Kathryn's Scenography Notes Part I:

Here are my notes on the first half of the "Scenography as a Machine" reading. Sometimes my note-taking style only makes sense to me. So let me know if you have any questions.

“Scenography as a Machine”
By Christopher Baugh

Pages 1-4

Page 1:

*Consider:
-If the stage scene should no longer exist to imitate a pre-existing reality, what should it look like?
-How should the “non-real” stage scene relate with the real actor?
-How should it function as a location for performance?
-If the scene begins to acknowledge that it looks like nothing other than itself, what does this mean for the relationship between dramatic literature and scenography?
-What is the purpose of scenery?
-Is there significance in considering a distinction between the ‘scene’ and the ‘place’ of performance?

*Suggestion: Metaphor of scene as machine represents one of the longest-lived leitmotifs (I wasn’t sure about that word, the article was really fuzzy and hard to read.) of scenographic research and experiment in the 20th century.
-Machine: A physical construct that theatrically locates and enables the public act of performance.

*Significant scenographic ideas generated in five year period of WWI.

Page 2:

*Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966):
-Published Scene in 1923 –Height of artistic power.
-Volume of essays, On the Art of Theatre, published in 1911.
-Controversial essay, “The Actor and the Uber-Marionette”—People thought he wanted
to replace actors with puppets.
-Name linked to Appia as co-founder of scenographic modernism.
-Overall: “Traditional ideas were abandoned and a new clarity and artistic conviction took their place.”
-Obtained patent on “screens” (new concept in scenery) in 1910.

Page 3:

-Craig’s screens were free-standing but could move and relate with actors’ physical movements.
-Craig entertained modernist concern of not imitating past or anything already in existence as prime function of scenography.
-Screens did not reproduce pre-existent space, but rather represented it.


Page 4:

*”Yet the aim of theatre is to restore its art, and it should commence by banishing from the Theatre this idea of impersonation…” –Craig
-Similar to views of Mies van der Rohe in the Bauhaus of the early 1920s.

*Stanislavski, is analyzing Craig’s screen designs for Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912, lamented the limitations of modern technology while praising the design itself:
-“What a tremendous distance there is between the scenic dreams of an artist or a stage director and its realization upon the stage.” –Stanislavski