Unit name | Scenography |
---|---|
Unit code | DRAMM1218 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | M/7 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Professor. Jones |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
s None |
Co-requisites |
s None |
School/department | Department of Theatre |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit will explore a selection of approaches to scenographic design and use developed during the past century or so, paying particular attention to contrasting collaborative practices. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, from the modernist avant garde (Appia, Craig, Diaghilev/Bakst, Meyerhold/Popova, Brecht/Neher, Artaud, etc.) to the postmodern experimentalist (Svoboda, Bausch, Mnouchkine, Bread and Puppet, Foreman, Wilson, Wooster Group, etc.) it will investigate key problematisations of the changing roles of director, designer and metier-en-schne in the varied processes of creative collaboration. It will also interrogate the expending fields of environmental, multimedia and cyber-theatrical staging that have produced dynamic cross-overs between theatre, performance, visual arts, technology and digital manifestations in recent years. The relationships between scenography, performativity and location will be investigated for their aesthetic and cultural significance in the processes of historical change. Practical exercises will extend understandings of the creative potential of selected approaches to scenographic innovation.
Aims:
Plus, as appropriate to the mode of teaching:
workshop.
Lectures; workshops; seminars; plenary and small group discussions; viewings; essay/critical analysis;
1 x 3000 word essay.
Birringer, Johannes (1991) Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Howard, Pamela (2001) What is Scenography?, London: Routledge.
Kaye, Nick (1997) Art into Theatre, London: Routledge. Kennedy, Dennis (2001) Looking at Shakespeare: a visual history of twentieth-century performance, Cambridge University Press.
Pavis, Patrice (1982) Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre, trans. Susan Melrose et.al., New York: PAJ Publications.
Sayre, Henry (1989) The Object of Performance: the American Avant-Garde since 1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.