piccoli  74 temporal spatiality  61 Termotebe  44 Terracini, Lyndon  207 Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Berlin  105

262 INDEX

theatre etymology of  164–5 as heterotopia  119 as “impossible” space  26 as monad  129 Theâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels  29 Théâtre du Châtelet  73 Théâtre National de l’Opéra  8, 68 theatricality  2, 5, 7–9, 11–13, 17, 18, 51, 57–61, 70, 76, 95, 111, 116, 120, 131, 136, 150, 164, 165, 178, 205 anti-theatricality  55–7 in No Exit  185–6 theatrical sign  3, 7, 13, 22, 42, 43, 51, 54, 57–9, 64, 185, 192, 231 n.37 theatron  12, 76, 164, 227 n.11 Theunissen, Sabine  233 n.3 thinking drawing, the  7, 9, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32–8, 48 scenographic  38–43, 45–6, 49 Tormey, Jane  56–7 TRACEY: Drawing and Visualisation Research  135 Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art  53 transcending reality  16 Treib, Marc  217 “trick-of-the-eye”  93 Tripp, Tony  21 trompe-l’œil  13, 64 Trubridge, Sam  43 Trudgeon, Margaret  85 Tseng, Winger  36 Tsypin, George  83 Turner, Victor  119, 227 n.9, 232 n.1 Twentieth-Century American Drawing: Three Avant-Garde Generations (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1976)  135 Tylesova, Gabriela  12, 139, 147–50, 204, 233 n.5 Swan Lake  147–50, 233 n.5 UNSW Art & Design, University of Technology  18

Ursyn, Anna Digital Drawing, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Journalism  208 utopia  132, 141 utopian performative  132 Varney, Denise  175 Vector Works  16, 48, 227 n.7 Verdi, Giuseppe  207 Victoria and Albert Museum  94 Victorian Arts Center, Melbourne  84 Viebrock, Anna  99, 129 Vila Flor Cultural Center, Guimarães  44 virtual reality  16, 133, 195, 199 virtual theatre  15 Vogiatzaki-Krukowski, Emmanouela Illusionistic Environments and Digital Spaces  200 Volkonsky, Serge  69 voyeuristic gaze, of the theatre-going spectator  172 VRay  211 Wagner, Richard  207 Walker, James Faure Pride, Prejudice and the Pencil  209–10 Wallen, Lawrence  2, 164 Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture, The  27, 193 1:1 Architectural Model as Performance and Double, The  182 Walt Disney Concert Hall  11, 128 Warner, Leo  152 Wartotsky, Marx  182 Weber, Samuel  55 Theatricality as Medium  12 Weigert, Laura  58 Welzbacher, Christian  106 Western text-based theatre  28–9 Wiene, Robert Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The  234 n.7 William of Ockham  170 Williams, Peter  89

INDEX

Wilson, Robert  4, 7 Einstein on the Beach  59–61 Wimpole, Horace  79 Wlodarczak, Gosia  12, 136–7 Room Without a View, A  136–7 Wood, Peter  115–18, 208–9

263

worlding  7, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 25, 54, 61, 64, 68, 131–3, 226 worlding theory  2, 24–7, 199–202 Yale School of Drama, New York  223, 235 n.7 Yaneva, Albena  182–3

264

PLATE 1  Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 2  Sue Field. Scenographic design drawing for The Curse of the House of Atreus: black pen, colored ink, and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1998.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 3  Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for Dracula: black pen and colored pencil on paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Dan Potra.

PLATE 4  Sue Field. Scenographic thinking drawings for All of Me: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 1993.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 5  Arthur Boyd. Double Figure with Shark Head and Horns (Elektra backdrop), 1962–3, etching and aquatint, printed in black ink with plate-tone, from one plate, 39.6 × 46.7 cm.

Source: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. The Arthur Boyd gift 1975.

PLATE 6  Production photograph for Elektra, 1966.

Source: Courtesy of National Archives of Australia.

PLATE 7 David Hockney. “Cobweb Drape, Tom’s House” from The Rake’s Progress, 1975. Ink on paper, 19 ¾ × 24. © David Hockney. Photo credit: Richard Schmidt.

Source: Collection of the David Hockney Foundation.

PLATE 8 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Architectural model of Slow House with drawings on acetate/glass inserted into the model, 1991.

Source: Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

PLATE 9  William Kentridge. Untitled (drawing from Wozzeck 17): Charcoal and red pencil on Hahnemuhle paper 56.5 × 78 cm, 2016.

Source: Courtesy of William Kentridge and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town.

PLATE 10  Dan Potra. Scenographic thinking drawing for The Perfect American: black pen and gouache on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2013.

Source: Courtesy of Dan Potra.

PLATE 11  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt.

PLATE 12  Paul Barritt. Scenographic design drawing for The Magic Flute: black pen and mix media on paper, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Paul Barritt.

PLATE 13  Sue Field. Panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 12,240 × 660 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 14  Sue Field. Detail of panoramic drawing, No Exit: mixed media on watercolor paper, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 15  Sue Field. Thinking drawings: black pen and collage on bond paper, 148 × 210 mm, 2017.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.

PLATE 16  Sue Field. Photograph of the Drawn Absence situated within the scale model, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of Sue Field.