Output details

Essay

This book/catalogue represents the outcome of a major collaboration of international stage designers, artists and theoreticians, under the aegis of The Society of British Theatre Designers, in a four-yearly cycle of national exhibitions of Design for Performance. The 2011 catalogue groups international designers working on innovative new concepts of visual narrative. The exhibition brought together models, drawings, objects and their conceptualizations from practitioners working at the cutting-edge of international theatre, opera and ballet design. It included designers working across artistic boundaries, such as Richard Hudson’s designs for Brandstrup’s ballet, Rushes (Royal Opera, Covent Garden, 2008), employing experimental visual/scenographic explorations (such as his use of scrims and gauzes) that cross production and staging contexts of ballet, theatre, music-drama and opera. Crawley’s role was to edit the catalogue and contribute an essay highlighting the idea of an integrated design collaboration where exhibition, selection and catalogue are ‘part of a creative process’, in which the catalogue becomes an extension of a dialogue of ‘transformation’ and ‘revelation’. The scenographic, spatial and temporal dimensions are emphasised by interrogating new ways designers, together with their audiences, create ‘visual narratives’ with the capacity to transform how we see the ‘work of art’. The curators and editors also highlight, in both catalogue presentation and design, cutting-edge visualizations of design processes in a sequence organized according to new scenographic ideas of ‘narrative’ transformations, disappearances and transpositions. The exhibition evolved from its first opening at Cardiff (Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama) 2011, then travelled to the Prague Quadrennial (2011) and opened at the V&A in 2012 as part of a major exhibition celebrating British Design from 1948 – 2012. The exhibition further toured to Edinburgh and Nottingham with Crawley adding new publications to support its evolving form.