Table of Contents:

The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site-Specific Theatre and Performance
Tompkins, Joanne

Rethinking Site-Specificity: Monopoly, Urban Space, and the Cultural Economics of Site-Specific Performance
McKinnie, Michael
Rehearsing across Space and Place: Rethinking A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle
Bennett, Susan (et al.)

Embodied Presence and Dislocated Spaces: Playing the Audience in Ten Thousand Several Doors in a Promenade, Site-Specific Performance of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
Collins, Jane

Haunted House: Staging The Persians with the British Army
Pearson, Mike

Toiling, Tolling, and Telling: Performing Dissensus
Irwin, Kathleen

Beyond Site-Specificity: Environmental Heterocosms on the Street
Haedicke, Susan

Repetition and Performativity: Site-Specific Performance and Film as Living Monument
Birch, Anna

Contemporary Ekkeklemas in Site-Specific Performance
Ferris, Lesley

‘Places, Like Property Prices, Go Up and Down’: Site-Specificity, Regeneration, and The Margate Exodus
Owen, Louise

Ambulatory Audiences and Animate Sites: Staging the Spectator in Site-Specific Performance
Zaiontz, Keren

Immersive Negotiations: Binaural Perspectives on Site-Specific Sound
Barton, Bruce (et al.)

My Sites Set on You: Site-Specificity and Subjectivity in ‘Intimate Theatre’
Iball, Helen

Siting the People: Power, Protest, and Public Space
Nield, Sophie

‘This is a welcome addition to the developing literature on site-specific theatre and performance, whose chief virtue lies in providing a range of original essays testifying to the diversity and disparateness of contemporary site-based work.’ – Steve Bottoms, New Theatre Quarterly

MAAIKE BLEEKER is Professor of Theatre Studies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. She has previously lectured at the School for New Dance Development, the Piet Zwart postgraduate programme in Fine Arts and the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She also works as a dramaturg for various theatre directors, choreographers and visual artists.

‘This study by Dutch theatre and performance scholar Maaike Bleeker is an important work. Its subject – visuality within theatre and performance studies – is new and in many respects Bleeker is quite literally defining a field. Her book provides critical and theoretical tools with which to analyse and better understand postdramatic theatre as part of today’s visual culture.’ – Professor Christopher Balme, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich

‘The book’s major contribution is to use theories of vision to track the mid-twentieth century shift from the avant-garde sublation of art and the everyday to a postmodern, deconstructive method a step towards addressing a curious oversight in theatre and performance studies: the absence of a convincing account of what we do when we look at events in the theatre.’- Dominic Johnson, Queen Mary University of London, Theatre Research International

Table of contents (17 chapters)

Bodies Without Bodies – Susan Melrose
Truth-Seeker’s Allowance: Digitising Artaud – Dixon, Steve
Transformed Landscapes: The Choreographic Displacement of Location and Locomotion in Film – Cook, John
Saira Virous: Game Choreography in Multiplayer Online Performance Spaces – Birringer, Johannes
Artistic Considerations in the Use of Motion Tracking with Live Performers: A Practical Guide – Wechsler, Robert
Materials vs Content in Digitally Mediated Performance – Coniglio, Mark
Learning to Dance with Angelfish: Choreographic Encounters Between Virtuality and Reality – Brown, Carol
Kinaesthetic Traces Across Material Forms: Stretching the Screen’s Stage – Schiller, Gretchen
Sensuous Geographies and Other Installations: Interfacing the Body and Technology – Rubidge, Sarah
Body Waves Sound Waves: Optik Live Sound and Performance – Edwards, Barry (et al.)
Intelligence, Interaction, Reaction, and Performance – Broadhurst, Susan
The Tissue Culture and Art Project: The Semi-Living as Agents of Irony – Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr
Addenda, Phenomenology, Embodiment: Cyborgs and Disability Performance – Kuppers, Petra
Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation? – Carson, Christie
Afterword: Is There Life after Liveness? – Auslander, Philip

In July 2017 WSD took place in Taipei at the campus of the Taipei National University of the Arts, organized in collaboration with the Taiwan Association of Theatre Technology.

