DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURES. THEATRE AND PERFORMING ARTS IN MOTION

DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURES THEATRE AND PERFORMING ARTS IN MOTION Jorge Palinhos Josefina González Cubero Luísa Pinto Editors CEAA CEAA I Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo, 2021 DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURES. THEATRE AND PERFORMING ARTS IN MOTION 2 1 2 3 DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURES THEATRE AND PERFORMING ARTS IN MOTION Jorge Palinhos Josefina González Cubero Luísa Pinto Editors 4 CEAA Editions / 8 Title DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURES. THEATRE AND PERFORMING ARTS IN MOTION Editors Jorge Palinhos, Josefina González Cubero and Luísa Pinto © 2021 by authors, CEAA Graphic design Jorge Cunha Pimentel and Joana Couto Typesetting Joana Couto Edition CEAA | Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo, CESAP/ESAP Print Adrenaline Code 1st Edition, Porto, November 2021 Print run: 300 copies ISBN: 978-972-8784-92-8 [Suporte: Impresso] ISBN: 978-972-8784-93-5 [Suporte: Eletrónico] Legal Deposit: This publication was funded by national funds through FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., within the project UIDB/04041/2020 (Centro de Estudos Arnldo Araújo). The authors of the texts have the exclusive responsibility of image copyrights printed in the correspondent texts. The editors do not accept any responsibility for any improper use of images and any consequences following. Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo Escola Superior Artística do Porto Largo de S. Domingos, 80 4050-545 PORTO, PORTUGAL (+351)223392130 [email protected] www.ceaa.pt 5 CHANGING SPACE AND PERFORMANCE FOR A CHANGING WORLD Jorge Palinhos, Josefina González Cubero and Luísa Pinto THEATRICAL SPACES HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 Dorita Hannah THE MEMORY OF A DISAPPEARED ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY OF THE POPULAR PERFORMANCE: THE CIRCUS-THEATRES IN SPAIN Josefina González Cubero and Leonor de Meer González WORD AND FLESH: FRAMING THE SPACE IN THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES IN CHURCHES Bridget Foreman OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA INTO THEATRICAL SPACES. PERFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES IN THE 21st CENTURY Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW: NEW FORMS OF RADICAL TOGETHERNESS IN AUDIENCE-PARTICIPATORY DANCE THEATRE Stefan Jovanović THEATRICAL ARCHITECTURAL BUILDINGS AND COMMUNITY: TEATRO CONTÊINER MUNGUNZÁ Luísa Pinto FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM Katarzyna Zawistowska 11 17 37 47 61 79 101 111 CONTENTS 6 SCENOGRAPHIC SPACES SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS: THE SET DESIGNS BY HERZOG & DE MEURON AND MORPHOSIS Niuxa Drago THE HOURS: THE (FE)MALE GAZE? Isabel Lousada and Vanda de Sousa GIULIO CAMILLO: SCENOGRAPHER OF MEMORY IN A DRAMATIC ARCHITECTURE Carolina E. Santo TOWARDS A PRACTICE-AS-RESEARCH MODEL OF PERFORMISE: TAKING SCENOGRAPHY FOR ANTIGONE THE UNBRAVE (2019) AS A CASE STUDY Yi-Chen Wu SPACE AND PERFORMANCE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FOUND ENVIRONMENT IN PERSIAN PASSION THEATRE Zahra Fuladvand and Judit Csanadi MAPPING MEMORIES. EXPLORING INTANGIBLE HERITAGE THROUGH PLAYWRITING: AN ARCHITEXTURAL APPROACH Jenny Knotts THE CURVE IS RUINOUS: ARCHITECTURE AND THE PERFORMATIVE INTERVENTION SPIRALS Hari Marini VERTICAL KNOWLEDGE: EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL OF VERTICAL DANCE AS A SCENOGRAPHIC STRATEGY IN THE PERFORMANCE OF SITE Natalie Rowland SETTING ARCHITECTURE IN MOTION BY MEANS OF PERFORMANCE Višnja Žugić CONTENTS 127 145 157 171 187 201 215 231 245 7 URBAN SPACES HOW DID MY PARENTS GET TO THE UNDERPASS? EXAMINATION OF A NON-THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE IN AN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE Gabriella Kiss THE USE OF SCENOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN CONTESTED PUBLIC SPACES: THE CASE OF THE SOUTH WALLED CITY OF NICOSIA Marina Hadjilouca DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: AN EXPERIENCE OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE IN A POST-INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE Jorge Palinhos PERFORMANCE MATERIALS SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE. HOW SOUND INFLUENCES SPACE: THE JOËL POMMERAT’S THEATRICAL CASE STUDY Rafaël Magrou INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: LIGHT, ART AND POLITICS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE Tomás Ribas THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY Lucy Thornett PERFORMANCE AND ARCHITECTURE PEDAGOGIES SPATIAL THEATRE FOR ARCHITECTS: EXERCISES FOR STUDENTS Gray Read SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA: PERFORMATIVE ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE’S BOUNDARIES Natalia Solano-Meza AUTHORS ABSTRACTS 259 273 287 301 315 327 345 357 375 381 CONTENTS 14 abandoned underpass that raises questions of “layers of the place”, Marina Hadjilouca uses the example of the growing gentrification and privatization in Nicosia, Cyprus, and the role of performance as a strategy of contesting the privatization of public spaces, while Jorge Palinhos examines the use of memory and parade as a performative device for the presentation and reflection of a postindustrial neighboorhood in the city of Porto, Portugal. In the chapter Performance Materials, a series of elements of theatre and performance are discussed in their spatial and architectonic potencial. Rafaël Magrou approaches the importance of Sound experiments in theatre through the example of French director and playwright Joël Pommerat, Tomás Ribas investigates the use of artificial light in urban spaces as an instrument of mass manipulation and surveillance and Lucy Thornett explores augmented reality as wearable technology that augments space at the level of the body. The last chapter, Performance and Architecture Pedagogies, presents different examples of using performative elements as tools to teach architeture. Gray Read presents a series of exercises based in theatre techniques to invite young architects to consider how buildings act socially, while Natalia Solano-Meza describes the uses of architecture and performance at the University of Costa Rica to address political issues. This is a wide range of perspectives that we hope can contribute to opening up new places of theatrical and architectural practice and research, bringing fresh concepts, methods and tools that can be quite useful as a way of rethinking the uses of contemporary architecture and performance. Jorge Palinhos, Josefina González Cubero and Luísa Pinto JORGE PALINHOS, JOSEFINA GONZÁLEZ CUBERO and LUÍSA PINTO 15 THEATRICAL SPACES 16 17 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 DORITA HANNAH “The New” To approach the problem of “the new” then, one must complete the following four requirements: redefine the traditional concept of the object; reintroduce and radicalize the theory of time; conceive of “movement” as a first principle and not merely as a special, dismissible case; and embed these later three within an all-encompassing theory and politics of the “event”. (Kwinter, 2001, p.11) Theatre Architecture is conventionally considered a static object – as playhouse, concert hall, dance space, opera house, stadium, or even art gallery – designed to contain performance and its audiences within a disciplinary hold. However, due to increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality, the performing arts exceed genre taxonomy and even architecture itself. Performance therefore can neither be spatially contained nor physically restricted – especially in our age of media spectacles, fluid technologies and uncontainable bodies. Edith J. R. Isaacs recognizes this as far back as 1935 in the introduction to her anthology, Architecture for the New Theatre, writing that “in the art of theatre, which uses for its completion all of the other arts, the building that serves it should be a way to freedom rather than a house of bondage” 18 DORITA HANNAH (1935, p.10). Centralizing spatial oppression as “the problem” facing theatre architecture, Isaacs maintains design needs to be approached “not only as an arrangement of mass and form, and not only as a functional unit, but as a social unit” (1935, p.12). Six decades later, architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter maintains that “the new” in architecture emerges from rethinking its objecthood by paying attention to temporality, mobility and the event dimension (2001, p.11). The perceptual shift from a static spatialization of time (architecture as enduring built form) to the livelier temporalization of space (architecture as dynamic environmental spacing) acknowledges ‘spatial performativity’, which philosopher Jacques Derrida refers to as “espacement (...) the archi-manifestation of force, or of life” (2004, p.46). By emphasising movement, relativity and duration, both Kwinter and Derrida hypothesize architecture as evental – active, spatiotemporal and interruptive of the status quo – and therefore as dynamic becoming rather than passive being. This has socio-political implications that require attention to ensure a less repressive and more emancipatory paradigm shift in performance space as well as a deeper engagement with its materiality, historicity and meaning. In Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-garde (Hannah, 2018) I observe how space is shaped by the transitory event – whether historic (epic incidents), aesthetic (theatrical displays) or banal (daily occurrences) – in order to expose architecture itself as a multiplicitous event and an intricate player in our everyday lives. As an event, the space housing events is therefore an integral driver of performance and how it is experienced. What does this mean at the end of a year in which a global pandemic, as major irruptive event, creates myriad events that radically shift our spatial perceptions of proxemic bodies, contestable borders and uncontainable ecosystems, while proving the conventional auditorium to be a house of potential contamination? This paper considers the evental nature of a seemingly banal shipping container – designed to efficiently convey goods across oceans and continents – and its links to globalization (colonialism’s ongoing project) and neoliberal gentrification, as 19 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 well as more communal and haptic potential described by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) as flights of “Fantasy in the Hold”. In the days preceding Christmas 2020, Britain experiences its highest rate of coronavirus cases, alongside the introduction of a virulent new strain, resulting in a nationwide lockdown and Europe closing its borders to the United Kingdom. This leads to thousands of trucks stranded at the southern frontier on December 21st, an event consistent with the many breakdowns and interruptions experienced throughout ‘the year of Covid-19’. The long lines of freight vehicles at a standstill – each carrying the ubiquitous shipping container – represent yet another disturbance in the smooth flow of global capital in which broken networks set off chain reactions that disclose an inherently unsustainable system. Earlier in the month, a multiple stack collapse on the freight ship ONE Apus led to 1,816 containers falling into the Pacific Ocean, including 64 dangerous goods (DG) boxes. While this ‘record loss’ (Van Marle, 2020) was barely reported in mainstream news, a media focus on the pandemic has exposed ‘logistics’ – the detailed organization and implementation of transporting goods and people – as a failed enterprise. Proliferating spectacles, such as miles-long tailbacks of lorries, draw attention to this icon of global trade and essential component in supply-chain capitalism. Such systemic failure coincides with another event on December 21st, in which a UK court convicts two lorry drivers with people-smuggling and manslaughter after the discovery, a year previously (23 October 2019), of 39 Vietnamese men, women and children (aged between 15 and 44) who had perished of asphyxia and hyperthermia in such an enclosed container on the back of a truck. Here, a confluence of historic and quotidian events exposes the shipping container as neither a passive nor prosaic receptacle: aligning it to what Alexander Klose calls “a crucible of globalization”, which harbours “container worlds” (Klose, 2009) that range from harbourside ports and industrial showgrounds to carriers of pandemics and human cargo: intruding into and reconfiguring physical sites and cultural paradigms. 20 DORITA HANNAH Container Worlds… off-the-shelf, pop-up, fit-for-purpose, plug-in-city… There are an estimated 20 million units of the standardized intermodal freight container – a steel box designed for efficient worldwide transportation by boat, truck and train – in motion over water and on land, rendering it the neoliberal global object par excellence. In theatre, its access and dimensions need to be taken into account for the efficient delivery, storage and movement of scenery and touring shows, which also link to a standardized architecture serving the performing arts market. Yet, the shipping container has become the building block for temporary venues such as the Illuminated Container Wall – a curving multilevel enclosure of staggered units designed by Bernades Jacobsen for Rio de Janeiro’s Music Festival (2011) – as well as more enduring theatre buildings, the best examples of which are the Container Kunsthalles in Seoul (2009) and Berlin (2011) by Platoon Cultural Developments. What follows is a discussion of the aestheticization and utilization of the container as a modular building unit for a range of architectural typologies – from pop-up event spaces to high-end and high-rise housing, as well as emergency border accommodation and triage medical stations. Hailed as eco-friendly, sustainable, compact, structurallysound, accessible and affordable, these easily reproducible transportation units are increasingly employed in the built environment as a modular clip-on kit-ofparts to be stacked, unstacked, relocated and reused as needed. However, the shipping container’s ‘meanwhile use’ – co-opted for temporary and emergency accommodation – has become more and more long term, leading to the rather alarming phrase ‘container urbanism’, which signals an impoverishment of architecture and the built-environment itself. It is also employed as a theatrical tool for covert gentrification in which developers transform brownfields sites and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities into zones of privilege under the guise of ‘culture-led regeneration’. Ten years ago, and consistent with this container-turn in architecture, I was involved in the design development of the Container Globe, a classically Shakespearean pop-up venue to be constructed out of thirty repurposed 21 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 shipping containers, the dimensions of which roughly conform to the multilevel seating galleries of the Globe Theatre that opened in 1599 on the south bank of London’s River Thames, drawing audiences from all walks of life, until it burnt down in 1613. The Container Globe: “party like its 1599!” An economical, mobile and demountable alternative to a bricks-and-mortar venue, the Container Globe (Fig. 1) is described by its originator and producer, Angus Vail, as a “punk reimagining of Shakespeare’s Theatre” (Vail, 2016). In the first half of the last decade, I collaborated with Vail – a zealous afficionado of both punk rock music and Shakespearean drama – on the design development of this venue, which was conceived as a transportable kit-of-parts, composed primarily of stacked shipping containers with rock ’n roll lighting infrastructure and exterior scaffolding walkways clad in steel mesh. In his 2016 TEDx Talk on the project, Vail describes the Container Globe as a “glow-in-the-dark, big Mad Max thunder-dome theatre”, created from cheap, strong and universally available 20ft shipping containers that resemble “giant punk rock Lego building blocks”. Like New York City’s Joseph Papp (1921-1991), who established The Public Theatre in the late 1950s, New Jersey-based Vail sees this venue as an opportunity to bring the Bard’s work to diverse audiences, especially those who perceive conventional theatre as elitist, intimidating and unaffordable. He envisages the mobile venue occupying empty sites in deprived neighbourhoods as a means of urban rejuvenation, by cohering the community around the theatre. Clad with industrial steel mesh embedded with LED lighting, the venue is designed as a media object: fulfilling multiple roles, including cinema, gallery and even a skating rink; attracting food-trucks and micro businesses while transforming blighted locations into lively urban parks. It is worth noting that Papp, who came from an impoverished and itinerant childhood, inaugurated the New York Shakespeare Festival in an abandoned band shell on Manhattan’s East River Park, insisting that all performances are 22 DORITA HANNAH without charge. When the company lost the site in 1956 and were no longer able to bring the people to free Shakespeare, Papp decided to take free Shakespeare to the people on the back of a flatbed truck that toured all five boroughs of NYC. A year later the vehicle ‘broke down’ in Central Park, claiming squatters’ rights and presenting gratis summer productions that led to Shakespeare-in-the-Park. This eventually became the site of the Delacorte Theatre, which opened in 1962 and – with continuing free admission – remains a permanent fixture alongside the Lower Manhattan multi-hall venue Papp established five years later in the former Astor Library, known as The Public. The name itself reinforces Papp’s mission for the theatre to be part of the city itself and accessible to diverse audiences. Unfortunately, the 2012 renovation to The Public’s front-of-house (costing $40 million USD) has given precedence to sponsors and serving a free-market economy through a design – focusing on security, surveillance and gastronomy – that is no longer democratic in atmosphere or actuality. Such gentrification Figure 1. Container Globe. Images: created by Jonathan Go http://www.thecontainerglobe.com 23 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 of spectators and neighbourhoods typifies the significant shift from a run-down late-mid-century NYC to a more thriving centre built on the ‘creative economy’ model, in which the cultural sector – hailed as an important driver of wealth, employment, tourism and development – now principally serves the capitalist elite. Stephen Pritchard refers to this as the ‘hyperinstrumentalization’ of art that “has entered into a Faustian pact with neoliberalism, gaining power and influence but only by becoming entirely incorporated into market economics, entrepreneurialism, commodification and consumerism” (2019). The Container Globe is currently being tested on an empty lot in Detroit; a city that declared bankruptcy in 2013 and is regenerating through investor developments. Although Vail doesn’t advocate (as Papp tenaciously did) for all events to be free, he does envisage “the Yard tickets to be less than the price of a movie ticket – so almost everyone can afford to see great Shakespeare – and we think we’ll attract lots of students, millennials and young people just curious about this bold new theatre, who want to engage in and lead the audience’s involvement in the plays” (Vail cited in McKee, 2016). As will evolve throughout this paper, such idealism becomes caught up in art that serves, rather than challenges, the neoliberal elite, resulting in productions that generally avoid radical socio-political commentary in spaces, which eventually eradicate the very accessibility and diversity they purport to foster and support. Citing Aaron Betsky’s reference to the shipping container as “a building block, an expression of systems, a moveable bit of changing society, and something that could be found, rather than having to be constructed by using up resources”, Alexander Klose asserts it “must serve as a metaphor for everything bad, misanthropic and technocratic” (2009, p.283). As will unfold, despite its link to an affordable and sustainable ideal, we cannot ignore the container’s instrumental role in gentrification, exploitation, corruption and contamination, while holding its multiple mythologies in mind. 30 landscape is established by private enterprise in order to achieve large-scale gentrification that masquerades as cultural development. Here, the shipping container is often called upon to play a central role in performances co-opted in the service of market-led infrastructural development, which, like The Public theatre in NYC, is no longer truly democratic in its publicness. Developer Theatrics UK-based theatre scholar, Michael Shane Boyle, examines container aesthetics and infrastructural politics in contemporary performance via an article focussing on ‘The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face’ (2016), a 2014 Thames-side event in London’s North Greenwich, staged by immersive theatre collective, Shunt: What geopolitical and historical conditions must first conspire to allow artists to repurpose a linchpin of international trade like the shipping container into the physical infrastructure for performance? And what can Shunt’s container aesthetics reveal about the enmeshment of contemporary performance in the urban and transnational infrastructures of global capital? (Boyle, 2016, p.59) Boyle carefully unpacks the production’s design dramaturgy, sited in and around shipping containers on a disused concrete coaling jetty, in order to expose a mutuality between the performance and proposed gentrification of the Greenwich Peninsula by Chinese developers, Knight Dragon, who publicise the development as “London’s single largest residential-led regeneration project” (WSP). While Knight Dragon sponsored ‘The Boy Who’ by providing the site and permits required for its refit as a performance space, they marketed the project as a temporary platform and pop-up venue – reinforced by the London Evening Standard description of a “hi-tech village for arty, foodie, design-savvy Londoners” (Mount, 2004) – thereby boosting their aspirational online claim to establish “an emerging modern community centred around design and culture” DORITA HANNAH 31 (WSP). Unlike the Hollywood film where a guerrilla performance successfully protests and halts developer-led gentrification, Shunt becomes entangled in supporting such development. As Boyle writes, the company “aestheticizes capitalist infrastructure itself” (2016, p.59), illustrating how pop-up container venues provide “affordable stopgaps that erase the past to usher in a dicey future” (p.71). Boyle points out that on 16th August 2014, two days after ‘The Boy Who’ opened, thirty-five Afghan Sikh ‘stowaways’ were found in a shipping container on the docks of nearby Tilbury, one of whom died in passage from Belgium. We therefore return to the haunting of the ‘hold’, and the fact that a “history of shipping cannot be separated from a history of the shipped” (Harney). In their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’ from The Undercommons, Harney and Moten equate the freighted spatial condition to the colonization and financialization of bodies, and therefore to the slave ship: To have been shipped is to have been moved by others, with others. It is to feel at home with the homeless, at ease with the fugitive, at peace with the pursued, at rest with the ones who consent not to be one. Outlawed, interdicted, intimate things of the hold, containerized contagion, logistics externalises logic itself to reach you, but this is not enough to get at the social logics, the social poesis, running through logisticality. (Harney/Moten, 2013, p.97) The hold, where bodies are thrown together, is also historically a floating microcosm for disease: from the grain ships carrying the Justinian Plague (541542 AD) that devastated the Byzantian Empire; to the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which docked in Yokohama on 4th February 2020, carrying more than half the known cases of Covid-19 in the world outside China. Coronavirus has shown us that contaminants can be neither controlled nor easily contained: evading borders, invading bodies and proliferating silently, quickly and without HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 32 prejudice. However, as Harney and Moten maintain, such a rise of “dispossessed feelings in common” allow us to develop “hapticality (as…) a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you” (2013, p.98). Theatre has generally ‘left the building’, which, as an interior with multiple histories, has too-long held its audiences in social bondage without acknowledging their haptic potential. This aligns to Jon McKenzie’s notion of ‘Global Feeling’ as “political love” – an interconnected condition we are both a part of and apart from in order to transmit effects and affects in unprecedented ways (2008, p.129). Aligning theatre to the hold as a “contrapuntal island” where we are marooned in “stateless emergency” (Harney/Moten, 2013, p.94), what now pops-up in relation to dramatic architecture in-motion? Conclusion We … have to recognize the wide range of uses for which the container box has been repurposed in different parts of the globe, as it now functions not only as a container for travelling commodities but also, in different contexts, as a form of temporary shelter, of low cost housing, and as one of the ‘building blocks’ of military encampments, prisons, educational institutions, and largescale markets across the globe. (Morley, 2017, p.13) The hold is a performative space etymologically linked to power, control and detention. It clasps, grasps, grips, clenches, imprisons, locks up and shuts up, influences and dominates. As a hold, the shipping container appears identical on the outside. Yet, as home, hideaway, or even prison, each unit is individualized by its occupants who attempt to establish a unique habitat, as they are held in a limbo of non-belonging, other than to each other through shared kinship, culture and hopes of return or better lives elsewhere. As Shauna Janssen points out in her catalogue essay for PhoneHome (2017), by acknowledging the agency of the ‘shipped’, Moten and Harney’s ‘Fantasy in the Hold’ also renders containerisation a space of critical mobility and political love: “Intensifying the DORITA HANNAH 33 proximate intimacy of human bodies within it forms a site of shared corporeal vulnerabilities, via a biopolitics of globalisation where the temporality of shipping and the shipped continues to overflow” (Janssen, 2017). This paper has engaged with the multiple narratives and histories of the shipping container, especially in the time of a worldwide pandemic, which, according to Michael Pooler and Thomas Hale, could signal “an end to the golden era of globalization… a period in which containers have been both the symbol and instrument” (Pooler/Hale, 2020). Through their socio-political associations, concealed haptic potentiality and problematic relationships to power and precarity, they can be understood as much more than neutral building blocks with an industrial aesthetic. So, what does this mean for Vail’s proposed Container Globe, which is still being investigated while New Zealand’s Pop-Up Globe (2015), which is principally constructed out of scaffolding, has succeeded in becoming “the world’s first touring replica of Shakespeare’s theatre” (Gregory, 2020)? HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 Figure 4. Cargo by Kasia Pol in The Performance Arcade: Wellington, New Zealand (2012) www.kasiapol.com/cargo 34 In his Prologue to Henry V, William Shakespeare described the Globe Theatre as a “wooden O”, capable of holding worlds within its timber embrace (1599). Regarding its circular plan as cosmological, Frances Yates also asserts the Globe as a quintessential ‘Theatre of the World’, operating at microcosmic and macrocosmic levels (1969, p.189). The Container Globe’s ‘steel O’ presents a fitting venue in this age of faltering hyper-globalization, reminding us that Shakespeare himself “lived in the age when all the world’s populated continents were first permanently linked by trade” (Bosman, 2010, p.285). However, it is inside the yard, rather than within the stacked shipping container galleries, where fantasy in the venue’s hold may lie: as the groundlings haptically negotiate each other’s bodies; self-organizing as a microbial organism in constant flux. Having taken up Boyle’s provocation in ‘Container Aesthetics’ that “any analysis of this infrastructural aesthetic must consider the material effects of transforming shipping containers into art” (2016, p.59), my paper concludes with an image from the 2012 Performance Arcade, connecting instead with the multiple affects of such transformation. Untethered from the waterfront site, a single rusty shipping container floats on Wellington harbour as if long-lost overboard. Titled Cargo, this project by Polish artist, Kasia Pol (Fig. 3), occupies the main event’s periphery and spectator’s peripheral view. An event in itself, this marooned vessel draws attention to the distant port on the other side of the harbour, which is alive with movement as machines move and stack countless containers enclosing a multiplicity of mysterious contents. As a resistant yet melancholic architectural object – suggesting events of escape, smuggling, entrapment, voyaging and disaster – Cargo bobs, sloshes and drifts, responding to the flux of weather and the sea it rides; transforming the city harbour itself into an event-space. Here, in its temporality, mobility and multiple event dimensions, we glimpse ‘the new’ as proposed by Kwinter in this paper’s opening epigraph. DORITA HANNAH 35 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 References AGAMBEN, Giorgio (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. BACKSTEIN, Karen (2016). “‘Stayin’ Alive’: The Post-Studio Hollywood Musical” in Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann & Art Simon (eds.), American Film History: Selected Readings, 1960 to the Present. Wiley Press. BANHAM, Reyner (1967). “Flatscape with Containers” in New Society, vol. 10, no. 255, 17 August 1967, pp.231-232. 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(2019). “The Sinister Brutality of Shipping Container Architecture” in New York Times: 4 Aug 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/shipping-container-homes.html (accessed 18 November 2019). WSP: Knight Dragon Developments. https://www.wsp.com/en-GB/projects/greenwich-peninsula-london (accessed 18 November 2019). YATES, Frances A. (1969). Theatre of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. WEF: World Economic Forum / Accenture (2013). ‘Building Resilience in Supply Chains’: Joint Report: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_RRN_MO_BuildingResilienceSupplyChains_Report_2013.pdf (accessed 18 November 2019). 37 THE MEMORY OF A DISAPPEARED ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY OF THE POPULAR PERFORMANCE: THE CIRCUS-THEATRES IN SPAIN JOSEFINA GONZÁLEZ CUBERO LEONOR DE MEER GONZÁLEZ Theatre and circus do not need architecture to be produced, but throughout history specific spatial structures have been created for their better development. If Greece first and the Roman Empire later established the models of theatre, amphitheatre and hippodrome-stadium-circus that contained specific shows, they also witnessed the subversion of this architectural independence, because the rest of these buildings had to supply them when they were missing. This was the case in Colonia Clunia Sulpicia, one of the most important cities in northern Roman Hispania, where, lacking an amphitheatre, theatre combined its own activity with animal shows1. Throughout history, both the degrees of adaptability of buildings conceived for a specific activity and the definition and fusion of architectural typologies have been exposing the intricate itinerary followed by the architecture. A path already enunciated by the American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber with the analogy of the two trees, one referring to biological evolution and other to cultural evolution, whose difference lies in the permanent separation and the entanglement with union by “tissue-callus” of its branches, respectively. 