Showing papers in "Nordic Theatre Studies in 2014"

From Candle Light to Contemporary Lighting Systems: How Lighting Technology Shapes Scenographic Practices

Abstract: In this article, I discuss the influence of stage lighting on the processes of scenic design and the functioning of performance space. There has been a huge advance in lighting technology with regard to their accessibility, usability, luminosity and costs during the past decades. Light can no longer be thought of as a necessity that can just be added to the performance. It has become one of its basic visual elements, directing and focusing the spectators gaze. The rhythm of changing lighting cues create a visual dramaturgy, which has turned visual design from solid constructrions to a score of temporal events. Today you seldom see a performance without any use of projections or digital videos. I begin with a quick historical survey on the adaptation of electric light in order to exemplify the artistic significance of technological innovations. I move on to a more philosophical conversation about the metaphorical connotations of light as a basic component of the visual mise-en-scene . Then I return to the practices of contemporary theatre making and examine the contributions of the latest projection technology. I suggest that stage lighting has developed from being a technical tool making the scenes visible into a sovereign artistic agency creating images on its own terms. Today’s intermedial scenography can be seen as a parallel to the contemporary experience of our spatio-visual environment in everyday life, echoing the changes that happen in our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the world.

The Expansion of Theatrical Space and the Role of the Spectator

Abstract: One of the theatre and performance conventions that has been challenged by the application of technology is that of space. Theatrical space has been “expanded” through the application of technology and its artefacts. However, it is not really clear what is meant by “expansion”, as it means different things according to different authors and these divergent meanings often lead to misunderstandings. In this article, I will demonstrate the need for a more nuanced understanding of what the expansion of theatrical space means and its impact on the concept of spectatorship. The analysis will be based on three distinct forms of digital performance where spatial expansion has been an issue; these are three categories that also mark the heterogeneity and dynamism of the convergence of performance and technology: multimedia performance, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Through an analysis of specific cases across the categories, I aim to show how the expansion of space implies a more participatory stance in the role of the spectator.

The Disenchantment of the Wonderful - A Doll’s House and the Idealist Imagination

Abstract: During the course of the nineteenth century, the notion of imagination under- went a radical redefinition. From being the highest, divine, power of man to being subjected to a growing pathologization and degradation, the redefinition of imagination played a central role in the transition from idealism and roman- ticism to the emerging modernism and realism. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) may be read into this particular context with its ‘disenchantment’ of the ‘wonderful’ – a word which Georg Brandes termed the very keyword of romanticism. Focusing on the specific Scandinavian context, where idealist aesthetics continued to be particularly strong, I will examine A Doll’s House from the perspective of the contemporary spectator in the context of an on-going Nordic aesthetic dispute. The contemporary Scandinavian reviews will serve to bear evidence of this dispute. In the article, I analyse how the play thematizes imagination and employs recurrent references to idealist culture in order to disenchant the romantic imagination of the wonderful. The analysis will focus in particular on the representation of the characters of Nora and Helmer, but also comes to implicate the spectator of the play.

Intermedial Ontologies: Strategies of Preparedness, Research and Design in Real Time Performance Capture

Abstract: The paper introduces and inspects core elements relative to the ‘live’ in performances that utilise real time Motion Capture (MoCap) systems and cognate/reactive virtual environments by drawing on interdisciplinary research conducted by Matthew Delbridge (University of Tasmania), and the collaborative live MoCap workshops carried out in projects DREX and VIMMA (2009-12 and 2013-14, University of Tampere). It also discusses strategies to revise manners of direction and performing, practical work processes, questions of production design and educational aspects peculiar to technological staging. Through the analysis of a series of performative experiments involving 3D real time virtual reality systems, projection mapping and reactive surfaces, new ways of interacting in/with performance have been identified. This poses a unique challenge to traditional approaches of learning about staging, dramaturgy, acting, dance and performance design in the academy, all of which are altered in a fundamental manner when real time virtual reality is introduced as a core element of the performative experience. Meanwhile, various analyses, descriptions and theorisations of technological performance have framed up-to-date policies on how to approach these questions more systematically. These have given rise to more sophisticated notions of preparedness of performing arts professionals, students and researchers to confront the potentials of new technologies and the forms of creativity and art they enable. The deployment of real time Motion Capture systems and co-present virtual environments in an educational setting comprise a peculiar but informative case of study for the above to be explored.

What Do Actors Do in Contemporary Theatre

Abstract: The article addresses the issue of strategies of acting in contemporary (largely postdramatic)theatre. In thefirst part of thearticle, theacting isconceptualized asplaying, with referencetorelevant theories, particularly that of Thomas Pavel. The article puts forward the argumentthat the play world created in a theatre performance can be described by the continuousfictional ? real spectrum that accommodates a number of strategies of acting. Within thecontinuum, there exists an ongoing tension between the fictional and the real; theirrelationship is largely variable depending on the strategies of acting at work in a particularperformance. In the second part of the article, these strategies are divided into three groups:?being someone else?, ?being oneself ?and performing actions ? and are then analyzed on thebasisof examplesthat aredrawn primarily fromEstonian contemporary theatre.

