REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES)

vincent roumagnac

REACCLIMATING THE STAGE (SKENOMORPHOSES) An Ecotonal Doctoral Piece in 40 Scènes, 15 Parergonal Writings and 5 Double-Postcards. From the perspective of mise-en-scène (staging), and correlatively that of the place and the practice of the metteur-en-scène (theatre director), this artistic research project addresses, examines and experiments on the question of the scenic/scenographic representation of a postnatural world, in climate transition, affected by global warming and moved by abstract data-flows, in a tangled web of storms, information, and algorithms. While lived and conceptual "time", no longer telically given as linear and chronological, is being anthropodecentered and, therefore, diffracted into an open plurality, the Reacclimating the Stage (Skenomorphoses) artistic research project takes the earlier notion of time as a raw material to reexamine, from an eco-scenic and research perspective, in order to transform the theatrical practice of its author and to trigger the latter’s specific contribution to artistic research milieu. By obliquely playing on one hand with memories of theatrical history of scenic internal modi operandi, architecture, and literature, and on the other hand with institutional requirements for doctoral research appearance, the project aims at repositioning the director's practice in a movement of transition of scenic thinking and imaginary through a series of artistic and research experiments, whose enactments and resonant redistribution are poetically at interpretative play in this exposition.

The Winter's Tale (Hyperdrama)

Gesture/Photography (Silisec® print)

The Winter’s Tale (Hyperdrama), titled after Shakespeare’s play (1610 or 1611) is a performative act that is part of the series of works addressing the rescaling of Western scenic thinking in relation to “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2013) such as global warming. The gesture is simple: it consists of placing three wooden beams on the frozen Merihaka Bay, which is part of the Baltic Sea - located near the Performing Arts Research Center where I conduct my research - in the middle of the winter in Helsinki. The arrangement of the three timbers in parallel is intended to function as an illustrative synecdoche by triggering the conventional or obvious architectural imaginary of what is called “a stage”. The gesture simultaneously generates the possibility of the “staging” of the seasonal evolution of the environment into a “scene” and of projecting this scenic/scenographic perception towards its own deconstruction in the inevitable perspective of the melting of the ice and of the slow drifting of the beams until their disappearance in the water. It activates the durational spectacle, both concretely and metaphorically, of the melting and of the dislocation of the material and conceptual scenic construction. The photography, which I shot at the beginning of the melting, two months after placing the beams, marks the (arbitrary) starting point of the hyperdrama, which space and time might expand, backward and forward, ad infinitum, as much as it opens an elliptic question in terms of spectatorship that could be speculatively formulated around an emergence of a spectator-network theory, diachronically composed of human and other than human audience members.

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