Scenography and Semiotics

The return of the unanswered questions.

The main focus for this post will be for that of Arnold Aronson’s book, Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. For which, from reading the introduction, is simply arguing that visuals are under evaluated in the twenty-first century; also that, like dramaturgy, there is no fixed definition of scenography.

He begins by describing the stage as “the abyss” (Aronson, 2005, 1) using Nietzsche’s famous quote of “[w]hen you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks back into you.” (Nietzsche, 2004). If this is his argument, then I read this simply as you get out of what you see what you put into it emotionally. If you were to go a see a performance with a minimalist set design without any understanding of the performance you may see it simply as its bare essentialness. However, you understand the performance, either previously from viewing or by understanding as you watch, then what you will see will be the finer details creating a whole world in front of you. You will interpret things differently, possibly due to your own upbringing, education or simply from previous pieces of work you have seen doing similar things (oh look, its ghosting again, hello). The scenography of a piece, if done well, will become clearer if you notice the smaller things, the touches of shadow, the angle and position of piece of set, where the actor stands in relation to other actors and set piece around them. It can all mean something.

To try and define scenography you need to understand isn’t just simply the design, whether that be of the set, the lights, the sound. “What is both maddening and delightful is that no two answers are alike, and many are wildly contradictory” (Aronson, 2005, 7). One of the definitions Aronson uses though which I enjoy is in relation to literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell who says:

“Poetry is an art of time, motion and action: painting an art of space. And arrested action.” Scenography, however, is an art of time, motion action, and space.

Aronson, 2005, 5

The reason I like this as a definition is how it relates scenography to both poetry and painting, and therefore fixing scenography as an art for in its own right just as much as the other two art forms.

Moving further into the book Aronson discusses the theatres and venues themselves:

[T]he theatre building and its concomitant technologies has seldom given birth to new forms of dramatic art that have had a life or significance beyond the immediate entertainment and gratification of its contemporary audience.

Aronson, 2005, 67

So, essentially we build new venues to suit our needs, abilities, technologies, but theatre itself has never created any of these new. An example of this, is that the basic ‘look’ of the theatre hasn’t changed in over one hundred years. The proscenium arch is a fixed sign of what theatre should (supposedly) look like and is generally what we come to expect when we go to visit the theatre *cough* ghosted *cough*. But theatres haven’t always looked like this.

We can go back to the old amphitheatre’s, great round venue, seating tiered into the centre where the performance would be and no technology to boost voices, it was all in the design because that’s all that was available. Jump forward hundreds of years to when we had candle light and we’re now much smaller venues in comparison to the amphitheatres but we not had lights on stage. Upgrade to gas lights and we now have more control of them, adaptations were made to theatres (and of course new ones built) to take advantage of this new ability to control the light we create. Jump forward again to electricity, every changes. This of course being a very basic crass example of how things have moved forward, things also changed with the way sets could be made, whether from painted images on board, dropped in cloths, to now projection.

Theatre has to move with the times, but structurally they haven’t changed for a long time.

Scenography within a performance is always changing with technology, this can be seen most recently with productions such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest production of The Tempest. Curious Incident is essentially just a small box of technology on stage where the actors perform and the whole set then changes around them to demonstrate the mind of the lead character. This makes the performance, not only interesting to watch, but also fairly easy to tour. The visuals for the audience help explain not only geographically where the play is set at times but the way it is then seen by the character within the play. This can help them to relate to him and understand him, even empathise with him, all this is down to the scenography.

For The Tempest, however things were done on a much larger scale, not for touring purposes. Using motion capture and live CGI effects to create the character of Ariel the spirit. Ariel would be projected on either the back canvas or on the large cylinder that is lowered down from the top of the stage. Again, this added atmosphere to the piece and with the effects used could also incorporate scenes directed underwater but it was all for the spectacle. “[S]pectacle theatre is little more than a showcase for technical wizardry” (Aronson, 2005, 70) for which I feel The Tempest here is a fine example.

Finally

 

Work Cited

Aronson, A. (2005) Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. USA: University of Michigan Press.

Nietzsche, F. (2004) Beyond Good and Evil. Montana: Kessinger Publishing.