Comparison between Representational and Presentational in theatre set design

Designing a scene is a very challenging work for a designer. They have to make sure that all the elements of scenic design must be follow in order to have a good design. In designing a stage the designer have to consider about the line, mass, composition, texture and the color of the stage design. This will make the design very attracting and meaningful. Set design is very importance because it will help the actors getting their mood and n the other hand it will also support the story that they want to present. A set design must be suitable with the text that they want to play. In order to get this, the designer must put in his consideration about given circumstances that already in the text. Beside that there is one more thing that designer have to think in the process of designing a stage. It is to decide either that performance should used presentational or representational setting on stage. What is the difference between this two elements? I will discuss more on presentational and representational in this writing. I also will give a couple of image that can make we see the difference between this two elements.

Representational

Representational is a term which use to a theatre which tries to create an illusion of reality. According to Moises Kaufman:

“In representational theatre the artists strive to create a visual and performance reality on stage that tricks the audience into accepting the idea that what they are seeing is real. For the amount of time that you are in the theatre watching the play you accept that what you are seeing is real and is happening in front of you. The audience becomes a passive viewer of the experience that is happening to the characters in the drama. From time to time the audience may respond to what is happening (laughter, applause), but, for the most part, the audience is there to watch and, hopefully, be entertained, educated, enlightened, or moved by the performance.”

A representational set generally form a type of reality setting. For example, if there is scene in a living room the set must visualize like an actual living room. There must be a table, sofa, maybe some carpets and the texture of the wall of the set must convince the audience that it was a living room. Furthermore, the representational set is more suitable for a realism play. It is because in a realism play everything must be real. According to the essay What Is Realism? realism is the movement toward representing reality as it is, in art. Realistic drama is an attempt to portray life on stage, a movement away from the conventional melodramas and sentimental comedies of the 1700s. It is expressed in theatre through the use of symbolism, character development, stage setting and storyline and is exemplified in plays. Here are some example of representational setting in theatre :

courteous of http://homepage.ntlworld.com/stumarsh/ARSENIC.htm

Set design by Iain Aitken for The Threepenny Opera, 2000, Sydney Theatre Company Production. courteous of : http://www.hsc.csu.edu.au/drama/hsc/studies/brecht/2758/Brecht.htm 

Set design Dracula 3,courteous of :http://theatre5.com/alumni/Set%20design%20Dracula%203.html


 

Wajah Lumpur sketch, courteous of :http://vitaminisme.blogspot.com/2008/06/wajah-lumpur-dalam-persiapan.html 

            

Presentational

            Presentational is a term which use to emphasize theatricality and acknowledges the theatre as theatre. In presentational setting there is no illusion. According to Kaufman:

            ”In presentational theatre the settings may not be realistic, at all, and actors may be assigned a number of roles, often shifting from role to role with only the most minimal of physical changes. The audience is challenged to keep up with what is developing on stage as the story is told”

In presentational theatre, epic stories can be told with a minimum number of actors and a few costumes and props. The Laramie Project, by Moises Kaufman, is an example of presentational theatre. In this play a company of 8 actors play over 100 roles, often playing 2 roles in the same scene. The actors shift roles by changing vocal characteristics, costumes, or props. Presentational designs are used in multi-set musicals, plays with an exterior location, and the classical dramas of Shakespeare and Sophocles. Here are some example for presentational setting :

use of painted backdrop courteous of :http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2008/12/stage_raw_babes_in_toyland.php

courteous of : http://livedesignonline.com/theatre/seaside_setting_0401/

References :

(n.d.). Retrieved March 6, 2011, from http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/laramie/presentational-theater.htm

(n.d.). Retrieved March 6, 2011, from http://www3.northern.edu/wild/th241/sc7.htm

Griffiths, T. R. (2004). Stagecraft. New York: Phaidon.

Kaufman, M. (n.d.). Retrieved March 6, 2011, from http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/laramie/presentational-theater.htm

They Started The Scenography....

