SHiFT : A Performed Reinterpretation of Visionary Theater

BETH WEINSTEIN University of Arizona SHiFT A Performed Reinterpretation of Visionary Theater Eluding categorization as seminar, workshop, and studio, the course documented here brought research into the history and theory of environmental scenography together through diverse methods of engagement, to provide the conceptual direction and content for a collective project. This process resulted in SHiFT, a performance of space—designed, constructed, scripted, and ultimately enacted by students. Reframing the Agenda After conducting several undergraduate seminars that explored ‘‘performance’’ in architecture and separate workshops in which the students designed and constructed sets for dance performances, I observed that as isolated and distinct learning methods both the seminars and design-build workshops fell short of their ultimate potential. At this point, it became clear that a more fulfilling process and more informed body of work would likely emerge from blending all of these processes in one semester. SHiFT resulted from a combined seminar ⁄ workshop in which the students’ research on the history of theater forms and settings gave a conceptual anchor to the semester’s project and directly informed not only the scenographic design but also the program, content, and roles to be played through a performed work. Method The methodology for teaching ‘‘Architecture ⁄ Theater’’ aimed at learning through various types of engagement with the material, fostering an understanding of architectural space in relation to theater intellectually, analytically, synthetically, and experientially. This included theater-architecture readings, building visits, attending performances, reading plays, documenting and analyzing theater and set designs (through digital and physical models), and as a team negotiating toward one design, detailing, constructing, composing, and performing. This diversity of activities called upon the students’ interests and skills as whole people, not just as 87 WEINSTEIN future architects. Their experience and interests in composing and mixing music, dancing, participating in theater productions, in addition to their individual architectural production strengths, became pertinent to the course content and learning methodologies throughout the semester. An important additional methodology, beyond the multiple modes of engagement, was the nondisclosure of the final project’s specificities. The rationale was to direct the students’ focus toward the process and questions at hand, and to allow the nature of the final project to be tailored to and emerge from collective interests and ambitions debated during the process. Establishing the Terrain The content of the first portion of the course introduced the students to key theater types across history, and to some degree across cultures, and the different architectural containers created or found for these events. This familiarized the students with the diverse constructed forms—amphitheater, courtyard, thrust, proscenium, arena, street and black box. Individual research topics spanned from the transformation of Dionysian rituals into Greek Tragedy and Comedy, to Noh theater and medieval street pageants, from the comedies played in Spain and England’s open-air courtyards to the birth of opera in Italy and the celebration of social ritual in Garnier’s Paris Opera. The students were asked to situate these works within social, political, cultural, and technological contexts. This exercise raised questions concerning the relationship between performer, participant and Journal of Architectural Education, pp. 87–98 ª 2011 ACSA spectator, and the formal or informal spatial structuring of those relationships. Linking performance types, venues, and technological advances reinforced understandings of when the audience was bathed in an inclusive light or literally left in the dark. The research sensitized the students to the contribution of landscape, urban, and architectural spatial sequences toward the construction of event—civic, religious, or theatrical—and drew connections between conceptual and technical shifts, such as perspective drawing, and theater works, including those of Serlio, Palladio and Scamozzi. Of the first theaters studied, the students were particularly influenced by Kabuki Theater space, with its bridges through the audience, and Garnier’s ‘‘other’’ theater as alternatives to an audience looking through a picture frame.1 These ideas would ultimately return in the final project. As a spatial and experiential counterpoint to the scholarly investigations, we visited black box and proscenium theaters, attended a concert in Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and a scenographically exuberant work by the Wooster Group in a black box theater. Intensification and Focus At the completion of the first exercises, each student embarked on an in-depth investigation and analysis of one experimental twentieth century theater or stage set by studying the architect, the playwright who commissioned the space, and the socio-political context of the performance. To assist the students in situating the works, they explored contemporaneous music, art, and literature, 1. Left, Heinrich Tessenow’s rhythmic Festspielhaus in Hellerau (1911–1912), home to Aldolphe Appia performances; model by Cruz Crawford. Right, El Lissitzky’s project for Tretyakov’s play, I Want a Child (1929), featuring a reconfiguration of the Meyerhold Theater, relocating the action to the center of the space and creating a common atmosphere for the audience and actors; model by Kevin Moore. 