1 Discovered in excavations carried out by Miguel Ángel de la Iglesia and Fransec Tuset, directors of the Colonia Clunia Sulpicia archaeological site. 38 JOSEFINA GONZÁLEZ CUBERO and LEONOR DE MEER GONZÁLEZ In our opinion, this is the case of the so-called circus-theatres or theatres-circus that explored the intermediate possibilities in the field of architecture and entertainment, the meeting place between the types of man defined by AmiardChevrel (1983, p.11): the physical man of action and the psychological man of word. In the Modern Age and on the periphery of art, the minor and popular forms of the spectacle (circus, fair theatre, variety shows, etc.) progressively acquired a new vitality, with the circus at the forefront. Its valued characteristics were the succession of shows with a different nature and without logical connection, the order motivated by internal needs that ignored the narrative practice linked to the text and the absence of illusionism or the free relationship with the spectators. In addition, these shows achieved a prestige, which they previously had not had, when were read in relation to the artistic expressions of oriental culture, which began to be widely disseminated in the Western world from the 19th century through universal exhibitions. Both references had special relevance in the art of the 20th century and were also wielded by the currents of theatrical renovation, whose mark was recorded in the architectural proposals and the shows of the avant-garde and post-avantgarde theatre. As for the type of shows, we can mention as examples the “theatre of attractions” by Eisenstein, Arvatov and Tretyakov, the unregulated theatrical practices of the counterculture of the 1960s or Grotowski’s paratheatre, among others. With regard to buildings, the influence of the circus as a circular space in the 20th century was connected with the equality and reciprocity of the interaction between artist and spectator, reproducing the way the crowd spontaneously gathered around an event with a point of equidistant and centripetal view. Likewise, it had something to do with the interaction between spectators who were located in the perimeter stands around the circular ring. Given that the 19th century was the time of panoramas, it was also then when circular or polygonal buildings were dedicated to popular leisure such as circuses, whose spectators 39 THE MEMORY OF A DISAPPEARED ARCHITECTURAL TYPOLOGY OF THE POPULAR PERFORMANCE were forced to take a centrifugal look that was translated by the cinematograph into the delocalized virtuality of the screen. The architectural modernity reabsorbed the circus space in the Great Theatre in Berlin (1919) renovated by Hans Poelzig for the stage director Max Reinhardt, the Endless Theatre (1924) by Frederick Kiesler or the Total Theatre (1927) projected by Walter Gropius for the stage director Erwin Piscator. All these works exemplify this ancestry that later reappeared more as an organization of the spectators than as an architectural form, as in the Théâtre en Rond (1954) in Paris by André Villiers and Paquita Claude as well as the Theatre in the Round (1951) by Margo Jones, just to name a few examples. The proper modern circus was born at the end of the 18th century in England from the equestrian art parades (1678) organized by the excellent rider Philip Astley at his Halfpenny Hatch riding school in Lambeth, where he taught in the morning and performed these shows in the afternoon during the summer. In order that the horses could be better observed, they ran in a circle within a rough enclosure, without a roof and near the indoor arena for their training, which had not been inspired by any circular historical building. In addition, the demonstrations had to become a massive spectacle to sustain themselves economically as a business activity with the sale of tickets. However, the circus was not truly produced as a show in solidarity with space until Astley put together equestrian demonstrations with acrobatics and pantomimes (1770) and he covered his Amphitheatre Riding House (1779) with a wood and cloth roof, located at the intersection of Stangate Street and Westminster Bridge Road. But, unfortunately, the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy (1782) of its close competitor Charles Hughes preceded the Royal Grove (1783) of Astley in defining the kind of permanently covered circus-theatres. Therefore, the equivalent presence of shows of an equestrian nature and the additions induced the transition from the domain of the outdoor riding arena, sometimes with a stage, to a covered construction, equipped with a stage box 46 47 WORD AND FLESH: FRAMING THE SPACE IN THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES IN CHURCHES BRIDGET FOREMAN In a village in the Yorkshire Dales, in the rural North of England, an elderly woman enters the church. She is greeted at the door and makes her way to her regular seat among a gathering of people, many of whom she has known for years. A man steps up to the lectern and begins to deliver a eulogy to Nathaniel, a farmer who has died suddenly in middle age. The church building fills and echoes to the sound of the speaker’s words as he shares memories of Nathaniel with his listeners, who sit, silently attentive. When he finishes speaking, lights come up behind him on the cramped interior of a cottage, framed in the wider space of the church. There is a pile of laundry, a table and chairs, an exit upstage. Because this is not, in fact, a funeral, but the performance of a play. The congregation is also an audience, the elderly woman is both a worshipper and a spectator, the site is at once a church and a performance space. This paper will expand upon the complexities implied by this convergence of event, meaning, site, space – all somewhat slippery terms – considering further the relationship between space and text, from the perspective of the playwright. Simeon’s Watch was commissioned from me as a writer in 2016. The play tells the story of a contemporary family facing the experience of dementia, but it also draws on the biblical story of Simeon, who appears in Luke’s gospel as a 48 BRIDGET FOREMAN man to whom it has been prophesied that he will not die until he has seen his salvation – that is, the Christ child. Simeon’s Watch presents three generations of sheep-farmers: Simeon, who at the start of the play is beginning to exhibit signs of dementia, his daughter, Leah, and grand-daughter, Rina. As the family wrestles with the challenges and change presented by Simeon’s illness, he moves towards apparently increasing inaccessibility and death. However, the horizon of the piece offers an alternative perspective of hope and a re-consideration of the ways in which relationships and communication can be preserved for people experiencing dementia, and their loved ones. It toured in the run-up to Christmas, playing for single performances in community venues, which were usually churches in rural areas. While this was in part determined by the modus operandi of the commissioning theatre company, there was also a dramatic, artistic requirement for the play to sit comfortably within those performance spaces, and to speak into the vernacular of the site-generic locations. The commission demanded a piece that could speak the languages, codes and signifiers of both theatre and church, and enable the audience to receive the play bilingually. This was in part a challenge to the visual and material aspects of production, design and direction, but it also presented a juxtaposition that needed to be expressed within the script. The debate around space and place in theatre is lively and populated with divergent terminology. The proposition in Peter Brook’s seminal work that there could be such a thing as an “empty space” (Brook, 1969) has been argued over and refuted, for example by Chris Goode, who aligns himself with John Cage’s assertion that “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time” (Cage in Goode, 2015, Ch.1). Brook himself develops his earlier argument by acknowledging that his quest to discover an “empty” space in which to make theatre was a reaction against making and seeing work that “has always been within a context. The context is either geographical, cultural or linguistic, so that we work within a system” (Brook in Goode). Goode contends that Brook’s response in the “staking out of an empty space” may be “blandly attractive”, 49 WORD AND FLESH but “there is something terrible going on: because nobody lives there” (Goode). This is an instructive debate in the consideration of understanding how the interaction between a piece of performance and the physical space in which it is performed can result in thick and complex layering of meanings. When a piece of theatre not only sits within a site but accrues that site’s significance, it can engage the audience in an effective and affective conversation. Goode has indicated that “the experience of an audience may have much to do with the idea of a particular ‘place’, especially one they know” (Goode). He goes on to reflect on the nature and character of churches as representing a “space that, viewed secularly in formal terms at least, could serve simply as a site for community gathering, the circulating of information, the celebratory enaction of lives shared”. However, he concludes that “their meaning is defined in practice not by their appointed custodians but by their users, and not in abstraction but in the enaction of… that useage” (Goode). If we view this in Brook’s terms, we can conclude that a church presents a context, and represents a system. Expanded Scenography and Site-Generic Performance While Cathy Turner bemoans the fact that “architecture is often considered as though we can separate the meaning of buildings from their habitation” (Turner, 2015, p.2), subsequent commentaries have addressed this blind spot though a discussion of expanded scenography arising from the increasing use and understanding of found space as sites for performance. McKinney and Palmer propose that “expanded scenography utilizes space not simply as a backdrop but as an active part of the process of inviting spectators to situate themselves with regard to their lived experience” (McKinney & Palmer, 2017, p.1). The lived experience of a church member in relation to their church building manifests itself culturally, socially, spiritually and practically. It is a space that has been architecturally conceived, but it is also a place of meeting, of worship, of community, and of multiple functions. In addition to their structural and symbolic architecture, churches are cluttered with the rather more prosaic 50 paraphernalia of functionality: heaters and speakers, microphones, stacks of additional chairs, hand-crafted banners, flower arrangements; a visually chaotic story of the life lived within the space. In this context, the notion of expanded scenography as one that, in McKinney and Palmer’s terms, shapes “the interface between the performance and the audiences” (McKinney & Palmer, 2017, p.6), creating “a mode of encounter and exchange… between bodies, objects and environments” (McKinney & Palmer, p.2) becomes tangible, and presents us with three spaces, which I will discuss: the physical space, the conceptual space and the congregational space. The Physical Space McKinney and Palmer’s observation that “There is an inherent notion of performance and event in architecture” (McKinney & Palmer, 2017, p.10) is readily apparent in the physical space of churches, that provides the setting for rites, rituals and gatherings that are not in themselves theatre but are rich in theatricality. This is the case regardless of the vastly differing styles, ages and sizes of many church buildings: they share a common purpose, meaning that in addition to their conceptual affiliation with performance, churches also – in their physical architecture – provide many of the material conditions for performance events where an audience will observe an action of some sort. But it does not follow that churches are therefore appropriate spaces for the staging of almost any form of theatrical performance. The architectural and scenographic foundations for a piece of theatre that is performed in a church are the generic and particular canvas against which any theatrical design will be seen, and they demand recognition of the additional layers of perception that will result. Gay McAuley describes space as “crucial to understanding the nature of the performance event and how meanings are constructed and communicated” (McAuley, 1999, p.278). The set for Simeon’s Watch was compact: a raised platform on which a claustrophobically small domestic setting (opening up to a simple hillside in the second half) provided a focused context BRIDGET FOREMAN 51 for the performance, but it sat – physically – within the larger space of the church. That larger space, which changed every night of the tour, told its own story and spoke its own physical language: of history, community, iconography and function, and was visible to the audience throughout the performance. Thus the play was presented at every performance within two frames: the outer frame of the church building, the inner frame of the theatrical setting. In performance, this allowed the audience’s experience to take the form of Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn’s ‘oscillation’ between different modes of engagement and levels of immersion (Hutcheon & O’Flynn, 2013). And the physical relationship between the two frames expressed a psychological expectation: that the play being performed would sit within the cultural, social and spiritual framing with which the audience arrived. Clifford McLucas characterises this matrix as starting with “the host and the ghost” as an expression of (...) the relationship between place and event. The host site is haunted for a time by a ghost that the theatre-makers create. Like all ghosts it is transparent and the host can be seen through the ghost. (McLucas in Kaye, 2000, p.168) In a church, the space is both lived and – by implication – historic: churches exude a connection to the past, some through their antiquity, and their semifixed features of memorial tablets, books of remembrance, and so on, and all through the significance of their role as mediating contexts for life rituals such as baptism, marriage and burial, as well as the weekly rite of people gathering together and self-identifying as a community with a sense of its own history. This constitutes an expression of Mike Pearson’s “‘single stratum’: the idea that all we ever see is the present, but that the present is itself infiltrated by relics of the past” (Pearson, 2014), a description that also – in its suggestion that the past can make incursions upon the present – goes to the heart of the experience of dementia that Simeon’s Watch explores. So the layering, and simultaneous WORD AND FLESH 52 experience of past and present, and the porosity of the boundary between the two, are expressed as active elements by both the play itself and the site of performance. The Conceptual Space In considering the conceptual space represented by a church, the most assertive feature is that a church building is not neutral to performer or spectator: it is designed as a sacred space, and even when other, more secular activities take place within it, they are set against a backdrop that is purposed – and used – for communal acts of worship. At the very least, Pearson’s observation that “Religious buildings are freighted with history, with established routines of observance, with atmospheres of piety” (Pearson, 2010, p.64) begins to articulate the particular character of the host. If we consider a church within the framework of Elam’s spatial codes (the architectural, interpersonal, scenic and virtual, which combine to define dramatic space – Elam, 1980), the fixed and semi-fixed architectural features of the space itself tell the stories of the Christian faith: altars and crucifixes evoke sacrifice, sanctuaries speak of holiness, architectural grandeur imitates the grandeur of heaven. Wherever a performance of Simeon’s Watch was performed, these physical features were untouched, so while the scenes of the play were set in a cottage, a pub, or a hillside, the insistently visible, material signifiers of the spiritual function for which the framing church building was purposed remained while the performance was grafted onto it. The significance of this layering extended beyond the visual, however: it provided a lens through which the meaning of the play comes into focus; an implication that the experience of the characters, and the subject of the play, is not distinct or separate from a spiritual understanding of life, but is held within it. Key to the analysis of the power of this effect is the simple fact that it could not have been achieved in any performance site that was not a place of worship. So the church itself represents a further active element within the dynamic of the play’s reception; a participator in the collaboration between what Rachel Hann has BRIDGET FOREMAN 53 described as the “human and non-human agents that render a place as eventful, attentive” (Hann, 2019, p.4). The Congregational Space The human agents of that rendering define the congregational space. At performances of Simeon’s Watch, the audience was usually largely comprised of the congregation of the church that was hosting the performance. As such, they were people who not only knew each other but who shared deep connections and a willingness to engage emotionally with one another. Additionally, this audience brought a web of expectations that embraced the theatrical, cultural and spiritual; what Susan Bennett describes as “a horizon of cultural and ideological expectations” (Bennett, 1997, p.98). They came primed with ties of friendship, shared values, faith and community, and from their perspective as spectators, both the familiar space and the relationships between human and non-human elements had the potential to be re-conceived through participation in an act of theatre. As a congregation, familiar with participation in services, their mode of engagement was habitually active rather than passive. As an audience, they comprised a community of interest, co-constructive in the interface between themselves and the performance. In such familiar surroundings, it may become difficult for the congregation member – or spectator – to make a distinction between the communal experience of participation in an act of worship, and that of watching a theatrical performance, meaning that the meeting point of Sarah Grochala’s lived space and dramatic space is situated not solely in the nonhuman physical place of performance, but also in the human experience of the individual spectator. So we can view the audience in this context – both as a body and as individuals – as a form of human architecture; a specific space, with a particular character, within which the performance is situated and experienced, and one that completes McLucas’s “trinity that constitutes the work” – of the host, the ghost and “the witness, i.e. the audience” (McLucas in Kaye, 2000, p.128). WORD AND FLESH 54 Architecture and Dramaturgy Returning to the concept of two frames, Bennett sees the audience’s response as a force that brings the frames together: (...) the outer frame contains all those cultural elements which create and inform the theatrical event. The inner frame contains the dramatic production in a particular playing space. The audience’s role is carried out within these two frames and, perhaps most importantly, at their points of intersection. It is the interactive relations between audience and stage, spectator and spectator which… cause the inner and outer frames to converge for the creation of a particular experience. (Bennett, 1997, p.139) The language here – of frames, convergence, space and intersection – is structural, suggesting that the entire event might be viewed as a form of architecture, or – as McLucas suggests – a number of architectures that are of “different orders of material, some conceptual, some spatial” (McLucas, c.1993-94). This expansion of the definition of ‘architecture’ has prompted Cathy Turner to link it to her understanding of dramaturgy as a concept that relates ideas to structure: “In each case, what is being articulated is the relationship of diverse elements in a spatio-temporal structure, at once conceptual, material/sensory and symbolic/ mimetic” (Turner, 2009, p.2). As the production of Simeon’s Watch demonstrates, this relationship of diverse elements can result in a complex and distinctive event, both through the intended design of the piece as a whole – its conceptual and ideological foundations – and through the less clearly-defined details presented by the individual churches where the play was performed. The performance acted as a catalyst for spectators to re-frame their relationship with familiar church buildings, with their own narratives connecting with that of the play, evoking Doreen Massey’s description of place as being “unfinished business” that is “woven together out of ongoing stories” (Massey, 2005, p.131). BRIDGET FOREMAN 55 Space and Text But this account of the symbiotic relationship between space, performance and audience can be further extrapolated – to consider the relationship between space and text through the genesis and construction of the play itself. From the outset, the commission required a play that was conceived structurally and thematically in response to the spaces of performance. The relationship of audience to site became a key factor within the writing of the play, and these elements in turn defined spaces that the text was written out of and into. The start of the play demonstrates this, deliberately drawing upon the potency of the intersection between the outer and inner frames, acknowledging that the spectators may – at least in part – identify themselves primarily as a congregation rather than an audience. The opening scene, set in a church, in which Simeon gives the eulogy at his son-in-law’s funeral, appears at first to be located within the outer frame of the church space, before drawing the us into the inner domestic frame, where the dramatic action of the play is located. It provides a bridge for the spectator to cross from their own world into the world of the play. In the crossing of that bridge, they are transformed from congregation to audience. In writing of a theatrical performance in a chapel, Pearson suggests that “extant practices suggest a dramaturgical structure, as performance adopts the practicalities of the chapel” (Pearson, 2010, p.63). The opening of Simeon’s Watch gives spectators a familiar entry point, where they are directly addressed in a church setting – cast by Simeon as the family and friends gathered to mourn Nathaniel. As Simeon’s speech ends, and the focus moves to his grand-daughter, the audience is drawn fully into the lives of the play’s characters, entering a more fully theatrical dimension, and a world that, while familiar, is distinct from their own. Considered as a whole, the arc of the play takes on a particular resonance when viewed against its setting in a church. Where – in a different performance context – Simeon’s journey through the play might be regarded as a progress towards increasing confusion and death, in a church the space becomes – as Gay WORD AND FLESH 62 EVELYN FURQUIM WERNECK LIMA historic centre and specially in the old Docklands area, recently undergoing a regeneration project1. As other modern cities with a long urban history, Rio de Janeiro Docklands area and its neighborhoods are marked by strong contrasts, with different populations, with distinct lifestyles, which diversity can be defined by economic reasons, corresponding to income or social classes, and social reasons, such as immigration, strong Afro-descendant population, and other causes. The renovation works undertaken for the Olympic Games in 2016, strengthened problems of gentrification and segregation in the region. Encompassing three districts, this region presents interesting architectures to develop performing arts practices, attracting those directors that no longer want to stage in the traditional proscenium arch theatre. In the first chapter of her book Event-Space, entitled ‘Disciplining the bourgeois glory machine’, Dorita Hannah demonstrates the exhaustion of the Italianate stage pattern, in which the proscenium arch separates the audience from performers. Throughout the chapter, Hannah defends a more ephemeral theatre architecture, aiming at a dynamic and eventful character. She emphasizes that as performance became visceral, architecture became more disembodied. For Bernard Tschumi, “architecture is as much about the events that take place in spaces as much as about the spaces themselves”. Mentioning the interactions between architecture and performance in the 1970s, in an interview with Hannah e Khan, Tschumi points out that the discourse should be (...) architecture in an expanded sense whereby the movement of bodies in space was just as important as space itself. Hence the definition of architecture as space, movement, and what happens in it, that is, the action or what I later called the ‘event’. (Tschumi apud Hannah e Khan, 2008, p.52) 1 In spite of the construction of a long, tree-lined boulevard and multiple roadworks, there has been no rehabilitation of the numerous empty, unused buildings in the area. 63 OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA Grounded in this architect’s description of event-space, Hannah formulated a new concept of non-representational spaces based on the generative convergence between architectural theory (as the discourse of space) and the performance theory (as the discourse of events). She states that her book aims to establish “a general theory of spatial performativity through the specificity of performance space, insisting that the built environment housing the event is itself an event” (Hannah, 2018, p.xvi-xviii). The two studies examined in this paper discuss the flexibility of productions that can occur in different alternative spaces. In both cases, the troupes staged plays in industrial structures of historical value, with great repercussions among the spectators. Such structures, in the form of industrial warehouses, are true event-spaces that have brought together diverse and enthusiastic audiences in environments where, in the past, the dockworkers operated. As Marvin Carlson points out, social old spaces are already layered with several associations and memories before they are used for theatrical events (Carlson, 2003) and the two directors who chose the huge and old industrial structures to stage their plays knew how to explore the space as an event. Through scenography, theatre has always transformed scenic boxes into different spaces, but in contemporary times, space itself has transformed theatre. This paper aims to shed light on the occupation and ephemeral transformation of old industrial warehouses-sheds at Rio de Janeiro docklands area into theatrical spaces, examining two productions: Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (The Hinterlands), a production of the Oficina Group (2007), and Machiavelli’s La Mandragola, staged by Companhia Ensaio Aberto (2019). From the Oficina Theatre to a Warehouse: Zé Celso’s Event-Space in Os Sertões (The Hinterlands) The Oficina Group is a theatre company located in São Paulo, founded in 1958. Throughout its history the Oficina Theatre has existed in three different internal configurations: the first (1961-1966), designed by Joaquim Guedes, had two 64 EVELYN FURQUIM WERNECK LIMA seating areas with the stage in the middle, while the second (1967), designed by Flávio Império, had a revolving stage and concrete tiered seats. The third and current configuration, planned and built by architects Lina Bo Bardi and Edson Elito in the 1980s, transformed the building into its current ‘street-theatre’ configuration (Lima, 2018). In 1993, director José Celso Martinez Correa (known as Zé Celso) re-opened his Oficina Theatre in São Paulo featuring a revolutionary architecture2. Since the early 21st century, Zé Celso has developed his approach to stage drama that combines music, poetry recitation, dance, performance, epic theatre, popular game, party and carnival, which he calls ‘tragediacomediorgya’, revealed in productions such as Os Sertões (The Hinterlands). It is worth remembering that the Oficina Theatre is currently a space designated to the democratization of culture, adopting a social approach and allowing a huge range of artistic and political manifestations to be spread among all people, no matter what social class they belong to. Architect Lina Bo Bardi’s design reused the old structure of the 1920s and created a ‘theatre as a street’ – with a longitudinal stage that connects the entrance to the backstage of the theatre, taking advantage of a very long, narrow building, whose interior was demolished. Metal parts support the new roofs and mezzanines superimposed on the background of the building. The metal galleries arranged along this walkway/stage, on both sides, have three levels, allowing actors to act as spectators. Besides, the audience can circulate among the machinery, the screens, the musicians and even the director’s office, which are visible to the audience, as the architects had designed (Lima, 2018). But this solution for a linear stage, allowing the audience to participate in the play from the scaffolding galleries or the walkway sides has become so peculiar to the Oficina Group that recently, Zé Celso has put together spaces similar to his Oficina Theatre sited in São Paulo in the different cities where he performed 2 The Oficina Theatre was recently listed by The Guardian newspaper as one of the ten best theatres in the world. 65 his five plays based upon Euclides da Cunha’s most famous epic novel Os Sertões (The Hinterlands)3. One of the cities he moved with those plays was Rio de Janeiro, from 2nd to 14th October 2007. At that occasion, Zé Celso specified, We want to install a structure as close as possible to the original so that people feel that they are at the Oficina Theatre environment. So, we are concerned with suspending the floor in order to create an underground corridor and keep the galleries for aerial scenes. (Corrêa, 2012, online) To perform Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões in Rio de Janeiro, Zé Celso chose the oldest storage building of the Docklands area in Rio de Janeiro4. On purpose or not, the chosen warehouse is very close to Morro da Providência (Providencia Hill), where the first carioca slum was settled, when soldiers returning from the Canudos War, the main issue of the play, established themselves5. The building keeps historical and ethnographic values, for the importance of the Brazilian identity memory, as a symbol of a struggle for equity of rights and opportunities for the black population, still in slavery when it was built in 1871. Besides, it was designed by black engineer André Rebouças, who built the construction without the use of slave labor6. Its unique dimension and architectural structure consist of approximately 14.000 m2 distributed among two very high floors and the internal space features 168 meters of extension and 3 José Celso Martinez Corrêa dramatized the novel Os Sertões (The Hinterlands) by Euclides da Cunha. The book is divided into three parts: “The Earth”, “The Man” and “The Struggle”, which, in the Oficina Theatre, were unfolded in five: Earth (The Shell Award 2005), The Man I; The Man II, The Struggle I and II. 4 This relevant industrial heritage was listed by the IPHAN - The National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute in 2016. The Galpão Docas Pedro II is the oldest in the Docklands area and is adjacent to the old Cais do Valongo, an ancient wharf where enslaved Africans landed in Rio de Janeiro for more than a century, so there is a strong relationship of belonging between the shed and the residents, mostly Afrodescendants. 5 Like other Oficina Theatre’s productions, Os Sertões is another chapter of the group’s struggle for many decades against a business group that plans to build a huge shopping center and skyscrapers suffocating the listed and historical theatre. It is the ancient struggle between culture and savage capitalism. 6 Slavery in Brazil was only extinguished in May 1888. OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA 66 36 meters wide. The ritualistic, dithyrambic features of this production have been perfectly adapted to the basilica shape of the building, which, such as a Paleo-Christian church, presents a very large and high central nave and two shorter lateral aisles, divided on two floors. The use of this old non-theatrical space to exhibit a play that has been performed during 26 hours in five days attests how architecture can interfere with dramaturgical meaning. The hard seats, arranged along the lateral aisles, suggest that the audience attend the theatre, not for comfort, but to stimulate thought and imagination. Throughout the play, images of actors and audience were recorded in real time and projected on a large screen and interacted with a live musical band. No boundaries have been established between audience and stage. Sometimes the actors came up to the stands and spectators descended and came into the scenic area, fraternizing with the actors (Lima, 2017). Such ‘found space’ corresponds exactly to the concept of an architecture which is not limited to its dimensions and aesthetics but absorbs the dimensions of the bodies of the people who use it, as suggested by Andrew Filmer (2006, p.24). How did the architecture of the deactivated warehouse contribute to the dramaturgy? Why do I consider this production to be a real proposal for a performance in motion? In seeking to understand the nature of the sertanejo man who bravely resisted during the Canudos War, the writer Euclides da Cunha reviews the formation of Brazilian society, its indigenous origin and its beliefs in the masterful work Os Sertões. (Cunha, 2012 [1902]). Zé Celso’s adaptation is an anthropophagic production and in constant transformation, understanding the anthropophagy introduced by Oswald de Andrade as the fight against the violence applied by the colonizer when imposing an imported culture, enslaving and killing the EVELYN FURQUIM WERNECK LIMA 67 natives7 (Andrade, 1928). In the episode The Man I, he shows the European colonizer copulating with the slaves since they entered the ships in Africa, originating the typical Brazilian man, a result of miscegenation. In Zé Celso and the team of Teatro Oficina’s viewpoint, it is the story of the Brazilian Man from colonial times up to the Canudos War when the Nietzschean “Zarathustra”8 appeared in the Northeastern “sertão”: the leading character of Antônio Conselheiro represented 7 Oswald de Carvalho was a Brazilian modernist scholar who wrote ‘The Manifesto Antropófago’ published in Revista de Antropofagia, No. 1, May 1928. This manifesto proposes the de-catechization of the Brazilian people, intending to “devour” culture and religion imposed on Brazil by the colonizer, proposing to “swallow” the European cultural legacy and “digest” it in the form of typically Brazilian art. 8 For Nietzsche, Zarathustra was a “dionysiac monster”. In O Nascimento da Tragédia, 1992, p, 27. (Birth of Tragedy). OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA Figure 1. Zé Celso himself acts as the main character of the Canudos War, the religious leader Antonio Conselheiro, as a Nietzschean “Zarathustra”, surprising all performers and audience together. 2007. Courtesy of Teatro Oficina 68 by Zé Celso himself, in his mature age9. Reflecting on the episodes of the civil war that took place in Canudos at the end of the 19th century, the production of Os Sertões is also a great poetic libel in favor of the struggle for the construction of the Stadium Theatre already conceived in the project by Lina Bo Bardi and Edson Elito in the years 1980. The proposal to expand the space for a Stadium Theatre, in the “Greek-tropical” way, according to José Celso Martinez Corrêa, was inspired by Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago by (1928)10. In addition to believing in the power of art in social intervention through the cult of Dionysus, also defended by Nietzsche (1992 [1872]), in the Brazilian 9 Antônio Conselheiro was a Brazilian religious leader who assumed a messianic dimension by leading the Arraial de Canudos, a small settlement in the hinterland of Bahia that attracted thousands of countrymen, among peasants, Indians, and newly freed slaves. The Republican Army destroyed the settlement in the so-called Canudos War in 1896. Both the Catholic Church and the wealthy colonels in the region abhorred Conselheiro. 10 See note 7. EVELYN FURQUIM WERNECK LIMA Figure 2. One can notice the magic of the literature transformation into a sung spectacle, fully shared with the audience that occupies the steep bleachers installed on the side wings of the shed or standing along the central lane. 2007. Courtesy of Teatro Oficina 69 solid relationship between politics and anthropophagy, Zé Celso is also inspired by the eschatological proposals of Antonin Artaud (1958 [1937]). As one can observe in Os Sertões the strong Artaudian influence is reflected in what the body has most relevant, including in many scenes, the naked body. When telling the story through songs and lyrics, the group is inspired by the Greek choir and the Nietzschean notion that Dionysius’ creative and impetuous force comes from music. By transposing this powerful literary work to the theatre, Zé Celso generated a theatrical language that he called Carnival Opera. But the most amazing is that he transformed the play into a real fight, making a metaphor between the Canudos War and the Teatro Oficina fight against a well-known businessman, which has been carried on for more than 30 years11. 