Output details

Entitled : Scenographic design work for Quarantine Theatre Company considering how might we explore theatrically experiences of hope, privilege and disappointment, and negotiate, on and off stage, the impossibility of trying to arrive at a point of completion or perfection.

Scenographic design work for Quarantine Theatre Company, July 2011 Commissioned by The Royal Exchange Theatre, Sadler’s Wells and Curve Theatre, Leicester Quarantine co-production with The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, further development by Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival and The Grand Theatre, Groningen, Performances 2011- 2012: UK national tour; Festival de Otoño en Primavera, Madrid; Festival a/d Werf, Utrecht; Noorderzon Performing arts Festival, Groningen; Research questions: How might we explore theatrically experiences of hope, privilege and disappointment, and negotiate, on and off stage, the impossibility of trying to arrive at a point of completion or perfection? Significant features of process, and reflection: This is an investigation (developing from production/output Make Believe) into how as spectators we read and construct scenography in our 'mind’s eye'. Scenographically, the performance involves the formal enactment of a ‘get-in’ and a ‘get-out’: the usually hidden choreography of transforming a theatre, inhabiting it with a constructed place for performance and then returning it, back again, to an empty space. We begin by building an imagined theatrical space in the mind of the viewer through text: ‘spoken scenography’ is manifested through predictive/indicative marks (mapping the floor with coloured tape), then replaced by stage objects (manifestations in physical form). We, inevitably, fail to complete the scenography as it may have been imagined by the individual spectator; and do not proceed with any performed occupation of that space that might have been imagined or expected. However, we identify a point that is both the end and the beginning, when the space is left to resonate for 30 seconds before the deconstruction begins. The creation of this duality, of a space resonant with past experience and/or future possibilities, is a recurring strand of investigation.