2. Story-board Excerpt of SHiFT, assembled by Tyler Jorgenson w ⁄ content created by all students. SHiFT 88 3. Walter Gropius and Erwin Piscator’s unrealized Total Theater (1926) with revolving stage and fourteen projection towers; model by Corey Kingston. 4. Story-board Excerpt of SHiFT, assembled by Tyler Jorgenson w ⁄ content created by all students. significant scientific and technological shifts from the time of the project, and identified the architects’ and playwrights’ interests and influences, their circle of friends and collaborators. This information also informed the final project. The studied projects were selected for the architects’ innovative reconfiguring of the relationship between space, performer, and audience and included Heinrich Tessenow’s rhythmic Festspielhaus in Hellerau (1911–1912), home to Aldolphe Appia performances; El Lissitzky’s opposing audiences and theater reconfiguration for I Want a Child (1929); an unrealized Theater of the Future with revolving stage rings by Andrzej Pronaszko and Syrkus (1929); Friederich Kiesler’s theoretical Endless Theater (1923–1925); Walter Gropius and Erwin Piscator’s unrealized Total Theater (1926) with revolving stage and fourteen projection towers; Edouard Autant’s Theatre de l’Espace (1937) which surrounded spectators with screens and a horseshoe stage; and Jacques Polieri’s multimedia, spatially distributed scenography for the Book of Mallarmé (1967). Constructing digital models of each project familiarized the students with the scenography’s scale and spatial relationships (Figures 1, 3, 5, 7). This spatial understanding was further distilled, through abstract physical models, to capture the architects’ 3 4 89 WEINSTEIN 5. Left, The unrealized Theater of the Future with revolving stage rings by Andrzej Pronaszko and Syrkus (1929); Model by Heiman Luk. Right, Edouard Autant’s Theatre de l’Espace (1937) which surrounded spectators with screens and a horseshoe stage; Model by Tyler Jorgenson. 6. Story-board Excerpt of SHiFT, assembled by Tyler Jorgenson w ⁄ content created by all students. 5 6 SHiFT 90 7. Jacques Polieri’s multimedia, spatially distributed scenography for the Book of Mallarmé (1967); Model by Andre Rodrigue. 8. Story-board Excerpt of SHiFT, assembled by Tyler Jorgenson w ⁄ content created by all students. 7 8 91 WEINSTEIN 9. Left, Configuration for Festspielhaus, Hellerau, Heinrich Tessenow; right, for El Lissitzky’s set for I Want a Child. intentions as manifest in the theater or scenography’s most salient qualities. The students concluded that the design of these theaters and scenographies dissolved the hierarchies found in earlier theaters, distributed the action, multiplied sensations, and catalysed new forms of actoraudience interaction. Critical texts on theater architecture and scenography also revealed shifting cultural paradigms, and the place within that of the space of performance. Ned Bowman’s ‘‘The Ideal Theater: Emerging Tendencies in Its Architecture’’ and Arnold Aronson’s History and Theory of Environmental Scenography charted the paradigm shifts from spatially formalized and frontal audience-actor relationships to site specific, migratory, participatory and immersive environmental scenographies that prompted more complex actor-audience relationships.2 Writings by directors and philosophers such as Artaud’s ‘‘The Theater and Cruelty’’ and Jacques Rancière’s ‘‘The Emancipated Spectator’’ similarly exposed the students to arguments against the formalized separation of audience and actor inherited with the proscenium format.3 Many of these texts celebrated the work of architects who embraced the realm of theater as a design as well as social laboratory. Although the most contemporary theater the students studied dated from 1967, discussions of these historical works served as a context for understanding contemporary discussions of event space, such as Bernard Tschumi’s architecture of event as one ‘‘that would ‘eventualize’ or open up that which in our history or tradition is understood to be fixed, essential, monumental’’ and of performance as contemporary cultural, organizational, technological, and spatial paradigms.4 Synthetic Interpretation Specific qualities of the studied twentieth century scenographies discovered through the research and analysis directly impacted what would follow in the synthetic phase of the semester. Considering what the students found provocative—the immersive and dynamic environments, stories and ideas related to architects they had discovered, the broader context of the works, the multidisciplinary teams—an informed interpretation of theses works would ideally follow these cues. Thus the created work the students embarked upon was a collective project, incorporating multimedia content, creating an SHiFT 92 10. SHiFT Program. 