11 All the information can be confirmed in letters and manifestoes available in http://teatroficina.com. br/uzyna-uzona/Acessed Dec. 2019. OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA Figure 3. The magnitude of the spectacle in constant movement transforms the shed into an event-space with actors and audience moving from the street to the interior of the huge warehouse. Courtesy of Teatro Oficina 70 The very configuration that Zé Celso created inside the historic shed, with a central nave resembling a true temple, highlighted the ritualistic aspect of the Canudos War heroes’saga, which the director himself had already staged at the Oficina Theatre and in so many “found places” in several Brazilian cities, always in unusual spaces that left a strong mark on the history of Brazilian theatre in contemporary times, emphasizing how non-purposed built architecture can contribute to dramaturgy. Machiavelli’s La Mandragola: a Companhia Ensaio Aberto Production at the Armazém da Utopia While in Zé Celso’s production of Os Sertões at Docas D. Pedro II Warehouse Nietzsche’s philosophical theories and Artaud’s proposals for the Theatre of Cruelty emerge, in Luiz Fernando Lobo’s production of La Mandragola at Armazém da Utopia it is Brecht’s epic theatre that inspires the performance. Directed by Luiz Fernando Lobo since 1992, the Companhia Ensaio Aberto is a theatre group located in Rio de Janeiro that performs a relevant cultural and social work to the city because of the social and transforming nature of its productions. Focusing on the Brazilian political and economic reality, the group attracts an audience not habitually used to attend plays. Alongside intellectuals and habitual theatregoers, trade unionists and students always come to join the productions staged by the group, developing a politicized and critical view to discuss Brazilian people’s reality. Grounded in Brechtian theories, the company established a new stage-audience relationship and abandoned the Italianate illusionist stage to foster recognition of the masses’ transformative power. Besides, to reach a larger audience, the company staged its first productions outside the purposed theatrical building and held open roundtables and lectures to discuss dramaturgy and social issues concerning authors and plays. The group’s first production, O Cemitério dos Vivos (The Cemetery of Living People), was staged at the UFRJ – The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro old building, EVELYN FURQUIM WERNECK LIMA 71 which was a former hospice in which Lima Barreto, author of the original novel, had been a patient. Another production, called The Mission, was staged at the Imperial Palace, in the city centre, ‘to give greater access to the population working in downtown and to those who live on the outskirts of the city’, as stated by Luiz Fernando Lobo (2019). Those choices for staging in unusual places of the city already prove the mobility of the company’s productions. To implement its international reference project, after years of struggle and resistance, the company occupied in 2016 Warehouse-Shed n.6 and its annex belonging to the Rio de Janeiro Dock Company (CDRJ) and named it Armazém da Utopia (Utopia Warehouse)12. This industrial structure is currently the headquarters of the Companhia Ensaio Aberto, although the troupe constantly changes the different spaces within the huge shed to stage their productions. In this paper I analyse Machiavelli’s popular comedy La Mandragola, which premiered on October 26, 2019, at the Armazém da Utopia with a free season, open to the general public, schools, and unions workers. As the scholar of modern political thought, Machiavelli emphasizes in his text the contradictions between public and private, the play was staged in a sole setting, featuring a public square in Florence, that is, no scene is private because everything happens on the street. To house the piazza where the Renaissance comedy takes place, director Luiz Fernando Lobo built, inside the vacant warehouse-shed, specifically in its annex, a rough arena in a recessed rectangular space, surrounded by rustic wood bleachers, with three large tables and staircases as a piazza. As the Companhia Ensaio Aberto’s staging departs from the tradition of improvised stages and orality, a troupe of minstrels and jokers are always on the scene, as ‘the people’. Reassuring the popular theatre tradition, the company is inspired by the Brechtian theatre, the epic theatre before Brecht, the fair theatre, 12 The industrial structure stands out for its contrast between the massive masonry of exposed brick and the slenderness of the iron pillars. As the area is very extensive, the Company’s productions often move within the huge shed. OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA 78 79 Embodiment as knowledge production Modernity has produced an unwavering faith in progress, defined through rational, technological and scientific methods. This progress stands on the graveyards of multiple alternative epistemologies of knowing the world and knowing ourselves. Can we imagine a tomorrow that is based on feeling, therefore being; rather than Descartes’ knowing, therefore being? (Descartes, 2003). As Somatic Experiencing® founder & trauma-therapist Peter Levine writes: Most people, if asked the question, “How do you know that you’re alive?” would speculate with something like, “Well, because...” But that just isn’t the answer, it can’t be. The way we know we’re alive is rooted in our capacity to feel, to our depths, the physical reality of aliveness embedded within our bodily sensations-through direct experience. This, in short, is embodiment. (Levine, 2010, pp.286-287) In relation to the dichotomous construction of the rational over other ways (such as feeling) of knowing the world, architecture too is one of the products of this epistemic loss, and remains complicit. So, a question becomes, how can THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW: NEW FORMS OF RADICAL TOGETHERNESS IN AUDIENCEPARTICIPATORY DANCE THEATRE STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ 80 architecture integrate models from disciplines like dance, somatic therapy, and theatre, to make spaces for alternative orientations to the world and to cultural production? This paper explores how the combination of sensing into the history of existing spaces and the method of generating social choreographies proposes a new way of creating dance and theatre; one that gives priority to affect, empathy and resonance. The contemporary dance scene in the United Kingdom is made up of makers working at the edges of critical dance practices that explore questions around what an audience is, is asked to do, and what a performance is and can do. In Spirit Compass (2019), choreographed by Lucy Suggate, audiences are invited to dive into deep existential reflection over three 45-minute drumming meditations, watching performers “slip through the cracks and re-integrate, repurpose and reorganise in order to be more-than-human” (Suggate, 2019). In their work Slug Horizons, Florence Peake and Eve Stainton explore “the expressive potentialities STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ Figure 1. Constellations, directed by the author, the show opens with the audience being invited to waltz by a cast of seven archetypal characters. This image features performer Sara Ruddock with a member of the audience, photographed by Camilla Greenwell and presented at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, June 2019, London, UK 81 of queer bodies through intimacy, touch and collective reclaiming. Promoting an emotional landscape of bravery in response to restrictive attitudes to the sensual and visceral body, Slug Horizons elevates the marginalized affection, sexuality, power and energies within non-normative relationships” (Peake & Stainton, 2018). All three of these artists, and their respective works create unique proposals towards how a space of encounters, oftentimes within a museum or gallery, can be used and re-purposed towards the needs of the collective experience. As choreographer Mette Edvardsen writes: I think dance is not primarily a visual art form. It is also about other senses, and how the senses are working together. Seeing, listening, feeling, but also remembering, imagining and thinking. I think of choreography as writing, which doesn’t mean that it needs to be language, but also not an opposite to language, and maybe not as visual. (Edvardsen, 2017, p.217) I have often wondered about the ways in which architectural and choreographic methodologies may overlap in a meaningful way; beyond the trends of creating representations of ritual in visual arts spaces. Show after show, I observe that our current relationship to technology is, perhaps paradoxically, moving in step with a need for sensation, for empathy, for resonance, and so the notion of ritual as artistic practice is emerging with every curatorial turn1. In this instance, Peter Levine’s work acts as an interface linking these needs to bodily experience: As social creatures, it is through empathy that we make our deepest communications. To do this we must be able to ‘resonate’ with the sensations and emotions of others; we must, in other words, be able to feel the same things 1 See for example Sarah Shin’s talk ‘The Ritual Turn from Tarot to Tantra’ at Tate Modern (January 2020), and her co-curation of ‘Tender Intervals’ at the ICA (February 2020). THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW 82 as those around us feel. The way we indicate this is primarily nonverbal; it is through our postures and expressive emotions. (Levine, 2010, p.42) In my practice, the purpose of architecture and the performing arts is to craft experiences within spaces where guests can participate with empathic resonance towards history and towards each other. As a choreographer and architect, I prompt you with the following question: what can our disciplines do to bring audiences closer to more tangible experiences of connecting to their ancestry, of connecting to belief systems that are different to their own, of creating meaningful relationships with strangers, and with the unknown? I would like to accompany you through the reflection and description of the key milestones of my latest research project, Radical Togetherness (201718), and the dance-theatre show that emerged out of it, Constellations (2019), in which I explore these questions and concerns. The contracts of consent in being radically together In 2016 I joined choreographer Meg Stuart in a series of interventions in the city of Vienna during the ImpulsTanz International Dance Festival. Churches, hospitals, museums and public swimming pools became sites of improvisational encounters responding to the choreographer’s brief of practicing “love (as) the agreement”. Museums quickly became hostile environments, policed by security guards scared that century-old artwork would get damaged, whilst churches turned a blind eye towards what could have easily been read as ritualistic practice. Once the director of the Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien learnt that acclaimed choreographer Meg Stuart was in the museum’s jurisdiction, performing a guerrilla-choreographic-intervention, an invitation was immediately made for us to come back the following day, to do it all again. Refusing the invitation, Stuart prompted us with the question “What is radical togetherness?”. This is how Radical Togetherness was born, a series of London-based interventions bringing diverse artists into unconventional performance spaces, questioning STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ 83 which artistic practices are allowed within non-theatrical institutional spaces? Based on the research in Vienna the previous year, I recognized that churches and museums sat on opposite ends of a spectrum between freedom and censorship, respectively. The model I based my method and research on was a body of work called Crash Landings, which Meg Stuart and her collaborators produced between 1996 and 1999: Three choreographers, Meg Stuart, Christine De Smedt and David Hernandez, joined forces and visions to devise an interdisciplinary improvisation performance series that became perhaps the most daunting and definitely biggest improvisation series in the still recent history of European contemporary dance. Interdisciplinary in nature, this collaborative project entailed in total the participation of 80 artists who came from disciplines as diverse as dance, music, performance, theatre, scenography, industrial design, visual art, light design, costume and writing. (Imschoot, 2009, p.104) My first action was to make an open call to professional performers, artists, and students2 at the Architectural Association wanting to take part in a series of experimental and unannounced choreographic interventions in the Turbine Hall (Tate Modern), Curve Gallery (Barbican), and The Store (180 Strand). I invited the participants to use the artworks on display, ranging from film to multimedia installations, as inspirational starting points for creating non-violent improvisational interventions. It soon transpired that the perceived otherness of these sessions was either an intrusion and we were asked to stop, taking away 2 During the Research & Development phase of Radical Togetherness, the following dance artists, choreographers, and performers were invited to partake: Roni Katz, Alice Heyward, Jen Rosenblit, Nassia Fourtouni, Cécile Tonizzo, Lynda Rahal, Katharina Hölzl, Robert Malmborg, Emma Zangs, Eva Recacha, Siobhan Ni Dhuinnin; musician Liam Byrne, artists Pati de Souza Leão Müller and Pete Qiang Dong; and the following students from the AA School of Architecture: Andreas Stylianou, Joyce Chen, Tamara Rasoul, Ziyad Mourad, Chuck Wang, Marion Delaporte, Leticia Dadalto, Daria Moussavi, Jack Hardy and Oliver Savorani. THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW 84 the attention from the actual artwork that was on display, or we were ignored all together for it was all too queer to make sense of. It was the moments when the other members of public in the space were invited to join in with us, sometimes to participate in a touch exercise or a moving train3, that affect became more tangible. I come to the question of what constitutes an invitation in audience participatory performance? The last decade of work by choreographer Raja Feather Kelly introduced me to the notion of the agency of spectatorship. In their most recent work, We May Never Dance Again (2019) audiences confront the uncertainty of being spectators within a space that is deeply occupied by its own cultural production. Audiences are invited to question what it means to be voyeurs and watchers, and at what point silence becomes as complicit as loudness. The transactional nature of purchasing a ticket no longer stands in for either an invitation or consent, and this was central in thinking through the implications of Radical Togetherness which neither sought an audience, nor entered into clear transactional agreements. In the museum, we soon began to identify the difference between participating by watching versus participating by moving. When members of the public were able to visually recognise certain socially choreographed forms, or resemblances of gatherings, the invitation to participate was easier to negotiate and accept. What further facilitated joining in was the scale of anonymity in the space, the difference of hosting at least a hundred individuals, a mass, rather than a handful of spectators. Once repetition was witnessed, such as a line of twenty people facing the same direction, walking or crawling with hands on each other’s shoulders, more people would join in. What emerged from these interventions was a suggestion that the invitation for social choreographies was much more accessible 3 A human moving-train involved one participant placing their hands on the shoulders of another, both facing the same direction. Gradually the line of people kept growing, until the direction of movement and manner of interaction was clear to follow. Once a fully formed train of people was formed, the first person would initiate a series of movements that would escalate down the line in a domino effect. This exercise, when performed without touch, is often referred to as flocking in contemporary dance teachings. STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ 85 than individualized modes of authentic movement expression. Despite audience agreement and affective participation, the impermeability of the museums’ rules and regulations still remained, under the watchful eyes of ushers and security staff. In 2019, visual artist Anne Imhof presented Sex, a compilation of her most famous works at The Tanks at Tate Modern. What was presented as an exciting possibility to explore atmospheric environments was curtailed by security guards continuously escorting audience members out of the venue, that is, those who attempted to engage with the work by responding to the cast’s physical provocations. Audience-participation in this context was validated so long as it abided by standards where the performer replaced the art-object: Don’t touch the art, keep a minimum distance of one meter from the art, do not film, do not photograph with flash, etc. As critic Adrian Searle writes for the Guardian: The performers in Sex make you feel uncertain whether your presence is welcome. Meet their eyes and you get a good hard stare, or an expression of distain. Poking my head into a dark corner, a woman gives me a baleful look, and a young man’s implacable expression tells me to fuck off. It’s like being in a darkroom at a sex club. There is an etiquette. Don’t get too close, don’t interfere, no touching without consent. And then some guy pogos into me, and elbows his way between the viewers. What are the limits? Where should I be? Is eye contact allowed? (Searle, 2019) These experiences of the institutionalizing gaze of the museum led me to reflect on what spaces are void of protocol but whose foundations, walls and roofs still hold the semiotic history of protocol, ritual and spirit? This is what led me to choose repurposed or de-commissioned churches as the sites of future exploration. The architectural structures in this instance become the art-objects themselves, absent of rules and regulations regarding contact, distancing, media presence and audience-engagement. THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW 86 The g[hosts] that live on when an architecture is left to die In the summer of 2018, I began working on a group-show entitled Constellations, a two-and-a-half hour gathering in the round, a piece of unconventional dancetheatre that sat at the crossroads of a travelling circus, a dark comedy, ballroom, and phantasmagorical club hosted by ghostly archetypes. In the atmospheric settings that we designed, audiences were invited to reconsider who holds marginal and dominant roles within social spaces. Who leads and who follows? Who is in charge? Is the choreographer always directing? Is the lighting designer always fixed behind a lighting desk? Are the technicians only meant to operate behind the curtains and wear black attire? Can the theatre’s staff be part of the show in a socially meaningful manner? Can the audience decide which route the show will take? Gender fluidity and social dancing were called upon to explore new ways of understanding contemporary social politics and the idea of radical togetherness. This involved not only the invitation for audiences and performers STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ Figure 2. Radical Togetherness, directed by the author, the first of three public sharings of Research and Development for the show Constellations. This image features performers Pau Aran Gimeno, Roni Katz & Charlie Cattrall, photographed by Moad Musbahi and presented at Asylum Chapel, August 2018, London, UK 87 to interact in a direct manner, but also for artists with radically diverse artistic practices to share airtime and stage-space at the same time while finding a way in which to perform through their artistic differences. Our concern was not only focused on how to engage audiences in theatre, and how to advance notions of immersive performance within existing non-theatrical spaces, but rather how to bridge the conventional theatrical experience with the site-specific histories of the spaces and cities that lie outside of the black box. Representation is inescapable, so what does it mean to embody the stories of the characters we dance and narrate? How does architecture serve the embodiment of a story’s context? How does choreography serve it? What is the purpose of costume and drag in this instance? The beginning of our creation period for Constellations, involved the inhabitation of two derelict church-sites in London for the presentation of the work’s early development. The first event took place in Caroline Gardens Chapel, located in a former early-19th century almshouse estate, “a house where paupers are supported at the public expense; a poorhouse. Also a house set apart for the aged poor free of rent” (Brewer, 2001, p.35). This specific almshouse once housed disparate, mentally ill and retired members of Peckham’s Victorian community, who could seek refuge and sanctuary. Today, the space is known as Asylum Chapel, and is offered as a dry-hire venue, rented by an arts organization from the local council, sub-let to artists for performances and weddings. It is a very current example of a space that was once an asylum and is now easily monetized for its semiotics and alternative appearance. The second space we inhabited was the Welsh Chapel, a former Presbyterian Church in the heart of London’s Soho area, formerly known as the nightclub Limelight. Today it’s run by a non-for-profit arts organization, looking to advance the fringe dance and theatre scene. As one could imagine, Asylum Chapel and Stone Nest are merely two, grade-II listed buildings; out of a handful of others of the kind that one comes across in a large metropolis like London. It’s not a coincidence that performing arts organizations have found THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW 94 A couple of weeks before Constellations premiered, I was at a loss as to how all of these varied practices and fields would weave their way together. It had become a challenge to integrate all the collaborators’ varied artistic practices into one cohesive show, whilst retaining an abundance of content generated from each of our site-specific church improvisations. What did we learn by performing in the churches? How could we possibly convey the immensity of the stories we felt in an ever-changing neutralized theatrical space? How do we negotiate what are often unspoken contracts with audiences that we have never met before? At STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ Figure 4. Constellations, directed by the author. This image features performer Sara Ruddock, Pau Aran Gimeno, Roni Katz, Charlie Cattrall and Katye Coe performing the ritual sacrifice of the Fool, photographed by Camilla Greenwell and presented at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, June 2019, London, UK 95 this stage I facilitated a Systemic Constellation9 in service to the work, where the piece as a meta-physical entity became the client, the cast became participants to their own performance, and I acted as facilitator. Twenty volunteers acted as representatives—characters featuring in our process so far, being invited into the deep end of our group process to help the ensemble discern what material, both personal and fictional, to keep and which to let go of. After four shows, the question still remains: how little or how much audience participation does one need to arrive to meaningful modes of resonance, both with the individuals and with the collective as whole? I position this enquiry by referencing two different dance & theatre works dealing with notions of time and knowledge production, addressing audience participation in very different ways. The first is No-How Generator (2019) by choreographer Matthias Sperling, which explores the neuroscientific and hypnotic effects of looped sound & voice and carefully constructed lighting design. Over the span of an hour, audiences are somatically transported into deep energy wells of contemplation, spiritual dissociation and expansion. The second is A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (2016) by artist Taylor Mac, where “the audience participation is almost constant, pushing us way out of our comfort zone and ensuring that we remain engaged”. After 24 hours of staying awake in a show, a different state of spectatorship is achieved, for “staying up for such a long time has a strange effect on one’s state of mind”. These two enchanting opuses made me reflect on our methodologies of incantational duration versus quick fire participation. I decided to look for a way to titrate the show’s mood between moments of high activation and moments of subdued relaxation. 9 The labels “sculpture”, “reconstruction”, and “constellation” are often used synonymously. They refer to a method in which persons are “set up” as representatives of elements of a system in a space. When present this way, observers or therapists can elicit information about a system that would otherwise be nearly impossible to gather at the same level of complexity through verbal means. Depending upon the theoretical model used by the therapist, the information gathered has to do with the quality of the relationships between members or with the structural characteristics of the system. As with psychodrama, situations can be reproduced in various time periods, including the present, the past, and a possible future through the use of sculptures (Franke, 2003, pp.27-28). THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW 96 Whilst the systemic constellation achieved a depth of empathy and resonance in a short period of time through constant physical audience-participation, the actual shows relied on durational intermittent participation to reach similar wells of emotion. The choice I had to make was between therapeutizing a theatrical experience or theatricalizing a therapeutic context. The former lent itself better and more unobtrusively to our creative process. What resulted was a two-anda-half-hour medley of vignettes where audiences were in constant flux between scenes of trance-like meditation and dynamic social dancing. What I propose in conclusion is an invitation towards re-thinking the ways in which we gather and the practices that we share when we do. In hindsight I might say that the more radical performances dealing with architectural historical resonance were the ones that happened in the church-sites with more intimate audience numbers. These moments held a level of improvisation and honesty through non-representation that were made possible by the environment and context we were in. On the other hand, when these ancestral stories were shown at Sadler’s Wells, translated through the spectacle of set, costumes, lighting, and technology, the entire experience was elevated technically, whilst placing the non-representational narrative under greater strain. What I observed through the audience-participatory lens was that the audiences in the churches were invited to embody the felt narrative of the space through a more literal experience, conversation, and contact with the performers. The architecture of the churches did away with the need for theatricality, leaving us in service to the sunlight, weather, temperature and g[hosts] of the edifice. The difference between the performances and their respective venues was almost incomparable, leaving me with even more questions about the ways in which we might theatricalize unconventional performance sites, or perhaps not at all. Architecture serves a central purpose here. It is a container that holds performances, human encounters, and social choreographies disguised as the systemic constellations of our lives. The research and performance work I have done so far suggests that we must look to the spaces that we currently have STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ 97 access to, the built and unbuilt environments that have served one or many purposes and now sit waiting or slumbering. Sensing into the geo-social ancestry of these spaces offers an effective way of telling a story, of creating theatre. Translating those stories from performer to audience holds the possibility for empathy to be generated between the living and the dead, the forgotten, and the missing. It is this moment of translation which is key. What I learned from Radical Togetherness was that the unpolished storytelling of felt experiences and exchanges brought greater humanity to the methods and processes of public engagement. To achieve similar impacts within the black-box required a greater level of trust-building, as we competed with the inherent social protocols of what the theatre traditionally allows for or doesn’t. I end with an invitation. In the extraordinary times that we are currently living in, don’t be afraid to risk updating the traditions of spatiality, orientation and audience engagement. One definition of trauma is the fixation of an idea, structure or protocol, and without THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW Figure 5. Constellations, directed by the author. This image features performer Roni Katz with a member of audience, photographed by Camilla Greenwell and presented at Sadler’s Wells Theatre, June 2019, London, UK 98 that fixation, we might just be surprised by all the possibilities that the unknown can offer us. This paper is self-funded by Studio Stefan Jovanović. The research project Radical Togetherness and dancetheatre show Constellations, depicted and referenced, was funded by Arts Council England. A special thanks to all the participants of Radical Togetherness and Constellations including performers Roni Katz, Katye Coe, Charlie Cattrall, Sara Ruddock, Pau Aran Gimeno, composer Domenico Angarano, singer Bliss Carmxn, garment artist Curtis Oland, mask-maker Damselfrau, Sadler’s Wells artistic programmer Eva Martinez, project producer Robyn Cabaret, production assistant Christopher Haddow and technical team, Siobhan Davies and Lauren Wright, Asylum Chapel and Maverick Projects, Stone Nest, and the dramaturgical support of Frank Bock and Jonathan Burrows. The photographs featuring in the paper were taken by Camilla Greenwell and Moad Musbahi and are copyright of Stefan Jovanović. STEFAN JOVANOVIĆ 99 THE KINSHIPS OF TOMORROW References ANDERSSON, Danjel; EDVARDSEN, Mette & SPÅNGBERG, Mårten (eds.) (2017). Post-Dance. Stockholm: MDT, p.217. BREWER, Ebenezer Cobham (2006). The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Based on the original book by Ebenezer Cobham Brewer. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, p.35. CASTELLUCCI, Claudia; CASTELLUCCI, Romeo; GUIDI, Chiara; KELLEHER, Joel & RIDOUT, Nicholas (2007). The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Oxford: Routledge, p.203. DAVIES, Siobhan (2019). Torchlight Artist Programme. Artist’s Website. https://www.siobhandavies.com/work/torchlight-artist-programme/ DEBORD, Guy (1955). Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Translated by Ken Knabb. Paris: Les Lèvres Nues #6. DESCARTES, René & DESMOND, M. Clarke (2003). Discourse on Method and Related Writings. London: Penguin Books, p.25. DONALDSON, Gaye (2018). The Centre for Systemic Constellations. London: Applied Training Book, pp.36-27. FERNANDES, Ciane (2001). Pina Bausch and the Wuppertal Dance Theatre, The Aesthetics of Repetition and Transformation. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., p.84. FRANKE, Ursula (2003). The River Never Looks Back: Historical and Practical Foundations of Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations. 2nd edition. Heidelberg: Carl Auer International, pp.27-28. KELLY, Raja Feather (2019). We May Never Dance Again® // the feath3r theory. Artist’s Website. https://www.theinvisibledog.org/all/2019/5/2/we-may-never-dance-again-the-feath3r-theory\ LEVINE, Peter A. & MATE, Gabor (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, pp.42, 286-287. NEEDHAM, Alex (2016). “Taylor Mac review-24-hour-long pop show is everything” in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/oct/10/taylor-mac-24-hour-history-of-popular-music-review\ PEAKE, Florence & STAINTON, Eve (2018). “Slug Horizons / Kneading Paradise” in Artist’s website. http://www.florencepeake.com/http/wwwflorencepeakecom/rite-on-this-pliant-body-we-slip-our-wow PEETERS, Jeroen & STUART, Meg (eds.) (2010). Are We Here Yet? Damaged Goods, Meg Stuart. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, p.104. SEARLE, Adrian (2019). “Anne Imhof: ‘Sex, But Not As You Know It’” in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/27/anne-imhof-interview-sex-performance-arttate-modern SUGGATE, Lucy (2019). Spirit Compass – Where There is Movement There is Change. Edinburgh. Online https://www.lucysuggate.com/#/spirit/ WINGENROTH, Lauren (2018). “We Need To Talk About Non-Consensual Audience Participation” in Dance Magazine. https://www.dancemagazine.com/we-need-to-talk-about-non-consensual-audienceparticipation-2611218336.html 100 101 THEATRICAL ARCHITECTURAL BUILDINGS AND COMMUNITY: TEATRO CONTÊINER MUNGUNZÁ LUÍSA PINTO Recent set design distances itself from the pictorial two-dimensionality that characterized stage architecture for many years. The three-dimension space in the scene exploration is connected with the modern theatre renovation and it began with Adolphe Appia, who turned the scenic space into a laboratory of possibilities. Appia refused realism or naturalism and used expressive and symbolic elements of theatre, music and light. He was the first one to use shadows in the stage, creating spaces with more depth and distance, thereby suggesting new theatre lighting concepts (Appia, s/a). This Swiss theatre director and set designer understood light to be an essential tool in stage’s life. For Appia, the dramatic work should be an expression of movement in space; the movable body in space supported by words, sounds and musical rhythmic times that determine the duration of movements. Only in this way could staging be the basis for a work of art. However, the need of arts’ emancipation lead artists to leave the conventional places intended for artistic creation and, consequently, to occupy the streets and alternative spaces; becoming closer to the audience and people. 102 LUÍSA PINTO Recently, lots of creators devote themselves to artistic creations taking place in non-conventional spaces. These are different spaces that can be turned into theatrical places, where the artistic shows can be performed. The architectonic building becomes another dramaturgical element, allowing new possibilities of artistic experimentation in the occupation of scenic space. In João Mendes Ribeiro’s words: (...) a stage even deprived of any scenographic elements can be an object and inspiration of multiple appropriations. It can make a space of qualified performance, insofar as it allows the audience to project itself, with a huge imaginative freedom, in the absence of scenarios or scenic elements that usually build the sense of what is seen. (Ribeiro, 2007, pp.84-85) Thus, we can understand that when the stage action is moved into a nonconventional space the occupation of that space will allow new perspectives regarding the questions presented by the theatrical text, insofar as the architectonic building becomes part of the action. Thus, the following questions arise: what roles the theatrical architectural buildings have been performing, recently? To what extent the spatial arrangement influences the artistic object creation in contemporaneity, allowing a greater proximity with the audience and how it redefines itself in new functions and by new social actors contributing to the appreciation of the dimension of place. Artistic proposals have exploded in a multiplicity of ways searching for answers to the demands of each time, always in connection with political, economic, social, cultural and technological revolutions (Walter, 1994). For example modern theatre directors have been questioning the function of theatre, so they started researching new possibilities of communication between the stage and the audience, proposing reflections about the spectator’s role, what raises a productive attitude concerning the scene. This issue is ongoing and it is understood as one feature of contemporary theatre 103 THEATRICAL ARCHITECTURAL BUILDINGS AND COMMUNITY: TEATRO CONTÊINER MUNGUNZÁ (Desgranges, 2011). The importance of this new research field is clear and gives relevance to projects whose artistic concerns are allied with ethical and social questions, which allows us to understand that these changes reveal a will to educate and transform in modern artistic creation. It is important to understand these trends in theatremaking as a consequence of the need to communicate and the urgency of finding adequate answers to contemporary issues, through the local and collective construction of spaces of intervention, where the architectonic buildings are regarded as platforms of human-dimension derived from creative processes (Figure 1). The Mungunzá Contêiner Theatre arises as an exemplary architecture project whose aims are inscribed in the built object for artistic creation in articulation with the community and its territory, such as: the debureaucratization and democratization of access to Art, Culture and Citizenship, through an intensive Figure 1. Contêiner Theatre, 2018. Photograph: Victor Lemini 110 111 FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM KATARZYNA ZAWISTOWSKA Footbridge auditorium Nowadays, theatre is perhaps the last place with public character where we can experience our emotions and question our true selves. But, are we really able to create a common place where we can be present together at the very moment? As stage has been changing due to technology and its visual convention, I have been wondering if changing the spatial organisation of auditorium will have an impact on the perception of performance? 1. Architecture of auditorium The main subject of my research is auditorium as a spatial structure and its impact on the sense of perception. In my opinion, the question about a new type of auditorium is very current. What is the next spatial form of the auditorium which may give viewers more freedom in experiencing their own behaviour and participation in performance? We distinguish between two types of auditoriums which we are mostly familiar with, namely: amphitheatrical auditorium and gallery auditorium. Both are designed in order to hear and see what happens on the stage by taking an advantage of the two senses mentioned above. 112 Even if our understanding of visual perception has advanced recently, we should remember about the role of other senses in our perception of any performance. We gain more confidence to support it with various senses. Consequently, it is important to realise, how different the way in which a spectator perceives performance today is than it was 100 years ago. I am convinced, that we should shift our focus towards spectator as a main user of theatrical space, who is already aware of relational aesthetics (Bishop, 2004) and participating art (Bishop, 2012). The sensory impressions that our body receives, related to the reading of space in motion, could be used in theatre. The kinaesthetic sense could be a new tool in creating the spectacle! If viewers are allowed to change their observation point during performance, the question is how spectacle itself, its space and set design should be constructed? Also, auditorium should take on a totally different architectural form. If performances take place outside the theatrical buildings, the auditoriums are created for a site-specific project and formed according to the effect the creators want to achieve. Unfortunately, there is no permanent architectural record of any different forms of auditoriums. While conducting my research I have noticed that if performance is played outside theatre, the amphitheatre type of its structure is commonly used and there is little or no interest in experimenting with new forms of the audience architecture. In my view, this subject deserves greater attention because we simply need a new type of auditorium which will go in line with the needs of contemporary viewers. 