Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2010 - 88

USITT

exhibited

usa scenography at pq 2007
Pay Up (2005), designed by Anna Kiraly for the Pig Iron Theatre Company in
Philadelphia, takes place in a large warehouse in which the audience is herded to
various location as the play progresses.

Another vision of Fiery Angel (2004) by Geroge Tsypin, which he describes as "an
aggressive deconstructivist nightmare full of jagged lines, a flaming sky, and a bloody floor."

"undefined simulacra of each other." and, of
course, in this age of electronic communication, they do not exist in any tangible, visible,
or inhabitable space; they exist, of course, in
cyberspace.
it is a truism that we live in a world of
images, and the ubiquity of images has been
exponentially expanded through electronic
dissemination. (anyone who began using Pcs
or the internet in the pre-apple days may remember a world composed almost entirely of
type, not images.) of incidental interest is the
fact that much of the imagery we confront today
is created or conveyed by devices that function
as their own light source. that is, we do not
perceive the image because it is projected or
because light is reflected off it; the image radiates its own light. one critic has suggested that
because such an image contains its own light
source it is perceived as its own cause, which

Most people today
have a greater or
lesser degree of
experience with
electronic media and
digital imagery; few
have experience of
the theatre.

theatre

design

teChnology

is the spinozist definition of god. this begs the
question as to whether the aesthetic qualities of
the image are determined by its technical manifestation. is an image just an image?
one might argue that the Middle ages
and the baroque, for instance, were also visual
ages, but these, and any other visual regimes
prior to the twentieth century, required the image to be present in space and to possess some
degree of dimensionality. but today image and
space are not only divorced, the image has been
dematerialized. Where do the images seen on
the computer screen, the billboard or stadium
scoreboard, and related devices exist? Yes, the
image appears momentarily on (in? through?)
some sort of apparatus that makes it visible, yet
it cannot be said to exist in space. and the images themselves have little stability-they have the
ability to appear, disappear, transform, dissolve,
morph with no regard to quotidian realities or
the physics of everyday life. Moreover, while images were, historically, created by experts and
artisans for the consumption of others, today,
within a certain segment of this new scopic
regime, the images are created, called into existence, transformed, and erased at will by the
individual viewer.
Most people today have a greater or lesser
degree of experience with electronic media and
digital imagery; few have experience of the theatre. (actually, there is a form of theatre that is
familiar to a wide audience: sporting events and
stadium concerts. these satisfy the human need

W I N T E R

2010

for communal presence in shared space. not
surprisingly, some of the accompanying imagery
is created and displayed in the familiar digital
form.) inevitably, placing a contemporary spectator in a darkened theatre to view performers at
some distance, and who seem static compared
to the frenetic pace of digital media, and on a
stage that, no matter how brightly lit, will seem
dim in comparison to quantity of light in the external world, is problematic. i am still haunted
by the audience response (or actually lack of
response) to the scenography of andrew lloyd
Webber's The Woman in White i saw on broadway a few years ago. the scenery was entirely
created and projected by digital technology and
was probably the most technically sophisticated
example of such work to that time. While audiences will regularly applaud the detailed realism
or delightful extravagance of "old-fashioned"
scenery when it is revealed onstage, the digital
wonders of William dudley's digital scenery
elicited no apparent response at all. it would
seem that the look of the digital imagery, and
the dissolving and transforming locales were so
commonplace for this audience that it bordered
on the invisible, whereas a 3-d simulacrum of
the real world is a wondrous novelty that bears
little resemblance to the imagistic and spatial
expectations of a modern popular audience.
so where does this leave us? live theatre will
never disappear; the performer-spectator dyad,
in real space and time, seems to be hardwired
into human behavior. and live theatre demands

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2010