Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007 - 60

PHOTO BY RICHARD FINKELSTEIN

norway

sound designs, each one accompanied by a series of productions photos. Sound designs for
ﬁve additional productions could be accessed in
an interactive database.
Countries like Estonia, Norway, the Netherlands, and South Korea stood out in Prague,
because their stand-alone digital pavilions incorporated nothing else but video and electronic
media. The Netherlands pavilion was essentially
a media bunker for meetings and conversations,
and the South Korean exhibit was made only of
black plasma screens. In the case of Estonia,
the designer and curator Ene-Liis Semper, who
was unanimously elected by the Association of
Estonian Scenographers to represent her country at the PQ, drew heavily upon her ﬁne-arts
background to create what she hoped would be
a new concept for scenographic display.
"In a successful production, all the
components (design, sound, light and actors)
are perfectly in balance, so separating the
set design from the whole often ends up
demonstrating handicraft skill," Semper
contended. "The strength of a really good
scenography lies in serving the concept of
the production. Placing the set design on
exhibition inevitably weakens its effect. There
should appear to be something new to replace
the missing actors and other production
components."
For Semper, using three synchronized

screens made it possible for her video installation to capture the essence and recreate
the intensity of her polymorphously perverse
Ubu. Semper added: "The hardest thing was
to compress the material into a twenty-minute
movie, because the actual duration of the
production at the abandoned airﬁeld of Kiltsi
was three hours (intermission included) and
the entire duration of the material (ﬁlmed with
three cameras) was more than ten hours. To me
it seems impossible to separate the design from
the whole production. It would mean taking
the living actor away from the set and leaving
instead only 'shells.'"
Norway, too, impressed everybody not for
its elaborate pavilion (basically a box where a
curtained entrance was ﬂanked by two huge
photos on the exterior, and ﬁlms and stills were
projected on the white interiors). The curator
Hilde Skancke Pedersen had alerted the world
to the spirit of winter folly of the Beaivváš Sámi
Theáhter, a small indigenous theatre company
near the arctic; the sets and theatre for its two
Sami-language shows, The Lay of Volund and
Hamlet, were entirely made out of snow and
ice. To keep the actors warm, the Sami costumes had to be made out of reindeer skin and
sealskin.
Unlike Estonia, which received ﬁnancial support from the Cultural Endowment of
Estonia (about 200,000 Estonian crowns, or

$16,500, for everything, including plane tickets
and accommodations), Norway was caught in a
politicized bind. "Government ﬁnancial support
decreased dramatically from NOK 125,000 in
2003 to nothing in 2007," reported Pedersen.
"We suspect that this has to do with the Sami
context of the exhibit." Apparently, the Norwegian government expected the Sami parliament
to fund the exhibit, since it focused on Sami
culture. It did not help Pedersen's case that
the pavilion was being promoted in Prague as
a national Norwegian exhibition. "The Sami
Parliament did not fund this project because
the Norwegian Culture Council did not either,"
Pedersen said. "We did get some funding from
local funders like the North Norwegian Culture
Fund. Beaivváš Sámi Theáhter also supported
the project. The institution, Fritt ord (The Freedom of Expression Foundation), supported the
making of the catalogue."
As a result, Norway became an accidental technologist. Pedersen's original concept
was to build a large freezer space that would
contain walls of ice and snow structures, with
models and costumes placed on shelves of
snow. But with a scant budget, Pedersen said,
"the minimalism was forced on us." In comparison to Norway's 2003 PQ exhibit, which
presented one designer (Olav Myrtvedt) and
his work on various plays by Norway's foremost
dramatist Jon Fosse, Pedersen's choice for exhibiting Beaivváš Sámi centered on the theatrical struggles of an indigenous theatre culture
which "is a 'secret' in Norway and in the rest
of the world," Pedersen said. "I wanted to show
that glocal art can tell universal stories."
Believe it or not, Poland's controversial
pavilion, "The Reality of Transformation/The
Transformation of Reality," was a video/multimedia installation-a standalone digital display,
built by Mirek Kaczmarek, that consisted of videos of politically oriented plays by a young generation of Polish writers, actors and directors
who have been actively engaged in confronting
their present realities. But the imposing box
that contained this Polish package drew the
majority of the buzz. Many looked askance
at the large pink phallus that housed the videos-a giant shining pink Plexiglass tower
shaped like this Eastern European country.
According to the Polish actor, director and designer Pawel Wodzinski, the contrast between
the shining magenta-pink elevation ran counterpoint to the white inner space used for video
THEATRE

2007

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007