The festival featured 178 design works from more than 150 designers across 35 countries in five continents.

The catalogue features beautiful photographs of these selected design works plus information about the design, the production and the designer.

The book is packed with practical information on how to recreate these stunning period pieces for yourself. Each corset features an annotated pattern, a detailed drawing and close-up photography so any historical detail can be captured accurately by the maker. A brief overview places the corset within its historical context and explains any features or alterations necessary for making up the patterns. For those new to dressmaking there are two step-by-step projects – one for a hand-stitched, pre-1850 corset and one for a post-1850 corset made using the sewing machine. There is also invaluable advice on a range of corset-making techniques, from cutting and fitting the patterns to adding historical detail. Information on lacing the corsets, inserting eyelets, gussets and split busks and on stitching and flossing is all included.

Theatre and performance studies, cultural theory, fine art, philosophy and the social sciences are brought together in one volume to examine the principle forces that inform understanding of theatre and performance design.

The volume is organised thematically in five sections:

• looking, the experience of seeing
• space and place
• the designer: the scenographic
• bodies in space
• making meaning

This major collection of key writings provides a much needed critical and contextual framework for the analysis of theatre and performance design. By locating this study within the broader field of scenography – the term increasingly used to describe a more integrated reading of performance – this unique anthology recognises the role played by all the elements of production in the creation of meaning.

Contributors include Josef Svoboda, Richard Foreman, Roland Barthes, Oscar Schlemmer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Schechner, Jonathan Crary, Elizabeth Wilson, Henri Lefebvre, Adolph Appia and Herbert Blau.

‘…in this fabulous reader Jane Collins and Andrew Nisbet have collected a fascinating range of existing and newly commissioned contributions that explore and expand our understanding of scenography in theatre and performance. A reader of this kind has long been missing and therefore warrants celebration.’ – Paul Monaghan, Australasian Drama Studies

Table of contents

PART I: Looking: the experience of seeing

1 Appearance and reality BERTRAND RUSSELL

2 The simile of the cave PLATO

3 The draughtsman’s contract: how an artist creates an image JOHN WILLATS

4 The camera obscura and its subject JONATHAN CRARY

5 Meditations on a hobby horse or the roots of artistic form ERNST GOMBRICH

6 From Camera Lucida ROLAND BARTHES

7 The most concealed object HERBERT BLAU

8 Fascination and obsession SUSAN BENNETT

PART II: Space and place

9 Of other spaces MICHEL FOUCAULT

10 From The Production of Space HENRI LEFEBVRE

11 For a hierarchy of means of expression on the stage ADOLPHE APPIA

12 A taxonomy of spatial function GAY MCAULEY

13 6 axioms for environmental theatre: axiom three RICHARD SCHECHNER

14 Site-specifics NICK KAYE

15 Dancing in the streets: the sensuous manifold as a concept for designing experience SCOTT PALMER AND SITA POPAT

16 Grounding ANDREW TODD

17 Towards an aesthetic of virtual reality GABRIELLA GIANNACHI

18 The house. From cellar to garret. The significance of the hut GASTON BACHELARD

19 Making and contesting time-spaces DOREEN MASSEY

PART III: The designer: the scenographic

20 Postmodern design 145

ARNOLD ARONSON

21 “Oh, to make boardes to speak!” NICHOLAS TILL

22 Stage designs of a single gesture: the early work of Robert Edmond Jones ARTHUR B. FEINSOD

23 Foreword to The Stage is Set LEE SIMONSON

24 Hope, hopelessness / presence, absence: scenographic innovation and the poetic spaces of Jo Mielziner, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller LIAM DOONA

