Dramaturgy through Scenography
Understanding how a dramaturgical construct is possible through design
The conventional understanding of the term dramaturgy is coming from the practice and theory of dramatic composition of a performance language which is often textually written by a dramaturge for a devised performance process. The term scenography has been used to articulate the overall visual language of a performative event that includes all the aspects of visual inputs. Historically theatre has always been considered as a hybrid art form as an amalgamation of many art disciplines. But in conventional dramatic theatre, visual design has not been given the equal prominence as other components, for example written text although the experience of seeing is considered as equally important as listening. Conventionally spoken words have been considered as the intellectual base of a theatre performance and scenography has been considered as the atmosphere where the dramatic narrative can take place. In theatre of Avant-Garde this word centrism has been challenged by many theatre makers, making theatre as audio visual experience bringing scenographer as a key player in the making of the total theatrical experience. Contemporary modern theatre in many part of the world is on a cross road of a shift which has moved away from the notions of conventional drama and increasingly becoming more of a hybrid performance art form. Indian theatre has shown bit reluctance to accept this change induced in part by its colonial hangover of word-centred, proscenium based drama.
“with what care he selects a chair, and with what thought he places it! And it all helps the playing…”
— The Playwright’s speech about the Theatre of the Stage Designer Caspar Neher
In her book — “What is Scenography?”, Pamela Howard attempts to answer the question in the title through a provocative reevaluation of the traditional role and methods of theatre design, pointing towards a more holistic approach to making theatre. She examines scenography from seven perspectives — Space, Text, Research, Colour & Composition, Direction, Performance and Spectators.
Scenography is the seamless synthesis of space, text, research, art, actors, directors and spectators that contributes to an original creation.
The term Scenography describes a holistic approach to making theatre from the visual perspective. Derived from the Greek sceno-grafika and translated in common understanding as “the writing of the stage space — l’écriture scènique”, it is an international theatre word. It is not a spelling mistake! As the word is becoming more and more familiar in countries where it has not been in common use, so it becomes locally interpreted. At the same time, scenography and scenographers are taking a different path from theatre designers (often now mistaken for those who design theatres) and are sometimes crossing the demarcation lines between direction and design, becoming joint creators of the mise en scène.
The principles of scenography are the principles of Art. The seventeenth-century painter Jean-Siméon Chardin challenged the status quo of the French Academy to reassert his belief in Art as the communicator. He rejected the large, purely narrative picture in favour of focusing the viewer’s attention to seeing the familiar anew — selected for them by the artist’s eye. A teacup, a jar of apricots, a silver spoon — he makes the ordinary appear extraordinary. Objects and figures become, as in theatre, emblematic, the carriers of the myth, heightened by darkness and light, and adding value to the empty space. All the elements of scenography are contained in the geometric spaces placed within a conventional frame. Chardin is a teacher for theatre artists, for, as the painter Mark Rothko said 250 years later: “In simplifying the present, he re-invents the future.” That is scenography.
Let us attempt to understand the concept by analysing the metaphysical aspects of the famous painting by Lucas van den Leyden — Lot and his Daughters. This work is linked to Genesis 19:32.
In his book — “The Theatre and Its Double”, Antonin Artaud enquires into metaphysics and mise en scène using this painting as an powerful example.
Its emotion, in any case, is visible even from a distance; it affects the mind with an almost thunderous visual harmony, intensely active throughout the painting, yet to be gathered from a single glance. Even before you can discern what is going on, you sense something tremendous happening in the painting, and the ear, one would say, is as moved by it as the eye.
One cannot help but notice how the drama is born in the sky; the quality of light in the painting very powerfully brings out the dark and swollen sky and the jumble of shapes beneath it. A tent is pitched at the sea’s edge, in front of which Lot is sitting, wearing full armor and a handsome red beard, watching his daughters parade up and down as if he were a guest at a prostitutes’ banquet. And in fact they are strutting about, some as mothers of families, others as amazons, combing their hair and fencing, as if they had never had any other purpose than to charm their father, to be his plaything or his instrument. We are thus presented with the profoundly incestuous character of the old theme which the painter develops here in passionate images. Its profound sexuality is proof that the painter has understood his subject absolutely as a modern man, that is, as we ourselves would understand it: proof that its character of profound but poetic sexuality has escaped him no more than it has eluded us.
On the left of the picture, and a little to the rear, a black tower rises to prodigious heights, supported at its base by a whole system of rocks, plants, zigzagging roads marked with milestones and dotted here and there with houses. And by a happy effect of perspective, one of these roads at a certain point disengages itself from the maze through which it has been creeping, crosses a bridge, and at last receives a ray of that stormy light which brims over between the clouds and showers the region irregularly.