Finnish Theatre Photography and the Influence of Technology

Abstract: This article is mainly based on interviews with three Finnish photographers’, Kari Hakli, Jalo Porkkala, and Petri Nuutinen’s as well as on the theatre photographs they have taken. The criterion for selecting these three photographers has been that their work spans a number of decades; therefore, the development of Finnish theatre photography can be studied from this perspective. The theatre photograph is a photo of the stage image, which is often based on the dramaturgy of the play script. The subjects and points of view of the photographer are not generally agreed on in advance with the director or the actors, but they are based on the photographer’s own estimations and views. He/she interprets and transmits the performance to the audience with his images, and works in between the theatre and the spectator, but he is not the artistic producer when photograph- ing, the performance is, i.e. he/she has not chosen lights, costumes or set design. Technology has had a significant influence on the theatrical image and pho- tographic equipment. With the development of materials and equipment, the making of theatre photographs has shifted from a static process into a more dynamic one. Finnish theatre photography has reacted quickly to aesthetic trends in both theatre and photography. In the past it was possible to photograph only static or slow-moving objects in a set situation or in a pose. Today, the photographer can move among the actors, photograph fast-moving objects with a handheld camera using the stage lighting without the need for additional lights. The images look more as if they have been taken by an insider, someone who belongs to the team, rather than by an intruder. Theatre photographs are nowadays needed in the same way they have always been needed, as documents of the performance.

The Power of Illusion

Abstract: In this article, I examine how two English theatrical phenomena used stage technology to produce illusions for certain political ends. The two phenomena of interest are the court masque of the early 1600s and the illegitimate genres of the late Georgian London theatre. My focus will be on the latter, through an examination of the pantomime The Picture of Paris – opening at Covent Garden in 1790. Whereas a political reading of the court masque is well established in theatre studies, the same cannot be said regarding a political understanding of the theatre culture of the late Georgian period. Furthermore, those who have focused on the political aspects of this theatre culture have not been interested in the role played by stage technology. This is where this article aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Although the court masques and the illegitimate genres used much of the same stage technology, they differed in how they used it and to what political ends. Whereas the masque could be understood as a conservative statement of royal powers, asserting their right to rule, the illegitimate genres approached the governing powers and policies in a more subversive manner. Late Georgian cultural politics, censoring the spoken word on stage and patenting the performance of tragedy and comedy, gave rise to new theatrical genres where visual aspects – by legal necessity – took centre stage. The resulting spectacular theatre of action and visual image was exempt from government censorship, making possible a special kind of political freedom of expression in these genres. It was during performance, through their use of dumb shows, setting, stage machinery and special effects that government criticism could unfold within these genres.

The Spirit of Fluxus as a Nomadic Art Movement

Abstract: Fluxus was the brain-child of a Lithuanian-born artist named George Maciunas whose family fled to Germany in the Second World War, where they eventually became displaced persons and later emigrated to the USA. Maciunas studied art and architecture in Pittsburgh and New York before working as an architect and graphic artist and founded the Fluxus movement at the beginning of the 1960s. During his student years, he became fascinated by nomadic art in Asia and Eastern Europe that would later influence his life’s work. This essay considers the relationship between his interest in nomadism and the nature of the Fluxus movement that spread across the world, breaking down barriers between art and life, privileging concrete and conceptual art, and staging unusual events. It applies Braidotti’s notion of the nomadic subject to Maciunas’ encouragement of radical styles of performance art, such as Yoko Ono’s minimalist conceptual work and Joseph Beuys’s Tatar-influenced use of fat and felt.

Modalities or Surfaces: Postmodern Poetics and a Riddle

Abstract: This article will examine the playing with aesthetical surfaces in postmodern theatre and how itreflects the poetics and the cultural logic of late capitalism. Surfaces are examined as aestheticelements of the postmodern culture of the image. This culture is not neutral as it seems toreject the modern spiritual depth, for instance, sense of history and hermeneutic depth. Thearticle examines the riddle concerning how the absence of these aspects of human thought insurfaces generates the spectators' need to produce coherent individual activities, trajectories,and eventually acoherent culture. This reflexive mechanism of surfacesis analyzed within theframework of Donald Norman's (2005) cognitive principles of design. Starting from thepremise of Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's (1987) and Lev Vygotsky's (1978) notions ofplay, it is interpreted that postmodern stage and culture works, metaphorically, like the plane ofimmanence, the way of thinking in which an agent is able to move, make transitions andcrossings in a revolutionary way without restrictions of reality's conditions. However,culturally the blurring of boundaries between play and reality may lead to delirium andill-founded practices. Theatre and art examine these ill-founded practices but involve in theirpoetics a strong dimension of reflexive level of human cognition. This reflexive level is anexplanatory perspective, which helps spectators examine theatre's mechanisms as metaphors ofcultural logic, to achieve a critical position extrinsic from the flux of postmodern culture. Thispoetics is examined in several cases of theatrical representation including Sofia Coppola's filmThe Bling Ring (2013), The Need Company's production The Lobster Shop (2006), KristianSmeds' production The Unknown Soldier (2007) and in several casesof postmodern art and stagedesign.