We need brilliant people to start a brilliant stuff. Scenography become more important when many personality emerge and creating their wonderful piece. Their work influence many people who work in this line. Everybody must know them in order to become a good scenographer. So this are the people who makes scenography world become more colorful and have bring scenography towards the other level :

1. Adolphe Appia

 Adolphe Appia (born 1 September 1862 in Geneva; died 29 February 1928 in Nyon), son of Red Cross co-founder Louis Appia, was a Swiss architect and theorist of stage lighting and décor.
Appia is best known for his many scenic designs for Wagner’s operas. He rejected painted two-dimensional sets for three-dimensional "living" sets because he believed that shade was as necessary as light to form a connection between the actor and the setting of the performance in time and space. Through the use of control of light intensity, colour and manipulation, Appia created a new perspective of scene design and stage lighting.
Directors and designers have both taken great inspiration from the work of Adolphe Appia, whose design theories and conceptualizations of Wagner’s opera’s have helped to shape modern perceptions of the relationship between the performance space and lighting. One of the reasons for the influence of Appia’s work and theories, is that he was working at time when electrical lighting was just evolving. Another is that he was a man of great vision who was able to conceptualize and philosophize about many of his practices and theories.
The central principle underpinning much of Appia’s work is that artistic unity is the primary function of the director and the designer. Appia maintained that two dimensional set painting and the performance dynamics it created, was the major cause of production disunity in his time. He advocated three elements as fundamental to creating a unified and effective mise en scene:

1. Dynamic and three dimensional movements by actors
2. Perpendicular scenery
3. Using depth and the horizontal dynamics of the performance space

(Brockett 1994)
Appia saw light, space and the human body as malleable commodities which should be integrated to create a unified mise en scene. He advocated synchronicity of sound, light and movement in his productions of Wagner’s operas and he tried to integrate corps of actors with the rhythms and moods of the music. Ultimately however, Appia considered light as the primary element which fused together all aspects of a production and he consistently attempted to unify musical and movement elements of the text and score to the more mystical and symbolic aspects of light. He often tried to have actors, singers and dancers start with a strong symbolic gesture or movement and end with another strong symbolic pose or gesture. In his productions, light was ever changing, manipulated from moment to moment, from action to action. Ultimately, Appia sought to unify stage movement and the use of space, stage rhythm and the mise en scene.
Appia was one of the first designers to understand the potential of stage lighting to do more than merely illuminate actors and painted scenery. His ideas about the staging of "word-tone drama", together with his own stagings of Tristan und Isolde (Milan 1923) and parts of the Ring (Basle 1924-25) have influenced later stagings, especially those of the second half of the twentieth century.
For Appia and for his productions, the mise en scene and the totality or unity of the performance experience was primary and he believed that these elements drove movement and initiated action more than any thing else (Johnston 1972). Appia’s designs and theories went on to inspire many other theatre creators such as Edward Gordon Craig, Jacques Copeau and Wieland Wagner.


2. Edward Gordon Craig

Edward Gordon Craig (16 January 1872 – 29 July 1966), sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, producer, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings. Craig was the son of revered actress Dame Ellen Terry. The illegitimate son of the architect Edward Godwin and actress Ellen Terry,^[1] Craig was born Edward Godwin on 16 January 1872 in Railway Street, Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, England, and baptized at age 16 as Edward Henry Gordon. He took the surname Craig by deed poll at age 21.

Craig spent much of his childhood, from the age of 8 in 1889 to 1897, backstage at the Lyceum Theatre where his mother was the much-beloved leading lady to actor Sir Henry Irving. Craig later wrote an especially vivid, book-length tribute to the unique, haunting, autocratic charisma that was Henry Irving. Whether Irving's spectacularly successful relationship with Ellen Terry was romantic as well as professional has been the subject of much historical speculation. (Most of their correspondence was burned by her descendants). According to Michael Holroyd's book about Irving and Terry, A Strange Eventful History: "Years later, when Irving was dead, Marguerite Steen asked Ellen whether she really had been Irving's lover, and she promptly answered: 'Of course I was. We were terribly in love for a while.' But at earlier periods in her life, when there were more people around to be offended, she said contradictory things."

Whatever the nature of Terry's personal relationship with Irving, it never marred their work or, astonishingly, their reputation. Even before the Lyceum years, when Ellen Terry ran off with bohemian artist Godwin and bore him two illegitimate children, Teddy (Craig himself) and Edith 'Edy' Craig, Ellen's charm triumphed over Victorian disdain. She was somehow able to maintain an exalted position in the hearts of her Victorian audiences, regardless of how much and how often her behavior defied their strict moralities. Irresistible charm was her special gift, as well, perhaps, as her legacy to her son. It is nonetheless likely, even in the protective environment of the theatre, that Craig felt what Victorians thought of a child born out of wedlock.

In 1893 Craig married May Gibson, with whom he had four children: Rosemary, Robin, Peter and Philip. With his lover Elena Meo he had two children, Nelly (1904–1975) and Edward Carrick (1905–1998), art director of British motion pictures. With his lover, dancer Isadora Duncan, Craig had a daughter, Deirdre (1906–13), who drowned at the age of seven. Craig died in Venice in France in 1966 at the age of 94.