2. What is going to change for the spectator? In my opinion auditorium is also a part of public space, where every passerby becomes a viewer right after exceeding the threshold of theatre. It is a performative moment, but after that, the viewer has to be seated in the dark auditorium, and uses three out of his five senses, except from hearing and seeing. KATARZYNA ZAWISTOWSKA 113 In this case, the viewer becomes a passive recipient. That is why an active viewer, who becomes aware through using all senses, is in my field of interest. When reviewing the most of Avant-Garde projects focused on the relations between auditorium and stage, I have realised that they do not present any new idea linked to the perception of performance! Walter Gropius in his Total Theatre (1927) thanks to the mechanical rotating gave us three options of the stage: with audience on one side, stage surrounded by audience from three sides and with a central stage surrounded by audience from all sides (Zuvillaga, 2004). This idea of mechanical rotating was developed in the project of polish architect Szymon Syrkus in his Simultaneous Theatre (1928) in which the stage got more advanced shape of the two rotate rings (Surkusowie, 1930). It is significant that both architects designed amphitheatrical type of auditorium, so viewers become passive in the perception of performance. Even if both projects of theatres include an attractive proposal by bringing film projection inside them or new technology such as hydraulic trapdoors or revolve scenes, unfortunately they have never been built. Nowadays, technology has advanced, and we are able to build these theatres with modern equipment that will facilitate any theatrical production yet, my question is what might be changed for the spectator as a user of an auditorium? Today’s viewers perception has changed, but auditorium reproduces patterns from the past! It is time we searched for a more up-to-date architecture of it. My PhD dissertation was entirely devoted to this problem. I entitled it “Inter|auditorium. Architecture of the auditorium and the city” and defended it at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2013. My thesis justified that today we should not build the auditorium in the way which is so different from the contemporary needs. I pointed out that we should discover a new form of auditorium. We should use the energy which the passerby has outside the theatre before he becomes a viewer. The passer-by can actively observe while moving in space, but the viewer often FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM 114 becomes passive in this respect. Auditorium space can activate the viewer, but this experience requires a new form of it. 3. New auditorium: footbridge auditorium I am suggesting a new type of auditorium: footbridge auditorium. In this auditorium viewers can move and change their viewing position during performance due to the spatial system with ramps and platforms. They do not have to sit at one place like at the traditional auditorium and thus use all their senses, especially kinaesthetic one. How it might work in practice? I have tried to examine this idea in two of my projects. First one, Inter|Theatre was my architectural proposal of the advanced space of Shakespearean theatre (2005). It is the historical fact that in the 17th century the copy of The Fortune Theatre from London was built in Gdańsk. English actors visited this city to give performance. Unfortunately, there was no theatrical building there at that time, so they probably brought the layout of Elizabethan theatres (Limon, 1989). From this moment on, the building made of wood functioned in Gdańsk as a seasonal theatre for almost 200 years. Both the shape and size of the galleries were created in accordance with the square plan of The Fortune Theatre. Three-level galleries with seats were the spatial prototype of the gallery auditorium. In my project the observation area was equipped with the additional structure of bridges and ramps. It was my interference in the aforementioned gallery auditorium. This structure allows viewers to participate in any performance and change their viewing position. In my model, this structure is marked in red. I can say that it might be the prototype of footbridge auditorium. My second project named Cicada was a six meters high spatial installation with ramps and platforms made from scaffoldings. I designed and presented it in South Korea during artistic residency by the invitation of Hooyong Performing Arts Centre (2008). The idea was that only one viewer can take part in the KATARZYNA ZAWISTOWSKA 115 performance by climbing up the ramps and simultaneously being in the inner space of this installation. The observation area was only from the ramps and platforms. The viewer was moving and observing the ongoing process on the stage when performer thanks to wearing the coat with wings became just like a cicada. The actor and the viewer were able to meet at the last level of the installation. I think that this experimental installantion might be the prototype of footbridge auditorium. The next question I would like to raise is what the architecture can offer to performing artists today? Perhaps influencing the senses of the recipients is the point at which architecture, both as the art of space creation, and theatre as the art of giving meaning, can inspire each other and look for new solutions in searching for some new forms of the auditorium. It is interesting how the spatial form of auditorium shapes viewers’ behaviour FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM Figure 1. Inter|Theatre was presented during Prague Quadrennial in 2007 on the exhibition connected with 7th OISTAT Theatre Architecture Competition, organised by OISTAT Architecture Commission 116 because social distancing means something different to everyone due to both cultural and social factors. However, some architectural patterns force us to change our behaviour and act the same way as others. What is the essence of the spatial relationship between people in the theatre: between actors, spectators and between spectators themselves? Is it shaped only by theatrical architecture? What may happen if viewers do not have to sit in the armchairs, will it make them more involved in the performance? The variable dynamics of such audience would require a completely different construction of the spectacle’s space. I am fascinated with the moment when an actor will be confronted with the situation in which he meets the viewer face to face. It means that the viewer position in an auditorium will be not entirely predictable. Most of theatrical directors wish to keep control over the performance however, I hope that some of them will be open for the new spatial possibilities. KATARZYNA ZAWISTOWSKA Figure 2. Cicada project was the spatial installation which took place at Hooyong Performing Arts Centre in South Korea in August 2008 117 I will quote here the famous and repeatedly cited beginning of Peter Brook’s book, “The Empty Space”: I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged. (Brook, 1996, p.7) In this first sentence I have exchanged the word stage for the word auditorium: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare (...)” auditorium. The rest of sentence remains untouched and may give us an interesting vision: one man observes another one in the auditorium. This observing man is active, and he is the viewer at the same time. Are we ready to change the paradigm, so far based on active: observed and passive: observer? 4. The typology of auditorium While I have been working on the theory linked to the topic, I decided to go beyond the binary layout of stage versus auditorium. Every stage is governed by its own rules, staging and specialised requirements connected with technology. Also, we know historical and technological transformation of stage very well. I have decided that stage is not entirely in my fields of interest! Thanks to this division, auditorium will free itself from juxtaposing it with stage, recovering its own autonomy as an architectural part of the interiors which consist of the floor, walls and ceiling. These three elements also create the urban interiors but instead of ceiling we have the sky. This distinction was helpful to create the typology that I have taken an advantage of while doing my research. I have prepared the formal typology of auditorium, which presents amphitheatrical auditorium and gallery auditorium. In my typology I have compared plan and section of various theatres, which show that amphitheatrical auditorium is a part of the floor. Whereas gallery auditorium is a part of the wall. I have created FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM 118 spatial models of floors and walls and juxtaposed them together. Consequently, footbridge auditorium might be a part of ceiling as the system of ramps and bridges. All of them are hanging over scene and auditorium. This footbridge auditorium can bring us behind-the-scenes and show us the hidden infrastructure behind the Fourth Wall. I am going to present the models and description of amphitheatrical and gallery auditorium that consist of the typology used in my research. In both cases I analysed the same Théâtre de la Ville in Paris as a very interesting example of exchanging auditorium from the gallery to the amphitheatre. Even though the two types of auditoriums exist in our culture they are not sufficient to the contemporary viewer so I am going to take a closer look at the new type of auditorium: footbridge auditorium which might better to suit the current needs of the viewers. 4.1. The formal typology of amphitheatre auditorium The amphitheatre has its origins in the classical Greek theatre, and it is the first example in my formal typology of amphitheatrical auditorium. I have chosen a few examples which are relevant in the history of theatre construction precisely because of the use of amphitheatrical auditorium. In each of them, the amphitheatrical auditorium consists of gradually surpassing rows of seats which is needed to see and hear the action on stage well, but the difference is in the structure of a massif. By using the word – massif – I mean the layout of the rows together which forms the amphitheatrical type of auditorium and resembles a compact group of steps. The result is a division into the three following categories: I. Auditorium floor massif integrated with natural ground • Teatre in Epidauros, Greece / 4th Century before Christ The classical Greek theatre, theatron had no walls, its architectural interior provided only the appropriate shape of the floor. Theatron created a place for KATARZYNA ZAWISTOWSKA 119 viewers where the semi-circular rows of seats were surpassed gradually. It is worth mentioning that all ancient and modern outdoor theatres were built according to the landforms, where the floor massif models of amphitheatrical auditorium, belong to this category. II. Auditorium floor massif supported by an architectural structure • Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy / 16th century In the classical Roman theatre, amphitheatre auditorium was a part of the floor, but there were walls and pillars instead of the slope of the hill and that is why it was the first free-standing theatrical building. Renaissance Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza was a copy of this kind of building as an independent, wooden construction. But the difference was that this theatrical building had a roof. • Opera in Bayreuth, Germany/ 19th century After two centuries of using gallery auditorium, the amphitheatre auditorium was FOOTBRIDGE AUDITORIUM Figure 3. The formal typology of amphitheatre auditorium 126 127 SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS: THE SET DESIGNS BY HERZOG & DE MEURON AND MORPHOSIS NIUXA DRAGO Introduction Although in different ways, architecture and scenic design have historically shared investigations into the concept of space, temporal dimensions, illusion, and reality. Whenever science and technology propose new dimensions, it is art that first tries to experiment them and remind us that space and time are constructions that may be re-read and disassembled. Thus, the revision of geometric space, conducted through Einstein’s physics and the non-Euclidean geometries, has been incorporated into art, as well as the micro atomic space, where matter and energy converge. As Foster (2011, p.93) indicated, when analysing the work of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Architecture might seem to be extrinsic to such topics, dear as they are to postmodernist art, but, pace the discourse of “fusion”, the interdisciplinary thrust of these projects is first to suggest that architecture is always already present somehow – as unseen setting or frame – and then to disrupt this normative use of architecture with a critical intervention. 128 NIUXA DRAGO For some contemporary architects, interest in the performance of bodies and, therefore, in stage performances is growing, and has provided theatre audiences with experimental scenic devices that address issues which go beyond stage convention. The set designs analysed herein were produced by different theatre companies, but what they have in common, besides being for performances during the first decade of the twenty-first century, is that those responsible for their production sought architects in order to create them, since they recognised conceptual research in their works that would collaborate with the scenic performance. Through its characteristic as an “essay of space”, scenography, in a certain manner, enables “isolated” phenomenological experiments. The Italian stage, with controllable qualities of light, sound and visibility, functions as a kind of “test tube” for architects interested in the essential phenomenon of space, body and movement. Here, we use scientific language terms for two reasons. First, we draw a comparison between the Italian stage and a scientific laboratory, which seeks to reproduce “standard temperature and pressure (STP)”, in order to make the results of the experiment universally valid, within the standards stipulated by the scientific community, so that it may be repeated by other scientists. Likewise, the Italian stage has certain characteristics that make it possible to transfer a performance from one stage to another while maintaining some degree of uniformity. Second, but no less important, we believe that it is this quality that establishes the desire for architects to experiment on the stage with devices and concepts similar to those with which they work in the architectural field. The possibility of controlling lighting, sound and even pressure qualities (as revealed by the set for Tristan und Isolde, which we analyse herein), thereby fixing the attention of the audience in order to control almost entirely the image to be created, is an opportunity of experimentation, since such conditions are but predictable when dealing with architectural objects. Architecture is exposed to the weather, to the inconstancy of natural lighting, to interference from the lights and sounds of its surroundings, to the appropriation of spaces according 129 of to the decisions taken by the user, which thereby change the way of both approaching and walking through the object. Ultimately, architects have little control over the images that will be generated from their architecture. In the cases we analyse, the visual cues of the stage go beyond the scenic code to refer to aspects such as texture, topology, and spatial geometry. Brejzek indicated that in the theatre work of these ‘architects-scenographers’, attention is focused upon a single device (Brejzek, 2017, p.63), and we believe that this is in order to force us to plunge into the reflection implicit in its effect. Herzog & De Meuron The Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic Institute and, in the 1980s, began to act professionally. Their intention was to discover in art, mainly in the stream of minimalism, the inspiration to develop their projects. The two architects were involved with Joseph Beuys and the artists of the minimalist movement from which a significant part of their conceptual behaviour originated. Minimalism seeks an aesthetic impact in the physical qualities of the work (scale, material, spatiality), instead of investing in metaphors or rational reading. For Foster (2011, p.XI-XII), with this aim, Herzog & De Meuron began from a “formal reductivism”, so that the object could not be read as a composition, but rather as a totality (or series). Their greatest interest lay in the tension between the literalness of the geometric form and the phenomenal effects. Herzog & De Meuron stated that they proposed an architecture that had the ability to affect people first physically and emotionally before they are intellectually aware of what is happening (Zaera-Polo, 2016). To accomplish this, they sought to explore the material “before the image”. Hence its “volumetry” is almost always a single prism, a gesture that W. Wang calls “megatectonic”: ‘Dialogically oscillating between factual tectonics and megatectonics, between material reality and the great structural gesture, (…) They chase the paradoxical effect produced by the SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS 130 strict forms and the articulated materials’ (Wang, 2000, p.12)1. Their first outstanding project, the warehouse for the Ricola industrial complex in Laufen (1986), is a clear manifesto of this method of work: Whatever material we use to make a building, we are basically interested in finding a specific encounter between construction and material. The material is there to define the building, but equally, the building is destined to render the material “visible”. (…) we convey the material we use towards an extreme, in order to show that it is completely independent of any function other than that of “being”. (in Zaera-Polo, 2016, p.104) Generally, in the works of Herzog & De Meuron, they state that ‘the materials enable the appearance of form and help define the structure’. Undoubtedly, this is not a random choice of material, but is rather suggested by the architectural problem. The two architects emphasize that the material, whether in natura or industrialized, besides an external form, also possesses a visible form, an internal structure, invisible, but determinant. From the beginning of their careers, they were interested in the relationships that may be established between these invisible structures and the image, as well as social behaviour or human psychology. One method they describe as ‘a search for codes that adapt both natural and cultural information’ (idem, p.83). This concern resulted in the manifesto-text “The Hidden Geometry of Nature” (1989). Tristan und Isolde and Attila ‘(...) the invention of a new material addressed a specific architecture. It would not be easy, therefore, to extrapolate the invention elsewhere’. This sentence by Rafael Moneo (2004, p.366) on the work of the architects is valid for the set designs in 2006 for Tristan und Isolde at the Berlin Opera, directed by Stefan 1 This and all non-English citations hereafter have been translated by the author. NIUXA DRAGO 131 Bachmann. After months of attempts, a mechanism was finally achieved of a negative pressure chamber that enabled a rubber membrane to be moulded onto different backgrounds, realizing the conception of Herzog & De Meuron: ‘The stage sets and the staging would not represent the things themselves but rather their appearances. (…) that were constantly changing, breathing, imperceptibly overlapping, fading in and fading out. With the addition of precision lighting, these appearances acquired an almost hallucinatory effect’ 2. The device makes us intuit the material without guiding us towards it, although the light-texture sensation comes first, before the image-appearance that informs the scenery (‘The appearance of the hull of a ship, stairs, a cave or part of a body, a concrete form and identity, and the appearance of emptiness, of nothing, of a zero space’). Material intuition “informs” something, and then misinforms. The effect reminds us of the architects interest in the microscopic invisibility of materials and the substitution of determinism for probabilistic predictability, which describes the essential nature of particles, between energy and matter. The solid condition disappears, although this achievement is due to the material texture or, rather, due to our desire for the material that insinuates, but does not materialize. Rafael Moneo describes this same sensation when analysing the office building also created for Ricola in 1999, where the effect is achieved using glass: (...) The volume virtually dissolves with the superposition of images in an infinite play of reflections, rendering impossible any reading that might understand the building as a static reality. The image multiplies and dissolves, and the architects seem to be interested not so much in the values accompanying a world of presumably impenetrable solids, as in the values that are present in the virtual and atmospheric spaces to which the systems of voids have accustomed us. (Moneo, 2004, p.402) 2 This and the following excerpts from the architects themselves, when not referenced, were taken from the official websites of Herzog & De Meuron (https://www.herzogdemeuron.com) and Morphosis (Morphopedia – https://www.morphosis.com). SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS 132 The membrane created for Tristan und Isolde, rather like the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, sharpens our curiosity about the image by hiding it, and revives the perception of matter when it reveals its qualities of volume, texture and shadow, still perceptible under the skin. The membrane, when applied to architecture, proposes the resumption of something lost in the passage from the traditional façade to the contemporary screen. For Scoffier (2009), it recaptures a sense of interiority and exteriority, which modernism intended to snatch away in a universal isotropic space, revealing, while at the same time hiding, the interior, in a game of seduction that summons our imagination. The duo, in the 1990s, arrived at techniques that brought into question both the planarity and the depth, screen printing images on glass, as well as printing relief images on concrete blocks. These techniques, invented by the two architects during their research on screen and texture, textile and three-dimensional qualities, transparency and reflection, possibly originated from their observation of ornamental patterns. Pierre Herzog noted his perception on the Alhambra Palace: ‘the illusion of a plane instead of space, or of a trellis in front of the infinite space. Surface-stone (mundane, heavy) becomes clothing (textile, immaterial)’ (Apud Melo, 2002, p.55). In Tristan und Isolde, the membrane is sometimes lit from behind, becoming a transparent screen revealing the profile of the materials, and is sometimes lit from the front when stressing the materials, revealing their texture. This ambiguity between texture and screen, materiality and image is a very important issue in our relationship with the contemporary world. This is because we are constantly confronted by luminous images, created not only to transmit information to be processed rationally, but also to reach our senses. The ability of these images to make our organism react, to reach our senses of touch, smell and taste, involving our body, is part of its success in generating meaning and filling our existence. Similarly, our own perception is being transformed. The imbrications between the physical presence and the virtual image are increasingly explored, both by artists and by our own feelings. The idea of dematerialization, pursued by many architects since the dialogue NIUXA DRAGO 133 between matter and image proved to be irrefutable, is an expensive topic, and was successfully developed by Herzog & De Meuron. For the set designs of Attila, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, led by Pierre Audi in 2010, the architects designed two devices that worked in contrast. In the prologue, the mountains are represented by concrete rubble, with smaller pieces below and large slabs above. In the other acts, the forest around Rome is a “cloth” of leaves that covers the entire scene, from floor to ceiling, in a dense texture with holes for the characters to appear through. Here, the duo abolished “form” so that the focus fell on the qualities of materials that, in contrast, followed the main theme of destruction and rebirth. If the polystyrene mountain transmitted weight and indicated that the image and the material had become increasingly closer, they did so in the opposite direction of the gabion walls of the Dominus Winery, where the spaces between Figure 1. Herzog & De Meuron. Caja Forum in Madrid (2007). The image shows the contrast between vast planes of vegetation and construction materials. Photo: Júlia Martinelli (PIBIAC – FAU – UFRJ). August 2021 SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS 134 the “real” stones caused them “to float”, thereby betraying the ontological meaning of the material. The curtain of leaves, in turn, leads us to a direct parallel with the Vertical Garden of the Caja de Madrid (2007), where it provoked the same contrast and, less directly, with the Ricola pavilion (1993) and its polycarbonate façade applied with images of a leaf. Repeated hundreds of times, the leaf becomes a sign like those of Pop Art, going from image to texture. The silk-screened glass created by Herzog & De Meuron did not allow itself to be imprisoned. It is almost impossible to comprehend the matter of their mutant surfaces. The material deceived the eye and played with our perceptions, which journeyed between surface and depth, and between the leaf design and the transparency of the glass. ‘They apply its idioms cannily: often they use serial units in such a way that material and image are all but conflated, sometimes with materials deployed as images and sometimes the reverse’ (Foster, 2011, p.123). For Herzog & De Meuron, ‘[glass] is as solid and stable as stone or concrete. In NIUXA DRAGO Figure 2. Herzog & De Meuron. Library of University of Applied Sciences in Eberswalde (1999). The image shows the effect of “textilization” of glass and concrete. Photo: Immanuel Giel (August/2005) [CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:FH-Eberswalde_Bibliothek_Fassade.jpg (downloaded on 1/4/2020) 135 opposite, by printing on concrete, it suddenly becomes porous or shiny like glass’ (Apud Foster, 2011, p.263 [32]). Here, the duo presented a theatrical posture with regard to the materials, in a somewhat baroque fashion. No longer the rational mechanism of illusion that confronted the two-dimensional surface installing an illusion of three-dimensionality, but a phenomenal mechanism by which a tactile material surface was confronted with an image that destroyed its reality. An architectural experience that perfectly symbolized the contemporary precedence of the gaze and the creation of a purely visual world. The Silent Collisions of Morphosis Thom Mayne is the principal founding architect of the California studio Morphosis, created in 1972, which defines itself on its website as ‘a dynamic and evolving practice that responds to the shifting and advancing social, cultural, political and technological conditions of modern life’. In defining the studio as a ‘dynamic and evolving practice’, the collective highlights its interest in movement and transformation, not only of professional practice, but of the objects generated in this practice. Hence Morphosis embraces projects of installations and exhibition spaces, understanding architecture as an expanded field. On being invited to build the exhibition stand that would receive Vecta chairs at a large New York showroom in 1989, Morphosis applied its unpragmatic reflections. Instead of highlighting the products, they placed them in luminescent boxes with small cracks through which the viewer could glimpse parts of only 6 chairs (each “hidden” inside a cube), chosen from dozens that the company intended to expose. The luminous cubes, suspended from the floor, formed a small maze through which visitors searched for cracks that could reveal the objects exposed inside. The exposed object, traditionally on the cube, was now inside it. The purpose of the collective was, in his own words, ‘to create interest through mystification by hiding the chairs within an object’ (Apud Cook & Rand, 1989, p.217). The device emphasized the formal quality of the object, rather than its utilitarian value, because it instigated curiosity and proposed new views on it, both SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS 142 as it realized the material abstraction in which the music was conceived. The continuity in which the images were mounted and unmounted was the visible parallel of the invisible structure of the notes, which ran towards a harmonic “attractor” and, when they converges, materialized into full realization. In Attila, the textile quality emanating from the texture of the material was intended to accompany the texture of the music and reinforced its perception. By giving up decisive forms, the duo submitted the visual space to the sound space. We understand that in the strategy of postmodern art, integrating the flow of time seems more effective than trying to hold it up. David Harvey (1992), analysing the postmodern condition, reminded us that while social theories focus on temporal changes, aesthetic theories usually investigate the communication of values in a frozen spatial order. Harvey wondered how aesthetic practices, which are spatializations, are able to communicate flow and change when these become essential values. He admitted the protagonist effect of music and cinema in postmodernity and emphasized that the dilemma is especially serious for Architecture. ‘How could architecture be proposed as an evolutionary process rather than a fixed entity in time and space?’ (Mayne apud Weinstein, 2008, p.30). This is the question that Thom Mayne seeks to answer when he draws our attention to the time of the sun on architecture, or when he proposes to formally trace the transformation of the cube. Therefore, it does not seem strange that the architects approach performance – especially dance (choreography) and music (opera) – which are rooted in the flow of time, to try, once again, to dominate it. Essentially, as Harvey tells us, quoting Elliot, ‘Only through time, time is conquered’. This research would not have been possible without the support of the FAU/UFRJ students that collaborated in many phases - Bárbara Boy Oliveira, Anna Rita Alves de Lima Carvalho, Thaiz Batista and Daniel Disitzer Serebrenick – as well as Prof. Cássia Maria Fernandes Monteiro, my colleague and friend. This paper was funded with UFRJ funds by the Scientific Initiation Scholarship and Artistic and Cultural Initiation Scholarship Programs (PIBIC/UFRJ and PIBIAC/UFRJ). NIUXA DRAGO 143 SCENIC DESIGN AS A FIELD FOR EXPERIMENTATION BY ARCHITECTS References BREJZEK, Thea & WALLEN, Lawrence (2018). The Model As Performance – Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture. London/New York: Methuen/Drama. BREJZEK, Thea (2017). “Between Symbolic Representation and New Critical Realism: Architecture as Scenographyand Scenography as Architecture” in Joslin Mckinney & Scott Palmer (ed.), Scenography Expanded – An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury, pp.63-78. COOK, Peter & RAND, George (1989). Morphosis: Buildings and Projects. Vol.1. New York: Rizzoli. FERNÁNDEZ-GALIANO, Luis (2012). “Attila y Tristán, la Imaginación Romántica” in Arquitectura Viva, Monografias. Herzog & De Meuron (2005-2013), pp.157-158. FOSTER, Hal (2011). The Arte-Architecture Complex. London/New York: Verso Books. GOLDBERG, Roselee (2015). A Arte da Performance, do Futurismo ao Presente. Trans. Jefferson Luiz Camargo. São Paulo: Martins Fontes. HARVEY, David (1992). A Condição Pós-Moderna – Uma Pesquisa sobre as Origens da Mudança Cultural. Trans. Adail U. Sobral & Maria Stela Gonçalves. São Paulo: Edições Loyola. MELO, Magda (2002). “Herzog & De Meuron, Diálogo sobre Arte e Arquitetura” in Akrópolis – Revista de Ciências Humanas da UNIPAR. 10 (1 e 2), pp.53-57. MONEO, Rafael (2004). Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press. SALTER, Chris (2010). Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge/ London: MIT Press. SCHENBERG, Mario (2010). “Arte e Tecnologia” in Sergio Cohn (org.), Ensaios Fundamentais: Artes Plásticas. Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, pp.133-151. SCOFFIER, Richard (2009). “Os Quatro Conceitos Fundamentais da Arquitetura Contemporânea. Trad. Guilherme Lassance” in Beatriz Santos de Oliveira; et al (orgs.), Leituras em Teoria da Arquitetura. Vol. 1 – Conceitos. Coleção PROARQ. Rio de Janeiro: Viana & Mosley, pp. 162-232. WANG, Wilfried (2000). Herzog & De Meuron. Spanish Translation Gloria Bohigas and Alejandro Pinós. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. WEINSTEIN, Beth (2008). “Flamand and his Architectural Entourage” in Journal of Architectural Education. v. 61(4), pp.25-33. ZAERA-POLO, Alejandro (2016). Arquitetura em Diálogo. Trans. Cristina Fino & Cid Knipel. São Paulo: Ubu. 144 145 THE HOURS: THE (FE)MALE GAZE? ISABEL LOUSADA VANDA DE SOUSA Introduction Our aim is to show that the literary convention (renowned midday topos) is translatable to the text of a moving image using the grammatical code and sign constructs of film text (Wollen, 1984) present in Virginia Woolf’s novel (Mrs. Dalloway – 19961). There, the convention in question is used in its most classical sense, in writing, and in the literary use of space, light, colours and movement. Adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Michael Cunningham’s text The Hours (1998) maintains the classicism of the convention. However, the film The Hours (2002) suggests the affirmation of this same classicism but reverses the terms: underlying danger is transformed into a possibility of salvation and auspicious events, of the preservation of the soul, even if through death. Similar to the two literary texts on which it is based, the film employs the same elements (space, light, colours, and movement) to which we might add the scenography design (framework by opposing interior/women and exterior/men), framing emphasizing the field and the off-field, the mise-en-scène, and the soundtrack. 1 Mrs Dalloway had its first edition on May 14, 1925, edited by Hogarth Press (owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf), with cover art by Vanessa Bell; the first edition in Portuguese came to print in 1982, translated by Ricardo Alberty, edited by Ulisseia, we have used the 1996 edition, ed. Penguin Books. 