Chapter+6+Designing

Chapter 6 material is to be downloaded from the @Downloads page.

Below are ADDITIONAL materials related to the chapter on this subject.

@Design Elements and Principles @Scene Design @Lighting Design @Costume Design

@Interviews with designers

**Design History** As you are aware, design for the proscenium stage is, by necessity, frontal. Audience on one side, stage and design display (sets, costumes, lights, props) on the other.

Fundamentally, this suggests that the audience inhabits a world apart from the world created on the stage. Below are a few historic examples of how this development came about. It is an incomplete history to be sure but it gives you some idea about when the process took place.

During the Italian Renaissance there was an attempt to harken back to the Roman and Greek periods for ideas. You will remember that the Italian Renaissance is also known for the development of perspective painting. The Teatro Olimpico was the first Renaissance theatre building in which elements of scene design were incorporated into a proscenium arch in an indoor theatre building. Even then the environments created were displayed behind permanent arches. See the picture below of the Olimpico to recall this arrangement which you have already seen before when we discussed the frontal performance space. The actors normally stood on stage in front of the arches and the scenery was installed behind the arches. There is little attempt here to integrate the actor within a scenic environment. The use of perspective scenery seems to have been the highlight of this early attempt.

The theatrical practices of the early 16th century are summed up in Sebastiano Serlio's Architettura (1545) the first Renaissance work on the subject.

Below is the scenacomica designed for Selario.

Selario also designed the scena tragica. This hastened the process toward the Teatro Farnese below, which you have seen elsewhere. The Farnese had one large opening (the proscenium) behind which scenery could be placed. Performers acted, sung, and danced in front of the scenery but they were better integrated into the mix than they were in the Olympico. Without going into detail, it is enough for you to remember that this approach has dominated the thinking of countless artists and the general public since the Italian Renaissance.

The medieval theatre also had its share of scenery on both the fixed stages in Europe and the pageant wagons in England.





During the 17th century, the French court encouraged the development of the proscenium arch and painted scenery as seen below in this depiction of Louis IV watching a play in the Palais-Cardinal.

In the 18th and 19th centuries theatre artists took full advantage of larger and more complex scenic displays like those below:

The reliance on elaborate scenic displays in proscenium arch theatres reached its zenith in opera productions during the 19th century. Below are examples of two roll drops which were painted for an opera. In the early part of the 19th century a set was created for the play Hernani which shows a ground plan seen just below the rendering suggesting that there were ideas in this early period that would eventually lead to the box sets which became popular later in the century aiding the move toward realism. Adolphe Appia, the father of modern stage lighting, attempted to break the strangle hold of realism by simplifying scenery and suggesting place primarily through light. This is his 1892 design for the opera Die Walkure. Light helped to establish mood and atmosphere. In his own way, Appia was attempting to release the theatre from realism and return it to an arena for imagination. His efforts were to influence but not change the direction that scenery was taking during the 20th century as we shall see below.

Below are box sets used for two productions. The first is for True West. and the second for Idiots Delight. Although quite different kinds of plays both use a proscenium arrangement.

The move toward ultra realistic detail was perhaps most extreme in the example below. Harold Pinter's The Caretaker was produced in London and featured a detailed box set. Note the props that help to suggest the realism of the production.

Owing to the introduction of electricity, in the late nineteenth century, the development of lighing control systems, and ultimately the development of the computer control boards during the 20th century, as well as the increasing cost of constructing scenic objects, and the development of arena and thrust stages which required less attention to scenery and more focus on actors, costume, and lighting there is now a potential shift away from the proscenium arch staging techniques so popular during the 19th century and greater focus on simplicity and flexibility of all the visual objects.

We have still not broken free of the desire to create elaborate scenic worlds for play productions challenging audiences to use their imagination to the fullest extent. The major holdout in this shift has been opera and the Broadway musical many of which have become increasingly more visually complex and expensive, driving up theatre rentals and ticket prices, especially in New York. Yet with numerous attempts to find simple and more imaginative solutions to scenery, such as Pippin, musicals such as Into the Woods remain popular and demand enormous financial inventment before they reach the public.