Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007 - 53

Portugal: Gold Medal for Best Stage Design. Joao Mendes
Ribeiro's set for The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other.
(adapted from Russian Mikhail Bulgakov's novel) won for "its wit and
simplicity." Citing the inﬂuence of suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich to
"present shapes that take nothing from what has been created in nature,"
Suhanovs designed a white-box space (perhaps referencing Peter Brook's
A Midsummer Night's Dream) with a black square (recalling Malevich's
painting Black Square) above a red rectangle on the upstage wall and,
on the ﬂoor of his model, thirteen steel chairs with white seats arranged
haphazardly. The work is nothing if not simple. Its wit is more evasive,
seeming at ﬁrst to lay ostensibly in its unexceptional rejection of political
associations, freeing, as Peter Brook did with Shakespeare's comedy, the
text from historical and conventional references into a white box for free
play. Further reﬂection, however, in light of Suhanovs's notes on Malevich's religious mysticism and belief that suprematisim was the beginning
of a new civilization, the red rectangle in the communist hue, the number
of chairs, and the observation that one, in fact, has a square black seat,
releases a web of political associations, religious signiﬁcation of apostles
and last suppers, as well as implications of the artist as prophet, "engineer
of human souls" (Stalin's phrase), as well as sacriﬁce. What seemed stark
and obscure suddenly explodes as richly metaphorical and ironic, especially considering the fate of Bulgakov and the fact that one of his novel's
leading characters is Satan.
Suhanovs's design was part of the exhibit that won the gold medal
for best exposition in the Student Section and the Scenofest. The Latvian
students focused their exhibition around one playwright and play, an adaptation of Bulgakov's once-banned novel. Although Bulgakov's work is
rarely seen in English-speaking countries, it was frequently performed
in Soviet-Bloc nations during the latter part of the Cold War. The Latvians limited the number of participants to a small group (eleven), used
models inset to three black walls as the primary method of representation-although these were supplemented by research, conceptual, and
developmental material in drawers below each model-and relied upon
traditional means of presentation rather than video and digital media. The

THEATRE

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY
F

2007

Reinis Suhanovs, Latvia: Gold Medal for Most
Promising Talent in the Student Section and Scenofest.
Ms. Suhanovos's set design for Master and Margarita,
by Mikhail Bulgakov. (In addition, the student exhibit
from Latvia won the Gold Medal for Best Exposition
in the Student Section and Scenofest. Their theme was
"Let's Play Bulgakov!"

presentation was simple and clean, although done in black and ﬁlled with
classical orchestral music that gave it a vague sense of atmosphere. Their
Scenofest Birds and Babel exhibit was more distinctive, using a space ship
(shaped much like the Space Shuttle) that could move downstage, rotate,
and lift into a vertical (and phallic) position as the central and transforming image. Feathers, rails for shuttling the craft, and scaffolding of
the launch structure ﬁlled the space, which represented the symbolic city
between heaven and earth being constructed in Aristophanes' Birds. The
project's title reﬂected the ideas developed sequentially during the production: Flight = delight, ﬂight = fraud, ﬂight = power.
Although the Latvian students' exhibition was well done and their
Scenofest work creative, it and other choices beg the question of why
they were chosen as winners when so much other work of apparently

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