I began studying theater seriously in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and had to learn that theater was not a display case of a contrived realistic world. I passed through the crisis of letting go of my precious attachment to an egotistical realism, and I learned to love the heady, intellectually mysterious theater that grew out of the radicalism of the 60s and 70s - The Becks and Grotowski and Chaikin and Schechner and all. Of course, the everyday world of bourgeois theater was nothing like that (and still isn't). But there were experimental forays into improvisation, and the study of acting and directing found richer conceptual - and more exciting - foundations. The stage became a world, not of Aristotelean imitation, but of creating something richly new in each production.
Eventually I found my way into design exclusively and took another degree. I found great satisfaction in developing the perfect gestural expression of the work - or at least as far as I could get under the circumstances of production. It also gave outlet to the kind of focus on craft in which sculptors and painters are so invested. But in my mind that expression is never just a real space or even realism. It must be, indeed, gestural and expressive, and provocative and a little surprising. It is never television on stage. Like most of my contemporaries, my heroes were John Conklin, Ming Cho Lee and early Eugene Lee.
How sad it is for me to realize that my most profound and inspiring touchstones are 30 years in the past. We could hardly call that avant-garde today. We seem to have gone through and come out the other side where an aesthetic eclecticism can be seen within the dominant realism. (Well, I know what I mean by that.)
In attending regional theater in the Boston area I see that one answer is a kind of hyperealism. We take functional realism and surround it with something really extravagant. Eugene Lee's Sweeney Todd may have led the way on that. Many designs seem to involve a hubris of cinematic detail that can be pulled into the scene, and then set it off in a conceptual space. Or we'll see the indoors and the outdoors and the neighbor's house and down the street - but the actors never leave the living room.
There's more to be said. I'm thinking of my experience in the 80s seeing Performance Group's LSD in New York, and the old Mobius performance art events in Boston, and Julie Taymor's King Stag at ART. And I just saw ART's The Blue Flower, which is somewhat interesting, but not as conceptually challenging as it pretends to be.
So, I start this blog with a couple of propositions and a number of questions to consider.
The first proposition, verifialble or not, is that live theater matters, and that it has it's own function and aesthetic that is separate from film and video. The second is that design matters, and that it is critically relevant to the meaning and statement of the production. That said, some questions are:
-What are the marks in evolution of scenic and production styles?
-What are the necessary conditions for being artistically exciting today?
-How does scenic style serve as the interlocutor between the conceptual world of the play and the time-bound aesthetic sensibility of the audience?
-Who are the most exciting designers today and why?
-What are the aesthetic themes and production practices of the avant-garde in scenic design?
I also expect to consider matters of theatrical production practice, professional practice, career conditions, the larger artworld, and the world of higher education. And other earth-shattering things.I hope to write weekly, and I'll be appreciative of thoughtful responses. My thinking is clarified in the act of writing and ideas are strengthened through the collaborative jurying process of critique. As this goes forward, I encourage comments and responses, and thoughtful provocation. Whenever you stumble upon these words.
scenemaker
December 24, 2010
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