146 The Midday Topos or Noonscape The midday topos or noonscape are conventions of classical literature, reborn with modernism, which relate to the solar effects of midday and noontide inducing an event. In the Odyssey, Menelaus’s encounter with Proteu suggests a good omen (Hoff, 1999). In a more classical use, it indicates danger (Hoff, 1990), as used in Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s novel addresses the issue of the preservation of the soul, basing its dramatic structure on the hour indicated, throughout the text, by the beating of the various clocks of London, which are used to structure the novel itself, not in chapters, but by marking the hour. While aware of the danger in the heat of the sun (oppressive heat and indolence), the convention suggests a locus amnoenus. In the Woolfian text, the character of Clarissa Dalloway’s follows the doctor’s advice: “at midday they disrobe” (Woolf, 1996, p.35). She enters the house but does not realise that by putting the yellow hat on the bed, she is not out of reach of the hubris of superstition. The literary convention of the midday topos is expressed in color, time, seclusion, suspension of oneself as regards place and mode of preservation. At noon, the sun stops for an instant, suspending time: it is the moment of abnormality, carelessness, error, madness, perdition, and delirium. It’s the time of death or salvation. The Hours – the novel(s) According to Virginia Woolf’s diaristic work, the novel begins by being named The Hours2 that Michael Cunningham retrieves for his text, paying homage to Woolfian canonical text, Mrs Dalloway an account of one day in London – June 23rd, 1923. Having been ill and confined to her attic room for a long period, Clarissa Dalloway leaves that morning – at 10 o’clock, to the sound of Big Ben – to buy the flowers she will wear at the party that same night, in order to 2 “(…). Pensam com entusiasmo no meu próximo livro, a que eu penso chamar As Horas. (…)”. [They think enthusiastically of my next novel which I think I’ll call the Hours] (Woolf, 2018, p.233). ISABEL LOUSADA and VANDA DE SOUSA 147 promote the political career of her husband, Richard Dalloway. The splendid morning evokes memories of summer, when, at the age of eighteen, she chose to marry Richard in preference to Peter Walsh, for whom she had strong feelings. That same day, Peter Walsh in London, having returned from India, looks for Clarissa, introducing the midday topos. From this meeting, close to the fatal hour, doubts about her choice, about love, aging, identity and about the (un) happiness resulting from choices made throughout her life are renewed. It will be at the end of the day, upon learning of the suicide of the poet crippled in the war and unknown to her, that Clarissa appeases her soul (Wright, 1944). As she goes up to her attic room, seeing the old neighbour next door also climbing the stairs, light in hand, Clarissa resigns herself to the inevitability of being alive, of making choices. Life must be lived (Thakur, 1965). Cunningham’s novel The Hours revisits the Woolfian universe, recounting one day, in the year 1923, in Richmond, beginning with the character Virginia writing the book Mrs Dalloway, then switching to Los Angeles, in 1951, with the character Laura Brown reading the same novel on the birthday of her husband Dan Brown. The timeframe shifts once again to New York in 2001, to the day of the party in which Clarissa Vaughan (nicknamed Clarissa Dalloway) organizes a party commemorating the lifetime achievement award of the writer Richard Brown. Through three female characters, in different epochs, but united by the same text, Mrs Dalloway, the novel The Hours, encompasses three female universes containing the same existential questions as those present in the Woolfian character, leading to three encounters at the fateful hour and the making of three life decisions. The Hours – the film The film makes use of a prologue, one might say a false flashback, to the suicide of Virginia Woolf and the suicide letter she writes to Leonard Woolf. Immediately it reveals a solution to the existential question which has guided the writing from THE HOURS: THE (FE)MALE GAZE? 148 its origin – Mrs Dalloway, to Michael Cunningham’s text, culminating in the film. Contrary to the book adaptation in the form of remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 2000), the film interlocks timeframes as an exercise in postmodern writing (Lyotard, 2003) which interweaves distinct temporalities and distinct dramatic nuclei, as if they were not temporally and spatially distinct, and interweaves three different plots making use of the writing of the mother novel as a dramatic component of union and explanation. It is an exercise in post-modernism, in its revisitation of a canonical text, with a fragmentary structure that values both spatial and temporal discontinuity, celebrating the narration as a consequence of images, apparent themselves, but freeing space for interpretation (Deleuze, 2006, pp.43-44). Film however is not a universal and primitive language, nor itself an actual language, before movements and processes of thought (prelinguistic images) and views on these movements and processes – pre-signifying signs (Deleuze, 2006, pp.334-335). In this sense, the film experience of The Hours is paradigmatic, when it suggests a rupture of meaning and meaning systems, arising from each of the female characters, affirmed in a classic curve in three acts: Virginia, non-conformist; Laura, emancipated; Clarissa Vaughan, liberated. First Act – Dawn The film opens with Virginia dressed in brown. A close-up prevents the light from entering the scene, deepening the brown and beige that characterizes her. Through a voiceover we hear Virginia’s suicide letter, as she comes into view, with the focus on her hands. Only then is her identity revealed. The light is obscured by darkness – fear – and when she is visible, the brown she wears becomes almost ochre, fulfilling the screen. The character is inside, perpendicular to the dark frame of the doorway. Clearly, in the interior space, the feminine juxtaposes the external space framed by the door which, through glass, allows a glimmer of light to enter – but does not even fulfil the function of lighting: to lighten. When she turns towards the door, the brown of her dress is even more striking, ISABEL LOUSADA and VANDA DE SOUSA 149 darkening the interior space. Virginia heads to the door, but her position and movements indicate the pressure of an obsession, reflected in the way she walks. Symbolizing the bold transition from interior to exterior, the camera draws away from the character, establishing a distanced mise-en-scène (interpreted as non-agreement); the camera follows her from a distance. Her brown coated figure blends with the greens of the vegetation and lends itself to a scene mediated by the dramatic weight of the character’s performance. The light that outside would be expected is lost in this sequence and is already absent when Virginia reaches the River Ouse. From here the waters that appear brownish in unison with the clothes are invaded by grey, as the character enters with the intent of being swallowed up by the river. Submerged, the browns of Virginia’s clothes almost fade into the waters, the earth, and the branches that envelop her and drag her inert body down, invoking Ophelia3. The prologue ends. The day begins! The three feminine characters are surrounded by white light, which touches each of them, adjusting to the colors and light that represent them. The three are seen as faces on their pillow, invoking the Woolfian motif of the hours, but also defining them by solitude: all are married, all wake up alone. The shots of their faces resting on each pillow mark the transition between space and time: Virginia goes to the washbasin, and lowers her face, but it is the washed face of Clarissa Vaughan that rises again, in a profusion of white orchids detailing the décor. There immediately follows the face of Laura Brown, linked to the book Mrs Dalloway, immersed in a profusion of greenery and foliage, the colours of which become a dominant scenographic feature in the poesis. The scene defines the colour for each: brown for Virginia, white for Clarissa and green for Laura Brown. Similarly, the first act defines the dramatic structure. The women belong to the domestic interior. Introspection is reserved for the 3 We refer to the work of Sir John Everett Millais – Ophelia, 1852, which represents the character Ophelia of the Shakespearean text Hamlet. THE HOURS: THE (FE)MALE GAZE? 150 bedroom (each faces resting on its pillow), while in domestic life they lose their sense of self, being bound to their domestic routine. Clarissa leaves the flat to buy flowers, but we only see her briefly in public: we see her enter the florist’s; we see her enter Richard’s building; we see her in the hospital. Her presence outside is fleeting. We see Virginia going for a walk, with Leonard’s permission, but without enjoyment: she is immersed in the novel she is about to write. The three female figures are portrayed in a context that distinguishes them from the male characters. The men (with the exception of Richard Brown, the poet) make their entrance through the front, from the left to the right-hand side. The lighting and the rapidity of their movements are a metaphor for their freedom. Together with the men, two secondary female figures are treated in the same way. Clarissa’s companion Sally and her daughter, Julia, represent two different forms of emancipation: the former is an affirmation of her own will and is granted a certain masculinity even in the way she dresses; the latter displays the emancipation representative of her generation. Both are allowed a touch of red in the clothing they wear, perhaps concealing a bold, doomed figure. Notably, the canonically feminine characters remain in the space of domesticity, although each responds differently: Virginia is terrified of the maids; Laura feels uncomfortable at home because she feels uncomfortable in her role as wife, mother and housewife; Clarissa embraces two houses: her own and Richard’s. Such a reading is expressed in the setting in which we find each of them: mostly standing, rarely seated, but in any of the situations framed by doorways (either interior, or at the front door), or in a window bay. The female protagonists Daldry chose to frame. The male (or masculinized) characters he attributes with the movement of entering from the exterior to the interior, in tracking shots which emphasize this movement as a sign of transgression. This language excludes the character of Richard Brown, whom we witness mostly seated, an integral part of the house, the exterior of which is only revealed when, sitting on the window sill, he drops into the light, to his death. ISABEL LOUSADA and VANDA DE SOUSA 151 Second act – Midday, the yellow hour – of the non-removal of the hubris In a warmer light now, at noon, the three women are exposed to danger and obliged to reflect on their choices, their life, their quest for happiness. Virginia is visited by Nessa (her sister) and her nephews. We witness her reflection on death, when her niece finds a dead bird, whose grave will be adorned with the yellow roses Virginia was carrying. With her face to the ground, reclining by the bird, Virginia knows that it is necessary to cross the waters when one dies, in an evocation of the Hades River. This is repeated when Clarissa is interrupted by Louis Waters (waters), and also in the case of Laura in the dreamlike scene where she decides not to commit suicide, rising from the waters that have already submerged her. Yellow relates to Laura in the color of the roses that Dan offers her first thing in the morning and which she contemplates before deciding to leave the house and rent a room in a hotel (where she will live out the dilemma caused by her reading) and, in the kitchen, Clarissa has difficulty to separate the yellow egg yolks from the clear whites. While making a birthday cake for Dan, Laura is interrupted by her neighbour Kitty. She becomes aware that as a married housewife, mother of Richard and pregnant for the second time, she does not have the life she wishes for – she did not make the right choices. While preparing a meal for the party, Clarissa is interrupted by Louis Waters who questions her obsessive caring for Richard Brown. He confesses to feeling a sense of freedom since separating from Richard4. Marked by the presence of yellow in each scene, the three characters are exposed to danger: they reflect on their choices, they reflect on their identity; they reflect on what happiness means to them. The three are aware of being alive. 4 “CLARISSA – anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was you he stayed with. It was you he lived with. You’ll see when he comes. He’s still Richard. His mind wanders and he’s in a lot of pain. But there’s some constant quality. There’s his Richard-ness. LOUIS moves towards her, careful about what he wants to spell out. LOUIS – The day I left him I got on a train and made my way across Europe. I felt free for the first time in years” (Hare, 2002, p.70). THE HOURS: THE (FE)MALE GAZE? 254 VIŠNJA ŽUGIĆ in the inscription of textual practices into the built environment, which lead to accomplishing spatial qualities beyond those purely utilitarian. The problem of production of meanings has been formulated as the basic criteria for the accomplishment of architecture as a performative entity. Architecture was observed as the problem of performing arts and the phenomenon that belongs to the extended field of performance – one which is not a performance but can be performative. Three distinctive mechanisms of accomplishing performative architectural space were identified: (a) the mechanism of Confrontation, which is realised through architectural space as a collection of elements designed with an intention to make the observer/user an active accomplice in finishing its overall meanings; (b) the mechanism of Correlation, which focuses on relations between architecture and elements of a staged event. In this context space surpasses the limits of a neutral framework, and becomes a co-creator of the overall meanings of the performance; (c) the mechanism of Framing, which refers to a specific way of conditioning the perception, understanding, and interpretation of space. Thanks to the frame that belongs to the realm outside the designed space, its primary meanings are transformed towards generating an active, performative entity. The approach shown in this research was developed in order to point to the existence of the dynamic phenomenon of performative architecture, where physical space is seen ‘as an initiator, generator and a protagonist of the newly created story’ (Zeković, Žugić, Stojković, 2019, p.58). The final destinations for the practical application of the research outcomes range from designed to spontaneous physical structures, from planned to subsequently generated uses of space, and from permanent to ephemeral, temporarily constructed and inscribed characteristics and qualities of space. This paper resulted from the scientific project No.TR36051, financed by Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, 2020. 255 References GOFFMAN, Erving (1986). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. JOVIĆEVIĆ, Aleksandra (2007). “Uvod u Uvod Studija Izvođenja” in Aleksandra Jovićević & Ana Vujanović (ed.), Uvod u Studije Performansa. Beograd: Fabrika knjiga, pp.3-18. KRISTEVA, Julia (1980). Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. KUNZE, Donald (1994). “Architecture as a Site of Reception-Part I: Cuisine, Frontality, and the InfraThinby” in Alberto Pérez-Gómez & Stephen Parcell (ed.), Chora Volume One, Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp.83-108. LATOUR, Bruno & YANEVA, Albena (2008). “Give me a Gun and I will Make All Buildings Move: An ANT’s View of Architecture” in Reto Geiser (ed.), Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp.80-89. MURRAY, Simon (2003). Jacques Lecoq. London and New York: Routledge. PAVIS, Patrice (1998). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. PELIAS, Ronald J. & VANOOSTING, James (2003). “A Paradigm for Performance Studies” in Philip Auslander (ed.), Performance: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume 1. London and New York: Routledge, pp.215-231. PÉREZ-GÓMEZ, Alberto (1994). “Chora: the Space of Architectural Representation” in Alberto PérezGómez & Stephen Parcell (ed.), Chora Volume One, Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. McGillQueen’s University Press, pp.1-34. SCHECHNER, Richard (2013 [2002, 2006]). Performance Studies: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. STATES, Bert O. (2003). “Performance as Metaphor” in Philip Auslander (ed.), Performance, Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume 1. London and New York: Routledge, pp.108-137. VUJANOVIĆ, Ana (2006). Doksicid. Novi Sad: Izdavačka Knjižarnica Zorana Stojanovića. VUJANOVIĆ, Ana (2004). Razarajući Označitelji/e Performansa. Beograd: Studentski Kulturni Centar. ZEKOVIĆ, Miljana; ŽUGIĆ, Višnja & STOJKOVIĆ, Bojan (2019). “Intangible, Fetishized & Constructed – New Contexts for Staging the Socialist Heritage” in Nebojša Čamprag & Anshika Suri (ed.), Three Decades of Post-Socialist Transition. Urban Morphosis Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, pp.51-59. SETTING ARCHITECTURE IN MOTION BY MEANS OF PERFORMANCE 256 257 URBAN SPACES 258 259 In this paper I would like to examine my scenography project, a non-theatrical performance which occupied a real space: in a half-abandoned underpass, in the heart of the capital of Hungary, Budapest. I focused on the questions of sitespecificity regarding this. The notion of ‘site-specific’ is widely used today in the field of performance, because it encompasses a wide range of activities: in a sense, every event, including performative ones, could be called ‘site-specific’ because it utilises the physical capabilities of the place in which it is created. It is also commonly used for theatrical performances that leave the stage of the proscenium theatre and find a place for the performance outside the traditional theatre building. I wanted to narrow down this terminology, so I was looking for a proper interpretation. Carlson wrote that the only performances that can be considered ‘site-specific’ are those in which the performance is based explicitly and exclusively on the visible (physical) and non-visible (different aspects such as historical, sociological, etc.) aspects of the chosen place and cannot be separated from them without damaging its meaning (Carlson, 2012). The question was: how could this apply to the interpretation of my chosen place, the underpass? In the architectural sense, this place was an empty, decaying, HOW DID MY PARENTS GET TO THE UNDERPASS? EXAMINATION OF A NON-THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE IN AN URBAN PUBLIC SPACE GABRIELLA KISS 260 GABRIELLA KISS poorly lit underpass under the ground, where people walked hastily, without stopping. At the first glance, it didn’t seem as if it contained any remarkable non-visible story. While researching this question, I found McLucas’ conceptual trinity of “The Host, Ghost and Witness”. This helped to answer questions that arose. The notion was created by Clifford McLucas, who was the Art Director and scenographer of the Welsh theatre company of Brith Gof. The concept was developed by his directing and scenography design experience of the performance Tri Bywyd (‘Three Lives’ ). Adopting his conceptual triad, I began to examine the questions that arose in my scenography project. The Host The notion of “Host” covers the chosen place of performance. This is the (physical) location of the performance (‘locus or place’ ) that ‘embodies a complex, inter-related network of knowledge and narratives’ (McLucas, 1995. May: Brith Gof Archive – part of a manuscript – PL/9.). But what kind of narratives were embodied into my chosen place? The decaying underpass was under the ground, like a ‘time-capsule’, a buried memory, in contrast to the freshly renovated urban environment at the top. The underpass formerly had a completely different function. At the time of its inauguration in 1976, the underpass functioned as kind of a grand ‘underground mall’: glittering high-tech interior design spaces, small shops, and on one wall a long line of phone-boxes, all hidden under the ground. The underpass was part of a once large-scale construction that was intended to show the magnitude of the socialist dictatorship that ‘resembled the Western world’. It used to be the case that people slowed down, had a look around, or even made purchases while being able to interact and communicate with each other. Today it has lost this function: the shops have closed and people no longer stop, just hastily walked through. Nowadays certain materials/architectural elements 261 HOW DID MY PARENTS GET TO THE UNDERPASS? ... (toughened glass handles, chrome hinges, glass portals, etc.) remain in their original condition of 1976, but some parts of the space are in various stages of decay: the broken shop-windows have been replaced with wooden pallet and the broken entrances of the shops have been covered with iron bars. Because of the special mixture of these two, the space functioned as a ‘time capsule’. The presence of the original relics was strongly evocative of the decaying space. Their materiality carried a history and gave insight into a once-existing world. This place (the underpass) in a certain sense looks like a field of an archaeological digging area. The present state of the underpass shows a deteriorating urban public space, the fragments of the former past: the glass handles, chrome hinges and glass portals, material evidence testifying to a society that once existed. Figure 1. The freshly renovated urban environment on the top 262 GABRIELLA KISS These artefacts, the traces of the past, the ‘archaeological evidence’1 (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.9) “must be set in the context of the society that produced it, rather than allowed to simply stand on its own and speak for itself. And this context includes also the past in the present” (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.xvi). This new aspiration in the field of archaeology pointed out: (...) that archeology is more than recovery and examination of the material remains of societies and cultures. The archeological is held to be a dimension of social practice, referring to the articulation of people and things and the material processes they undergo and witness. In particular the archeological concerns the material presence of the past. (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.69) 1 ‘Archaeologists do not primarily deal with texts. They deal in words – the books and articles they write; and images – the plans, drawings and photographs. But their evidence is material; their subject-matter events, environments, and the traces left behind’ (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p.9). Figure 2. The decaying underpass under the ground 263 HOW DID MY PARENTS GET TO THE UNDERPASS? ... My scenography was based on using this feature of the underpass. I researched how could I find a meaningful story which was based on this evidence. The socialist dictatorship when these objects were made is very distant from us, and the stories of this time were just tales for people who were born after the revolution of 1989, when this regime of dictatorship was terminated. My questions led me to find personal stories which could become ‘Ghosts’ of this underpass. I hoped that these would enable people to explore and bring closer certain layers of meaning of the underpass through their personalities of the stories. The Ghost According to McLucas, the story (or stories) of the performance hold the “Ghost”. A congruent or incongruent relationship may arise between the ‘Host’ and the ‘Ghost’, and this ‘may occur at any one of a number of levels including theme or content, or the format interface of existing and newly created architectures’ (McLucas, 1995. May: Brith Gof Archive – part of a manuscript – PL/9.). To this statement, McLucas adds, there is no complete congruence between ‘Host’ and ‘Ghost’. In other words, there will always be a kind of distance2, a ‘gap’ between the two, even if this is based on some very similar and sensitive relationship. McLucas suspects that one of the reasons for this is perhaps because this relationship is (depending on the given theatrical semiotic situation – my comment) ‘dynamically changing rather than permanent and static’ (McLucas, 1995. May: Brith Gof Archive – part of a manuscript – PL/9.). Based on this, I examined, how aspects, ‘layers’ of the place could relate to the story which is ‘ghosted’ in them. The socialist dictatorship was flourishing in the 70s when the underpass was built, but behind the greatness were individual human destinies forced onto a pre-determined path, which drew a completely 2 (…) In fact it is arguable that congruence is never possible (and that an illusion of it is only achieved by a kind of flower arranging of “seemliness”) and that incongruence is always the result of such a coming together. (…) (McLucas, 1995. May: Brith Gof Archive – part of a manuscript – PL/9.). 270 GABRIELLA KISS the traditional theatre building, the fixed relation of stage and auditorium ceased to be: in the new sites, spaces changed into three or four dimensions. Every attempt – with its solutions to spatial modification – aimed to bring spectators and the events of stage closer together: moving across the boundary into each other’s spaces, making the two poles palpable and more sensitive to each other. The requirement of change created fundamental changes in the traditional theatre system. Leaving the two-dimensional space and thinking in three or four dimensions, the previously immobile relationship lost some stability. The new situations have generated a presence demanding the definition of new relationships. This study focused on the questions of place, space, and site, and the issues of how could I find and reveal the ‘layers’ of the place – the “layers of meaning” – that could serve as the basis for the planned performance. The ‘Ghosts’ of the planned performance and the chosen layers of meaning of the place may be interrelated, but it could (also) be a very distant relationship, and the ‘specific’ place requires a special attitude from the scenography designer, one which may be different from a designing for a traditional proscenium stage. The city is constantly in motion. Shortly after documenting and filming the plan of the performative event, one of the underground stores was rented again by a small matchbox dealer who had been there in the 70s in the underpass. A new story is being formed between the walls… The research at The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth is funded with i-Portunus Funds by the Creative Europe Programme, and the Funds by ‘Art Research and Collaboration – Inter and CrossDisciplinary Projects, Research Infrastructure Development and Capacity Building Program at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts’ (EFOP-3.6.1-16-2016-00021). 271 HOW DID MY PARENTS GET TO THE UNDERPASS? ... References AUGÉ, Marc (1995). Non-Places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. London and New York: Verso. CARLSON, Marvin (2012). “Non-Traditional Theatre Space” in Arnold Aronson (ed.), The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadriennal. Prague: Arts and Theatre Institute, pp.26-35. MCLUCAS, Clifford (1995, May). Proposal to the Performance of Tri Bywyd. Manuscript, Brith Gof Archive, PL/9. Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales. MCLUCAS, Clifford (1998, November). The Host, the Ghost and the Witness. Manuscript, Brith Gof Archive, GL/2. Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales. PEARSON, Mike & SHANKS, Michael (2001). Theatre/Archaeology. London and New York: Routledge. PEARSON, Mike (1992). Theatre/Archaeology, Manuscript – A (lecture) on Theatre Archaeology by (Mike Pearson), Brith Gof Archive, GL/18. Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales. 272 273 Introduction In March 2017, design academics Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin, wrote an open letter to the design community inviting us to “stand up for Democracy”, and to recognise the strong convergence between democracy and design. These convergences were listed through four distinctions: 1. design of democracy, improving democratic processes and the institutions on which democracy is built; 2. design for democracy, involving issues of access and transparency, allowing more people, especially using technology, to participate in the democratic process; 3. design in democracy, including projects that help to bring about conditions of equality and justice; 4. design as democracy, whereby the equitable and inclusive principles of participatory design set a stage on which diverse actors can come together to share constitutive power in shaping the present and future world we live in. (Manzini, Margolin, 2017) Design in Democracy refers to all the design initiatives that are particularly responsive to the goals of democracy. In previous writings Manzini (2013, 2015) discussed the importance of a designer and how they can act as ‘trigger’ to THE USE OF SCENOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT IN CONTESTED PUBLIC SPACES: THE CASE OF THE SOUTH WALLED CITY OF NICOSIA MARINA HADJILOUCA 274 MARINA HADJILOUCA start new social conversations; designers can operate as key factors by designing with and designing for communities. Through the use of creativity designers can ‘make things happen’, and therefore further develop and sustain the social conversation in place-making and developing the urban. For the last decade most of the ‘public places’ that have been built in Europe, are private, based on shopping, coffee-shop culture, finance centres and apartments (called POPs, an abbreviation for Privately Owned Public spaces), with clear rules about who is, or is not allowed in, and what they can do there (A. Minton, 2009). However, the public space that I am focusing on, Phaneromeni Square, a square in the south walled city of Nicosia, is more complex than the POPs found in Europe and in the USA. Although Phaneromeni Square, shares many characteristics with POPs, has recently been affected by the gentrification process that the wider area has undergone, and is now exhibiting characteristics of privatization (see practice component), is also part of a complex urban milieu. This is due to its strong socio-political history linked to the ethno-national conflict in Cyprus, its unique position within the divided city of Nicosia and its proximity to the buffer zone (Figure 1). When Sharon Zukin (1995) discussed the importance of public spaces, she pointed out that they are the primary site of public culture. They are the places where strangers meet but they also constitute an arena for continual negotiation of the boundaries and markers of human society. Public spaces constitute the social and political arena for different groups to become visible and heard, thus essential to the functioning of democracy. The availability of such space is under threat, and by overlooking the need for public spaces where democratic performance can be exercised, we run the risk of undermining some important conditions of democracy in the modern world (Parkinson, 2012). The privatization of public space entails increasingly alienation of people from the possibilities of inherent social interactions and increasing control by powerful economic and social actors over the production and use of space (Mitchel, 1995). 275 THE USE OF SCENOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT ... 1. Phaneromani Square In order to acquire a better understanding on the complexity aforementioned we should look at the ethno-national conflict which took place in Nicosia during the previous century. Following the inter-communal or ethno-national conflicts in 1963, the walled city was divided by the United Nations, in Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot quarters with a buffer zone, or what is called the ‘Green Line’ in the middle. As a result of the Turkish troops invasion and occupation in 1974, the walled city fell into decay and the centre that was the most vibrant and commercial area turned into a no man’s land. The citizens felt unsafe to be near the green line and developed their businesses in the northern and southern outskirts of the city respectively (Calame et al., 2009). Following the first three decades after the Turkish invasion the unoccupied old city was mainly inhabited by immigrants and rarely frequented by the majority of Greek-Cypriot citizens. In 1979 a master-plan (Nicosia Master Plan) was initiated at a meeting between Figure 1. Map of Walled city of Nicosia, demonstrating location Phaneromeni Square and buffer zone. Source: author 276 the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities of Nicosia under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The Nicosia Master Plan (NMP) aimed at the revitalization of the walled city and to help plan the city in a way which would lessen the urban sprawl. Although the NMP is still running, the south side of the walled city of Nicosia has been sporadically developed by private investors resulting in gentrification. The centre of the unoccupied walled city has become a Mecca of coffee shops, restaurants and bars, which has created conflicts between the stakeholders and the users in the area, with Phaneromeni Square forming one of the strongest examples in the area. Pheneromeni Square is situated within the medieval walls of Nicosia, linking Ledras Street and Onasagorou Street. The square has been named after Phaneromeni Church, which was built in 1872 on the ruins of an ancient Greek Orthodox nunnery. Panayia Phaneromeni is the largest Greek Orthodox Church within the city walls and it owns shops, offices and other buildings in the area, with the most important being the extensive square block of shops and offices within Ledras, Liperti, Phaneromeni and Nicocleous street (Figure 2), (K. Keshishian, 1978). The area of Phaneromeni, with the Square as a focal point, has been through dramatic changes over the years, especially from the 1950’s1 onwards, both in terms of infrastructure and identity, and has been consistently connected to socio-political developments. In the contemporary history of Cyprus, the area of Phaneromeni is strongly linked to important political moments of the history 1 In 15 January 1950, a referendum took place where 95,7% of Cypriots (Greek-Cypriots, TurkishCypriots and a minority of Armenians) voted for the unification of Cyprus with Greece. The referendum was not taken in consideration by the British colony. (A. Pantelidou et al., 2002). In 1955 the National Organization of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA), a Greek-Cypriot anti-colonial movement was formed and in April 1955 a guerrilla war against the British colony commenced, which lasted until 1959. The British recruited Turkish-Cypriot police officers in order to contain the EOKA attacks. In 1956 the first serious conflict between the two communities took place when a Turkish-Cypriot officer was killed by EOKA. As a result the Turkish-Cypriot community formed VOLKAN, a paramilitary group, which was later reformed as the Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT) (J. Calame et al., 2009). MARINA HADJILOUCA 277 and socio-political conflicts that took place in the Square. In 1996 a coffee shop by the name Kala Kathoumena opened next to the Square. After the opening of the coffee shop an urban sub-culture begun to develop in the area. Young people who frequented the coffee shop also spent time in the Square, mainly under and around a tree, which they named ‘Manolis’ after a Greek children’s song, because of the circular bench that was at the time bolted around the tree. This signified the beginning of an ever-growing sub-culture2 that used the Square as a functioning public space for leisure, exchange and expression of social and political views (figure 2). When this site was initially chosen it was at the centre of attention with regards to its future as a public space. Following the regeneration of Phaneromeni Square in 2004, by Nicosia Master Plan, the extensive use of the space by the anarchist, 2 Young people with anarchist, activist, antiauthoritarian and antifascist views. Figure 2. Pictures of young people using the public space of Phaneromeni Square. Source: pictures taken by author, March 2013 THE USE OF SCENOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT ... 278 anti-authoritarian and antifascist groups begun to frustrate the administration of Phaneromeni Church, the elderly, mostly churchgoers and shop owners, who begun to feel unsafe. In 2010, Ionas Nikolaou (at the time MP and currently the Minister of Justice of the Republic of Cyprus) described the Square as the ‘Exarchia’ of Nicosia. The comparison to the troubled neighborhood in Athens, Greece (where many socialist, anarchist and antifascist groups are accommodated and which is perpetually policed) resulted in negative connotations to the area of Phaneromeni and cultivated fear amongst the locals. During that time the area was regularly policed. The negative connotation for crime in the area has driven the local authority to gentrify it at an extremely fast pace, in an effort to dispel any type of what is considered antisocial behaviour, as it is thought that crowded places tend to come across as safer places (Van Melik et al., 2007, pp.25-42). An action that urban sociologist Sharon Zukin calls ‘pacification by cappuccino’, or ‘domestication by cappuccino’, in order to describe public spaces, which have been recaptured by the middle class at the expense of other users (S. Zukin, 1995). Following the course of gentrification: renovated housing, new spaces of consumption and middle class residents (F. Tonkiss, 2005), over the past eight years, new coffee shops, restaurants and bars have opened in Phaneromeni Square and the two neighbouring main streets, Onasagorou Street and Ledra Street (figure 3). The rapid changes that took place in Phaneromeni Square created a series of conflicts between the different actors of the Square (Politis, 2011). Both the local authority and the church administration were accusing the groups of activists, anarchists and anti-authoritarians for vandalisms in the area and for not respecting the Church. The activists, anarchists and anti-authoritarians criticised the local authority and the Church for handing over the public space to the coffee shop owners and at the same time felt that they had been secluded and chased away from a public space (https://cyprus-mail.com/2014/03/15/warbreaks-out-over-phaneromeni-square/). The young people from these groups believed that the sudden development of the Square was a result of the local MARINA HADJILOUCA 279 authority’s effort to move the group away from the Square. In April 2014, the local authority went on to remove the public benches from the Square (some of which were returned following an outrage on social media and the local press, https://cyprus-mail.com/2014/04/06/the-battle-of-the-benches/), the Church begun closing its gates3 at night and in 2017 it raised its railings, in order to prevent young people from climbing into the Church yard at night. The anarchist, anti-authoritarian and antifascist groups have now moved away from the Square. Currently, there are only a few young people hanging-out in the Church yard, and the public attention has moved to two other public spaces within the city, Eleftheria Square and the old Municipal Market. Nevertheless, it is still pertinent to question the publicness of Phaneromeni Square and interrogate the role of the performance designer and how active co-existence 3 The Church yard is traditionally a public space in Cyprus. Figure 3. Pictures of Phaneromeni Square following the opening of cafes and bars. Source: pictures taken by author, 2013 THE USE OF SCENOGRAPHIC INTERVENTIONS FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT ... 