Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2007 - 63

PHOTO BY CARL WALLING

production in a large scale opera house was a massive tour de
force in design and also became
a widely recognized production
internationally."
The original concept for
"The Copenhagen Ring" was to
display scenery composed of the
massive number of scale-model
fragments re-sampled into a new
context that would elaborate on
this new Ring interpretation.
Despite its government's declaration that it would support
the exportation of Danish art,
the Danish pavilion to the PQ
did not receive any government
funding and was solely funded
by the country's association of
theatre designers. "Rather than
proving our ability to deal with
scale models or three-dimensional renderings," Aarﬁng said,
"we found that the all-digital
approach to the character designs could be an interesting
perspective to the story." At the
same time, the pavilion, a dramatic spiral of life-size character
sketches accompanied by a plasma screen, did
not neglect craft. "The costume designs," Aarfing added, "represent the travel in time, during
a century, that was one of the major motives in
our work with the Ring. We did some tests with
life-size printing of the characters and found
that quite successful.
Gorgeously, Iceland depicted itself as an
old greenhouse of creativity (designed by Gretar
Reynisson for an actual show), its glass walls either broken in place or opaque with fog and icky
substances that necessitated entry to see clearly.
Small DVD screens were discreetly situated behind the models, which hung in the air. "My exhibit differs from past Icelandic exhibits which
have mostly been built up on photographs from
many participants, including myself," Reynisson
said. "I wanted to change this presentation of
beautiful pictures. Iceland can't present as big
and expensive exhibits as other bigger nations,
so I wanted to ﬁnd other ways of presenting
works, rather than competing on the level of
size and scale."
Unlike the Copenhagen Ring, Iceland's
pavilion does not concentrate on aesthetics;

denmark
periences. Instead of concocting and proposing
some woolly-headed concept of a collective nationally-centered expression, these multimedia
installations can focus intensively instead on
speciﬁc trends, new narrative techniques, and
narrative forms. Both the Iceland and Denmark
pavilions offer beguiling models of how new
media can be combined and artfully incorporated with actual design objects that together
deliver fresh, new ways of presenting and capturing scenography.
"I ﬁnd the traditional, national exhibition
to be very boring," stated scenographer Steffen
Aarﬁng, who co-authored, with designer Marie
í Dali, the theme of Denmark's pavilion, "The
Copenhagen Ring," which beautifully presented
the practices and creative processes behind
their designs for the Danish National Theater's
staging of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung.
Aarﬁng said that he was more interested in immersing visitors of the pavilion into the realm
of performance. "Scale models on parade look
cute but seldom tell us anything about the dynamics of a production," Aarﬁng said. "The decision
this year was motivated by the fact that this Ring

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TECHNOLOGY
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rather it elaborates on speciﬁc design ideas
and focuses on their relationship to the plays.
"When the look is raw, the meaning becomes
clearer," Reynisson said. "You look at what's
inside rather than on the beautiful wrapping. Instead of having my exhibit in a stall, we brought
in an original set-a full-sized green house-
from the successful Icelandic play The Green
House. Inside the house, I hung the 1:20 models-stark and naked, like potted plants."
In effect, the set models were like blossoms that bloomed inside a greenhouse of theatrical ideas. "Since the models aren't the ﬁnal
result, why show just the models like works in
a museum?" Reynisson asked. "It's really quite
strange that PQ exists, because it only shows the
way to the ﬁnal result instead of the ﬁnal result
itself." Iceland's solution, both ﬁlm and modeloriented, was ingenious and charming. "Instead
of having big screens or video projectors, I had
7.5 inch digital screens behind the models. The
focus was on the models, but you had to look
through them to see the show-the models become spectacles that look back in time."
Even among the countries that employed
no multimedia elements in their displays, there
was a marked restlessness and noticeable disinterest in simply assembling a carefully conceived museum stand. The British exhibit, which
tackled the theme of "Collaborators," expressed
this disquietude by having a giant, rust-colored
crescent metal sculpture, created by scenic designer Ralph Koltai and sculptor Stephen Pyle,
dominate its austere pavilion. "We wanted to
make a real piece of artwork that was not part
of a set from a production in another place and
time, nor an exhibition structure," says curator Kate Burnett. "It could be argued that our
exhibit takes a distinctive personal style, while
still framing a more representative selection of
design works. National curators have any number of motivations or criteria to meet. In putting
our exhibit together, we were on the one hand
wishing to show a selection of work reﬂecting
the diversity of practice in the U.K. On the other
hand, we were being very aware of our 2003
successes and wished to ﬁnd a different aesthetic which would lead on to allow or encourage
2011 to be something else again. Ralph Koltai's
offer to make a sculpture for PQ seemed like
an excellent opportunity to take an idea, shown
in maquette form and (as in a theatre process)
make it full size-and present it as an artwork
in its own right. Inevitably it becomes a set

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