A Prop’s Story: From the Everyday to the Stage (original) (raw)

Dramatic Space and Performer ’ s Body , a Case Study (2015)

Studia Dramatica UBB, 2015

Mediated images alter the perception of the real, then again, they emphasize themselves in a dynamic manner arising critical attitude, for they compel the spectator to consider all the images entering his/her visual field, and to integrate them into his/her own reference system. As recorded images offer the possibility of simultaneous representation of parts of actors’ bodies, an interaction between virtual images and real / optical images occurs, interaction which, whether demonstrates itself compulsory, acquires a powerful dramatic finality, since the existence of a viable relation between the stage images, either virtual or real, is a sine qua non dramatic condition.

Performing Objects: working in between materiality and the imagination

The puppet theatre is a small site where nonhuman elements come into play. In this kind of performance, everyday objects are transformed when put to work on stage or film. Under the spotlight on stage, objects that may have previously been perceived as passive, redundant and useless are transformed into characters and challenge notions of what is seen as active in the world. When a teapot and a bunch of old animal bones jump into a suitcase and float in a bath in what could be seen in a Jan Swankmajer or The Brothers Quay animation, the whole of humanity is played out. Observations on the liveliness of objects as well as the relationship between object and puppeteer and the process of creating a puppet theatre performance can teach us something of the complexity of human and nonhuman relations. This paper will discuss the practice of working with the materiality of performing objects in order to contribute to new materialist thinking on the vitality of matter.

The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, introduction to first edition (2012)

The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image provides a series of individual proposals and speculations on the intersections of what might be termed ‘live-ness’ in moving image and performance art practices today. Unfolding around the concept of ‘staging’, The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image discusses the use of performance and theatre strategies in contemporary art as a means to question the boundaries of stage and screen. Published by Picture This with Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects, The Sensible Stage: Staging the Moving Image contains a mixture of discursive, theoretical and creative texts, including monographs on the work of Yael Davids, Clare Gasson, Jimmy Robert, and Cara Tolmie, and a new text-piece by Beatrice Gibson. The book also contains new essays by Vanessa Desclaux, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Dominic Andrew Paterson, Lucy Reynolds, and Ian White plus a conversation between Alain Badiou and Elie During on theatre.* 168pp., soft cover with full-colour images. Published by Picture This with Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects. 2012. Distributed by Cornerhouse Books. £12.99 * Badiou & During reprinted with kind permission from Theatre Without Theatre, 2007 (Barcelona: MACBA)

SETTING AND UNSETTLING THE STAGE

Within the last decade in visual, performance and performing art circles, French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s lecture on the Emancipated Spectator has changed the debate about the dilemma of spectacle and spectating versus engagement and participation. How does architecture participate in not only staging scenarios but also participate in scenarios? To perform must architecture actively become a dynamic, mobile actor in an event? Or can it do so by empowering humans to participate as dynamic actors or physically active interpreters? Or can it construct more engaging relationships for ‘distant spectators’ to also be ‘active interpreters,’ as per Rancière’s terms? Can these three modes of performance be a way to question the performance of architecture in performance events? Within a context of architectures for contemporary dance performances this paper addresses architecture’s staging and participating in the scenario, and its engaging and empowering the performer, the public or participant. The works discussed in this essay resulted from collaborations between architects and choreographers, including Frank Gehry, TWBTA, John Pawson, Jaafar Chalabi, Thom Mayne, Nikolaus Hirsch with Michel Müller, and Francois Roche.

Staging the Moment: Play and Fictional Reality

This paper is a thesis for a professional doctorate in fine art degree, a supplement to art practice. Inspired by Mikhail Bahktin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, I focus on art as act, in my case the act of playing, and play as a means of engaging with the momentary existence. Establishing the rules, and contextualizing my practice led me to multiple questions on the nature of art as one of the method of cognition in the context of the concepts of cognitive closure (Nagel, McGinn), and visual fiction (Walton). Just as, according to Umberto Eco, one should see the difference between story and discourse, my aim is to understand the difference between the moment of experience (story), the moment of perception (discourse) and their manifestation in artificial form. The desire to further explore these topics in the future led me to enumerate and summarize all the thousands of the last three years’ moments that yielded the story entitled Staging the Moment: Play and Fictional Reality.