286 MARAGKOU, Anna G. & KOUTAS, Andreas G. (2009). Λευκωσία , Η ιστορία της πόλης . (Nicosia, the history of the city). MARGOLIN, Victor (1997). “Design History or Design Studies: Subject Matter and Methods” in Design Issues, Vol. 11, No.1, pp.4-15. MINTON, Anna (2009). Ground Control, Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City. London: Penguin. MOUFFE, Chantal (2000). The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. MOUFFE, Chantal (2013). Agonistics, Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso. PANTELIDOU, Aggeliki & HADJICOSTI, Constantia (2002). Ιστορία της Κπρου, Μεσαιωνικ – Νεότερη (History of Cyprus, Middle Ages – Contemporary). Nicosia: Ministry of Education and Culture. STANEK, Łukasz (2011). Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minesota Press. STAVRIDES, Stavros (2016). “Towards an Architecture of Commoning” in ASAP/Journal, Vol 1.1, pp.77-94. STRATIS, Socrates (ed.) (2013). The UAW Book: About Urban Awareness. Korea: Damdi Academic Series 5. SUCHAR, Charles (1997). “Grounding Visual Sociology in Shooting Scripts” in Qualitative Sociology 20, pp.33-55. THORPE, Adam & GAMMAN, Lorraine (2011). “Design with Society: Why Socially Responsive Design is Good Enough,CoDesign” in International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 7:3-4, pp.217-230. TONKISS, Fran (2013). Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity Press. TONKISS, Fran (2005). Space, the City and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. VAN MELIK, Rianne; VAN AALST, Irina & VAN WEESEP, Jan (2007). “Fear and Fanatasy in the Public Domain: The Development of Secured and Themed Urban Space” in Journal of Urban Design, 12:1, Routledge, pp.25-42. VARNA, George & TIESDELL, Steve (2010). “Assessing the Publicness of Public Space: The Star Model of Publicness” in Journal of Urban Design, 15:4, Routledge, pp.575-598. ZUKIN, Sharon (1995). The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell. Newspaper Articles LAMBROU, Christina. 16/06/2013, “Sketching the Buffer Zone” in Politis Newspaper, Parathyro, pp.440. RECLAIMING HOXTON. 14/04/2004, www.independant.co.uk. TODERIAN, Brent. 21/05/2013, Moving on from Gentrification to ‘Shared Neighborhoods’, www. huffingtopost.ca. TZANI, Chrysta. 13/05/2011, Μιλον για την Πλατεία οι ανθρωποι της, Η αλθεια για τη Φανερωμένη, (Its People Talk About the Square, The Truth for Phaneromeni), Politis Newspaper. MARINA HADJILOUCA 287 Introduction Between 2016 and 2018 the international performance project “Reclaim the Future: Nomadic Carnival for change” took place in different parts of northern Europe. The project was a partnership between Teatermaskinen, from northern Sweden, Dirty Deal Teatro, from Latvia, Rural Nations, from Northern Scotland, Compagnie des Mers du Nord, from Northern France, and Visões Úteis, from Northern Portugal. This artistic project aimed to explore the potential of the European periphery to demand substantial change from the centre of power. The artistic entities proposed to activate local communities, triggering their abilities to imagine their own futures, by providing to the communities artistic and conceptual tools, that allowed them to better express their aspirations and demands in a way to make them visible not only to the authorities of their own countries but to European authorities. The project was funded by the Creative Europe program, which allowed the companies to develop a series of local and international initiatives in all the areas, in a continuous process of artistic exchange and contamination, which ended up with an international parade at the heart of the European Union, in DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: AN EXPERIENCE OF SOCIAL PERFORMANCE IN A POSTINDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE JORGE PALINHOS 288 Brussels, at the stairs of the European Parliament. There were two interesting aspects in the project, which are the reason of my ongoing research on it. First, it aimed to develop a social practice, an ethical relationship between artists and communities, where communities were not used as outsourcing of authenticity, to evoke a criticism that Claire Bishop (2012, p.219) directs towards social practice, but in an attempt to find a means where the artists would provide communities the necessary tools for them to express their own authenticity and identity. Second, the project aimed at uniting the local and the international, by simultaneously working with local communities, but also attempting to find a common ground between them that allowed them to be an international force in the face of power. This, the articulation of the local and the international, is something that the European institutions have been trying to achieve for some decades, with widely different results. While the project wasn’t entirely successful in achieving these two aims, the attempt is thought-provoking enough, both in an artistic and political perspective, and some of the outcomes resulted in relevant attempts at the idea of designing a shared social space of community. The example I will address here, a carnival that happened in Porto, called “Parada Desatada”, developed a dramaturgy of space, time and community that revealed a series of artistic tools to the communities, and how the dramaturgy of the parade, based on Medieval and Renaissance models can still be useful in an artistic and social context. Art and politics on the Northern fringe “Reclaim the Future – Nomadic Carnivals for Change” was the project of a series of European theatre companies to develop a project to promote increased social inclusion and the application of arts as a force of social change. The leading company, Theatermaskinen, was also interested in exploring the idea of the Carnival as an ancient disruptive instance of the established social rules. The Carnival, for Theatermaskinen, could still be a poweful mode of expressing the wish for social change. The Carnival, has the theatre of the street, the display of JORGE PALINHOS 289 the grotesque, where laughter and excess replace official protocol, according to Bakhtin (Elliot, 1999, p.129) the symbolism of unity, freedom and inclusion of the other. At the time of the project, Theatermaskinen was exploring the technique of the bouffon, and had became fascinated by this figure of medieval theatre expressing the irrational, the grotesque, the unconscious experience of the world, but also the late medieval idea of the inverted world, where the fringes and the outcasts become the centre of society, allowed to question the established order, as it had been explored by Dario Fo, among others, and allowing the invisible, the nonconformed, to be presented and seen. Therefore, the proposed carnival, in the form of a parade, attempted to use the classical artistic performative shape of the outcast, of the monster, to challenge the respectability of institutional, technocratic power, and bring the marginalized communities of northern Europe to present themselves in front of the seat of political power, in a display of their own nonconformed power. Through this, they hoped to activate the power of communities and allow them to reflect on their own identities, ambitions and possibilities. This was the underlying concept of Reclaim the Future, with the Nomadic carnival becoming a symbol and hypothesis of this shared European carnival of the future, where all the different identities could find a equalitarian space of expression, joy of the carnival, hope of the future, and pride in their own specificities. Theatermaskinen is a Swedish company based on the wooded areas of Riddarhyttan, an old mining region, which was joined by Visões Úteis, a Portuguese company based in Porto, a post-industrial town, Rural Nations, a Scottish multiarts platform, based in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides, Dirty Deal Teatro, an independent theatre company in Riga, Latvia, an old Soviet country undergoing a capitalistic and western transformation, and Compagnie des Mers du Nord, a French theatre company based in Dunkirk, an old area of heavy industry. The concept was that each company would work with their local communities to develop several projects that would later be joined. DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: ... 290 The project took place between June 2017 and June 2018, dates selected to happen during the solstice, an astronomical and ancient symbol and time of mystical transformation, where ancient religions would enact parades dedicated to the pagan gods. Each partner was responsible for the local program, which usually entailed performances, conferences, workshops and other initiatives connected with the community. The focus would be a local parade joining the local people and colletives of each region. The first phase of the project happened in Riddarhyttan, in Sweden, followed by Parada Desatada, em Campanhã, Porto, directed by Visões Úteis, and then in Riga, Latvia, the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Dunkirk, in France, and finally in Brussels the final parade took place, with elements of all the other local parades slowly crossing the city centre until the stairs of the European Parliament, as a sign of the arrival of the fringe to the centre of European power, the local forces to the seat of the international forces, of those who live under circumstances they feel helpless to change, to those who have the power to change circumstances. For the aims of this paper, I will only focus on the local initiatives that happened in Porto, which I was able to follow closely. This program entailed performances by Visões Úteis and Teatermaskinen, a project of social cartography, an experience of georeferencing in the old social housing area of São Vicente de Paulo, the documentary film Reclaim the Future/ Exige o Futuro, and the book Ficou tudo ao deus-dará, by Márcia Andrade, with memories of the old inhabitants of the razed Bairro de São Vicente de Paulo, as well as a workshop of Performance in Community. The main event was Parada Desatada, the carnival built together with the community. This parade was the initiative and conception of Visões Úteis, under the leadership of Inês de Carvalho, but involving a series of local authorities, art galleries, amateur artistic groups, ecology activists, dance studies, gym studios, elderly homes, etc., in a wide effort of mobilization. The aim was to recruit these associations as being representative of local JORGE PALINHOS 291 populations, some of whom already trying to use artistic practices as a means of cultural and social development, others anchored in training, work or dynamizing projects for populations. After identifying, contacting and establishing partnerships with these entities, several workshops were led by Inês de Carvalho and her collaborators. The main concept of these workshops was “lines with which to sew a community”, and the objective was to identify and map the social and imaginary threads that could unite all these local entities in order to use them as the foundation of the Parade. One of these workshops was that of Fotos do Futuro, in which each participant was photographed with a slate where was written what the person hoped the future would bring. However, in the process, it was found that despite the geographical and urban proximity, most of these entities maintained little contact and articulation with each other, functioning rather as autonomous universes, centred on their own close community and on the activities they developed. Thus, an important work, and possibly a very relevant result of this initiative, was the establishment of bridges of contact between some of the communities mentioned above, to develop future partnerships. Another of the project’s first workshops focused on exploring possibilities for the parade, meanwhile entitled “Parada Desatada”, to provide participants with both an idea of the carnival freedom that was sought, as well as opening the space to debate which invisible lines could unite the district. There was also a second workshop focused on conferring artistic skills to the different partners. The central concept of the parade was the rejection of a hierarchical imposition in which the artists directed the non-artists, but providing each community with the possibility of developing their artistic autonomy, both by offering them artistic tools that they might not have, as well as the ability for them to decide what they intended to present within the global dramaturgy of the parade. The third workshop, of internationalization, provided the various local entities with the possibilities to meet and interact with representatives of international DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: ... 292 partners, in order to create links between different European peripheries and gaining a clearer awareness of the European dimension of the event, which was also one of the objectives of European support for this. The fourth workshop was a buffons’ workshop, guided by Ana Azevedo. The buffoon’s technique had been chosen to be a common link of all parades, not only because of the buffoon’s association with the carnival, but also because it represented the subversion of the Apollonian social order, and the freedom of human drives against social and political conventions. The Parada Desatada Carnival The parade took place on July 15, 2017. It started at 5 pm in the demolished Bairro de São Vicente de Paulo and took a little over 500 meters, crossing the entire Praça da Corujeira through the central garden and then turning to Rua de São Roque da Lameira, where traffic was stopped to allow the procession to enter the precinct of the former and downtrodden Industrial Slaughterhouse of Porto. I mentioned earlier that one of the principles of the intervention was to allow collectives to choose what they would do during the parade, but there was a dramaturgy of the space of the parade itself. In the demolished Bairro de São Vicente de Paulo, there were several QR codes scattered throughout the space, which allowed listening to memories of former inhabitants, but also possible futures for that space, imagined by the children of the Elementary School of Corujeira. There were sticks with white flags painted with symbols and messages from each group participating in the parade, as a sign of the presence of these groups, which would function as a spatial aggregation device to start the parade. This was a way of introducing a temporal three-dimensionality in the carnival, making it not only move through space, but also through the time layers inherent to the place. The parade started with the movement of the backhoe and the buffoons, and with a lyrical singer singing on top of the backhoe. The group of buffoons, led by Ana Azevedo, JORGE PALINHOS 293 then led the audience in a procession to Praça da Corujeira, accompanied by a percussion group, Batucada Radical. The group of buffoons thus functioned as an element of aesthetic continuity through the various stages along the way, just as they functioned as a link between the various international phases of Reclaim the Future. This was followed by an amateur theater play, composed of scenes from the play “Conversas à Janela”, by the local group “Rugas de Expressão”, evocative of several episodes from the past of the parish. This took place in the windows of the neighborhood itself, decorated with paper flowers. Praça da Corujeira, the central meeting place for the parish of Campanhã and the old cattle fair, revealed the historic position of the area as an interface between the city of Porto and its surrounding countryside. This was followed by a show of young urban dances, by the MK group, of the Associação Cultural e Recreativas Malmequeres da Nôeda, and then the performance Fado do Futuro, with the seamstress and fado singer Amélia, followed by the “Hino dos Ciganos”, with a presentation of Gypsy music and dance by a part of the numerous local Roma community. From here, several local music groups accompanied people who carried messages for the future, on the way to the Slaughterhouse. The Industrial Slaughterhouse, as an evolution and complement of the cattle market, was a space that revealed the past of the parish as a place of industry, meanwhile extinguished, and is the place that the Porto City Council intends to transform into the developmental backbone of Campanhã, through a new architectural project, by Kengo Kuma, dedicated to art and new media. That is, a space for the future. Here there was a ritual of opening the slaughterhouse gates by the company Era uma Vez Teatro, composed by performers with cerebral palsy. This performative ritual, inspired by the aesthetics of Mad Max films, forced the interruption of the road traffic to allow the gates to be opened and the parade to enter the courtyard of the slaughterhouse. At the courtyard, messages for the future were tied to the pigeons of the Associação DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: ... 294 Columbófila Invicta, before they were released and there was a toast to the future, with fortune cookies and glasses with the words “the future” containing a drink called Pirolito: a non-alcoholic soft drink very popular in Portugal in the middle of the 20th century, which was reimagined for the occasion. In the courtyard, the atmosphere of a folk celebration had been created, with popular food and drink that invited the audience to remain, in what would be a real and replicant practice of social interaction. The Dramaturgy of Past and Future Objectively, Parada Desatada results from a combination of dramaturgical thinking that seeks to reflect the variety of a particular community in a time horizon, from the memory of its eldest inhabitants to the expectations of the youngest. Such concept was translated into a space-time path that sought not only to articulate these sensibilities but also to integrate the community’s own contributions. In this way, both theatrical and musical performances depended on the self-representation awareness of the communities involved, as the texts that viewers could read or hear were the real testimonies of the locals interviewed. In this way, the intervention did not seek to impose an artistic aesthetic external to the community, but rather to endow it with tools and means for it to seek its own form of representation. Further, the dramaturgical structure of Parada presupposes the identity of a community as being defined by anchoring to a place, the parish of Campanhã, regardless of ethnicity or ethnic group, and by temporal persistence: what united people was a shared memory and a communal hope for the future, a future that is also anchored geographically in the territory of the parish. Through its choice of integrating the contributions of the locals under a dramaturgical itinerary, Parada Desatada became an open-slot teleological performance, where Visões Úteis determined the overall direction of the parade, and the community collectives filled in the empty slots with their own selfrepresentation. This open-slot dramaturgy was not imposed, but slowly built JORGE PALINHOS 295 considering the different spaces and collectives involved, as a sort of imaginary community (Hobsbawn and Ranger, 2012), but one framed in a model very similar to the Corpus Christi parades of the Middle Ages, where the different guilds and corporations would join in a festive parade to claim their rights and existence in front of the city authorities. Remarkably, this community performance attempted to connect a shared, remembered past with the idea of a potential shared future through a sort of memory loci device, which Frances Yates described as being “established from places and images” (2014, pp.6-8), and Simon Critchley argues is defined by motion: “The brilliance of Hegel’s insight was not to reduce memory to a kind of dull recitation of the past, but to create something permanently moving. (…) Memory needs to be imagination. Transfiguration. (…) We are constituted through the vast movement of history, of which we are the largely quiescent effects. Sundry epiphenomena. Symptoms of a millennia-long malaise whose cause escapes us. Memory theater cannot be reduced to my memory, but has to reach down into the deep immemorial strata that contain the latent collective energy of the past!” (2014, pp.80-81). The positioning of QR Codes, the images, the recovering of the historical memory of places, the use of posters with sentences and wishes built a real memory loci in a real space. And by the use of the parade movement, the conscious re-enactment and addressing of the collective memory, the parade attempted, dramaturgically, to also build an image of the future. This became clear at the entrance of the slaughterhouse, with the juxtaposition of images of future (real or fictional), with the sounds and flavours of the past, creating a blending of urban memories, and giving credence to Critchley’s argument: “And implicitly that story becomes one about the future as well. The city is a spatial network of memory traces, but also a vast predictive machine” (2014, p.38). DESIGNING SOCIAL SPACE THROUGH PERFORMANCE: ... 302 filmique” when Jatahy is making “ciné-théâtre”. Certain shows are literally using the set as a cinema studio, while the film is projected simultaneously. At what point this cinema dimension on stage become a means to reach the ‘theatre experience’? In the same way, amplified sounds, microphones, recorded music diffused, and even headphones for spectators, are now oftently used for theatre. I. Sound dimension on stage Before the arrival of sound amplification on stage, theatrical voices were fully recognizable like actors such as Louis Jouvet or Maria Casares for the French stage and the voices of British Alec Guiness or Lawrence Oliver were fully participating to their dramaturgy. They were able to strengthen their voice and to make it intelligible, but theatrical, as they projected their voice to the audience. During the early mediatization of actors’ voices on stage, from the 1930-1960s3, microphones were used for dramatic effects rather than to suggest reconciliation between audience and actors. Later on, to amplify voices on stage, some microphones were hung above actors’ heads, giving an uneven sound restitution and creating an artifical dimension on stage. To have actors’ voices supported by speakers is now accepted. In the most recent decades, sound technology has significantly progressed, with the spreading of headset microphone use, to support actors’ voices but also to avoid having theatrical voices. This participates to balancing the experience of spectators listening from the first to the last row, as the actors can be up or downstage, facing the audience or turning their back. These devices can bring similar effects as the cinema sound spatialization, we will develop. Theatre is not always two separated halls but devices are trying to make only one: in Roman Tragedies4 (2008), Ivo van Hove invited spectators on the stage set as on a TV studio, when Thomas Ostermeier had spectators wear headphones to create the effect of being 3 Jeanne Bovet (2019), Premières médiatisations de la voix, de la Comédie des Champs-Élysées au Théâtre de l’Athénée, revue Sciences/Lettres [en ligne] 6/2019. 4 Play created with parts of the Shakespeare tragedies Coriolanus, Julius Cesar and Antony and Cleopatra. RAFAËL MAGROU 303 on stage with the actors of Abgrund (2019), as left and right ears coresponded to stage left and right. But, as the spectators are changing their place or wearing prosthesis, doesn’t it change his appreciation of the play? This clearly isolates each one from the other, transforming theatre in an individual experience. How far sound devices could be used for the live, original and shared theatre experience? II. Joël Pommerat “théâtres en présence” In contemporary French theatre, Joël Pommerat (1963) is leading a specific approach, as he’s both writing and directing all of his shows5. His plays are written as the result of collaborative work with actors. Since the founding of his theatre company Compagnie Louis Brouillard in 1990, various methodologies have been applied. He’s writing “from” the plateau, as the text is not given to actors at the beginning, but constructed through a long process with theatrical improvisations guided by Pommerat, on research topics or texts pieces he gives to his actors. This rough material is live transformed to reach the final text6. This so called “prospective dramaturgy”7 is specific to his work and as Pommerat explains: ‘I need them (the actors) to approriate the text, to be in the speaking, and not reciting or giving a restitution of a text. (…) I am trying to break the play machine, theatrical attitude, artificiality’8. Through dramaturgic writings and playings, each play is the opportunity to reach an intimate relationship between spectators and actors. To support this approach, stage set is to the bare minimum, empty boxes with some removable furniture. Main spaces are created by the contrasts between light beams and 5 Among more than thirty texts, the only exception are the fairy tales, inspired by known authors, such as Le petit Chaperon rouge / little red Riding Hood, Cendrillon / Cinderella or Pinocchio and one text: Une Année Sans Été (Catherine Anne). 6 All of his texts are published by Actes Sud–Papiers, Arles. 7 “Dramaturgie prospective”, in Marion Boudier (2019), Avec Joël Pommerat, Tome II, L’écriture de Ça Ira (1) Fin de Louis, Actes Sud-Papiers. 8 Joël Pommerat (2007), Théâtres en Présence, Actes-Sud-Papiers, pp.9-10. ‘J’ai besoin qu’ils (les comédiens) s’approprient le texte, qu’ils soient dans la parole, et pas dans la récitation ou la restitution d’un texte. (…) J’essaie de casser la machine à jouer, à produire du jeu théâtral, de l’artificiel’. Our translation. SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE ... 304 darkness created by stage and light designer Éric Soyer. Pommerat’s work is often suggestive. Actors can appear like spectra, either moving forms in the darkness or light irradiated-like bodies, as lightings often comes from the fly loft or from stage left and right (as in choreography), rarely from the front. Pommerat explains he’s seeking for some reality not for the truth and to make it happen, the actors’ presence (présence) is his first act. In my shows, I am searching for the same relationship we can have with the characters in a novel. That’s the reason why, I think, I am looking for the light balance between showing and hiding, desire to watch and preventing that, and that seeking this balance also finds itself in all other aspects of the writing of the text and directing 9. Pommerat generally says he’s a ‘show writer’. At the beginning of the compagny, he’s been using for the set some panels mounted on wheels to make appear and disappear actors and props in a few seconds. It has been transformed in blackouts used as director’s cuts to switch from one scene to the other, thanks to the theatre magic box. In this cinematographic process, there are neither cameras nor screens with projected images used to make changing points of view. If stage sets and lights contribute to create a physical atmosphere, the sound dimension is equally as important and we will see the different ways he’s using it to suggest several dimensions. As theatrical act is based on relational phenomenon, Pommerat is following Peter Brook’s lessons, founded on respect for presence-based communication10 and to reach this presence Pommerat is aiming for, the actors voices are the main medium to lead the dramaturgy. 9 Ibid. p.32. ‘Je cherche dans mes spectacles le même rapport que celui que nous entretenons avec les personnages d’un livre à la lecture. C’est pour cela, je crois, que je cherche dans mes spectacles cet équilibre de la lumière entre montrer et cacher, désir de voir et empêchement, et que cette recherche d’équilibre se retrouve également dans tous les autres domaines de l’écriture du texte et de la mise en scène’. Our translation. 10 Joël Pommerat and his compagnie has been in residence at the Bouffes du Nord, Peter’s Brook theatre in Paris, at the turn of 2010s. RAFAËL MAGROU 305 II.A. Pommerat’s voices spectrum This is important to “invite” spectators on stage and the light amplification of actors’ voices enables Pommerat to tighten the space and François Leymarie, Pommerat’s sound designer since the early 1990s, had been trying to realize Pommerat’s vision for some time. In the early years of the Compagnie Louis Brouillard, due to a low budget, they used microphones on the side of the stage. Discontent by the blurred sound rendering, as soon it was financially possible, they equipped the actors with high frequency microphones (HF)11, then headset microphones. From the beginning, considering HF micros, Joël’s main aim is to bring the voice of the actor closer to the spectator, to enable the actors to have natural voices, as in everyday life, avoiding the traditional vocal projection – the HF (microphone) has solved this problem, of the theatrical need to project the voice 12. As for the French semiologist Roland Barthes: the actor’s voice is an ‘intimate signature’, Pommerat can use his actors’ spectrum of voices levels. Amplification enables sound, inaudible in reality, to be used – until whispering or even breathing. Since Grâce à mes yeux in 2002, the director equips the actors with HF. Considered by some as a technical assistance, in his work this enable him to reinforce the presence of characters, in different ways. First, playing with colouring characters’ voices: strong or soft, twangy or warm, child’s voice or 11 Skin coloured microphones, held by actors or performers to amplify their voice wherever they are on the stage. One of the first test of this technical device has been proved in 1979 “Tour of Life” by Kate Bush, a dance and singing show. With the help of her sound engineer Martin Fisher: he rigged a wireless headset microphone, using a wire clothes hanger, giving the freedom to the singer to move and dance on stage while singing. 12 “L’orientation principale de Joël, et ce depuis le début, par rapport aux HF, c’est le désir de rapprocher la voix du spectateur, de sorte qu’il puisse faire jouer ses comédiens d’une manière naturelle, comme dans le quotidien, sans être dans une projection vocale traditionnelle – le HF ayant résolu cette problématique de la nécessité théâtrale de projeter la voix”. François Leymarie, interview with Christophe Triau (2013), in the Cendrillon dedicated dossier, June 2013, Arts au singulier, Théâtre, p.60. Our translation. SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE ... 306 elderly person’s voice, etc., sound devices are used to lightly amplify the voice and to make this intelligible to the whole room. ‘For many years, the headsets have enabled the actors to speak with their own voice intensity, without projecting the voice. That gives an impression of proximity and reality’ says Marion Boudier, who’s been collaborating on Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis13. More than this, it enables Pommerat to attain a level of natural effect with voices and avoids theatrical projection to the audience, in order to reach the intimate experience he aims. Second, these devices lead to suggest several identities and characters. Pommerat can choose to distort voices to express several levels of behaviours: in Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, the mother’s voice is completely distorted when she’s playing a monster to frighten her daughter to forbid her to go out to visit her grandma. This reminds Lynch’s process, with ‘characters presenting an invisible part, a part of themselves being offered to the imagination of the spectator’14. At last, he can trouble image and sound, as in Cendrillon, the male narrator on stage is dubbed by a woman voice. In addition, the microphone in hand is one of the specific accessories in Pommerat’s theatrical direction. They are often used to elucidate the use of the amplified sound. In Je tremble 1 & 2 (2010): actor Lionel Codino is playing a ringmaster who’s talking directly to the public “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening”, though he’s the central character telling his own life and death on stage15. Then, a playback song is playing and he’s dancing as he was acting the singer, revealing the micro is a fake. Later on, an actress used a microphone in a stand – blackout – one second later, this device is left alone and accentuated by droplight, and embodies a presence. We imagine this to be another Lynch quote, while Rebbekah del Rio is fainting while performing “Llorando” (Crying) in 13 Marion Boudier (2015), Avec Joël Pommerat. Un Monde Complexe, Arles, Actes Sud-Papiers, coll. Apprendre, p.141. 14 Marion Boudier, Guillermo Pisani (2008) “Joël Pommerat: Une Démarche Qui Fait Œuvre”, (2008. 2, Jeu 127, pp.150-157) ‘des personnages présentant une part d’invisible, une part d’eux-mêmes offertes à l’imagination du spectateur’. Our translation. 15 Ibid. Stage directions are given in the book and mentioning the microphone. RAFAËL MAGROU 307 the Mulholland drive Silencio Club (2001): the song is going on, disclosing the playback track. Playback moments are repeated in Pommerat’s show to enhance a transition, such a device following Eisenstein “attraction” concept16. Lastly, in Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis17, dedicated to the French Revolution, the microphone is like a ‘weapon’ as the show is based on political speeches. ‘Using the microphone on the stand is a contemporary way of imposing on the world’ says François Leymarie. It was a ‘starting axiom, they (the actors) took possession of it. (…) Each voice then appropriates the microphone with different dexterity’18. II.B. Atmospheres: a large sound palette Pommerat’s sounds range is quite large, from illustrative with some audio dubbing to abstract atmospheres used during the play or for transitional effects. This combination between diegetic sounds – relative to the space and time of the story – and extra diegetic sounds – external as background music or special sound the characters can’t hear – are either illustrative or suggestive. Sound features are giving clues to what is happening on stage, or backstage. In Les Marchands, engines noises are giving clues to what the main characters are mimicking on stage: an assembly line. In Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis, different frequency bombing noises are expressing the army rapprochement to the building where the newly established Assemblée Nationale is discussing the French constitution. Some diegetic sounds can be exaggerated in Le petit Chaperon rouge (2004) the French director is dubbing the actress walking with footsteps noises, accentuating with a reverb the sound effect recorded though the carpeted stage floor. Referring 16 In his 1925-27 films, the famous Russian director used this “trick” as a metaphorical tool to reach the spectators through emotional pictures or pictures associations. 17 Created in 2015 for Mons Capital of Culture. 18 Alisonne Sinard (2016), La Multitude des Voix: Représentation Sonore de la Foule au Théâtre (Dossier J. Pommerat), entretien avec François Leymarie, Alternatives Théâtrales 130, octobre 2016. SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE ... 