The sea in the background of the canvas is extremely high, at the same time extremely calm considering the fiery skein that is boiling up in one corner of the sky. It happens that when we are watching fireworks, the crackling nocturnal bombardment of shooting stars, sky rockets, and Roman candles may reveal to our eyes in its hallucinatory light certain details of landscape, wrought in relief against the night: trees, towers, mountains, houses, whose lighting and sudden apparition will always remain definitely linked in our minds with the idea of this noisy rending of the darkness. There is no better way of expressing this submission of the different elements of landscape to the fire revealed in the sky of this painting than by saying that even though they possess their own light, they remain in spite of everything related to this sudden fire as dim echoes, living points of reference born from it and placed where they are to permit it to exercise its full destructive force.
There is moreover something frighteningly energetic and troubling in the way the painter depicts this fire, like an element still active and in motion, yet with an immobilised expression. It matters little how this effect is obtained, it is real; it is enough to see the canvas to be convinced of it. In any case, this fire, which no one will deny produces an impression of intelligence and malice, serves, by its very violence, as a counterbalance in the mind to the heavy material stability of the rest of the painting.
Between the sea and the sky, but towards the right, and on the same level in perspective as the Black Tower, projects a thin spit of land crowned by a monastery in ruins. This spit of land, so close that it is visible from the shore where Lot’s tent stands, reveals behind it an immense gulf in which an unprecedented naval disaster seems to have occurred. Vessels cut in two and not yet sunk lean upon the sea as upon crutches, strewing everywhere their uprooted masts and spars. It would be difficult to say why the impression of disaster, which is created by the sight of only one or two ships in pieces, is so complete.
It seems as if the painter possessed certain secrets of linear harmony, certain means of making that harmony affect the brain directly, like a physical agent.
In addition, Lot and his daughters suggest an idea concerning sexuality and reproduction, for Lot is seemingly placed there among his daughters to profit unfairly by them, like a drone. It is almost the only social idea that the painting contains.
All the other ideas are metaphysical.
…their poetic grandeur, their concrete efficacy upon us, is a result of their being metaphysical; their spiritual profundity is in separable from the formal and exterior harmony of the picture.
Artaud summarises the metaphysical aspects of the painting using a few prominent ideas that are being revealed. There is an idea of Becoming which the various details of the landscape and the way they are painted-the way their planes and perspectives are blotted out or made to correspond introduce into our minds with precisely the effect of a piece of music. The idea of Fatality, expressed less by the sudden apparition of this fire, than by the solemn way in which all the forms are organised or disorganised beneath it, some as if bent under a wind of irresistible panic, others immobile and almost ironic, all obeying a powerful intellectual harmony, which seems to be the exteriorisation of the very spirit of nature. And there is an idea of Chaos, an idea of the Marvellous, an idea of Equilibrium; there are even one or two concerning the impotence of Speech whose uselessness this supremely material and anarchic painting seems to demonstrate.
Artaud uses this premise to stress the importance of the language of the physical space in theatre over that of the textual.
“Dialogue-a thing written and spoken-does not belong specifically to the stage, it belongs to books, as is proved by the fact that in all handbooks of literary history a place is reserved for the theatre as a subordinate branch of the history of the spoken language.
I say that the stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak.”
The Language of the Physical — consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words. It creates poetry in space.
Complex poetry assumes the aspects of all the means of expression utilisable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery.
The idea of a play made directly in terms of the stage, encountering obstacles of both production and performance, compels the discovery of an active language, active and anarchic, a language in which the customary limits of feelings and words are transcended.
It is the mise en scène that is the theatre much more than the written and spoken play.
The influence of good scenography is visible not just in theatre but some of the great motion pictures as well. The Colour of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov, The Holy Mountain, Endless Poetry by Alejandro Jodorowsky are to name a few. One may draw a parallel between set-design in movies and scenography, but they are not the same; because a theatre performance occurs in a single stretch and in a confined space, contrary to the freedom and digital visual effects available to movie directors.
The brilliant use of scenographic techniques is quite commendable in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — the very first German Expressionist thriller by Robert Wiene in 1920 (cover pic). The silent film uses hand-written text cards as a part of the cinematography to weave the narrative. The movie has been adapted for stage by many theatre directors, prominent among them is one by director Deepan Sivaraman. Sivaraman has adapted the film to India’s present contemporary socio-political climate and believes that art is a strong medium to speak truth to power. Sivaraman’s play throws a pool of questions to the audience rather than giving away answers.
Dr Caligari in the play says ‘Freedom is not absolute’ to which Francis retorts saying ‘You cannot kill my thoughts and put everybody in a mad house’.
The theatre is identical with its possibilities for realization when the most extreme poetic results are derived from them; the possibilities for realization in the theatre relate entirely to the mise en scène considered as a language in space and in movement. This concrete physical language is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. As Artaud puts it —
The contemporary theatre is decadent because it has lost the feeling on the one hand for seriousness and on the other for laughter; because it has broken away from gravity, from effects that are immediate and painful-in a word, from Danger. Because it has lost a sense of real humour, a sense of laughter’s power of physical and anarchic dissociation. Because it has broken away from the spirit of profound anarchy which is at the root of all poetry.
And that is the gap Scenography seeks to fill. It is not merely a part of the stage and the background; in it lies the soul of the entire act, the voice of the physical and the sense of the unspoken!