11. Left, Configuration for the Endless Theater, Friederich Kiesler; right, for the Total Theater, Walter Gropius and Erwin Piscator. 93 WEINSTEIN 12. Left, Configuration for the Theater of the Future with revolving stage rings by Andrzej Pronaszko and Syrkus; right, Edouard Autant’s Theatre de l’Espace which surrounded spectators with screens and a horseshoe stage. immersive, non-proscenium space in which to perform. The interpretation of the theaters and scenographies would become more than an informed installation or didactic structure; it would by nature be a performance of space. The collective imperative, paralleling the nature of working on performance projects, was initiated with the students’ group effort, through physical model, to create a limited kit of parts that, through reconfiguration, would spatially manifest the most important quality of each studied theater. The abstract site (no walls, only floor and ceiling, 360 planimetric exposure) constrained the kinds of components possible. To keep the focus on the kit of parts-scenography correspondence, the students learned where such a site existed after a design solution was reached.5 Once the kit of parts was fabricated, each student’s ideal configuration for their studied scenography was tested at full scale. This exploration offered immediate spatial and experiential feedback about the designs developed through models and drawings.6 The modularity afforded improvisation and adjustments, clarifying the legibility of each scenography’s spatial qualities. Engaging their designs experientially at full scale offered a critical method for reflecting on the researched, analyzed, and abstracted scenographies. At several points throughout the development of this dynamic installation, the group debated bringing in a choreographer to create movement for the spaces, or an actor to perform within it. With each debate, the intention of the work—to create a performance of space, and specifically the space of the seven scenographies—became more resolute. Any ‘‘dance,’’ given the Constructivist, Futurist, Modernist scenographies studied, would need to be purely functional. Taking cues from various scores, the team story-boarded the continuous reordering of the components, chronologically passing through seven precise formations manifesting the essential spatial quality of each theater or set.7 Drawing upon my experience collaborating with choreographers, and inspired by the precise and minimal movements we studied in Samuel Beckett’s Quad (1981), the team developed a constrained, ‘‘stage-hand’’ movement vocabulary, to be synchronized by giving each other visual cues. The sonic content of the performance was similarly to originate from the texts and music the students had identified during their research. This SHiFT 94 13. Rehearsal, marking points for each configuration and taking cues. 14. Final ‘‘scene’’ interpreting Jacques Polieri’s Book of Mallarmé. spoken text and ‘‘era-appropriate’’ music would also help contextualize the scenographies for the audience. Each student developed a sound track corresponding to their theater, compiled from music and spoken text contemporaneous to the project, program notes for the play, architects’ diaries and other sources. For the studied scenographies incorporating projected imagery, as in Gropius and Piscator’s Total Theater and all of Polieri’s work, the students added in live video feed. Just as the athletes and dancers in the class had contributed greatly to the conceptualization of the movement, this part of the project celebrated the skill-set and interest of the DJs, VJs, and musicians in the class. To further communicate the project intention to the audience, on the night of the performance the class exhibited the detailed score, containing plan and elevation drawings of the set at regular time intervals and information about the seven studied scenographies (Figures 2, 4, 6, 8). Critical information about the project, including architect, scenographic titles, date, and key qualities, was reproduced on a miniature timeline and distributed to the audience (Figure 10).The seven architecture students and teaching assistant performed SHiFT—a thirty-five minute performance of space with prerecorded sound and live video feed (Figures 9, 11–18). Reflecting Back Following the experimental models of the studied scenographies, the learning methodology challenged the students