308 to Raymond Murray Schafer Soundscape19, this sound-based storytelling looks like a ‘show soundscape’, as a combination of sounds that forms or arises from an immersive environment20 as movies can be lead by original soundtracks. Pommerat’s range of sounds is well balanced, and combines with voices to support them21. These levels of sound contribute to the close relationship Pommerat wants to install between audience and stage, with the aim to immerse the spectators in a specific space-time dimension. At last, Pommerat never wants the set to be silent, explains us Leymarie. Show soundscapes contribute to the transitions as his dramaturgy is based on very quick scene changes, akin to a live movie montage. This obliges to cover the actors come and go to the plateau while blackout is done22. To reach this level of sound, combining soundscape and voice amplification, with the aim to enable image / body of characters and sound / voices to match, the use and implementation of speakers is very important. Leymarie’s son, Anthonin, is also composing specific music pieces for Pommerat shows. II.C. A strategic speaker implementation The Pommerat’s case is quite experimental as he has developed shows in several stage settings. A result of a long-term experimentation, Pommerat has reached this space organization with the help of theatre technical teams and partners of the compagnie Louis Brouillard, Leymarie reached a specific sound 19 Raymond Murray Schafer (1977) The Tuning of the World, a Pioneering Exploration into the Past History and Present State of the Most Neglected Aspect of Our Environment The Soundscape, Random House / french translation by Sylvette Gleize, Wildproject 2010. 20 This is combined by the sound designer François Leymarie, with his nephew Grégoire Leymarie, who’s work consists in mixing, distorsing, and also balancing voices and added sounds and musics, while Antonin, François’ son is composing since 2006 (Cet Enfant) harmonies that will give a sound identity to the show – mostly extra diegetic sounds. 21 At early years, before HF, audience was complaining that in Pommerat’s plays, it was ifficult to hear the actors’ voices, as the director asked his characters not to project voice. The HF has been compensating this loss of text information. 22 The Pommerat blacks in the theatre hall are complete. Stage designer Éric Soyer is even hiding the emergency lamps to reach a total blackout and to make changes without being seen by the spectators, like cinema director’s cuts. There could be dozen of blackout per play depending on the writing. RAFAËL MAGROU 309 implementation 23 . (...) it’s very important to have a sound diffusion in the middle of the stage, that’s a bit powerful and distinct for the intelligibility of the voice (…). Upstage speakers are used to create sonorous spaces which would not be visible on stage, which represents an exterior to that which we see on stage. (…) Finally, other speakers are dispersed in the room, around the public space, to wrap the audience and to create some unrealistic, fictional exaggerated sounds as close as possible to the spectator’s ear. The implementation diagram of speakers for Cendrillon shows central clusters for voices relayed by left and right upstage and downstage speakers combined with halls speakers in the middle at each side. This general disposal works in historical theatres or contemporary ones. This is more complex when it’s developed for the arena in the circle Cercles / Fictions – Bouffes du Nord 2010, and Ma Chambre froide, Odéon-Berthier 2011. Different levels of speakers hang over the stage disc and a larger circle is installed over the spectators heads. In a traverse space organization as in La réunification des deux Corées (Odéon-Berthier, 2013), due to the long corridor and the distance from spectators to actors, small speakers have been integrated in the low partition walls that separates audience from the stage rectangle, balanced with speakers rigged above the heads of the rear rows, organized in three areas: left, center and right, used depending on the actors positioning. Depending on the room – as shows are turning in France and abroad –, the implementation is always studied to immerse the audience in the 23 François Leymarie interview with Christophe Triau (2013), p.57. “Il est très important d’avoir une diffusion au centre du plateau un peu puissante et distincte, pour l’intellibilité de la voix. (…) Des enceintes au lointain sont utilisées pour diffuser des notions d’espaces sonores qui ne seraient pas visibles sur la scène, qui représenteraient un extérieur par rapport à ce que l’on voit sur le plateau; (…) Enfin, d’autres enceintes sont disposées un peu partout dans la salle, dans l’espace du public, pour envelopper ce dernier à certains moments, pour soutenir des événements sonores qui seraient plus irréalistes, fictionneles et qui demanderaient à ce qu’ils soient exagérés, rendus plus proches de l’oreille du spectateur dans la salle”. Our translation. SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE ... 310 space and time aimed. At last, for Ça ira (1) Fin de Louis, the spectators represented members of the assembly while actors were playing on stage AND in the auditorium. Pommerat has been using live voices in the hall to embrace the audience in his dramaturgic action24, and to recreate the assembly hall where debates were taking place. Speeches were given to persuade of the ideologies held by each political side, being “Tiers état” (main population), nobility or clergy. Some reactions have to come from the hall and supported not only by actors. After several essays, holophony-like25 tests installed among the seats, sounding like ventriloquism, ultimately, the solution has been to incorporate into the public some extras. ‘We quickly understood that the problematic of this show was more sonorous than musical’ Leymarie explains26. Called “Forces vives”, these are fifteen people, separated in two political groups (left and right wings), applauding their leaders or booing their opponents. Spread into the rows of the hall, they unfold a large spectrum of reaction, depending on the ideas expressed27. III. When sound creates image and space As in cinematographic technologies, sound perspective is used to zoom in on space, situation, or character, to render dull or reverberating spaces. “In the first sense, the term ‘perspective’ is applied to visual perception and graphic techniques. However, our hearing system allows us to perceive plans, to assess the relative distances of different sound sources. And, since the advent of stereophony, the techniques of sound capture and reproduction aim tot the 24 I can attest about this as I have been playing an extra Force vive while a week in may 2019 while the repise of Ça Ira (1) Fin de Louis, at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. 25 Holophony is a principle of spatial distribution, it is to the sound what hologram is to the image. This has been tested in collaboration with IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique) in Paris, where François Leymarie organized some voices rehearsals with 130 professional and amateur actors. Some recorded parts have been used to represent the rebellious nation and to give the idea of a mass of people hurrying against the palace gates. 26 Alisonne Sinard (2016). 27 It even happen some spectator are reacting at the same time or at other moments of the show, though it’s not a participative play. RAFAËL MAGROU 311 realization of an ‘image sound’”28 explains Jean Chauteret in La perspective sonore. “The sound creates the image, plays the role of the camera and influences the gaze”29 offstage can be depicted. Pommerat sound dimension research aims to create a special atmosphere, to suggest spaces and to realize an intimate relationship with the public. From this complex of levels with soundscape, voices, etc, Pommerat is able to build or unbuild space, to open or close the walls. He generates images with sounds, most of all spaces and atmospheres, without any cameras nor screen to establish a special relationship between actors and spectators. If necessary, he creates his own architecture, as happened in the arena in the circle or in the traverse theatre. So he can virtualy “invite” the audience on stage while keeping spectators on their seats, aiming to treat equally each row of the room. The power of sound is here to create an intimate proximity or an estrangement, possibly a distancing, still as both an individual and a collective experience. Thanks to technology and speakers implementation studies, Pommerat’s sound ‘score’ is composed or assembled to create the intended atmosphere and complete the stage set, the writing reduced to the bare minimum to be evocative. Contrary to his contemporaries using projected image to underline their dramaturgy, Pommerat creates three-dimensional theatrical spaces by means of sound, combined with lights, costume and poem. Thus, he opens a free space to the spectator to build his own understanding as an invitation to travel into space and also time. Compared to other directors playing with stage / backstage using cameras, Pommerat composes stage limits blurred by Soyer’s lights and darks. ‘In art, 28 Jean Chateauret (2009), La Perspective Sonore, Communications, issue 85 “L’homme a-t-il encore une perspective?”, p.139. “C’est à la perception visuelle et aux techniques graphiques que le terme de perspective, au sens premier, s’applique. Cependant notre système auditif nous permet de percevoir des plans, d’évaluer des distances relatives de différentes sources sonores. Et les techniques de captation et de reproduction du son visent, surtout depuis l’avènement de la stéréophonie, à la réalisation d’une image sonore”. Our translation. 29 Philippe Couture (2010), Présences au Théâtre des Codes Sonores du Cinéma. À Propos de Jean Boillot, Joël Pommerat, Jérémie Niel et Marie Brassard. Cahiers de Théâtre Jeu (134), p.96. “Le son crée l’image, joue le rôle de la caméra, influence le regard”. Our translation. SOUND DIMENSION IN THEATRE ... 318 In this sense, shop windows’ private lighting and public lighting complement each other perfectly. Light provided by poles, which allows a view of the spatial context, creates a foundation to enable the lighting of stores, facades and monuments to attract the eye in a much more efficient way than during the day, and at the same time leaves all the space visible in order to impose visibility on its users. Schivelbusch observes this complementarity between the two forms of lighting in a very pertinent way: Commercial light is to police light what bourgeois society is to the state. As the State, in its appropriately named ‘night-watchman’, function guarantees the security that bourgeois society needs to pursue its business interests, so public lighting creates the framework of security within which commercial lighting can unfold. (1988, p.142) Guy Debord says that the spectacle is precisely the domination of all social life, including its visuality, by consumption: ‘The spectacle is the moment when commodity reaches total occupation of social life. All this is perfectly visible in relation to commodity, because nothing else is seen but the commodity: the visible world is its world’ 3 (2003, p.32). Commercial lighting works, in conjunction with other mechanisms to reinforce this dominance of merchandise at night. Robert Williams (2008) draws attention to the fact that lighting can work together with advertising and with discourses on ways of living and being at night to direct people to certain places chosen by the government and large corporations. Street lighting, boulevards and highways help people on the way home, work and consumer places, commercial streets are brighter than residential ones, poor neighbourhoods receive a qualitatively worse light than rich neighbourhoods. Commercial centres are extremely brighter, attracting consumers and making rest time productive again as it becomes time to consume. 3 Translated from the Brazilian edition by the author. TOMÁS RIBAS 319 Focus and Composition What I would like to note here is the similarity between the kind of balance (with the commercial light emphasis) I see in urban lighting and technics of focus and composition in stage lighting. There are many reasons why a spectator’s eyes are oriented to an action or place on stage and light is not the only force to drive it. As Richard H. Palmer notes in The Lighting Art: The Aesthetics of Stage Lighting Design (1994), the expectation of something to happen or the knowledge about the play can make the audience search for an actor on stage independently of the light but it is unequivocal that brighter places have an attractive force to the eye. As Palmer observes there are different features that are responsible for drawing attention to a certain place like brightness, color, movement and area size. Something can trigger attention because it is brighter, or because it has a more saturated color or because it is in constant movement like neon signs or because INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: LIGHT, ART AND POLITICS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE Figure 2. Tomás Ribas, Follow Spot, 2019 320 it has more than one of these features at he same time. Regardless of these attributes however, ‘The more discordant a stimulus is in relation to its environment, the more it will draw attention’ (1994, p.141). In theatre, this discordant stimulus can be achieved by illuminating the key area of the stage with a strong or less dimmed fixture then the rest of the stage, or with a contrasting color, or even with a softer one but before everything we usually are already in a darkened audience. If, with a lit-up audience area, the theatre was a place of social interaction, without audience lighting its character changes completely. What happens on stage overlaps what happens in the audience and the spectators eyes are drawn to the scene. Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that: The spectator in the dark is alone with himself and the illuminated image, because social connections cease to exist in the dark. Darkness heightens individual perceptions, magnifying them many times. The darkened auditorium gives the illuminated image an intensity that it would not otherwise possess. (Schivelbusch, 1988, p.221) As the audience’s darkness increases the power of perception, light onstage unbalances the balance of power in the visual field, favouring the conduction of vision. Similarly, on an urban context, the night itself creates the same kind of opportunity and the light of the spectacle, not a neutral light, but a very ideological one, creates a visual hierarchy focusing light on certain places. Schivelbusch cites a 1926 advertising handbook that says that shop windows should not be evenly illuminated, but instead products should receive more focused lights in order to stand out (1988, p.148). If we also think that according to James J. Gibson in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1986) the eyes are part of a system, being as they are on a moving head and a moving body, we can think about how this body’s movement, TOMÁS RIBAS 321 whether from the eye, the head or the whole body is, despite being informed by context, guided by detail vision, which is narrower and needs greater light intensities. The contrast of light and shadow provided by night light is a true narrative designed to guide the eye to certain places. I believe there is a close relationship between the accumulated knowledge of how our vision works and the way night light has established itself. As I understand urban lighting, there is a relationship between the supposedly public light provided by the state and private light, each one with its own concerns and characteristics, but with common interests. As Schivelbusch (1988) notes, the light of the police and the light of commerce complement each other. The ultimate goal of street lighting is the abolition of darkness to support police work at times when their work is impaired and perhaps more “necessary” as social self-regulation, which is stronger during the day, becomes more fragile at night. The light of commerce, however, makes good use of darkness as it uses INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: LIGHT, ART AND POLITICS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE Figure 3. Tomás Ribas, Follow Spot, 2019 322 the shadows to gain attention more easily than during the day. If street lighting tries to diffuse light as evenly as possible into all spaces, consumer lighting makes an effort instead to create light points, such as in shop windows and advertising materials, to get the attention of passersby and sell their products. There is then a balance for street lighting, between a level of illumination that is higher enough to not allow groups of people unwanted by the commerce but not so high to disturb consumption. In any case, it seems clear to me that there is an equilibrium relationship between diffuse light and accent light, which evidently is not only exercised by commerce, but also by the State, as in the case of monuments and government buildings. If we make an analogy with the theatre, this balance is a dim light that illuminates the scene and the actors as a whole plus a strong but focused light where the most important action for the narrative is going on. Follow Spot During the research for my master thesis I did many nigh time excursions to observe the light in the city of Porto and surroundings. I started observing and taking photographs in order to document the lighting of the city and the changes I could see in different neighbourhoods. One thing that interested me was, as I developed before, the balance between street lighting and commercial lighting and the impact it does in our visual field at night. As I observed, shop windows, public buildings, corporate logos, advertising, monuments, landmark sites, restaurants, usually have a difference in color or luminance in a concentrated place that puts them visually above its surroundings. It creates strong points of attention, like islands (or a lighthouse) in the ocean. On Avenida dos Aliados, we can clearly see the effort to highlight the town hall, just as on the shores of Vila Nova de Gaia, port wine brands remain present at night through illuminated signs. The Luis I bridge has a light that illuminates the floor for pedestrians who stop to see the view without dazzling their eyes and Porto’s downtown has much of its space illuminated by amber lights. Some old TOMÁS RIBAS 323 neon signs still exist, such as the Sá da Bandeira drugstore, next to new shops and restaurants with newer attention-grabbing techniques. The amount of white light illuminating the billboards of the Bolhão market does not let the night erase the rehabilitation that takes place there. Elsewhere in the city the situation is quite different. The Avenida da República, in Vila Nova de Gaia has a diffuse and constant lighting with high poles that diffuses the light to the maximum “flattening” the avenue. The El Corte Inglés brand, lit on its roof, marks its presence all night but on the ground floor, while there are advertising inviting potential consumers with sales, a row of white light directed to the square discourages its use during the night. On side streets like Rua do General Torres, vacant land and abandoned old farms are forgotten, completely in the dark. Light creates an edition of what we see. It picks points of interest and transforms the visible, creating a new visual reality of the night space. INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: LIGHT, ART AND POLITICS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE Figure 4. Tomás Ribas, Follow Spot, 2019 324 Interested in experimenting with this kind of equilibrium a I started a practice with the aim of unbalancing in some way the visual hierarchy created by night light. The practice was simply to walk at night carrying a flashlight with me so I could illuminate dark spaces when shooting, in an attempt to re-balance what is seen and what is unseen. As it is possible to see in the images, part of the urban structure disappears at night: vacant terrain, wild plants, waste from buildings that are not considered heritage sites, squares that cannot be entered at night, political messages, graffiti, become dark, as well as all places one should not go. Some passages become invisible to those who do not know them by limiting movement to certain paths. Later I named the photographs produced Follow Spot. Follow spot is a lighting equipment used in theatre and concerts to follow the main star of the show, such as the protagonist of a musical or the lead singer of a rock band. Unlike a conventional spotlight, which has a fixed focus, the follow spot is controlled by an operator to keep the “star” always illuminated and detached from whole. The spot thus keeps our focus where it should be, controlling the direction of our gaze. Almost like a “rebel” follow spot, which breaks free from its script and turns to the backstage, I lit the darkest places in my surroundings with my flashlight and photographed it to make apparent what was invisible, rebalancing the visual field. My objective with this practice was not to propose how the light should be but to open a reflection about the priorities of urban lighting and its ideology. Conclusion In this paper I tried to propose similarities between theatre and street lighting, more precisely, on how both uses the concentration of light in certain places and the contrast with the surrounding ambient as a tool to attract attention. If the theatre commonly use focus and composition to lead the eye due to a dramaturgical idea, urban lighting, in a more decentralised way, uses a similar mechanism to conduct city dwellers attention to certain places. TOMÁS RIBAS 325 As we have seen, the State and large corporations try to impose themselves on this night space, manipulating our sight, sustaining historical narratives, attracting or distancing inhabitants and tourists from certain places (stigmatising or promoting these places), facilitating production and stimulating consumption. Urban light is thus largely subjected to surveillance, production and consumption, and with it the nocturnal landscape of its inhabitants. With my creative practice I tried to expose, in some way, how this logic permeate urban lighting in the city of Porto exploring what is in the shadows. Carrying a flashlight created the possibility to wander through off-grid places, to choose what to illuminate and so what to see at night. To choose what to illuminate in an urban context where a lighting system is already working creates an awareness about the priorities of urban lighting. Light emitted by artificial sources, and the transformation it causes in spaces, objects and people, cannot be analysed only aesthetically, but, on the contrary, needs to be analysed in the social consequences of its action. When the use of light is subjected to the logic production / consumption / surveillance, it implies that all possible influence that light can have on our social interactions is subject to this logic. The objective here was not a proposition of how it should be but an attempt of a reflection. A reflection about lighting ideology and the potential it has in dragging attention. INVISIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: LIGHT, ART AND POLITICS IN THE PUBLIC SPACE 326 TOMÁS RIBAS References CRARY, Jonathan (2017). Técnicas do Observador – Visão e Modernidade no Século XIX. Lisboa: Orfeu Negro. DEBORD, Guy (2003). A Sociedade do Espetáculo. Projeto Periferia. https://www.marxists.org/portugues/debord/1967/11/sociedade.pdf FOUCAULT, Michel (1977). Vigiar e Punir: Nascimento da Prisão. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes. GIBSON, James J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press. LEFEBVRE, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. PALMER, Richard H. (1994). The Lighting Art: The Aesthetics of Stage Lighting Design. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. SCHIVELBUSCH, Wolfgang (1988). Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. WILLIAMS, Robert W. (2008). “Night Spaces: Darkness, Deterritorialization and Social Control” in Space and Culture 11 (4), pp.514-532. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331208320117. 327 Introduction There has been a recent wave of research attention focusing on immersive and mixed reality technologies across a range of artforms, including theatre and performance. Accompanying this is a pervading sense that the creative potential of these technologies has not yet been realised. Somewhat surprisingly, there has been very little work in this area within a specifically scenographic context. This paper will focus specifically on augmented reality (AR), drawing on frameworks within scenography to argue that this context provides a way to think through and experiment with the affective potential of these technologies. AR is not necessarily understood here as associated with a particular technology. Rather, I define it as any handheld or wearable technology that creates an augmented experience of space. Contrary to most existing research in AR, I resist thinking in terms of a binary distinction between virtual objects or information, and ‘reality’. I instead build on the work a small minority of scholars who argue that AR creates new mediated spaces or realities. I take this further, proposing that AR, like the related but distinct virtual reality, can be discussed in terms of its spatiality. I consider this spatiality in the context of a practice-research performance installation Ernest THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY LUCY THORNETT 334 the sensing body of the audience. I will turn now to another moment in the performance to illustrate this further. In the final part of the performance, audiences were guided to return to the space they had started in. While they were elsewhere in the space, the curtains had opened to reveal posters of trees on the auditorium floor. A fan had been turned on, creating a gentle breeze that moved the curtains. When audiences directed the tablet at the trees, life-sized virtual trees appeared that remained in place if the screen was moved up towards the leaves at the top. For some audiences, the trees registered as a solid presence in the space. For these participants there was an embodied instinct to avoid walking through the trees, despite knowing that they weren’t physically there, as seen in the comments from two audience interviews below: B: Yeah the trees were, that was a very cool feeling, sort of walking in and… knowing where I could move and where I could walk suddenly became a bit of like a ‘Oh, wait’. I almost questioned whether I could walk over the tree… Yeah, it felt definitely felt like physical obstacles and I was sort of almost… moving around them rather than sort of confidently moving through them. LT: Oh, you moved your body to get around them? C: Yeah, I went like that to try and get round it. And I was like (imitates movement) ...that’s ridiculous. LT: That’s quite interesting. So then there’s a kind of bodily feeling that the tree is in the space? C: Yeah. Even though I knew it wasn’t. The virtual trees here are visually seen on-screen, but felt to be co-present in the same physical space as the audience – they have a virtual materiality. The fact that this slippage of virtual into actual was described by the participant above as producing a ‘cool feeling’ points to the affective nature of this experience. For LUCY THORNETT 335 Massumi, affect is temporal – a ‘state of suspense’ (1995, p.86) or pre-conscious intensity that allows the virtual to enter, briefly, into our conscious experience. In fact, he argues that it can only be understood temporally and not spatially (2011, p.16). However, an atmospheric and scenographic perspective might reveal this affective experience of the virtual to be spatial as well as temporal. There is a growing body of scholarship on the spatiality of these affective processes. Derek P. McCormack uses the term ‘affective spacetimes’ to articulate the inseparability of spatiality and temporality in this process: Space, in other words, is never a backdrop for something more dynamic. Nor indeed, can it or should it be juxtaposed to process or temporality in a way that privileges the latter. Instead, it is always more accurate to speak of space, or spaces, as multiple: spaces produced via a range of technologies and experienced through different sensory registers; spaces with variable reaches and intensities; and spaces that can often only be apprehended in and through the assemblages of movement and stillness of which they are composed. (2014, p.2) This discussion of spaces as multiple, as produced by bodies in movement and through technologies underscores the way that the AR technology in Ernest Remains enacted speculative scenographic space(s). Kathleen Stewart similarly speaks of atmospheric ‘attunements’ – ‘an attention to the… complex emergent worlds…’, which, following Heidegger, she calls ‘worlding’ (2011, p.445). Like McCormack, she discusses the embodied practices through which such worldings emerge (p.446). This helps to think through the way in Ernest Remains, the moving body in concert with handheld screen, digital content and headphones – produced a particular spacetime or atmosphere. There are a number of ways that this spatiality was seen to manifest in the performance. One of these was a particular directionality necessitated by the THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY 336 device, a forward motion produced by the need to follow the screen and keep focus directed towards it: D: you do not know what will (happen) because I can only look forward… you’re afraid some(thing) horrible will go behind… E: you’re never watching your back because you’re always watching the front. This opened up a space of potentiality behind and around the audience. This mediation of the embodied relationship to space can also be seen in the moment with the virtual trees. In other AR reactions to objects in the space, where they were visual, they were constrained in scale in relation to the object that triggered them. The trees produced a different kind of embodied encounter to the device and space, as audiences moved the screen and their bodies in order to look up: LUCY THORNETT Figure 3. Ernest Remains augmented reality installation at Banham Theatre, University of Leeds (2019) by author. Virtual trees appearing on-screen 337 F: It somehow changes the, you’re no longer just looking at a space holding an iPad in one way. You’re moving your body, just so you can see different things. Even just extending your back for a little bit, I think was really interesting because you spend the whole performance just walking around, holding it in one way and then going upwards changes the way you’re using your body. For one audience member, this embodied movement, in concert with the sensation of the breeze created by the fan, transported them to another space entirely: G: I think that was a wonderful moment and then with the trees it just, I don’t know, you just definitely forgot you’re in a theatre, especially those long verandas with those curtains and blowing takes you into a specific (place). It’s definitely not winter, perhaps it’s summer with a breeze. For others, rather than space becoming other, it became multiple or unstable: F: And you’re questioning the... I'm going to say reality. Because it was, it shifted. It was shifting. It was in two places at once. What these audience experiences have in common, I propose, is that the embodied relation to technology enacted speculative scenographic space(s). This occurred as - variously, for different audience members – a directional opening out of spatial possibility or potential; a sense of elsewhere overlaid onto here; and/ or a feeling of inhabiting multiple simultaneous spaces or realities. In the section that follows, I will discuss this speculative spatiality in terms of its scenographic potential. THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY 338 Scenographic Space(s) As touched on above, scenography is often discussed as a spatial and relational practice. Rachel Hann highlights how scenography mediates these relations in ‘a crafting of stage geographies as felt atmospheres through material and technological interventions’ (2019, p.22). She extends Stewart’s notion of atmospheric worlding to a concept of ‘scenographic worlding’, to articulate how ‘stage geographies become manifest as perceptual worlds’ (p.82). Drawing on both Stewart and McCormack’s work, Hann emphasises the temporality of worlding, and the way in which ‘worldly thresholds become manifest, albeit fleetingly, in relation to other worlds already transgressed and the worlds that lie ahead’ (p.83). In this sense we can see the AR in Ernest Remains functioning as an embodied relation to technology that scenographically produces multiple simultaneous and overlapping worlds. Hann argues that this is different to scenography’s ability to produce speculative (or human-conceived) worlds. For her, scenographic worldings are not ontologically speculative. However, following Massumi’s conception of the virtual as both actual and abstract, I contend that the space(s) that emerge through this embodied relation are simultaneously real and speculative. I use space(s) here in order to connote an experience of space that is both singular and multiple, echoing McCormack .This also draws on Dorita Hannah’s discussion of scenography’s spatial multiplicity. She argues that scenography ‘establishes environments through which actions develop and multiply beyond any physical or virtual frame’ (2017, p.44), and that digital technologies in performance and daily life particularly underscore this multiplicity. In Ernest Remains space was for some audiences directly perceived as multiple; for some as a field of potential that surrounded them as they focused on the device; and for others still as another space and time, experienced in the here and now. In this sense, the plural space(s) also points to multiple individualised audience experiences rather than a single idealised experience. These experiences of space were not necessarily or not always experienced separately, but as spaces that LUCY THORNETT 339 overlapped and shifted in affective process. Conclusion Ernest Remains shows how AR does not simply overlay digital content onto physical space. Rather, it is capable of producing affective, speculative space(s). This occurs through the particular relations of body and technology that AR constructs. These embodied relations are specific to particular sites, bodies and devices, and should not be understood as constant across all AR experiences. A scenographic lens allows us to conceive of augmented reality as a relational, spatial practice. Following this, I contend that scenography is distinctly placed to reveal some of the key ways in which AR might be utilised affectively. Moreover, I argue that the relational virtuality that emerged through this AR experiment reveals the ways in which the affectivity of scenographic space might be inherently linked to virtuality. In other words, if scenography allows us a space for thinking through AR’s affectivity, AR might in turn shed light on how affect operates in scenography. The research in this paper forms part of a PhD funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). Ernest Remains was supported through a WRoCAH large award. THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY 340 LUCY THORNETT References ARONSON, Arnold (2017). “Foreword” in Joslin McKinney & Scott Palmer (eds.), Scenography Expanded. London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp.1-20. ARTAUD, Antonin (1958). The Theater and Its Double. New York: Grove Press Inc. AZUMA, Ronald T. (1997). “A Survey of Augmented Reality” in Presence 6 (4), pp.355-385. BENFORD, Steve & GIANNACHI, Gabriella (2011). Performing Mixed Reality. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. CARDIFF, Janet & MILLER, George Bures (2014). The City of Forking Paths. (Audio and video walk). 19th Biennale of Sydney: Sydney. CARDIFF, Janet (1999). The Missing Voice. (Audio Walk). London: Artangel and Whitechapel Gallery. FURHT, Borko (ed.) (2011). Handbook of Augmented Reality. New York: Springer-Verlag. Available at: https://www.springer.com/gb/book/9781461400639 (accessed 13/05/19). GEROIMENKO, Vladimir (2018). Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (2nd edition). New York: Springer International Publishing. GRIMSHAW, Mark (2014). “Introduction” in Mark Grimshaw (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.1-16. HANN, Rachel (2019). Beyond Scenography. Abingdon: Routledge. HANNAH, Dorita (2017). “Scenographic Screen Space: Bearing Witness and Performing Resistance” in Joslin McKinney & Scott Palmer (eds.), Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp.39-60. LICHTY, Patrick (2018). “The Aesthetics of Liminality: Augmentation as an Art Form” in Vladimir Geroimenko (ed.), Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (2nd edition). London; New York: Springer International Publishing, pp.133-162. MANOVICH, Lev (2006). “The Poetics of Augmented Space” in Visual Communication 5 (2), pp.219240. MASSUMI, Brian (1995). “The Autonomy of Affect” in Cultural Critique (31), pp.83-109. MASSUMI, Brian (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Available at: www.dukeupress.edu/parables-for-the-virtual (accessed 24/11/18). MASSUMI, Brian (2011). Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. MCCORMACK, Derek P. (2014). Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham: Duke University Press. MCKINNEY, Joslin & PALMER, Scott (2017). “Introducing ‘Expanded’ Scenography” in Joslin McKinney & Scott Palmer (eds.), Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp.1-20. MILGRAM, Paul & KISHINO, Fumio (1994). “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays” in IEICE Transactions on Information Systems 77 (12), pp.1321-1329. POPAT, Sita (2016). “Missing in Action: Embodied Experience and Virtual Reality” in Theatre Journal 68 (3), pp.357-378. SKWAREK, Mark (2018). “Augmented Reality Activism” in Vladimir Geroimenko (ed.), Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (2nd edition). London; New York: Springer International Publishing, pp.3-40. 341 STEWART, Kathleen (2011). “Atmospheric Attunements” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3), pp.445-453. THIEL, Tamiko (2018). “Critical Interventions into Canonical Spaces: Augmented Reality at the 2011 Venice and Istanbul Biennals” in Vladimir Geroimenko (ed.), Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (2nd edition). London; New York: Springer International Publishing, pp.41-72. THOMAS, Lisa May & GLOWACKI, David R. (2018). “Seeing and Feeling in VR: Bodily Perception in the Gaps Between Layered Realities” in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 14 (2), pp.145-168. VINCS, Kim; BENNETT, Alison; MCCORMICK, John; VINCENT, Jordan Beth & HUTCHISON, Stephanie (2018). “Skin to Skin: Performing Augmented Reality” in Vladimir Geroimenko (ed.), Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium (2nd edition). London; New York: Springer International Publishing, pp.183-193. WRIGHT, Rewa (2014). “Art, In Your Pocket: New Currents In Mobile Augmented Reality” in The Journal of Creative Technologies 4, pp.1-8. WRIGHT, Rewa (2018). “Interface is the Place: Augmented Reality ad the Phenomena of SmartphoneSpacetime” in Max Schleser & Marsha Berry (eds.), Mobile Story Making in an Age of Smartphones. (1st ed. 2018 edition). New York, NY: Palgrave Pivot, pp.117-125. THE SCENOGRAPHIC SPACE(S) OF AUGMENTED REALITY 342 343 PERFORMANCE AND ARCHITECTURE PEDAGOGIES 350 ecological niche. An oak tree seeks the sun, growing branches that place leaves where they will receive as much light as possible. Lacking a brain, it still acts effectively to feed its own growth and reproduction. Even a rock asserts its presence with solidity, resisting the eroding forces of rain, wind, and human machinery according to the qualities of its formation, whether hard if granite or soft if limestone. Designed objects carry the purposes of their creators as well as the material presence of their elements, which act independently. Designers well know that materials resist; they warp or check or bend according to their history and their nature. Do things act with intent? Yes, however their intentions are not the singular, explicit purpose of a sentient being, but the compound intentions of materiality and history. These intents and interactions are deeply ecological. Nothing exists apart from its relationships with other things. Everything, including humans, asserts its position and continually adapts to its situation, acting with purpose in its own way, with the qualities it has. To explore some of these non-human qualities and their relationships with people, I gave a week-long workshop with a study-abroad group in Genoa. We warmed up with exercises based on director Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints, developing an awareness of each other and of the things around us (Bogart, 2004). Then I asked students to find a simple architectural element out in the city, such as a doorway, set of steps, a wall, or a bench and to engage it as a third partner in a short video, which included drawings that described the real dimensions and positions of things and people. The idea was to read the social potential of the element and to interpret it in as many ways as they could, to ask in their actions what else it could do with them, bringing their own set of intentions to the game. Then to draw it to understand the real, architectural dimensions in plan and section. Elise Francis and Vera Kolalias found an old door on a Genoa street, which they wove into a story of desire (Figure 4). Kolalias’ interaction with the door, focusing on her hands, conveys the power of open and closed in emotions of GRAY READ 351 touch without words. These projects were intended to develop an architectural sensibility based in interaction, rather than visual composition. Design, often considered an explicit projection of human desires onto compliant material, is recast as creating an interaction or event. The projects, in both video and drawing, show people doing what they might do in the spaces, while highlighting the materiality and presence of architectural elements. Design becomes a social proposal, like an improvisational move, asking for a response. This shift in thinking requires a shift in drawing technique. Plans, sections and elevations are still necessary because they register the real dimensions of construction. The crux of the matter is to show how dimensions and materials play in the life of the place. Two advanced graduate students: Maria Flores and Victoria Gomes explored alternative types of drawing that might be more suited to a design process based SPATIAL THEATRE FOR ARCHITECTS: EXERCISES FOR STUDENTS Figure 4. Elise Francis and Vera Kolalias, stills from video exploring the emotional potential of a door in Genoa 352 in the interaction of people and place. Flores designed an entire community based on the premise that when Miami is flooded by sea level rise, its high-rise buildings will still be habitable, albeit accessible only by boat. She devised a “Colony” of inhabitants who built around, within and between existing highrise buildings, inventing a self-sufficient and communal way of life. She wrote stories from the point of view of Colony inhabitants, which described their postdiluvian life and the decisions they had made to survive together, and she drew architectural views detailing how the city worked. She produced a graphic novel that combined narrative with scenes, people and places. The images focused on the descriptive and architectural more than on interpersonal drama, and the sweeping expanse of her vision became accessible through characters in action. Imagining the future is the architect’s profession. Flores’ work draws on a tradition of almost mythological thinking in architectural education, that flourished particularly in the 1980s and 90s, drawing on literature to feed spatial imagination. That impulse leapt from the stories of the deep past toward imagining technological futures in drawings that hover between science fiction and comic book style. Some architecture students develop exquisite skill in drawing and computer graphics and go on to careers in set design for movies. Victoria Gomes developed a means of drawing to describe the life of an existing place – a market street in Port of Spain, Trinidad (Figure 5). She interpreted a classical form of drawing, the analytique, as a means to show the interaction between people and place. An analytique merges plan, section, and detail into one composed drawing in order to describe an architectural space more fully than any single drawing can. A building façade is peeled away to reveal the section, which is folded down into plan and a detail projects forward at a larger scale. Gomes started with photographs taken at the market, projected the architectural lines of the buildings outward, then cut sections in order to see both inside and outside spaces simultaneously. Plans and maps sprung out of the photos at whatever depth was appropriate to their scale on the drawing. She populated the scene with photos and drawings of people she observed at the market and she GRAY READ 353 interviewed some of them to add narrative inserts. In this composite way, the drawing shows the overall location of the market in the city, the dimensions of the street, the stalls, and buildings, as well as some of the details of railings and vending tables, all embedded within a scene of the life of the place, showing people both inside and outside doing what they do at the market. Theatre has long been embedded in architecture and architectural education, notably in the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas schools of design in the early 20th century. Aldo Rossi’s teatro scientifico and John Hedjuk’s architectural performances carried part of the tradition forward. Since the 1990s, architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Diller/Scofidio have embraced theatre and the idea that architecture is meaningless without the events that take place there1. They design buildings 1 Tschumi has produced several books on his firm’s work that explore the idea of event. See Event-Cities 1-4 (1994, 2001, 2005, 2010) all published by MIT Press. SPATIAL THEATRE FOR ARCHITECTS: EXERCISES FOR STUDENTS Figure 5. Victoria Gomes, Analytique of the social life of the Charlotte Street market in Port of Spain, Trinidad. Collage of photos and drawing, 2019 354 to provide the potential for people to make their own decisions on how to live and move, indeed their buildings provoke or challenge people to make creative use of the spaces. Such buildings do not fit their function precisely, rather they act with people, open to the many reuses and reinterpretations that characterize the spontaneous life of the city (Tschumi, 1994; Diller + Scofidio, 2019). They see their work embedded in action, whether literally in performance pieces or over time as buildings in the city. Increasingly the pressures of climate change, the imperative of social equity, and even the pandemic challenge architects to build for complexity and change. Creative vision is needed more than ever but framed as a proposal within an ongoing improvisation. It must say yes to its situation, open to the actions of others, and, through the physicality of building, propose a way forward, which in turn will be interpreted by people in the process of constructing their lives as they envision them. In learning their craft, architecture students should play and playact as part of the process of putting themselves in the role of both the people they design for and the things that they design. Sometimes it’s useful to think like a thing, to imagine non-human existence within a social world. GRAY READ 355 SPATIAL THEATRE FOR ARCHITECTS: EXERCISES FOR STUDENTS References BENNETT, Jane (2015). “Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy” in Richard Grusin (ed.),The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.223-245. BOGART, Anne & LANDAU, Tina (2004). The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. New York: Theatre Communications Group. LATOUR, Bruno (1988). “Mixing Humans with Non-Humans: Sociology of a Door-Closer” in Leigh Star (ed.), Ecologies of Knowledge – Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Albany. New York: SUNY Press, pp.257-280. LATOUR, Bruno (2006). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. SCOFIDIO, Diller & RENFRO (2019). Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Tokyo: Shinkenchiku-Sha Co. TSCHUMI, Bernard (1994). Event-Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 356 357 Introduction This paper examines the pedagogical opportunities that arose after students executed a series of performative events at the School of Architecture or Escuela de Arquitectura (EA by its name in Spanish) at the University of Costa Rica (UCR). These performative events occurred in October of 2019. The “October events” allowed for a group of students to begin an ongoing exploration1 of the potential of performance and of the value of intersecting spatial or architectural knowledge with performative practices. Students voices2 claimed that the EA had turned its back to performative and more theoretical explorations, focusing mainly on building and technical aspects. Performance, specifically what I will refer to as “spatial performances” – performative events where architecture 1 In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemics these efforts were suspended. 2 For this work, conversations were held with students who were interested and participated in the actions taken including: Juan Leiva, Daniela Araya, Jeremy Salazar, Julio Matamoros, Esteban Barrantes, Zetty Alonso, Maximilano Morales. Some of this advanced students – Araya, and Barrantes – along with others not cited are working on a collective dissertation under the author’s tutoring which tackles, precisely, the notion of experimenting as a means to address fixed or institutionalised ideas regarding spatial design in the Costa Rican current political, social and environmental context. Their voices should be only considered as partial opinions of the events that have become the interest of this essay. They provide a partial account of the recent events and serve to initiate a theoretical reflection on the possibilities of the performative in architectural education, which is precisely the intention of this essay. SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA: PERFORMATIVE ARTS AND ARCHITECTURE’S BOUNDARIES NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA 358 knowledge is essential –, seemed to have served to expose topics of concern within the students body, complementing traditional methods of communication such as forums, letters and talks. In order to offer context, the essay offers a brief history of the EA’s foundation and early years as well as a short account of the socio-political events that allowed for these spatial performances to occur. From that point on, the text focuses on raising questions regarding the possible intersections between performative practices and the spatial knowledges commonly associated with training in architecture. As a theoretical framework, the essay will establish references to other experiences in teaching architecture and arts. Notions of Dissidence As Ines Weizman asserts architecture often has difficulties articulating a dissident position. Specifically Weizman affirms that: Architecture is perhaps the least likely of practices to articulate a dissident position. Producing buildings requires political powers that control the two main conditions necessary for construction to occur – land and money. These are largely conservative and institutional. But the position of architecture – at the nexus where political, commercial, financial military, ideological, cultural forces operate – also has the potential to serve as the medium for articulating ideas of resistance, critique, reform or evasion. (Weizman, 2014, p.6) At the same time, Architecture schools occupy a fundamental role, as Weizman establishes, in the articulation of such ideas. Since schools are partially free from the inherent pressures of building and market economies, they can observe building practices and explore associated phenomena from different positions, with the ability to shift, transform, ask questions and cross disciplinary boundaries while doing so. Weizman affirms “schools have, in particular areas and situations in both east and west, become the sites of dissident politics, NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA 359 providing alternative sites of free thinking, imagination and political dissent through architecture” (Weizman, 2014, p.6). Despite the opportunities that an academic context offers to reflect upon the discipline’s condition, consistent efforts require systematic use of theories and thinking methods. Given its geopolitical situation, the EA has had a tendency to focus on land planning and urban problems, social dwelling as well as in the development, within design studios, of institutional typologies. Design exercises are sometimes understood as solutions to specific realities or social needs. In this approach, experimentation and imagination – as means to analyse and defy constructed notions of reality – tend to occupy a more peripheral position. Scholarship suggests that this situation is partially related to the EA’s foundation. In the EA, where a progress narrative – in which aiding development occupied a central role – seems to have overpowered the EA’s foundational tradition on experimenting with intersections between architecture and the arts (SolanoMeza, 2017a). In the recent “October events”, spatial performances designed and executed by architecture students served, as means to question a perceived lack of experimentation, obsolete knowledge transfer practices, the role of architecture in national politics, and, more comprehensively, the future of the discipline in the country. The results of these spatial performances were timid but offered opportunities to question certain practices, thus becoming objects of interest. A Brief History of the School of Architecture and its “experimental” performative tradition The EA was founded in 1968 and begun operations in 1971 under an experimental programme. The programme had no specific subjects and all activities converged in the design studios. The course complemented techno-scientific knowledges with interests in freeing and exposing individual design processes. The first can be traced to the experience of the EA’s intellectual founders – Rafael “Felo” Garcia, Jorge Bertheau and Edgar Brenes – at the Department of Development SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA... 366 57% of the FEES. At the end of that day, the four deans of the four universities, students representation and the president himself sat down to negotiate. Negotiations eventually led to the government’s apparent acceptance of the universities terms. However, at the moment this paper was written conflicts and legal processes were still on course regarding budget allocation. On that day, the emblematic building of the EA – designed by Edgar Brenes – appeared covered in black fabrics by the students’ decision: a performative act suggesting an intention to expose a political stance regarding the events cited above, but also an intent to raise questions about the role of the EA and its ability to adapt to a world in transformation – see figure 4 –. According to students voices, an intention to allow discussion and promote eventual transformation was fundamental in their decisions and actions10. Overall, the act of covering the six-story building seems to have had more symbolic impact over the students and the staff than the result itself. Although timid, their action could be considered as performance in the sense that it implicated an active and physical involvement from the students’ body. In it, the building served as the stage and also as a subject, one trying to tell a story of action over concerns about the future. Performative arts as a means to expose concerns In order to reopen the building and resume regular activities, the student group negotiated with the EA’s principal to allow for time and spaces – otherwise dedicated to formal teaching – to discuss the School’s current condition and needs of transformation ideas as identified by students. During these negotiated spaces, students designed a series of small performative events with the aim to expose specific circumstances that needed to be made visible from their perspective. 10 Refer to first footnote. NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA 367 One of the exercises simulated the future location of restrooms inside the design studios. The perfomance objective was to point out the need to discuss the built intervention, its aesthetics and impact over the current layout and consequent functionality of the space. The design, according to students – and a portion of faculty members – lacked integration with the EA’s building, which was designed in the late seventies by one of its intellectual founders. Historically, the building has had a deficiency in the amount and quality of the restrooms for reasons related to the original design layout, budget and and failure to adapt to changes in population, policies and regulations. However, the UCR’s proposal to build restrooms affecting the open layout of the building have raised questions about its quality and impact. Another exercise, which calls for a future and more detailed assessment, attempted to criticise the nature of a skills test – Prueba de Habilidad – which is SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA... Figure 4. School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica in black fabrics, taken by the author, 2019 368 mandatory for admission at the EA11. The test attempts to measure the skills of future architecture students regarding space, construction and problem solving. Usually at the test, future students are given a list of materials and a problem that needs to be spatially solved using those materials. The nature and contents of the skills test will not be examined here, however I would like to point out that a future exploration of its nature seems necessary. In this text, the skills test is only of interest as the event that served as the basis for the students’ spatial performance. From the students’ perspective the performance allowed them to point out and express their concerns regarding the future of architecture education within the EA. One of their concerns was related to the skills that future architects are 11 In order to provide brief context: the test was established in 1998 as an intent to control admission and the profile of students. Historically, since then, first year staff and the EA’s principals have been involved in the assessment of the test. NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA Figure 5. A performance replicated the dispositions of desks in the plaza outside the EA’s building, courtesy of Juan Leiva, an advanced architecture student, 2019 369 expected to have in a changing environment, shaped by social, environmental and economical crisis. Furthermore, the silent performance about the disposition of the desks during the test, the providing of the list of allotted materials and the “mocking” of the given instructions attempted to show an implied rigidity in the test itself. Perhaps, the acting performance also exposed the consolidation to seek for an inherent “talent” for technical construction rather than for other types of spatial intuitions and knowledges. This sort of profiling seems to be latent in teaching practices since admission. However, it needs to be further examined. Opportunities for Dissidence? Students were interested in discussing the future of the EA in the specific context of Costa Rica. These events, and their performative nature, could be considered attempts to dissent from the institutionalised canon – transfered in architecture SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA... Figure 6. Students replicated the desks’s disposition from the skills test, courtesy of Juan Leiva, 2019 370 schools – of what architecture professionals need to know and are expected to do. In other words, performative events served to partially question the skills and knowledges that future architects are expected to have. The building shut down was, as one anonymous student claims, an attempt to achieve “something related to the nature of their training in architecture”. This is relevant, as Magali Sarfatti Larson suggests, because “the autonomous discourse of the profession – the knowledge it produces by and for itself – is articulated, transmitted, and, above all, received in schools” (Sarfatti Larson, 1995, p.11). The students’ spatial performances seem to have operated as a sort of opposition, as a sort of obstacle to this rigid autonomous discourse that promotes technical knowledges. They were small-scaled and rather timid. However, the represent an opportuniy to systematically question the role of the school and the profession in Costa Rica. They were opportunities for dissidence, as they attempted to “question the relationship of the architect and political power, (...) between ideology and the NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA Figure 7. Students also listed the materials that are employed at the skills test. Courtesy of Juan Leiva, 2019 371 built form” (Weizman, 2014, p.7) an this case the relationship between a school, the cluster of knowledges and skills it offers and its students. For the EA, these spatial performances offered an opportunity to promote a collective discussion about disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, crossings with performative arts seem to offer possibilities when exposing critical or theoretical problems. Because of its “dramatic nature” they allowed the exploration of architecture related problems from different perspectives, hence offering chances for new readings concerned with architectural training. These “spatial performances” seem to constitute an opportunity to explore dissent in relationship to architecture’s disciplinary boundaries and reduced or simplistic notions about design and building and the social role of architects. As Alberto Pérez-Gómez affirms: “the experience of architecture is never merely spatial, and yet what passes today for architectural design is often no more than a manipulation of geometric spatial concepts”. As Peréz Gómez continues “our lived world is rich in sensations and emotions that arise from our bodily actions and engagement in the world” (Pérez-Gómez, 2016, p.16). Pérez Gómez establishes a connection between architecture and the dramatic arts, by recalling how the use of the word architect in dramatic plays of classical tradition. The call “to architect” appears in works such as Cyclops by Euripides and Peace by Aristophanes, plays that reveal the cultural roots, connotations, and expectations associated with the person of the architect and his actions, a term that would eventually (a few centuries later) give its name to the latin discipline of Architectura. This understanding adds a new dimension to the more conventional understanding of the architect as “master craftsman”, which has been taken for granted in most histories of architecture. (PérezGómez, 2016, p.16) The dimension, Pérez Gómez refers to opens a series of possibilities, again associated with the exploration of the discipline boundaries utilising SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA... 372 performative practices, not only as interdisciplinary tools but as inherent pieces of architecture’s own core. Also, political and environmental transformations suggest the need to formulate new questions, regarding the skills that are developed within architecture schools through certain pedagogical practices and studio exercises. This seems relevant in school located in the Global South, as performative practices may also serve to challenge notions of development, design and architectural culture. In the case of the EA, opportunities to include performative exercises seem to have the potential to aid in the construction of critical analysis. However in order for these efforts to become effective in opening discussions about the EA’s course and its syllabuses, continuity and systematisation seem necessary. In that sense, recollections and archival work addressing the EA’s history offer new perspectives regarding the role of performative events in the EA’s academic culture. This work is part of a research project hosted by the School of Architecture and funded by the Vicerectoría de Investigación of the Universidad de Costa Rica. I particularly thank the students who collaborated and shared their experiences. In the COVID scenario, their efforts seem to have faded and hopefully will be soon resumed. NATALIA SOLANO-MEZA 373 SEARCHING FOR DISSIDENCE IN THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF COSTA RICA... References BERTHEAU, Jorge (2014). Entrevista con Natalia Solano-Meza. DÍAZ, Eva (2015). The Experimenters Chance and Design at the Black Mountain College. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. GARCÍA, Rafael Angel F. (2013). Entrevista con Natalia Solano-Meza. JONES, John Chris (1992). Design Methods. New York: John Wiley & Sons. MIRANDA CAMACHO, Guillermo (2010). “La Fundación del Partido Liberación Nacional y el Origen del Proyecto Político Educativo Socialdemócrata en Costa Rica – Una Aproximación Hermeneútica Crítica” in Revista de Ciencias Sociales 130, IV, Universidad de Costa Rica, pp.185-213. MOLINA JIMÉNEZ, Iván (2015). Identidad Nacional y Cambio Cultural en Costa Rica durante la Segunda Mitad del Siglo XX (11). San Pedro de Montes de Oca: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica. PÉREZ-GÓMEZ, Alberto (2016). “Architecture as a Performing Art: Two Analogical Reflections” in Marcia Feuerstein & Gray Read (ed.), Architecture as a Performing Art. UK: Taylor & Francis, pp.15-26. SARFATTI LARSON, Magali (1995). Behind the Postmodern Facade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America. Oakland, California: University of California Press. SOLANO-MEZA, Natalia (2017a). “Tropical Dissidence: The Creation of the School of Architecture of the University of Costa Rica at the Department of Development and Tropical Studies” in Fabrications, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Volume 27 (issue 2), pp.177-199. SOLANO-MEZA, Natalia (2017b). “Against a Pedagogical Colonization: The Case of the School of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica” in Charrette, Volume 4 (issue 2), pp.40-58. WEIZMAN, Ines (2014). “Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, an Introduction” in Ines Weizman (ed.), Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence. Hoboken: Taylor & Francis. ZAVALETA OCHOA, Eugenia (1994). Los Inicios del Arte Abstracto en Costa Rica, 1958-1971. San Pedro, Montes de Oca: Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica. 374 375 AUTHORS BRIDGET FOREMAN Is a playwright and Associate Lecturer at the University of York, where her research focuses on directive commissioning in theatre. She studied for her BA Hons at Oxford University and holds a PhD in Playwriting by Practice from York University, where she lectures on the Playwriting MA, as well as supervising playwriting and dissertations for undergraduate and postgraduate students. She has taught Literature and Creative Writing for Sarah Lawrence College at Oxford and writes plays to commission for a range of companies, collaborating with multi-disciplinary artists. Her work is regularly performed in the professional theatre across the UK. CAROLINA E. SANTO Is a performance designer and independent researcher based in Paris, France. She has studied theatre at the Sorbonne, scenography at the Zürich University of the Arts and holds a PhD from the University of Vienna. Her career as a designer for theatre and opera has been challenged by her research on the performative aspects of space and place. Her current work deals with memory and territory and includes installations, walking and sites-specific performances. Addressing scenography from a philosophical point of view has redefined her work as Geoscenography. She has recently been appointed curator for performance for the Prague Quadrennial PQ23. DORITA HANNAH Is a designer and academic who focuses on performance space and spatial performativity. A scenographer and theatre architect, she is also aligned with the University of Auckland (NZ), AUT (NZ), UTAS (Australia) and Aalto University (Finland). Through trans-disciplinary research, her Critical Spatial Practice explores the creative arts, addressing the dynamics, politics and intermediality of the public realm. Publications include Performance Design (2008) and EventSpace (2018). Dr Hannah co-convenes the Theatre & Architecture working group for IFTR (International Federation of Theatre Research) and co-chairs the Performance+Design working group for PSi (Performance Studies international). She is a regular contributor to the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space – as exhibitor, workshop leader, design director and curator – and current research collaborations include Performative Urbanism (Canada) and Floating Peripheries (Finland). 382 HOLD: EVENT-SPACE AND CONTAINERIZATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 Dorita Hannah For well over a century, the enduring Italianate theatre with its numbered seating matrix – fixing us side by side to collectively face a prescribed stage – has been increasingly rejected by experimental performing arts practitioners seeking alternative sites that enable a more critical engagement with the ‘real’ and a self-organising public. Such recognition, that live performance can neither be permanently housed nor securely contained, led to a proliferation of ‘pop-up’ venues in the first two decades of the 21st century. Born out of economic necessity, these expeditious, flexible and low-cost solutions repurposed vacant sites for temporarily accommodating nomadic theatre, restaurants, bars, clubs and shops, leading to innovative ways of gathering communities to participate in public space through deliberately anti-commercial urban regeneration. However, as will unfold throughout this paper, such revitalizing phenomena tend to become commercially co-opted to normalize insecure conditions, while operating as shortterm gentrifying agents that glorify precarity for longer-term capitalist ends. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the rise of shipping container architecture, which requires close scrutiny in order to consider its inherent socio-political performativity in our current age of neoliberal markets, global trafficking and a worldwide pandemic. As a means of coming to terms with the Container Globe – a proposed mobile pop-up venue, the design of which I helped develop a decade ago – my paper focuses on the intermodal shipping container as a spatial module in which myth and theatre become entangled with global logistics, specifically in relation to the built environment as performance space and spatial performativity. This is particularly prescient at the close of 2020, a year in which the coronavirus pandemic forced the closure of theatres, while highlighting and destabilizing the harsh realities of a globalized world. Yet Covid-19 shows us that contaminants can be neither easily controlled nor confined: that they evade borders, invade bodies and propagate silently, quickly and without prejudice. What are the repercussions for theatre architecture as a container of performance events and those who gather to witness them? ABSTRACTS OCCUPATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF OLD WAREHOUSES AT RIO DE JANEIRO DOCKLANDS AREA INTO THEATRICAL SPACES. PERFORMATIVE EXPERIENCES IN THE 21st CENTURY Evelyn Furquim Werneck Lima The challenge for theatrical groups concerned with socially engaged theatre is to reduce the impasses of capitalism through performing arts activities in alternative venues to ensure the full exercise of citizenship. The appropriation of the industrial heritage warehouses not originally intended to be theatrical opened new possibilities for the performing arts, besides the option of working at different scales, and producing dramatic architectures. Theatre has always transformed stages into diverse spaces, but currently, space itself has transformed theatre. This paper aims to examine vacant warehouses occupation at Rio de Janeiro Docklands as theatrical spaces, examining two performative experiences: Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, an Oficina Theatre production (2007), and Machiavelli’s La Mandragola staged by Companhia Ensaio Aberto (2019). Both venues are old industrial structures in Rio de Janeiro docklands. To perform the Sertões in Rio de Janeiro, director Zé Celso chose the oldest storage building of the docks area in Rio de Janeiro (built in 1871) and adapted the ritualistic production to the building’s huge basilica shape. Actors and audience images were edited in real-time and projected on a large screen. Celso established no boundaries between the audience and the stage, as actors came up to the stands and spectators descended to the scenic area, socializing with the performers. On the other hand, to stage La Mandragola, director Luiz Fernando Lobo built a rough arena in a rectangular space surrounded by rustic wood stands, having three large tables as the stage for the Renaissance piazza inside one chosen location inside a huge warehouse. The exposed brick structure and the effects of scenic lighting contributed to the play’s atmosphere in which all actions happen in front of the spectator, highlighting the contradictions between the public and the private. In both performances, spectators and performers were bodies in movement, true events in total harmony with the ‘found spaces’. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]