Abstraction, Theatre and the Musical Frame

"Brief Synopsis: a beautiful naked woman ‘of a certain age’ brutally stabs a young man to death" is a practice-led research project that consists of a production staged at Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney (November 27th – 29th, 2013) and an exegesis exploring how physical notions of space and the abstract qualities more generally attributed to music (tempi, dynamics, durations) can provide the structural, narrative and aesthetic building blocks of a new theatre work. The project considers how existing structures (vocal expressivity, linear narrative, etc.) limit the understanding and practice of theatre and impact the creation of new work. In asking if a work such as "Brief Synopsis" could be described as operatic, it reframes that question in terms of what might be described as a composer’s theatre. The exegesis interrogates the process of creating "Brief Synopsis", contemplating precedence in theatre practice history with reference to my own work over past decades, in its elaboration of the methodology intrinsic to my making of a work. It argues a case for alternative strategies (extant and possible) to nineteenth-century models in the creation of a theatre that might be described as both “postdramatic” and “post-operatic”, guided by recent theoretical engagements with contemporary theatre and the concept of ‘musicalization’ (Roesner 2008, Lehmann 2006, Till 2006). "Brief Synopsis" aims to contribute to research that documents the creative process and in doing so, theories of performance that conceptualise approaches to the theatre medium as an abstract “landscape” in which the body, text, sound, space and character coexist within a visual/spatial construct, blurring the separation between scenario and image, story and style, content and form.

NARRATING STAGE DESIGN AS A MOMENTARY SPATIAL EXPERIENCE

INARCH2018, 2018

Stage design is a temporary space built specifically for a performance or play. Although it is created for temporary use and not permanent, the atmosphere, which is created and narrated by a stage designer, is build to determine the individual or a group of people of how they should perceive or feel. There is a space shared by a group of people who enjoy the very precise moment, confirming that all of them has share the same spatial experience at the same time. Case study for this paper is a musical stage Ariah the Musical, a musical drama to celebrate Jakarta 486th Anniversary (2014). This musical drama performed on a massive stage, using Monumen Nasional (Monas) as a background. This paper suggest that the narrative build through a systems of interiority which has create a momentary spatial experience. There is an engagement between the temporarity of time, sensorial and social spatial experience in a stage design. This stage serves it purpose not only as a temporary space for a performance but also to exhibit Monumen Nasional to the audiences. The idea need to be explore through an analytical design approach to articulate the idea.

Essay on Stage: The Artistic Practice Introducing a Germ into the Cultural Matrix

Creating for the Stage and Play, Arti della Performance: orizzonti e culture, Collana diretta da Matteo Casari e Gerardo Guccini:, 2021

The chapter will take a closer look at a specific writing procedure for the stage, the essay on stage, a form of expression within a given performative system that reveals the limits of that system as inadequate, imposed. A theatrical essay or an essay on stage belongs to the tradition of the bordercrossing experimental performance-art pieces conceptualized in the 20 th century by Craig, Artaud, Meyerhold, futurist synthetic theatre, neo-avant-garde theatre, and others. I. Towards a definition of the term One can call an essay on stage any performance practice that (like the essay according to Graham Good) makes «a claim to truth, but not permanent truth. Its truths are particular, of the here and now. Nothing is carried over» (Good 1988: 9). This specific form and procedure produce particular truths and reveals the limits of artistic genres. It is far from a stable category, and it establishes its inventiveness and singularity by operating at the very unstable limits of the theatrical and by reinventing the category of theatricality itself. Among numerous possible examples of this "critical art", we will choose the following ones: 1) The 2009 performance Alice in Wonderland: A Theatrical Essay on the End of a Civilization, (Alice nel paese delle meraviglie-Saggio sulla fine di una civiltà) by the Italian director Armando Punzo, staged in Voltera Prison; 2) The 2012 performance Drawers (Schubladen) by the German collective She She Pop; and 3) Oliver Frljić's 2016 performance Our Violence and Your Violence (Naše nasilje in vaše nasilje) based on Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance (Ästhetik des Widerstands). Using these examples, we will try to map this specific textual procedure that produces what Badiou terms «a generic vacillation» (Badiou 1990: 91).