to ‘‘eventualize’’ this historical material, to actively engage and explore the studied spaces, giving that material relevance throughout the 13 14 95 WEINSTEIN 15. Photographic story-board. process and evidence in the final performance. This performance of space sought to evoke an experiential understanding of the research through held ‘‘scenes’’ and dynamic spatial transformations. The students learned through the enactment of space as performers, enriching earlier explorations on paper and in model. The immediacy of full-scale exploration offered rapid feedback and promoted debate about the spatialization of actor–audience relationship, both historical and as reinterpreted. The consistent thread of the performance of space—from the introduction to actor–audience relationships in theater space, to in-depth study, analytic parsing, synthetic exploration, fabrication and performance—challenged the students to focus on concept and process over end goals. This shift of focus also challenged the students to link architectural explorations to other conceptual, material, spatial, and temporal practices; it invited the students to explore and ultimately create a story of space through text, music, sound, video, and movement, as well as constructed elements. These cross-disciplinary links, in addition to the combined analytic and synthetic learning methodologies, engaged the students in a creative and collaborative process as whole people with diverse interests and skills, and challenged the students to connect their métier to the larger cultural and creative world. Acknowledgments Many thanks to my colleagues for their support and to the students for their involvement in this and earlier SHiFT 96 16. Photographic story-board (cont.) explorations into architecture and performance.The drawings, digital models, design, construction, and performance presented here are the collective work of Cruz Crawford, Tyler Jorgenson, Corey Kingston, Lara Lafontain, Heiman Luk, Kevin Moore, and Andre Rodrigue.Tyler assembled the score. Superlative project assistance was lent by Nicole Sweeney. Performance and rehearsal photographs are courtesy of Tabitha Rodrigue and Jennifer Heinfeld.Video documentation is courtesy of Schuyler Bott and Kristofer Westfall. 97 WEINSTEIN Notes 1. In Kabuki theaters, such as the Minamiza Theater (Kyoto), actors process across the hanamichi, or ‘‘flower path,’’ from behind the audience toward the stage. This spatial and performative device is a derivative of Noh, which also incorporates a hanamichi, but one that does not traverse the audience space. Garnier’s ‘‘other’’ theater is the participatory space, from lower lobby through the grand stair to the foyer, in his Paris Opera. 2. Texts concerning experimental theater design of the twentieth century included: Arnold Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI research Press, 1981); Ned Bowman, ‘‘The Ideal Theater: Emerging Tendencies in Its Architecture,’’ Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3. (October, 1964): 220–29; and Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor Audience (London: Routledge, 1993). 3. Texts by directors and philosophers included: Antonin Artaud, ‘‘The Theater and Cruelty,’’ in The Theater and its Double, Mary C. Richards, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1958); Jacques Rancière, ‘‘The Emancipated Spectator,’’ in The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), and Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). 4. Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), p. 256. In this section of his lecture ‘‘Six Concepts’’ (Columbia University, Feb 1991) Bernard Tschumi paraphrases his dialogue with Jacques Derrida on the concept of the event in regard to his recent project, La Villette. The other texts referred to are Branko Kolarevic’s Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality (New York: 17. Public for the performance, and their shadow on the ‘‘final curtain.’’ 18. Final ‘‘scene’’ interpreting Jacques Polieri’s Book of Mallarmé. 17 Spon, 2005); Jon McKenzie’s Perform of Else (London: Routledge, 2001); and Chris Slater’s Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 5. The kit of parts included fabric panels, defining space overhead and peripherally as in Autant and Polieri’s scenographies; fourteen plywood column-plinths, based on the number of projection towers in the Total Theater; and ropes and pulleys, dynamically connecting ground and ceiling. 6. I must credit Mies van der Rohe for inspiring the one-to-one mock up and would also like to recognize the work of Frances Bronet, Ronit Eisenbach, and others specifically exploring body, space, movement, and performance at full scale. 7. Bernard Tschumi’s Fireworks for La Villette (1991); Cue Score from Synchronous Objects (OSU ⁄ William Forsythe, 2009), John Cage’s Piano Score for the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957–1958), and others. 18 SHiFT 98