Craig asserted that the director was "the true artist of the theatre" and, controversially, suggested viewing actors as no more important than marionettes. He designed and built elaborately symbolic sets; for instance, a set composed of his patented movable screens for a Moscow Art Theater production of Hamlet. He also was the editor and chief writer for the first international theatre magazine, The Mask.
He worked as an actor in the company of Sir Henry Irving, but became more interested in art, learning to carve wood under the tutelage of James Pryde and William Nicholson. His acting career ended in 1897, when he went into theatrical design.

Craig's first productions, Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, Handel's opera Acis and Galatea - both inspired and conducted by his life-long friend Martin Shaw who founded the Purcell Operatic Society with him to produce them - and Ibsen's The Vikings were produced in London. The production of Dido and Aeneas was a considerable success and highly influential in reviving interest in the music of Purcell, then so little known that three copies of the Times review were delivered to the theatre, one addressed to Mr Shaw, one to Mr Craig ... and one to Mr Purcell. Craig had begun to develop his style. He concentrated on keeping the designs simple so as to set off the movements of the actors and of light, and introduced the idea of a "unified stage picture" that covered all the elements of design.

After finding little financial success in Britain, Craig set out for Germany in 1904. While there, he wrote one of his most famous works, the essay The Art of the Theater (later reprinted with the title On the Art of the Theatre). In 1908, Isadora Duncan introduced Craig to Constantin Stanislavsky, who invited him to direct their famous production of Hamlet with the Moscow Arts Theater, which opened in December 1911. After settling in Italy, Craig created a school of theatrical design with support from Lord Howard de Walden.
Craig was considered extremely difficult to work with and ultimately refused to direct or design any project over which he did not have complete artistic control. This led to his withdrawal from the practical theatre production. He received the OBE and in 1958 was made a Companion of Honour.

  

Craig's 1908 design for Hamlet at Moscow Art Theatre, 1911-12

That was two leading personality in scenography world. There are two more personality which i will continue later on.

source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gordon_Craig

             http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Appia

What is Scenography....????

I am very sure that not many people have this term in their vocabulary. Except a person who work on this line such as in film industries or theater production. According to Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged scenography [siːˈnɒgrəfɪ] is the art of portraying objects or scenes in perspective. It comes from Greek word skēnographia which mean a drawing in perspective, from skēnē scene.  

British Scenographer Pamela Howard, had clearly explain in her book title 'What is Scenography' (2002) about scenography that i find very helpful to student who in this line. I quote here some of her text that i think very useful. 

"The scenographer visually liberates the text and the story behind it, by creating a world in which the eyes see what the ears do not hear."

"A scenographer is by nature a cultural magpie, delighting in the search for the ephemera of history and sociology. The variety of work that presents itself is part of the fascination of the subject, and satisfies an inherent and insatiable curiosity that wants to know not only the great events of history by the precise details of how people lived, ate, dressed, washed, and earned their livelihood."

"Scenography - the creation of a stage space - does not exist as a self-contained art work. .......(snip)....... Scenography is always incomplete until the performer steps into the playing space and engages the audience. Moreover, scenography is the joint statement of the director and the visual artist of their view of the play, opera or dance that is being presented to the audience as a united piece of work."
"The scenographer has to be an artist who can understand how to work with and incorporate the ideas of the director, understand text as a writer, be sensitive to the needs of a performer exposed to an audience, and create imaginative and appropriate spaces for productions........."

(also understand music and sound as a musician and composer, movement as a dancer and choreogapher, and the effects of light and shadow as a fine arts painter and a photographer)

"......I especially listen out for the sound of the words, the "musicality" of the text, the timbre and texture of the speech, trying to decide for myself what makes this play difference from any other – for example, the difference in sound between an Ibsen play and one by Beckett. This sense of sound is very near to the sense of colour......."

So, that is the meaning of scenography. There are many opinion from the expert about scenography but after all it have same objective which mean the art of portraying the stage.   

Example of Scenography design
courteous of : http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles/75502/projects/122335/755021220269350.jpg

Abstract

This knowledgeable blog is prepare due to full fill the requirement of introduction of scenography. Beside that it will be a medium for learning proses which mean this blog will not be perfect. So there a room for discussion if there any abstruseness. A lot of scenography element will be discuss in this particular blog especially involving theater and art. So enjoy reading and get some information. for the good of art.....  

courteous of : http://www.suzylamplugh.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/men_at_work1.jpg