25 Brecht and stage design: the Bühnenbildner and the Bühnenbauer CHRISTOPHER BAUGH

26 The diseases of costume ROLAND BARTHES

27 My idea of the theatre TADEUSZ KANTOR

28 Visual composition, mostly RICHARD FOREMAN

29 Defining and reconstructing theatre sound ADRIAN CURTIN

30 On performance writing TIM ETCHELLS

PART IV: Bodies in space 231

31 Docile bodies MICHEL FOUCAULT

32 Eye and mind MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

33 Of language and the flesh THOMAS LAQUEUR

34 From Adorned in Dreams ELIZABETH WILSON

35 The actor and the über-marionette EDWARD GORDON CRAIG

36 Man and art figure OSKAR SCHLEMMER

37 From Towards a Poor Theatre JERZY GROTOWSKI

38 Woman, man, dog, tree: two decades of intimate and monumental bodies in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater GABRIELLE CODY

39 The will to evolve JANE GOODALL

40 Glow: an interview with Gideon Obarzanek CRISTIANE BOUGER

PART V: Making meaning

41 The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility: second version WALTER BENJAMIN

42 Interaction between text and reader WOLFGANG ISER

43 Semiotics LOIS TYSON

44 Limits of analysis, limits of theory and Pavis’s questionnaire PATRICE PAVIS

45 Sound design: the scenography of engagement and distraction ROSS BROWN

46 Olfactory performances SALLY BANES

47 The naturalistic theatre and the Theatre of Mood VSEVOLOD MEYERHOLD

48 Theatre and cruelty ANTONIN ARTAUD

49 The humanist theatre/The catastrophic theatre and The cult of accessibility and the Theatre of Obscurity HOWARD BARKER

50 Drawing in rehearsal RAE SMITH

51 Speech introducing Freud ROBERT WILSON

52 From The Secret of Theatrical Space JOSEF SVOBODA

Table of Contents

Part I: The Design Process

Introduction

Chapter 1: Collaboration and Initial Conversations

Chapter 2: Collecting & Working with Research

Chapter 3: The Costume Sketch

Chapter 4: Fabric Selection

Chapter 5: Developing the Design Through Fittings

Part II: Construction

Introduction

Chapter 6: Construction Basics

Chapter 7: The Female Bodice

Chapter 8: The Female Sleeve

Chapter 9: The Skirt Basque & Skirt

Chapter 10: Female Undergarments & Accessories

Chapter 11: The Male Doublet

Chapter 12: The Male Sleeves

Chapter 13: The Male Breeches

Helen Q. Huang is an award-winning costume designer who has worked in theatres throughout the United States. The recipient of both the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Costume Design and the Ivey Awards, she is also a professor of the MFA Costume Design Program in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Study at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Emily Hoem is an Instructor of advanced sewing, tailoring, and patternmaking at the University of Maryland and the Tailor/Draper for the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. She also does freelance tailoring and draping for many theatres in the DC Metro area, including Wolf Trap Opera Company, Washington Ballet, Signature Theatre, Folger Theatre, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

Kelsey Hunt is a freelance costume designer based in the DC Metro area. Her work may be seen at Studio Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Theatre J, The Maryland Opera Studio, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, and Triad Stage. Kelsey served for six seasons as Resident Costume Designer at Triad Stage and is a two-time recipient of the Marian A. Smith Award.

Individual chapters of the book focus on Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe (including liturgical drama, street pageants, festival outdoor drama, Spanish religious drama, and royal entries), the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth-century Europe, Classicism to Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, and contemporary scene design. Making the Scene‘s authors review everything from the effects of social status on theatre design to the sea changes between Classicism, Romanticism, and Naturalism and the influence of perspective-based thought. Particularly intriguing is their rediscovery of lost tricks and techniques, from the classical deus ex machina and special effects in coliseums to medieval roving stage wagons and the floating ships of the Renaissance to the computerized practices of today’s theatres. Such ingenious techniques, interwoven with the sweeping beauty of scene design through the ages, combine with the keen scholarship of Oscar Brockett and Margaret Mitchell to create a book as involving as the art it showcases.